“And, therefore,” I said, “it will resemble the remarks of your anthropometric expert. I never had such an exact account of myself before. Anthropometry strikes me as being a pretty good medicine for human vanity.”
An Arab Type of Convict. A combination of Ideality and Homicidal Mania.
Out of the depth and width of his experience the Commandant agreed with me, and then I was photographed. There was no artistic posing or anything of that sort. I was planted on a chair with my back straightened up and my head in a vice such as other photographers were once wont to torture their victims with. The camera was brought within three feet of me. I was taken full face, staring straight into the lens, and then I was taken en profile. When, many weeks afterwards, I showed the result to my wife, she was sorry I ever went; but for all that it’s a good likeness.
By the time the negatives were developed, and I had satisfied the Commandant that certain black spots which the pitiless lens had detected under my skin were the result of a disease I had contracted years before in South America, and not premonitory symptoms of the plague, it was breakfast-time, and I went down to the canteen, where I found convicts buying wine and cigarettes, and generally conducting themselves like gentlemen at large.
I did not see the Commandant again that day, save for a few minutes after lunch, when he told me that he had an appointment at the Direction in Noumea, and placed me in charge of his lieutenant, the Chief Surveillant. The Chef was a very jolly fellow, as, indeed, I found most of these officials to be, and during our drives about the island, we chatted with the utmost freedom. As a matter of fact, it was he who gave me the description of the execution which I reproduced in the last chapter.
He, too, was entirely of the same opinion as myself as to the pitiless iniquity of the dark cell; but he took some pains to point out that it was not the fault either of the French Government or of the Administration, but simply of certain politicians in France who wanted a “cry,” and got up a crusade among the sentimentalists against “the brutality of flogging bound and helpless prisoners far away from all civilised criticism in New Caledonia.” Some of these men, too, as I have said, were déportés, or exiled communards who had been forgiven, and had brought back batches of stories with them as blood-curdling as they were mendacious.
“Bien, monsieur,” he said. “You have seen the Cachot Noir. Now we will go to the Disciplinary Camp first, because it is on the road, and then—well, you shall see what the cachot does, and when you see that I think you will say the lash is kinder.”
The Disciplinary Camps in New Caledonia have no counterpart in the English penal system. “Incorrigibles,” who won’t work, who are insubordinate, or have a bad influence on their comrades of the Bagne, are sent into them partly for punishment and partly for seclusion.
