I naturally said things about getting up at four o’clock for nothing more than a day’s compulsory loafing, but I got through the day somehow with the aid of some fishing and yarning with the surveillants and the convicts, one of whom, a very intelligent Arab, told me, with quiet pride, the story of his escape from New Caledonia twelve years before.
He had got to Australia in an open boat, with a pair of oars, the branch of a tree for a mast and a shirt for a sail. He made his way to Europe, roamed the Mediterranean as a sailor for nine years, and then, at Marseilles, he had made friends with a man who turned out to be a mouchard. This animal, after worming his secret out of him under pledge of eternal friendship, earned promotion by giving him away, and so here he was for life.
He seemed perfectly content, but when I asked him what he would do with that friend if he had him in the bush for a few minutes, I was answered by a gleam of white teeth, a flash of black eyes, and a shake of the head, which, taken together, were a good deal more eloquent than words.
One of the Lowest Types of Criminal Faces. An illustration of the ease with which it is possible to disguise the chin, typical of moral weakness, and the wild-beast mouth, which nearly all Criminals have, by means of moustache and beard.
By permission of C. Arthur Pearson, Ltd.
La France turned up that afternoon, so did the Commission of Inspection from Bourail with several other passengers. I was told that we should be crowded, but until I got on board in the dawn of the next morning I never knew how crowded a steamer could be.
I had travelled by many crafts under sail and steam from a south sea island canoe to an Atlantic greyhound, but never had the Fates shipped me on board such a craft as La France. She was an English-built cargo boat, about a hundred and thirty feet long, with engines which had developed sixty horse-power over twenty years ago. She had three cabins on each side of the dog-kennel that was called the saloon.
If she had been allowed to leave an English port at all she would have been licensed to carry about eight passengers aft and twenty on deck. On this passage she had twelve first-class, about fifteen second, and between fifty and sixty on deck, including twenty convicts and relégués on the forecastle, and a dozen hard cases in chains on the forehatch.
She also carried a menagerie of pigs, goats, sheep, poultry, geese, and ducks, which wandered at their own will over the deck-cargo which was piled up to the tops of her bulwarks. Her quarter-deck contained about twenty square feet, mostly encumbered by luggage. The second-class passengers had to dine here somehow. The first-class dined in the saloon in relays.