A former Paris lawyer digging sewers in Cayenne, under a negro boss
Schoelcher, author of the act of emancipation of the negroes of the French possessions in America
The human scavengers of Cayenne are ably assisted by the vultures
In the market-place of Cayenne. The chief stock is cassava bread wrapped in banana leaves
In 1891 the Czar of Russia established the boundary between French and Dutch Guiana at the Maroni and Awa Rivers, and in 1900 the Swiss president named the Ayapoc as the frontier of Brazil, leaving the French about one fourth the territory they had claimed. At that, they have no definite conception of its extent, most of it being virgin forest unexplored by civilized man. Though in theory it runs far back to the plateau and watershed of Tumac-Humac, France has no real hold over more than a comparatively narrow strip of coast. The colony claims 30,000 inhabitants, virtually all of whom live within cannon-shot of the sea. Alcohol has done for the aborigines, except a degenerate tribe called the Galibis back in the interior, estimated by the latest census as 534 in number, and there are some three thousand “boschs” or “bonis,” wild negroes descended from runaway slaves. The few towns besides Cayenne are insignificant, and in most cases have scarcely half as many inhabitants as a century ago. In those days of plentiful slave labor there were sugar plantations, spice trees, and prosperous estates along all the coast from the Ayapoc to the Maroni, and many ships carried to France sugar, rum, cacao, coffee, indigo, and cotton. Then there were more than 20,000 field laborers alone; to-day there are barely two thousand loafing tillers of the soil scattered about the colony, and agriculture in French Guiana is a blank. Once many cattle were introduced; now there are none left and even milk for babies comes from the North in tin cans. As a native editor puts it, “A country placed on a burning soil, swampy and unhealthful, where paludic fevers, plague, and elephantiasis abound, needs the patience of the Hollander to become such a prosperous colony as our neighbor on the west.” Ambitious projects for opening up the country have been formed, but there has been much promise and little accomplishment. Sixty kilometers of French highways stretch out in all directions from Cayenne, passing simple dwellings and careless gardens peering forth from the bush; but these are the only roads passable the year round and soon die out in the untamed wilderness. Even what were good roads a century ago have in many cases become mere paths, or have completely grown up to jungle again. The native inhabitants are content to live on cassava—which now suffers severely from a big red ant called the fourmi-manioc—and foreign capital shuns a Latin government and a penal colony; indeed, the negro inhabitants complain that the coming of the convicts ruined their “invaluable” country, though it would still be prosperous “if there were any arms to do the work,” they add, at the same time completely overlooking the idle arms hanging on either side of each of them.
Cayenne is known in France as the “dry guillotine.” In the middle of the last century, soon after the abolition of slavery, some French idealist, or practical joker, thought of a plan to kill two birds with one stone. Cayenne needed laborers; France was overrun with criminals. Jean Jacques Rousseau had asserted that “Every man was born good; it is society which inculcates in him the germ of all his vices and defects, and as he is also essentially corrigible, he must be offered means to redeem himself.” The betterment and regeneration of criminals by work was the panacea of the day, and this idea, “more or less modified,” inspired the establishment, in 1854, of the present penitentiary system. It is not likely that the hard-headed, materialistic statesmen of France took the prattle of theorists seriously; but it opened up to them a possible way out of certain troublesome perplexities. In 1851, therefore, the French president issued a decree prescribing the “use of convicts in the progress of French colonization,” and appointed a committee to decide to which colony six thousand forçats in the crowded bagnes of Toulon, Brest, and Rochefort should be sent. Guyane was chosen, with “Devil’s Island” as a landing-place, and the following year volunteers were called for among the inmates of those institutions. More than three thousand offered to go to Cayenne—and soon deeply regretted it. Way down under its superficial buncombe the chief purpose of the plan, of course, was to give the government a means of getting rid of its radical enemies and all those whose presence at home greatly worried the ruling powers, and to-day old J. J. Rousseau would be delighted to see how man, essentially good, is regenerated and recovers his manly dignity at Cayenne.
During the second year of the plan, volunteers became insufficient, and new decrees ordered all individuals sentenced to hard labor or reclusion, or criminals of African or Asiatic origin, to be sent to Guiana and used in “les traxaux les plus pénibles” of the colony and its public works. This last clause, at least, has been manfully carried out. At the same time a penal colony was established in Algeria, but the latter proved too strong to have its protests unheeded and the onus was transferred to New Caledonia. The first law of deportation was for not less than five and not more than ten years. Causes for such a fate included conviction of belonging to a secret society. Then New Caledonia was limited to those prisoners of European race sentenced to less than eight years. All others, of longer terms or of the negro or Arab race, as well as all rélégués and recidivists, were to be sent to Cayenne. Of late years New Caledonia has become less and less popular with French judges, so that to-day the cream of the criminality of France, as well as of her other colonies, comes to end its days in French Guiana.