In another room were a few trinkets, odds and ends, and covers of various origins for some of the canvas-strip beds. The “principal” explained that this was the room of trusties and turnkeys, several of whom were then standing at attention before him. Then, still pretending to give me information, but raising his voice to a bellow, he screamed, “Yes, these we allow a few extra privileges, and they are even greater pigs than the others—Oui, ils sont les plus cochons de tous!” There was not much visible sign of an opportunity to be anything else. I not only saw no bath anywhere within the “camp,” but no place where a prisoner could so much as wash his hands. Nothing but absolute brute necessities were recognized, and even then everything was of the crudest and coarsest.
“And do you treat educated men and those who have formerly lived in clean surroundings the same as you do the recidivists and the apaches?” I asked.
“Bah!” cried the captain, with his nastiest sneer, though maintaining his attitude of overdrawn courtesy toward me. “After a few days they become just like the others and you never see the slightest difference.”
Come to think it over, I suppose they would.
The prisoners get up at five o’clock, have coffee, and go to work at 6:30. A “breakfast” of thin soup, one vegetable, half a kilo of bread de deuxieme qualité, and what is supposed to be 250 grams of meat before it is cooked, but which boils down to about half that, is served at 10:30. Three hours later the famished convicts are marched out into the blazing sunshine again to complete their eight hours of daily toil. At night they get a slab of bread and a kind of vegetable hash, duly weighed on dirty scales. It is impossible that any grown man doing manual labor should not be habitually ravenous on such a diet. Not only was the stuff of the coarsest grade imaginable, and unsavory as food carelessly cooked in great bulk always is, but it was handled by guards, visitors, and any other chance passer-by exactly as one might handle the food of a dog, perhaps dropped underfoot and then tossed back into the pan, from which it may be doled out to a man who a year or two before ate in the best restaurants of Paris.
An old chapel, now full of cells, was a place of punishment for minor infractions of the rules, the inmates of which slept on boards and were given bread and water two days out of three. In another building were the cachots, or dungeons proper, stone rooms about four by six feet in size, with very low ceilings, solid doors, and only a hole some ten inches in diameter for ventilation. Here recaptured men awaiting trial were kept in solitary confinement, with a plank for bed, worn concave during many years of occupation, a block of wood as pillow, and bread and water one day out of three. For those who aroused still greater wrath among their guards there were cells in which a man could neither stand up nor lie down, and other underground horrors worthy of the Inquisition. I am not one of those who believe in making prison life a perpetual ball-game; but there are limits to the brutality which man should permit himself toward his fellow-man. After all, it did not look as if Hugo’s famous novel had done much to mitigate the lot of French prisoners. Things may have been alleviated in France itself, but in this tropical Hades there has certainly been no improvement over the bagnes of Toulon of a century ago.
“Look at that dog!” cried the commander, as the occupant of one of these ovens rose to his feet when we entered. Then, with all the sarcasm he could throw into his voice, “Vous êtes content, hein?” The officials all seemed to try to impress me with the fact that they had a particularly dangerous and incorrigible lot of wild animals in their charge, and looked for applause at their ability to keep them under control by such methods as savage brutality and by taking every advantage of the helpless wretches to taunt them. Yet no owner of wild animals would have dreamed of keeping them in such airless, crowded and starved conditions. There was a den of rélégués, for instance, ex-convicts who had violated their parole as libérés and were awaiting trial—nearly all white Frenchmen and as fine a collection of hopeless, helpless, careless, don’t-give-a-damn toughs as it has ever been my privilege to see. The atmosphere was exactly that of a den of savage beasts who considered all the outside world their implacable enemies and were ready to rend and tear anyone who was so careless as to come within reach without a weapon with which to cow them. There were between thirty and forty in each of the 12 by 16-foot rooms, and by no means space on the two wooden platforms, resembling those in the aisles de nuit of French cities, for all to lie down at once.
To add to the joy of their lot, the prisoners are constantly robbed of their legal rations to fill the pockets of the officials and guards. There is a saying that officers arrive in Cayenne with half a trunk and leave with six. In theory, the men are entitled to wine, tobacco, and reading matter; practically, they never see any of those things unless they manage to get them from outside. At Albina, across from the chief penal station on the Dutch boundary, wine is always for sale at a song. The Indians or “boschs” who bring in an escaped prisoner get two of the five dollars paid by the French Government, the prison officials pocketing the rest. There is always an advantage in killing off prisoners, for their names are still kept on the books and the officials still draw their ration money, as they do that of un-captured fugitives. It has often been proved quite possible for a guard at least passively to bring about a prisoner’s death, merely for the few cents a day he can pocket for his rations. Naturally there is much underground favoritism, and the prisoner with money or powerful friends outside can usually get away. The guard is not only amenable to a bribe, but glad to have another dead man on his ration books. Such escapes are generally engineered from over the Dutch border. An expert American cracksman, well known to our police, “did a job” in Paris a few years ago and was sent to Cayenne; few who have been there will blame the perfectly respectable Americans of Paramaribo for helping him to escape. The German who attempted to get Morocco to revolt against French rule escaped while I was in the Guianas, and there were very persistent rumors to the effect that the German Moravian missionaries in Dutch Guiana knew quite well how it happened.
The prisoners themselves sometimes help their oppressors in the matter of ration money, for they have secret societies of bloodthirsty tendencies and private enmities are often settled while the prison camp lies in restless slumber. Sometimes it is merely a quick stab upward in the darkness through a stretched-canvas bed; sometimes a ring is formed by the other prisoners, and the two opponents, each armed with a knife and attended by a second who has no other right than to give his man another knife if his own is knocked from his hand, go at it, with no quarter asked or given. The guards will not risk their lives—and their probable “rake-off”—by entering and attempting to stop the fight in the dark, and when one combatant is killed he is left to lie where he has fallen until morning, when everyone in the room assures the investigating official that he slept soundly all night long. Death naturally has few terrors for these convicts, and it is impossible to punish them more than they are already being punished; hence there is no motive to restrain themselves. In short, Cayenne definitely proves the existence of a hell, though its geographical location does not exactly tally with the notions of old-fashioned theologians.
It took all day to get back on board the Antilles, silhouetted far out on the horizon beside the lighthouse of “Lost Child” Rock. For, with typical Latin disorder, the sailing was postponed as often as it was announced. At the customhouse outgoing baggage was examined by slovenly but pompous negroes as thoroughly as if it were being landed, mainly because it is illegal to take gold out of the colony. A rowboat carried us out to a small steamer which could not touch shore. Another brought out that month’s contingent of conscripts, in blue-jean uniforms and the familiar French army cap, their shining new cups, canteens, and the like hanging about them. With few exceptions they were negro youths, pale under their jet-black skins; and it was difficult to decide which looked the sadder—the white prisoner boatmen from France who had to stay behind, or the black “freemen” soldiers of Cayenne who had to go. Among them was a French priest already gray and heavily bearded, still in full priestly garb, but with a soldier’s kit and cap hanging over one shoulder. All the afternoon the Gallic chaos reigned, until at last we neared the Antilles and were transferred to her again in rowboats, the soldiers descending into the third class and the canvas-clad convicts, who had come on board carrying the bags and bundles of negro passengers and the officers, meekly descending the gangway again, their manhood evidently so completely shattered that they dared not even attempt to stow themselves away. We were off about six; and as I looked back upon the dim, flat land dying away in the sunset, there came to mind an old slab of wood that had been removed from a prisoner’s grave to the museum of Cayenne, on which one can still make out the epitaph, crudely carved by some fellow-convict: