There are convicts everywhere in and about Nouméa—convicts and libérés. Their presence makes the ugly little town seem even more unprepossessing than it is. The pleasantest spot anywhere around is Île Nou, the convict island that I have often heard called a hell on earth. On this green little island are about five hundred convicts—all old men, for France has not deported any of her criminals to New Caledonia since 1897. They are all “lifers.” Indeed, I was told of one old man who is in for two hundred years; he has tried to escape many times, and, according to a rule of the settlement, ten years are added to a man’s sentence for each attempt at escape.
We visited Île Nou in company with Governor Joulia and Madame Joulia; the Mayor of Nouméa; the manager of the big nickel mines; the Governor of the prison settlement, and a lot of aides-de-something. We saw the old prisoners, in big straw hats and burlap clothing, each with his number stamped on his back, all busy doing nothing. We were taken through the cells where, in former times, convicts slept on bare boards, with their feet through leg-irons. We were locked in dark dungeons, and, for the benefit of my camera, the guillotine was brought out and, with a banana stalk to take the place of a man, the beheading ceremony was gone through with. We were taken in carriages over the green hills to the hospitals and to the insane asylum, where we saw poor old crazy men, with vacant eyes, staring at the ceilings. Here we met the king of the world, who received us with great pomp from behind the bars of a strong iron cage, and a pitiful old inventor, who showed us a perpetual-motion machine which he had just perfected. It was made from stale bread.
LOOKING SEAWARD
Yet Île Nou is better than Nouméa, with its ugly streets full of broken old libérés. While most of the convicts were sent out for life, some were sent for five years. At the end of that time, they were freed from Île Nou and permitted to live in New Caledonia on parole, and if they had committed no fresh offense, at the end of another five years they were given their ticket back to France. Any one sentenced to a longer term than five years, however, never saw France again. He regained his freedom, but was destined to lifelong exile. Some of the libérés have found employment and have become responsible citizens of New Caledonia, but many of them drift through the streets of Nouméa, broken old men who sleep wherever they can find a corner to crawl into and pick their food from the gutters.
I was glad, while in Nouméa, to renew my acquaintance with Commissioner King of the New Hebrides, who had come to New Caledonia to have the Euphrosyne repaired. I talked over with him my proposed expedition to Malekula, and received much valuable advice. He could not give me the armed escort I had hoped to secure from him, for he had no police boys to spare. He promised, however, to pick us up at Vao, in about a month’s time, and take us for a cruise through the group in the Euphrosyne. I wanted him, and the New Caledonian officials as well, to see some of my work, so I decided to show my films in the Grand Cinéma, the leading motion-picture house of Nouméa. I gave the proprietor the films free of charge, under condition that I got fifty seats blocked off in the center of the house. We invited fifty guests, and the remainder of the house was packed with French citizens of Nouméa, Chinese and Japanese coolies and native New Caledonians. I showed the five reels called “Cannibals of the South Seas.” Then I showed my four reels of Malekula film, and ended up with a one-reel subject, Nouméa. We were given an ovation, and both Osa and I had to make speeches—understood by few of those present. The French have a passion for speeches whether they can understand them or not. The next morning, we found ourselves celebrities as we walked through the streets of Nouméa.
CHAPTER III
THE THRESHOLD OF CANNIBAL-LAND
We left New Caledonia at midnight on July 3d, and steamed over a calm sea to Vila.
Vila is the commercial center as well as the capital of the New Hebrides and its harbor is one of the finest in the South Seas. On our right, as we steamed in, was the island of Irriki, a mountain peak rising out of the sea, on the highest point of which Mr. King has built his house. Vila is a typical South Seas town—a rambling mixture of tropical and European architecture and no architecture at all. Its public buildings, French and British, its churches, and the well-kept British settlement, with the parade grounds and barracks for the native police, make it more imposing than the run of the pioneer villages of Melanesia, but it seemed strange to us that it should be the metropolis for the white people of thirty islands. We spent a day in Vila looking up old acquaintances and laying in supplies. Among the acquaintances we found good old Father Prin who had been retired from active duty on Vao and had come to Vila to spend his declining days. He was glad to see us, but shook his head when he heard that we were again going to try our luck among the Big Numbers.
“Big Numbers plenty bad,” he warned us in bêche-de-mer. And Osa and I replied in the same tongue, “Me no fright.”