French Convict Curse
Rev. “Golightly” has favored The Whiz Bang with another able article for the September issue. It is a story on the practice of witchcraft, with its revolting rites, throughout the West Indies and the three Guianas. The story holds the reader’s attention from start to finish and gives an exposé that would put the ouija board and clairvoyant mysticisms to shame. Get the September number and read Morrill’s story of the human hyena which kidnaps children, the goat without horns, and the “loupgarou.”—The Editor.
BY REV. “GOLIGHTLY” MORRILL.
Pastor of People’s Church, Minneapolis, Minn.
POOR devil! He was an escaped convict from French Guiana—haggard, half-starved, barefooted; his shirt torn as if to show his torn heart, his trousers ragged; bareheaded, blue eyes, a mat of brown hair, and a neat mustache and beard, reminiscent of the Parisian boulevards. He didn’t look half so ferocious as his black, British gorilla of a guard, who dragged him on our boat, and later transferred him to the train bound for Georgetown, Demerara, to languish in jail till the French mail steamer arrived to take him back captive to Cayenne. I took pity on him, gave him some fruit, chocolate and money, wished him a bon voyage, and was sorry I couldn’t give him his liberty as well.
French Guiana is a penal colony, a prison of 35,000 square miles, bounded by Dutch Guiana, Brazil and the Atlantic ocean. Out of a population of some 40,000, 10,000 are convicts. While there are exports of balata and phosphates, the principal ones are gold, cocoa, hides, rosewood and rosewood oil, the last shipped to France as a substitute for attar of roses. But the glitter of the gold is dimmed by the shadow of the prison, and above the fragrance of the rosewood rises the stench of political putridity, convict crime and corruption.
From her earliest history, Cayenne has furnished an inspired chapter for the Devil’s Bible, written with finger of fire in ink of blood. In the first of the seventeenth century the settlers not only had before them the interesting fate of being massacred and devoured by the cannibal Indians, but a providential blessing in the form of their mad commander, Sieur de Bretigny, who, not satisfied with torturing the 400 colonists with gibbet, gallows and wheel, amused himself by instituting pleasures called “Purgatory” and “Hell,” in which he forced them to relate even their dreams as to a father confessor; if he were displeased, he maltreated and killed them. The next batch of settlers mutinied en route from France, and on arriving here so angered the Indians by enslaving and plundering them that the natives forced them to take refuge in a fort where Famine and Disease were the red man’s best allies.
Succeeding colonization companies were failures. Mismanagement and Misfortune were president and vice-president of the ventures. For example, in 1763, 12,000 volunteer colonists came to French Guiana, with the promise of free lands, which proved to be free graves. By 1765, 11,000 died. They landed and lived in mud and water; there were no tools for tilling the soil, yet they had a shop to make skates in this equatorial clime; drinking water there was none, probably because they thought it would rain or they might be able to get wine; rivers rose, and not knowing how to dike them, those who lived through the fevers died from the floods. Such colonial schemes are finely satirized by Daudet in his “Port Tarascon.” At best, the French are the worst colonizers, whether here or in Tahiti, Marquesas, Caledonia, Panama, Algeria, Canada and Martinique. Cayenne next became the criminal cesspool of France, costing the lives of hundreds and 800,000 livres.
During the French Revolution men were arrested in Paris, paraded before the populace like wild beasts in cages, then shipped to Cayenne, the white man’s grave. Of 600 Royalists transported here and landed on the Sinnamaire River without shelter or food, two-thirds perished. Often they were brutally murdered before reaching there, according to De Vigny’s story of “Laurette or the Red Seal.” The country was dubbed the “dry guillotine,” and it is said that a prisoner who had the choice between it and the blood-wet one in Paris, chose the latter.