The white steamers of the “Compagnie Générale Transatlantique” take two leisurely days from Georgetown to Cayenne, which I spent in furbishing up my long unused French. I had not intended to leave British Guiana so soon, but it would still be there when I came back and transportation between the three European colonies of South America is not frequent enough to scorn any passing chance with impunity. Four typical Frenchmen of the tropics, in pointed beards not recently trimmed and the white toadstool helmets without which they would no more expect to survive than if they left off their flannel waist-bands, put themselves, unasked, at my disposal. It was still dark on the second morning when there loomed out of the tropical night three isolated granite rocks, with what was evidently a thin covering of grass and bush and dotted with scattered lights. Their official name is “Isles du Salut,” but the more popular and exact term for the whole group is that properly belonging to one of them—“Devil’s Island.” The water about them is very deep, and our ship went close inshore. Soon two boatloads of people, rowed by deeply sunburned white prisoners in the tam-o’-shanter caps of Latin Quarter studios, appeared through the growing dawn, tumbled a few passengers and the baggage of a family from Paris aboard us, then the commander of the isles and his kin and cronies were rowed back again from their monthly excursion to the outside world.

Just two hours later we stopped far out near a lighthouse on a rock called the Enfant Perdu, a low coast with some wooded hills and a rather insignificant looking town several miles off. The water was already yellowish-brown, and there was not enough of it to allow the steamer to draw nearer. Launches and barges finally tied up alongside us and, with the usual chaotic volubility of Latins, the considerably tar-brushed crowd of arrivals fought their way into them. With us were eight prisoners, four of them pasty-white, but tough-faced apaches from Paris, still in their heavy civilian garments, each with a bag over his shoulder; the rest were evil-eyed negroes from other French colonies, already in prison garb. We chug-chugged for nearly an hour toward what seemed to be a scattered village on a slight knoll, largely hidden by trees, a big, box-like yellow building which my mentors said was the Colonial Infantry barracks conspicuous in the foreground among royal palms. Cayenne is the best port in French Guiana, yet even the launch could not reach the shore, but tumbled us into rowboats manipulated by impudent, patois-chattering blacks, to whom we paid a franc each to be set across the fifteen feet of mud remaining. Once there was a landing jetty here, but the sea carried it away and the tropical Frenchmen had not yet been moved to carry it back. Our baggage was inspected as if we, too, were incoming convicts, but as I had luckily left most of my own, including my revolver, in Georgetown, the haughty black officials could not trump up any just cause to refuse me admission to the colony.

I had expected to find Cayenne a less model place than Georgetown, but the glaring reality was beyond my worst dreams. One would have to go back to the West Coast, to such places as Popayán and Quito, to find anything approaching this. It showed at a glance why the French failed at Panama, what Colón and Panama City would still have been had not Uncle Sam taken them in hand. Indeed, the wide streets of crushed stone and earth lined by rows of noisome two-or three-story wooden houses gave the place considerable resemblance to those cities before the Americans came, the general appearance of a negro slum in the dirtiest of our cities, with all the sanitary laws ignored. Built on a shallow mud shore among jungle brush into which all but a few of its streets quickly disappear, with swamps and mosquito breeding-places overgrown with unkempt vegetation in the town itself, it is everywhere a rubbish heap. Little advantage has been taken of the riches of nature; even the strip of land between town and sea, which a progressive people would have turned into a blessing, is a constant litter of filth. Cesspools abound; there is dirt in every hole, corner, or place enough out of the way so that daily movements do not inadvertently keep it clean; carrion crows are the only members of the street-cleaning department, except two decrepit old women armed with brush brooms. The conglomeration of odors is beyond description; nothing seems to be regularly kept in repair, so that even the most recent buildings have already a dilapidated aspect. Some of the larger houses have mud-plastered façades to imply wealth or importance within, yet every residence I entered was visibly unclean, and men whom in other climes one would expect to find in spick and span surroundings here lived in noisome holes that one shuddered to enter. Out of doors every imaginable iniquity against sanitation is committed with impunity, and one is not surprised to learn that epidemics are frequent and that the death rate exceeds that of births, though the native population is notoriously industrious, irrespective of age or marriage vows, in the reproduction of its uncommendable species.

Here the traveler, though he be rolling in wealth, will see what the man with only ten cents for lodging is forced to endure. I told the negro boy carrying my bundle to lead me to the best hotel, whereupon he gave me a leer of mingled stupidity and insolence and turned in at a miserable tavern of the kind to be found in French slums, kept by negroes into the bargain. The wench behind the dirty counter admitted that she had one room and that she “could cook for me”—any susceptible person would have fainted to see where and how. The room turned out to be an incredibly filthy hole up under the baking roof, with a nest of ancient mattresses, visibly containing all the iniquities of half a century, on a wooden platform-bedstead. When I protested, my guide assured me with a gesture of indifference that it was the best in town, whereupon I dismissed him, determined to sleep under the royal palms in the high grass of the pleasant, though astonishingly unkempt, central Place des Palmistes unless I could find better than this. There were “Chambres à louer” signs all over town; but though everyone seemed anxious to rent rooms, none would clean them. I found at last a negro woman who offered to let me have her own room, reached by a noisome stairway, but on a corner, with four windows making it as airy as one could expect in Cayenne, with its ridiculous clinging to the European style of architecture so unfitted to the tropics. The room was cluttered with rocking-chairs, tables, kerosene lamps, and all the gaudy, worthless rubbish beloved of negroes,—photographs, porcelain dolls, bric-à-brac—until it was impossible to make a sudden movement without knocking down something or other. A corner was partitioned off with paper to form a washroom with entirely inadequate washing facilities, and everything had an air about it which made one hesitate to sit down or even to touch anything. Everything in plain sight in the room looked clean enough, for the usual occupant prided herself on being of the Cayenne aristocracy; it was only when one began to peer into or under things, to move anything, that the negro’s lazy indifference to real cleanliness came out. The enormous bedstead of what appeared to be mahogany had five huge mattresses, one on top of the other; all of them, it turned out, were ragged nests of filth, except the uppermost, and the bed was so humped in the middle that it was impossible to lie on it. Evidently it had been made so purposely, for I found great bunches of rags and worn-out clothing stuffed into the middle of the various mattresses, which the owner had evidently found it too much trouble to throw out when a new one was indispensable.

The yard below, always rolling and howling with piccaninnies of all sizes, had a hole in the “kitchen” where one might throw water over oneself with a cocoanut-shell, if one insisted—unless it happened to be between three in the afternoon and seven the next morning, when the request for a bath brought a scornful sneer at one’s ignorance of the hours of the Cayenne waterworks. In a ground-floor room, looking like an old curiosity shop kept by a negro under penalty not to use a broom or a dust-cloth for a century, was a rickety table on which I ate amid the incessant hubbub and rumpus of Galicized negro women. Their “French” was a most distressing caricature of that language, and they could never talk of the simplest things without giving a stranger the impression that they were engaged in a violent quarrel that would soon lead to bloodshed. Virtually every negro woman—and one rarely sees any others of the sex in Cayenne—wears a loose cotton gown of striking figures and colors, and a turban headdress of general similarity, yet always distinctly individual, a little point of cloth, like a rabbit’s ear, rising above its complicated folds. In theory the turban is wound every day, but in practice that would mean too much exertion, and it is set on a sort of mould. For the market-women and those habitually out in the gruelling sunshine there are sunshades of woven palm-leaves, large as umbrellas, but worn as hats.

The town claims 13,000 inhabitants, which possibly may have been true before the World War drained it of much of its manhood; yet with the exception of high government officials, soldiers, convicts, and libérés, there are very few whites. In fact, French Guiana is so eminently a negro country that unless one is a high government official one is out of place in it as a white man; others of that color seem to the thick-skulled natives to be outcasts who have come there more or less against their will. The few white women are seen only after sunset and along the few shaded avenues, and white children do not seem to thrive. The social morals of the colony are admittedly low, and influences are so bad that even whites of the most protected class assert that they must send their girls away as children or all will be lost. The Cayenne negro is not only dirty, impudent, and sulky, but forward and presumptuous, constantly striving by such manners to impose upon the whites the superiority he feels, or pretends to feel, over them. French residents treat the negroes with deplorable familiarity and equality, many a white man obsequiously taking off his hat to haughty colored officials, who accept the homage with a scornfully indifferent air. I called one day on the mulatto editor of the local daily newspaper—of the size of a handbill, taken up entirely with advertisements on one side, and on the other chiefly with the names of negroes ordered to the front. Together we went to call upon the colored aide of the governor, both editor and aide treating me with a patronizing air and a haughty manner which said plainly that, while I might be officially a “distinguished foreigner,” I was, at best, considerably lower in the social scale than men of their color. Suddenly there was a swish of silk skirts at the door behind me. All of us sprang to attention—when into the room, with a manner that might have been borrowed from Marie Antoinette herself, swept the Parisian-gowned negro wife of the aide, whose bejewelled hand every other man in the room, including two white Frenchmen, proceeded to kiss.

The usual indifference and inefficiency of Latin public officials is to be expected in Cayenne. Public employees have a certain superficial French courtesy, but with it even more than the Frenchman’s gift for red tape and procrastination. One ordinarily stands half an hour before a post-office window to buy a stamp, and the distribution of the mails rarely begins within twenty-four hours of their arrival. There is no bookstore in the colony, except that a Jewish ex-convict rents lurid tales of bloodshed; and though there is a public library, it is open only from 6 to 7:30 four evenings a week and is never crowded then. Though it lacks many such things, the town has several elaborate fountains—most of which fail to fount—and more than a fair share of statues—another proof, I suppose, that Latins are artistic. The place makes one wonder whether the English are good colonizers because their calm self-control has a sobering effect on primitive races, whose passions are always near the surface, while the French, the Latins in general, are poor colonizers because they are emotional and lack full control of their own passions, thereby making the wild race worse by influence and example.

Out under a grove of trees in the outskirts white French officers were putting negro youths through the manual of arms. “They don’t want to go and defend their country (patrie), the poltroons,” sneered the officer who had come out with me; but conscription is as stern as in France, so that hundreds were being trained for a month or more and shipped to Europe by each French Mail. The laws of France apply only to three of her colonies,—Martinique, Guadeloupe, and Réunion; Cayenne, though it has a representative in the Chamber of Deputies, is ruled by decrees and a governor sent out from Paris. Perhaps it is this spirit of centralization which causes the clocks of the colony to be so set that at six in the evening it is dark and at six in the morning the sun is high and hot. The local bank issues notes on poor paper of from five francs up; otherwise the money of France is used, except the “smacky” (which is what has become of the words “sou marqué” in the mouth of the illiterate negro), a local ten-centime piece made—one could hardly say coined—in 1818 and resembling worn-out tobacco tags, used interchangeably with the big two-sou pieces of France.

I went one evening to a “Benefit Concert” at the Casino, a barn-like board structure recalling the “Polytheamas” of Brazil, where local talent gave a performance in aid of those left behind by the men who had gone to war. The entertainment began at 8:30—in French style, so it was nine even by Cayenne clocks and really near midnight when the curtain finally rose. The governor, a Frenchman with a white goatee, sat with the elected town mayor and other authorities, all of more or less negro ancestry and wearing the same Gallic facial decoration, as well as haughty official expressions. There was no heavy formal evening dress, as in Brazil, but mostly white duck, which is taboo for men of standing in the big land to the south. Every shade of black to white humanity was hobnobbing like intimate friends. It gave one a creepy feeling to see dainty French démoiselles entertaining not only elaborately dressed men of color but jet black men—though personally I prefer the full black. The entertainment, chiefly musical, was produced by the local talent left in the colony, particularly by a trump of a white girl of scarcely eighteen, who not only made up more than half the show but carried herself unerringly through several trying situations. For example, she played the heroine in a silly little local drama, and as the departure of most of the white men for the war had left them hard up for heroes, it became her duty in a particularly emotional and tragic love scene, with a speech about “your beloved wavy locks,” to lay her dainty hand lovingly on the bald pate of a dumpy lump of a man beyond fifty, the ridiculousness whereof caused even the Latinized audience to burst forth in laughter. It seemed to be the Cayenne system for all white French residents who had been called to the front to leave their women behind at the mercy of the negroes, economically and otherwise. Some had been given minor government positions, such as in the post-office, never before filled here by members of their sex; but as the sternness of Penelope is not characteristic of hard-pressed Gallic womanhood, and the French color-line faint, certain conditions had already grown up that would not have been tolerated in an American community.

The former inhabitants of Cayenne called it Moccumbro. An expedition financed by merchants of Rouen landed on the coast in 1604, and more or less successful attempts were made during the next half century to establish colonies there. Holland held the territory for a time, as she did most of the northeastern coast of South America, and gradually the claims of the French on that continent shrank to their present insignificance, as in the rest of the New World. About 1660, colonists stole fourteen negroes from a traveler along the coast and established African slavery. Twelve thousand French immigrants came out in 1763, but no preparations had been made to help them endure tropical life, and only two thousand survivors returned in a sad state to France. The slaves were freed by the French Revolution; and the Convention, and later the Directorate, sent out déportés to take their place; but with Napoleon slavery was revived. Portugal held the colony from 1809 to 1817, “luckily,” a local school-book puts it, “for if it had been taken by Portugal’s ally, England, it would never have been given back.” Finally, in 1848, complete emancipation of all slaves in “French America” followed the introduction of a resolution in the French congress by Schoelcher—a statue of whom decorates Cayenne—and the colony, by admission even of its own people, has vegetated ever since. Naturally the liberated slaves took at once to the bush, built themselves rude shelters, and settled down to eat bananas and mandioca and prolifically to multiply. The discovery of gold and the promise of quick fortune in the placer mines of the interior for the few who cared to exert themselves was the final straw that broke the back of agriculture in French Guiana.

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.

For years different convict camps were established within the colony, and changed because the prisoners died of fever in droves—which would not have mattered had not some of their guardians suffered the same fate. In 1867 there were 18,000 convicts, with an average of 1200 arriving every year. They are divided at present among four penal stations, of which that at the mouth of the Maroni River and the big stone penitentiary on a slight plateau at the edge of the sea in Cayenne are, the most important, the latter housing about 330 regular prisoners and 400 “transients” at the time of my visit. Though they come from all the other French colonies,—Algeria, the West Indies, Madagascar, and the rest—by far the majority of the convicts one sees in Cayenne are white men from France, probably a large percentage of them from Paris, many of them truly rough looking customers, for all their whipped-dog attitude. A few are educated men of good families who have gone seriously astray and been caught at it. The man who stole millions of French church money after these churches were declared state property; another once high up in the government who made undue use of that position to feather his own nest; several lawyers who were unusually rapacious in robbing their clients; half a dozen traitors are there—or were, for one must not assume the present tense long in such surroundings—all dressed in exactly the same buff-colored blouse and trousers of coarsest canvas-like stuff, the former generally open to the navel, and a crude straw hat woven of the awara palm-leaf, working at the same digging of sewers, the cutting of grass, or the breaking of stone in the public streets as the thieving degenerates from Les Halles and the perverted apaches from Montmartre. Irrespective of their origin and former habits, newcomers begin at the hardest manual labor under the blazing tropical sun, which soon kills off the weak and establishes a new sort of survival of the fittest. “The climate itself is a great factor in bringing repentance,” as a jailer puts it. This, the arduous toil, and the diet—or lack of it—give those who survive a greatly changed appearance, and it is only by looking twice that one can see the Parisian apache or trickster under the sallow, yellow faces, gaunt with fever, of the wretches whose clothing hangs about them as from a clothes-pole.

The déportés are divided into three classes,—transportés, merely sentenced to a certain number of years at forced labor; rélégués, serving life sentences; and libérés, former convicts free to live where they choose within the colony. Highwaymen, burglars, and murderers make up a large percentage of the list; yet if he is asked, almost any one of them will answer “affaire de femme,” though he may be the most miserable sneak thief or a man who “only killed his mother.” There are no women in the Cayenne penitentiary, for they are sent to a prison in charge of the Sisters of St. Laurent over on the boundary of Dutch Guiana. Professional criminals and recidivists are particularly assigned to the Cayenne establishment; though there are men with sentences of from five years up for almost every conceivable crime. In practice, any man sentenced to seven years or more is virtually a life prisoner. Even if his sentence is less than that, he can only get back to France after serving a like term as libéré and earning his own passage money honestly—and honest money does not float about French Guiana. When one considers how stern is the struggle for existence in crowded French cities, the hardship of the accused being obliged to prove his innocence under French law, and the carelessness or indifference of French judges in handing out sentences of seven years or more for almost minor crimes, it is not strange that, though the world has never heard of them, there are many more examples of the devilish injustice of man to man than the notorious case of Dreyfus.

Not only can he wear only the two coarse garments and a hat, without shoes, but the prisoner is denuded even of the Frenchman’s pride, his mustache, being clean shaven and shorn to accentuate the difference between him as an outcast and the free members of society. Luckily, I was wearing a labial decoration, and thus was looked on with less scorn and suspicion by the negro population than might otherwise have been the case; for the standards and symbols of Cayenne are to their primitive minds also those of the outside world. Educated prisoners are sometimes made use of, after they have served the first part of their time at hard labor, as bookkeepers or skilled mechanics—a bright-looking rélégué was installing new telephone lines with convict workmen during my visit—but these things are mainly for the convenience of the administration and to save the officers in charge from work, never with the idea of helping the man himself. In fact, “the regeneration of the man sentenced to travaux forcés, imagined by the law of 1854, has become a legend at which the first to laugh are the unregenerated themselves.” Somehow I had pictured to myself a penal colony as a place where the unfortunate, removed from their former troubles and temptations, were turned loose in a new and virgin land and, with an occasional helping hand from above, given the opportunity to begin life anew. Nothing could be farther from the fact in French Guiana. The officers themselves consider it a punishment to be sent there, and their treatment of the wretches under them is that of noxious animals which it is an advantage to be rid of as soon as possible. In view of the many splendid qualities of the French, it is incredible how few “bowels for their kindred” these officers in charge have for their prisoners, unbelievable that the French soldier, who has known some of the hardships of life as a conscript, can treat his own flesh and blood in a way that does not seem human, giving the onlooker full credence in the story of “Jean Valjean,” making their helpless victims feel that what society seeks is not reform, but revenge—revenge for forcing the particular members of it with whom they come in contact to spend months or years as prison-guards or administrators in a hot and fever-stricken land far from their beloved France.

I am not a particularly firm believer in the efficacy of repentance, but even if he felt the desire to do better stirring within him, the convict of Cayenne would find every conceivable difficulty on the road to reform. He is marked and stamped with, and hounded for, his past sins, without a friend on earth, except in the rare cases when he has money, without which he is made to understand that his early elimination is the thing most desirable. The great majority, of course, are scoundrels who deserve their fate—or at least a somewhat more humane one. But imagine yourself an educated, well-bred man who, succumbing to overwhelming temptation or cruel force of circumstances, has appropriated public funds, for example, and been suddenly removed from Paris boulevards to dig sewer-trenches in stony soil in the public streets of a negro city beneath a tropical sun, working in bare feet on the scantiest of prison rations under a bullying negro boss! The most iniquitous part of the whole French system is that not only are white prisoners set at the most degrading tasks among the black population, but that they are often under command of negroes—and naturally, the effect of this on the primitive African mind is to double their native insolence and convince them that all white men are of a low and criminal type. The other two Guianas would never dream of letting the negro population see white men doing manual labor, even though they were sentenced to it—much less put them under negro command; but the intangibility of the color-line among the French is notorious.

Forty years after the establishment of the penal colony, the prisoners were allowed to be rented out to private individuals. Those who hire them must pay the prison authorities about two and a half francs a day each, defray certain hospital insurance, and comply with several irksome and rather stupid rules. The red tape and poor dovetailing between departments is especially troublesome. The man who hires a prisoner pays the government a total of 78 francs a month, or considerably more than the wages of free labor—when this can be had. A foreigner long resident in the colony had found that only by giving the convicts wine with their meals, tobacco at night, if they had worked well during the day, and other gratuities, could he get any real work out of them, so that in the end the prisoner cost twice as much as free labor and was a much poorer workman; while if the convict falls ill, a mishap at which he is an expert, the cost becomes “fantastic.” Most of the prisoners, therefore, still toil directly for the government on public works, and, the negro freeman scorning labor, private persons who require workmen usually hire libérés, whom it is not necessary either to treat or pay well.

Though he cannot leave the colony, the libéré can go where he chooses within it, and dress like a civilian—if he can afford it. When his sentence is up he is given a suit of blue jeans, a slouch felt hat, clumsy shoes, and is left to shift for himself, though often obliged to report to the authorities at frequent intervals. Almost always he has an avoid-your-eyes manner which discloses his past, even if his five years or more as prisoner has not made his face familiar to all the colony. Here and there in a stroll through the town one is startled—at least after three years of disconnection between manual labor and the European race—to find white men working as shoemakers, butchers, small mechanics, or anything else at which they can rake and scrape a livelihood. These are invariably libérés, some of whom have formed alliances with such females as the colony affords and bred more of their kind with negro trimmings. As there are no white women available for this class, and the libéré has been a familiar sight in French Guiana for the past sixty years, unquestionably many of the mulattoes and quadroons one sees strutting about town, holding political places of importance and looking with deepest scorn upon the white convicts, are the sons and daughters of released criminals. Having in most cases lost all sense of shame or decency during their bestial imprisonment, libérés not only work at odd jobs about the market and the town, but throughout the colony, the sight of their groveling and lowly estate naturally not decreasing the negro’s conviction of his own superiority over the white race. Coming from prison life after a background of artificial civilization, most of them cannot cope with existence in such surroundings and often commit new crimes for no other purpose than to get back into prison and at least have something to eat again.

Though there has been an average of 1200 convict arrivals a year since 1854, and almost none have returned home, the number in the colony remains almost stationary, at the remarkably low figure of from six to eight thousand. Of the surplus, perhaps four per cent. have escaped; many have been shot by guards or been killed in prison feuds, while great numbers have died of tropical diseases, rough treatment, and virtual starvation. Many have run away into the bush or the dense jungles on the Brazilian or the Dutch side of the colony; but being mainly city men and generally of slight education or intelligence, they have absolutely no adaptability in the bush, not even knowing enough to take directions by the sun; and while a man used to wilderness travel might get away, most of the refugees have found the jungle impossible and have returned to serve life sentences. The bones of others are not infrequently found up in the interior. The few who reach civilization in Brazil are the most fortunate. Those who get into Dutch Guiana are, in theory, subject to extradition, but are commonly overlooked, unless they make themselves conspicuous by becoming penniless or returning to their old ways. A few have become men of importance in the neighboring colony, particularly a well-dressed rascal who has lived some twenty years now as a merchant in Paramaribo. Rafts of moco-moco stems, and a canoe made from a sheet, are among the curiosities left by escaped prisoners to the Cayenne museum. On the Dutch side of the Maroni River they are free from French pursuit, but have still greater trials with the Indians, and particularly with the wild negroes, who shoot them freely, or more often, make them slaves and work them until they are all but dead, then bring them back to the French and claim the standing reward.

It is against the law, or at least almost impossible, to visit the “camp,” as the big prison in the town of Cayenne is called, particularly since some American got the former commander “in wrong” with the French Government by publishing an account of such a visit. But neither laws nor strict rules survive personal friendship in Latin countries, and I had made good use of my short acquaintance with the four Frenchmen who had landed with me. At that, they politely hedged when I hinted a desire to get inside the prison, until one morning, catching alone one of them who had just been transferred from New Caledonia as a guard, I mellowed him with strong iced drinks under the earth-floored veranda of Cayenne’s least disreputable café. So wheedlingly did he introduce me to the stern “principal” of the prison, a French captain, that the cut and dried refusal shriveled on his lips and, taking down a large bunch of big keys, he led us into the prison in person.

It is under strict military régime, the building that forms a part of the wall of the immense yard being the barracks of soldier guards. Here they had good spring beds and paid the nominal sum of one franc twenty-five centimes a day, with an additional two francs for their wives, in the rare cases in which they had brought them out from France. There were separate rooms for one or two families, and a good kitchen well served by convicts, with wine and champagne for those who could afford it. Across the bare yard were many massive gates with prisoner turnkeys, for discipline is maintained largely by making trusties and “stool-pigeons” and setting them as spies over the rest. There was an infirmérie where the merely sick are shut up in pens, a sad looking place with much fever and crude, careless surgery without anesthetics, from which those who can convince the hardhearted officials that they are really ill are sent to the hospital. The “principal” was full of courtesies for me, but he took it out on the prisoners, always addressing them as one might a particularly low class of animal. Indeed, officials high and low were incredibly prejudiced against the convicts; not one of them seemed to be large enough to recognize them as partly the victims of society or of circumstances. The officers have a secret identification system, and the prisoners a secret argot, or slang, which keep guards and guarded still farther apart. There are special and incredible punishments for the slightest offenses, such as failing to grovel before the meanest underling among the soldier guards, which increases the number of invalids. Even in the infirmary there was not a book to be had, nothing whatever to take the minds of inmates off their present deplorable surroundings, not even a sign of a priest. I have never seen a human institution over the door of which Dante’s famous phrase would be more entirely appropriate. The bitter cynicism of the monument of Schoelcher freeing a black slave in the main square of Cayenne is sure to strike one after a visit to the prison.

The bulk of the prison is made up of big dungeons with a few small barred windows high above the unleveled earth floor, in which are confined the regular prisoners divided by “classes,”—Arabs here, men from Madagascar there, white Frenchmen in others. This division is no concession to the color-line, but is merely for the purpose of simplifying the administration. Three feet above the ground were four parallel poles, and fastened to these were strips of stiff canvas two feet wide and a little more than five long, all so close together that even a thin man could barely squeeze between them, forming two rows of sleeping quarters the length of each dungeon. Evidently nothing else was allowed, for one fellow with a fever being covered with a dirty old rag the “principal” demanded of the trembling trusty in charge, in a voice such as one might use to a street cur, at the same time snatching the cover off the invalid, “Where did he get that?” The trusty shakingly replied that it was an old flour sack, which he was forthwith ordered to turn over to the guard outside. “Do you dare not rise and take off your hat when you see me pass?” bellowed the commander to another emaciated wretch who with the greatest difficulty could crawl to his feet and force his legs to hold him, though he hastened to do both. Even this was not enough for my wine-cheered friend from the boat, who proceeded to shout more insults at the fellow for his “insubordination.”

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: