I followed him upstairs. He opened the door without any ceremony, and I found myself in the presence of the Governor—a man of medium French height, with a square, close-cropped head, moustache, and close-clipped beard. If the chin had matched the forehead it would have been a strong face, but it did not.

I learnt afterwards that his Excellency Monsieur Feuillet is a man of decided anti-English tastes; but for all that he received me very cordially. He had already received notice of my coming from the French Government, and expressed himself as willing to do anything to further my mission. As a matter of fact, this came to countersigning my credentials from the Minister of Colonies and writing a letter to the Director of the Administration. I then shook hands, and saw Monsieur Paul Feuillet no more save from a distance.

Then I went to the Direction, and in a few minutes I was sitting in a half-darkened, comfortable room, with double doors, through which no sound could penetrate. This room is the centre of the system which really controls the destinies of bond and free throughout New Caledonia. On the other side of an ample writing-table sat a square-headed, strong-jawed man of about five-and-thirty, with close-cropped hair, and moustache and shaven chin à l’Anglais.

This was M. Edouard Telle, Director of the Penitentiary Administration for New Caledonia and Dependencies, the strongest, politest, and most friendly Frenchman I have ever met.

He is supreme chief of an army of commandants, surveillants, and jailors, whose duty it is to keep watch and ward over between ten thousand and twelve thousand convicts, relégues and libérés—terms which I have already explained.

He is absolutely independent of the Governor, who cannot even employ convicts on public works without his permission. He is responsible to no one but the Minister of Colonies and the President of the Republic, and they are many a long thousand miles away. With the stroke of a pen he could instantly stop all convict labour throughout the colony, and so bring its principal industries to a standstill. It was he, too, and not the Governor, who could have issued that ukase which would have closed the prisons and turned my long journey into a wild-goose chase.

But, instead of this, he took quite as much trouble with me as if I had been an inspector sent out by the French Government, rather than a wandering Englishman who was only there on sufferance. He took the utmost pains to find out exactly what I wanted; he mapped out my journeys for me; gave me special passes authorising me to inspect all the prisons and camps en détail—which is a very different thing to the ordinary, but still rarely bestowed, visitor’s pass.

He addressed a circular letter to the commandants, enjoining them to do everything to help me; and, not content with this, he telegraphed to each prison and camp so that conveyances might be ready for me. At the same time, when I suggested fixing dates, he replied:

“No, Mr. Griffith, go when you please. I wish you to see the establishments exactly as they are always, and not as they might be if they were got ready for you. When you have seen them come back and tell me what you think of them. From what you have told me of your English prisons”—this was at the end of a somewhat long conversation—“your opinion will be most valuable to me.”

Then I thanked him, and mentioned the delicate subject of photographs, and his good nature and indulgence once move proved equal to the strain.

“Photograph anything you please,” he said, “inside or outside the prisons; but I shall ask you to remember that good English rule of yours about photographing individual prisoners.”

Of course, I agreed to this, and left the Direction well at ease and wondering more than ever at the misconceptions I had managed to form of the Caledonian prison system. I frankly admit that I had expected to be received with suspicion and reserve, perhaps even with hostility.

Instead of this the most powerful man in the colony had greeted me with perfect cordiality and frankness, and had taken more trouble to make my tour a success than I should certainly have expected a good many English officials to take.

During another interview with M. Telle, before I had yet seen the inside of a Caledonian prison, we both managed to astonish each other not a little. The Director is a criminologist and the son of a criminologist, who was Director before him, but he was sufficiently French only to have studied the continental systems.

Therefore he was about as much surprised when I told him that the cat and the birch were still used in English prisons; that English prisoners ate and slept in absolute solitude and worked in silence, as I was when he told me that, in this land of supposed horrors not only had all corporal punishment been abolished, but that the surveillants were not permitted even to lay a hand upon a prisoner, except in actual self-defence; that cells and silence were only used as punishments; and when he added that the better-behaved prisoners might smoke and drink wine, I confess that I was almost shocked. All this, however, with other strange things, I was soon to see for myself.

I dined that night, as usual, at the club, in a more contented frame of mind than heretofore, for now the omnipotent Administration had spoken, and I was free of the colony—free to go where I pleased, to see what I liked, and, within the limits of the law, do as I liked.

No man might say me nay. All the prison-houses in the land must give up their secrets to me. In short, I had in my pocket the keys of every cell door in New Caledonia.

Under these circumstances I naturally found things much pleasanter than before. I listened with equanimity to a local editor’s remarks on the war news—which he had been spending the day in mangling—and even the military doctors’ descriptions of the new plague cases and the ghastly operations which they had just been performing with those nail-stained hands of theirs did not seem quite so loathsome as before.

There was, by the way, another peculiarity of New Caledonian social life to which I was already becoming accustomed. There are practically no free servants in the colony. Male or female, they are either convicts or ex-convicts, and it was no uncommon thing to have your knife and fork laid for you at breakfast or dinner by a hand which had stuck a knife into somebody else, or to take your food from hands that had poisoned.

I admit that I did not like the idea at first, but in time I got accustomed to it, just as I did later on to being shaved by a most amiable and accomplished murderer, and having my bed made up by a lady who had cut her child’s throat. It is, in fact, the fashion in New Caledonia to have murderers for servants. As a distinguished resident said to me:

“You see, the assassins are reliable. They are the aristocrats of the place. They don’t condescend to smaller crimes. In fact, they would be absolutely insulted if they were accused of a theft, at least, the good murderers would, and as for killing you, they would never dream of it. Why should they? Besides, they know perfectly well that there wouldn’t be the remotest chance of escape for them.”

This I found afterwards to be the cold-drawn truth. Fewer after-crimes are committed in New Caledonia by those who are sent there for assassination than by minor criminals. Later on I shall have some curious information to give on this subject.

III
ILE NOU

Half-past five on a glorious tropical morning. The sun was still hidden behind the green, rugged mountains which gained its name for New Caledonia; but it was still high enough for the shadows to be melting out of the valleys; for the grey roofs and white walls of the town to be glimmering among the dark masses of foliage; and for the smooth waters of the lovely harbour to light up with foregleams of the glory of sunrise.

A little beyond the northern end of the plague-infected area, with its corrugated iron walls and its white-clad sentries, I found a collection of pretty buildings, with neat little gardens round them. They were the offices of the executive police, and when I had passed through them I found myself on a short, board, wooden, T-shaped quay—the Quai de la Transportation—which is used solely for the purposes of the Administration.

Leading down to this is one of the only two railways of New Caledonia on which a locomotive travels. It is quite a toy affair, with a gauge of about twenty inches, and a length of perhaps five hundred yards; but the engine puffed around just as busily, and seemed just as proud of itself, as if it had been hauling the Empire State Express. It runs from the wharves to the head of the quay, and its function just then was carrying ballast for a new road.

It is a curious fact that the French have had possession of New Caledonia for nearly half a century, and yet the only railway by which passengers can travel is one on which the cars are drawn by convicts, concerning which more hereafter.

I presented my credentials at the douanerie, where my cameras were viewed with considerable suspicion until the all-compelling documents had been read. After that, I suppose, they would have almost let me take a Maxim gun on to the island. Then they were noted and handed back to me with a polite “Très bien, monsieur. The canot will start in a quarter of an hour. If you will give your apparatus to this officer he will see it safe in the boat.”

A polite surveillant stepped up, touched his helmet, and took them from me. Then I lit a pipe and strolled up and down the quay to enjoy my strange surroundings.

I had seen hundreds of convicts in England working both within and without the prison walls; working in grim, joyless silence, surrounded by equally silent, rifle-armed warders, and never a prisoner moving without one of these at his heels. Here it was difficult to believe that I was in Prisonland at all save that the other occupants of the quay were wearing two very different uniforms, and that I was the only one en civile.

The surveillants were dressed in spotless white—the official washing-bill of New Caledonia must be something enormous—their white helmets bore a silver badge, the chief figure in which was a glorified representation of the now forbidden rod, with the letters “A. P.” (Administration Pénitentiare). Their rank was shown by galons, a sort of stripe worn on the cuff of the left sleeve. This was of blue cloth with silver braid—the lines of braid served the same purpose as stripes do with us. For instance, the French equivalent for “two stripes” is “à deux galons.”

The uniform of the others was chiefly conspicuous for its ugliness and utility—a pair of trousers and a jumper of light grey canvas cloth, with a vest underneath, and a very broad-brimmed straw hat, without a ribbon. No convict in Caledonia is allowed a ribbon on his hat. Some had stout, undressed brogues, and some were barefoot. They were without exception extremely ugly and fairly hearty.

A good many of them were smoking, and this rather got on my nerves, for I kept on asking myself what would happen to an English prison official if he saw a convict take out a cigarette and go and ask another one for a light? But here surveillants strolled about puffing their own cigarettes—making me wonder again what would happen to an English warder smoking on duty?—and not worrying particularly over anything.

At the same time, there was no lack of discipline of its kind, though it was not what we should call discipline in England. Still, the convicts worked hard and regularly; harder, indeed, than I have ever seen English convicts work.

Their task was loading the canots and the steam-launch with provisions for the great prison on the other side of the harbour; and they went at it steadily and in excellent order until it was finished, scarcely needing a word of direction from the surveillants.

As I watched them I thought of the quiet-spoken, square-headed despot with whom I had been talking a day or two before. These men, like hundreds of others that I saw, evidently knew him, if only by repute.

Presently the surveillant who had taken my cameras came and saluted and told me that the canot was ready. I got in, and found it manned by twelve convicts, who were protected by an awning stretched from stem to stern. They were chatting and smoking when we got in, and my conductor, thinking perhaps to impress the Englishman with a sense of French discipline, ordered them to be silent.

They stopped talking for five minutes while they got under weigh, then, like a lot of school-boys, they began again, whereupon the surveillant rebuked them again. “Silence, je vous dis!” said he in his most authoritative tone; and they obliged him more or less for the rest of the passage.

I must say that they rowed very well, and with a vigour which betokened good nourishment. They looked at me with smiling curiosity. They evidently knew pretty well all about me by this time—Heaven and the mysterious “loi du bagne” only know how; and I daresay they wondered why any one should have taken the trouble to come across the world just to make their acquaintance.

I was received on the quay at Ile Nou by an officer—a chief warder, as we should call him in England—who took me to the Commandant’s house. En route I found that Ile Nou, about which I had read such terrible stories, is a very pleasant little settlement, composed of white houses and shady streets, at the foot of a hill on which the great prison buildings stand.

In a few minutes another illusion was shattered. I admit that I expected to find the Commandant of the greatest prison in Caledonia a semi-military despot in a braided uniform, boots and spurs, with a sword, and, possibly, a revolver, to say nothing of fiercely waxed moustache and imperial.

Instead of this I found a mild-mannered, grey-haired gentleman of about sixty, clad in a négligé white suit, with no sign of official rank about him save a silver-embroidered blue band round the left cuff of his coat, which reminded me rather oddly of the band that a British policeman wears when he is on duty.

He was drinking his early coffee and receiving reports, which were noted by a convict clerk at another table. He gave me a cup of coffee, and ordered the carriage to be got ready. Meanwhile, he dropped his reports and began to ask me about my journey, my impressions of New Caledonia, and so on.

Presently a surveillant came in to say that the carriage was ready. We got in, and a couple of well-bred, well-fed horses pulled us at a good pace up the winding road, until our convict driver halted in front of a big black iron door in a long white-washed wall. As the Chief Surveillant put his key into the lock the Commandant said to me, with a smile:

“You will be the first Englishman who has ever passed this gate.”

“Mais pardon, Commandant,” said the surveillant, as he threw the door open. “There have been two others, but they did not come across the world to see the prison, and they stayed a good deal longer than monsieur would care to do.”

“No doubt,” said I; and with that we crossed the Threshold of Lost Footsteps.

As the door swung to behind me I found myself in a long rectangular courtyard, one side of which was almost filled by a row of long, white buildings fronting endways on to the court, with a door at the end and small windows along the side.

At the further end, to the right hand, there was another door in the high, white wall, of which I was to learn the use later on, for the quadrangle which we were crossing is to the convicts of Ile Nou what the Place de la Roquette was lately to the Parisians—the Field of Blood, the Place of Execution.

The Commandant apologised for not being able to invite me to assist at the spectacle, as there was no patient available. I should see shortly a forçat awaiting trial for murder, but it would be some time before he could be tried, and then there would be the ratification of the sentence.

I should, of course, have assisted at such a spectacle if it had been possible; but I had the advantage of hearing a simple, but none the less graphic, description of an execution at Ile Nou from the lips of one who had more than once been an eye-witness of the dread ceremony; and this I will reproduce hereafter not only because of its dramatic interest, but because it is so absolutely different from anything ever heard of in England.

After we had inspected the cases, or dormitories, where the convicts of the third, or lowest, class sleep on sloping wooden shelves, with one foot manacled to an iron bar running the whole length of the long room, we went through other gates and walls into the central prison—the Prison Cellulaire—the heart and centre of the vast organisation.

Here I might have fancied myself in a somewhat old-fashioned English prison. Here there were no convicts smoking cigarettes or chatting at their work while their guardians smoked theirs and chatted also. The chill of silence cut down through the warmth of the tropic morning as the iron gates clashed to, and the heavy bolts shot back. Underfoot, black stone or cement pavement; around, white walls and two tiers of little black doors, the upper fronted by stone balconies and iron rails.

On the ground floor we went through several cells into which light as well as air was admitted, and here I found convicts who had been sentenced to various terms of hard labour with solitary confinement. This, with reduction of diet, is the first degree of punishment inflicted on an idle or disorderly prisoner. It was about equal to the ordinary hard labour of English prisons.

Then, after a look into the two little exercise-yards, we mounted to the second storey. Here I noticed that the cells had no windows and no gratings in the doors. Some of them had little cards affixed to them.

I went and read a couple of these; they contained the names of the prisoners, their first sentence, their subsequent offences, and their present sentences.

In these two cases it was “ten years’ solitary confinement in the dark.” Then I knew that I was standing in front of the terrible Cachot Noir, or Black Cell—that engine of mental murder which the sentimentalism of French deputies, some of them amnestied communards, has substituted for the infinitely more merciful lash.

I asked for the doors to be opened. My polite Commandant demurred for a moment. It was not réglementaire. The Cachots Noirs were never opened except at stated intervals,—once every thirty days, for an hour’s exercise and medical inspection,—but the wording of my credentials was explicit, and so the doors were opened.

Out of the corner of one came something in human shape, crouching forward, rubbing its eyes and blinking at the unaccustomed light. It had been three and a half years in that horrible hole, about three yards long, by one and a half broad. I gave him a feast of sunshine and outer air by taking his place for a few minutes.

After the first two or three the minutes lengthened out into hours. I had absolutely no sense of sight. I was as blind as though I had been born without eyes. The blackness seemed to come down on me like some solid thing and drive my straining eyes back into my head. It was literally darkness that could be felt, for I felt it, and the silence was like the silence of upper space.

When the double doors opened again the rays of light seemed to strike my eyes like daggers. The criminal whose place I had taken had a record of infamy which no printable words could describe, and yet I confess that I pitied him as he went back into that living death of darkness and silence.

We went along the galleries, looking into other cells and at other prisoners, some of whom I was surprised to find quite cheerful, but they were new-comers, and perhaps liked the idleness and the sleep. Then we came to a corridor cut off by a heavy iron gate. There were six ordinary cells in this, the cells of the condemned, and it is here that the last tragedy of the convict’s life on Ile Nou begins.

Let us suppose that, as often happens, there are four or five men lying in these cells under sentence of death. The English murderer knows the day and hour of his doom. These men do not. Every night they go to sleep not knowing whether or not it is their last sleep on earth. All they know is that they are doomed. Then the fiat goes forth that “Un nommé D.” is to make the final expiation of his crimes.

That night, when the prison doors are locked, the parts of the guillotine are brought in through the door at the end of the great courtyard, and set up on a platform supported on a stone foundation, under the supervision of “Monsieur de l’Ile Nou,” who is always a convict released from his other duties in consideration of performing the last functions of the law on his colleagues.

Soon after three the next morning, accompanied by the Chaplain and the Chief Surveillant, the Commandant mounts the little hill on which the central prison stands. The black doors open, and they ascend to the corridor of the condemned; a key clicks in the lock, and the bolts rattle back.

You can, perhaps, imagine what that sound means to A., B., C., and D. Men in their position do not take much awakening. Perhaps they have been waiting for this for weeks.

They hear the footsteps coming along the stone-paved corridor. Which door will they stop at? Think of the agony of apprehension that is compressed into those few seconds!

Then the footsteps stop. Three men wipe the sweat from their brows, and fall back on their plank-beds. They at least will not die for a day or two yet. The fourth hears a key rattle into the lock of his cell door. The door swings open, and the early morning flows in. “L’un nommé D.” has already accepted his fate. He is already off his bed and standing to attention as steadily as he can. The Commandant says kindly, and, perhaps, with a check in his voice:

“C’est pour ce matin!”

Then he steps back, and the priest takes his place. The door is not closed, but the Commandant and his assistants retire a little out of respect for the last confidences of the condemned.

Meanwhile “Monsieur de l’Ile Nou” has been summoned, and, in due course, he takes the chaplain’s place. He binds his patient’s hands behind his back, ties his legs so that he can only just walk, and cuts away the collar of his shirt.

At the same time, other and more picturesque preparations have been made in the great courtyard. A company of infantry with loaded rifles and fixed bayonets have been marched in and surround the scaffold in hollow square. Almost at the same time come the Director of the Administration, the Procurator-General, the Clerk of the Marine Tribunal, the Court which holds the power of life and death over the convicts, and a few other officials.

The swift tropical dawn is approaching by this time. The gates and doors of the prison are thrown open, and columns of convicts file into the yard, guarded by surveillants, revolver on hip. They take their places in ranks inside the hollow square of soldiers.

The door at the end of the courtyard opens last of all, and through it comes a little procession composed of the Commandant, the Chief Surveillant, the priest, and “Monsieur de l’Ile Nou,” escorting the principal actor in the scene. The priest mounts the scaffold with the victim, followed by the executioner and his assistant; the clerk of the court reads the verdict and sentence, the Commandant hands his warrant to the Director and then he gives the order:

“Uncover and kneel!”

The broad-brimmed hats come off and the grey-clad ranks sink on their knees around the Altar of Justice. The living sacrifice is asked if he has anything to say. He usually makes a short speech either of exhortation or bravado.

Then, with the assistance of the executioners, he takes his place on a sloping plank. A roll of drums rumbles echoing round the white walls. The plank swings into a horizontal position, the body is thrust forward till the neck is imprisoned in the lunette—the little window through which those who die by French law take their last look at the world. “Monsieur de l’Ile Nou” touches a button; then comes the “skirr” of the falling knife, a sharp thud, and there is one scoundrel the less on Ile Nou.

After which the comrades of the deceased are marched back to breakfast, and thence to their daily tasks.

IV
MEASUREMENT AND MANIA

I left the central prison breathing the soft, sweet air, and looking up at the deep blue sky with a sudden sensation of thankfulness which I had never experienced before. In a sense I was like a man who had been blind and had had his sight given back to him; and I thought of the wretches I had left behind me in that high-walled enclosure and those little black holes built away into the thick walls which, for so many of them, were to be tombs of mental death.

We came down the hill to the Pretoire, the Bureau of Anthropometry. This is the ante-chamber through which every prisoner must pass who enters the Prisonland of the South. On the way the Commandant and I discussed a topic which I found a favourite one with all the officials whom I met in Caledonia—the differences between the French system and our own.

They were quite as much surprised at the rigours of our system as I at first was at the leniency of theirs—always saving that horrible Cachot Noir.

We went then, as I did many times afterwards, with other officials, into matters of diet, hours, and kinds of labour, detentions, and punishments, and I succeeded in showing him that the Caledonian convict was to be envied in every particular by the English convict, until he came to the threshold of the dark cell. With us, three days’ dark cell and bread and water is the maximum punishment. There it is five years, and sentences may run consecutively. When the discussion was over the commandant added an entirely French rider to it:

“But, monsieur, you must remember that this is not only imprisonment—it is exile. How many of these poor wretches will ever see France again? Whereas your criminals, when their sentence is done, are set free in their native land.”

To which I replied:

“Quite so, and more’s the pity! Every avenue of honest life is closed to them, and they are released only to commit more crimes and deserve another sentence. There your system is better. You exile them really, but you give them another home where they have hope. We only exile them socially, and give them no hope.”

And this brought us to the door of the Pretoire.

It consisted of three apartments, the middle one was the examination room. To the right hand was a larger chamber, sometimes used as a judgment room. To the left was a smaller one, the walls of which were covered with cabinets containing the records in duplicate of every criminal that had landed on Ile Nou. Beyond this there was a dark-room.

When I had had a general look round and a chat with the Officer who operated the Bertillon system, the Commandant asked me if I would care to go through the mill. To which, not having been found out so far, I consented.

Thereupon I was delivered over into the hands of a functionary who had a pair of eyes like visual gimlets. They bored clean through me every time he looked at me. I was no longer the favoured guest of the all-powerful Administration; I was simply a subject, a thing to be measured, and weighed, and examined in the most minute detail, and to have my most trivial characteristics noted and put down under their proper categories.

He told me to take off my boots and coat. By rights my socks should have come off also, but that, although I offered to do it, was dispensed with. He put me up against a wall, fixed my head with one hand and pushed my stomach in with the other, saw that my knees were properly back against the wall, and lowered the bar on to my head. Then he moved my head a little to right and left, and said to the clerk:

“One metre, 816.”

When this was noted down he sat me in a chair. The seat was longitudinally divided by a ridge; the back was a measuring scale. Again he took means to satisfy himself that I was sitting perfectly straight, and so my sitting height was taken.

Then he got a pair of callipers, and measured my head in two directions, from back to front and across, all the time calling out the fatal figures which, in case of need, would have identified me among ten million men.

After this he descended to minor matters, ears, nose, lips, thumb- and finger-joints, eyelids, and so on. Then he stood me on a box on which was rudely outlined a human foot. I put my right foot on this, bent forward, and rested my right hand on a table, using my left leg and foot to keep my balance. When I was steady my foot was measured.

Then I rested my right arm on a table, standing on one leg the while. It was measured from the elbow to the point of the middle finger. After this the prints of my thumb and three fingers were taken, and duly impressed on the fiche, or identification card.

Then came the most trying part of the ordeal, the general observation. I stood to attention in the middle of the floor. The gimlet-eyed official walked round me, and looked through and through me, what time the clerk at the table asked questions from the schedule he was filling up.

No detail was so minute as to escape those all-searching eyes. A scar which I had got twenty years before in a football match, though half hidden under an eyebrow, was detected, measured, and noted. The scars of a couple of old knife-stabs in my left hand, and the trace of a parrot-bite on one of my fingers—nothing escaped. The colour of my hair and moustache fell into a certain category. My eyes were examined, and the colours of the iris duly placed in their proper category.

By this time I began to feel as though I were being taken to pieces and examined bit by bit. It was a sort of mental and physical vivisection without the knife and the chloroform. Finally, the gentleman at the desk asked the question, “Intellectuality?”

“Mediocre,” replied Mr. Gimlet-eyes, with brutal frankness. Then I laughed, and the Commandant suggested that I should be photographed.

“Pas artistique, mais exact,” he said, as we went into the other room.

“And, therefore,” I said, “it will resemble the remarks of your anthropometric expert. I never had such an exact account of myself before. Anthropometry strikes me as being a pretty good medicine for human vanity.”

Out of the depth and width of his experience the Commandant agreed with me, and then I was photographed. There was no artistic posing or anything of that sort. I was planted on a chair with my back straightened up and my head in a vice such as other photographers were once wont to torture their victims with. The camera was brought within three feet of me. I was taken full face, staring straight into the lens, and then I was taken en profile. When, many weeks afterwards, I showed the result to my wife, she was sorry I ever went; but for all that it’s a good likeness.

By the time the negatives were developed, and I had satisfied the Commandant that certain black spots which the pitiless lens had detected under my skin were the result of a disease I had contracted years before in South America, and not premonitory symptoms of the plague, it was breakfast-time, and I went down to the canteen, where I found convicts buying wine and cigarettes, and generally conducting themselves like gentlemen at large.

I did not see the Commandant again that day, save for a few minutes after lunch, when he told me that he had an appointment at the Direction in Noumea, and placed me in charge of his lieutenant, the Chief Surveillant. The Chef was a very jolly fellow, as, indeed, I found most of these officials to be, and during our drives about the island, we chatted with the utmost freedom. As a matter of fact, it was he who gave me the description of the execution which I reproduced in the last chapter.

He, too, was entirely of the same opinion as myself as to the pitiless iniquity of the dark cell; but he took some pains to point out that it was not the fault either of the French Government or of the Administration, but simply of certain politicians in France who wanted a “cry,” and got up a crusade among the sentimentalists against “the brutality of flogging bound and helpless prisoners far away from all civilised criticism in New Caledonia.” Some of these men, too, as I have said, were déportés, or exiled communards who had been forgiven, and had brought back batches of stories with them as blood-curdling as they were mendacious.

“Bien, monsieur,” he said. “You have seen the Cachot Noir. Now we will go to the Disciplinary Camp first, because it is on the road, and then—well, you shall see what the cachot does, and when you see that I think you will say the lash is kinder.”

The Disciplinary Camps in New Caledonia have no counterpart in the English penal system. “Incorrigibles,” who won’t work, who are insubordinate, or have a bad influence on their comrades of the Bagne, are sent into them partly for punishment and partly for seclusion.

They have poorer food and harder work, no “gratifications” in the way of wine or tobacco, or other little luxuries. They sleep on plank-beds with their feet in anklets, and, if they don’t behave themselves, they are promptly clapped into a cell for so many days’ solitary confinement on bread and water. For graver offences they are, of course, sent back to the central prison as hopeless cases, after which their own case is usually hopeless for life.

I found several of the men in this camp working in chains. This was another subject about which the sentimentalists made a good deal of fuss in France, but when I saw what the alleged chains really were, I laughed, and said to my friend the Chef:

“So that is what you call chains in New Caledonia, is it? May I have a look at one?”

He beckoned to one of the men to come up, and this is what I found: There was an iron band riveted round his right ankle, and to this was attached a chain which, as nearly as I could calculate with my hands, weighed about six pounds. It was as absolutely no inconvenience to its wearer, when he was either sitting or lying down. When he was walking or working he tucked the end in under his belt, and, as far as I could see, it didn’t make any difference to his walk, save a little dragging of the foot. In fact, when I asked him whether it was any trouble to him, he said:

“No, not after a few days. One gets accustomed to it.”

“Very likely!” I said. “If you got the chains in an English prison, you would have them on both legs and arms, and you wouldn’t be able to take more than a half-stride.”

“Ah, they are brutal, those English!” said the scoundrel, with a shrug of his shoulders, as he tucked the end of his chain round his belt and sauntered away.

The chain is usually a punishment for gross insubordination or attempted escape. This man, the Chef told me, had tried three times with the chain on, and once had used the loose end to hammer a warder with, for which he got twelve months’ Cachot Noir and the chain for life—and a little more, since he would be buried in it.[2]

Then, after I had made the round of the cells, I was taken to a very curious punishment-chamber which is in great vogue in New Caledonia. In one sense it reminded me of our treadwheel, though it is not by any means so severe. I have seen a strong man reduced almost to fainting by fifteen minutes on a treadwheel. Nothing like this could happen in the Salle des Pas Perdus, as I christened the place when its use had been explained to me.

Here, after a brief and scanty meal at 4.30 a.m., the convicts are lined up in a big room, or, rather, shed, about sixty feet long by forty feet broad. There is absolutely no furniture in the place, with the exception of a dozen flat-topped pyramids of stone placed in straight lines about ten feet from each side.

If there are twenty-four convicts condemned to this particular kind of weariness, twenty-four are taken in, in single file. Then the word “March!” is given, and they begin. Hour after hour the dreary round-and-round is continued in absolute silence. Every half-hour they are allowed to sit on the pyramids for a couple of minutes, and then on again. At eleven the bell rings for soupe, which, in the Camp Disciplinaire, resolves itself into hot water and fat with a piece of bread. In the other camps the bell doesn’t go again till one, but these have only their half-hour, and then the promenade begins again, and continues till sunset.

I was assured that those who could stand a week of this with the chain did feel its weight, and I don’t wonder at it, for a more miserable, weary, limping, draggle-footed crowd of scoundrels I never saw in all my life than I watched that day perambulating round the Hall of Lost Footsteps.

From here we drove across to the western side of the island, and presently came to a magnificent sloping avenue of palm-trees.

“The avenue of the hospital,” said the Chef. “Now you will see the best and the worst of Ile Nou.”

And so it was. We drove down the avenue to a white, heavy stone arch, which reminded me somewhat quaintly of the entrance gates of some of the old Spanish haciendas I had seen up-country in Peru. Inside was a vast, shady garden, brilliant with flowers whose heavy scent was pleasantly tempered by the sweet, cool breeze from the Pacific; for the eastern wall of the whole enclosure was washed by the emerald waters of the Lagoon.

In the midst of this garden stood the hospital, built in quadrangular form, but with one side of each “quad” open to the garden. The houses were raised on stone platforms something like the stoep of a Dutch house, and over these the roofs came down in broad verandahs. Grey-clad figures were sitting or lying about on the flags underneath, a few reading or doing some trifling work, and others were wandering about the garden or sleeping in some shady nook. It was, in short, very different from the central prison and the disciplinary camp.

I was introduced to the Medical Director, and he showed me round, omitting one wing, in which he told me there were a couple of cases of plague. I happened to know that there were really about a dozen, so I readily agreed that that part should be left out.

As prison hospital, it differed very little from others that I had seen in England. There was the same neatness and exquisite cleanliness everywhere, though the wards were somewhat darker, and therefore cooler, which, with the midday sun at 106° in the shade, was not a bad thing. All the nurses were, of course, Sisters of Mercy.[3] In fact, practically all the nursing in New Caledonia is done by Sisters, and not a few of these heroic women had become brides of the Black Death before I left.

Here, as in all other prison hospitals I have visited, diet, stimulants, and medicine are absolutely at the discretion of the Director. No matter what the cost, the spark of life must be kept alive as long as possible in the breast of the murderer, the forger, and the thief, or the criminal whose light of reason has already been quenched in the darkness of the Black Cell.

In fact, so careful are the authorities of their patients’ general health that they give them nothing in the way of meat but the best beef and mutton that can be imported from Australia; Caledonian fed meat is not considered nourishing enough. In normal times the death-rate of Ile Nou, which is wholly given over to convict camps, is two or three per cent. lower than that of the town of Noumea.