On another part of the peninsula, in a semi-circular valley, hemmed in by precipitous hills, there is a piteously forlorn colony, that of the liberés collectifs; that is to say, convicts who have been released from prison, but are compelled to live in one place under supervision. They are mostly men whose health has broken down under the work of the bagne, or who have been released on account of old age.

They live in wretched little cabins on the allotments, which it is their business to keep in some sort of cultivation. They have the poor privileges of growing beards and moustaches if they like, and of wearing blue dungaree instead of grey, and of earning a few pence a week by selling their produce to the Administration.

This is not much, but they are extremely proud of it, and hold themselves much higher than the common forçat. They do not consider themselves prisoners, but only “in the service of the Administration.” I have seldom, if ever, seen a more forlorn and hopeless collection of human beings in all my wanderings.

There was, however, a time when Ducos was one of the busiest and most important of the New Caledonian Settlements, for it was here that the most notorious and most dangerous of the communards were imprisoned after their suppression in 1872. Here lived Louise Michel, the high-priestess of anarchy, devoting herself to the care of the sick and the sorrowing with a self-sacrifice which rivalled even that of the Sisters of Mercy, and here, too, Henri Rochefort lived in a tiny stone house in the midst of what was once a garden, and the delight of his days of exile.

Louise Michel’s house has disappeared in the course of improvements. Rochefort’s house is a roofless ruin in the midst of a jungle which takes a good deal of getting through. It was from here that he made his escape with Pain and Humbert and two other communards in an English cutter, which may or may not have been in the harbour for that particular purpose.

One night they did not turn up to muster, but it was explained that Rochefort and Humbert had gone fishing, and the others were away on a tour “with permission.” As they did not return during the night search-parties were sent out for them. Meanwhile, they had kept a rendezvous at midnight with the cutter’s boat and got aboard.

The next day was a dead calm; and, as the cutter lay helpless at her anchor, the fugitives concealed themselves about her cargo as best they could. The hue and cry was out all over the coast, but the searchers looked everywhere but just the one place where they were. If the next day had been calm they must have been caught, for the authorities had decided on a thorough search of every vessel in the harbour. Happily for them a breeze sprang up towards the next morning, and the cutter slipped quietly out. Once beyond the outward reef the fugitives were in neutral water, and, being political prisoners, they could not be brought back.

By daylight the truth was discovered, but pursuit was impossible. The cutter had got too long a start for any sailing vessel to overtake her in the light wind, and the only steamer which the administration then possessed had gone away to Bourail to fetch back the Governor’s wife. If it had been in the harbour that morning, at least one picturesque career might have been very different. MacMahon was President at the time, and of all men on earth he had the most deadly fear of Rochefort, so he took a blind revenge for his escape by ordering the Governor to expel every one who was even suspected of assisting in the escape.

The story was told to me by one who suffered through this edict quite innocently, and to his utter ruin. He was then one of the most prosperous men in Noumea. He owned an hotel and several stores, and had mail and road-making contracts with the government. Unhappily, one of his stores was on the Peninsula of Ducos, and the man who managed it was reputed to be very friendly with Rochefort.

This was enough. He was ordered to clear out to Australia in two months. It was in vain that he offered himself for trial on the definite charge of assisting a prisoner to escape. The Governor and every one else sympathised deeply with him, but they dare not even be just, and out he had to go. He is now canteen-keeper on the Isle of Pines, selling groceries and drink to the officials and relégués at prices fixed by the government. He told me this story one night at dinner at his own table.

The general amnesty of 1880 released Louise Michel and the rest of those who had survived the terrible revolt of 1871 from Ducos and the Isle of Pines.

There are, however, two other celebrities left on Ducos. One of them is a tall, erect, grizzled Arab, every inch a chieftain, even in his prison garb. This is Abu-Mezrag-Mokrani, one of the leaders of the Kabyle insurrection of 1871, a man who once had fifteen thousand desert horsemen at his beck and call. Now he rules a little encampment in one of the valleys of the peninsula, containing forty or fifty of his old companions-in-arms, deported with him after the insurrection was put down.

When the Kanaka rebellion broke out in New Caledonia in 1878, Abu-Mezrag volunteered to lead his men against the rebels in the service of France. The offer was accepted and the old warriors of the desert acquitted themselves excellently among the tree-clad mountains of “La Nouvelle.” When the rebellion was over a petition for their pardon was sent to the home government, but the remnant of them are still cultivating their little patches of ground on Ducos.

The other surviving celebrity is known in Caledonia as the Caledonian Dreyfus, and this is his story:

In 1888 Louis Chatelain was a sous-officier of the line stationed in Paris. He was dapper, good-looking, and a delightful talker. He engaged the affections of a lady whose ideas as to expenditure were far too expansive to be gratified out of the pay of a sous-officier. Poor Chatelain got into debt, mortgaged or sold everything that he had, and still the lady was unsatisfied. Finally, after certain recriminations, and when he had given her everything but his honour, she suggested a means by which he could make a fortune with very little trouble. She had, it appears, made the acquaintance of a gentleman who knew some one connected with a foreign army, who would give twenty thousand francs for one of the then new-pattern Lebel rifles.

He entered into correspondence with the foreign gentleman, addressing him—c/o the —— Embassy, Paris. His letters were stopped, opened, photographed, and sent on. So were the replies. Then the negotiations were suddenly broken off, Chatelain was summoned before the military tribunal and confronted with the pièces de conviction. He confessed openly, posing as a martyr to la grande passion—and his sentence was deportation for life.

When I went into his little sleeping-room at Ducos, I found on a little table beside his mosquito-curtained bed, a photograph of a very good-looking young woman. On the wall above the table there were two others of the same enchantress, the evil genius of his life. The moment he fell she deserted him. Unlike many another Frenchwoman, who has done so for lover or husband, she did not follow him across the world to Caledonia, and yet every night and morning of his life Louis Chatelain kneels down in front of that table as he might before an altar, and says his prayers with his eyes on those photographs.

VIII
A PARADISE OF KNAVES

For the next three or four days after my visit to the Peninsula of Ducos there was nothing definite to be learnt about means of transit. In fact there was nothing certain except the plague—always that Spectre which seemed to stand at the end of every pathway. It was really getting quite monotonous, and I was beginning to wonder whether I should ever get out of Noumea at all.

Then I began making inquiries as to an over-land journey through the interior. No, that was impossible, save at great risk and expense. The Spectre had jumped the mountains. Huge armies of rats had appeared in the bush, just as though some Pied Piper of Hamelin had enticed them away from the towns into the mountains, and they were spreading the plague in all directions among the Kanakas.

It is a curious fact that rats, who of all animals are the most susceptible to the plague, will migrate from a plague-stricken town just as they will try to escape from a sinking ship.

Convicts and Kanakas were dying in unknown numbers. Camps were being closed, and the rains were coming on. There was nothing to be seen or done worth seeing or doing, so I had to content myself with wandering about Noumea and the neighbourhood, taking photographs, making acquaintances with convicts and liberés and getting stories out of them, wondering the while, as every one else was doing, what the Spectre was going to do next.

As far as I was concerned, he did me the unkindest turn that he could have done, save one. He infected the only two decent boats on the Coast Service, and so left me the choice between voyaging to the Isle of Pines in La France or stopping where I was.

I had to get to the island somehow, so I chose La France, and at five o’clock one morning, after being duly inspected and squirted, I once more boarded the detestable little hooker.

I thought my first passage in her was bad enough, but it was nothing to this. She was swarming with passengers, bond and free, black, white, and yellow, from end to end. She was loaded literally down to the deck, and she smelt, if possible, even stronger than she did before. The worst of this was that before we got to the Isle of Pines we had to get outside the reef and into the open water.

I have seen too much of seafaring to be easily frightened on salt water, but I candidly admit that I was frightened then. In fact, when we got outside and she began to feel the swell, I took out my swimming-jacket and put it on, though, of course this was a pretty forlorn hope, as the water was swarming with sharks and the shortest swim would have been a couple of miles. Still, one always likes to take the last chance.

Happily, she was English-built, and high in the bows, so she took nothing but spray over. Two or three green seas would have swamped her to a certainty, but they didn’t come, and so in time we got there.

On board I renewed the acquaintance of the Commandant of Ile Nou, who was taking his wife and family to the Isle of Pines, which is to Caledonia as the Riviera is to Europe. At midday we stopped at Prony, the headquarters of the forest camps which I was to visit later on my return; and we lunched in the saloon with six inches of water on the floor. That was the first time I ever saw a steamer baled out with buckets. Still, they managed to get the water under somehow. There didn’t appear to be a pump on board.

When we passed the reef, and started on the sixty-mile run through the open sea, some began to say their prayers and some said other things, but in the end we worried through, and just as the evening star was growing golden in the west we anchored in the lovely little Bay of Kuto.

Never before had I heard the anchor chain rumble through the hawse-hole with greater thankfulness than I did then, and, judging by the limp and bedraggled look of every one, bond and free, who went ashore, I don’t think I was alone in hoping that I had seen the last of La France—which I hadn’t.

My friend the Commandant introduced me to his confrère of the Isle of Pines. He was not particularly sympathetic. I believe I was the only Englishman who had ever come to the island with authority to inspect his domains, and he didn’t take very kindly to the idea. Still, ruler and all as he was in his own land, the long arm of the Minister of Colonies reached even to the Isle of Pines, and, although he did not even offer me the usual courtesy of a glass of wine, he handed the credentials back to me, and said:

“Très bien, monsieur! If you will come and see me at nine o’clock to-morrow morning we will make arrangements. You will, I think, find accommodation at the canteen.”

With that I took my leave, and went out into the darkness to find the canteen and some one to carry my luggage there. I found a surveillant, who found a relégué, and he shouldered my bag and found the canteen, the only semblance of an hotel on the island.

There, quite unknowingly, I stumbled upon excellent friends. The canteen-keeper was the man whose story I told in the last chapter. I was a stranger from a very strange land. Their resources are very limited; for communications with the grand terre were few and far between, and yet the twenty days that I was compelled to stop on the Isle of Pines, proved after all to be the pleasantest time that I had spent in New Caledonia.

But there was one exception, happily only a transient experience, yet bad enough in its way. If the plague was not on board La France it ought to have been, for never did a fitter nursery of microbes get afloat, and when I got into the wretched little bedroom, which was all they could fix up for me that night, I honestly believed that the little wriggling devil had got into the white corpuscles of my blood.

I had all the symptoms with which the conversation of the doctors at the Cercle in Noumea had made me only too familiar—headache, stomachache, nausea, dizziness, aching under the armpits and in the groins.

Of course, I was about as frightened as an ordinary person could very well be, a great deal more so in fact than I had been a few years before when I first experienced the sensation of being shot at. It may have been the fright or the fact, but the glands were swelling.

Then I caught myself repeating fragments of “Abide with me,” mixed up with Kipling’s “Song of the Banjo”; and when a lucid interval came I decided that the case was serious.

I had three things with me which no traveller in the outlands of the world should be without—quinine, chlorodyne, and sulpholine lotion. I took a big dose of quinine, and then one of chlorodyne. I should be afraid to say how big they were. Then I soaked four handkerchiefs in the lotion, put them where they were wanted, and laid down to speculate as to what would happen if the microbe had really caught me?

I had an appointment with the Commandant at nine o’clock the next morning. His house was more than a mile away. What would happen if I couldn’t walk in the morning?

I should have to explain matters, if I were still sane, to the people at the canteen. I had just come from Noumea, the very centre of the plague. The inference would be instant. The military doctor in charge of the hospital would be sent for, and he would say la Peste. I should be taken to the hospital, where, a day or two after, I saw a man suspected of the plague die of blood-poisoning, and once there—quien sabe?

Thinking this and many other incongruously mixed-up things, I went to sleep. Probably it was only a matter of a few minutes altogether. Nine hours after I woke and thought I was in heaven. The pains and the deadly fear were gone. I pulled my watch out from under my pillow. It was ten minutes to seven. The light was filtering in through the closely shut persiennes. The waves on the silver-sanded beach within a few yards of my bedroom were saying as plainly and seductively as waves ever said:

“Come and have a dip, and wash all that plague nonsense out of your head.”

So I got up, opened the window, put on my deck-shoes, and walked down to the beach.

I could walk! Out of hell I had come back to earth. A few hours before I had really believed that the next dawn would be shadowed by the presence of the Black Death. Now I looked up at the sapphire sky, and threw my hands above my head to make sure that the pains in the armpits were gone. Then I stepped out to the full length of my stride along the smooth, hard coral sand, to see if the groins were right.

Having reached a decent distance from the canteen I rolled into the cool, bright, blue water, and for half an hour I splashed around—not daring to go much beyond my depth, because those same blue waters are often cut by the black triangle of a shark’s dorsal fin—thinking how good a thing it was to live instead of dying, especially in such a paradise as this.

When I paid my official visit after breakfast, I found M. le Commandant in a more friendly mood. We exchanged cigarettes and compliments, and then we had a stroll round the little settlement of Kuto.

Kuto is most exquisitely situated on a promontory between two delicious, white-shored, palm-fringed bays, broken with fantastic, tree-crowned rocks. Long ago it was the home of the “politicals” and those soldiers of the Commune who had not been thought dangerous enough to be put in batches against a wall and shot. In those days Kuto, so they told me, might have been taken for a tiny suburb of Paris. It had a theatre, and a couple of newspapers, one serious and one humorous. There were social functions and many gaieties in the intervals of road-making and barrack-building.

But nowadays all this is changed. The deportés have gone back to France, and the relégués have come in their place, which is the same thing as saying that over this lovely scrap of earth there has descended the moral night of incurable crime and hopeless despair. Kuto is now a silent place of prisons, barracks, and workshops, inhabited by a few soldiers and officials and many blue-clad figures with clean-shaven faces, mostly repulsive to look upon and all stamped with the seal of stolid despair.

In order that you may understand what manner of people these were it is necessary to explain the meaning of the French legal term relégation, since there is nothing at all corresponding to it in the English system.

In France, as in all countries, there are criminals of many kinds and ranks, and of these the French relégués are the lowest and meanest. I have said before that in the criminal society of New Caledonia the assassins, forgers, embezzlers, and what we should call swell-mobsmen form the aristocracy. The relégués are the lowest class. They are the gutter-snipes of crime; the hard cases; the human refuse beyond all hope of social salvation; mental and moral derelicts, of no use to themselves or anybody else.

We have thousands of them in this country, but we don’t deal as wisely or as humanely with them as the French do. Our judges and magistrates send them to prison again and again, well knowing that they will only come out to commit more crimes and be sent again to prison, becoming in the intervals of liberty the wives and husbands and parents of other criminals.

This is one of the social problems which they deal with better in France. There is no nonsense there about a criminal “having paid his debt to society” when he has served his sentence, and being, therefore, free to go and commit more crimes. When a man or woman has committed a certain number of crimes of the minor sort, or has been convicted of hopeless immorality or alcoholism—in other words, when there is reason to believe that he or she is absolutely unfit to possess the rights of citizenship—such person may be, in the last resort, sentenced as in England, say, to twelve or eighteen months’ hard labour as punishment for that particular crime.

Now in an English police-court the habitual criminal might possibly thank the magistrate and go away to “do it on his head,” but in France he may hear the fatal words:

“At the expiration of your sentence you will be placed in relégation.”

Of this the meaning is: “You have proved yourself unfit to live in the society of your fellow-citizens. Punishment is no warning to you. You will neither reform yourself nor be reformed; therefore Society has done with you: you are banished! You will be fed and clothed and attended when you are sick. You will have work found for you, and you will be paid for it. But if you won’t work there will be the prison and the cell for you. Now go, and make the best of it.”

The banishment is practically for life. There are circumstances under which a relégué can win his release, but there are two things that he can never do: he can never gain a concession and marry and settle down on his own property; and he can never gain restoration of the full rights of citizenship—both of which, as I have shown, the forçat can do.

As we drove out through the big gate in the wall which had been built across the neck of the peninsula to keep revolting Kanakas out, I remarked what a pity it was that such a lovely land should be nothing better than the habitation of scoundrels, to which the Commandant replied that the island served the purposes of the Administration very well, and if the relégués were not there it would have to be given over to the Kanakas, for free colonists would not come.

I thought—but, of course, I didn’t say—what British colonists would have made of such a paradise—fertile, well-watered, and blest with an absolutely perfect climate.

The first thing I noticed in the Isle of Pines was the excellence and extent of the roads. They are broad, level, and beautifully kept, and, tiny as the island is, there are many more miles of them than there are in all New Caledonia. They were mostly made by the deported communards, who also built the solid stone prisons, barracks, hospitals, chapels, and official residences which seemed to me to be ample for about twice the present white population of the island, which is under two thousand, bond and free.

I found very little difference between the treatment of the relégués and the best class of convicts, save that they were rather better fed, and lived in open camps. They slept in hammocks in common dormitories, and were permitted to have any little luxuries that they could buy with their earnings. There were no plank-beds or chains to be seen in the camps. In fact, they might just have been ordinary industrial settlements, save for the blue cotton livery, the bandless straw hats, and the hang-dog, hopeless faces which looked out under the brims.

But before our first drive was half over we passed a big quadrangle of high, white walls, and over the little black door in front was the word “Prison” in big black letters.

“That’s for the hard cases, I suppose?” I said to the Commandant as we passed.

“Yes,” he said; “we will visit it another day, and you shall see. This is worse than Ile Nou, you know. There they have the aristocrats. Here we have the canaille, the sweepings of the streets. Any one of these animals here would cut your throat for a few francs if he dare.”

Then I told him what the Commandant of Bourail had said about locking doors.

He laughed, and said:

“Parfaitement, but you had better lock your door here, and if you have a revolver put it under your pillow.”

The advice was well-meant but somewhat superfluous. The faces I had seen were quite enough. I soon found that my friend was somewhat of a cynic and a humorist in his way, for when I asked him what was the greatest punishment he could inflict on a recalcitrant relégué, he said:

“Make him work. Look at that gang of men yonder,” he went on, pointing to the hillside, which a long row of blue-clad figures was breaking up with picks and spades. “Every stroke of the pick is a punishment to those men. They are wretches whose only idea of life is to get through it without working. They have been thieves and swindlers, beggars and souteneurs—everything that is useless and vile. There is nothing they have not done to save themselves from working. Now, you see, we make them work.”

“And if they won’t?”

“Eh bien! They have stomachs—and soup and fish and meat and coffee and a drink of wine now and then, with a cigarette or a pipe, are better than bread and water, and the open air in a country like this is better than the black cell or the quartier disciplinaire, which you will see later on.”

“In other words,” I said, “you have gone back to the good old law: If a man will not work, neither shall he eat. Well, I must admit that you deal more sensibly with your hopeless vagabonds than we do with ours.”

“Bien possible,” he said, with some justification, “you will see that at least we make some use of them, more than they would in Paris or London, I think. For instance, this is our farm.”

As he said this we pulled up opposite to a rustic arch, over which were the words Ferme Uro.

We went down through a flowery avenue to a pretty verandahed house almost buried in greenery and flowers—the home of the Farm Superintendent. He came out and greeted his territorial lord, and then we went over the farm.

It was as perfect a specimen of what the French call petit culture as could be imagined. It was, in fact, rather a collection of exquisitely kept vegetable gardens than a farm. Every patch was irrigated by water from the low hills which run across the centre of the island. Every kind of vegetable, tropical and temperate, was under cultivation, and outside the gardens there were broad fields of maize and grass pasture.

In one of the fields I saw a long line of women hoeing the ridges for corn, and at one end of the line stood a white-clad surveillant, revolver on hip. For the fiftieth time my English prejudices were shocked when I learnt that these were a detachment of the female relégués; and I wondered what would be thought at home if the lady-guests at Aylesbury were turned out to work in the fields under the charge of a male warder. Here it was quite a matter of course.

“Wait till you have made the acquaintance of the ladies,” laughed the Commandant, in reply to a rather injudicious question, “and you will see that they want some watching.”

IX
USE FOR THE USELESS

From the farm of Uro, after a drink of delicious milk, which, for some reason or other, took me back instantly to far-away England, we went on a few miles along the road to the ateliers, or workshops, where all kinds of industries, from boot-making to waggon-building, were being carried on in a somewhat leisurely style, and under what seemed to me very slight supervision.

“This is a hard school for them to learn and us to teach in,” said the Commandant. “The forçats generally know a trade and are accustomed to work, if they have not been gentlemen; but these have been brought up to hate the name of work. Yet you see we have made something of them. Everything that is used on the island is made here. In fact, we make something which will be used a long way from here.”

I saw this later on during our visit to the prison, which was too similar to the others to need any description. About a score of the occupants of a big shed within the walls were busy plaiting a long, reedy grass which others, squatted about the yard, were stripping and preparing for them. They had to get through so much a day or their rations were docked. The unhappy wastrels didn’t seem to like the regime at all, but they worked, if only for their stomachs’ sake.

When we left the prison we went to a long shed, where the plaits were being worked up into matting—miles of it there appeared to be—and when I asked what it was all for, I learnt that it was destined to be trodden by the millions of careless feet which would saunter through the halls and corridors of the Paris Exhibition.

This was the contribution of this far-away spot to the great show. Of course, those who were making it knew what it was for. Perhaps their thoughts—if they had any by this time, beyond their daily meat and drink, or any dreams of delight, beyond the little luxuries that their hard-earned pence could buy them at the canteen—were travelling even as they stitched back to the elysium of crime and idleness which they would never see again. From what I saw and heard I doubt not that many a bitter thought was woven in with the miles of matting which afterwards covered the exhibition floors.

The next day we went to make the acquaintance of the lady reléguées, who are accommodated in the Convent, as it is called, under the charge of a Mother Superior and six Sisters of St. Joseph, among whom I was a little surprised to find one who, learning that I was English, came and greeted me in a deliciously delicate Irish brogue. She was an Irish lady who had taken the vows in a French Convent, and had voluntarily exiled herself to this far-away foreign land to spend the rest of her days in a prison. Still, she and her French sisters appeared to be most cheerfully contented with their lot.

They had, however, one little trace of feminine vanity left. They sorely wanted their photographs taken, and my Irish compatriot wanted it most of all. It was against the rules not only of the Administration, but of their order, wherefore the photographs which I did take of the convent and its occupants did not turn out successes.

There were one hundred and seventy-six female reléguées in the Convent just then, mostly healthy, hearty-looking women of all ages, from twenty to sixty. Their faces were, if anything, more repulsive than the men’s. They had committed almost every possible crime, but most of them were there for infanticide. I was the first man—not an official—that they had seen, perhaps, for a good many years, for there are few visitors to the Isles of Pines, and fewer still to the jealously guarded Convent.

A little before dinner that evening I was sitting under the trees in front of the canteen jotting down some notes when I heard a voice, with a suspicion of tears in it, asking whether “monsieur would speak for a minute with an unfortunate woman.”

I turned round, and saw the gaunt figure and unlovely face of Marie, the reléguée housemaid of the canteen. Here was another human document, I thought, so I told her to go on.

She was in great trouble, she told me, and as I was a friend of the Government and of the Administration I could help her if I would. She had been released from the Convent to take service at the canteen, but though she was comfortable, and had a good master and mistress, her heart was pining for the society of her husband, who was working in enforced celibacy in far-away Bourail. They had been parted for a trifle, and she was sure that if “Milor” interceded for her with the Director she would be restored to his longing arms.

When she had finished, I said:

“And what was your husband sent out here for?”

“Il a éventré un homme,” she murmured.

“And what are you here for?” I continued.

“J’ai tué mon enfant,” she murmured again as softly as before.

I did not think the reunion desirable, and so the petition was not presented. Nevertheless, it would have probably been a very difficult matter to have convinced that woman that she hadn’t a perfect right to rejoin her husband, raise a family, and become with him a landed proprietor. I learnt afterwards that she had been relegated to the Isle of Pines for theft aggravated by assault with a hatchet.

Somehow the food that she handed round the table at the canteen that night didn’t taste quite as nice as usual, in spite of the conversation of Madame Blaise and her two charming daughters, the elder of whom, though she had never been farther into the world than Noumea, might, as far as grace of speech and action went, have just come out from Paris.

In the course of the next few days I wandered, sometimes in the Commandant’s carriage and sometimes afoot, all over the island, and ascended its only mountain, the Pic ’Nga, on the top of which there are the foundations of an old fort and look-out tower, dating back, so they say, to the old days of the pirates of the southern seas. From here you can see every bay and inlet round the coast, and a very lovely picture the verdant island made, fringed by its circlet of reefs and coral islets, with their emerald lagoons and white breakers, and the deep blue of the open ocean beyond.

Another day I went through the native reserve, and visited the settlement of the Marist Brothers, a most delightful little nook where the good brothers lead a contented existence, teaching their bronze scholars the beauties of the Catholic Faith, and the beneficence of the good French Government, which graciously permits them to live in a part of their own country, and sell their produce to the officials and such of their prisoners as have money à prix fixe.

After this I visited the coffee plantation—the only actually profitable industry in which prisoners are employed in New Caledonia—the hospitals and the disciplinary camps, which I found practically the same as those which I had already seen on the mainland.

The hospital was, however, an even more delightful abode of disease and crime than the one on Ile Nou. It stands well up the hillside behind the Convent, and the view from its terraces is one of the most beautiful I have ever seen. With the exception of the man who died of blood-poisoning under suspicion of the plague, the principal disease seemed general decay and old age. In fact, out of a criminal population of over twelve hundred, there were only thirty patients, for which reason the Isle of Pines, with its perfect climate, reminded me of Mark Twain’s Californian health resort, which was so healthy that the inhabitants had to go somewhere else to die.

Later on I saw a much more mournful place than the hospital. This was the Camp des Impotents.

I don’t think I ever saw a more miserable, forlorn-looking collection of human beings than I found here. They were not suffering from any specific disease, or else, of course, they would have been in the hospital. They are just mental and physical derelicts, harmless imbeciles, cripples incapable of work, and men dying quietly of old age.

Of course, the camp was exquisitely situated, and their lot struck me as being, after all, not a very bad ending to a useless, hopeless life—to dream away the last years under that lovely sun, breathing that delicious air, and waiting quietly for the end without anxiety or care.

The poor wretches looked at me somewhat as they might have looked at a visitor from some other world. They had ceased to be criminals or prisoners. They had no more crime left in them, and they would not have escaped if they could, so in their case discipline was relaxed and I spent a few francs in buying some of the rude carvings and a few walking-sticks which they had made out of lianes, the only work with which they whiled away the long sunny hours. It was worth twenty times the money to see their feeble, almost pitiful, delight as they looked at the little silver coins in their brown, shrivelled hands, and I really think that some at least of the blessings which followed me out of the camp were sincere. But when I said this to the Commandant he only smiled, and said:

“Perhaps! But no doubt they would like a visitor from England every day.”

A few days after I had finished my round of visits to the prison camps I had the privilege of assisting at a session of the Disciplinary Commission, a court whose function it is to hear complaints, grant redresses and privileges, try offences against the penal regulations, and inflict punishment. The Commandant is President, ex officio, and he is assisted by an officer of the Administration, who is a sort of civil magistrate and the Conductor of Works. These functionaries sit at a curved desk on a platform, and here, for the first time, I took my seat on a judicial bench.

There was a space of about twelve feet between the end of the platform and the railing which divided off the rest of the hall. Here the Principal Surveillant sat at one desk, and opposite to him on the other side of the room the Greffier or Clerk of the Court.

The court being a French one, precedence was, of course, given to the ladies. They were brought in one by one through a side door between the railings and the platform. The triviality of their complaints testified eloquently to the narrowness of the little lives they led.

One woman accused another of stealing her needle and thread so as to get her into trouble. Another wanted three halfpence of her savings, which she said the Mother Superior was unjustly keeping from her. A third wanted to know why she hadn’t had a letter from a friend of hers in service in Noumea, and was gravely informed that the plague had seriously interrupted communications and the letter would probably arrive as soon as possible. Another had rheumatism, and wanted to be taken off the field-work; besides, she was getting too old, she was nearly seventy—and her request was promptly granted.

Then a few were accused of little acts of idleness or insubordination or wastefulness. These were either fined a penny or so, according to the magnitude of the offence, or dismissed with a caution.

It must not, however, be imagined from this that the ladies of the relégation at the Isle of Pines are exactly models of female deportment, for, as the Commandant told me afterwards, they once revolted, and before help could be got they had caught two surveillants, stripped them stark naked, and made them run the gauntlet of the Convent between two rows of beautiful palms, after which they douched them well in a muddy duck-pond. They were proceeding to treat the good sisters in the same way when rescue arrived from Kuto and the other camps.

The male prisoners were a terribly hard-looking lot. They were brought up in twos and threes—plaintiff, defendant, and witnesses—and they accused each other of every sort of crime, from stealing a bit of bread to attempted murder.

The English axiom about dog eating dog does not hold good among relégués. They will steal from each other just as cheerfully as they will from anybody else, and will descend to any little meanness to spite each other. Most of the offences were of the pettiest and meanest kind, such as stealing each other’s clothes, or food, or tools and selling them for a penny or so to some one else who had lost his.

Others were up for being out of bounds after hours, and I noticed that these nearly all said they’d been fishing, which was not inappropriate.

During the proceedings I was very much struck by the appearance of an Arab in the grey uniform of the quartier disciplinaire. He was a tall, well-built, handsome fellow of about thirty, with a frank, open expression and an ever-smiling mouth which continually showed a magnificent set of teeth. There was a wonderful difference between him and his fellow-scoundrels, but I learned afterwards that he was the biggest scoundrel of the whole lot.

Two or three hundred years ago he would probably have commanded a fleet of Corsairs, and made his name a terror from one end of the Mediterranean to the other. Now, thanks to changed environment, he was only a deserter and a common thief who could not even keep his hands off the property of his fellow-thieves.

The procedure of the Court was quite different to anything we have in England. The prisoners were all, as I say, brought up and examined individually with accusers and witnesses. Then they were taken away what time the Court deliberated and fixed the sentence. Then the whole lot were brought in and ranged up along the two sides of the room. The greffier called out the names, and each man stepped forward, heard his sentence, and was marched out. The Arab took his fifteen days’ prison with an even jauntier smile than usual.

While this was going on I had been making a study in criminal physiognomy, and I came to the conclusion that if forty criminals were taken at random from English prisons, dressed exactly as these forty French criminals were, and mixed up with them, it would be absolutely impossible to tell which were French and which were English. There is no nationality in crime. Criminals belong to a distinct branch of the human family, and the family likeness among them is unmistakable.

As we were driving back that morning the Commandant invited me to a picnic which he was giving in honour of the Commandant of Ile Nou and myself. Naturally I accepted, and, being on the subject of pleasure excursions, I said:

“Of course you must have some delightful yachting and fishing about these lovely bays. I have been wondering why I haven’t seen any sailing craft about.”

“That is forbidden,” he said. “No one may own even a rowing boat without the licence of the Administration in Noumea, and even then he would have to give guarantees for its safety. You see these fellows would think nothing of stealing a boat and trying to escape in it, and the owner of the boat would be responsible for any escapes. Twenty-five of the politicals once managed to make a big canoe and got away in it, but they were all drowned or eaten by the sharks. Now all boats, even the Kanakas’ canoes, have to be kept locked and chained and guarded from sunset to sunrise.”

This, then, was why these smooth, sunlit waters were sailless and deserted—another effect of the curse of Crime on Paradise.

The picnic was a great success, and the Commandant proved a most excellent host. There were four wagonette loads of us, with a fair sprinkling of pretty girls, among whom, of course, were my host’s daughters. Everybody seemed to have forgotten for the time that I was an Englishman, and so I passed a very jolly day.

We camped in a big white stone building which had once been a gendarmerie barracks, standing in a delightful valley near to the entrance of a magnificent limestone cavern. We lunched sumptuously under the verandah, and I think I prattled French more volubly than I had ever done before. Then we went and shot pigeons, quite half as big again as the English variety, and splendid eating. The woods of the Isle of Pines swarmed with them and other feathered game whose names I don’t remember.

Of course, we wound up with a dance, and this was the queerest dance I had ever seen. Our drivers and attendants were, of course, all relégués, and so were the musicians. One ingenious scoundrel led the orchestra with a fiddle that he had made himself, even to the strings and the bow. It had an excellent tone, and he played it very well. I wanted to buy it, but he loved it and wouldn’t sell.

I must say that I pitied these musicians not a little as I watched them standing in a corner looking with hungry eyes upon the Forbidden and the Unattainable as it floated about the room in dainty light draperies with the arms of other men about its waist—for the relégué is not like the forçat. He has no hope of marriage, even with the meanest of his kind. His sentence includes, and very wisely too, perpetual celibacy.

All the same, I tried to picture to myself a picnic, say, at Dartmoor, with a company of English men and maidens dancing in one of the prison halls to music made by a convict band!

When the feast was over every bottle, full and empty, every knife, fork, spoon, plate, cup, and dish was counted over. The remnants were given away, but everything else was packed under the official eye. If the slightest trifle had been overlooked it would have been immediately stolen. This is one of the peculiarities of picnicing in Prisonland.

A few days afterwards my pleasant exile came to an end. The ungainly form of La France waddled into the bay, bringing news of the outside world. The principal items were to the effect that the plague was increasing merrily in Noumea, and that the victorious Boers were driving the British into the sea.

We had quite a sad little supper that night at the canteen, for I was rapidly becoming quite one of the family. Still this was the turning-point in my thirty-thousand-mile journey. At daybreak the snub nose of La France would point toward home, and so when I had said good-bye for the third or fourth time I pulled out across the bay which lay like a sheet of shimmering silver under the glorious tropic moon, and boarded the wretched little hooker for the last time with feelings something akin to thankfulness.

When many days afterwards, I got back to Noumea the Director asked me what I thought of the Isle of Pines.

“If you want my candid opinion,” I said, “I think it is an earthly paradise which you have used as a dust-heap to shoot your rubbish on. If the French Government would give me a hundred years’ lease of it, with power to do as I liked as long as I didn’t break the law, I would find capital enough in England and Australia to make it the Monte Carlo of the South Pacific. I’d have everything there that there is at Monte Carlo, and a couple of fast boats to bring the people over from Sydney in two days. I’d have all the wealth and fashion of Australia and a good many people from Europe there every year. In fact, your paradise should pay you a million francs a year and me twenty millions.”

“Ah!” he said, after a few moments of silence. “That is just like you English. That is enterprise. Here we only have government.”

X
A LAND OF WOOD AND IRON

New Caledonia is essentially a land of contrasts, both in scenery and climate, and when I had left the sunny hills and plains and the silver-sanded, palm-fringed bays of the Isle of Pines some fifty miles behind me, I found myself in a region of enormous forests, clothing the slopes of rugged mountains running sheer down to the sea from the clouds which rarely broke above them.

There were no white beaches here, only boulder-strewn shores, which were literally, as well as in the metaphorical sense, iron-bound. Not only the rocks and the boulders, but the very sands of the shore themselves were of iron, sometimes pure, but, as a rule, containing from eighty-five to ninety per cent. of the metal.

This was Prony, the chief of a cluster of convict camps scattered about what is literally a land of wood and iron. The wood is used, the iron is not. Millions of tons of it are lying round the shores of one of the finest and safest natural harbours in the world. A thousand miles away are the coal-fields of New South Wales. Since it pays to ship copper and iron from Spain and even South America to Swansea, one would think it would pay to ship this to Newcastle. However, there it lies, waiting, I suppose for some one to make fortunes out of it, and the energies of the eight hundred or one thousand relégués are devoted to hewing timber in the forests, bringing it down to the shore, and floating it in big barges to Prony, where there is a finely equipped saw and planing mill.

The dressed timber is, of course, the property of the Administration, and is used for building wharves and jetties. A good deal of it is sold to the public for building purposes. Some day, too, there is going to be a real railway in Caledonia, and then the forest camps of the Baie du Sud will furnish the sleepers, signal-posts, and platforms.

Meanwhile Prony has a railway all to itself, of which I shall here give some account.

I was fortunate in making two very pleasant acquaintances in this out-of-the-way corner of the world. One was the Commandant, who was quite the most intelligent and broad-minded man of his class that I met in Caledonia, and the other was the Doctor of the port. He was, of course, a military Doctor, and held the rank of lieutenant in the army. His official title was “Le Médecin Major!” He had seen a good deal of the world, and had visited the United States on a French warship, and from him I heard the first words of English that I had heard for nearly three weeks. The dear little Doctor was proud of his English, and he had a right to be. Although it was not very extensive, it was distinctly select. One day the Commandant referred somewhat slightingly to it as “son peu d’Anglais”; but perhaps that was because he couldn’t speak a single word himself. At any rate, he never tried to.

At Prony, too, I renewed my acquaintance with the microbe. In fact, the Doctor was there because of him. One day a coast steamer had brought some tons of flour for the station, which depended entirely for its food on Noumea and Australia. The sacks were stacked under cover in the Commissariat Department. The little daughter of the Chief Surveillant got playing about among these sacks. Some infected rats had been doing the same a short time before, and so she got the plague.

The Doctor was telegraphed for to Noumea, and he came and saved her, and, thanks to his skill and precautions, that was the only case in Prony, although we actually had the infection in the midst of us, and for the fifteen days that I was tied up there we ate bread made from that flour!

I often had to pass the sacks, but I did so at a respectful distance. One morning, however, I had a bit of a fright. There had been a deluge of rain all night, and, when I woke, I found a dead and very wet mouse on my bedroom floor.

What if it had come from those sacks?

I drenched it with corrosive sublimate, and pitched it carefully out of doors with a stick. Then I poured petroleum over it and burnt it and the stick, and there the incident closed.

It always struck me as somewhat of a miracle that rats did not find those sacks out and spread the plague broadcast among us. It would have been a terrible thing in that isolated camp, cut off from all communication with the world except the telegraph. Perhaps there were no rats. At any rate, I never saw any, and felt duly thankful.

There are no roads about Prony, only footpaths, and not many of these, so we paid our visits to the camps in steam launches. When it was fine it was very pleasant work cruising about the picturesque bays, discoursing the while on crime, criminals, and colonisation with the intelligent Commandant, or swopping Anglo-French jokes and stories with the Doctor, who had a very pretty wit of his own.

The Commandant was a firm believer in relegation and transportation generally, but like every one else, he looked down upon the liberé and the relégué. According to him a forçat was worth two liberés, and a liberé was worth a relégué and a half, if not more. Nevertheless, during my stay at Prony I saw a squad of relégués working about as hard as I have ever seen men work. This was on the railway aforesaid.