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.
[144]
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[145] 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.
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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.
the bureau of anthropometry, ile nou.
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[147] 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.
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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.”
an arab type of convict. a combination of ideality and homicidal mania.
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[149] 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[150] 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.
the courtyard of a disciplinary camp, ile nou. inspection at 5 a.m. after breakfast, and before hard labour. to the right is a kanaka “policeman.” the average physique of the criminals may be seen by comparison with myself, standing in front of the kanaka.
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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[152] 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]
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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[154] 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;[155] for the eastern wall of the whole enclosure was washed by the emerald waters of the lagoon.
the avenue of palms, leading to the hospital, ile nou.
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[156] 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.
part of the hospital buildings, ile nou. the roofed-terrace in front is where the patients take their siesta in the middle of the day. one of these is attached to each court of the hospital. some of the mattresses may be seen to the right.
then from this little flowery paradise of rest and quietness we went across the road to another enclosure in which there were two long, white[157] buildings, a prison and a row of offices, at right angles to each other. this was the “bad” side. on the other there had been invalids and invalid lunatics; here there were only lunatics, and mostly dangerous at that—men who, after being criminals, had become madmen; not like the dwellers in broadmoor, who are only criminal because they are mad.
i once paid a visit to the worst part of the men’s side at broadmoor, but i don’t think it was quite as bad as the long corridor which led through that gruesome home of madness. on either hand were heavy black-painted, iron doors, and inside these a hinged grating through which the prisoner could be fed.
the cells were about nine feet by six feet. they had neither furniture nor bedclothes in them. the furniture would have been smashed up either in sheer wanton destruction or for use as missiles to hurl through the grating, and the bedclothes would have been torn up into strips for hanging or strangling purposes.
it has been my good or bad luck to see poor humanity in a good many shapes and guises, but i never saw such a series of pitiful parodies of[158] manhood as i saw when those cell doors were opened.
some were crouched down in the corners of their cells, muttering to themselves and picking the sacking in which they were clothed to pieces, thread by thread. it was no use giving them regular prison clothing, for they would pick themselves naked in a couple of days. others were walking up and down the narrow limits of their cells, staring with horribly vacant eyes at the roof or the floor, and not taking the slightest notice of us.
one man was lying down scraping with bleeding fingers at the black asphalted floor under the impression that he was burrowing his way to freedom; others were sitting or lying on the floor motionless as death; and others sprang at the bars like wild beasts the moment the door was opened.
but the most horrible sight i saw during that very bad quarter of an hour was a gaunt-faced, square-built man of middle-height who got up out of a corner as his cell door opened, and stood in the middle facing us.
he never moved a muscle, or winked an eyelid. his eyes looked at us with the steady, burning[159] stare of hate and ferocity. his lips were drawn back from his teeth like the lips of an ape in a rage, and his hands were half clenched like claws. the man was simply the incarnation of madness, savagery, and despair. he had gone mad in the black cell, and the form that his madness had taken was the belief that nothing would nourish him but human flesh. of course he had to be fed by force.
when we got outside a big warder pulled up his jumper and showed me the marks of two rows of human teeth in his side. if another man hadn’t stunned the poor wretch with the butt of his revolver he would have bitten the piece clean out—after which i was glad when the doctor suggested that i should go to his quarters and have a drink with him.
