Devil's Island

The French Guiana penal colony collectively called “Devil’s Island” was completely closed down in 1953, after a century of brutal mistreatment of prisoners. This infamous place was immortalized in the mostly fictional story “Papillon”, and even more so in the very un-fictional story of Captain Alfred Dreyfus, who was unjustly imprisoned here from 1896 to 1904.

Both stories were pretty vague to me until a few days ago, at which point the upcoming visit made us delve into the history and get the facts straight.

Some good info came from Channel 28 on the cabin TV, which I referred to as the Spencer Brown Show in a previous entry. Spencer’s gone, and Lew Snyder took over as Veendam Travel Guide a few weeks ago in Rio de Janeiro. Lew has spent the greater part of his career being the tour guide on buses all over the world. Being the resident travel guide on a cruise ship is fairly new for him, and it’s been a challenge.

Lew is about my age, and he happens to be my next-door neighbor on this ship. He has put a ton of work into his lectures in the Showroom. The Brazilian part of this itinerary, which just ended, consisted of a string of places - 17 ports in 21 days, many of which he’d never visited. Day and night for weeks, doing Internet research on these places, downloading photos for his Power Point presentations. He may never get to re-use these presentations, unless he does this rare Brazilian itinerary again sometime in the future.

On the other hand, his upcoming 5-month Alaskan contract will be a piece of cake. Starting on May 15, he will need presentations for only 4 Alaskan ports. It’ll be just those 4 ports, visited regularly during a string of week-long cruises, until early October. In the meantime Lew is paying his dues and getting very experienced with Power Point.

On channel 28 Lew told the story of Captain Dreyfus, a French Jew convicted of espionage. The political climate in France was nasty at the time, and anti-Semitism played a part. A noteworthy movie “The Life of Emile Zola” describes the heroic efforts of a journalist to get Dreyfus exonerated and released.

On the other hand, the “Papillon” story, based on the so-called autobiography of Henri “Papillon” Charriere, is now largely discredited, despite the fact that the book and the Steve McQueen movie made a ton of money. Charriere did at one point escape from a prison on the French Guiana mainland. This mainland prison plus 3 small offshore prison islands became known as the “Devil’s Island” prison system, creating some confusion. Of the 3 islands, the smallest one is the actual, original Devil’s Island, from which the whole complex takes its name, and Henri “Papillon“ Charriere was never imprisoned there, as he claims in the book.

But Alfred Dreyfus WAS imprisoned at little Devil’s Island, an inhumane, well-documented solitary confinement in a constantly guarded hut. Over the course of a few years the experience almost drove him completely mad, until his deliverance, spearheaded by Emile Zola.

The ship came within viewing distance of the original Devil’s Island, but that’s all. It anchored out in the ocean and sent tender boats out to a different island, called Ile Royale. This annoyed a few passengers, who wanted to see Dreyfus’ hut, which is apparently still standing and restored on Devil’s Island.

But otherwise there’s nothing else over there. It never had any infrastructure to handle large groups of prisoners, and it’s really just a wilderness, quite impenetrable for hoardes of old Holland America folks.

Ile Royale, on the other hand, is quite tourist-friendly. In its day it held far more prisoners than Devil’s Island, and was an administrative center, with far more infrastructure, organization and amenities. Presently it has a little hotel and café, and plenty of open space, walking room, and structures from its time as a prison. It has a very nice view across the water to Devil’s Island, so disappointed folks could at least take a consolation photograph. So it’s a matter of opinion whether we “visited Devil’s Island“ or not.

Ile du Diable as seen from Ile Royale

People were impressed by the absolute beauty of Ile Royale, and the irony of having to view it from behind bars. It must have been pretty nice for the guards however, who lived comfortably there with wives and family.
French Guiana is still French-owned, and therefore so are the 3 offshore islands -- Ile Royale, Ile Saint-Joseph, and of course Ile du Diable. The employees were quite French, but I was able to buy my “Ile du Diable” T-shirt with American dollars.

We enjoyed the various critters on this island. Many monkeys were spotted. Hens and roosters are common all over the world but they’re still fun to look at, and they were running wild all over the place. I got a good shot of a some kind of green lizard, and also a large, weird reddish-colored rodent without a tail, called an agouti. Weird to me anyway. To each other I suppose they were perfectly normal.

This lizard was nice enough to sit down still for a minute so I could get up close

However, this little half-rat half-squirrel was very skittish

yeah I know, not exactly National Geographic

French Guiana and the 3 islands are on the north side of South America. And the final stop in South America. As I write this the ship is in Caribbean waters heading for Barbados. Weatherwise, this will be significantly different from the clouds and rain of the past month, with much sunshine and beaches, and opportunity for everybody to bring a nice tan back to New York.