The trip over nearly did me in. They send a boat, the Martinière, twice a year. They shaved our heads, gave us these striped outfits, and marched us out to the docks at bayonet point. Then they packed us all into cages below decks, 90 at a time. It was horrible. You’re fed from a bucket, and hosed down every morning with sea water.
As for my “companions”… what a lot! Thieves, swindlers, thugs, murderers. Even I would have sent most of them to the guillotine. I went over with René from our gang. We looked out for each other, but the things we saw. The man in the next bunk got stabbed in the night with a knife through his hammock. We found him in the morning, eyes wide open, stiff as a plank. They say he got robbed of 20,000 francs he’d smuggled on board. Another fellow, a crooked accountant, he went crazy. He started screaming. The guards sprayed him with a hose to calm him down and left him shivering. He got ill, and wouldn’t eat or drink. They still left him in the cage though. He died on the morning we got there.
That’s a moment I’ll never forget. Eighteen days we spent at sea. There’s nothing out of the portholes but flat, dreary ocean. Then, the boat reached the coast. As we made our way up the estuary to St. Laurent, the main town, the air changed. Instead of a salty sea breeze, we got something thicker and sicklier. Air that leached the strength from your body. Air that smelled of disease. We all knew we’d arrived in a hellish place.
I jostled for a look out of the porthole in our cage. The river was wide and I could see the bank about half a mile away. The jungle was an amazing shade of emerald, and so thick you wouldn’t believe it.
“I’d hate to think what kind of snakes and insects are slithering around in that,” said René.
Every now and then, red and blue parrots would break cover above the trees and shimmer by. As we watched, we saw a huge eagle sweep from the sky and grab one. It was over in a second. It seemed like an omen.
The ship’s crew started to look busy as we approached St. Laurent. All along the quay it seemed like the whole town had turned out to meet us. Chinese shopkeepers, the bushmen, the wives and children of the guards, all the prison officials in their spotless, white uniforms. They were all craning their necks towards the ship, curious to see who was arriving.
As we got closer, I saw something that made my flesh creep. Among the crowd were a few scarecrows… scrawny, dead-eyed men. Heaven help me, they looked like the walking dead in their ragged clothes, and they were covered head to foot in tattoos. These were prisoners who had survived their time as convicts, and were now serving out their time as colonists. I turned to René and pointed them out. He didn’t say anything, but I could see him swallowing hard.
They herded us off the boat and we were marched through the prison gates, which were right next to the dock. We stood there in the main square of the prison, standing stiffly on parade in the stifling heat. There was a guillotine set up in a corner of the square, and I wondered how many times a year that got to do its horrible work.
The prison director was waiting for us. He was a little man in a white suit, and he climbed up the stairs of a platform in front of us and started to speak.
“You’re all worthless scum,” he said, “sent here to pay for your crimes. If you behave yourselves you’ll find life is not too unbearable. If you don’t behave, you’ll find yourselves in more trouble than you can imagine.”
He paused and looked over to the guillotine.
“Most of you here are already thinking about your escape. Well forget it! You’ll have plenty of freedom in the camps and town. You’ll find the real guards here are the jungle and the sea.”
That was that. We were marched off to the prison blocks and allocated a place in a dormitory. René and I got split up, which made me feel very, very anxious.
The first few weeks were a horrible haze, but I learned very quickly. I’m not a big man, but I’m solid. You wouldn’t think I’m a pushover, but I had to fight for everything. You’d lose the blanket on your bed if you didn’t stick up for yourself.
I don’t know which was worse, the night or the day. By day you had to go out in work parties to the jungle, clearing away the trees and the creepers, so they could build roads, or set up farms. That was horrible. Sweat would pour off you, and insects would eat you alive. The guards kicked you or beat you with their rifle butts if you stopped to get your breath back.
I heard tales of men being shot on the spot by guards. These people had the power of life and death. Nothing would be done if they decided to bury you alive. One work party all hanged themselves rather than spend another day working for a guard they called “The Scourge”. Some of these guards were psychopaths. One of the prisoners in my dormitory, Henri Bonville, was a history professor who got sent here for murdering his wife. He told me our Emperor Napoleon III set the camps up in 1854. One of Napoleon’s courtiers said:
“Who sire, will you find to guard these villains?”
Napoleon said:
“Why my good man, people more villainous than they are!”
And then there were the nights… We got locked in our dormitory. It was a huge, long room, and the heat was stifling. I’ll never forget the stench of all those people. But the gang fights were the worst. I kept out of that, but barely a night would go by without someone being murdered.
After about six months René and I had found out all we needed to know about the place, and we reckoned it was time to escape. St. Laurent, where we were, was one of the better places to be. You could come and go during the day if you weren’t on work duty, but you had to be back at the camp at night. The worst camps were deep in the jungle, and few of the convicts who were sent out there ever came back.
When we got to the colony in 1907, the word around the camp was that Venezuela was the best place to go. It’s just up the coast, and they let you stay if they found out you were an escaped convict. At least they did until 1935. Then, the army wanted to get rid of the President, so they paid an escaped convict to kill him. He messed it up, and the President had all the convicts rounded up and returned to the camps.
Dutch Surinam, next to French Guiana, was a good place too, until another escaper burned down a shop that had refused to serve him. After that everyone from the camps got sent straight back. In Brazil they send you straight back if they catch you, but it’s such a big place, it’s easy to just disappear there. Argentina’s good, though. There’s lots of work in Buenos Aires for people like us. It’s just an awful long way to get there.
René and I thought we’d try for Venezuela, so we hooked up with these two brothers Marcel and Dedé Longueville. They were huge, tattooed thugs. Not ideal companions, but handy if you’re in a spot of bother. We all put up money we’d managed to smuggle in, or make while we were there, to buy this boat from a local fisherman. Another man joined us, a Parisian villain called Pascal, and his young friend who was only about eighteen. Then this fellow, Silvere, who was a sailor, joined us. He didn’t put up any money. He said his sailing skills would pay for his place on the trip.
So one December night, after we’d been there less than a year, we all made our escape. We slipped away from a work party and hid in the jungle ’til nightfall. Then, before the evening roll call, when they’d notice we were missing, we sneaked down to the Maroni river and into the boat. It was a good boat – well equipped, and with food for the journey. The first bit of the trip was easy. The current was strong and we just slipped away from St. Laurent. The river got wider and wider. The closer we got to the Atlantic Ocean, the stronger the smell of the salty sea. It smelled like freedom, and I just couldn’t wait to get away.
But when we got there, things went very, very wrong. The estuary out to the Atlantic is full of sand banks, and we got stuck on one. Dedé went crazy and stabbed the sailor to death. René and I, we knew we were finished from that moment onward, but the Longuevilles were such terrors we didn’t like to say anything.
The boat was grounded, and we knew the guards would be out looking for us as soon as they discovered we�
�d gone. We had a brief, bad-tempered argument about what to do next, and all decided we’d have to head into the jungle. We got out of the boat, and started to wade towards the shore, waist deep in water. I grabbed the box full of food, but a huge wave came in from nowhere and knocked me over. All the food got washed away and Dedé wanted to kill me then and there, but Marcel talked him out of it.
The next few days were a nightmare. We couldn’t find a thing to eat in the jungle, apart from a few small crabs on the riverbank, and we were starving. Then Pascal said that he and his friend would head off inland to see what they could find. We all waited by the riverside, hoping they’d come back with something tasty.
The next day, Pascal came back alone. He said he’d lost his friend, but he didn’t seem that bothered about it. The Longuevilles would kill you on the spot if you fell out with them, but they had this odd sort of loyalty. They set off to look for the boy. Pascal got really fidgety, and kept telling them it wasn’t worth it.
We found out soon enough why Pascal didn’t want them to go. The Longuevilles hadn’t gone far when they found a corpse. The boy was dead and parts of his body had been eaten. Any fool could see Pascal had killed him. They came back and killed Pascal on the spot, but that night we were all so hungry we cooked up bits of him ourselves. Yes, I did feel guilty, but he deserved it. Besides, if I hadn’t eaten him, I wouldn’t be talking to you now.
After that we lost heart. We wandered around for a few more days wondering what to do, until the local police caught us and we got sent back to the camp.
Then I went through the worst two years of my life. Escaping was so common, you didn’t get sent to the guillotine for it. What you got was worse. They put you in a solitary confinement cell. Four out of five there went crazy or died. The guillotine’s quick. You get your head cut off in less than a second, but solitary confinement kills you slowly, second by minute by hour by day. It’s the worst kind of torture you could imagine.
You get sent to the island of St. Joseph and stuck in a block with row upon row of tiny cells. They’re barely wide enough for you to stretch out your arms. There’s a hinged plank for a bed, and an iron door with a hatch big enough for you to stick your head out of. There’s a terrible, terrible silence there. No one’s allowed to talk, and the guards even wear soft shoes to cut down on the noise. You get just enough food to keep you alive, and that’s it.
René and I got two years apiece, but sometimes men get five years. That would kill you just as surely as any guillotine or firing squad. I kept sane by tapping messages out to other convicts and chasing the centipedes that infested my cell. I spent a lot of the time in a sleepy daze, dreaming about girls, and countries I could visit, and my childhood.
I had friends among the convicts who helped clean the block, and they probably saved my life. They smuggled in a coconut every day, and five cigarettes. The coconut kept me healthy, and the cigarettes I rationed out to break up the day. René, he had the same thing, but they found him out a year and a half into his sentence. No coconuts, no cigarettes. Then he got a bad fever and never really recovered. He died just a month before his release date.
I’ll never forget the day I walked away from that place. After two years in a tiny cell, I could hardly put one foot in front of the other. People talking – that was frightening, especially when they shouted. And big, big wide-open space. It was bewildering. But I came out even more determined to escape.
This time I was more cautious, and picked my travel companions with a lot more care. After a year I managed to save up enough to join another escape plan. There were five of us this time. We all put up funds for a local fisherman, Bixier des Ages, to take us to Brazil.
It went really well to start with. Des Ages met us where he said he would, we handed over the money, and off we went down the river. Des Ages was a good sailor, and he’d taken us out to the Atlantic Ocean by dawn of the next day. He seemed OK, very quiet and distant. He just sat there puffing his pipe. Then later on the first morning, he said we’d have to sail near the coast, and navigate through some tricky sand banks.
As we got to the sand banks, he told us we’d all have to get out and push the boat over a particularly shallow piece of water. So off we got, and immediately sank in the mud up to our knees. No sooner were we all off the boat than des Ages fired up the motor and pulled away a few feet. We all stood there in the water, wondering what on earth was going on.
Then he went into the cabin and got out a rifle. It was all over so quickly… I remember him quite clearly, standing on the side of the deck, pipe in his mouth, calmly picking us all off, very business-like, a shot a piece. He came to me last, and I just stood there, completely frozen, like a rabbit cornered by a snake. Everything seemed to move very slowly. Everyone around me was dropping in the water, and he pointed the rifle straight at me and his finger squeezed the trigger.
Nothing happened.
Des Ages looked a bit rattled then, and he started to fiddle with the bolt on the gun, and curse to himself.
I turned and waded off as fast as I could through the mud and into the jungle, which came right up to the coast. I expected a bullet in the back of the head at any second, but des Ages must have run out of ammunition. I could hear him laughing. A horrible mocking laugh.
“You run off, you little maggot,” he yelled. “There’s plenty in the jungle to finish you off.”
But this time I was lucky. As I made my way along the coast, I came across a rickety raft made from four barrels lashed together around a couple of ladders. Whoever had been using it even left a paddle next to it. I found out soon enough why they’d abandoned it. As I pushed the raft out to sea, intending to drift with the current away from French Guiana, I was quickly surrounded by sharks. But I’d come too far now to stop.
The sharks circled around me, but they soon got bored and by nightfall I’d almost reached the Brazilian border. There was a small settlement by the coast, and I managed to pilfer a bit of food to keep me going. The next day I slipped into Brazil and headed for Belem, the nearest big town.
With amazing good luck, I arrived in the town during their annual carnival, and there in the street was a costume parade. I passed myself off as a beggar, and no one looked at me twice. After that it was easy. I managed to walk off with some fellow’s wallet, and booked myself into a hotel. I got cleaned up, bought some clothes, and soon found work in the town. After a year I had saved up enough to buy a ticket back to France.
So here I am. Back “home”. I work in a bakery in Paris, on the ovens at the back of the shop, away from the customers. I live in a small apartment in St. Dennis, near the middle of the city. I like Paris. All that bustle, all those people. Far enough away from my old home in the south to make it unlikely I’ll bump into someone I know.
But sometimes I think I never really escaped. I never remarried. I like to keep a distance from people, in case I give myself away. At every street corner, I wonder if someone I know will see me, and betray me.
At home in the evening, or in my bed at night, I’ll hear voices outside my apartment. Then I start to shake and shake, and expect a knock at the door. No one comes to visit, so it could only mean the police have found me. I couldn’t go back again. That trip on the Martinière, another spell in solitary confinement, and more awful years in the jungle of French Guiana. And do you know, I’ve been back here 22 years now.
After the escape
Between 1854 and 1937, over 70,000 men were sent to the prison camps of French Guiana. Of that number, over 50,000 attempted to escape, and one in six succeeded. Shipments of convicts stopped shortly before the outbreak of the Second World War. During the war, food supplies from France virtually dried up, and prisoners in the colony suffered terribly from starvation. After the war, the French government decided to close the prison camps and bring back the remaining prisoners to serve their sentences in France.
Bixier des Ages was eventually betrayed by an escaper he failed to kill, and was arrested. He was sent
enced to 20 years in the prison camps, but even here he continued to bring grief to the convicts of the colony. He became a turnkey, a trusted prisoner whose job it is to track down escapers.
Several books have been written about life in the camps of French Guiana. The most famous is probably Papillon, by ex-convict Henri Charrière, which was made into a famous film of the same name starring Steve McQueen and Dustin Hoffman.
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This edition published in 2012 by Usborne Publishing Ltd, Usborne House, 83-85 Saffron Hill, London, EC1N 8RT.
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Copyright © 2012, 2007, 2002 Usborne Publishing Ltd. U.E.
This edition first published in America 2007.
The name Usborne and the devices are the Trade Marks of Usborne Publishing Ltd.
Based on Tales of Real Escape by Paul Dowswell
Edited by Jenny Tyler
Series Editors: Jane Chisholm and Rosie Dickins
Designed by Mary Cartwright and Brian Voakes
Cover photograph © David H Wells/CORBIS
Illustrations by Gary Cross
Escape Page 8