AN ACCOUNT OF CONVICTS AND COLONISTS IN NEW CALEDONIA WITH JOTTINGS OUT AND HOME BY GEORGE GRIFFITH AUTHOR OF “MEN WHO HAVE MADE THE EMPIRE,” “THE VIRGIN OF THE SUN,” A TALE OF THE CONQUEST OF PERU, “BRITON OR BOER?” A STORY OF THE FIGHT FOR AFRICA, ETC., ETC. WITH A PORTRAIT AND NUMEROUS ILLUSTRATIONS London: HUTCHINSON & CO Paternoster Row 1901 PRINTED BY HAZELL, WATSON, AND VINEY, LD. LONDON AND AYLESBURY To THE EARL OF DUNMORE WHOSE KINDNESS AND HOSPITALITY MADE MY SOJOURN IN PRISON-

The last sentence on p. 137 should read: “The Cachots Noirs were never opened except at stated intervals,—once every morning for inspection, and once every thirty days for exercise and a medical examination of the prisoner.” I am glad to be able to state on the authority of the Minister of Colonies that this terrible punishment has now been made much less severe. Every seventh day the prisoner is placed for a day in a light cell; he is also given an hour’s exercise every day; and the maximum sen

It was on the fifth night out from Southampton that the threatening shadow of the American Custom House began to fall over the company in the saloon. One could see ladies talking nervously together. The subject was the one most dear to the female heart; but the pleasure of talking about “things” was mingled—at least in the hearts of the uninitiated—with an uneasiness which, in not a few cases, amounted to actual fear; for that evening certain forms had been distributed by the purser, and these f

I have seen cities in many parts of the world, from the smoke-grimed, flame-crowned, cloud-canopied hives of industry of middle and Northern England, of Belgium, and Northern France, to the marble palaces and broad-verandahed bungalows which sleep among the palm-groves by the white shores of tropic seas; but never—north, south, east, or west—have I seen a collection of human habitations and workshops so utterly hopeless, so irretrievably ugly as that portion of Chicago about which I wandered dur

( From a Guide-book—with Annotations and an Impression of Chinatown ) San Francisco—no well-bred American, unless he comes from Chicago, ever says ’Frisco—is a delicious combination of wealth and wickedness, splendour and squalor, vice, virtue, villainy, beauty, ugliness, solitude and silence, rush and row—in short, San Francisco is just San Francisco, and that’s all there is to it, as they say there. It was discovered and settled by Franciscan friars. It would be no place for them now. It is al

( With Incidental remarks on the Paradise thereof and the Great Tropical Fraud ) By the end of my third day’s stay in San Francisco a splendid sea-wind had blown the smell of Chinatown out of my nostrils, and the mephitic stuffiness of its streets and shops and restaurants out of my lungs. I would fain have stayed longer, for I was beginning to like the Queen of the Golden Shore, and some of her loyal subjects were beginning to like me, wherefore there was every prospect of a goodly time ahead f

There are not many portions of the sea-realm of Oceania, or, indeed, of the whole Southern Hemisphere, of which the name is so well and the history so little known as New Caledonia. Throughout Europe, not excepting even France, it has for fifty years been the name of a convict station. To the forçat and the relégué its name meant something even worse than the traditions of the old galleys could tell of. It meant banishment over an illimitable stretch of ocean; and, through the hazes of distance,

After a flying visit to Auckland, our old steam-roller staggered through a southerly buster into Sydney Heads on Christmas Eve, and it was then that I began to make acquaintance with the Microbe of the Black Death. We had got alongside the wharf at Circular Quay. On the other side of the jetty a white-painted Messageries mail-boat was being moored. If Sydney had only known the terrible cargo which she carried, Sydney would have seen her sunk a thousand fathoms deep rather than let her touch Aust

My first official business in the colony was, of course, to write to the Governor acquainting him with the fact of my arrival. I did this with considerable misgivings, for both at Sydney and on the boat, I had heard the evil rumour that in consequence of the plague the Government of New Caledonia had decided to close the prisons. This meant that the convicts who had been hired out to work in the mines and elsewhere would be recalled to the prisons and the camps, and that all communication would

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

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

I visited two or three other industrial camps and the farm-settlements before I left Ile Nou, but as I had yet to go through the agricultural portions of the colony it would be no use taking up space in describing them here. There are practically no roads to speak of in New Caledonia outside a short strip of the south-western coast. In September, 1863, Napoleon the Little signed the decree which converted the virgin paradise of New Caledonia into a hell of vice and misery—a description which is

Society in Bourail, although in one sense fairly homogeneous, is from another point of view distinctly mixed. Here, for example, are a few personal items which I picked up during our stroll down the main and one street of the village. First we turned into a little saddler’s shop, the owner of which once boasted the privilege of making the harness for Victor Emmanuel’s horses. Unfortunately his exuberant abilities were not content even with such distinction as this, and so he deviated into coinin

My next expedition was to include the forest camps to the south-west of the island, and a visit to the Isle of Pines, an ocean paradise of which I had read much in the days of my youth; wherefore I looked forward with some anticipation to seeing it with the eyes of flesh. There would be no steamer for three or four days, so the next day I took a trip over to the Peninsula of Ducos, to the northward of the bay. The glory of Ducos as a penal settlement is past. There are now only a few “politicals

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

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 ar

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 sens

The Emily arrived that evening, and we fed royally on good fresh Australian beef, fried fish, and potatoes, and compôte of fruit, followed by fresh cream cheese, with bread and tinned butter—as usual, from Australia. In fact, if it wasn’t for Australia I believe that New Caledonia would either live on tinned everything or starve, which is of course a good thing for Sydney and Newcastle. The Doctor produced a couple of bottles of excellent Burgundy from his private cellar, and altogether we did o

Everything, even quarantine, comes to an end in time; and so on the morning of the eighth day at anchor, and the thirteenth out from Pam, the sanitary policeman who formed our sole connection with the outside world brought with our morning letters and newspapers the joyful news that our imprisonment was to end at noon that day. Never did convicts hail the hour of their release more gladly than the passengers on board the Ballande liner St. Louis . We had managed to make our durance vile tolerabl

No doubt it was due to the very wide difference between the two points of view from which I had seen Australia and the Australians, but I must confess that my first impressions were more pleasant than my second. Naturally the happy-go-lucky-sailor lad who thought that the earth was his and the fulness thereof as long as he had a shilling in his pocket and a square meal ahead of him, would not look upon things in general with the same eyes that I did after twenty years of changing fortunes and th

It must not be gathered from what I have said in the last two chapters that it is all play and no work in Australia. There is a great deal too much play, and far too keen an interest in winning money instead of making real wealth; but still Australia boasts of splendid industries which she is working to real and lasting profit. While I was in Adelaide I renewed my acquaintance with a lady and gentleman with whom I had come into contact by a lucky chance during a coaching trip through the Blue Mo