Chapter VII: Part II: Prison Land (4)

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.

_Drawn by Harold Piffard from a photograph._]

We started one morning, as usual, about five o’clock, and steamed across two or three bays to the Camp du Nord. In all the other camps the timber is got down from the hills to the sea by means of wood-paved slides, which are quite as much a feature of this part of Caledonia as the ice-slides are in Norway, but the Camp du Nord rises to the dignity of a railway on which that morning I did the most curious bit of railroading I have ever done.

When we had inspected the camp at the terminus and, for the Commandant’s sake, I had duly admired the landing-stage, the trim buildings, and the gardens in which the flowers and vegetables were struggling for existence in the burning iron soil, the State car was brought out for us.

It was a platform on wheels, with four sloping seats facing backwards. I could see the line twining away up through the forest, but there was no engine.

Presently it, or, rather, they, materialised at the summons of the Chief Surveillant. Fifteen blue-clad figures, each with a halter and hook-rope over his shoulder, came out of one of the dormitories. There was a long chain shackled to the front of the car. At an order the human beasts of draught passed the halters over their heads and hooked on to the chain, seven on each side and one ahead.

Then the Commandant invited the company to mount. There were seven of us. The Commandant had brought his two little girls, and there were four besides: the Chief Surveillant, who weighed fifteen stone if he weighed a pound, the Chief Forester, who weighed a good twelve stone, and the Doctor and myself, who were comparatively light weights.

I had often seen convicts harnessed to carts in England, and, of course, I had ridden many miles in rickshaws in the East, but this was the first time I had ever travelled in a car drawn by human beings who did it because they had to, and who would have had their food docked if they had refused to do it, and I confess that I didn’t exactly like it. Still, I took my place, and the strange journey began.

At first it didn’t seem very bad, for the line was almost level, but when we got into the hills the collar-work began, and our human cattle had to bend their necks and their backs to it.

The line wound up through cuttings and over bridges at what seemed to me an ever-increasing gradient. It was a damp, muggy, tropical morning. It was not exactly raining, but the moisture soaked you to the bones for all that, and the leaves and branches of the vast virgin forest on either hand shone and dripped as the moisture condensed on them.

We perspired sitting still and making no more exertion than was necessary for breathing, so you can imagine how those poor wretches tugging at the chains sweated—and, great heavens, how they stank!—though the most fastidious, under the circumstances, could hardly blame them for this.

For very shame’s sake I got off and walked whenever there was an excuse. It made breathing pleasanter. So did the Doctor, who was a botanist and found us Venus’ Fly-Traps and other weird vegetable monsters. The Forester also got off now and then, not from motives of mercy, but to point out varieties of timber to the Commandant. The Chief Surveillant sat tight, probably on account of his weight, until I wanted to put him into one of the halters.

But what, though I hardly like to say so, disgusted me most was the absolute callousness, as it seemed to me, of the two little girls. Perhaps the worst of it was that it was absolutely innocent. They had been born and bred in Prisonland, and I don’t suppose they really saw any difference between that sweating, straining, panting team of human cattle and a team of mules or donkeys.

At last, to my own infinite relief, the journey was over. What it must have been like to our team I can only guess from the fact that in a distance of a little over four miles they had dragged us up one thousand five hundred feet! It took an hour and three-quarters to do it. They were dismissed when we got to the top and allowed to have a drink—of water.

The Doctor took us back. He understood the brake, and in consideration for the young ladies he kept the speed moderate. We got back in twelve minutes and a half. He said he had done it in six; but I wasn’t with him then, and didn’t want to be.

Although forestry is, of course, the same all the world over, and, therefore, not the sort of thing to describe here in detail, there were two other camps that I visited which had interesting peculiarities of their own. One of these was the Camp of Bonne Anse, a pretty little spot whence a very steep and stony path led over a little range to a promontory called Cap Ndoua, which is the telegraph station for the Isle of Pines. I don’t know whether there are any other telegraphic stations which have neither cables nor wires and make no use of electricity, but this and the one on the Isle of Pines were the only ones I have ever seen.

When I was taken into the operating-room at Cap Ndoua I saw an apparatus which looked to me like a gigantic magic-lantern with a telescope fixed to its side. In the front of the big iron box there was a huge lens about eighteen inches across, behind this was another smaller one, and behind this again a powerful oil lamp, with a movable screen in front of it, worked with a sort of trigger; on a table in the corner of the room were the usual telegraphic transmitters and receivers in connection with the general telegraphic system to Noumea and the cable to Sydney.

Every evening at seven, when it is of course quite dark, the operators go on duty until nine. If Ndoua has a message to send to the island the lamp is lit, and the man at the telescope in the observatory above the hospital on the island sees a gleam of white light across the forty-six miles of sea. He lights his lamp, and the preliminary signal twinkles through the darkness. Then the shutter begins to work. Short and long flashes gleam out in quick succession, the dots and dashes of the Morse system in fact; and so the words which have come over the wire from Noumea, or, perhaps, from the uttermost ends of the earth, are translated into light, and sent through the darkness with even more than electrical speed.

Saving only fogs, which are not very frequent in those latitudes, the optic telegraph is just as reliable as the cable and the wire, and they are good for any distance up to the range of the telescope. The apparatus cost about £50 apiece, while a cable would cost several thousands; and it struck me that for quick communication between the mainland and islands or distant light-houses, the optic telegraph is worthy of a wider use than it seems to have.

The other visit was to Port Boisé, near to Cape Queen Charlotte, which is the extreme north-western point of Caledonia. Port Boisé is, like so many other of the Caledonian convict camps, a most beautiful spot. It is fertile, too, thanks to the existence of ancient bog lands, which make it possible to temper the heat of the ferruginous soil, and so skill and patience have made it a delightful oasis in the midst of the vast forest and jungle which surround it on all sides save the one opening to the sea.

These forests and jungles, by the way, are of somewhat peculiar growth; the timber is mostly what is called _chêne-gomme_, and is an apparent combination of oak- and gum-tree. It is almost as hard as the iron which is the chief ingredient in the soil from which it derives its sap, and it is practically indestructible. As for the jungle, it is composed of brush and creepers which have the consistency of wire ropes—a sort of vegetable steel cable, in fact.

But for me, as an Englishman, the chief interest in Port Boisé was connected with Cape Queen Charlotte, and a little island lying about five miles out to sea, which is called Le Mouillage de Cook—the Anchorage of Captain Cook. It was here that the great navigator made perhaps the greatest mistake of his life. As every one knows, he discovered and named New Caledonia. He sailed along its shores, and contented himself with describing it as an island of lofty mountains surrounded by reefs which made it inaccessible.

He anchored at a little island, and named the bold promontory in front of him Cape Queen Charlotte. He landed here, and, as he says, found the natives very civil and obliging. It is a million pities that he did not cultivate their friendship further, and learn something about their country. He would not then have described it as “inaccessible” and “unapproachable.”

Beyond the bay in which his boats landed he would have found a stretch of open country under the hills across which his men could have marched till they discovered what is now the Baie du Sud—another Sydney Cove in miniature. If he had only done this, Caledonia, with its enormous mineral wealth and its magnificent harbours, would have been British instead of French, a worthy appanage to that other Empire of the future, the new-born Commonwealth of Australia.

I discussed this with the Commandant as we walked back to Bonne Anse, and he told me the story of how on a much later occasion we also lost Caledonia.

Once upon a time, a little more than fifty years ago, there were two frigates lying in Sydney Harbour—one British and one French. We will call the British ship H.M.S. _Dodderer_. She was commanded by an old woman in naval uniform who ought to have been superannuated years before. The Frenchman, as events proved, was a man of a very different sort.

New Caledonia in those days was a sort of No-Man’s Land, but there were both Catholic and Protestant European missionaries working among the natives. The two warships received almost simultaneous orders to go and annex the island. They started the same day. The British frigate out-sailed the Frenchman, but her captain had got those fatal words of Captain Cook’s deep-rooted in his mind, and when he got near the dreaded reefs he began to take soundings. The Frenchman went ahead, neck or nothing. He gambled his ship to win a colony, and, taking only the most ordinary precautions, he kept on his course.

By great good luck he struck the broad passage through the reef which leads to the harbour of Noumea, and when H.M.S. _Dodderer_ eventually groped her way in she found the French frigate at anchor, and the Tricolour flying from a flagstaff on one of the hills, after which the French captain politely invited him and his officers to lunch and to an excursion on French soil; and here ends a short but exasperating chapter in our colonial history.

I had been ten days in Prony when we visited Port Boisé, and each day we had been looking anxiously for the coming of the steamer which was to bring us food and me release. Morning after morning we looked out across the bay to the two islands which guarded the channel through which she had to come, but for six more days never a whiff of smoke drifted across the clear-cut horizon. Meanwhile, food was running very low, and we were getting decidedly _ennuyés_. So one day, by way of a diversion, the Doctor proposed that we should break the law and go dynamite-fishing and shark-slaying.

The fresh meat had given out. Vegetables—far more important to a Frenchman than to an Englishman—were nearly a memory. The fruit supply of the camp was represented by a lime-tree in the Doctor’s garden, and that grew in imported soil. No fruit would grow in the iron soil of Prony. The preserved Australian meat was getting very low. In short, in a few more days we should have got within measurable distance of starvation, and then mutiny; and it was with an idea of deferring such unpleasant contingencies that the doctor suggested we should go fishing.

Any change from the monotony of wandering about the little area walled in by jungle and forest, impassable by any save those who knew the Kanaka paths, was welcome, and I began to talk gladly about rods and line and bait, to which the doctor replied:

“Oh no, we must work quicker than that. We shall fish with dynamite! You will see them come to the bait, and then—_pouf!_—there breaks out the waterquake, not earthquake, as you say, and they are all dead—hundreds! You shall see sharks, too. Dynamite is good medicine for them.”

This sounded interesting, and I got up the next morning about half-past four, more cheerfully than usual, because, of course, we were going to start at five o’clock. It was a dull, cloudy, steamy morning when I went down to the jetty, and found the big whale-boat manned by six stalwart Kanakas armed with their throwing-spears, and the Doctor with a little saloon rifle, and the Director of Works—the biggest and most English-looking Frenchman that I met in the colony—with his pockets full of dynamite.

We first paid a visit to a camp about eight miles away, taking a contribution of meat and bread, and the news that the long-expected supplies had not yet come. Then we shaped our course for Sharks’ Bay, which proved to be a most characteristically tropical piece of water. The dense vegetation not only came down to the water’s edge, but threw out long, snaky-looking roots a couple of yards from the shore. It was among these that the first sport began, because it was in these oily-looking shallows that the flat fish were wont to take refuge from the wolves of the sea.

This was the Kanakas’ part of the sport. We ran the boat in quietly and four of them went ashore with their spears. The Director of Works did the same, and when he had landed I felt that the Doctor and I were a little farther off from the razor-edged brink of eternity than when he was sitting beside us with enough dynamite in his pockets to blow the boat to matchwood and ourselves beyond the confines of time.

We amused ourselves by taking potshots at the black triangles which keenly cut the unrippled surface of the brown water. As far as my own experience goes, I don’t think there’s another piece of water in the world that possesses as many sharks to the acre as that well-named bay. Wherever you looked you could see a black fin cutting the water, and every minute or so you would see a swirling eddy which meant that one of the sea-wolves had made a dash at something, and had either got an instalment of his breakfast or missed it.

When I was talking this over afterwards with the Doctor, who was a bit of a naturalist, I learnt a little more about the doctrine of evolution and the survival of the fittest than I knew before. Sharks swarm in the New Caledonian waters, and the only chance for their victims is flight; wherefore about the shores of New Caledonia you find the fastest swimming fish in the world.

After we had had a few ineffective shots at dorsal fins, one of our crew said “Ough!” and pointed to the shore. We pulled in, it being evident that there was sport afoot. The Kanakas ashore had been climbing with marvellous agility over the snaky water-roots of the trees until they had come to a tiny little cove.

They were leaning over the roots peering down into the water, motionless as bronze images. Then one swiftly and silently shinned up a tree with his spear in his mouth. He got a foot- and hand-hold. Then with his right hand he took the spear out of his teeth, balanced it for a moment, and then down it went like a flash of lightning.

The next instant there was a terrific commotion in the water below. Three other spears went down, and our men laid to their oars and rushed the boat in. Two of the others jumped into the water, and the crowd began struggling with a huge flat-fish, something like an exaggerated flounder, which was nailed to the bottom by a couple of spears. When we got him into the boat, I thought he would have knocked the side out of it. Subsequently he made good eating for many hungry convicts.

Meanwhile, the Director had been wandering about with a cigarette in his mouth and a dynamite cartridge in his hand, looking for his prey, which, unobligingly, kept too far out. His turn was to come later on, when we had pulled across past the sulphur stream to the mouth of the river which flows into Sharks’ Bay.

It is a rather curious fact that the waters of this bay are strongly impregnated with sulphur, and yet, as I have said, they are literally swarming with fish. They evidently seemed to like it, for both the sharks and their victims were thicker in the neighbourhood of the submarine springs than they were anywhere else. Wherefore it was here that we made the best bags.

Our Kanakas seemed to have a faculty of seeing through the brown water which none of us possessed. Again and again they located swarms of fish that we had no notion of. One of them lay in the bows with his big black eyes seeing things where we could see nothing, and directing our course by moving his right or left hand.

Meanwhile the dynamiter stood on the seat with one foot on the gunwale, puffing at his cigarette, keeping it in a glow so that he might light the fuse of his cartridge at it. Presently there came from the bows a low intense whisper, “Stop!” The Kanakas use a good deal more English than French when they’re out sporting. He got up and pointed to the water about ten yards ahead, and hissed:

“There, _là_! plenty! _beaucoup!_”

The dynamiter took his cigarette from his lips, blew the ash away, and touched the end of the fuse with it. Then he pitched his cartridge into the water about ten yards from the boat. Ten seconds later a volcano seemed to burst up from the bottom of the bay, and the boat jumped as if a whale’s flipper had struck her. The water ahead boiled up into a little hillock of foam and dropped again.

Then all about us I saw the water sprinkled with the white bellies of fish, some quite dead, and others swimming in a feeble, purposeless sort of way with their tails. The next moment there were six big splashes, and I saw six pairs of brown legs disappearing into the water, after which heads and arms bobbed up, and it began to rain fish into the boat.

They ran from eight to eighteen inches in length, and from two to six pounds in weight, and so I took some pains to dodge them as they came flying up out of the water. They were something like bass, but they had the heads and tails of mackerel, and they swam like lightning—of course, before they struck the dynamite.

I have often watched, in clearer waters, the sharks hunting shoals of them. The Caledonian shark can get a tremendous speed on him. I have seen a twelve-footer carried clean out of the water by the impetus of his rush. But the way these things dodged them just at the moment that they turned over to make their grab was simply marvellous. You would see a shark plunge into the midst of a swarm of them. The long, blue-grey body would turn over, the mouth—the ugliest mouth in all creation—would open, and the tripled-armed jaws would clash together on a mouthful of empty water. Every fish had vanished, and brother shark would give a disgusted wriggle, and go on the prowl again.

Escapes of this kind were, of course, due to inherited wisdom, but dynamite was a recent experience, and the fish fell victims to it through sheer curiosity. When the cartridge dropped into the middle of the shoal they naturally scattered in all directions. Then they came back to see what had fallen into the water, and after that came the catastrophe. Those who died were victims to curiosity. Those who escaped would probably be about the most scared fish that ever wagged a fin.

The effect of the dynamite on those who did not escape was most extraordinary. In every case the vertebral column was broken just behind the head, and the heart was as cleanly divided as if it had been cut with a razor.

When we had our boat about half full we started in pursuit of bigger game. The shock of the explosion had startled the sharks, who, like all bullies, are mostly cowards, and the Kanakas had kept them away by beating the water every now and then with their hands in their usual fashion. So our dripping, laughing crew, sure now of a splendid feed, pulled merrily down the bay to a point on which we landed two of them and the dynamiter. They crept stealthily along the tangled shore till one of the Kanakas stopped and pointed to three little black spots on the surface of a tiny jungle-fringed bay.

The dynamiter took out a cigarette and lit it, watching the three points the while as they moved along the oily surface through little eddies made by the great bodies underneath. Presently they formed a triangle not many feet apart. Two or three vigorous whiffs of his cigarette, a touch to the fuse, and a motion of the hand, a scurry in the water—and then a muffled bang and an uprising of muddy water.

We waited a moment or two, and then we could see something white—three streaks of it—gleaming through the water, and three livid shapes rose slowly to the surface, wagging the great tails which would never send them through the water again. Their horrible mouths were a little open, but they would never close fish or man again.

I took the Doctor’s word for it that their necks, so to speak, were broken, and their hearts split as those of the smaller fry were; but I didn’t make any personal investigations, for soon after the troubling of the waters had subsided there came swift, swirling rushes from all sides; black fins cut the water, white bellies gleamed under it, and then came a clashing of cannibal jaws, a tugging and a tearing, a silent, horrible contest, and presently all that was left of those three sharks was a blood-reddened scum on the surface of the little leaf-fringed bay.

Our morning’s fishing closed with the slaying of a shark who fell a victim to his insatiable appetite just as the smaller fry had done to their curiosity. When the tragedy was over we pulled out into the middle of the outer bay and waited until quiet and confidence was restored among our friends below. Meanwhile, one of the Kanakas had cut one of our biggest fish open. The Director put a dynamite cartridge into it, and then it was tied up, after which the end of a line was passed through its gills. When one of the black triangles came within a few yards of us the Director touched the end of about six inches of fuse with his cigarette and dropped it quietly overboard.

Brother Shark didn’t seem to notice the little fizzy splutter which made this fish different from all others that he had eaten, or, if he did, he took no notice of it. He turned over on his side, the jaws opened, and the fish vanished.

In a few moments and for just an immeasurable fraction of a second he was the most astounded shark in the Pacific Ocean. After which came chaos for him, and a breakfast for his brethren. The pieces weren’t very big, with the exception of the head, which, after a bit of a scrimmage, was carried off by a monster who might have been his mother-in-law. The rest of the fragments disappeared in a swirl of bloody froth, and we went home to breakfast to learn the glad news that the long-awaited _Emily_ had really left Noumea at last.

XI

_MOSTLY MOSQUITOS AND MICROBES_

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 ourselves exceeding well. The next morning the _Emily_ sailed, of course, at five o’clock; but I turned out of bed in the moonlight well contented, for my last journey but one was over. The Commandant invited me on to his verandah for a farewell consommation. After which I went with the Doctor and the Dynamiter for another one or two at the canteen. Then we parted in as friendly a fashion as English and French ever did.

I was glad to get away, yet I left some regrets behind me. Though I had come under unpromising circumstances, every one had made me welcome, and although my stay had lengthened into something like a little exile, my visit to the Land of Wood and Iron had been both pleasant and profitable.

The Doctor I parted from with real regret. He was one of the best types of the travelled French officer and gentleman that I have ever met. At first his ideas about the Boers were hopelessly wrong, and that was all there was the matter with him; but I was the first man he had ever met who had actually lived among them, and when I left his views were considerably altered.

Just before I left, the Director of Posts and Telegraphs—every official seems to be a director of something in Caledonia—brought me the first letters that I had received in Prisonland. They had been carried by a Kanaka over the mountains from Noumea, through fifty miles of jungle-paths. These bush-postmen have never yet been known to lose a letter. When I asked how much extra they were paid for work like this I was told that they were made to do it as a punishment—which struck me as being entirely French.

The _Emily_—may her name be blessed!—was only a steam launch multiplied by two, but she was clean and sweet, and her nose was pointed towards home. She towed two lighters loaded with dressed timber, and she took something like fifteen hours to do forty-five miles. But that mattered little. It was a delicious day, and the scenery along the coast was lovely. Moreover, you could lie down on her decks without having to change afterwards and throw your clothes overboard, and so the long hours passed pleasantly under the awning.

When at length she had puffed and panted her way into Noumea, I looked about the harbour and saw that Yellow Jack was flying more numerously than ever. The first news I learnt when I landed was that the plague was a great deal worse than the papers were allowed to say. It had begun to jump about all over the town, just as it did later on in Sydney. The Chief of the Sanitary Commission had just been struck down by it.

The first thing I noticed as I drove from the wharf to my old quarters was the number of people in mourning. My landlady, who—I dare say under compulsion—had had her premises cleaned and disinfected, greeted me with even more than French effusion. I owed her a long bill, and she thought I was dead of the plague in some out-of-the-way spot. She nearly cried for joy when she saw me. Poor old lady, she was to be one of the next of the microbe’s victims!

At dinner that night I learnt, to my intense disgust, that the Messagerie Company and the Government had established a twelve-days’ quarantine on a mosquito-haunted islet in the bay for any one who wanted to travel by the monthly mail to Sydney. The principal reason for this was that the Governor was going home and wanted to be quite certain that no microbes got on board concealed about the persons of his fellow-passengers.

From my point of view it amounted to this: Twelve days on _Ile Freycinet_, four days’ passage, and from eight to ten days’ quarantine in Sydney—total at least twenty-six days for a trip of a little over a thousand miles.

It had to be avoided somehow, and at the same time Noumea was getting every day a better place to get out of. Even Lord Dunmore, who had stuck to his offices down near the wharves while his neighbours were running away, and while the rats, driven out of destroyed buildings, were coming under his floors to die, at last admitted that things were serious, and advised me to “get” as soon as I could.