Murder in Monte Carlo

by Michael Sheridan

  The Marseilles police chief looked again at the transport label retrieved from the side of the trunk. The destination was Paddington Station, London. The owners Sir Vere St Leger Goold and Lady Violet Goold.

  PART TWO

  7

  LE BAGNE

  Deus Mihi Providebit

  FRENCH GUIANA 1908-9

  He had been moved from the prison in Monte Carlo back to Marseilles and then readied for the train journey to La Rochelle. That last-named port had a special resonance for him. An ancestor of his, Elisabeth Goold, daughter of Alderman Stephen Goold and his wife Helen of Cork, Ireland, had been married there to James Nagle in 1705. When Mrs Nagle died two decades later she left money and a house in Paris. Now how far had the ancestral line sunk in the mire? The next Goold to go there would arrive a manacled prisoner destined for French Guiana, an overseas region of France located on the northern Atlantic coast of South America.

  DEUS MINI PROVIDEBIT . . . God Will Provide For Me. With a bitter sense of irony he remembered his family motto. The crest: a lion rampant.

  French Guiana was originally inhabited by a number of indigenous American people. It was settled by the French during the 17th century. The first French effort to colonise Guiana was in 1763 when 12,000 Frenchmen were induced to accept free offers of land there. They arrived expecting to scoop sacks of gold and diamonds from the ground. Unprepared for the tropical climate, they died in their thousands. Lacking proper dwellings they were caught in drenching storms, after the rains they reeled through the steaming jungles, caught in floods, assaulted by clouds of mosquitoes carrying malaria.

  Only 2,000 of the original group survived the first year. They were saved by taking refuge on three islands, ten miles from the mainland. These islands became known as the Isles of Salvation (Îles du Salut): Île Royale, Île St Joseph and Île du Diable, the smallest and separated from Royale by a vicious tide. It is said that this island got its name Devil’s Island from the cloud of black birds that nested on the island. In time the whole penal colony came to be known as ‘Devil’s Island’.

  By 1775 there were 1,300 whites and 8,000 slaves in the colony. All three of the neighbouring Guianas – French, Dutch and British – were dependent on slaves for their existence. This resulted in thousands of blacks fleeing into the bush. For more than a century they formed renegade bands and made forays against the plantations and white settlements, killing, looting and liberating other slaves.

  The slaves were emancipated in 1794, only to be re-enslaved when the fortunes of the colony diminished. A second emancipation occurred in 1848. However, by this time, the reputation of Guiana was so evil that white colonists could not be persuaded to emigrate. Napoléon III decided to solve the problem by transporting political prisoners to the colony, which from that time became a penal colony.

  So awful were the conditions there that the French government decided that only Africans, Arabs and Annamese (from French Indochina) would be transported. From 1884 white prisoners were also brought there. It was not for nothing even now, over half a century after Napoléon III had created his hell on earth, that it had become known as the Colony of the Damned.

  He was at the same station in Marseilles that he had come to the previous year to submit to his well-deserved fate.

  He was taken with some others in a van from the prison and brought to a freight entrance, where railway carriages specially built for the transportation of convicts to the penal colonies were waiting. The carriages were divided into small cells, three feet by four. Each cell had a small bench and a sliding panel through which food was passed. Each contained a prisoner, feet securely fastened by chains, wrists handcuffed and irons placed on the ankles. There were three armed guards in each of the carriages. Such carriages arrived at La Rochelle from all parts of the nation, hitched to passenger and freight trains, stopping by the prisons to pick up men banished to the hell of the penal colony.

  Sometime around noon the train arrived at La Rochelle to a crowd of onlookers at the station. His stomach churned with fear. It was the first time that the reality of where he was destined sank in. Before that it was tomorrow and tomorrow, with always the thought that something might intervene. Nothing did. It was the last stop before leaving France.

  The convicts were marched through La Rochelle. There was a crowd watching, some weeping relatives and wives and sweethearts, all bathed in tears. It was a heartbreaking spectacle. He had nobody and felt all the better for it. Those people knew that they would never see their men again. They were put on a ferry for Saint-Martin-de-Ré on the Île de Rè, an hour’s crossing. The prison here was in former days a grim embattlement from which the musketeers of Louis XIV once repulsed the forces of the Duke of Buckingham.

  They entered through a great drawbridge into a large court. The convicts there were stripped naked and given a rectal examination. This was to look for suppositories or “plan” in French criminal jargon. This was a hollow cylinder inserted into the anus by convicts to contain money or other articles of value to them. They were given prison clothes and wooden-soled shoes. There was an inventory taken of possessions such as letters and photographs which could be sent on to family or if not, destroyed. More often the latter.

  They were then given the attention of a barber, clipped, shaved and put into icy showers. Then to the quartier cellulaire where guards let them into a large cell. They were lined up at the edge of a tier of bare boards which served as bunks. The sergeant keeper of cells appeared and asked for all the names and length of sentences. Chains were then put on the prisoners. In the morning each was given a number and sent to workshops. Silence was insisted upon and there was a regime of brutal discipline. For the slightest thing, the turn of a head, a beating ensued.

  Prior to the departure of the convict steamer, each was given a canvas sailor’s sack containing two sets of clothing and a blanket. They were then taken to the courtyard where they saw the prison guards from Guiana and Senegalese soldiers. They were counted and handed over to their new captors. They now belonged to the prison administration of Guiana. All 450 men were marched back over the drawbridge and into the town. They began to take their last steps from the soil of France.

  They were watched by the same crowd of spectators including grief-stricken members of family, mothers, wives, girlfriends and children. There were newspapermen and photographers to record the transportation. As if the humiliation was not sufficient.

  None more than he had previously been subjected to this form of attention. His foul crime had already been the focus of worldwide attention. He kept his eyes firmly fixed on the ground. No photographer picked him out; he was now just a number among the detritus of French society, not given the dubious privilege of being incarcerated in their own homeland.

  They reached the pier where a number of barges took the army of convicts to the waiting steamship. On board they were forced into a series of cages. Each cage held up to 90 men, counted as they entered. Hammocks were distributed and the cages were locked.

  The cages were 60ft long, 12ft wide and the same in height. There was a hardly an inch of room to breathe, the heavy air awash with human sweat and the acrid stench of vomit. Younger men had some hope in their hearts, mostly because the possibility of escape was in their minds. He and the older men were deprived of all hope as they knew that they had no chance of any other life than the one that faced them.

  The reality would prove that neither age nor youth would provide any protection from the awful tortures that would compose their future incarceration.

  The intense heat inside the cages overwhelmed the prisoners. For half an hour a day they were marched on deck for air while sailors sloshed out the cages with salt water to get rid of the detritus of their stay. They were forbidden to talk and were forced to stand facing the sea. One more lash of the whips – the thousands that they faced when they arrived at their destination.

  It quickly became apparent to him that the cause of the brutality they were already ex
posed to, quite apart from any larger design, was that the guards were, to a certain extent, not a whole lot better off than their charges. They were subject to the same conditions, diet, climate and apparently poorly paid for their efforts. They would resort to anything to ease their lot. And their resentment was transmitted at every turn to the convicts.

  In the cages the discipline was relaxed and they were allowed to talk, smoke and play cards. Leaders and bullies, mainly strongarm men called fort-à-bras, many of whom were tattooed head to foot, with experience of African prisons, took control and struck terror into the weaker convicts. Even in this stinking quagmire there was a hierarchy established.

  This vicious mentality pervaded the cages. They organised gambling games, with playing cards drawn on bits of paper, checkers and dominoes fashioned from bits of bread or lumps of sugar. It was a far cry for him from the tables at Monte Carlo. Gambling was, it was confirmed, part of life for all classes, and these were the lowest of all. The results, he found out, would not be much different. On the high seas, the game of chance was still being played born of the same desperate need.

  Dreadful food was brought in slop buckets and the old and feeble were given little. The laws of the jungle prevailed. If this was a foretaste of what was to come, it had the effect of hope being created for men by discussing plans for escape when they arrived in the colony.

  They entered the Mediterranean and, three days after departure from La Rochelle, the ship docked in Algiers where 200 hundred more prisoners, Arabs and Black Africans, were taken on board. The ship then headed straight to Guiana, passing between Gibraltar and Tangiers and out into the Atlantic once more.

  As it reached the tropics, the heat and humidity of the air became even more intolerable. The prisoners were hosed down by the guards. The drinking water became contaminated and was mixed with rum to make it acceptable. Most of the men wore nothing but towels around their waists. The twice-daily hosing with cold seawater proved the high point of the stifling experience of human incarceration in the heat and humidity of the holds.

  When the ship slowed down, which it frequently did on the journey, a shiver of fear shot through the seaborne community. It signalled a death and the deposit of the corpse into the sea. There were some poor souls who would not make it to the colony, and they would prove to be the lucky ones.

  After what seemed an interminable time the shore appeared and the ship reached the mouth of the Maroni River after a journey which had lasted a day over three weeks. The ship shuddered to a halt and waited for the high tide. An air of expectation and excitement gripped the men instead of the dread that should have been their reaction. It was but a temporary escape from reality.

  When the tide was right the ship moved off and into the mouth of the Maroni, a name that would become etched in the consciousness of every prisoner. It steamed slowly along the bank, flanked by the immense wall of a green jungle, a more effective obstacle than anything the penitentiary authorities could have built. The natural ramparts were as crushing as the appalling habitation of this forgotten but very much alive penal colony.

  The convicts were ordered to dress for the landing. The whistle blew and the ship stopped again. They had arrived at St Laurent de Maroni which, bathed in tropical sunlight, looked almost pleasant – from the outside. A crowd had gathered to watch the arrival of another human cargo, among which were white-attired colony officials, colourfully dressed black women and more ragged denizens. Whatever their status, they were free to stop and stare at the miserable band of humanity that was disembarking and being marched in a line along the pier.

  There was a strange atmosphere of expectation. The sort, incredibly, that he and countless others might have had when arriving at a holiday destination. It resembled somewhat a feeling of pleasure, an irony that all too soon would become obvious to all. The sunlight, the sensation of normality, the gathered crowd was almost seductive.

  The walk, he thought like all the others, confirmed this feeling. St Laurent de Maroni was a pretty little place, neat and clean. There was, like in any French town, a Hôtel de Ville and a Palais de Justice. The streets were wide and bordered with fine trees. Houses nestled in little gardens with palm trees. They were spick and span with flowers everywhere. There were prisoners with straw hats and pink-and-white striped clothing cleaning the streets and tending the gardens. It seemed that they could go where they liked. The impression was that of an ideal life.

  It was an initial impression. After a short walk of several hundred yards the line was turned to the left and was soon confronted with a high wall and a huge gate with a few armed guards in front. Over the gate in large letters, the seemingly unassuming announcement of their new home:

  CAMP DE LA TRANSPORTATION

  The unreality of their arrival evaporated with the reality of the destination. Those words in the title spoke the truth of it. This was not a holiday camp, it was not a place of joy. It was a place of punishment. After filing through into the large yard behind the gates, they were addressed by the Commandant of the Penitentiary of St Laurent. It was clearly a speech that had been given many times before and would be again. And again.

  Even the tiny minority who might have been unaware of the reputation of this penal establishment would in time reflect on the true meaning of the speech. Nonetheless, at the time it did not seem disingenuous.

  “You must behave yourselves, first and foremost, or suffer the consequences. If you follow the regulations and do not cause trouble you may well qualify for a pardon. That is a fact of life in this colony that is given. Its founders had the hope that for you all there would be something positive and productive and that you would contribute in time to the creation of a good society with economic benefits for the inhabitants and your homeland.

  I urge you to cast off the iniquities of the life that you have left behind and look forward to rehabilitation and a better future. I am not going to suggest that your time here will be easy, after all there are very good reasons that each one of you has as part of your sentence to join us here. But believe me that if you adapt willingly to the rules of the administration you will be rewarded in a very positive way. Life is not all bad here unless you choose it to be. There are guards here, there are workers in the local community here, that formerly shared your situation. They have thrived, have a satisfactory and productive existence and there is no reason why you cannot be part of this positive process.

  We have our responsibilities but so have you. Let us share them in peace.

  There are some among you who will wish to escape but I warn those of this disposition that there are formidable obstacles in the way of such temptation. We are no fools here and realise from experience that such is, was and always will be the desire among, in particular, some of the young convicts. It may seem a natural inclination but it is a dangerous one.

  Let me warn you that those who attempt to run away from the tasks allotted to them will be shot on sight by the guards. But beyond that is the jungle and the sea containing their own natural guards. And the bullet compared to their realities will seem merciful by comparison. I do not wish to emphasise these dangers, all or any that take them on will find out soon enough.

  But allow me to emphasise that in the event that some want to take this route, the sea contains sharks and the river piranha, both of whom will strip a human bare of every last inch of flesh from the body. A slow and horrible end which I am sure the majority of prisoners would want to avoid. But those by chance who avoid this awful death and are returned here will face severe punishment in solitary confinement, which I assure you is far from pleasant.

  You may all live in peace with us and your guards; that choice is entirely up to you. All are welcome by the administration and if we all get along then all our lives will be made as accommodating as possible. We do not want your punishment for your crimes to be rendered any more difficult than the deprivation of your freedom. That I assume is more than sufficient for the differing reasons for which you have
been brought here.

  But in these difficult circumstances, for all of us, let us hope that your stay in French Guiana will be as pleasant as it can and should be. The climate is not the best for us, no more than you, used to the more temperate one of our homeland. But we must all endure that together. It is as demanding for us as it is for you. The Third Republic has decreed fit to support the administration in its best efforts to house you.

  Let us all attempt properly to dwell in peace and I hope sincerely that some future prosperity awaits those prisoners who will be returned to their homeland. I wish you all bon chance. Your peace and welfare is our first and enduring priority.”

  After the speech the men were locked into barracks with 60 men in each.

  Soon he heard from his fellow-prisoners about the real obstacles to escape that the Commandant had mentioned.

  At first, the neighbouring government of Dutch Guiana had provided sanctuary to those who successfully crossed the piranha-infested Maroni River. Later as a result of atrocities committed by bagnards the Dutch administration adopted a firm policy of returning all convicts (except, in later years, those of German nationality – a policy instituted by Hitler on his accession to power in 1933). Hundreds of the less imaginative convicts persisted in crossing to the Dutch side. This was an attempt to escape down the Moengo Road to Paramaribo, the only passageway through the dense jungle.

  Catching them was simple. Dutch soldiers stationed themselves along the road and waited. A soldier guarding a section of the Maroni River once heard horrific screaming after dark and went to investigate. About 25 feet from the bank he saw a convict struggling forward with the water boiling underneath him. Fist-sized chunks of flesh were being torn from the victim’s arms, face and chest. The piranhas were making a skeleton of the man before the eyes of the helpless soldier and he sank screaming under the blood-coloured water.