The Mammoth Book of Prison Breaks

by Paul Simpson

  Napoleon knew that he would come to be regarded as a museum curiosity – “let them stare, then they can go home and amuse the gentlemen by distorting my words and gestures” he wrote – but he was charm personified to those who visited him. He flattered the captain of HMS Undaunted, the ship that transported him to Elba, to the extent that within a month of embarkation, Captain Ussher was accepting gifts of wine and a diamond-encrusted snuffbox from the emperor. A throne was prepared for him on board another vessel, HMS Curagao, on 4 June, and it seemed that any Englishman or woman who visited Napoleon came away with a heightened regard for the man.

  The emperor then tried to convince himself that life on Elba represented a temporary exile and that before the end of 1814, the sovereigns of Europe would need to call upon him. However, he learned from a magazine forwarded by Lady Holland that plans were afoot to exile him much further away – to St Helena, an island in the South Atlantic, from where it would be nigh on impossible to escape, or to answer the call if the French people or army demanded his return. He considered taking the offers made by some of his English visitors of asylum in Great Britain, assured that the enmity that had been directed at him previously had dwindled now the two countries weren’t at war.

  But returning to France seemed like a much better prospect. Napoleon had to keep the British commissioner on the island, Sir Nicholas Campbell, from suspecting anything. Campbell had been instructed by the British Foreign Secretary, Lord Castlereagh, to give “every proper respect and attention” to Napoleon, and at the end of 1814, he noted in his diary, “It is universally supposed in Italy, and publicly stated, that Great Britain is responsible to the other Powers for the detention of Napoleon’s person, and that I am the executive agent for this purpose. Napoleon believes this.”

  Napoleon was quite happy for Campbell to believe this, and didn’t demur when the British Commissioner spent time with his mistress in Florence when he began to bore of the post. Indeed, Campbell spent the ten days away from Elba before Napoleon absconded from the island, despite being asked by His Majesty’s Minister in Florence, Lord Burghersh, to return to his duties.

  During the nine months leading up to his escape, Napoleon had spent time developing the iron mines on the island, while keeping an eye on political developments in Europe at the Congress of Vienna, which was sorting out the shape of countries in the aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars. At the start of February 1815, he judged that it was time to stop concentrating on the smaller-scale issues, and to return to the larger stage. There was obvious dissatisfaction with the restored Bourbon monarchy in France, and Napoleon felt that he would be by far the better ruler. He also heard that a plot was under way in France to overthrow Louis XVIII.

  On 13 February, Napoleon ordered his brig, the Inconstant, to be painted like an English vessel, and three days later was delighted to hear that Campbell was heading to Tuscany for a break taking the main Royal Navy ship, HMS Partridge. Captain Adye unwisely told one of Napoleon’s men that he was going back for Campbell ten days later, making that the ideal day for Napoleon to make his move.

  On the evening of 26 February, with Adye out of the way, Napoleon set sail from Portoferraio on board the Inconstant, accompanied by five smaller vessels carrying a large contingent of his volunteer troops. Their progress was very slight for much of the next day, as the winds fell – although equally that meant that Campbell’s return was delayed. On the 28th, Campbell discovered that Napoleon had fled; a day later, the emperor and his 600-strong army was back on French soil.

  On the afternoon of the 27th, the winds had started to pick up again, and the Inconstant was hailed by the Zephyr, a ship from the French Navy, representing the restored Bourbon monarchy. Its master, Captain Andrieux, asked after the emperor, to be told he was marvellously well. (Tradition has it that Napoleon dictated this response.) Andrieux asked no further questions, and allowed the Inconstant to pass.

  Perhaps not surprisingly, questions were asked about the ease with which Napoleon was able to set sail. French minister Talleyrand said there was a “negligence [the English] will be hard put to explain”, while there were plenty of rumours that Napoleon had been allowed to escape so he could be recaptured and dealt with more severely. It was pointed out that Elba was hardly a suitable place to keep a man who, in Admiral Sir Sydney Smith’s words, “has marched from one end of Europe to the other”, and there were some who considered that Napoleon had only agreed to be exiled there because he knew it would be so easy to return to France.

  Whether Napoleon planned his escape earlier than the start of February is unlikely ever to be known for sure; what he certainly didn’t anticipate was the speed with which his return to France would be routed. Although he started to put in place reforms that would alter the constitution of the empire, he immediately had to face a fresh coalition of allies ranged against him. Following the Battle of Waterloo on 18 June 1815, Napoleon abdicated for a second time, and on 15 July, after considering trying to escape to the United States, the defeated emperor formally requested political asylum from the British.

  Napoleon was exiled to St Helena, and lived there for the last six years of his life. Although there were numerous plots to rescue him – one involving a primitive version of a submarine – none ever came to fruition. In addition to the difficulties anyone would face trying to retrieve him caused by the island’s remote location, St Helena also received an extra garrison of troops, and a naval squadron patrolled the nearby waters. Napoleon died in 1821, and his remains were eventually returned to France in 1840.

  Sources:

  Brown University Library Center for Digital Scholarship: “Timeline:The Congress of Vienna, the Hundred Days, and Napoleon’s Exile on St. Helena”

  History Today, Vol 44. #2, February 1994: “A Sympathetic Ear: Napoleon, Elba and the British”

  Gates, David: The Napoleonic Wars, 1803–1815 (Pimlico, 2003)

  McLynn, Frank: Napoleon (Pimlico, 1998)

  The Real Papillons

  “Devil’s Island penal colony is one of the world’s sore spots, and it breeds more social pestilence than one can imagine. The aftermath of imprisonment is sometimes worse than continued confinement or death.” That was the headline story in the Virgin Islands Daily News in October 1937 when Captain Raymond Vaude and three other fugitives from Devil’s Island arrived on the island of St Thomas, and it made clear that although they would be treated for injuries after their homemade canoe hit a reef, “these convicts will not be permitted to remain longer than Tuesday”. Even though Vaude told reporters that “we know not what to do next”, they were forced to leave. Unless escapers from possibly the worst prison in the world managed to reach Venezuela, chances were that all their efforts would be for nothing – but, as they told officials, “they preferred the perils of another ocean voyage in an open boat rather than return to the convict settlement”.

  Technically, Devil’s Island refers only to the actual Île du Diable, the smallest island at the north of the Îles de Salut (the Islands of Salvation), where the political prisoners, such as Captain Alfred Dreyfus, were kept, but the name has become used in English to signify the entire prison area in French Guyana. The prisoners themselves had a very different name for it: la guillotine sèche – the dry guillotine.

  Although it was promoted as the true story of a daring escape from the clutches of the terrible regime on Devil’s Island, the events described in Henri Charriere’s book Papillon – and even more so, the subsequent movie – were highly unlikely to be true. One Devil’s Island survivor, who died in 2007, lived through events that were very similar to those that Charriere claims were his own experiences, and there is even some doubt as to whether Charriere was even sent to the Îles de Salut at all, or whether he was kept in one of the mainland camps in French Guyana. There is no question, though, that the horrendous world that Charriere describes in the book is true to life, and it paints a picture of a prison unlike any other. (Charriere responded to criticisms of his book’s
veracity, from other prisoners as well as guards, by saying that he didn’t “go into that hell with a typewriter”.)

  Devil’s Island was established by Louis Napoleon, himself an escaped prisoner (as related in chapter 52), in 1852, to get rid of those who had opposed his coup d’etat the previous year, as well as common criminals who the French didn’t want polluting their society. The prisoners were transported by ship from Marseilles to the prison, at the tip of South America, in France’s only colony on the continent. Those that survived the journey faced dreadful hardship in the prison, where they were constantly watched. Escape was feasible – if you could get to the mainland, and travel north through the jungle to Dutch Guyana, or somehow create a craft that would survive the rough seas and the sharks that patrolled the waters to reach Venezuela, or go even further north to Cartagena or other ports on the northern shores of Colombia. Escape attempts were punished severely. Solitary confinement, on the Île du Joseph, left men craving death.

  Alfred Dreyfus, the French Army captain who was framed for treason and espionage by anti-Semitic colleagues, was kept on the actual Devil’s Island, and even though there was no possibility of escape, was kept in almost total isolation. When a rumour arose that he had tried to flee, he was strapped to his bed each night, unable to protect himself from the vampire bats that attacked him. The publicity over Dreyfus’s case, which included an impassioned plea by writer Emile Zola headlined “J’Accuse” published on the front page of Paris newspaper L’Aurore, brought details of conditions in the prison to the public’s attention, but people really didn’t want to know.

  Not long after Captain Dreyfus was returned to France for a fresh trial, pardoned and eventually exonerated, anarchist Clement Duval managed to escape, one of the first recorded successes. Born in 1850, Duval had served in the Franco–Prussian War of 1870–71, but then succumbed to smallpox, which left him unable to work. He was convicted of theft and served a year in prison, before joining anarchist group The Panther of Batignolles. During the course of another burglary in 1886, he set fire to the house, and the following year he was sentenced to transportation for life, and because he was an anarchist, his sentence was to be served on Devil’s Island itself.

  Duval tried to escape from the island on more than twenty different occasions, building rafts that were found, or trying to stow away on the ships that called at the islands, but each time he was caught, and sent for punishment. Although he didn’t realize it at the time, Duval was lucky during one of these: other anarchists on the island began a revolt on 21 October 1895, and instead of simply quelling the disturbance, the authorities decided to use the opportunity to rid themselves of the nuisance of the anarchists. The guards were allowed to get as drunk as they wanted, and then were let loose on the prisoners. At the end of the massacre that followed, eleven of the key anarchists were dead, and their bullet-riddled bodies were simply thrown into the sea for the sharks to devour.

  Six years after the abortive revolt, on the night of 13 April 1901, Duval and eight others successfully managed to steer a flimsy canoe they had built away from the island. Their absence wasn’t spotted until the next day, by which time they had rowed a considerable distance and after surviving a horrendous storm, during which they nearly capsized, they reached the port of Paramaraibo, in Dutch Guyana, the next day. Aware that the French could request their extradition, they adopted false names. Duval made his way to New York, where he later wrote a rather self-serving book about his time as an anarchist in the penal colony.

  By the early 1930s, escapes from the colony weren’t that infrequent. In 1928 the Marseilles poisoner Dr Pierre Marie Bougrat and two other criminals managed to get away using a hollowed-out tree trunk that they had secretly obtained from a Chinese merchant. They made their way down the Guyanan coastline, eventually arriving in Venezuela in the middle of an epidemic, which the doctor immediately set to work to deal with. He survived there until his death in 1936.

  Regular large-scale escapes in 1931 from the mainland camp led to reports around the world that the French had “definitely” decided to abandon Devil’s Island and to find a more secure prison. Two hundred convicts had headed towards Dutch Guyana because they had heard inaccurate rumours that a new railway was being built, and they were desperate for jobs. When they discovered the truth, they surrendered to authorities and were returned to the prison.

  According to the Milwaukee Journal’s substantial story on the proposed change, the islands themselves were still regarded as pretty much escape-proof (“although escape from the isles is by no means impossible”, the paper noted), the metaphorical walls of the mainland prison were porous. “Competent critics have declared it to be doubtful if any other penal settlement in the world presents the same chances for escape and the same high percentage of successful breaks for liberty . . . Hundreds have won their way through to the broad Orinoco in the Venezuelan hinterlands and then followed it through to the settlements.” Once in Venezuela, they were safe: since there was no extradition treaty with France, many chose to stay there and build new lives.

  The prisons weren’t closed. The “inescapable pit of hopelessness and despair” was to remain in operation for a further twenty-two years, although it would certainly have shut down earlier had it not been for the outbreak of the Second World War. The catalyst for the government’s decision wasn’t a sudden change of heart about the way the convicts were being treated, but the public approbation that followed the publication of the book Dry Guillotine, by former Devil’s Island inmate René Belbenoit.

  Before that, during the 1930s, those who did manage to cobble together some form of raft, and head towards the Virgin Islands, received a poor reception, as the reports from the local press indicate. Others, who made it as far as the Dutch territory of Aruba, did rather better, particularly as there were around 1,200 Americans based there with the Lago Oil & Transport Company. One party of escapers reached Aruba in 1934 or thereabouts, providing a snapshot of life on Devil’s Island at the time. The captain of the group, Jean Duvernay, had been imprisoned on the Îles du Salut, and was part of a group of ten who had bribed a local fisherman to allow them to use his dugout canoe, “about seven metres long and a metre and a half wide”. They had braved the seas “realizing we might be sacrificing our lives for the sake of the liberty we loved so much”. With help from the crew of a British freighter who set them on the right course, they reached Trinidad, where the majority of the party continued on to Colombia – where they were caught and returned to Devil’s Island. Duvernay was taken ill so didn’t join them, but teamed up with two other groups of escapees, both from the mainland prison colony. They had set out for Haiti, but ended up shipwrecked in Aruba, where the Americans had a whip-round, and bought them a new boat, as well as supplies. The ten men made it to Colombia, where seven of them headed off inland; Duvernay and two others were sent to Baranquila prison until they could show they had a valid way of leaving Colombia. The rest of their fate is not known.

  A year or so later, René Belbenoit escaped for the fifth, and final, time from Devil’s Island. During the period he was a fugitive, he made contact with Ernie Pyle, a freelance journalist who arranged for his story to be published in the Los Angeles Times Sunday Magazine in August 1936. “As this is published,” an editorial informed the reader with rather more hyperbole than accuracy, “he is living like an untamed animal in the jungles of Colombia – unless the police have captured him. If they have – it means his end.” Sentenced to eight years hard labour in 1921, after committing a burglary following his demob from the army, Belbenoit eventually arrived in Guyana in June 1923. At the start of July, he made his first escape, crossing the River Maroni into Dutch Guyana but was arrested by the authorities there and returned. After a three-month punishment spell, he was sent to work in the jungle – and promptly escaped again with six other convicts, stealing a canoe and paddling frantically to get to Georgetown in British Guyana. The authorities there also sent him back.

  P
erhaps to his surprise, although he was declared “incorrigible”, Belbenoit wasn’t immediately sent to the Îles du Salut. Instead, he was put in a punishment camp, where the prisoners had to work naked in the jungle to prevent escape. During that time he got to know an American writer, Blair Niles, who used his story as background for two of her novels. After nine months, Belbenoit planned to leave with Niles and her husband; Niles provided him with money, and he bought a suit, but the Dutch authorities were suspicious of a man walking in ordinary clothes through the jungle. They returned him to the French, who this time took his escape attempts seriously, sending him for a six-month stretch on Devil’s Island.

  Belbenoit was brought back to the mainland after serving his term, and kept out of trouble for a few months. However, the desire to escape was too deeply ingrained, and he and six others set out for Brazil. This time it was the Brazilian police’s turn to send him back. A further six months in Devil’s Island followed, at which point Belbenoit decided he might as well serve out his term, and then go back to France. He worked conscientiously as the governor’s secretary during this time, and was horrified when he was told that, on completion of his sentence, he was not allowed to go home. He would have to stay in Guyana for the rest of his life – a condition that was imposed on all the French prisoners who were sentenced to seven years or more in the colony.

  After some begging, Belbenoit was allowed to spend a year in Panama, on condition that he didn’t try to escape, but he did, on board a freighter bound for France. However, on landing at Le Havre, he was arrested, and sent back to Guyana for a further three years, all of which he spent locked up on Devil’s Island. On 2 November 1934, he became a “free man” once more.