Word: guianas
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...years some of the world's most lurid, blood-curdling "true-story" prison tales have come out of experiences, real and embellished, gained in France's famed penal colony in French Guiana, on the northeast coast of South America. Horror stories deluxe have told of men working stark naked in the sizzling tropical jungle, of lust, greed, murder, homosexuality in prison cages crammed with killers, rapists, thieves. Other tales have told of years of maddening isolation in "bear pits" on one of the three Iles du Salut (variously translated as "Safety Isles" and "Isles of Salvation...
Most of French Guiana's chroniclers have followed a pat formula. The story usually starts with the teller being convicted of a felony. In a temporary prison at the citadel of St. Martin-de-Ré, in the Bay of Biscay, the convict awaits the sailing of the plodding 3,800-ton "hellship" La Martinière, formerly a German freighter, now outfitted with steel-girded cells and mutiny-suppressing hot-steam hose. Into her hold go Foreign Legion deserters, Algerian Spahis convicted of rape, French Indo-Chinese murderers, Circassian thieves, arch-crooks from Montmartre. The ship arrives...
...more than 25 traitors to France have generally inhabited Devil's Island at one time. Currently only five or six exiles live on the island. So publicized was the case of the first prisoner on Devil's Island, the martyred Captain Alfred Dreyfus, that the entire French Guiana penal colony commonly takes the name of the tiny island...
...Rene Belbenoit made his fifth escape from Devil's Island. When he arrived in Los Angeles, two years later, an emaciated, toothless old man of 38, the legends circulated about that sensational escape had made him the best-known fugitive ever to be confined to French Guiana's famed penal colony. With him he carried, wrapped in oil paper, 30 pounds of closely-written manuscript describing his 15-year imprisonment...
...after taking off from Brunswick, Ga., to fly to Rio de Janeiro; by a Michigan circuit court judge in Detroit, at the appeal of his widow. Visionary travelers have reported his survival as "a god that fell from the sky" in Brazil, as a crippled "medicine man" in Dutch Guiana...