1/12/2024 0 Comments Vikings tremulous wayThis island was originally the colony for prisoners with leprosy, now known as Hansen’s disease. All three of these islands held prisoners, but only one of the three was the Île du Diable-Devil’s Island. One small part of this large penal system was the group of three small islands-the Îles du Salut or Salvation Islands-collectively known as “Devil’s Island.” The three islands are Île Royale, Île Saint-Joseph, and Île du Diable. Mâitre Renard prepares to grab Mâitre Corbeau’s fromage. Devil’s Island, the most notorious part of this penal colony, has come to stand in common parlance for French criminal punishment in general. The whole colony was a large penitentiary, to which more than 80,000 prisoners were banished over the 101-year period from 1852 to 1953. “Devil’s Island” is one of those terms that has several varying degrees of precision.įor example, if you say, “Mâitre Renard, convicted of stealing cheese from Mâitre Corbeau, was shipped off to Devil’s Island”-you may be referring generally to French Guiana. But would we have been exploring the real Devil’s Island, the place where Dreyfus languished until a nationwide campaign led by literary lion Émile Zola prompted the reconsideration of his case? No guided tour was planned-only self-guided exploration of some ruins, perhaps bearing explanatory signs. The thing is, Dear Reader: We cannot know precisely what we missed. The captain’s decision was undoubtedly correct the swells were too great. Had we been a shipful of young Olympians, Viking might have chanced the maneuver, but hardly a passenger aboard was under seventy. We would have had to step from the large, stable ship into a small lifeboat bobbing on the tremulous sea. The only way ashore was by ship’s tender. Our disappointment was palpable when, after this buildup, we were not permitted to land. So “the Dreyfus affair” became France’s most celebrated case of miscarried justice-justice colored by more than a tinge of antisemitism.Īs background to our projected trek on Devil’s Island, Viking Cruises had shown us the film Papillon-the 2017 film starring Charlie Hunnam and Rami Malek, not the 1973 classic with Steve McQueen and Dustin Hoffman-which was based on a mostly fictitious memoir by Henri Charrière, one of the few Devil’s Island prisoners ever to make a succcessful escape. Even after another officer confessed to having been the spy, it took years for Dreyfus to regain his freedom and clear his name. Suspicion quickly settled on Dreyfus, the only Jew on the general staff, and he was convicted of treason. The French Army’s counter-intelligence section discovered a leak of military secrets in 1894. Our cruise itinerary noted a brief excursion, on foot, over the grounds of the now-defunct penal colony, where Captain Alfred Dreyfus had been imprisoned from 1895 to 1899. On the morning of our third day at sea, we stood a few hundred meters off Devil’s Island. Alfred Dreyfus in 1894, photographed by Aron Gerschel.
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