Devil's Island - a prison in paradise

It was a gorgeously hot afternoon on the veranda of the Auberge de l'Ile Royale, perched on a hill in the little archipelago off French Guiana. From the shade we looked out over the Atlantic, past a pretty islet with a solitary hut a few hundred metres offshore. My third cold Heineken was as welcome as the first and Madame, who had met us off our catamaran that morning, was making sure that the waitresses were serving hors d'oeuvres and chicken couscous promptly. I dozed off momentarily.

It was a gorgeously hot afternoon on the veranda of the Auberge de l'Ile Royale, perched on a hill in the little archipelago off French Guiana. From the shade we looked out over the Atlantic, past a pretty islet with a solitary hut a few hundred metres offshore. My third cold Heineken was as welcome as the first and Madame, who had met us off our catamaran that morning, was making sure that the waitresses were serving hors d'oeuvres and chicken couscous promptly. I dozed off momentarily.

It had been a good morning for fauna. Our guide, Monsieur Collin, had rushed off through the long grass after a big, green iguana; later a crocodile, with its eyes in their armoured sockets and its nostrils breaking the surface of the brackish water like the periscopes and snorkel of a tiny submarine, had surveyed us impassively before sinking out of sight.

Paradise? Today perhaps. But yesterday these little specks of land an hour's sail from Kourou struck fear through France and beyond. Together they formed the South American penal colony in which thousands were condemned to hopeless misery.

The islet I had been looking at, known as Devil's Island, had been the home - if such a word can be used in this context - of Captain Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish officer in the French army who was framed on treason charges in 1895. Housed in a hut built on the sea's edge, he was prevented from seeing the ocean for four years, kept in solitary confinement and often shackled. His warders, who were forbidden to talk to him, held a pistol to his head each time a vessel was seen in the surrounding waters.

For years the connection between the two islands was a basket on a ropeway. That has now gone and visitors are not allowed to land on Devil's Island. In what is now the Auberge de l'Ile Royale, the fate was settled of Papillon, a convict who escaped to Venezuela and wrote a book about the experiences of his companions. The third island, Ile St-Joseph, was the lodging of hard cases and the mad. They rose against the warders in 1894 but were brought back under control; their ringleaders were tossed into the sea with a weight round their legs. The authorities were too rushed or too alarmed even to erect a guillotine.

Monsieur Collin had us fascinated as he took us round the surviving buildings on Ile Royale. They are being rescued from dereliction and destruction half a century after the penal colony was closed down, after the Second World War.

His story made one thankful to be living in the 21st century. The first convicts were sent here during the French Revolution but the colony was formally founded in the mid-19th century. The remains of the main cell block still stand, its once bare courtyard now softened by the shadows of massive tropical trees. A stone's throw away lies the punishment block where offenders were kept in a regime of continuous silence. Some were put in individual holes where they could be watched the 23 and a half hours a day they were kept banged up. Others lived in dormitories, feet shackled to the wall. In a cell hardly bigger than a modern telephone box, the incorrigible Roussencq spent 3,779 days. There is no convicts' cemetery on the islands. For years, the convicts' corpses were put in a coffin with a hinged panel and, just before sundown, they were taken away and dumped out of a boat for the sharks.

The museum pays tribute to the thousands who bore up under such crushing suffering. Dreyfus, for instance, with the help of Emile Zola, fought to be reinstated into the French army, where he distinguished himself in the First World War and was awarded the Legion of Honour.

French Guiana is the only part of the European Union on the American continent. Today the three Salvation islands belong to the CNES, the French space agency which monitors the rockets it launches from Kourou. Anyone heading towards the islands will pass the rocket base which, being a few degrees north of the equator, takes best advantage of the rotation of the earth.

The Centre Spatial Guyanais has been carved out of the South American jungle on an enormous site at great cost. It alone accounts for almost half of the GNP of French Guiana. The Musée de l'Espace is open daily with a fascinating multi-media display in French and English. You have to book ahead for places to watch launches, but even if you don't get a seat at the stand the spectacle is visible for miles around.

* The Auberge de l'Ile Royale (00 594 32 11 00), the former warders' quarters, has been refurbished. A double room costs 355 francs (£35.50) a night, and a dormitory bed 80 francs (£8). Return tickets for the catamaran from Kourou to Ile Royale (00 594 30 29 80) cost 190 francs (£19). The CNES web site is at www.cnes.fr

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