I left the central prison breathing the soft, sweet air, and looking up at the deep blue sky with a sudden sensation of thankfulness which I had never experienced before. In a sense I was like a man who had been blind and had had his sight given back to him; and I thought of the wretches I had left behind me in that high-walled enclosure and those little black holes built away into the thick walls which, for so many of them, were to be tombs of mental death. We came down the hill to the Pretoire, the Bureau of Anthropometry. This is the ante-chamber through which every prisoner must pass who enters the Prisonland of the South. On the way the Commandant and I discussed a topic which I found a favourite one with all the officials whom I met in Caledonia—the differences between the French system and our own.
[144]
They were quite as much surprised at the rigours of our system as I at first was at the leniency of theirs—always saving that horrible Cachot Noir.
We went then, as I did many times afterwards, with other officials, into matters of diet, hours, and kinds of labour, detentions, and punishments, and I succeeded in showing him that the Caledonian convict was to be envied in every particular by the English convict, until he came to the threshold of the dark cell. With us, three days’ dark cell and bread and water is the maximum punishment. There it is five years, and sentences may run consecutively. When the discussion was over the commandant added an entirely French rider to it:
“But, monsieur, you must remember that this is not only imprisonment—it is exile. How many of these poor wretches will ever see France again? Whereas your criminals, when their sentence is done, are set free in their native land.”
To which I replied:
“Quite so, and more’s the pity! Every avenue of honest life is closed to them, and they are released only to commit more crimes and deserve another sentence. There your system is better. You exile them really, but you give them another[145] home where they have hope. We only exile them socially, and give them no hope.”
And this brought us to the door of the Pretoire.
It consisted of three apartments, the middle one was the examination room. To the right hand was a larger chamber, sometimes used as a judgment room. To the left was a smaller one, the walls of which were covered with cabinets containing the records in duplicate of every criminal that had landed on Ile Nou. Beyond this there was a dark-room.
When I had had a general look round and a chat with the Officer who operated the Bertillon system, the Commandant asked me if I would care to go through the mill. To which, not having been found out so far, I consented.
Thereupon I was delivered over into the hands of a functionary who had a pair of eyes like visual gimlets. They bored clean through me every time he looked at me. I was no longer the favoured guest of the all-powerful Administration; I was simply a subject, a thing to be measured, and weighed, and examined in the most minute detail, and to have my most trivial characteristics noted and put down under their proper categories.
[146]
He told me to take off my boots and coat. By rights my socks should have come off also, but that, although I offered to do it, was dispensed with. He put me up against a wall, fixed my head with one hand and pushed my stomach in with the other, saw that my knees were properly back against the wall, and lowered the bar on to my head. Then he moved my head a little to right and left, and said to the clerk:
“One metre, 816.”
When this was noted down he sat me in a chair. The seat was longitudinally divided by a ridge; the back was a measuring scale. Again he took means to satisfy himself that I was sitting perfectly straight, and so my sitting height was taken.
Then he got a pair of callipers, and measured my head in two directions, from back to front and across, all the time calling out the fatal figures which, in case of need, would have identified me among ten million men.
 
The Bureau of Anthropometry, Ile Nou.
 
After this he descended to minor matters, ears, nose, lips, thumb- and finger-joints, eyelids, and so on. Then he stood me on a box on which was rudely outlined a human foot. I put my right foot on this, bent forward, and rested my right[147] hand on a table, using my left leg and foot to keep my balance. When I was steady my foot was measured.
Then I rested my right arm on a table, standing on one leg the while. It was measured from the elbow to the point of the middle finger. After this the prints of my thumb and three fingers were taken, and duly impressed on the fiche, or identification card.
Then came the most trying part of the ordeal, the general observation. I stood to attention in the middle of the floor. The gimlet-eyed official walked round me, and looked through and through me, what time the clerk at the table asked questions from the schedule he was filling up.
No detail was so minute as to escape those all-searching eyes. A scar which I had got twenty years before in a football match, though half hidden under an eyebrow, was detected, measured, and noted. The scars of a couple of old knife-stabs in my left hand, and the trace of a parrot-bite on one of my fingers—nothing escaped. The colour of my hair and moustache fell into a certain category. My eyes were examined, and the colours of the iris duly placed in their proper category.
[148]
By this time I began to feel as though I were being taken to pieces and examined bit by bit. It was a sort of mental and physical vivisection without the knife and the chloroform. Finally, the gentleman at the desk asked the question, “Intellectuality?”
“Mediocre,” replied Mr. Gimlet-eyes, with brutal frankness. Then I laughed, and the Commandant suggested that I should be photographed.
“Pas artistique, mais exact,” he said, as we went into the other room.
“And, therefore,” I said, “it will resemble the remarks of your anthropometric expert. I never had such an exact account of myself before. Anthropometry strikes me as being a pretty good medicine for human vanity.”
 
An Arab Type of Convict. A combination of Ideality and Homicidal Mania.
 
Out of the depth and width of his experience the Commandant agreed with me, and then I was photographed. There was no artistic posing or anything of that sort. I was planted on a chair with my back straightened up and my head in a vice such as other photographers were once wont to torture their victims with. The camera was brought within three feet of me. I was taken full face, staring straight into the lens, and then I was[149] taken en profile. When, many weeks afterwards, I showed the result to my wife, she was sorry I ever went; but for all that it’s a good likeness.
By the time the negatives were developed, and I had satisfied the Commandant that certain black spots which the pitiless lens had detected under my skin were the result of a disease I had contracted years before in South America, and not premonitory symptoms of the plague, it was breakfast-time, and I went down to the canteen, where I found convicts buying wine and cigarettes, and generally conducting themselves like gentlemen at large.
I did not see the Commandant again that day, save for a few minutes after lunch, when he told me that he had an appointment at the Direction in Noumea, and placed me in charge of his lieutenant, the Chief Surveillant. The Chef was a very jolly fellow, as, indeed, I found most of these officials to be, and during our drives about the island, we chatted with the utmost freedom. As a matter of fact, it was he who gave me the description of the execution which I reproduced in the last chapter.
He, too, was entirely of the same opinion as[150] myself as to the pitiless iniquity of the dark cell; but he took some pains to point out that it was not the fault either of the French Government or of the Administration, but simply of certain politicians in France who wanted a “cry,” and got up a crusade among the sentimentalists against “the brutality of flogging bound and helpless prisoners far away from all civilised criticism in New Caledonia.” Some of these men, too, as I have said, were déportés, or exiled communards who had been forgiven, and had brought back batches of stories with them as blood-curdling as they were mendacious.
“Bien, monsieur,” he said. “You have seen the Cachot Noir. Now we will go to the Disciplinary Camp first, because it is on the road, and then—well, you shall see what the cachot does, and when you see that I think you will say the lash is kinder.”
The Disciplinary Camps in New Caledonia have no counterpart in the English penal system. “Incorrigibles,” who won’t work, who are insubordinate, or have a bad influence on their comrades of the Bagne, are sent into them partly for punishment and partly for seclusion.
 
The Courtyard of a Disciplinary Camp, Ile Nou. Inspection at 5 a.m. after breakfast, and before hard labour. To the right is a Kanaka “Policeman.” The average physique of the Criminals may be seen by comparison with myself, standing in front of the Kanaka.
 
[151]
They have poorer food and harder work, no “gratifications” in the way of wine or tobacco, or other little luxuries. They sleep on plank-beds with their feet in anklets, and, if they don’t behave themselves, they are promptly clapped into a cell for so many days’ solitary confinement on bread and water. For graver offences they are............