Escape by Paul Dowswell

and I wondered how many times a year that got to do its horrible work.
    The prison director was waiting for us. He was a little man in a white suit, and he climbed up the stairs of a platform in front of us and started to speak.
    â€œYou’re all worthless scum,” he said, “sent here to pay for your crimes. If you behave yourselves you’ll find life is not too unbearable. If you don’t behave, you’ll find yourselves in more trouble than you can imagine.”
    He paused and looked over to the guillotine.
    â€œMost of you here are already thinking about your escape. Well forget it! You’ll have plenty of freedom in the camps and town. You’ll find the real guards here are the jungle and the sea.”
    That was that. We were marched off to the prison blocks and allocated a place in a dormitory. René and I got split up, which made me feel very, very anxious.
    The first few weeks were a horrible haze, but I learned very quickly. I’m not a big man, but I’m solid. You wouldn’t think I’m a pushover, but I had to fight for everything. You’d lose the blanket on your bed if you didn’t stick up for yourself.
    I don’t know which was worse, the night or the day. By day you had to go out in work parties to the jungle, clearing away the trees and the creepers, so they could build roads, or set up farms. That was horrible. Sweat would pour off you, and insects would eat you alive. The guards kicked you or beat you with their rifle butts if you stopped to get your breath back.
    I heard tales of men being shot on the spot by guards. These people had the power of life and death. Nothing would be done if they decided to bury you alive. One work party all hanged themselves rather than spend another day working for a guard they called “The Scourge”. Some of these guards were psychopaths. One of the prisoners in my dormitory, Henri Bonville, was a history professor who got sent here for murdering his wife. He told me our Emperor Napoleon III set the camps up in 1854. One of Napoleon’s courtiers said:
    â€œWho sire, will you find to guard these villains?”
    Napoleon said:
    â€œWhy my good man, people more villainous than they are!”
    And then there were the nights… We got locked in our dormitory. It was a huge, long room, and the heat was stifling. I’ll never forget the stench of all those people. But the gang fights were the worst. I kept out of that, but barely a night would go by without someone being murdered.
    After about six months René and I had found out all we needed to know about the place, and we reckoned it was time to escape. St. Laurent, where we were, was one of the better places to be. You could come and go during the day if you weren’t on work duty, but you had to be back at the camp at night. The worst camps were deep in the jungle, and few of the convicts who were sent out there ever came back.
    When we got to the colony in 1907, the word around the camp was that Venezuela was the best place to go. It’s just up the coast, and they let you stay if they found out you were an escaped convict. At least they did until 1935. Then, the army wanted to get rid of the President, so they paid an escaped convict to kill him. He messed it up, and the President had all the convicts rounded up and returned to the camps.
    Dutch Surinam, next to French Guiana, was a good place too, until another escaper burned down a shop that had refused to serve him. After that everyone from the camps got sent straight back. In Brazil they send you straight back if they catch you, but it’s such a big place, it’s easy to just disappear there. Argentina’s good, though. There’s lots of work in Buenos Aires for people like us. It’s just an awful long way to get there.
    René and I thought we’d try for Venezuela, so we hooked up with these two brothers Marcel and Dedé Longueville. They were huge, tattooed