The Mammoth Book of Prison Breaks (54 page)

A year or so later, René Belbenoit escaped for the fifth, and final, time from Devil’s Island. During the period he was a fugitive, he made contact with Ernie Pyle, a freelance journalist who arranged for his story to be published in the
Los Angeles Times Sunday Magazine
in August 1936. “As this is published,” an editorial informed the reader with rather more hyperbole than accuracy, “he is living like an untamed animal in the jungles of Colombia – unless the police have captured him. If they have – it means his end.” Sentenced to eight years hard labour in 1921, after committing a burglary following his demob from the army, Belbenoit eventually arrived in Guyana in June 1923. At the start of July, he made his first escape, crossing the River Maroni into Dutch Guyana but was arrested by the authorities there and returned. After a three-month punishment spell, he was sent to work in the jungle – and promptly escaped again with six other convicts, stealing a canoe and paddling frantically to get to Georgetown in British Guyana. The authorities there also sent him back.

Perhaps to his surprise, although he was declared “incorrigible”, Belbenoit wasn’t immediately sent to the Îles du Salut. Instead, he was put in a punishment camp, where the prisoners had to work naked in the jungle to prevent escape. During that time he got to know an American writer, Blair Niles, who used his story as background for two of her novels. After nine months, Belbenoit planned to leave with Niles and her husband; Niles provided him with money, and he bought a suit, but the Dutch authorities were suspicious of a man walking in ordinary clothes through the jungle. They returned him to the French, who this time took his escape attempts seriously, sending him for a six-month stretch on Devil’s Island.

Belbenoit was brought back to the mainland after serving his term, and kept out of trouble for a few months. However, the desire to escape was too deeply ingrained, and he and six others set out for Brazil. This time it was the Brazilian police’s turn to send him back. A further six months in Devil’s Island followed, at which point Belbenoit decided he might as well serve out his term, and then go back to France. He worked conscientiously as the governor’s secretary during this time, and was horrified when he was told that, on completion of his sentence, he was not allowed to go home. He would have to stay in Guyana for the rest of his life – a condition that was imposed on all the French prisoners who were sentenced to seven years or more in the colony.

After some begging, Belbenoit was allowed to spend a year in Panama, on condition that he didn’t try to escape, but he did, on board a freighter bound for France. However, on landing at Le Havre, he was arrested, and sent back to Guyana for a further three years, all of which he spent locked up on Devil’s Island. On 2 November 1934, he became a “free man” once more.

There was no possibility of Belbenoit accepting that he had to stay in Guyana for the rest of his life, and on 2 May 1935, he and five others set out in a canoe to paddle to Trinidad. They reached there in a pitiful state, after nearly losing their lives on many occasions. The British authorities didn’t arrest them, or try to send them back to Guyana – instead, because their canoe was so badly damaged, they provided them with a new lifeboat, with sail, oars, a chart, food, water and a lamp! They planned to head for Florida, but got caught in currents, and ended up in Colombia, where they were arrested and taken to Barranquilla prison. The French ambassador wanted him to be returned to Guyana; the Colombians refused, and, Belbenoit believed, passively assisted him to escape. The others with him, who were still prisoners, rather than freed like Belbenoit, were returned. Belbenoit made his way through Colombia to Panama City, where he met Pyle and told his story.

At this point Belbenoit’s story becomes rather puzzling. According to most accounts, Belbenoit travelled from El Salavador to Los Angeles, and with help from Blair Niles, had his account of life on Devil’s Island published. He lived on and off for the next twenty years in America – he attracted attention from the immigration authorities, and served a term for false entry, but eventually gained American citizenship. He died in 1959, and received an obituary in the
Los Angeles Times.

However, an article published in Brazil in 2005 claimed that Belbenoit never went to the US. Instead, another prisoner went in his place, and pretended to be Belbenoit. The real Belbenoit remained in Brazil and invested heavily in gold and diamond mines. He also wrote accounts of his life in prison and afterwards, which found their way into Henri Charriere’s hands and became his bestsellers
Papillon
and
Banco.
Charriere was one of the five others who fled from Devil’s Island with Belbenoit; according to them, Belbenoit died in 1978. (The inconsistencies in this account with Belbenoit’s original version, let alone the story as related in
Dry Guillotine,
make it dubious, although it does provide one explanation for where Charriere derived his material.)

Dry Guillotine,
subtitled “Fifteen Years among the Living Dead”, caused a storm and went through fourteen printings in its first year in a translated edition. The French government issued a decree in June 1938 preventing any further prisoners from being dispatched. But before too much could be done by the authorities to deal with conditions on Devil’s Island, France was overrun by the Nazis. It was during this time that the later events of Henri Charriere’s
Papillon
are set.

If Charriere’s story is taken at face value, then he was wrongly convicted of the murder of a pimp, and sent to Devil’s Island. He quickly escaped, sailing to Trinidad but was then arrested when he reached Colombia. He managed to get away from that prison, and spent time living with an indigenous tribe. Unfortunately, he was recaptured, and despite many attempts to escape from Barranquilla prison, he was returned to French Guyana. He spent years in solitary confinement after various tries to flee from the island, but when the authorities decided to support the quisling Vichy regime after the conquest of France by the Germans, the penalty for escaping became death.

Charriere therefore tried to feign madness, and was sent to the prison asylum, which wasn’t as well guarded. A flight by sailboat ended with the death of his fellow fugitive, and the boat smashed against the rocks. Apparently cured of his illness, Charriere asked to be sent to Devil’s Island, where he studied the wave pattern, and deduced that every seventh wave could carry a large object out to sea so it could drift to the mainland. He and another prisoner tried this, using coconuts as a makeshift flotation device, and succeeded in reaching land, only for his fellow to succumb to quicksand. Charriere eventually made his way to Venezuela where he found freedom.

The title
Papillon
(butterfly in French) derives from a tattoo that Charriere had; he also had a deformity on his hand. Oddly enough, so did another convict from Devil’s Island, who definitely was imprisoned there: Charles Brunier, who had the tattoo of a butterfly on his arm, and an atrophied left finger.

Brunier came to media attention in 2005, aged 104, when there were a number of articles in the French press about him after the then-minister of tourism wanted to see if Brunier recalled the minister’s grandfather, who had also been incarcerated in Guyana. (He didn’t.) He had been sent to Devil’s Island in 1923 for an attack on a pimp and the murder of an old woman. Once there, he adopted the name of Johnny King, and tried hard to escape. On one occasion, he reached Venezuela and spent several months there before being recaptured in a manner very similar to Charriere’s supposed adventures; after the outbreak of war, he finally made it to the coast of Mexico, and enlisted as a fighter pilot. He fought with the Free French Army in North Africa, but at the end of the war, he was returned to Guyana. On 12 June 1948, he was given a complete pardon “because of his skilled conduct during the course of the hostilities”.

After entering the nursing home in 1993, Brunier would often tell staff that Charriere stole his story. “From time to time Monsieur Brunier tells us stories from his life. He certainly served in the ‘bagne’ with Henri Charriere, and knew him quite well. And he is utterly convinced that Charriere stole the idea for
Papillon
from him,” Isabelle Mesureur-Cadenel, the director of his retirement home, said. Brunier died in 2007, the last survivor of Devil’s Island.

Charriere was certainly held prisoner in French Guyana, and he escaped from the prison in 1944. But it seems certain that it wasn’t by jumping from Devil’s Island holding onto a string of coconuts. “Far from being one of the outstanding tough guys in the penal colony, he was a comparatively well-behaved convict, who was contentedly employed for a long time on latrine duty. He never escaped from Devil’s Island, and the heroic confrontation with the commander of the camp never occurred,” Gerard de Villiers commented in the
New York Review of Books
after carrying out a detailed investigation into Charriere’s story, published as
A Butterfly Pinned.

Whether he conflated many people’s stories into one or not, Charriere’s
Papillon
and the movie starring Steve McQueen and Dustin Hoffman taken from it, both ensured that the name of Devil’s Island will remain remembered for many years to come. The prison itself was finally shut down in 1953 (although some of those who had gone insane lived out the remainder of their lives there), and although most of the Îles de Salut are now a tourist resort, boats don’t go to Devil’s Island. Those brave few who venture across unanimously report that it feels haunted . . .

Sources:

Duval, Clement with Michael Shreve, Marianne Enckell:
Outrage: An Anarchist Memoir of the Penal Colony
(1929; PMP 2012)

Canberra Times,
7 September 1928: “Prisoner’s Escape”

Sabotage Times,
7 September 2012: “Return To Devil’s Island: The Toughest Penal Colony Of All Time”

Mail & Guardian,
26 June 2005: “Papillon alive and well in a Paris retirement home”

Le Parisien,
17 December 2005: “The real Papillon”

ISTOE Independent,
17 August 2005: “A verdadeira história de Papillon”

Belbenoit, Rene:
Dry Guillotine
(Blue Ribbon Books, 1938)

Los Angeles Times,
3 March 1959: “Death of a Fighter”

Los Angeles Times,
23 August 1936: “Fugitive from Devil’s Island”

Murderpedia: Dr Pierre Marie Bougrat:
http://murderpedia.org/male.B/b/bougrat-pierre.htm

Black Flag Quarterly,
Vol 7, Number 5 (Winter 1984): “An Anarchist on Devil’s Island”

Pittsburgh Press,
17 October 1937: “3 Fugitives Spend 77 Days in Canoe” (note: error in number of escapees)

Virgin Islands Daily News,
18 October 1937: “Four Fugitives from Devil’s Island Here”

The Victoria Advocate,
19 October 1937: “Four Devil Island Men Float 77 Days”

Milwaukee Journal,
28 November 1931: “France to Abandon ‘Devils (sic) Island’ as Prison; Too Many Men Escape”

The Lamp
(probably 1934): “Escaped from Devil’s Island” (posted at
http://www.lago-colony.com/DEVILS_ISLAND_ESCAPE/escape_from_devil.htm
with lots of photographs from the time)

Charriere, Henri:
Papillon
(HarperCollins, 1970)

One of the best-known prisons in the world is Alcatraz, the maximum-security penitentiary that was built on the island of that name in the middle of San Francisco Bay. Its location meant that there were considerable natural forces opposing anyone who wished to flee from its not particularly welcoming shores, and although most people only think of the federal penitentiary featured in the 1996 Sean Connery movie
The Rock,
or the recent short-lived J.J. Abrams TV series
Alcatraz,
there were prisons on, and escape attempts from, the Rock long before Joseph Bowers tried to leave in 1936.

The Rock first became a long-term prison in 1861. There had been a guardhouse on the island as part of the Army outpost that was stationed there but on 27 August 1861, four months after the outbreak of the American Civil War, the Rock became the point for collecting military prisoners on the west coast. Civilians were also incarcerated, although there aren’t adequate records of the period to indicate how many. The Rock’s usefulness was noted in a report by Colonel De Russy in 1865: “the only locality in this Harbor suitable for such a purpose is Alcatraces (sic) Island, where the guard house and prison are of a good size and well guarded by sentinels, added to that, the difficulty of escape from the Island is rendered extremely difficult on account of its size as well as the formation of the high banks or bluffs which surround it.”

That hadn’t prevented John D. Wood, of the 2nd Cavalry Volunteers, who was under sentence of death for trying to kill his captain, from getting hold of a small boat and disappearing on 21 June 1862, making him possibly the first person ever to escape from Alcatraz. The first massed escapes from the Rock occurred soon after De Russy’s death in 1867 when prisoners from Alcatraz were moved over to work at Fort Point, situated beneath where the Golden Gate Bridge now runs. They took advantage of being on the mainland and scarpered. The remaining prisoners were returned to Alcatraz in early 1868.

Prisoner numbers increased in the early 1870s, necessitating further building work which went on throughout the rest of the nineteenth century. Alcatraz prison had deplorable sanitation, even by contemporary standards, and the hole in the floor in the privy which allowed the sanitary waste to flow into the bay was so large that on one occasion in around 1890, an intoxicated civilian fell through it.

Attempted escapes were frequent, mostly from work details on the mainland, rather than from the Rock itself. In the mid-1870s, deserter James Wright of the Fourth Artillery caused some scandal by taking a fifteen-year-old girl to a hotel bed while on the run after escaping from a work party at Point San Jose. In 1877 nine prisoners escaped from such work parties, and one fled from the post hospital on Angel Island. May 1878 saw two prisoners commandeer a boat, and row to freedom from the Rock itself; similar such escapes are noted in the records in both 1884 and 1890. On these occasions, the guards didn’t try to shoot the prisoners, but in 1892, an Alcatraz inmate was shot when trying to escape from a work detail at the Presidio, on the mainland. A further prisoner was killed while trying to flee in 1900.