Framing the Penal Colony:

Representing, Interpreting and

Imagining Convict Transportation
Sophie Fuggle
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PALGRAVE STUDIES IN CRIME, MEDIA AND CULTURE

Framing the
Penal Colony
Representing, Interpreting and
Imagining Convict Transportation
Edited by Sophie Fuggle
Charles Forsdick · Katharina Massing
 Palgrave Studies in Crime, Media and Culture

Series Editors
Michelle Brown, Department of Sociology, University of
Tennessee, Knoxville, TN, USA
Eamonn Carrabine, Department of Sociology, University
of Essex, Colchester, UK
This series aims to publish high quality interdisciplinary scholarship for
research into crime, media and culture. As images of crime, harm and
punishment proliferate across new and old media there is a growing
recognition that criminology needs to rethink its relations with the ascen-
dant power of spectacle. This international book series aims to break
down the often rigid and increasingly hardened boundaries of main-
stream criminology, media and communication studies, and cultural
studies. In a late modern world where reality TV takes viewers into
cop cars and carceral spaces, game shows routinely feature shame and
suffering, teenagers post ‘happy slapping’ videos on YouTube, both cyber
bullying and ‘justice for’ campaigns are mainstays of social media, and
insurrectionist groups compile footage of suicide bomb attacks for circu-
lation on the Internet, it is clear that images of crime and control play a
powerful role in shaping social practices. It is vital then that we become
versed in the diverse ways that crime and punishment are represented
in an era of global interconnectedness, not least since the very reach of
global media networks is now unparalleled.
Palgrave Studies in Crime, Media and Culture emerges from a call to
rethink the manner in which images are reshaping the world and crimi-
nology as a project. The mobility, malleability, banality, speed, and scale
of images and their distribution demand that we engage both old and
new theories and methods and pursue a refinement of concepts and
tools, as well as innovative new ones, to tackle questions of crime, harm,
culture, and control. Keywords like image, iconography, information
flows, the counter-visual, and ‘social’ media, as well as the continuing
relevance of the markers, signs, and inscriptions of gender, race, sexuality,
and class in cultural contests mark the contours of the crime, media and
culture nexus.
 Sophie Fuggle · Charles Forsdick ·
Katharina Massing
Editors

Framing the Penal

Colony
Representing, Interpreting and
Imagining Convict Transportation
Editors
Sophie Fuggle Charles Forsdick
Nottingham Trent University University of Liverpool
Nottingham, UK Liverpool, UK

Katharina Massing
Nottingham Trent University
Nottingham, UK

ISSN 2946-3912 ISSN 2946-3920 (electronic)

Palgrave Studies in Crime, Media and Culture
ISBN 978-3-031-19395-8 ISBN 978-3-031-19396-5 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-19396-5

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature
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 Acknowledgements

Many of the chapters upon which this collection is based first started
out as conference papers at the Framing the Penal Colony conference
held at the National Justice Museum in Nottingham, UK, in November
2019. The conference was generously supported by the AHRC as part
of the “Postcards from the bagne” project led by Sophie Fuggle (Ref.
AH/R002452/1).

v
 Contents

1 Introduction 1
Sophie Fuggle, Charles Forsdick, and Katharina Massing

Part I Reporting the Penal Colony

2 Framing New Caledonia: Policing Escapees
from the Bagne in Colonial Australia 31
Briony Neilson
3 “Dancing and Discipline, Frolics and Felonies,
Punch and Punishment, Rum and Reform”: Queen
Victoria’s Birthday Party, Norfolk Island Penal
Station, 25 May 1840 57
J. M. Moore
4 Re-framing Albert Londres’ ‘Reportages’ as Graphic
Novel: From Adventure Narrative to Prison Comics 79
Chantal Cointot and Sophie Fuggle

vii
viii Contents

Part II Exploring the Penal Colony

5 Strange Reflections on the Abashiri River: Between
the Prison and the Museum 109
Sophie Fuggle
6 Seeing the Penal Colony Through Heritage Trail
Maps: Global Connections and Local Views
of the bagne in French Guiana and New Caledonia 133
Claire Reddleman
7 Writing the French Guiana Penal Colony: Starting
from the End with Patti Smith and Jean Genet 153
Samuel Tracol and Glória Alhinho

Part III Framing and Reframing the Colonial Prison

8 Graphic Histories of New Caledonia: Visualizing
the Bagne 179
Charles Forsdick
9 Framing Postcolonial Narratives in the Prison
Museum: The Qingdao German Prison Museum 197
Katharina Massing
10 Framing the Tiger Cages: Contested Symbols
of Postcolonial Conflicts in the USA and Vietnam 221
Maryse Tennant
11 Screening (Out) the Isle of Pines Youth Work
Camps: Sara Gómez’s 1960s Documentary Trilogy
and the Racialized Legacy of Cuban Penal
Deportation 247
Susan Martin-Márquez
 Contents ix

Part IV Creative Encounters in and beyond the Penal

Colony
12 Listening with Our Feet: Decolonial and Feminist
Arts-Based Methodologies in Addressing Australian
Incarceration Policies on Nauru and Manus Islands 275
Kate McMillan
13 Abolitionist Ways of Seeing: Artists in the Penal
Colony Complex 301
Ros Liebeskind and Khadija von Zinnenburg Carroll

Index 319
 Notes on Contributors

Glória Alhinho, Ph.D. in Iberian, Latin American, Mediterranean

Studies, University of Bordeaux, France. Her work is influenced by a
great interest in the interconnection of artistic and scientific knowledge,
mainly through imaging. She successively builds up a dialogue between
the academic and diplomatic dimensions at Georgetown University and
at the Embassy of Portugal in Washington, DC, through a multiplicity
of scientific, cultural, aesthetical, ethic and diplomatic debates, and
teaching film and writing and cultural diplomacy. Her latest publica-
tion gathers her photographic work at Saint-Joseph (French Guiana) and
writing, exploring visible and invisible spheres of this penal colony as a
cultural and natural heritage.
Chantal Cointot is Senior Lecturer at Nottingham Trent University.
Her doctoral thesis, ‘Fragmented lives: representations of the self in
Franco-Belgian autobiocomics’, explores to what extent the interplay
of text, image and frame in autobiocomics can propose new ways of
approaching a self that is fragmented, complex and contradictory. In it,
she notably investigates how formal framing processes provide a space for

xi
xii Notes on Contributors

self-formation and self-transformation, and examines their potential for

educating others.
Charles Forsdick is James Barrow Professor of French at the Univer-
sity of Liverpool. He has published on a range of subjects, including
travel writing, colonial history, postcolonial and world literature, and
the memorialisation of slavery. Recent books include The Black Jacobins
Reader (2016), Toussaint Louverture: Black Jacobin in an Age of Revolu-
tion (2017) and Keywords for Travel Writing Studies (2019). He co-edited,
with Laurence Grove and Elizabeth McQuillan, The Francophone Bande
Dessinée (2005) and published an article on ‘Haiti and Bande dessinée’
in a special issue of Yale French Studies (2017) devoted to ‘Bande Dess-
inée: Thinking Outside the Boxes’, guest edited by Laurence Grove and
Michael Syrotinski.
Sophie Fuggle is Associate Professor of Postcolonial Studies and Cultural
Heritage at Nottingham Trent University. She is author of Foucault/Paul:
Subjects of Power (Palgrave, 2013) and co-editor (with Yari Lanci and
Martina Tazzioli) of Foucault and the History of Our Present (Palgrave,
2015). Her current research focuses on the cultural and ecological
legacies of French colonial prisons and penal colonies.
Ros Liebeskind is a multidisciplinary researcher, creative practitioner
and community organiser. Her research explores issues of abjection,
space, queerness and resistance. She has recently graduated from the
University of Birmingham with a first in their History of Art B.A.,
researching contemporary art and queer methodologies towards prison
abolition. She is currently part of the team at Grand Union, a contem-
porary art gallery based in Birmingham, merging theory and practice to
imagine otherwise.
Susan Martin-Márquez is Professor at Rutgers University, with joint
teaching responsibilities in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese
and the Program in Cinema Studies, and an affiliation with the Compar-
ative Literature Program. Her scholarship centres on Spanish-language
cinema, as well as on nineteenth- and twentieth-century Spanish impe-
rial practices, and Cuban and African anti-colonial movements and their
cultural expression. Her books include: Sight Unseen: Feminist Discourse
 Notes on Contributors xiii

and Spanish Cinema (Oxford UP, 1999) and Disorientations: Spanish

Colonialism in Africa and the Performance of Identity (Yale UP, 2008).
She is currently completing a book manuscript, Jail-Breaking the Carceral
Atlantic: Cuban Rebellion and Political Deportation in the late Spanish
Empire, and also has another book in progress on transatlantic networks
of revolutionary filmmaking. Her chapter represents the intersection of
those two projects.
Katharina Massing is a senior lecturer and researcher in Museum
and Heritage Development in the School of Arts and Humanities at
Nottingham Trent University working on holistic approaches to heritage
management, community participation and heritage and tourism devel-
opment in the Asia-Pacific region. Before working at NTU, she
completed her Ph.D. in Museum, Gallery and Heritage Studies at
Newcastle University. Her doctoral thesis, entitled ‘Finding an ecomu-
seum ideal for Hainan Province: Encouraging community participation
in intangible cultural and natural heritage protection in a rural setting
in China’, investigated the current ecomuseum development in Hainan
Province, China. She also holds a M.A. in Chinese Studies (major),
Chinese Language (minor) and East Asian Art History from Freie
Universität in Berlin.
Kate McMillan is an artist and Senior Lecturer in Creative Practice at
King’s College, London. Her research engages with histories connected
to colonial violence and women’s knowledges. She is the annual author
of ‘Representation of Female Artists in Britain’ commissioned by the
Freelands Foundation, as well as various other academic publications
that consider gender inequality in the visual arts. In 2019, Palgrave
Macmillan published her monograph called Contemporary Art & Unfor-
getting in Colonial Landscapes: Islands of Empire which investigates female
artists in the Global South and the ways their practices defy colonial
amnesia. Her own creative practice incorporates sound, film, textiles
and sculpture to create immersive environments which aim to engender
empathic responses to difficult histories.
xiv Notes on Contributors

J. M. Moore is a historian, sociologist and activist who lives in west

Wales. His research centres on the theory and history of penal law,
colonialism and its relationship to penal law, and the potential of
abolition.
Briony Neilson is an honorary associate in History at the University of
Sydney and specialises in the history of criminal justice in nineteenth-
century France and its empire, particularly New Caledonia. She has
published on the history of juvenile delinquency, convict transporta-
tion and penal colonialism, and her research has been supported by
grants from the French Embassy and the Academy of Social Sciences
in Australia. She is currently preparing a monograph for McGill
Queen’s University Press which explores the significance of new prac-
tices concerning children and adolescents for the French criminal justice
system at the end of the nineteenth century.
Claire Reddleman is Lecturer in Digital Humanities at the Univer-
sity of Manchester and previously taught digital humanities at King’s
College London, working on digital cultural heritage, visual methods,
mapping and contemporary art. Prior to this, she carried out post-
doctoral research as part of the AHRC-funded project ‘Postcards from
the bagne’ led by Dr. Sophie Fuggle, using visual research methods to
engage with the history of France’s penal colonies. She received a Ph.D.
in Cultural Studies from Goldsmiths, University of London, and her
research monograph based on the thesis is titled Cartographic Abstraction
in Contemporary Art: Seeing with Maps. She previously gained a M.A.
in Art and Politics from Goldsmiths, and a B.A. (Hons.) in History
of Art and Architecture from the University of Reading. She is also a
photographic artist and can be found online at www.clairereddleman.
com.
Maryse Tennant is a Senior Lecturer at Canterbury Christ Church
University where she teaches criminology. She is a historical criminol-
ogist who has published and presented on historical and cultural aspects
of policing and imprisonment, as well as the ethics of remembering and
representing crime and punishment. She has researched and exhibited
material on the lives of inmates at the former Canterbury prison, using
 Notes on Contributors xv

these with her students to explore the interconnections between private

troubles and public issues. She is the Course Director for the criminology
undergraduate and postgraduate degrees and Chair of the School Ethics
Committee. She supervises research students working on historical and
cultural understandings of crime and punishment.
Samuel Tracol is a Ph.D. candidate in Contemporary History in
Sorbonne-Université (France). His thesis is focused on the French Penal
colonies servants, but he is interested more largely in those on social
margins such as vagrants and delinquents, and geographical margins such
as Amazonia. He holds the Fondation Thiers scholarship for 2022-2023.
He co-founded the CoPALC (Penal Colonisation of Latin America and
Caribbean) research group, with a transnational and transdisciplinary
perspective. He was previously lecturer in the Université de Guyane and
in Sciences Po Aix.
Khadija von Zinnenburg Carroll is an artist and historian, currently
leading the ERC project REPATRIATES: Artistic Research in Museums
and Communities in the process of Repatriation from Europe. She is
Professor of History at the Central European University and Honorary
Professor and Chair of Global Art at the University of Birmingham.
She is the author of the books Art in the Time of Colony (2014); The
Importance of Being Anachronistic (2016), Botanical Drift (2017); Mit
Fremden Federn (2022); and The Contested Crown: Repatriation Politics
between Mexico and Europe (2022). She is the co-author of Bordered
Lives: Immigration Detention Archive (2020) and co-editor of Third Text
journal .
 List of Figures

Fig. 5.1 Photo wall of images taken at Abashiri Prison Museum

(Photo by the Author) 122
Fig. 5.2 Mannequins making horseshoes. Abashiri Prison
Museum (Photo by the Author) 123
Fig. 5.3 Agricultural scene forming part of a diorama. Abashiri
Prison Museum (Photo by the Author) 125
Fig. 5.4 Mannequins representing convict mealtime. Abashiri
Prison Museum (Photo by the Author) 126
Fig. 6.1 Third sign on the sentier du bagne des Annamites
at Montsinéry-Tonnégrande, French Guiana. ‘La
chimérique conquête de l’inini’ [The chimerical
conquest of the Inini], 2018 (Photograph by Claire
Reddleman) 139
Fig. 6.2 ‘Itinéraire du bagne’ sign located at Kuto Bay,
Île des Pins, New Caledonia, side panel featuring
the trio of satellite maps, 2018 (Photograph by Claire
Reddleman) 142
Fig. 6.3 ‘Itinéraire du bagne’ sign located at Kuto Bay, Île des
Pins, New Caledonia, showing the main information
panel, 2018 (Photograph by Claire Reddleman) 144

xvii
xviii List of Figures

Fig. 10.1 The French Tiger Cages upper walkway, Con Dao.
Photo by the author 227
Fig. 10.2 The American Tiger Cages inner corridor, Con Dao.
Photo by the author 229
Fig. 10.3 Looking down on the bamboo Tiger Cages, Phu Quoc.
Photo by the author 230
Fig. 11.1 The film clapper frames Manuela’s challenging gaze.
Sara Gómez, 1968a. On the Other Island. Havana:
ICAIC 254
Fig. 11.2 Cuban stamp featuring the watchful eye imagery
of the Committee for the Defence of the Revolution.
“X Aniversario de los CDR.” Original photograph
by Karen Horton: https://www.flickr.com/photos/kar
enhorton/4463837284. Licensed under CC BY-ND
2.0: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.0/leg
alcode 255
Fig. 11.3 Sara Gómez prompts Rafael to reveal his experience
of racism. Sara Gómez, 1968a. On the Other Island.
Havana: ICAIC 259
Fig. 11.4 Working side-by-side, young Black and White Cubans
eradicate weeds. Sara Gómez, 1968a. On the Other
Island. Havana: ICAIC 260
Fig. 11.5 The ‘exemplary’ White internee César encourages
Afro-Cuban Miguel to become ‘just like’ him. Sara
Gómez, 1968b. An Island for Miguel. Havana: ICAIC 263
Fig. 11.6 Raúl Martínez’s cover illustration for Cuba magazine,
‘The Youngest Island in the World,’ May 1968 265
Fig. 12.1 McMillan, K (2010) Islands of Incarceration, Cockatoo
Island, Biennale of Sydney digital print on polysynthetic
fabric, sound produced in collaboration with Cat Hope 283
Fig. 12.2 Karina Utomo performing in Cat Hope’s ‘Speechless’.
Image by Toni Wilkinson 286
Fig. 13.1 Drawing of a cell by Mohamed from Morocco
in Dover, 2015. Immigration Detention Archive Oxford 304
Fig. 13.2 Courtyard in Colnbrook IRC, Heathrow, outside
the exercise area, taken by Khadija von Zinnenburg
Carroll during a photography workshop inside, 2015 305
 List of Figures xix

Fig. 13.3 Bordered Lives exhibition at VBKOE Vienna (from left

to right: exhibition from the book, performance lecture
from Darwin College Cambridge on screen, script
and censorship, and border intervention by Emma
Humphris), August 2021 307
 1
Introduction
Sophie Fuggle, Charles Forsdick, and Katharina Massing

In April 2022, then UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson and Home Secre-
tary Priti Patel announced that a deal had been made with Rwanda
which would now see asylum seekers sent to the African nation (5,500
miles or 8,800 km away) for processing (The Guardian, 2022). The new
arrangement was announced after long-term speculation around extrater-
ritorial management of refugees arriving in the UK including those
taking the perilous journey from Calais by dinghy. Previous suggestions
had included the proposal of sending asylum seekers to Ascension Island
in the South Atlantic over 4,400 miles (or 7,000 km) from the UK and

S. Fuggle (B)
Nottingham Trent University, Nottingham, UK
e-mail: sophie.fuggle@ntu.ac.uk
K. Massing
Nottingham Trent University, Nottingham, UK
e-mail: katharina.massing@ntu.ac.uk
C. Forsdick
University of Liverpool, Liverpool, UK
e-mail: craf@liverpool.ac.uk
© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 1
Switzerland AG 2023
S. Fuggle et al. (eds.), Framing the Penal Colony, Palgrave Studies in Crime, Media
and Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-19396-5_1
2 S. Fuggle et al.

1,000 miles from the coast of Africa (Walker & Murray, 2020). So far the
proposed deportations have attracted widespread criticism against a back-
drop of the erosion of human rights in the UK following the withdrawal
from the European Union in January 2020. Earlier proposals seemed
ludicrous and, if anything, simply an attempt, in the aftermath of Brexit,
to remind British society of its claims to sovereignty via reference to
remaining overseas territories such as Ascension Island (part of the Saint
Helena, Ascension and Tristan da Cunha territory; on the post-imperial
contexts of Brexit, see Dorling & Tomlinson, 2019). Such assertions to
sovereignty hark back to the use of distant islands as sites of exile for
political deportees. Indeed, after his second defeat against the British at
Waterloo in 1815, Napoleon Bonaparte was sent to live out his days
on Saint Helena (Unwin, 2010). The choice of location was intended
to ensure he did not escape as he had done from his earlier exile to
the Island of Elba in the Mediterranean. Evoking Ascension Island as
a possible site (despite the high costs and impracticalities of such a loca-
tion) for those who have recently crossed both the Mediterranean and
the English Channel must be understood as a symbolic gesture intended
to evoke past Franco-British histories and to affirm both Britain’s inde-
pendence from Europe and the country’s ability to exile anyone perceived
as threatening its borders.
However, this flex has now been revealed to have been a distrac-
tion tactic whilst other non-UK sites for immigrant detention have
been sought. The UK is not unique here. Denmark has also report-
edly been in talks with Rwanda over a similar initiative (see Neilson,
Chapter 2). The model of establishing such partnerships is frequently
referred to as the ‘Pacific Model’ with reference to Australia’s use of
Nauru, Manus and Christmas Island to process asylum seekers. The
human rights violations—which have seen children also detained and
a high number of suicides—have elicited international criticism. Despite
successful legal challenges, the centres have remained open alongside
a complex network of sites located across Australia itself. As Alison
Mountz (2020) has argued, the increased use by countries in the Global
North of what she terms the ‘enforcement archipelago’ since the 1970s
is bringing about ‘the death of asylum’. Such a ‘death’ is both metaphor-
ical (as society comes to accept that such practices are legitimate and
 1 Introduction 3

necessary) and literal (since the result of such practices is what Ruth
Wilson Gilmore refers to as the ‘premature death’ of those being held,
whether this be during detention or subsequently as a result of physical
and mental hardships experienced). Indeed, as Wilson Gilmore points
out, ‘premature death’ is the endpoint of racism: “Racism, specifically, is
the state-sanctioned or extralegal production and exploitation of group-
differentiated vulnerability to premature death” (Wilson Gilmore, 2007,
p. 28).
Alongside the wider practice of offshore detention as part of broader
border control measures, it is also important to note the extraordinary
rendition used, notably, by the United States during the ‘War on Terror’
declared by the Bush administration following the 9/11 attacks on the
World Trade Center and Pentagon. The extralegal practices of torture
used as part of such practices also bring into relief the deployment of
extraterritorial spaces such as Guantánamo, together with ‘black sites’
or temporary sites, not marked on any map or flight manifesto. This
capacity to block, erase and ‘disappear’ different ‘bodies’ deemed danger-
ously ‘other’ occurs as a result of the ability to impose and suspend
laws and borders that operate as perpetually shifting lines and frames.
Such lines are made visible in Mohamedou Ould Slahi’s memoir Guan-
tánamo Diary published in 2015 and based on his experience of being
held without trial for fourteen years. The original version of the memoir
features pages and pages of text redacted by the U.S. government,
including extensive passages recounting the use of torture and other
forms of abuse.1 The thick black lines, which are frustrating for readers,
embody the way information is controlled and denied to certain parties
even when it directly concerns or affects them. It also emphasises how
the narrative of what happens in places like Guantánamo continues to
exclude or limit the voices of those transported there.
The current use of overseas territories for asylum processing, immi-
grant detention and extraordinary rendition should thus be situated
within longer, global practices of deportation and transportation as
central strategies within colonial expansion from the mid-eighteenth
century onwards. Ann Laura Stoler (2012) has pointed out, “There are
no straight historical lines that lead from les colonies agricoles to Guan-
tanamo”. However, it is our contention in this volume that the complex
4 S. Fuggle et al.

historical phenomenon of the penal colony, as an archaic and seemingly

defunct symbol of empire, continues to be reimagined and reactivated
within contemporary, postcolonial manifestations of border control and
other forms of securitisation aimed at excluding and marginalising
different groups and individuals according to racist logics underpin-
ning earlier forms of colonialism. Where, for example, the British ceased
convict transportation from the United Kingdom to Australia in 1867,
it continued to maintain offshore prisons for colonial subjects until the
mid-twentieth century. The Andaman Islands were used as a prison for
Indian political prisoners from 1857 with construction of the notorious
cellular jail completed in 1906 (see Sherman, 2009). During the 1950s,
French colonial officials in Indochina cited the Andamans as justifica-
tion for their own proposal of maintaining the island of Poulo Condor
(now known as Con Dao) as a penal colony for colonial subjects from
the region following the closure of their main penal colony in French
Guiana (Fuggle, 2021).
At the same time as historians (Anderson, 2018, 2022; Forster, 1996)
have begun to take stock of the global reach of convict transportation
and related sites of forced labour and incarceration, placing them into
new transnational and often transcolonial perspectives (Patterson, 2016,
2018), the penal colony and, within it, the prison island have maintained
key roles within popular imaginaries of empire, crime and punishment.
For instance, collective memory around the use of convict transporta-
tion and forced labour is frequently co-opted to nationalist ideologies
that seek to rehabilitate the anonymous convict as pioneer, celebrating
their sacrifice and labour in the building of empire and nation. Such a
move involves both a re-imagining and forgetting of the longer histo-
ries of the territories given over to penal settlement. It works to erase
the lives and cultures of indigenous populations, notably in locations
such as Tasmania, whilst rehabilitating settler colonialism via narratives
of convict suffering and the more recent need to redress intergenerational
shame and silence that followed. Elsewhere, tales of the celebrity convict
(of which Ned Kelly and Papillon are perhaps the best-known exam-
ples), including their daring escapes from and confrontations with both
hostile, unknown territory and the colonial authorities, emphasise heroic
 1 Introduction 5

exceptionalism and sensationalist events over the banal, slow violence of

everyday life endured by most convict populations.
Within media reporting, cinema, literature, games and other forms of
visual culture, the regular reactivation of themes of exile, forced labour
and hostile, unknown territories should draw our attention to the contin-
uing efficacy of the penal colony as ideological construction aimed at
evoking awe, wonder, horror and fantasy. The figure of the individual
anti-hero—allowed escape and redemption via acts of courage and inge-
nuity—exists against a backdrop of monstruous, forsaken others who
have been purged from society with their lives suspended indefinitely.
The aim of this collection is to explore the multiple ways in which
the penal colony has been and still is defined, described, represented,
interpreted, imagined and reimagined both during and after its oper-
ation. The wider intention here is to draw attention to the richness
and complexities of cultural constructions, identifying their different
ideological functions at different points in time and in different places.
Many of the chapters emphasise the penal colony as a widely misunder-
stood, paradoxical space, replete with tensions between lived experience
and discourses (both utopian and repressive) imposed from elsewhere.
Where, on the one hand, the collection calls for a close and careful
analysis of existing historical and contemporary material in order to
better grasp key ideological stakes, on the other hand, different, creative
methodologies are brought to bear on these sites and their representa-
tions, emphasising alternative encounters and narratives to those which
have, thus far, provided dominant cultural imaginaries of the penal
colony.
A further stake here is to affirm the importance of the penal colony
and convict transportation within the ongoing work of abolition and
related decolonial praxis. Penal colonies are a key part of global geogra-
phies of empire. The use of forced labour as punishment at different
points in history (and, indeed, its ongoing use within certain carceral
regimes today) must be read alongside the parallel histories of the transat-
lantic slave trade and in conjunction with other forms of punishment
including the death penalty. If the discontinuation of transportation
to different sites represents a form of decarceration, this must be read
carefully in relation to what comes next.
6 S. Fuggle et al.

Writing of the Port Arthur historic site in Tasmania, John Frow (2000)
points out the problem of framing the penal colony in terms of the
abolition of convict transportation. This creates the notion of the penal
colony as an endpoint, a moment that has passed and is sealed off from
subsequent history and present:

To singularise the past and to isolate it in its pastness is to reduce this

complexity to a single story, to sever a monumental time of national
origins from the generational times which continuously modify it. (p. 13)

This ignores the multiple, complex functions of Port Arthur and the
wider region. In turn, this allows both the ‘sanitisation’ of that history
and its re-imagining according to contemporary fantasies. Today, the
Historic Port Arthur website claims the status of one of Australia’s
‘most visited’ sites and is one of 11 sites forming the UNESCO
World Heritage-listed Convict Sites. Visitor activities include the ‘Escape
from Port Arthur Tour’, a walking tour subtitled ‘The daring and the
desperate’ and the ‘Isle of the Dead cemetery tour’. But the focus on a
sealed-off past also avoids acknowledgement of how Australia’s convict
histories not only underpin colonial development and nation-state
building, but, equally, the development of policing and punishment. In
1996, 35 visitors to the site were shot with another 23 wounded by a
single gunman, Martin Bryant. There is now a Memorial Garden based
around the shell of the Broad Arrow Café in which 20 of Bryant’s victims
died, but as Frow points out, the site’s refusal to mark more actively the
subsequent histories up to and including the 1996 massacre risks: “for-
getting the line that runs from the model prison to the coldly violent
maximum-security institutions of today. It means failing to understand
how the violence of the past is both repeated in and is radically discon-
tinuous with Martin Bryant’s shooting spree in April 1996, which cannot
be told as part of the ‘same’ story” (p. 13). Moreover, it is only recently
that work is being done to redress the forgetting of genocide and violent
displacement of Australia’s aboriginal population as part of the occu-
pation of Van Dieman’s land. As is often the case, this excavation of
these silenced histories and their interconnections has occurred in the
creative arts, with Jennifer Kent’s 2019 film The Nightingale, set in 1825,
 1 Introduction 7

recounting the ways in which the search for revenge by a young Irish
convict Clare (raped by a British lieutenant, and witness to the murder
of her husband Aidan and their baby) intersects with the story of an
Aboriginal tracker called Billy.

What is a Penal Colony?

In this collection, the parameters of what constitutes a ‘penal colony’
have been left deliberately broad and it is the task of individual contrib-
utors to set out their own definitions and limits. The role and represen-
tation of colonial prisons will also be considered alongside multi-sited
penal settlements and prison islands. Nevertheless, it is perhaps useful
to make a few assertions in relation to how the ‘penal colony’ exists
and operates as historical phenomenon, geographical location and ideo-
logical and cultural construct. Of particular use here is Ann Laura
Stoler’s description of the ‘colony’ as a deliberately ambiguous (shadowy)
configuration of space and time:
“Already knowing what a colony is precludes asking whether
ambiguous nomenclatures, competing visions, repeated failures, and
reversals of course (and the violence, alleged permanence, and the
fortressed settledness they engender) prefigure the colony not as a site of
settlement but as always unstable and precarious, plagued by the expec-
tant promise and fear of its becoming another sort of entity” (Stoler,
2012).
One of the most enduring and globally recognisable of all representa-
tions of the penal colony is Franz Kafka’s short story In der Strafkolonie
(translated into English either as ‘In the Penal Colony’ or ‘In the Penal
Settlement’), first published in 1919 in the wake of the First World War.
Scholars of various penal colonies (Hecht, 2013, p. 126; Redfield, 2000,
p. 51) frequently draw on the story to frame their own historiographies.
It has been suggested (Nicholls, 2007, pp. 17–18) that Kafka might
have been inspired by the high-profile Dreyfus Affair which saw Alfred
Dreyfus sent first to New Caledonia and then to Devil’s Island off the
coast of French Guiana where he spent five years.
8 S. Fuggle et al.

Literary and philosophical readings of the story have focused on theo-

logical (Fowler, 1979; Steinberg, 1976) or psychoanalytic interpretations
(Barth, 2013; Webster, 1956) which assume the text as largely allegor-
ical. The abstract tropical location which we are subsequently told is
an ‘island’ is largely ignored as backdrop in favour of a focus on the
law as bodily inscription (Lyotard & Fynsk, 1991) that falls short in
its promise of transfiguration. However, a more interesting reading for
our purposes is offered by Peters (2001) who proposes greater atten-
tion is paid to the notion of colony as punishment, arguing that Kafka
should be read alongside anti-colonial writers such as Franz Fanon, Aimé
Césaire and Albert Memmi as well as in terms of colonial discourses
from the period.2 What, asks Peters, if we read Kafka’s text more liter-
ally? In other words, the ‘remarkable apparatus’ described at length is
not only ‘metaphor made material’ but, in fact, constitutes an account of
the real, complex violent apparatus of colonial administration condensed
into the form of a single, imaginary machine. Indeed, the complicated
machine captures the paradox of colonial violence as both technologically
advanced and ‘archaically’ violent, evoking a spectacle of punishment
whilst remaining largely invisible or overlooked by those in charge. The
execution is attended by no one else beyond the small group, yet the
Officer refers to the sending off of the condemned man by the Comman-
dant’s ‘ladies’ who offer their handkerchiefs and ply the condemned with
sweets he later throws up. Another key element of Kafka’s tale is the refer-
ence to the shifting regimes and the displacement, albeit slow, of the
earlier Commandant’s ‘utopian vision’ embodied in the complex plans
accompanying the ‘apparatus’ and in the long-winded speeches of the
Officer. Here, Kafka captures the bizarre bureaucracy of penal admin-
istration which was often managed by different branches of colonial
government such as the Navy. The frequently short-term appointments
of governors meant that regimes could shift with each newly arrived
governor seeking to define himself in relation or contrast to his prede-
cessor. Consequently, penal colonies often became sites of short-lived,
failed experiments thought up from outside the territory (as shall be
explored in Chapter 3).
Several aspects remain enigmatic in Kafka’s text: to what extent is the
colony’s status as ‘penal colony’ determined by the excessive use of the
 1 Introduction 9

‘remarkable apparatus’? Is its regular use, as mentioned by the Officer,

and its centrality within the former Commandant’s regime, the defining
feature of this island? Or does it represent a surplus, an exceptional
form of punishment in a place, the exile to which is a punishment in
itself? Where are the convicts in this penal colony? The figure of the
Condemned Man offers few clues here. He is described as a former
soldier who is being punished for insubordination. His original presence
on the island does not appear to be as a punishment yet his role appears
to be one of servitude to colonial masters. He does not speak the same
language as the Officer who talks in French thus further implying he is
a colonised rather than colonising subject. As Frow (2000) suggests:

[I]f we think of some of Kafka’s other closed, pointless, and self-

perpetuating hierarchies, it is perhaps no accident that it is a guard rather
than a prisoner who undergoes punishment. There is no outside of such
systems, and in this the penal colony resembles rather closely the hier-
archy of surveillance envisaged in Bentham’s panopticon, in which it is
not only the prisoners in their cells but the warders at every level of the
apparatus of inspection who are held under constant scrutiny. (p. 3)

Finally, we might consider the figure of the Traveller whom the reader
is most closely invited to identify with. What was his interest in visiting
the penal colony if not to witness an execution? What are we to make
of his apparently ‘impartial’ observation of the machine as it destroys
both itself and the Officer who has staked his career and life on its
functioning? Despite his claims to humanitarianism, his departing act
of threatening the soldier and formerly condemned man so as to prevent
them from boarding his boat should leave readers with a final, unset-
tling image of one whose opposition to the barbarity of the penal colony
and its ‘remarkable machine’ fell short of physical action. Peters describes
the Traveller as a ‘scholar-explorer’ and this appellation might equally be
applied to the contemporary researcher of the penal colony including
the contributors in this book. The Traveller in his observation of the
‘remarkable machine’, his initial lack of interest followed by growing
fascination and disgust coupled with his lack of sustained empathy for
10 S. Fuggle et al.

those confined to the island embodies what Michelle Brown has termed
‘penal spectatorship’.
In The Culture of Punishment (2009), Brown identifies the widespread
consumption of images and narratives of incarceration in contemporary
society particularly in the United States as fostering a vicarious experi-
ence of punishment which ultimately underpins public attitudes about
decision making around criminal justice:

The cultural imaginary is not subject to simple cause and effect models
and is a nebulous, playful arena where vicarious identities and moral-
ities are picked up and later discarded, but with consistent patterns
and attractions to particular disguises. These tendencies then gradually
become ideology and convention, habit and value, proper narratives of
punishment. With regard to punishment, these processes render represen-
tations of imprisonment a particularly seductive site for the production
of cultural scripts and classifications on the part of the spectator. (p. 57)

The chapters in this book take up Brown’s concerns via the specific
example of the penal colony and its representation in popular culture
together with the interpretation of its built heritage as ruin or museum.
The penal colony not only constitutes a space and set of practices
but also a grouping of people often constructed in public discourse as
monstruous, dangerous, abject and undesirable. Yet, as such, they are also
a source of the deep fascination that manifests itself as part of a broader
carceral exoticism. The lives when framed via sensationalist reporting
and fictionalised memoirs offer a vicarious experience of adventure and
transgression whilst maintaining the real convict population at a safe
distance. In analysing the ongoing, shifting depiction of what Eamonn
Carrabine (2011) has termed “iconographies of punishment”, including
instruments of torture, constraint and death found in such spaces, the
aim is not to reaffirm or rehabilitate the penal colony as object of anal-
ysis. As Carrabine has also argued, there is a need when considering
images of punishment and, therefore suffering, “to develop an approach
to the visual that avoids both the essentialism of art history and the
reductionism of sociology by offering a rethinking of the relationships
between the two” (Carrabine, 2018, p. 559). The task at hand is to
 1 Introduction 11

demonstrate the multiple sometimes conflicting ways in which the penal

colony as image and text has been instrumentalised by different political
agendas via, on the one hand, the fantasies and imaginaries associated
with the dual operation of exile and confinement and, on the other, the
common tropes and markers that emphasise both carceral continuities
and ruptures with other times and places. Yet, in our study of different
forms of cultural production that draw on the penal colony, we also
seek to identify alternative possibilities, ways of reading, looking and
listening that open up space in which to hear other, forgotten or silenced
voices (dubbed by Chamoiseau, in the context of French Guiana, as
“memory-traces” [2020]) and craft new critical perspectives.

Carceral Geographies
The geographical features of Kafka’s story are deliberately sparse—a
barren landscape, tropical climate and small dilapidated port town (with
the only well-maintained building being the Commandant’s residence)—
evoking any number of places under European colonial occupation in
the late nineteenth century or early twentieth century. The abstract
image of the penal colony here identifies dominant colonial discourses
which sought to present overseas territories as blank spaces or tabula rasa
(Duschinsky, 2012) awaiting resource extraction, agricultural develop-
ment and colonial infrastructure. As Miranda Spieler (2012) has pointed
out, the 1795 French constitution marked out its colonies as such ‘blank
spaces’ on the map, representing “institutionless, vacant units of the
metropolitan state” (p. 54). In the case of penal colonies, the hostility of
the environment was also evoked as offering both effective punishment
and new opportunity for those sentenced to forced labour. Further-
more, the specific topography of the prison island (which frequently
provides a ‘prison within the prison’ of the wider colony) evokes a
specific form of what Kothari and Wilkinson (2010) have termed “colo-
nial island imaginaries”. Drawing on Edward Said’s broader notion of
“colonial imaginaries” (Said, 1978), Kothari and Wilkinson describe how
such imaginaries are bound up in the projection and construction of
multiple aspects of island existence, landscape and resources as befit
12 S. Fuggle et al.

various colonial projects. Whilst frequently dependent on various myths

and binaries, these are nevertheless subject to reconfiguration over time.
What is particularly interesting for this collection is the persistence of the
prison island within colonial and postcolonial imaginaries, a theme we
will return to at the end of this introductory chapter.
Within this collection, various chapters take up the question of the
specific and often underexamined geographies of the penal colony and
their representation in text, image and maps as well as their posthumous
exploration via walking, photographing, viewing and listening. A central
tenet of this book is to work towards a more nuanced understanding of
the (evolving) space of the penal colony as perceived from multiple places
and positionalities. This echoes Roscoe’s call (2018, p. 63) to attend
to the “view from the colonies” in her analysis of the use of carceral
islands off the coast of Australia both during and after the end of convict
transportation from Britain. By extension, it is also necessary to perpet-
ually deconstruct the language and discourse which maintains the penal
colony as a ‘green hell’ situated at ‘the end of the world’. Here, the notion
of ‘ecology’ has been drawn upon by scholars to offer a more complex
account of penal geography. Edwards (2021) adopts the term ‘carceral
ecology’ to explore the history of the port town Ushuaia in Argentina,
which between 1902 and 1947 housed an experimental prison that
combined the radial architecture of the panopticon with convict labour
for the region’s timber industry. Edwards contests the persistent refer-
ence to Ushuaia as situated ‘at the end of the world’ and the implication
that this makes it an isolated space disconnected from the rest of society.
Fuggle (2022) has drawn on the notion of “prismatic ecology” (Cohen,
2013) to challenge the dominant, restrictive image of French Guiana as
a ‘green hell’.
Working to better understand the complex spaces and mobilities
defining convict transportation and the lived experience of the penal
colony constitutes a significant aspect of the subdiscipline of ‘carceral
geography’ which has emerged over the past two decades (see Moran
et al., 2018). One of the first scholars to adopt the term ‘carceral geogra-
phies’ was Ruth Wilson Gilmore who describes using it in her teaching
back in 1999 as a way of broadening the scope of what was being termed
 1 Introduction 13

(in the United States and elsewhere) the “prison industrial complex”
(Wilson Gilmore, 2022, p. 480).3
Wilson Gilmore counters the idea of ‘carceral geographies’ with
what she terms the ‘abolition geographies’ embodied in her work with
activist groups such as Mothers Reclaiming our Children and Crit-
ical Resistance and, more specifically, via the connection of different
societal concerns around environmental justice, community disposses-
sion and the multiple, diffuse forms of ‘premature death’ occurring to
marginalised poor and non-white populations. The role here of geog-
raphy is as a tool for understanding the connections between different
forms of spatial planning, management and land use. It reveals the glob-
alising effects of certain practices whilst at the same time enabling people
to understand the different components and how they contribute to the
wider carceral landscape. In doing so, it becomes possible to identify
how to challenge specific, local practices whilst connecting these to other,
wider struggles across space and time.
In considering the ways in which analysis of the penal colony as
political concept and cultural imaginary might contribute towards the
multifaceted work of abolition and decolonial praxis, it is worth keeping
in mind the origins of geography as a discipline bound up with colonial
occupation, dispossession and extraction. As J. M. Moore (2020) has
explored via the specific biography of geographer and prison reformer
Alexander Maconochie (also the subject of this volume’s Chapter 3), the
carceral and the colonial come together via the work of geography which,
at base, is taken up with the use of space to control and coerce different
populations. Moore raises the ethical implications of forms of carceral
geography that reproduce such work often in the form of reformist
agendas (see, for example, Moran et al., 2021) including those taken up
with ‘greenwashing’ the prison.
Although largely beyond the scope of this volume, one of the pressing
tasks for research on penal colonies past and present is to take stock of the
ecological impact and legacy of transportation and convict labour across
the globe. As Edwards (2021) argues as part of his ‘carceral ecology’, it
is necessary to move beyond reductive notions of the ‘natural’ prison,
14 S. Fuggle et al.

instead recognising how the land upon which penitentiaries and penal
colonies were sited was shaped and continues to be shaped by these.
Developing a wider understanding of global carceral ecologies can be
situated in relation to contemporary activist work on prisons and other
sites of confinement as toxic ecologies with enormous carbon footprints
and water consumption that frequently impact on local communities
(Stohr & Wozniak, 2014). Implicated in such work is a reversal of
traditional discourse of pollution and contamination applied to convict
populations, a discourse epitomised in the 1890s by the New Caledonian
Governor Paul Feillet who described the flow of convicts into the penal
colony as a “robinet d’eau sale” [dirty water tap] that needed turning off.
Moreover, in wrestling historiographies of the penal colony from tales
of heroic white convicts and their conquest of hostile territories, other
stories emerge attesting to the role of transportation in terraforming
the world. Just as the image of the ‘natural prison’ suggests nature as
a universal, divine force imposing judgement on a criminal population,
contemporary discourses on climate change frequently universalise the
era that has come to be known as the Anthropocene. As Kathryn Yusoff
(2018, p. 2) argues:

[T]his planetary analytic has failed to do the work to properly identify

its own histories of colonial earth-writing, to name the masters of broken
earths, and to redress the legacy of racialized subjects that geology leaves
in its wake. It has failed to grabble with the inheritance of violent dispos-
session of indigenous land under the auspices of a colonial geo-logics or
to address the extractive grammars of geology that labor in the instru-
mentation and instrumentalization of dominant colonial narratives and
their subjective, often subjugating registers that are an ongoing praxis of
displacement.

Miranda Spieler (2012) has pointed out that the early camps associated
with French Guiana’s 100-year penal colony disappeared from sight as
building materials were recuperated and secondary forest enacted a form
of ‘rewilding’. Spieler warns that we should avoid thinking of this disap-
pearance as a ‘return of nature’ or that this suggests the penal colony left
no lasting legacy: “(French) Guiana was not a place where human history
had yet to begin, but one where human traces on the land tended to
vanish” (Spieler, 2012, p. 2).
 1 Introduction 15

Empire and Capital

If, as Clare Anderson has suggested, “all the world’s a prison” (2016),
there are nevertheless limits to the territories and cultural representations
we have been able to incorporate into this book. Significant space has
been given to both British and French penal colonies. This is partly due
to the longevity and geographical scope of both transportation regimes
and partly due to the place both histories have come to assume within
popular culture particularly in the Global North. Readers will note that
several chapters reference representations of France’s largest penal colony
located in the South American territory of French Guiana. Operating for
a hundred-year period between 1852 and 1953, the penal colony (known
as the bagne) was widely documented in both French and English
language newspapers, not least because of its persistence into the twen-
tieth century. The penal colony was (not without irony) taken up as a
human rights obsession by the U.S. media with various celebrity convicts
such as René Belbenoit escaping to the United States and obtaining citi-
zenship there. Following the publication of Henri Charrière’s bestselling
memoir Papillon in 1969, the 1973 Hollywood adaptation of the book
starring Steve McQueen and Dustin Hoffman consolidated the status of
French Guiana and, moreover, Devil’s Island as the most notorious of all
penal colonies.
Alongside these two sets of colonial geographies, attention is also given
to other examples of European colonisation (German and Spanish) as
well as Japan whose internal expansion into Hokkaido [1869–1882]
drew on convict labour to build roads across the island. Various chap-
ters take up the question of continuity (and rupture) between different
political regimes and, notably, the role of the prison (and prison island)
in representations of anti-colonial struggle in Vietnam and Cuba.
The ongoing operation of penal colonies and related forced labour into
the mid-twentieth century suggest possibilities for comparison with the
representation of other forms of internment such as the concentration
camps, gulags and re-education camps that define and, in some places,
continue to define fascist, communist and other authoritarian regimes.
As Stoler has argued: “Colony and camp make up a conjoined conceptual
matrix, twin formations and formulations of how imperial rather than
16 S. Fuggle et al.

national logics of security operate. They borrow and blend features of

their protective architecture and anticipatory fear. They are in a deadly
embrace from the start” (Stoler, 2012, pp. 77–78).
A key part of the twentieth-century carceral archipelago is the Soviet
Gulag, an abbreviated form of Glavnoe Upravlenie Lagerie (or Main
Camp Administration). Tsarist Russia had deployed various types of
penal transportation, often involving banishment and exile, but the
Gulag itself was developed under Lenin as a means of controlling polit-
ical dissidence and was subsequently expanded by Stalin (Applebaum,
2004). The Gulag was a tentacular system spread across the breadth
of the Soviet Union. It began locally with investigative cells in police
stations but relied on the rail network to transport people often long
distances to multiple penal sites, of which the largest contained over
25,000 prisoners. These camps were often in more remote locations,
separated geographically from their surroundings as was often the case
also with penal colonies (Pallot et al., 2012). Their dual purpose was
to discipline prisoners whilst exploiting their forced labour. By the end
of 1940, the Gulag population amounted to 1.5 million people kept
in the 53 Gulag camps and 423 labour colonies which stretched across
the Soviet Union (Ellman, 2002; Getty et al., 1993). It is estimated
that between 1929 and 1953, between fourteen and twenty-five million
people passed through the Gulag (Gheith & Jolluck, 2011). Another
seven million people had been deported to remote areas of the Soviet
Union and approximately seven or eight million had been sent to other
forms of labour colonies or settlements. Although all of these figures are
approximate and much disputed, it is clear that tens of millions of people
were victims of the Gulag system (Bacon, 1994; Getty et al., 1993). The
death of Stalin in 1953 marked the end of the Gulag, but it was not offi-
cially abolished by Khrushchev until 1960. Although prominent authors
such as Albert Camus had alluded to the Gulag throughout his post-war
writings, it was The Gulag archipelago: An experiment in literary investiga-
tion by Soviet dissident Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, first published in 1973
and translated into English and French the following year, that brought
the institution to broad international attention, leading to the increase
in comparisons discussed above with the use of concentration camps
by the Nazis. Many Gulag camps are now sites of memory forming
 1 Introduction 17

parts of a broader carceral network in evidence around the globe, with

ALZhIR (the Akmolinsk Camp of Wives of Traitors to the Motherland)
and Karlag in Kazakhstan for instance playing an increasingly important
role in the country’s post-Soviet national story.
Another way in which we might think about these connections
between sites is via examples of creative engagement emerging from
within such spaces. Of particular interest are those activities whereby
detainees tried not so much to represent poetically and aesthetically their
lived experience but, conversely, sought out artistic and intellectual prac-
tices that allowed mental escape from confinement. As part of her work
on “concentrationary memory”, Griselda Pollock (2015) takes up the life
and work of artist Charlotte Salomon, interned at Gurs in France before
deportation to Auschwitz in 1942. Pollock’s interest in Salomon lies in
her refusal to represent Gurs in the artworks she produced during her
internment: “She could paint bloodied suicides, abusive sexual assault,
attempted rape, escape, solitude, and even pose the question of killing
herself. But she would not bear witness to what she had seen in Gurs”
(p. 189). Imprisoned in a Soviet Camp during the Second World War,
the Polish artist Józef Czapski (2018) gave a series of lectures based on
his memories of reading Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time several
years beforehand. Delivered without the original texts to hand, Czapski
nevertheless successfully manages to evoke, with a high degree of accu-
racy, the rich detail of Proust’s world, creating a reminder for his fellow
prisoners of life beyond the prison.

Outline of Chapters
The chapters in this collection eschew a straightforward chronological
approach and are not organised into geographical territories or empires.
The intention instead is to emphasise the complex, multifaceted ways
in which penal colonies are represented in reporting, maps, literature
from memoir to science fiction, comics and graphic novels, documen-
tary footage, cinema, museum and heritage interpretation, photography
and other forms of visual culture. Reflecting the richness of the media
studied, methodologies are drawn from history, geography, criminology,
18 S. Fuggle et al.

literary criticism, comic and film studies, museology and critical theory.
As such, they incorporate archival research, ethnography, mapping,
walking, photography and listening. Where some chapters focus on a
single site or set of sites and their representation or interpretation within
a specific timeframe, others take up a more comparative and/or transna-
tional perspective. To celebrate the wealth of approaches and objects of
analysis whilst also offering a conceptual roadmap for the reader, the
collection is organised into four broad sections: 1. Reporting (from) the
Penal Colony; 2. Exploring the Penal Colony; 3. Framing and Reframing
the Colonial Prison; and 4. Creative Encounters in and beyond the Penal
Colony.

1. Reporting (from) the Penal Colony

News from the penal colonies played an important role within wider
forms of crime and punishment reporting. Official and unofficial reports
of life in the penal colonies together with the perceived successes or
failures of penal settlements both fed and fed off public appetites for
stories from these distant sites of exile and the infamous convicts sent
there. Yet, reporting could also reveal tensions between public percep-
tions and official discourses back home and the day-to-day running
of the penal colonies. Moreover, journalists and other authorised visi-
tors were not only sent to report back to the mainland but often came
from neighbouring states with their own interests and concerns about
the impact of the penal colony on their own populations and terri-
tories. In Chapter 2, Briony Neilson provides a detailed reading of
late nineteenth-century Australian reporting taken up with accounts of
escaped convicts from the neighbouring French penal colony in New
Caledonia. As Neilson’s extensive reading of newspaper archives reveals,
much of the discourse around New Caledonia reflected Australian anxi-
eties around its own recent history as penal colony. Chapter 3 focuses
on an earlier period in Australia’s penal history. J. M. Moore examines
the application of Alexander Maconachie’s controversial ‘mark system’ on
Norfolk Island. The chapter emphasises both the framing of the island
itself within public discourse and reporting on Maconachie’s attempt
 1 Introduction 19

to impose radical reform conceived from elsewhere. Chapter 4 main-

tains focus on reporting but shifts attention to French Guiana and
the investigative journalism of Albert Londres during the early 1920s.
The subsequent republication of Londres’ reports for Le Petit Parisien
as memoirs ensured his critique of the penal colony reached a wider
readership. Recently, his accounts of the penal colony and, notably, the
escape and subsequent pardon of Eugène Dieudonné have been adapted
as graphic novels. Cointot and Fuggle consider the role of these adapta-
tions as they draw on earlier visual iconography whilst opening up new
readings and readerships.

2. Exploring the penal colony

As indicated above, penal colonies are complex, multi-sited geograph-

ical spaces which incorporate specific environmental and topographical
features together with multiple forms of architecture and infrastructure,
often constructed by initial convoys of convicts. The second part of the
book focuses on how such geographies are presented for exploration in
the present whether this be as ruin, restored heritage site, trail or disap-
pearing/disappeared traces. In Chapter 5, Sophie Fuggle considers the
strange doubling which occurs between Abashiri Prison Museum and
the prison itself and the wider narratives of colonial development of
Hokkaido (Japan) via convict labour presented here. A key element of
her ethnography, which examines how the space is offered up to visitors
from elsewhere, involves exploring different photographic methods for
both documenting the extensive museum grounds and exhibitions and
reflecting on motivations and assumptions shaping her own perspective
as tourist-researcher. In Chapter 6, Claire Reddleman provides a compar-
ative analysis of maps used to illustrate signage in heritage trails at sites
belonging to France’s former penal colonies in both French Guiana and
New Caledonia. The comparison allows for critical reflection on trans-
portation as both specific local history and heritage and a means of
asserting the global connectedness of a site. Taking up the penal colony
as form of literary inspiration in Chapter 7, Samuel Tracol and Gloria
Alhinho use Patti Smith’s account of her trip to Saint Laurent du Maroni
in the early 1980s to rethink the penal colony not as an endpoint but,
20 S. Fuggle et al.

rather, as a starting point for literature. In Smith’s writing, the bagne as

a space once imagined (but never visited) by Jean Genet is explored as
material ruin via practices of walking and collecting.

3. Framing and Reframing the Colonial Prison

Penal colonies are frequently defined as sites where forced labour has
been co-opted to colonial expansion and development. They also func-
tion as spaces used to exile and contain different forms of political
dissent. Moreover, the colonial prison and its technologies of constraint
are frequently repurposed by subsequent political regimes. The complex
legacies of such spaces and the forms of punishment, restraint and
torture which mark both the continuities and ruptures between regimes
pose challenges in terms of how such histories are narrated and inter-
preted according to later nationalist and international memorial agendas.
Chapter 8 takes up once more the literal framing of the penal colony on
the page of the graphic novel. Forsdick considers how representations of
New Caledonia’s penal colony have often been eclipsed by more promi-
nent material on French Guiana. He explores the existence of a corpus
of visual material that presents not only the history of the bagne but
also the place of the institution in broader Melanesian history. Reading
graphic accounts of the Paris commune of 1871 (and of its protago-
nists such as Louise Michel and Nathalie Lemel), he identifies stories of
solidarity with Kanak rebels. Finally, analysing narratives of settler colo-
nialism and Vietnamese indentured labour, he detects a spectral presence
of the penal colony across accounts of post-carceral New Caledonia in
the twentieth century. In Chapter 9, Massing explores the lesser-known
history of German colonial occupation in Qingdao, China and the
interpretation of this history in the city’s colonial prison museum. Along-
side its consideration of competing narratives and interpretive strategies,
the chapter develops a methodology based on the concept of ‘vicar-
ious looking’, drawing on visitor testimony and photography shared
on social media platforms. As such, the chapter offers important food
for thought in a time of reduced global mobility, calling into ques-
tion existing conceptions of the ‘scholar-explorer’. Chapter 10 explores
two types of cellular imprisonment both known as ‘tiger cages’ used as
 1 Introduction 21

part of French colonial and U.S. military occupation in Vietnam during

the early and mid-twentieth century. Tennant analyses the way in which
architecture and technologies of punishment frame the penal colony as
well as the symbolic role these have assumed post-independence. The
theme of regime change and carceral continuity is also taken up in
Chapter 11 which focuses on documentary representations of the Isle
of Pines in Cuba. The island had been used as a site of deportation
since the nineteenth century and remained in use under Castro until
1967. Martin-Márquez discusses the aesthetic strategies adopted by Afro-
Cuban filmmaker Sara Goméz as a means of highlighting the experiences
of young camp internees and the ongoing criminalisation of race in
post-revolution Cuba.

4. Creative Encounters in and beyond the Penal Colony

As suggested previously, there are forms of creativity that take place

within spaces of confinement that resist or refuse its reproduction as
cultural commodity. This final section of the collection explores different
forms of creativity which both affirm and challenge dominant imagi-
naries of the penal colony. Art and performance produced in and of
the penal colony can always be co-opted by those wishing to affirm and
maintain colonial and postcolonial forms of constraint and restraint. Yet
to acknowledge the threat of appropriation is not to refuse or deny the
impetus to tell different stories or create new worlds.
Kate McMillan takes up questions of silence and forgetting in
Chapter 12 to consider the colonial-carceral continuities of the contem-
porary use of carceral islands as extraterritorial immigrant detention.
She proposes different forms of listening as creative practice aimed at
redressing the silencing of different dispossessed populations. The role
of the artist-activist together with the academy in developing aboli-
tionist praxis is developed in Chapter 13 where Khadija von Zinnenburg
Carroll and Rosamund Liebeskind expand our understanding of the
penal colony in terms of the carceral state in Australia and Britain
today encompassing different forms of secure units alongside prisons and
detention centres.
22 S. Fuggle et al.

The Persistence of the Prison Island

“The concept of the colony is not foretelling a future colony held in place
by design, but rather the unstable morphology of its provisional making
and remaking again and again” (Stoler, 2012).
According to Michael Taussig (2004), every treasure island, that is
every island targeted by European colonisers as a site of magical, untold
wealth and resources, has, at some point or other, also operated as a
prison island. If numerous colonial prison islands have shed their role
as spaces of exile and confinement, today they have been repurposed as
neo-colonial sites of escape and sanctuary, and their coastlines peppered
with exclusive tourist resorts. Back in mainland Europe, islands along the
French Atlantic coast have maintained their role as prisons well into this
century. Following his arrest and trial, Philippe Pétain lived out the end
of his days on Ile d’Yeu. Between 1956 and 1962, Algerian indépendan-
tiste and future president Ben Bella was imprisoned in Fort Liédot on
the Ile d’Aix along with other members of the FLN. Today, the prison
on Saint Martin de Ré, once the point of departure for the penal colonies
in French Guiana and New Caledonia, continues to operate as a Maison
Centrale, housing one of France’s oldest prison populations. In Italy, the
island of Gorgona houses a prison farm (known as the Gorgona Agri-
cultural Penal Colony) which includes a vineyard. Bastøy prison located
75 km off the coast of Norway, once a penal colony for boys,4 is regu-
larly cited for its progressive methods and described as an ‘ecological
prison’. However, even in the context of Norway’s small prison popula-
tion, the site which houses 100 inmates is perhaps given undue attention
as a key example of the ‘Nordic exception’, held up in contrast to mass
incarceration and super maxes elsewhere. Scholars working within Scan-
dinavia have suggested that the region is not immune to the ‘punitive
turn’ (Reiter et al., 2018; Shammas, 2016; Todd-Kvam, 2019), which
has defined criminal justice throughout the Global North since the 1970s
and 1980s.
Elsewhere in the Mediterranean, islands such as Lampedusa have
become refugee camps for those fleeing the long-term after-effects of
European imperialism. The shifting role of islands as spaces used to ‘hold’
and ‘process’ those defined as ‘illegal’ or ‘undocumented’ should remind
 1 Introduction 23

us of the fluidity with which certain people are defined as ‘criminal’ and
certain acts as ‘crime’ at different points in time. Prisons and policing
were established in response to the need to protect colonial interests
at home and abroad. Similarly, the status of detainees and deportees as
political prisoners or common criminals was open to interpretation and
revision subject to their specific value as either labour force or political
bargaining chip.
As technologies evolve, different mobilities and counter-mobilities
emerge. In developing a concept of ‘viapolitics’, William Walters (2015)
has argued that not enough attention has been given to the forms
of transport and routes used in both voluntary and forced migration.
Deportations now take place by air not sea or train. Artist Meriem
Bennani’s video installations ‘Party on the CAPS’ and ‘Life on the
CAPS’ screened at the Renaissance Society in Chicago and Nottingham
Contemporary in 2022 explore a not-so-distant future in which tele-
portation has replaced air travel. Borders have become virtual and new
forms of illegal migration emerge in response to this new form of trans-
portation. Illegal teleporters are intercepted by U.S. troopers who dump
the reassembled bodies onto the CAPS, a large rock located in the
middle of the Atlantic. Not all bodies are reassembled successfully or
without issues such as a bizarre condition known as ‘plastic face’. Some
of the island’s population have not only teleported themselves across the
ocean but, at some point, exchanged their original bodies for new ones.
Sometimes this results in extreme age reversals with octogenarians now
inhabiting the bodies of children. Over the years, the camp becomes
a huge urban sprawl with distinct neighbourhoods and infrastructure
including a sports stadium.
The origins of the CAPS are briefly explained at the start of ‘Party on
the CAPS’. However, what is particularly powerful about the installations
is that one can enter the screening rooms at any point and experience the
feeling of being dropped into this strange, alienating yet often somewhat
familiar world. It is almost as if one has teleported oneself and trying to
get one’s bearings after reconstruction. The films focus on the Moroccan
neighbourhood on the CAPS and much of the action follows two protag-
onists Kamal and his son and their different life views. Yet these are
24 S. Fuggle et al.

not films about the individual heroism or suffering that we might asso-
ciate with films set on other prison islands. Instead, it is the banality of
life within one’s community that is key together with the slow accep-
tance that, ultimately, this is all there is. CAPS as a future, mythical
prison island offers a different take to Kafka’s ‘metaphor made mate-
rial’. No longer is the body simply a surface upon which the law can be
violently written. Henceforth, the body becomes the message, the writing
or code which travels through space and time, seeking to transgress laws
of physics along with national and international borders.

Notes
1. An unredacted version was later published in 2017.
2. See also Pierce (2020) which offers a similar reading using Achille
Mbembe and Saidiya Hartman as interlocuteurs.
3. Mike Davis (1995) is generally credited with coining the term. See also
Schlosser (1998) and Davis (2003).
4. As a reformatory, the island was the site of a riot in 1915 which saw
the military called in when staff failed to handle the situation. The events
were the subject of the 2010 film King of Devil’s Island directed by Marius
Holst.

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Another random document with
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work in a forlorn hope. In this fight she avenged the death of a
comrade by killing the author of it with her own hands. At the siege of
Pondicherry she received eleven wounds in the legs, and a ball in
the body which she extracted herself for fear of revealing the secret
of her sex. On her return voyage to England she heard that she need
not bother about killing her husband, because he had been decently
hanged for murder. So on landing at Portsmouth she revealed
herself to her messmates as a woman, and one of them promptly
proposed to her. She declined and went on the stage, but ultimately
received a pension of thirty pounds a year, and set up as a publican
at the sign of the Women in Masquerade.
Anna Mills, able seaman on board the Maidstone frigate in 1740,
made herself famous for desperate valor.
Mary Ann, youngest of Lord Talbot’s sixteen natural children,
was the victim of a wicked guardian who took her to the wars as his
foot-boy. As a drummer boy she served through the campaigns in
Flanders, dressing two severe wounds herself. Her subsequent
masquerade as a sailor led to countless adventures. She was a
seaman on a French lugger, powder monkey on a British ship of the
line, fought in Lord Howe’s great victory and was crippled for life.
Later she was a merchant seaman, after that a jeweler in London,
pensioned for military service, and was last heard of as a
bookseller’s housemaid in 1807.
Mary Dixon did sixteen years’ service, and fought at Waterloo.
She was still living fifty years afterward, “a strong, powerful, old
woman.”
Phœbe Hessel fought in the fifth regiment of foot, and was
wounded in the arm at Fontenoy. After many years of soldiering she
retired from service and was pensioned by the prince regent, George
IV. A tombstone is inscribed to her memory in the old churchyard at
Brighton.
In this bald record there is no room for the adventures of such
military and naval heroines as prisoners of war, as leaders in battle,
as victims of shipwreck, or as partakers in some of the most
extraordinary love-affairs ever heard of.
 Hundreds of stories might be told of women conspicuous for
valor, meeting hazards as great as ever have fallen to the lot of men.
In one case, the casting away of the French frigate Medusa, the
men, almost without exception, performed prodigies of cowardice,
while two or three of the women made a wonderful journey across
the Sahara Desert to Senegambia, which is the one bright episode in
the most disgraceful disaster on record. In the defenses of Leyden
and Haarlem, besieged by Spanish armies, the Dutch women
manned the ramparts with the men, inspired them throughout the
hopeless months, and shared the general fate when all the survivors
were butchered. And the valor of Englishwomen during the sieges of
our strongholds in India, China and South Africa, has made some of
the brightest pages of our history.
 XLIX
THE CONQUERORS OF INDIA

ONLY the other day, the king of England was proclaimed emperor of
India, and all the princes and governors of that empire presented
their swords in homage. This homage was rendered at Delhi, the
ancient capital of Hindustan; and it is only one hundred and ten
years since Delhi fell, and Hindustan surrendered to the British arms.
We have to deal with the events that led up to the conquest of India.
The Moslem sultans, sons of the Great Mogul, had long reigned
over Hindustan, but in 1784 Shah Alam, last of these emperors, was
driven from Delhi. In his ruin he appealed for help to Madhoji
Scindhia, a Hindu prince from the South, who kindly restored the
emperor to his palace, then gave him into the keeping of a jailer, who
gouged out the old man’s eyes. Still Shah Alam, the blind, helpless,
and at times very hungry prisoner, was emperor of Northern India,
and in his august name Scindhia led the armies to collect the taxes
of Hindustan. No tax was collected without a battle.
Scindhia himself was one of many turbulent Mahratta princes
subject to the peshwa of Poona, near Bombay. He had to sit on the
peshwa’s head at Poona, and the emperor’s head at Delhi, while he
fought the whole nobility and gentry of India, and kept one eye
cocked for British invasions from the seaboard. The British held the
ocean, surrounded India, and were advancing inland. Madhoji
Scindhia was a very busy man.
He had never heard of tourists, and when De Boigne, an Italian
gentleman, came up-country to see the sights, his highness,
scenting a spy, stole the poor man’s luggage. De Boigne, veteran of
the French and Russian armies, and lately retired from the British
service, was annoyed at the loss of his luggage, and having nothing
left but his sword, offered the use of that to Scindhia’s nearest
enemy. In those days scores of Europeans, mostly French, and
scandalous rogues as a rule, were serving in native armies. Though
they liked a fight, they so loved money that they would sell their
masters to the highest bidder. Scindhia observed that De Boigne
was a pretty good man, and the Savoyard adventurer was asked to
enter his service.
De Boigne proved honest, faithful to his prince, a tireless worker,
a glorious leader, the very pattern of manliness. The battalions which
he raised for Scindhia were taught the art of war as known in
Europe, they were well armed, fed, disciplined, and paid their wages;
they were led by capable white men, and always victorious in the
field. At Scindhia’s death, De Boigne handed over to the young
prince Daulat Rao, his heir, an army of forty thousand men, which
had never known defeat, together with the sovereignty of India.
The new Scindhia was rotten, and now the Italian, broken down
with twenty years of service, longed for his home among the Italian
vineyards. Before parting with his highness, he warned him rather to
disband the whole army than ever be tempted into conflict with the
English. So De Boigne laid down the burden of the Indian empire,
and retired to his vineyards in Savoy. There for thirty years he
befriended the poor, lived simply, entertained royally, and so died full
of years and honors.
While De Boigne was still fighting for Scindhia, a runaway Irish
sailor had drifted up-country, and taken service in one of the native
states as a private soldier. George Thomas was as chivalrous as De
Boigne, with a great big heart, a clear head, a terrific sword, and a
reckless delight in war. Through years of rough and tumble
adventure he fought his way upward, until with his own army of five
thousand men he invaded and conquered the Hariana. This district,
just to the westward of Delhi, was a desert, peopled by tribes so
fierce that they had never been subdued, but their Irish king won all
their hearts, and they settled down quite peacefully under his
government. His revenue was eighteen hundred thousand pounds a
year. At Hansi, his capital town, he coined his own money, cast his
own cannon, made muskets and powder, and set up a pension fund
for widows and orphans of his soldiers. All round him were hostile
states, and whenever he felt dull he conquered a kingdom or so, and
levied tribute. If his men went hungry, he starved with them; if they
were weary, he marched afoot; the army worshiped him, and the
very terror of his name brought strong cities to surrender, put legions
of Sikh cavalry to flight. All things seemed possible to such a man,
even the conquest of great Hindustan.
De Boigne had been succeeded as commander-in-chief under
Scindhia by Perron, a runaway sailor, a Frenchman, able and strong.
De Boigne’s power had been a little thing compared with the might
and splendor of Perron, who actually reigned over Hindustan, stole
the revenues, and treated Scindhia’s orders with contempt. Perron
feared only one man on earth, this rival adventurer, this Irish rajah of
the Hariana, and sent an expedition to destroy him.
The new master of Hindustan detested the English, and
degrading the capable British officers who had served De Boigne,
procured Frenchmen to take their place, hairdressers, waiters,
scalawags, all utterly useless. Major Bourguien, the worst of the lot,
was sent against Thomas and got a thrashing.
But Thomas, poor soul, had a deadlier enemy than this coward,
and now lay drunk in camp for a week celebrating his victory instead
of attending to business. He awakened to find his force of five
thousand men besieged by thirty thousand veterans. There was no
water, spies burned his stacks of forage, his battalions were bribed
to desert, or lost all hope. Finally with three English officers and two
hundred cavalry, Thomas cut his way through the investing army and
fled to his capital.
The coward Bourguien had charge of the pursuing force that
now invested Hanei. Bourguien’s officers breached the walls and
took the town by storm, but Thomas fell back upon the citadel. Then
Bourguien sent spies to bribe the garrison that Thomas might be
murdered, but his officers went straight to warn the fallen king. To
them he surrendered.
 That night Thomas dined with the officers, and all were merry
when Bourguien proposed a toast insulting his prisoner. The officers
turned their glasses down refusing to drink. Thomas burst into tears;
but then he drew upon Bourguien, and waving the glittering blade,
“One Irish sword,” he cried, “is still sufficient for a hundred
Frenchmen!” Bourguien bolted.
Loyal in the days of his greatness, the fallen king was received
with honors at the British outposts upon the Ganges. There he was
giving valuable advice to the governor-general when a map of India
was laid before him, the British possessions marked red. He swept
his hand across India: “All this ought to be red.”
It is all red now, and the British conquest of India arose out of the
defense made by this great wild hero against General Perron, ruler
of Hindustan. Scindhia, who had lifted Perron from the dust, and
made him commander-in-chief of his army, was now in grave peril on
the Deccan, beset by the league of Mahratta princes. In his bitter
need he sent to Perron for succor. Perron, busy against his enemy in
the Hariana, left Scindhia to his fate.
Perron had no need of Scindhia now, but was leagued with
Napoleon to hand over the Indian empire to France. He betrayed his
master.
Now Scindhia, had the Frenchmen been loyal, could have
checked the Mahratta princes, but these got out of hand, and one of
them, Holkar, drove the Mahratta emperor, the peshwa of Poona,
from his throne. The peshwa fled to Bombay, and returned with a
British army under Sir Arthur Wellesley. So came the battle of
Assaye, wherein the British force of four thousand five hundred men
overthrew the Mahratta army of fifty thousand men, captured a
hundred guns, and won Poona, the capital of the South. Meanwhile
for fear of Napoleon’s coming, Perron, his servant, had to be
overthrown. A British army under General Lake swept Perron’s army
out of existence and captured Delhi, the capital of the North. Both
the capital cities of India fell to English arms, both emperors came
under British protection, and that vast empire was founded wherein
King George now reigns. As to Perron, his fall was pitiful, a freak of
cowardice. He betrayed everybody, and sneaked away to France
with a large fortune.
And Arthur Wellesley, victor in that stupendous triumph of
Assaye, became the Iron Duke of Wellington, destined to liberate
Europe at Waterloo.
 L
A. D. 1805
THE MAN WHO SHOT LORD NELSON

THIS story is from the memoirs of Robert Guillemard, a conscript in

the Grand Army of France, and to his horror drafted for a marine on
board the battle-ship Redoubtable. The Franco-Spanish fleet of
thirty-three battle-ships lay in Cadiz, and Villeneuve, the nice old
gentleman in command, was still breathless after being chased by
Lord Nelson across the Atlantic and back again. Now, having given
Nelson the slip, he had fierce orders from the Emperor Napoleon to
join the French channel fleet, for the invasion of England. The nice
old gentleman knew that his fleet was manned largely with helpless
recruits, ill-paid, ill-found, most scandalously fed, sick with a
righteous terror lest Nelson come and burn them in their harbor.
Then Nelson came, with twenty-seven battle-ships, raging for a
fight, and Villeneuve had to oblige for fear of Napoleon’s anger.
The fleets met off the sand-dunes of Cape Trafalgar, drawn up in
opposing lines for battle, and when they closed, young Guillemard’s
ship, the Redoubtable, engaged Lord Nelson’s Victory, losing thirty
men to her first discharge.
Guillemard had never been in action, and as the thunders broke
from the gun tiers below, he watched with mingled fear and rage the
rush of seamen at their work on deck, and his brothers of the
marines at their musketry, until everything was hidden in trailing
wreaths of smoke, from which came the screams of the wounded,
the groans of the dying.
 Some seventy feet overhead, at the caps of the lower masts,
were widespread platforms, the fighting tops on which the best
marksmen were always posted. “All our topmen,” says Guillemard,
“had been killed, when two sailors and four soldiers, of whom I was
one, were ordered to occupy their post in the tops. While we were
going aloft, the balls and grapeshot showered around us, struck the
masts and yards, knocked large splinters from them, and cut the
rigging to pieces. One of my companions was wounded beside me,
and fell from a height of thirty feet to the deck, where he broke his
neck. When I reached the top my first movement was to take a view
of the prospect presented by the hostile fleets. For more than a
league extended a thick cloud of smoke, above which were
discernible a forest of masts and rigging, and the flags, the pendants
and the fire of the three nations. Thousands of flashes, more or less
near, continually penetrated this cloud, and a rolling noise pretty
similar to the sound of thunder, but much stronger, arose from its
bosom.”
Guillemard goes on to describe a duel between the topmen of
the Redoubtable and those of the Victory only a few yards distant,
and when it was finished he lay alone among the dead who crowded
the swaying platform.
“On the poop of the English vessel was an officer covered with
orders and with only one arm. From what I had heard of Nelson I had
no doubt that it was he. He was surrounded by several officers, to
whom he seemed to be giving orders. At the moment I first perceived
him several of his sailors were wounded beside him by the fire of the
Redoubtable. As I had received no orders to go down, and saw
myself forgotten in the tops, I thought it my duty to fire on the poop of
the English vessel, which I saw quite clearly exposed, and close to
me. I could even have taken aim at the men I saw, but I fired at
hazard among the groups of sailors and officers. All at once I saw
great confusion on board the Victory; the men crowded round the
officer whom I had taken for Nelson. He had just fallen, and was
taken below covered with a cloak. The agitation shown at this
moment left me no doubt that I had judged rightly, and that it really
was the English admiral. An instant afterward the Victory ceased
from firing, the deck was abandoned.... I hurried below to inform the
captain.... He believed me the more readily as the slackening of the
fire indicated that an event of the highest importance occupied the
attention of the English ship’s crew.... He gave immediate orders for
boarding, and everything was prepared for it in a moment. It is even
said that young Fontaine, a midshipman ... passed by the ports into
the lower deck of the English vessel, found it abandoned, and
returned to notify that the ship had surrendered.... However, as a
part of our crew, commanded by two officers, were ready to spring
upon the enemy’s deck, the fire recommenced with a fury it had
never had from the beginning of the action.... In less than half an
hour our vessel, without having hauled down her colors, had in fact,
surrendered. Her fire had gradually slackened and then had ceased
altogether.... Not more than one hundred fifty men survived out of a
crew of about eight hundred, and almost all those were more or less
severely wounded.”
When these were taken on board the Victory, Guillemard learned
how the bullet which struck down through Lord Nelson’s shoulder
and shattered the spine below, had come from the fighting tops of
the Redoubtable, where he had been the only living soul. He speaks
of his grief as a man, his triumph as a soldier of France, who had
delivered his country from her great enemy. What it meant for
England judge now after nearly one hundred years, when one meets
a bluejacket in the street with the three white lines of braid upon his
collar in memory of Nelson’s victories at Copenhagen, the Nile and
Trafalgar, and the black neckcloth worn in mourning for his death.
It seemed at the time that the very winds sang Nelson’s requiem,
for with the night came a storm putting the English shattered fleet in
mortal peril, while of the nineteen captured battle-ships not one was
fit to brave the elements. For, save some few vessels that basely ran
away before the action, both French and Spaniards had fought with
sublime desperation, and when the English prize-crews took
possession, they and their prisoners were together drowned. The
Aigle was cast away, and not one man escaped; the Santissima
Trinidad, the largest ship in the world, foundered; the Indomitable
sank with fifteen hundred wounded; the Achille, with her officers
shooting themselves, her sailors drunk, went blazing through the
storm until the fire caught her magazine. And so with the rest of
eighteen blood-soaked wrecks, burned, foundered, or cast away,
while only one outlived that night of horror.

Lord Nelson

When the day broke Admiral Villeneuve was brought on board

the Victory, where Nelson lay in state, for the voyage to England.
Villeneuve, wounded in the hand, was unable to write, and sent
among the French prisoners for a clerk. For this service Guillemard
volunteered as the only uninjured soldier who could write. So
Guillemard attended the admiral all through the months of their
residence at Arlesford, in Devon, where they were at large on parole.
The old man was treated with respect and sympathy.
Prisoners of war are generally released by exchange between
fighting powers, rank for rank, man for man; but after five months
Villeneuve was allowed to return to France. He pledged his honor
that unless duly exchanged he would surrender again on the English
coast at the end of ninety days. So, attended by Guillemard and his
servant, he crossed the channel, and from the town of Rennes—the
place where Dreyfus had his trial not long ago—he wrote despatches
to the government in Paris. He was coming, he said in a private
letter, to arraign most of his surviving captains on the charge of
cowardice at Trafalgar.
Of this it seems the captains got some warning, and decided that
for the sake of their own health Villeneuve should not reach Paris
alive.
Anyway, Guillemard says that while the admiral lay in the Hotel
de Bresil, at Rennes, five strangers appeared—men in civilian dress,
who asked him many questions about Villeneuve. The secretary was
proud of his master, glad to talk about so distinguished a man, and
thought no evil when he gave his answers. The leader of the five
was a southern Frenchman, the others foreigners, deeply tanned,
who wore mustaches—in those days an unusual ornament.
That night the admiral had gone to bed in his room on the first
floor of the inn, and the secretary was asleep on the floor above. A
cry disturbed him, and taking his sword and candle, he ran down-
stairs in time to see the five strangers sneak by him hurriedly.
Guillemard rushed to the admiral’s room “and saw the unfortunate
man, whom the balls of Trafalgar had respected, stretched pale and
bloody on his bed. He ... breathed hard, and struggled with the
agonies of death.... Five deep wounds pierced his breast.”
So it was the fate of the slayer of Nelson to be alone with
Villeneuve at his death.
 When he reached Paris the youngster was summoned to the
Tuileries, and the Emperor Napoleon made him tell the whole story
of the admiral’s assassination. Yet officially the death was
announced as suicide, and Guillemard met the leader of the five
assassins walking in broad daylight on the boulevards.
The lad kept his mouth shut.
Guillemard lived to fight in many of the emperor’s battles, to be
one of the ten thousand prisoners of the Spaniards on the desert
island of the Cabrera, whence he made a gallant escape; to be a
prisoner of the Russians in Siberia; to assist in King Murat’s flight
from France; and, finally, after twenty years of adventure, to return
with many wounds and few honors to his native village.
 LI
A. D. 1812
THE FALL OF NAPOLEON

THE greatest of modern adventurers, Napoleon Bonaparte, was

something short of a gentleman, a person of mean build, coarse
tastes, odious manners and defective courage, yet gifted with
Satanic beauty of face, charm that bewitched all fighting men,
stupendous genius in war and government. Beginning as a penniless
lieutenant of French artillery, he rose to be captain, colonel, general,
commander-in-chief, consul of France, emperor of the French,
master of Europe, almost conqueror of the world—and he was still
only thirty-three years of age, when at the height of his glory, he
invaded Russia. His army of invasion was gathered from all his
subject nations—Germans, Swiss, Italians, Poles, Austrians,
numbering more than half a million men, an irresistible and
overwhelming force, launched like a shell into the heart of Russia.
The Russian army could not hope to defeat Napoleon, was
routed again and again in attempting to check his advance, yet in
retreating laid the country waste, burned all the standing harvest,
drove away the cattle, left the towns in ashes. Napoleon’s host
marched through a desert, while daily, by waste of battle, wreckage
of men left with untended wounds, horrors of starvation, and wolf-like
hordes of Cossacks who cut off all the stragglers, the legions were
swept away. In Lithuania alone Napoleon lost a hundred thousand
men, and that only a fourth part of those who perished before the
army reached the gates of Moscow.
That old city, hallowed by centuries of brave endeavor, stored
with the spoils of countless victories, that holy place at the very sight
of which the Russian traveler prostrated himself in prayer, had been
made ready for Napoleon’s coming. Never has any nation prepared
so awful a sacrifice as that which wrenched a million people from
their homes. The empty capital was left in charge of a few officers,
then all the convicts were released and provided with torches. Every
vestige of food had been taken away, but the gold, the gems, the
silver, the precious things of treasuries, churches and palaces,
remained as bait.
Despite the horrors of the march, Napoleon’s entry was attended
by all the gorgeous pageantry of the Grand Army, a blaze of gold
and color, conquered Europe at the heels of the little Corsican
adventurer with waving flags and triumphal music. The cavalry found
cathedrals for stabling, the guard had palaces for barracks, where
they could lie at ease through the winter; but night after night the
great buildings burst into flames, day after day the foraging parties
were caught in labyrinths of blazing streets, and the army staled on a
diet of wine and gold in the burning capital.
In mortal fear the emperor attempted to treat for peace, but
Russia kept him waiting for a month, while her troops closed down
on the line of escape, and the winter was coming on—the Russian
winter.
From the time when the retreat began through a thousand miles
of naked wilderness, not a single ration was issued to the starving
army. The men were loaded with furs, brocades, chalices, ingots of
silver, bars of gold and jewels, but they had no food. The transport
numbered thousands of carts laden with grain, but the horses died
because there was no forage, so all the commissariat, except
Napoleon’s treasure train, was left wrecked by the wayside.
Then the marching regiments were placed in the wake of the
cavalry, that they might get the dying horses for food, but when the
cold came there was no fuel to cook the frozen meat, and men’s lips
would bleed when they tried to gnaw that ice. So the wake of the
army was a wide road blocked with broken carts, dead horses,
abandoned guns, corpses of men, where camp followers remained
to murder the dying, strip the dead and gather the treasures of
Moscow, the swords, the gold lace, the costly uniforms, until they
were slaughtered by the Cossacks. Then came the deep snow which
covered everything.
No words of mine could ever tell the story, but here are passages
from the Memoirs of Sergeant Burgogne (Heineman). I have
ventured to condense parts of his narrative, memories of the lost
army, told by one who saw. He had been left behind to die:—
“At that moment the moon came out, and I began to walk faster.
In this immense cemetery and this awful silence I was alone, and I
began to cry like a child. The tears relieved me, gradually my
courage came back, and feeling stronger, I set out again, trusting to
God’s mercy, taking care to avoid the dead bodies.
“I noticed something I took for a wagon. It was a broken canteen
cart, the horses which had drawn it not only dead, but partly cut to
pieces for eating. Around the cart were seven dead bodies almost
naked, and half covered with snow; one of them still covered with a
cloak and a sheepskin. On stooping to look at the body I saw that it
was a woman. I approached the dead woman to take the sheepskin
for a covering, but it was impossible to move it. A piercing cry came
from the cart. ‘Marie! Marie! I am dying!’
“Mounting on the body of the horse in the shafts I steadied
myself by the top of the cart. I asked what was the matter. A feeble
voice answered, ‘Something to drink!’
“I thought at once of the frozen blood in my pouch, and tried to
get down to fetch it, but the moon suddenly disappeared behind a
great black cloud, and I as suddenly fell on top of three dead bodies.
My head was down lower than my legs, and my face resting on one
of the dead hands. I had been accustomed for long enough to this
sort of company, but now—I suppose because I was alone—an
awful feeling of terror came over me—I could not move, and I began
screaming like a madman—I tried to help myself up by my arm, but
found my hand on a face, and my thumb went into its mouth. At that
moment the moon came out.
 “But a change came over me now. I felt ashamed of my
weakness, and a wild sort of frenzy instead of terror took possession
of me. I got up raving and swearing, and trod on anything that came
near me ... and I cursed the sky above me, defying it, and taking my
musket, I struck at the cart—very likely I struck also at the poor
devils under my feet.”
Such was the road, and here was the passing of the army which
Burgogne had overtaken.
“This was November twenty-five, 1812, perhaps about seven
o’clock in the morning, and as yet it was hardly light. I was musing
on all that I had seen, when the head of the column appeared. Those
in advance seemed to be generals, a few on horseback, but the
greater part on foot. There were also a great number of other
officers, the remnant of the doomed squadron and battalion formed
on the twenty-second and barely existing at the end of three days.
Those on foot dragged themselves painfully along, almost all of them
having their feet frozen and wrapped in rags, and all nearly dying of
hunger. Afterward came the small remains of the cavalry of the
guard. The emperor came next on foot, carrying a baton, Murat
walked on foot at his right, and on his left, the Prince Eugene,
viceroy of Italy. Next came the marshals—Berthier, Prince of
Neuchâtel, Ney, Mortier, Lefevre, with other marshals and generals
whose corps were nearly annihilated. Seven or eight hundred
officers and non-commissioned officers followed walking in order,
and perfect silence, and carrying the eagles of their different
regiments which had so often led them to victory. This was all that
remained of sixty thousand men. After them came the imperial
guard. And men cried at seeing the emperor on foot.”
So far the army had kept its discipline, and at the passage of the
River Berezina the engineers contrived to build a bridge. But while
the troops were crossing, the Russians began to drive the rear
guard, and the whole herd broke into panic. “The confusion and
disorder went on increasing, and reached their full height when
Marshal Victor was attacked by the Russians, and shells and bullets
showered thickly upon us. To complete our misery, snow began to
fall, and a cold wind blew. This dreadful state of things lasted all day
and through the next night, and all this time the Berezina became
gradually filled with ice, dead bodies of men and horses, while the
bridge got blocked up with carts full of wounded men, some of which
rolled over the edge into the water. Between eight and nine o’clock
that evening, Marshal Victor began his retreat. He and his men had
to cross the bridge over a perfect mountain of corpses.”
Still thousands of stragglers had stayed to burn abandoned
wagons, and make fires to warm them before they attempted the
bridge. On these the Russians descended, but it was too late for
flight, and of the hundreds who attempted to swim the river, not one
reached the farther bank. To prevent the Russians from crossing, the
bridge was set on fire, and so horror was piled on horror that it would
be gross offense to add another word.
Of half a million men who had entered Russia, there were only
twenty-five thousand left after that crossing of the Berezina. These
were veterans for the most part, skilled plunderers, who foraged for
themselves, gleaning a few potatoes from stripped fields, shooting
stray Cossacks for the food they had in their wallets, trading with the
Jews who lurked in ruined towns, or falling back at the worst on
frozen horse-flesh. Garrisons left by Napoleon on his advance fell in
from time to time with the retreating army, but unused to the new
conditions, wasted rapidly. The veterans found their horses useful for
food, and left afoot, they perished.
Even to the last, remnants of lost regiments rallied to the golden
eagles upon their standards, but these little clusters of men no
longer kept their ranks, for as they marched the strong tried to help
the weak, and often comrades would die together rather than part.
All were frozen, suffering the slow exhaustion of dysentery, the
miseries of vermin and starvation, and those who lived to the end
were broken invalids, who never again could serve the emperor.
From Smorgony, Napoleon went ahead, traveling rapidly to send
the relief of sleighs and food which met the survivors on the German
border. Thence he went on to Paris to raise a new army; for now
there was conspiracy in France for the overthrow of the despot, and
Europe rose to destroy him. So on the field of Leipsic, in the battle of
the nations, Napoleon was overwhelmed.
Once again he challenged fate, escaped from his island prison of
Elba, and with a third army marched against armed Europe. And so
came Waterloo, with that last banishment to Saint Helena, where the
great adventurer fretted out his few sore years, dreaming of glories
never to be revived and that great empire which was forever lost.
 LII
A. D. 1813
RISING WOLF

THIS is the story of Rising Wolf, condensed from the beautiful

narrative in My Life as an Indian, by J. B. Schultz.
“I had heard much of a certain white man named Hugh Monroe,
and in Blackfoot, Rising Wolf. One afternoon I was told that he had
arrived in camp with his numerous family, and a little later met him at
a feast given by Big Lake. In the evening I invited him over to my
lodge and had a long talk with him while he ate bread and meat and
beans, and smoked numerous pipefuls of tobacco.” White man’s
food is good after years without any. “We eventually became firm
friends. Even in his old age Rising Wolf was the quickest, most
active man I ever saw. He was about five feet six in height, fair-
haired, blue-eyed, and his firm square chin and rather prominent
nose betokened what he was, a man of courage and determination.
His father, Hugh Monroe, was a colonel in the British army, his
mother a member of the La Roches, a noble family of French
émigrés, bankers of Montreal and large land owners in that vicinity.
“Hugh, junior, was born on the family estate at Three Rivers
(Quebec) and attended the parish school just long enough to learn to
read and write. All his vacations and many truant days from the class
room were spent in the great forest surrounding his home. The love
of nature, of adventure and wild life were born in him. He first saw
the light in July, 1798. In 1813, when but fifteen years of age, he
persuaded his parents to allow him to enter the service of the
Hudson’s Bay Company and started westward with a flotilla of that
company’s canoes that spring. His father gave him a fine English