{"id":199,"date":"2013-01-28T23:20:31","date_gmt":"2013-01-28T23:20:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.peterwoolley.co.uk\/blog\/?p=199"},"modified":"2014-11-25T19:16:21","modified_gmt":"2014-11-25T19:16:21","slug":"monday-iles-du-salut-devils-island","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.peterwoolley.co.uk\/blog\/monday-iles-du-salut-devils-island\/","title":{"rendered":"Monday – Iles Du Salut – Devils Island"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Today, we arrived in Iles Due Salut, better known as the infamous French penal colony of Devil’s Island, made famous by the book ‘Papillon’, by Henri Charriere, and, later, the film starring Steve McQueen and Dustin Hoffman. Actually, there are three islands here; Iles Royale, Iles St Joseph, and Illes du Diablo. The island we were visiting was Iles Royale, which was actually used mostly for administrative purposes, although there were cells here, used for some of the lesser convicts. Iles Du Diablo, or Devils Island, was where the worse inmates were sent; transferred by a pulley wire from the larger island.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Last year, this stop was one of the highlights of the whole trip, and today it didn’t disappoint either. It was a half-day stop again, so we planned to start in the centre of the island, and check out the old buildings, then work our way out around the perimeter. Tender boats took people to the island, and the seas were choppy, making transferring people from ship to boat quite a challenge; the fact is, there had only been a 50\/50 chance that we might not have made it onto the island at all, if the sea had been any choppier… thankfully, we did.<\/span><\/p>\n

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Despite its dark history (Google ‘Dreyfus’, a notorious inmate charged with treason, to see just how horrific man’s treatment of his fellow man can stoop – he had a far worse time of it than Papillon), the island is an absolute joy to behold. It absolutely bursts with life; we saw monkeys, Palm Rats, parrots, and even a couple of humming birds. We didn’t get to see any turtles this time around, as we found ourselves running out of time yet again (and Tracey had a bit of a major disaster with her camera). Someone did report having spotted a shark, though, which is a bit of a coup… the waters around these islands are apparently festooned with them. In Papillon’s day, a guillotine mounted in one of the central courtyards had a channel for the blood to flow directly to the sea, and prisoners who died (and there were many of them; of the 700 who were sent there at a time, only 10% would live to see out their sentence, the remainder, who would die from from leprosy, malnutrition, or far more exotic diseases) where simply thrown into the sea… all to attract the sharks, and discourage prisoners from trying to swim to freedom.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Today, we arrived in Iles Due Salut, better known as the infamous French penal colony of Devil’s Island, made famous by the book ‘Papillon’, by Henri Charriere, and, later, the film starring Steve McQueen and Dustin Hoffman. Actually, there are three islands here; Iles Royale, Iles St Joseph, and Illes du Diablo. The island we were visiting was Iles Royale,...<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[5,6],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.peterwoolley.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/199"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.peterwoolley.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.peterwoolley.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.peterwoolley.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.peterwoolley.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=199"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.peterwoolley.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/199\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":200,"href":"https:\/\/www.peterwoolley.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/199\/revisions\/200"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.peterwoolley.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=199"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.peterwoolley.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=199"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.peterwoolley.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=199"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}