A CRUISER'S VIEW OF BEQUIA - Caribbean Compass

NOVEMBER 2008 CARIBBEAN COMPASS PAGE 40
A Different
Island Memoir
Papillon, by Henri Charrière. Harper Perennial Modern Classics ©2005, paperback,
688 pages, ISBN 9780007179961.
When cruisers sail around the Cape of Good Hope bound for the Caribbean, many
stop at Les Iles du Salut off French Guiana. These islands gained a sinister reputation
because of the former French penal colony there. The prison was closed in 1947,
and has since become an attraction for bluewater sailors. There is a good, sheltered
anchorage south of Ile Royale (5°17’N, 52°35’W). Reading Papillon while anchored
here ranks among cruising’s top reading experiences.
Many will remember “Papillon” as a movie starring the tough guy and the short fry:
Steve McQueen and Dustin Hoffman. It is considered a classic. Perhaps of lesser
fame is the book. In 1969 Henri Charrière, called “Papillon” for the butterfly tattoo
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BOOK REVIEW BY RYAN WEAVER
on his chest, published an autobiography that makes the movie seem a cheap Cliffs
Notes version of the truth.
Charrière wouldn’t have thought of writing his story, according to the introduction
of Papillon, if he hadn’t chanced upon a book by Albertine Sarrazin, who was then
famous for her true prison escape yarns. Charrière was inspired. He began scribbling
in spiral-bound notebooks of the type students have. In two months he’d filled 13 of
them. He sent the books to the same publisher Sarrazin used, accompanied by this
note: “Here are my adventures: have a professional write them up.”
But the great charm of the book proved to be Charrière’s colloquial style, so it was
left his own. He is a charismatic storyteller with one of those rare minds prone to
recalling rich and explicit detail, and it doesn’t require a stretch of the imagination
to transport oneself to the penal colony, to see oneself perspiring in the shade of an
island palm, listening to Charrière begin at the beginning.
“It was a knockout blow…” the book opens, “a punch so overwhelming that I didn’t
get back on my feet for fourteen years.” Charrière was convicted of murder in 1931
(he forever claimed innocence) and sent to the crumbling, disease ridden penal colonies
(bagnes) in French Guiana, where the purpose of his existence found new definition:
ESCAPE. The bagnes were already infamous in France thanks to the “Alfred
Dreyfus Affair,” in which a young Jewish captain in the French Army was wrongly,
and famously, convicted of selling military secrets to Germany in 1894. Even after
proven innocent, Dreyfus was left to rot for a shameful length of time on Diable
(Devil’s Island), one of Les Iles du Salut.
The bagnes were built under Napoleon III, who, when asked, “Who will guard these
bandits?” replied, “Worse bandits.” Prisoners were shipped first to the mainland
penitentiary of Grande Terre, then siphoned off to more secure islands according to
the severity of their crimes. Three penal islands lay just off the Caribbean coastline:
Ile Royale, Saint-Joseph, and Diable. Collectively known as the Iles du Salut, or
“Safety Islands,” they were more difficult to escape from but did not prove a sanctuary
from the plentiful plagues of the mainland.
Papillon contends that 80 percent of the population died in the bagnes annually.
Not so much from assassinations (plentiful) or beatings (plentiful) as from leprosy,
yellow fever, dysentery, tuberculosis, malaria, and other tropical delicacies. The odds
against living — let alone escaping successfully — are what make Papillon’s true trials
and tribulations worthy of being classified among other amazing triumphs of
human will. “Each time I was tempted to despair,” Charrière said, “I would repeat
three times: ‘As long as there’s life, there’s hope.’”
It would be a spoiler to go into detail about the escape attempts, except to mention
that Charrière was a creative man, never escaping the same way twice. He employed
bludgeon, riot, raft, sleeping potion, dynamite, boat, and the good old wall hop. Most
of the time he had accomplices in fellow prisoners and guards and even wardens
whose palms had been greased. While on the lam, everyone seemed to want to help
him. Most notably, the rotting lepers on the Ile aux Pigeons, the bishop and nuns of
Curaçao, a lawyer and his family in Trinidad, and the Guajira Indians, who not only
adopted Charrière but presented him with a pair of youthful wives. Apparently,
everybody considered the French justice system an abomination that deserved to be
escaped from.
No matter how charming the film is, it becomes clear that Charrière and his memoir
Papillon are superior — not only for being true but for the very depth of that truth.
The movie had the odds stacked against it from the beginning: a film that hoped to
be completely faithful to the book would run about 26 hours long.
What did the film omit? Escapes, mostly. “Papillon” the movie presents only a third
of the escapes that actually took place, and even those aren’t accurate: the first is
made up, the second ends prematurely and the final one did not, in fact, end with
Charrière floating on a sack of coconuts in the Caribbean Sea shouting in a cracked
and tattered voice, “I’m still here, you bastards!”
The tropical Iles du Salut permanently closed their gates to prisoners not long after
Charrière’s final escape. These days the rotting ruins are tourist attractions, Caribbean
versions of Alcatraz that, for all their barbarity, failed to castrate the part of the human
spirit that clings to hope — and never more poignantly than in Henri Charrière.
Available at bookstores and via online booksellers.
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