the Guianas, French and Dutch

When one looks down on those huge twin beds from an enormous height, they can scarcely be told apart. Each one appears to be covered with a green counterpane, the endless roof of the green jungle. For these two Guianas are virtually all jungle, nearly a hundred thousand square miles of it.

But at ground level, as I knew from previous visits, there would be a riot of color: not only the violent colors of tropic birds but the crazy-quilt pattern of the costumes of Java and other parts of the Far East, the Congo black man and the Carib red man, all under that jungle roof.

Loren Tutell and I flew from Martinique to Cayenne, the capital of French Guiana, on the afternoon of May 31, 1941, to make motion pictures in color of the colony and of its penal camps.

Cayenne has some 13,000 people, of whom scarcely a thousand are of white blood. The Cayenne River bounds it on the west, the ocean on the north, and the jungle hems it in on the other two sides. Our Pan American Airways seaplane's "landing field" in the river seemed deep in the jungle, although actually only three or four miles from town.

At the pier we handed our passports to a diminutive French military policeman whose uniform consisted of brown shorts and an open-necked shirt, approved costume for Cayenne's hot and muggy climate.

We went on by taxi to the center of town. Color was everywhere. I remember one little street lined with tiny houses set in gardens, no two houses alike in color. Blue, yellow, red-brown, each sang a different tune, a dancing tune. We passed a garden wall of pink stone, with a big gate of delicate iron grill-work, and behind it a hedge of vivid green.

The hedge enclosed a house of three stories, each a different color. The first floor was pale blue, the second canary yellow, the third deep blue, and the roof was bright red.

Our hotel fronted on the Savane, the city's principal public square, shaded by tall palm-trees and palmettos.

That evening we watched the citizens parading in their finery. Nine out of ten persons on the streets were black, or shades of black, although there were many Chinese, Indo-Chinese, and a few Indians.

At the gates of the Governor's Palace Senegalese soldiers in colorful uniform stood guard. Splendid fighters, these troops, numbering only a few hundred, are the entire military force of the colony, except for the military police, who guard the prison camps.

Governor Robert Chot, of dynamic personality, wiry and athletic, with coal-black hair and flashing eyes, seemed even younger than his forty-odd years. Already he had served France in the colonial administration of Madagascar and Pondichery.

Much of the wealth of French Guiana lies in the forests, whose stands of greenheart and purpleheart timber in the Territory of Inini seem inexhaustible. These woods are highly prized for shipbuilding and dock building, because of their resistance to borer insects. Much timber is felled by convict labor.

We accompanied the Governor in his little launch to one of the largest of these prison camps in the forest, near Cayenne. Here were some 175 prisoners, all from French Indo-China. Some were felling timber with two-man saws, others pulled up stumps with a tractor. Their midmorning meal was brought them in two baskets suspended from a pole slung across the shoulders of a Tonkinese coolie.

One basket was heaped with cooked rice. The other was laden with casseroles containing shrimps, pork, string beans, corned beef, and stews of meat and fish.

"They are served this sort of meal twice a day," said the Governor.

"And on Sundays," added the commandant, "if they have behaved themselves well during the preceding week, they are allowed to fish and hunt. They find game plentiful-wild pig, agouti, deer, and birds."

We strolled from the timber clearing to the big barn, both the repair shop for the tractors and the warehouse for the food supplies, passing a meadow on the way. Rice was growing in its rich wet soil.

Back in Cayenne I met a young French physician named Floch, who had been associated with the Pasteur Institute, in Paris. He arrived in Cayenne late in 1938 and heroically attacked the leprosy problem singlehanded…"