The Îles du Salut are three jungle-covered islands fifteen kilometres off French Guiana, near Kourou, and their name means Islands of Salvation. That sounds like a bitter joke for a place that held France's harshest penal colony. The name is a century older than the prison, and it once meant what it says. In 1763 France shipped some 14,000 settlers to Kourou on the mainland; within months about 11,000 were dead of fever and starvation. The survivors rowed out to these breezy, near mosquito-free islands to recover before sailing home, and named them for their deliverance. Only in 1852 did the state turn that refuge into a prison, and it ran until 1953. Île Royale was the headquarters, its barracks, chapel and hospital now ruins you can walk through. On Île Saint-Joseph men spent years in silence in isolation cells the forest has since grown into.
Coming in by boat you see Saint-Joseph as a green dome of palms rising out of the Atlantic, with nothing about it to suggest what stands under the canopy. A weathered stone cross rises among the palms at the guards' cemetery, marking the staff who died on an island built to punish other people. The currents driving through the channels between them are why the prison never needed a wall in the water. The Guiana Space Centre now launches over their heads. The islands entered legend through Papillon, Henri Charrière's 1969 memoir of an escape. Historians read much of it as borrowed from other men, and he was most likely never held on Devil's Island at all. It is the smallest of the three. From the shore of Île Royale it lies across a narrow channel, a low hump of palms that looks close enough for you to swim to. It never was. Sharks and violent currents run through that water, and no prisoner ever crossed it. Alfred Dreyfus was carried over to his stone hut on the point by a cable car strung above it. Landing there is still forbidden, so the view from this side is as close as you will get.