DRY GUILLOTINE — René Belbenoit —Button ($3).
Most contemporary tales of Devil's Island and its fugitives are traceable to the career of one man—a diminutive Frenchman named René Belbenoit. In 1927 he supplied Blair Niles with the background material for her best-selling romance, Condemned, to Devil's Island. On May 2, 1935, Rene Belbenoit made his fifth escape from Devil's Island. When he arrived in Los Angeles, two years later, an emaciated, toothless old man of 38, the legends circulated about that sensational escape had made him the best-known fugitive ever to be confined to French Guiana's famed penal colony. With him he carried, wrapped in oil paper, 30 pounds of closely-written manuscript describing his 15-year imprisonment.
Last week that 30-pound manuscript was published—a grisly, 345-page document that sent queasy readers out for fresh air, sounded fantastic enough to be the truth. Less emotional than Dreyfus' famed account of his five-year exile, Belbenoit's covers more ground, is heavy with unrelieved nightmare.
Though each year 700 new convicts arrive at Devil's Island, at year's end death and desertion account for about 700 missing. Thus the convict population remains constant at about 3,500. Dry Guillotine illustrates these grim statistics in the making, grinds on with an almost casual description of diseases, guillotinings, tortures, feuds, corruption. In the end a kind of tranquillity creeps into Belbenoit's account.
He tried four times to escape. The second time, he and eight companions got hold of an Indian dugout, headed into the Caribbean. When they ran into rough weather and it turned out that none of them knew navigation, they beached the boat, started back through dense jungle for the Penal Colony. A peg-legged convict killed a comrade for his can of condensed milk, and the leader in turn killed him. They roasted and ate his liver and his good left leg, of which Belbenoit confesses that one mouthful (which tasted like wild pig) was enough for him.
Belbenoit's third and fourth abortive escapes were financed with the money paid him by Authoress Blair Niles. It was seven years before he made his successful fifth escape. Again he got an Indian dugout, with five fellow-fugitives headed for the U. S. Fourteen days later, lucky to be only half dead, they reached Trinidad. The sympathetic British took them in, gave them a new boat, told them to push on. In Colombia, their boat wrecked, robbed by Indians, they skulked naked along the coast for a week, finally reached a Colombian town, where they were arrested. Belbenoit's comrades were deported. He was allowed to escape after writing a series of articles for the local paper. In five months he reached Panama by paddling stolen canoes (21 in all) along the coast.
His story told to properly dumbfounded reporters in Panama City, he stayed seven months with the primitive Indians in the Darien back country, then pushed on through Central America. Except for being robbed once, his luck held. By truck and Shank's mare he reached La Libertad. There he stowed away on a freighter bound for Vancouver. Seven days later he staggered out of the hold, walked unmolested down the gangplank at San Pedro. When he asked where the car tracks went, a workman said: "To Los Angeles, you done!"