Succeeding colonization companies were failures. Mismanagement and Misfortune were president and vice-president of the ventures. For example, in 1763, 12,000 volunteer colonists came to French Guiana, with the promise of free lands, which proved to be free graves. By 1765, 11,000 died. They landed and lived in mud and water; there were no tools for tilling the soil, yet they had a shop to make skates in this equatorial clime; drinking water there was none, probably because they thought it would rain or they might be able to get wine; rivers rose, and not knowing how to dike them, those who lived through the fevers died from the floods. Such colonial schemes are finely satirized by Daudet in his “Port Tarascon.” At best, the French are the worst colonizers, whether here or in Tahiti, Marquesas, Caledonia, Panama, Algeria, Canada and Martinique. Cayenne next became the criminal cesspool of France, costing the lives of hundreds and 800,000 livres. During the French Revolution men were arrested in Paris, paraded before the populace like wild beasts in cages, then shipped to Cayenne, the white man’s grave. Of 600 Royalists transported here and landed on the Sinnamaire River without shelter or food, two-thirds perished. Often they were brutally murdered before reaching there, according to De Vigny’s story of “Laurette or the Red Seal.” The country was dubbed the “dry guillotine,” and it is said that a prisoner who had the choice between it and the blood-wet one in Paris, chose the latter. In 1852 free transportation was offered as a “favor” and more than 3,000 accepted. In 1854 Napoleon III, that third-class Napoleon, made Cayenne a penal colony for his political enemies, as if he hadn’t already enough crimes to atone for. Between 1852 and 1867, 18,000 exiles were brought over, although New Caledonia for the next 20 years became the ticket-of-leave tourist resort. In 1885-7 confirmed criminals, and those with more than 8-year sentences to hard labor, were shipped here. However, they have proved unfit for government employment. Convicts formerly sent to Caledonia had such lease of long life, that they are now sent to Guiana to reduce living expenses. Grave-digging, next to gold-digging, is the principal occupation.