As I watched them I thought of the quiet-spoken, square-headed despot with whom I had been talking a day or two before. These men, like hundreds of others that I saw, evidently knew him, if only by repute. Presently the surveillant who had taken my cameras came and saluted and told me that the _canot_ was ready. I got in, and found it manned by twelve convicts, who were protected by an awning stretched from stem to stern. They were chatting and smoking when we got in, and my conductor, thinking perhaps to impress the Englishman with a sense of French discipline, ordered them to be silent. They stopped talking for five minutes while they got under weigh, then, like a lot of school-boys, they began again, whereupon the surveillant rebuked them again. “_Silence, je vous dis!_” said he in his most authoritative tone; and they obliged him more or less for the rest of the passage. I must say that they rowed very well, and with a vigour which betokened good nourishment. They looked at me with smiling curiosity. They evidently knew pretty well all about me by this time—Heaven and the mysterious “_loi du bagne_” only know how; and I daresay they wondered why any one should have taken the trouble to come across the world just to make their acquaintance. I was received on the quay at Ile Nou by an officer—a chief warder, as we should call him in England—who took me to the Commandant’s house. _En route_ I found that Ile Nou, about which I had read such terrible stories, is a very pleasant little settlement, composed of white houses and shady streets, at the foot of a hill on which the great prison buildings stand. In a few minutes another illusion was shattered. I admit that I expected to find the Commandant of the greatest prison in Caledonia a semi-military despot in a braided uniform, boots and spurs, with a sword, and, possibly, a revolver, to say nothing of fiercely waxed moustache and imperial. Instead of this I found a mild-mannered, grey-haired gentleman of about sixty, clad in a _négligé_ white suit, with no sign of official rank about him save a silver-embroidered blue band round the left cuff of his coat, which reminded me rather oddly of the band that a British policeman wears when he is on duty. He was drinking his early coffee and receiving reports, which were noted by a convict clerk at another table. He gave me a cup of coffee, and ordered the carriage to be got ready. Meanwhile, he dropped his reports and began to ask me about my journey, my impressions of New Caledonia, and so on. Presently a surveillant came in to say that the carriage was ready. We got in, and a couple of well-bred, well-fed horses pulled us at a good pace up the winding road, until our convict driver halted in front of a big black iron door in a long white-washed wall. As the Chief Surveillant put his key into the lock the Commandant said to me, with a smile: “You will be the first Englishman who has ever passed this gate.”