My next expedition was to include the forest camps to the south-west of the island, and a visit to the Isle of Pines, an ocean paradise of which I had read much in the days of my youth; wherefore I looked forward with some anticipation to seeing it with the eyes of flesh. There would be no steamer for three or four days, so the next day I took a trip over to the Peninsula of Ducos, to the northward of the bay. The glory of Ducos as a penal settlement is past. There are now only a few “politicals,” and traitors, and convicts condemned a _perpétuité_; that is to say, prisoners for life, with no hope of remission or release. A considerable proportion of them are in hospital, dragging out the remainder of their hopeless days, waiting until this or the other disease gives them final release. [Illustration: The Peninsula of Ducos. In the background is Ile Nou with the Central Criminal Depôt.] On another part of the peninsula, in a semi-circular valley, hemmed in by precipitous hills, there is a piteously forlorn colony, that of the _liberés collectifs_; that is to say, convicts who have been released from prison, but are compelled to live in one place under supervision. They are mostly men whose health has broken down under the work of the _bagne_, or who have been released on account of old age. They live in wretched little cabins on the allotments, which it is their business to keep in some sort of cultivation. They have the poor privileges of growing beards and moustaches if they like, and of wearing blue dungaree instead of grey, and of earning a few pence a week by selling their produce to the Administration. This is not much, but they are extremely proud of it, and hold themselves much higher than the common _forçat_. They do not consider themselves prisoners, but only “in the service of the Administration.” I have seldom, if ever, seen a more forlorn and hopeless collection of human beings in all my wanderings. There was, however, a time when Ducos was one of the busiest and most important of the New Caledonian Settlements, for it was here that the most notorious and most dangerous of the _communards_ were imprisoned after their suppression in 1872. Here lived Louise Michel, the high-priestess of anarchy, devoting herself to the care of the sick and the sorrowing with a self-sacrifice which rivalled even that of the Sisters of Mercy, and here, too, Henri Rochefort lived in a tiny stone house in the midst of what was once a garden, and the delight of his days of exile. Louise Michel’s house has disappeared in the course of improvements. Rochefort’s house is a roofless ruin in the midst of a jungle which takes a good deal of getting through. It was from here that he made his escape with Pain and Humbert and two other _communards_ in an English cutter, which may or may not have been in the harbour for that particular purpose.