The Îles du Salut are three jungle-covered islands fifteen kilometres off the coast of French Guiana, near Kourou, that held France's harshest penal colony from 1852 until 1953, Devil's Island among them, and their ruined cellblocks under the coconut palms now lie beneath the flight paths of the rockets launched from the space centre on the mainland. The name means Islands of Salvation, which sounds like bitter irony for a prison, but it is a century older than the colony and meant what it says: settlers dying of fever on the mainland in 1763 found the islands healthier and were saved by them. Île Royale was the headquarters, with the barracks, the chapel, the hospital and the director's house, now a small inn, in walkable ruins among the palms; Île Saint-Joseph held the solitary confinement blocks, where men spent years in silence in roofless cells that the jungle has grown into, and a weathered stone cross rises among the coconut palms in the guards' cemetery. Devil's Island itself, the smallest, was for political prisoners, most famously Alfred Dreyfus, who spent four years in a hut there, and it is closed to visitors.
From the shore of Île Royale Devil's Island lies across a narrow channel, a low hump of palms that seems close enough to swim to, though the current between them is what kept the prisoners in. The islands entered legend through Papillon, Henri Charrière's 1969 memoir of a convict's escape from them on a raft of coconuts, a global bestseller and two films, much of which was probably borrowed from other men's stories. On the exposed side the Atlantic swell pounds bare rock beneath wind-bent palms, and agoutis, macaws and monkeys have the ruins. A catamaran crosses from Kourou for the day, most reliably in the dry season of September and October, and launches from the space centre are watched from the islands. The Îles du Salut are a prison that the jungle is taking back, and the rockets go over it.