Henri Charrière’s Escape From Devil’s Island
Roger Viollet Collection/Getty ImagesHenri Charrière standing trial in France, c. 1930.
Born in Saint-Étienne-de-Lugdarès, France, in 1906, Henri Charrière served briefly in the navy before turning to crime. Nicknamed “Papillon” due to the butterfly tattoo on his chest, he was a decent safecracker and certainly a gangster. But whether he committed the murder for which he was imprisoned remains debated.
As chronicled in Charrière’s autobiography Papillon and its 1973 Hollywood adaptation, he was convicted of murdering Paris pimp Roland Legrand in 1931. He claimed to have been set up as the fall guy by a crooked justice system but was ultimately sentenced to 10 years of hard labor in Cayenne, French Guiana.
Known as “Devil’s Island,” the penal colony of Cayenne sat about seven miles off the mainland coast and housed inmates of all stripes between 1852 and 1953. Some 40 percent of all prisoners sent there died. Charrière was desperate to escape — and did just that in November 1933 after befriending inmates Joanes Clousiot and Andre Maturette.
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Charrière’s autobiography was adapted into a feature film starring Steve McQueen.
The three men made a run for it, grabbing an open boat and drifting for nearly 2,000 miles over the course of five days before being shipwrecked in Colombia. After briefly being recaptured, Charrière was able to evade authorities under the cover of a fortuitous storm — and make his way north to the Guajira Peninsula.
Charrière claimed in his book that he spent months in the northern Colombian region and was hosted by an Indigenous tribe in the jungle. But soon, he was captured once again. Punished with two years of solitary confinement, Charrière would attempt to escape at least seven more times.
For the authorities, guards were virtually unnecessary. Swimming to the mainland would see an inmate eaten by sharks or drown, whereas failure and recapture would lead to solitary confinement. Charriére was undaunted by those dangers, as he made a raft from coconuts in 1944 and took to sea yet again.
Charrière landed on the Guyana coast only to be imprisoned for a year. Ultimately, however, he was granted citizenship upon release and made his way to Venezuela — where he wrote one of the most famous prison escape autobiographies ever written.
