Dear rss free blog,
First off,
I wanted to share Tom McClellan’s Oscillator thinking on gold, based on
what he calls a rainbow chart phenomenon. That means there is a convergence at
around $1050/oz of different time series with different colors, usually an
indicator of a turning point in the price.
Unfortunately,
things like Christmas make the charts unreliable. So Tom thinks that there may
be a further price drop below $1050 before the price rises.
Meanwhile
the gold fraternity panicked. Too many speculators with weak hands joined the
gold musical chairs dance. When the music stopped and the price went down there
weren’t enough chairs. Tom says it is “reminiscent of 1991 when an entire
battalion of the Iraqi army tried to surrender to a single U.S. Army helicopter
crew”.
It is
Boxing Day, the day after Christmas, and I am relieved to be sailing away from
Devil’s Island, the smallest and hardest-to-reach of the Isles du Salut in the
rough shark-invested waters off the coast of French Guyana.
This is formally not in the Caribbean.
The French
wound up with this bit of mainland South America
after losing the French and Indian War, a rotten consolation prize. Attempts to
settle the swampy mainland failed because the settlers died like flies and fled
to the Isles to take ship back to France.
In 1851
Napoleon III’s government had the brilliant idea of shipping supporters of the
Revolution of 1848 to the Isles (and to New Caledonia in the Pacific.) And so the penal colony
was born. There are three islands with three prisons. Devil’s Island was the worst, isolated in very rough shark-filled seas. You
sailed to it hanging onto a steel cable from Isle Royale.
We never tried to cross.
France used Isle
du Diable for the most violent prisoners and the most feared political
opponents, and it never held more than 12 bagnards at any time. The most
famous was Capt. Alfred Dreyfus, a totally innocent French military officer
accused of spying for Germany,
sent to the Isle du Diable in 1894 and only exonerated and restored to his army
rank a decade later.
But the
whole place undermines France’s
claim to a “mission civilisatrice”, since the prisoners were often minor
offenders or political opponents of the regime, subject to extremely frutal
conditions, denied medical attention or enough food, and mistreated by sadistic
guards. And of course there have been lots of movies about the place.
The latest
theory is that Henri Charrière, Papillon, was too minor an offender to have
been on any of the Isles; he merely escaped from the mainland, and spun out a
book based on tales he had heard. But the scenes in the move (starring Steve
McQueen and Dustin Hoffman) are authentic, based on painting by François
Lagrange, a convicted forger incarcerated on the Isles. He painted
well-preserved murals in the Catholic Chapel on the top of the hill in Isle Royal
(the other end of the Devil’s Island cable)
which we visited. He also painted pictures he sold to the guards and won better
conditions like a single room rather than a barrack one, and paints and canvas.
His
paintings tell it like it is. Heavy labor, executions by guillotine, dead
prisoners being dropped off a boat and fed to the sharks, the horror of
solitary confinement for 23 hours per day, the road project the prisoners
worked on in the hot sun, the infirmary filled with dying bagnards.
The island
prisons were finally closed in 1946 being too like Nazi concentration camps. And
France
has been embarrassed by what happened here ever since. Monuments Historiques,
the prison buildings are run down and collapsing. The islands are now used for
the European and French space center, because the Equator gives rockets an
extra boost. Next April the Russians will launch their first satellite from
here.
More news
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