The French had notorious Devil's Island off the coast of French Guiana, a disease-infested tropical penal colony, where they sent their worst criminals and basically anyone opposing the king too vocally. Hardly a single convict sentenced there came back, at least alive. Still more humane than guillotine, I suppose. But the Brits, giving the French a bloody nose in pretty much everything except in gastronomy, took the concept onto an entire new level and went large,more precisely extra-super-large, even more to the point, full frontal bloated obese-large, and had an entire continent set up as a penitentiary. At the outset, the continent seemed almost to be designed for this purpose - vast void of inimical land, that happens to be the driest, flattest, most infertile and climatically aggressive of all inhabited continents. What's more, it has
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