Escorted by Sharks, He Paddles His Sepulchral Canoe.
Some curious details of the life of the French convicts at Cayenne, Guyane, and the Safety Islands are given by M. Paul Mimande in a volume which he has just published in Paris, entitled ‘Foreats et Proserits.” After describing all the most famous criminals at present in the penal colonies, the auther deals with marvelous escapes and attemps to escape.
Perhaps the most remarkable of them all is that of the assassin Lupi, who went to sea in a coffin. He managed to get some nails, tar and cotton, and one dark night he got into the coffin shed. He selected a fine, stanch and seaworthy coffin, fastened the lid, in order to turn it into a deck, leaving a cockpit sufficient to enable him to crawl in. he calked all the joints as well as he could, and when this work was finished he made a pair of paddles out of two planks. Then he brought out his craft with great precaution. Without much difficulty he reached the water’s edge. There he launched his bark and crawled on board. Assisted by the tide, he paddled his sepulchral craft. Silently and slowly he proceeded, in the hope of reaching either Venezuela or British Guinea.
Now, 150 nautical miles in a coffin did not constitute a very tempting enterprise, but Lupi was full of confidence. At the penitentiary it was soon discovered that he was missing. No boat had been taken away. The boats are always well guarded, and nobody ever dreamed for a moment that any man would go the sea in a coffin. It was thought that he had either committed suicide or concealed himself somewhere nearby.
Fortunately, or unfortunately, for Lupi, the steamer Abeille, returning from the Antilles, off Paramaribo, came close to him. The captain noticed an object that looked like a piece of wreckage around which a flock of seagulls were circling and screaming. Naturally that excited his attention. He steered the boat in the direction of the object. As he came close to it his curiosity was increased. The thing which at first he took to be a piece of wreckage turned out to be a coffin, and in addition to its noisy winged escort it was accompanied by two guards that traveled on either side of it like mounted escorts at the doors of an official carriage. These two guards were enormous sharks, whose great dorsal fins from time to time seemed to touch the sides of the box. The captain of the Abeille stopped the vessel and ordered a boat to be launched and manned. When the boat approached the coffin the birds continued to hover about, but the sharks went down. The men in the boat looked into the box, and what was their astonishment to find a man in it half drowned and almost in a fainting condition. They hauled him into the boat and took him on board the vessel, and a few hours later he was in irons in his cell.
Unseaworthy boats are sometimes called coffins, but Lupi is perhaps the only man who ever went to sea in a genuine coffin.-New York Sun.
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