LASSERRE J Rapport de la commission formée pour examiner les conditions dans lesquelles se trouvent les établissements agricoles et pénitentiaires de la Colonie.

Very interesting reports written at the request of the governor of the island, by Boyer, commissaire-ordonnateur, Herbillon, lieutenant-colonel, and Lasserre, president of the tribunal supérieur.

Following a first inspection trip, and even before completing its mission, the Commission decided to write the first report to alert the authorities to the deplorable state of the agricultural colonies. It estimated the number of deportees in New Caledonia at 5,000, of whom 1,200 to 1,500 were assigned to the agricultural colonies.

This first report concerns the settlements of Uaraï, Bourail, the Foa region, and the Moindou farm. On the whole, these farms, created two or three years earlier, have not prospered much in relation to the considerable investments they required. In most cases, the appointed managers were incompetent, and the cane was poorly cultivated (yield per hectare was half that of private farms). Moreover, a contract has been signed with Higginson, Morgan et Cie to install sugar factories, but the state, unable to fulfill its contract with such low production, will have to pay damages to the company. Hence the rapporteurs’ cry of alarm: Agricultural penitentiaries have had their day, and experience confirms that they have never produced anything but deplorable results… In a word, penitentiary labor should be made available to farmers to the greatest extent possible, and the State should be relieved of the concern and responsibility of a feasibility that is better left to private industry”. On their second trip, aboard the steamer Coëtlogon, the rapporteurs visited Quarai, Monea, Gomen, Nehoué, Diahot and Canala where the commission recommended establishing vast concessions for large-scale cultivation such as sugar cane, some plots have been broken up, horses are no longer shoed, “no less than 184 cubic meters of wood await some kind of destination” in the rain in the southern bay, but logging continues… The Diahot region along the island’s first watercourse, near the Ouegoa mines, would need an administrative center in the village of Le Caillou. Only the Canala farm, in “a magnificent valley watered by several streams”, is flourishing and almost profitable. There are large concessions with rich coffee and rice crops.

n the whole, the colony lacks manpower, but “the freedmen and deportees … for the most part indulge in laziness and drink…. The strong and robust Canaques would be a powerful aid for cultivating the land, but, without needs, they live in a savage state and show no interest in improving their condition through work”.

These reports, peppered with a variety of lively observations on life on the island, provide an initial assessment of the penal colony in New Caledonia after just a few years’ existence. The experiment was abandoned in 1896.

A very important document, perfectly legible.