Sailing Saoirse - Salvation Island exploring 😳⛵️🏝 (part 2)

Salvation Island Exploring - prisons, graves, history, spiders and more. In this weeks video we show our time spent visiting St Joseph’s Island, part of the Salvation Islands of French Guiana. As we showed in last weeks video, the Islands served as penal colonies back in the 1800’s. They were know for the barbaric conditions that resulted in almost three quarters of the criminals demise during their stay there. Last week we showed Iles Royale where the ruins are very well preserved, there are a lot of information boards around and it was all very informative. Sadly, the ruins on Iles St Joseph, have no information boards around the ruins and the ruins themselves are just being swallowed up by nature. Whilst this lends itself to stunning beautiful sights. It’s all pretty much a guessing game and all the information we have, has been as a result of our own ‘googling’. This island housed 1000’s of prisoners over its more than 100 years as part of the penal colony. The prison buildings have since been turned into almost fairytale type ruins, covered in green moss and ferns, huge trees growing up through the passageways and cells with their root systems snaking down the corridors between the cells in the natural forestry on the island. Many of the cells had no roofs, only steel bars across the tops of the walls, where apparently the guards would patrol from above, being able to see down into the cells! They would even use slippers so that they could do it silently to catch out the prisoners. The prisoners had to survive all the spiders, mosquitoes, deadly centipedes, rain, disease and a phenomenal amount of violence from fellow prisoners, and very few actually survived, around 20%. Not unlike Iles Royale, this island holds a very similar macabre energy which is so juxtaposed to the unbelievable beauty of the island. There is a cemetery on the island that literally has to have one of the most incredible views of any cemetery in the world, surrounded by palm tree forests and overlooking the ocean. It was the cemetery reserved for the burial of non prisoners - doctors, nuns, teachers, prison guards, priests, medical personnel and their families. Now the island is very quiet, inhabited by monkeys and other creatures. There is a small hotel and charter catamarans bring in a few tourists a day from the French Guiana mainland. We were the only visiting yacht that stayed over night whilst we were there. So it was incredibly quiet and peaceful. We swam, ‘boat showered’ on the sugar scoops, fished in the anchorage and we spent days, walking and exploring the different islands. For anyone passing this way on a yacht or visiting mainland French Guiana, these islands are an experience not to be missed and will live in our memories forever.