George John Seaton

George John Seaton (born December 3, 1900, in France), was an English man who was sentenced to imprisonment on Devil's Island in French Guiana. Seaton was one of the last prisoners to escape the island before it was officially closed as a prison colony. After escaping his imprisonment, Seaton went into servitude for local farmers. His autobiography, published in the 1950s, details his experiences as a prisoner and freed man in French Guiana and was widely reviewed in both Britain and the United States.

Early life

Most details about Seaton's early life stem from his autobiography. Besides this recollection of childhood, there are no other records of Seaton in existence regarding his life before prison.

Seaton was born on December 3, 1900, in France. He was born at 24 Avenue du Bois on the corner of the rue Chalgrin.

His grandmother was a very wealthy woman. After the death of her father, Dr. Julius Wolfe, he left her nearly three quarters of a million pounds. His behavior continued despite the first offense and worsened with time. In 1919, his grandmother wrote him a letter letting him know that she could no longer spare any money to him. During his incarceration, Seaton claims, he became animalistic and uncivilized, obeying only the laws of survival. He was of the mere 25% of people who survived the island's merciless nature. Disease, rampant heat and humidity, overpopulated living, and lack of cleanliness caused high death rates amongst the prisoners. The guards were often ruthless, which also led to high mortality rates.

Seaton eventually escaped from prison but faced new challenges. Even when properly released, ex-prisoners on Devil's Island were not allowed to reenter France. Accordingly, they had to find work locally, and many ex-convicts turned to African farmers.

In 1949, Seaton made a deal with a black Frenchman named Belone to work for two dollars a month. Although Seaton had agreed to get paid, Belone told him he could work for free, or he would tell Devil's Island authorities he was causing issues, and his imprisonment would be reinstated. As a result, Seaton accepted work without pay. Both editions contain a foreword by Cyril Kersh, an English reporter with whom Seaton established contact from French Guiana and who assisted him in writing up his experiences. Their publication coincided with the last days of Devil's Island, which officially closed as an active penal colony in 1953.

The resulting book, which retells Seaton's life in the French penal colony from his own perspective, was heralded as "incredible" and a "must-be-read" that was "not to be missed" across the Anglophone sphere. Reviews highlighted the inhumanity of the French overseas prison system, going as far as to compare the operations on Devil's Island to Nazi concentration camps.

In light of the nascent civil rights movement in the United States, Seaton's interactions with Black prison guards and locals in particular captured the interest of African Americans. In his autobiography, Seaton mentions that the most humane among the guards on Devil's Island stemmed from France's North African army. According to him, their relative sympathy towards the prisoners may have been due to an age-old memory of slavery. Although they were severe enforcers of the rules, they did not, according to Seaton, enjoy beating prisoners in the same way as their white colleagues. and prominently included him in a feature on "white slaves" in the French overseas territory.

The British edition of Seaton's autobiography was eventually banned by Ireland’s Censorship of Publications Board in 1952. The book was banned due to an overwhelming amount of homosexual behavior described by Seaton as part of prison life. At the time, the Board did not find it appropriate for the common people. For this reason, it was taken out of circulation. The Board consisted at that time of C. J. O’Reilly, Joseph Deery, a Roman Catholic priest, T. G. O'Sullivan, a district justice, John J. Pigott, a professor at St. Patrick's Training College, and C.J. Joyce, a solicitor. Topics of analysis for which Seaton's autobiography has served as evidence range from general accounts of the effects of solitary confinement and homosexuality among prison populations to more specific inquiries into the rise of space engineering in French Guiana, the prisoners' day-to-day life on Devil's Island, and the fate of Chinese political prisoners in the penal colony.