Devil's Island (Kourou) Devil's Island (Kourou) Devil's Island (French: Île du Diable) is the third-largest island of the Salvation's Islands, an island group in the Atlantic Ocean. It is located approximately 14 km (9 mi) off the coast of French Guiana in South America just north of the town of Kourou. It has an area of 14 ha (34.6 acres). The island was a part of a controversial French penal colony located in French Guiana for 101 years, from 1852 to 1953. Although it was the smallest part of the penal colony, it is notorious for being used for internal exile of French
Ross Island Penal Colony the Japanese and also by an earthquake which had struck the island in 1941, and it now appears more like a "jungle-clad Lost City." The earliest known effort to establish a penal colony was by Archibald Blair who found the remoteness of the island as ideal for such a colony. But his initiative failed to go beyond 1796 as malaria prevented it. The First War of Indian Independence in 1857 rekindled the interest of the British Administration in India to establish a penal colony in the Andaman Islands for political prisoners. The first group of 200 prisoners were transported under