Devil's Island

noun

1. one of the Safety Islands, off the coast of French Guiana: former French penal colony.

Devil's Island

noun

1. French name: Île du Diable. one of the three Safety Islands, off the coast of French Guiana: formerly a leper colony, then a French penal colony from 1895 until 1938. Area: less than 2 sq km (1 sq mile)

Example Sentences

He compared the ICC to the antisemitic conspiracy that sent Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish officer in the French army, to the penal colony on Devil's Island for treason in 1894.

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Saint-Laurent-du-Maroni is the former port of entry to the infamous Devil's Island penal colony, where 70,000 convicts from mainland France were sent between 1852 and 1954.

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If the preceding description wasn't enough, the screwworm's scientific name, Cochliomyia hominivorax, hints at how much we really, truly don't want it back — hominivorax translates as "man-eater," and refers to observations of a 1858 screwworm outbreak among prisoners on Devil’s Island in French Guiana.

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It certainly wasn’t coming from Dreyfus, who was then serving a life sentence on Devil’s Island, Simon’s former home.

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First, Simon had been convicted of the murder and sentenced to twenty years of labor on Devil’s Island, a French prison off the coast of South America.

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