Free colonists Many colonists either came to New Caledonia through personal initiative or were supported by government programmes and policies to populate New Caledonia. Examples of different waves of settlement include the following: • 'Paddon' colonists, named after the English merchant
James Paddon. In exchange for selling his own land on
Île Nou to the French state in 1857 to become part of the infrastructure of the penal colony there, he was given 4000 hectares of farmland in the
Karikouié and
Katiramona river basins in
Païta, on condition that they be populated with at least 22 'males of the white race' together with their families. In the end he received 18 families, including some of Paddon's own nephews who inherited the land after Paddon's death, with the first 5 families, mostly of German origin, arriving in 1859. These settlers mostly cultivated vegetables, with sugarcane cultivation having been abandoned early on. However, difficult conditions forced many of the settlers to move either to the capital or to Australia. • 'Cheval' colonists, named after the Norman restorator Timothée Cheval, who sought his fortune in New Caledonia in the 1860s and received 1800 hectares by a decree from the governor, on condition that he bring 6 to 8 European settlers, 100 horned livestock, 16 mares and one stallion. These settlers arrived on
La Gazelle from Australia in 1862, followed by Cheval's own brother Hippolyte in 1866. As with the Paddon colonists, many subsequently resettled in
Nouméa or outside New Caledonia. • Bourbonnais colonists, made up of
Reunionese Creoles who settled in New Caledonia between 1864 and 1880 when the
Mascarene Islands entered a period of economic crisis linked with droughts and diseases that attacked the islands' sugar cane crops. Many of these families brought
Malbar and
Cafre indentured labourers with them and settled on 10,000 hectares of land, used for sugar cane plantation, scattered around the island particularly in
Nakety,
Canala and
Houaïlou on the East coast and
Dumbéa,
La Foa,
La Ouaménie and
Koné on the West coast. These plantations were initially a success, and by 1875 at least 454 Reunionese people had arrived to the island. However,
locust invasions and the
Kanak revolt of 1878 put an end to sugar cane cultivation on the island, and so many of the Reunionese settlers either emigrated back to
Réunion or to
Metropolitan France or found other careers in the government administration. By 1884 only 173 Reunionese settlers remained. As well as these planned colonisation projects, many other settlers arrived through their own initiative, for various reasons including poverty at home (such as in the case of Irish and Italian settlers, as well as peasants from mountainous areas of France which were hit hard by the rural crisis of the 19th century), the possibility of acquiring wealth, politics (e.g. republican militants who fled Metropolitan France during the
1851 Coup, or people from Germany and Alsace who refused to live under Prussian rule), or simply overstaying their posts in the civil service or the military.
Penal colonists The first 250 prisoners arrived in Port-de-France on board the ship ''L'Iphigénie''. Alain Saussol estimates that 75 different convoys brought around 21,630 prisoners to the penal colony between 1864 and 1897. The prisoner population could be divided into roughly three groups. The 'transported' were convicts sentenced under common law, ranging from eight years up to life, for crimes ranging from physical and sexual assault to murder. These were mostly taken to the prison at
Île Nou and worked on the construction of roads and buildings in the colony. Political prisoners, or the 'deported', made up the second group. Many of these participated in the
Paris Commune of 1871, 4250 of whom were sent either to
Île des Pins or
Ducos, including
Louise Michel and
Henri Rochefort. After they were all granted amnesty in 1880, less than 40 families decided to stay in New Caledonia. Another group of 'deportees' were participants in the
Mokrani Revolt of 1871–72 in Algeria, the majority of whom decided to stay in New Caledonia following the granting of amnesty in 1895 and from whom the majority of
Algerian New Caledonians in
Bourail are descended. Recidivists, or the 'relegated', made up the third group, 3757 of whom were sent from 1885 onwards to New Caledonia, particularly to
Île des Pins,
Prony or
Boulouparis. The 'transported' and 'relegated' stopped being brought to New Caledonia in 1897. Following being condemned to forced labour, the prisoners had to atone for their crimes by working on penitentiary farms, and once freed were given a portion of the land. Overall around 1300 pieces of land, totalling around 260,000 hectares largely taken from the indigenous
Kanak people, were awarded to freed prisoners, particularly around
Bourail,
La Foa-Farino,
Ouégoa and
Pouembout, where many of the descendants of the prisoner population remain to this day.
Geographical origins The vast majority of Caldoche people are of French origin. Notable French immigration waves include those who fled
Alsace and
Lorraine following the
Franco-Prussian War in 1870, Creole people from
Réunion who fled during the sugar crisis of the 1860s and 1870s, merchants and ship owners from
Bordeaux and
Nantes drawn to the island at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries by economic opportunities related to the discovery of nickel reserves, and colonists from the
Nord and
Picardy regions. Other French people who settled the island included sailors and adventurers from
Normandy and
Brittany, as well as settlers from the poorest regions of France in what is now the
empty diagonal. However, as previously mentioned, there were also a large number of Paddon and Cheval colonists of British and Irish origin (many of the latter having fled Ireland during the
Great Famine) who came to the island via Australia, as well as a sizeable number of Italians, Germans (particularly from the Rhineland), Belgians, Swiss, Spaniards, Croatians and Poles. A significant number of non-Europeans are also grouped under the Caldoche people despite often being of mixed race origin, notably those from Indonesia, Vietnam, Japan, India (via Réunion) and Algeria (the latter particularly concentrated around
Bourail) Since the twentieth century, the Caldoche population has grown to include the families of
pieds-noirs (people of French and European heritage who were born and lived in colonial era
French Algeria) and their descendants. Some pieds-noirs chose to relocate to New Caledonia over metropolitan France during the 1960s and 1970s in the wake of the
Algerian War and subsequent independence of Algeria. ==Geographical distribution==