to the English privateers Woodes Rogers and William Dampier in 1709. The island, rich in fresh water and valuable wood, served as a supply station for ships en route from Panama to Peru and back. During the 1820s, after the independence of Colombia from Spain, Simón Bolívar gave Gorgona to Federico D'Croz, as thanks for his military service during the Battle of Vargas Swamp. By 1870 the island was inhabited by a small mestizo community which lived by fishing. Ramon Payan bought part of the island from one of D’Croz's descendants and built a hacienda that was destroyed in 1899 during the Thousand Days' War when 1100 members of the liberal forces stayed on the island for a little less than two weeks. Penal colony During the first half of the 20th century, Gorgona remained mostly uninhabited. In 1959 the island was turned into a penal colony. It became a state high security prison housing Colombia's more violent criminals, generally those convicted of murder and rape. The penitentiary was built following the model of Nazi concentration camps. Prisoners slept on beds without a mattress or a pillow. The bathrooms were just a hole in the floor. Because of constant rapes and murders that were carried out in the bathrooms, the walls were lowered so that the guards could see each prisoner. Gorgona became known as Colombia's Alcatraz Island. Inmates were constantly abused by their jailers and other prisoners. Many of them also lost their lives from snake-bite and tropical diseases. Convicts were dissuaded from escaping by the venomous snakes in the interior of the island and the sharks patrolling the 30 km to the mainland. However, Daniel Camargo Barbosa, a psychopathic serial killer and rapist, managed to escape on 24 September 1984. For a long time he had studied the ocean currents with the idea of escaping by the sea. On the feast of the Virgin of Mercy, patron of the inmates, Camargo hid in the bushes on the island evading the authorities. He constructed a small raft of logs tied with jungle vines. A day later, he arrived on the Pacific Coast. The authorities assumed that he had died at sea and the press reported that he had been eaten by sharks. From his 1984 escape until 1986 Carmago killed and raped between 72 to 180 girls in Ecuador until he was captured in Quito, a few minutes after