And what was the awful power of evil that robbed of life 50,000 in city and neighboring villages almost in a moment? It was this verdure-clad Mount Pelee, their familiar sentinel, in the shade of whose sheltering palms they had built their summer resorts or found their innocent pleasures. It was this shadowing summit, now suddenly become a fiery vent through which earth’s artilleries blazed forth their terrible volleys of molten projectiles, lava masses, huge drifts of ashes, and clouds of flaming, noxious, gaseous emanations to suffocate every living thing. Nothing could withstand such a bombardment from the exhaustless magazines within the vast chambers of the planet, no longer kindly Mother Earth, benign in the beauty of May-time, but cruel, relentless, merciless alike to all.
St. Pierre and the island of Martinique are no strangers to destructive earthquakes and volcanic eruptions. In August, 1767, an earthquake killed 1,600 persons in St. Pierre. In 1851 Mount Pelee threatened the city with destruction. St. Pierre was practically destroyed once before, in August, 1891, by the great hurricane which swept over the islands. The harbor of St. Pierre has been a famous one for centuries. It was off this harbor on April 12, 1782, that Admiral Rodney’s fleet defeated the French squadron under the Comte de Grasse and wrested the West Indies from France.
St. Pierre was the largest town and the commercial center of the island. It was the largest town in the French West Indies, and was well built and prosperous. It had a population of about 30,000. It was divided into two parts, known as the upper and lower towns. The lower town was compact with narrow streets, and unhealthy. The upper town was cleaner, healthier, and handsomely laid out. There was in the upper town a botanical garden and an old Catholic college, as well as a fine hospital.
Mount Pelee, the largest of the group of volcanic mountains, is about 4,400 feet high. It had long been inactive as a volcano, although in August, 1851, it had a violent eruption. It is in the northwestern end of the island, and near the foot of its western slope, fronting the bay, St. Pierre was built.
The Consuls resident at St. Pierre were: For the United States, T. T. Prentis; Great Britain, J. Japp; Denmark, M. E. S. Meyer; Italy, P. Plissonneau; Mexico, E. Dupie; Sweden and Norway, Gustave Borde. There were four banks in the city—the Banque de la Martinique, Banque Transatlantique, Colonial Bank of London, and the Credit Foncier Colonial. There were sixteen commission merchants, twelve dry-goods stores, twenty-two provision dealers, twenty-six rum manufacturers, eleven colonial produce merchants, four brokers, and two hardware dealers.
The whole area of the island, near 400 square miles, is mountainous. Besides Mount Pelee, there are, further south and about midway of the oval, the three crests of Courbet, and all along the great ridge are the black and ragged cones of old volcanoes. In the section south of the deep bay there are two less elevated and more irregular ridges, one running southeast and terminating in the Piton Vauclin, and the other extending westward and presenting to view on the coast Mounts Caraibe and Constant.
The mountainous interior is torn and gashed with ancient earthquake upheavals, and there are perpendicular cliffs, deep clefts and gorges, black holes filled with water, and swift torrents dashing over precipices and falling into caverns—in a word, all the fantastic savagery of volcanic scenery, but the whole covered with the rich verdure of the tropics.
The total population of the island was reckoned at 175,000, of whom 10,000 were whites, 15,000 of Asiatic origin, and 150,000 blacks of all shades from ebony to light octoroon.
Martinique has two interesting claims to distinction in that the Empress Josephine was born there and that Mme. de Maintenon passed her girlhood on the island as Francoise d’Aubigne. At Fort de France there is a marble statue of the Empress Josephine.
It was just before eight o’clock on the morning of Thursday, May 8, 1902, that the lava and gases of the crater of Mount Pelee burst their bounds and bore destruction to the fated city. Within thirty seconds perhaps 50,000 persons were killed, and the streets of St. Pierre were heaped with dead bodies, soon to be incinerated or buried in the ashes that fell from the fountain of flame. Within ten minutes the city itself had disappeared in a whirling flame vomited from the mountain, though for some hours the inflammable portions of the buildings continued to burn, until all was consumed that could be. The volcano whose ancient crater for more than fifty years had been occupied by a quiet lake in which picnic parties bathed, discharged a torrent of fiery mud, which rolled toward the sea, engulfing everything before it. The city was no more.