The direct crisis of these Carib islands in 1902 was introduced by Soufrière Volcano on St. Vincent, 100 miles south of Martinique, at 1 p.m. on May 7, nineteen hours before the St. Pierre disaster. Soufrière exploded, as the common saying is, through a crater lake pit southwest of its 4,000-foot summit, the crater edge being 3,500 feet high. It is notable how many volcanoes are 4,000 feet high, and how many have crater pits, not at the top, but along a rift below the peak. Just this was the case of Pelée, just this characterizes the calderas of Kilauea and Mauna Loa. A dozen other volcanoes could be named where the vents are through the flank of the heap.
Hovey, Curtis, and I were taken by the Dixie to St. Vincent, where the hospitable English colonists provided us with houses at the base of Soufrière, and with servants and horses; and the Government supply steamer took us around the island. We made the ascent of Soufrière to the edge of the great crater and looked down at boiling waters far below, green and muddy, and sending up a column of steam on one wall.
We three Americans guided by T. M. MacDonald, a Scottish planter, made the first ascent after the fearful eruptions of May 7 and 18. Leaving our quarters at Chateau Belair, we climbed on foot from the southwest base, with six stalwart negroes carrying instruments, water, and food. In the ruins of Wallibu sugar mill we encountered a wild-eyed East Indian coolie and his helpers looting sugar.
The Wallibu River received the brunt of the heavy, dry, red hot, gravel of the eruptions, drifted like snow and crusted with wet mud. Water supplied by the river broke its way into the eighty feet of incandescent fill of the valley. Instantly a steam explosion was hurled up in white volutes, and the river dammed its own channel with the stone shower from upblasts. This forced its own waters into fresh hot cinder and so maintained explosive action. One such exploding river sent up a column three quarters of a mile high, indescribably majestic, causing the natives to report new craters. A shower of mud and sand fell on our party.
The old road crossing Soufrière mountain was destroyed, the river flats were deeply trenched, and difficult ridges and hollows were encountered at every step. The gulches were deepened into gorges, the slopes above furrowed with a feathery rill drainage pattern. Each spur between gulches was like a very steep roof, with a smooth pathway uphill along the watershed. This made progress easier. Big tree stumps of Ficus jutted ragged through the hardened mud, the branches charred and sharpened by sand blast.
A whirl of volcanic sand made an unpleasant stinging shower of dust, and sulfuretted hydrogen smelled of rotten eggs. But near the summit the air was fresh and the sunshine bright. A rain would have made the mud slippery and perilous, for the gulch slopes were practically cliffs. Finally we did come to mud clots, resembling a cattle wallow, knee deep and sticky. Large blocks of rock two feet across lay on the surface, flung-out pieces of the old crater walls; and there were some bombs of new lava.
After three hours we assembled at the rim of the old crater, which before the outbreak had been full of a high crater lake. Suddenly we came to an immense chasm almost circular, then the profile of a black precipice falling away 2,000 feet; and up its face we saw a silent steam column purling away in billows. The bottom was a green pool of boiling water, muddied by springs from the wall; and a hundred tails of white steam joined the column on the wall.
The inner walls showed horizontal bands of old lava, and intrusions both in lens shape and as dikes. There were red brown puddingstones made up of fragments. A funnel-shaped intrusion looked like the diagram cross section of a volcano, making a perfect T of gray lava, like a mushroom. A large fissure, filling west, rose from bottom to top. A northern rocky horseshoe rim, or somma, at the top made the peak of St. Vincent. The crater lip was a mile wide and the interior a half mile deep; and the green puddle at the bottom was 1,200 feet across. The base of the wall column sputtered fiercely and sent up spurts of black mud and rock fragments. The lake level was 1,100 feet above the ocean, 800 feet lower than before the eruption; and the pool was shallow, with mud flats and islets. We operated cameras, compass, and sketch books; paced off a base line; and noted that the northwest corner of the crater had been blown away to leave a big notch.
When we returned to Chateau Belair, the negro peasant women brought out their children to gaze at us, the godlike men who had dared the crater. Mr. MacDonald had to steer us through the crowd, and we felt like the twelve apostles after a miracle.
The Soufrière eruption during the first week of May was more voluminous and violent than that of Pelée, for Pelée was concentrated on one target. Soufrière wrought havoc east and west, whereas Pelée was in a sector southwest of the mountain. They were equally devastating, however, and both made downblasts of superheated steam and gravels. Scalding dust killed people, but so did water waves, conflagration, steam, stones, drowning, and burial.