Soufrière’s dust fall was reported all the way to Trinidad and Barbados; and from ships east and southeast, directly against the trade winds, from 100 to 900 miles away. The dust column penetrated the antitrades of the upper atmosphere. Sounds were loud 150 miles away, but not heard close to the mountains. In the red hot gravel were innumerable landslides, river waters rushed into the gravel and made false eruptions, and shore cliffs collapsed.
No lava, except as fragments, appeared in St. Vincent, whereas it rose as a crateral heap in Pelée. Floods of rivers radial to the volcanoes appeared both before and after the first eruptions, and scientists erroneously attributed them to cloudburst rains. Later, exact descriptions by natives showed that the sources were hot waters gushing out in places where there was no rain.
A succession of eruptions at increasing intervals from May to December actuated both volcanoes. In succeeding years, explosions dwindled; but over Pelée’s crater rose a mighty dome and spine of stiff quartz-basalt lava, like ointment from a tube.
There was, on Pelée, a splitting of the bottom of the long crater gulch. Cauliflower steam volutes charged with dust gushed up the cracks, hard-edged in profile down near the shore, soft and diffuse near the crater. Scalding waters in the gulch bottom carried mud. The mountain was cracking open along radial gulches, and squirting up steam and geysers, but this all concealed itself with sediment. Nobody ever saw the cracks open. The migrating steam clouds charged with gravel were called glow clouds and were believed to “flow” as gas fluids from the crater.
An elucidation of all this mystery came many years later, after a thorough study of all reports. The glow clouds, which were at first confused with the gigantic blasts that had destroyed the city, were gradually explained. It became apparent that radial cracks are ancient characters of lava domes, and that lava domes lie under heaps of agglomerate. Pelée and Soufrière are heaps of agglomerate. Kilauea and Mauna Loa are lava domes. Vesuvius is an intermediate type of volcano.
I remained in the field from May to July, returned to Mount Pelée, cruised through the northern Caribbee Islands, and went to the bottom of the deep crater of Mount Misery, on St. Kitts. My guides on St. Kitts were two colored men, Johnny Eddy and Samuel Jim. In the crater we found steam and sulfur and a rotten-egg smell, on the bank of a cold crater lake. We descended by seemingly vertical cliffs covered with roots. This was a typical fumarole, or solfatara, one of the unsatisfactory characteristics of craters. We collected specimens and took snapshots, wondered how often such places change suddenly, and knew hydrogen sulfide gas only by the smell. It all jibed with what I was later to discover in Hawaii; that the only way to know a crater is to live with it, and that gases can melt lava.
As I look back on the Martinique expedition, I know what a crucial point in my life it was and that it was the human contacts, not field adventures, which inspired me. Gradually I realized that the killing of thousands of persons by subterranean machinery totally unknown to geologists and then unexplainable was worthy of a life work.
The story of Rita Stokes made a tremendous impression on me. In Barbados hospital I talked with this young white girl and her colored nurse, Clara King, who had been passengers on the SS Roraima which was at St. Pierre when the city was destroyed. When I saw them they were swathed in bandages. Clara’s burns were severe on knee, arm, and hand. Rita’s were on her head, hands, and arms, and one seriously disfigured ear. Both were somewhat injured for life. Mrs. Stokes, a boy, and a baby girl in the cabin with them had been killed. All saw the adjacent mountain sending up puffs, as the ship lay at anchor off the St. Pierre waterfront on the morning of May 8, but they were reassured by the ship’s officers.
Suddenly the steward rushed by shouting, “Close the cabin door, the volcano is coming!” Mrs. Stokes slammed the door just before a terrific explosion came which nearly burst the ear drums. The vessel was lifted high and sank down, and all were thrown off their feet by the shock, and huddled crouching in one corner of the little cabin. Scalding moist ashes poured in through a broken skylight in inky darkness. Next came suffocation, relieved by the door bursting open and air rushing in.
When a little daylight came back, Mrs. Stokes and the little boy were plastered black with hot mud, the baby girl was dying, and the nurse and Rita were in great agony. A heap of scorching mud had collected on one corner of the floor, and as the young girl put her hand down to raise herself, her arm plunged to the elbow in scalding sand. They were all taken out to the deck where mother, boy, and baby died. The ship was on fire, and the nearby city was a mass of roaring flames. More ashes fell and scalded the victims. Curiously, third degree burns were left on flesh, through underclothing not burned at all.