Clara said that the mountain appeared gray with smoke rolling west, that the weather was very calm, and that the dust smelled like gunpowder. She saw no flames during the blast and did not know what set fire to the steamer. The fires probably came from the city. Ashes came in sputtering splashes like “moist marl.” No rocks fell and the grit in cabin and on burns was wet sand. Before the blast there had been falling dust but, according to Clara, no difficulty in breathing. The sun was brownish red.
The bow of the ship was pointed seaward, and the vessel heeled over left, then right. The stern, toward the conflagration, caught fire first, the bow later. There was no rumbling, only shock and rattling thunder all at once, no noise before or after. The only people Clara King saw toward the shore were some men on a raft.
I wrote President Eliot and the American Relief Committee about the case of Rita Stokes, half American and the only white woman saved in St. Pierre. And I rejoiced to learn from her guardian and uncle, J. E. Croney of Barbados, that she was provided for. The sum of $450 was sent to the committee, and $6,000 in trust was set aside for her. She was never separated from her devoted nurse, Clara King.
Apart from the experiences of the wounded, I found much to contemplate in the findings of numerous geologists; in the accounts of doctors, sailors, naval officers, resident government men, the local newspapers, and photographers; in the specimens we collected; and in the work of great newspaper and magazine correspondents.
The facts and photographs we collected were baffling. They did not correspond with the text books. Two volcanoes a hundred miles apart suddenly spouted death downward. Obviously they were connected along the island chain, with ocean to the east and ocean to the west. Telegraph cables were broken. Why? That which lay under the ocean was totally unknown, both events and topography. The biggest part of these volcanoes was submarine.
Earthquakes at Pelée were relatively small but often continuous. Tidal waves were local and accompanied by downblasts of steam. The downblasts were at first supposed to be due to fallen avalanches from the upblasts. Then it appeared they were really sloping jets from concealed holes or cracks in the gulches, with inclined orifices amid the blocks of a cracked-up mountain. For at Pelée the blast that destroyed St. Pierre shot from the crater gulch in cascades of water and steam, while observers on high ground saw the horizon, or clear sky, over the crater.
The speed of the blast was six miles in two minutes, or 180 miles per hour. This was different from the glow clouds in the later months, migrating slowly along cracks in the gulch bottom.
Man’s perception of speed relative to himself has nothing to do with actual speeds. It may be argued that a miniature volcano erupts faster than a big volcanic system, but not if the whole terrestrial plexus of systems is taken into account. An eruption of Mauna Loa is a very slow affair, in comparison with the 10,000 underground squirtings of lava in cracks totally unperceived, except as tremors on seismograph.
Pelée’s eruption was like turning on a hose. A structural valve or orifice, suddenly opened by underground heaving of the mountain block and letting out steam and mud, appears to be the only reasonable explanation of what happened. And the only agents possible were glowing stiff lava heating boiling water underground. Both of these were later identified.
Grove Karl Gilbert of the U.S. Geological Survey, who had criticized favorably my manuscript on the Black Hills intrusive lavas, wrote me not to drop the enigma of Mount Pelée, because he found the published reports unsatisfying. In 1949, forty-seven years after the disaster, I published “Steam blast eruptions,” dealing with Pelée. In the interim I studied many volcanoes.