Mount Pelee: The Volcano That Destroyed the City of St. Pierre on the Island of Martinique
St. Pierre was a gorgeous town, alive with natives and tourists alike. It was full of red tiled cottages and tropical beauty, a prosperous destination for many Europeans. In January of 1902, the volcano suddenly sprung to life. Few were alarmed in the village, as it seemed to be only minor activity. On April 23rd, a series of explosions at the top of Mt. Pelee were followed in the next few days by clouds of sulfurous gases, earth tremors and tons of ash descending into St. Pierre. Insects and snakes, fleeing from the sides of the mountain, invaded the streets, with some 50 people perishing from snake bites. On May 5th the water in a lake located in a crater at the summit reached its boiling point. When the rim of the crater gave way, the water mixed with volcanic debris to form a wet concrete-like mix called a lahar. This came down the volcano at high speeds, killing 23 workers in a distillery near the mouth of the River Blanche. It flowed into the sea, causing what could be described as a miniature tsunami that flooded the St. Pierre waterfront.
At this point, town officials tried to calm the fears of the populace, but for all the wrong reasons. An election was scheduled for May 11th, one which the Progressive Party of Governor Mouttet was expected to win. To insure this outcome, Mouttet wanted to keep the only residents financially able to leave for safer havens, the wealthy, from going, as they were his biggest supporters. He sent a group of city leaders to climb the volcano; the only person among them with even an iota of scientific knowledge was a high school science teacher. They reported back to Mouttet that there was nothing to indicate that people should depart from the city. The governor then convinced the town’s newspaper to allay the people’s fears of an eruption. Some residents fled anyway, prompting Mouttet to turn back the rest with troops, who watched the road to Martinique’s other large city, Fort de France. The citizens living in the countryside, believing the newspaper’s propaganda, felt St. Pierre was the safest place to ride out the volcanic activity and streamed into the village.
There would be no election. On the mountain, there was a large V shaped notch in the cliffs that circled the summit crater. It could just as well as been used for a gun site, as it was aimed directly at St. Pierre. On May 8th, at ten minutes to eight in the morning, the volcano erupted. A huge black cloud of superheated gases, ash and rock, known today as a pyroclastic flow, directed by the V shaped notch, blew down the slopes at a speed of over 100 miles an hour. It took less than a minute for this 1300 degrees Fahrenheit “breath of hell” to reach St. Pierre, where it hit with the force of a hurricane. Rock walls were obliterated, homes leveled. A three ton statue was moved 16 meters! Anyone in the path of the pyroclastic flow died almost instantly, their lungs and throats seared from the superheated gases and ash. Bodies were burned beyond recognition; clothes vaporized off their bodies, as the cloud overspread the village and reached out into the harbor. Sailors on at least twenty ships were killed. The steamship Grappler was capsized and the American ship Roraima caught fire; almost everyone on board died. Thousands of barrels of rum stored in the city exploded and turned the streets into a river of fire. Governor Mouttet and his wife were among the dead.
A shoemaker on the outskirts of town, on the very fringe of the cloud, was badly burned but managed to somehow live through the disaster. In town, only one man survived. Louis Cyparis, a local ruffian, had been thrown in jail in April for murdering a man with his cutlass. On May 7th he had escaped from a work party in town, lived it up that night, and then turned himself in. He was thrown in solitary confinement, into a prison dungeon with only one small opening above the door. Before breakfast, he saw everything go dark, then felt the rush of hot air and ash through the grated opening. Intense heat followed and he passed out. He was severely burned and spent four days in the cell before he was rescued. He was eventually pardoned and joined the Barnum and Bailey circus, billed as the “Lone Survivor of St. Pierre.” He died in 1929.
In October, five months after Mt. Pelee had destroyed St. Pierre, a lava dome of unheard of proportions began to rise from the crater floor. Growing at a rate of fifty feet a day, it was five hundred feet wide at the base and rose a remarkable one thousand feet into the air, making it the largest such formation of modern times. Before it crumbled into a pile of rubble in March of 1903, it stood like a giant tombstone over St. Pierre and the 28,000 souls that the volcano had claimed.
