The inhabitants of Caribbean Paris, as the town of St. Pierre on the island of St. Pierre was affectionately known, looked anxiously towards the summit of Mt. Pelée, just over six kilometres away. It was true that gas had been leaking from the volcano for less than two years, but now, on 22 April 1902, the ground beneath their feet was shaking. They did not let up on the second day either. When they did, the townspeople could smell the sulphur in the air and could remove the ash from their skin, which had been blown in by the wind from the volcano. Should they stay or should they go? There is no danger, the French governor assured them. His successor was already counting the bodies – he counted around 30,000. Among them were the bodies of the governor and his wife.
“It started to blow desperately. The earth began to shake and the sky suddenly darkened”, Léon Compere-Léandre, a young shoemaker, later recalled the morning of 8 May 1902, when his town of St. Pierre disappeared from the face of the earth in a single minute, along with its inhabitants and some eight thousand refugees.
The town, which was boasting a city of bright red houses, narrow streets and a bustling harbour, was a place where the country people took refuge, thinking they would be safe. It was not because St Pierre was over 350 years old, where schools, theatres and botanical gardens blended seamlessly with brothels, casinos and rum distilleries, that it became the ideal home for Martinique’s intellectual elite, business upstarts and the few tourists who wanted to see this French economic jewel. No, there were fewer ashes.
Snakes and ants fight for life
Something was happening in the volcano, they knew that, but they had no idea that the lake was already boiling. At the beginning of May, they were again frightened by the earthquakes, and increasingly worried by the steam escaping from the crater and the lava, which some would have sworn they saw in the middle of the night, when it made the bare top of the mountain glisten in the moonlight.
The next day, the birds were observed on the ground instead of in the air. They were reportedly falling vertically down from the sky because the volcanic dust made them too heavy to stay in the air. The fish were probably killed by a shock wave triggered by an underwater earthquake, researchers later speculated, which is why a steamship captain saw the fish floating dead in the water.
The slopes of the volcano have become too dangerous to live on, and so have the plains below. Not just for people. Armies of ants and giant centipedes occupied the streets of St Pierre. In search of a safe haven, they devoured everything in their path.
But 50 people lost their lives, not to them, but to the deadly green pit vipers, snakes up to two metres long, which invaded the town, killing children in particular, although 200 animals reportedly perished under their venom. Soldiers fired at them, but they did not keep people away for long.
Meanwhile, the water in the lake boiled and eroded the rim of the crater until it gave way on 5 May 1902 and the lake’s contents spilled into the Blanche River, which flowed down the south-west side and into the sea north of the town.
The river has been strange for a few days. It has been restless, sometimes crossing the banks and sometimes simply disappearing. It had never been like this before, but no one connected its new nature with the fact that something must be going on in the volcano – as the magma inside the earth was rising, it was pressing on the underground waters and changing the behaviour of the river.
“This morning, all the townspeople are on the alert, all eyes are on Mount Pelée, the extinct volcano. Everyone is afraid that the volcano has burned its head in, that it will erupt and destroy the whole island,” wrote the wife of the US ambassador to her sister.
She and her husband lived in St Pierre, but she did not see the rim of the crater give way and the water overflow the rim. And she did not see that it was not clear lake water, but lahar, which is formed when water mixes with pyroclastic debris, i.e. ash and rock fragments, although these can be as large as 10 metres.
This creates a kind of volcanic mud river, almost as thick as wet concrete, but not slow. It can rush down a hill or down a riverbed at astonishing speed, demolishing anything in its path.
On 5 May, a cane plantation north of the city was in its destructive path. All 23 workers on it died. The boiling mud flow bypassed the town but, at more than 100 kilometres per hour, it spilled into the sea, creating a giant wave three metres high. The tsunami flooded low-lying areas along the coast of St Pierre, killing the inhabitants.
Don’t worry, it’s safe!
The citizens of St Pierre were neither blind nor stupid. They thought of evacuating to Fort-de-France, the second most important town on the island, but hesitated: the island’s leading newspaper, the conservative Les Colonies, persistently assured them that there was nothing dangerous going on in the volcano.
Unfortunately, the security assessment was not a reflection of a concern for real security, but of a desire for dominance and superiority. Martinique fell under French administration. Until then, the island had been ruled by a right-wing political party, but it needed the votes of the conservatives from St Pierre to win the elections. Unfortunately, they were among those who could afford to flee the town, and this would have meant that they would not have been at the polls on 11 May 1902.
Governor Louis Mouttet could not allow the power of the island to pass into the hands of a black governor and a radical party, so he ordered the escapees to stop, even though on 6 May everyone saw the blue flames on the top of the mountain that usually herald the arrival of magma and lava spills.
In the newspaper, the Governor urged people to stay and at the same time promised to organise an evacuation if necessary. The mayor of St Pierre and the town’s parish priest agreed with him and did not resist even when he sent the army onto the roads to bring back people who wanted to leave the town. Officially, of course, the army kept the peace so that panic did not break out quite unnecessarily.
But that is why, on 7 May, the Soufriere volcano on the nearby island of St Vincent erupted. Now people were also boiling, but the authorities continued to insist that there was no cause for alarm. The Governor had taken a trip to Mt. Pelée sent an expedition to see what was happening at close quarters. Its most scientifically trained member was a high school teacher.
Thus, “local experts” reported to the Governor that “everything that has happened so far is normal and can be observed regularly in all volcanoes around the world”. They expertly assessed that “the craters of the volcano are wide open, which will allow the gases to spread without causing an earthquake or eruption of rocks”.
According to them, “the Mt. Pelée’s activity does not include anything that would make it necessary to leave St Pierre” because “St Pierre is completely safe”. The Governor and his wife, the Mayor and his family, the US Ambassador and his wife, and all the members of the expedition stayed there, along with some 28 000 people, and the report also stated that “given the location of the craters and valleys leading to the sea, the town of St Pierre is perfectly safe”.
But the next morning, on 8 May 1902, the sky over the city suddenly darkened. The time was 8.02 when Léon Compere-Léandre, a young shoemaker, felt a strong wind and a shaking of the ground. He turned around to “go into the house. With the greatest effort, I climbed the three or four steps that separated me from my room. I could feel my arms, legs and body burning. I fell on the table.”
All dead, one miraculously alive
He didn’t understand what was happening. He didn’t know much about volcanic eruptions anyway, and now there was no lava. But the eruption that day was not just a mystery to him. It was only later that researchers told him that a giant V-shaped fissure had formed in the rocks at the edge of the crater, looking straight towards the city.
When the volcano erupted with a deafening roar, a huge dark mushroom cloud appeared in the sky. For more than eighty kilometres around, not a ray of sunlight reached the ground. Extremely overheated gases, volcanic ash and crushed rocks mixed in what is known as a pyroclastic flow and sent a plume of hot water down the southern flank of Mt. Pelée at speeds of more than 160 kilometres per second.
When the remains of the burnt wood were later analysed, it was found that the temperature of the gaseous stream was relatively low, probably no more than 300 or 400 degrees Celsius. It would have been quite normal for it to have been around 1000 degrees Celsius, but for the people of St Pierre, 300 or 400 degrees Celsius was enough to kill them.
They did not have time to flee. “A light appeared, more brilliant than a flash … At the same time, the cloud that formed at the top of Mt. Pelée, literally fell on St Pierre, and at such a speed that no one had a chance to escape,” reported Victor Albert, one of the eyewitnesses who observed the catastrophe from boats relatively safely away from the coast.
Just a few minutes after the eruption, the pyroclastic flow was already in place. The impact was so violent that a 16-metre-high statue weighing 3 tonnes was torn off its base. The hurricane-like force turned the metal supports into twisted metal and the metre-thick stone walls into rubble. Only some of them, which stood parallel to the current, survived.
Yet most people were not killed by this powerful force. What killed them were the poisonous gases and high temperatures that burned their lungs and skin. That day, four more people took refuge in the room of Léon Comper-Léandre, a young shoemaker.
“They cried and screamed in pain, even though their clothes showed no signs of having been touched by fire. After ten minutes, a young Delavaud girl of 10 years collapsed dead. The others left,” he later recalled of the strange scene, when all of them had burns, although none of them had come into contact with the fire.
“I went upstairs and into another room. In it I found Father Delavaud. He was still dressed, lying in bed. He was dead. He was pink and bloated, but his clothes were intact.”
Léon Compere-Léandre could take no more. He threw himself on the bed in despair and without strength. “I was immobile, waiting for death. I regained my senses about an hour later when I noticed that the roof was on fire. I still had enough energy left to run to Fonds-Saint-Denis, six kilometres from St Pierre, my legs bleeding and covered in burns.”
To this day, it is not clear to anyone why he survived and others did not. The fact that his house stood at the edge of a pyroclastic flow certainly worked in his favour, but it was still miraculous that the poisonous gases and boiling debris killed most of the others but not him.
Four days under the ashes
When he managed to reach the neighbouring village and told what had happened to him, the villagers were convinced that he had gone mad. But he hadn’t. The pyroclastic flow, without lava, had killed nearly 28,000 people, as many as there were in the town, and destroyed sixteen ships out of the eighteen moored in the harbour.
The US cruise ship Roraima catches fire due to extremely high temperatures. Most of the passengers and crew died. Charles Thompson survived. “The fire raged as far as St Pierre. The town disappeared before our eyes,” he said.
The steamer Grappler capsized from the force of the impact. There were no survivors. The other ship, the Rodham, managed to get away, but was buried by boiling ash and float or foamed igneous rock. She was heading for St Lucia with dying people on board. At the finish, officials asked the captain where he was from. “From the brink of hell,” he replied.
That was where the warship Suchet was heading at the time. The deputy governor sent it to reconnoitre, but at first its captain could not report anything. It reached the town at half past eleven in the morning. The burning ruins, full of volcanic ash and rubble, were still so hot that he could not anchor. He was only able to get ashore at around three in the afternoon.
He couldn’t believe his eyes. Although he could see no lava, not a single building was standing upright. He did not see a single tree. What was once the most exotic and vibrant place on the island was now an unrecognisable ruin. More than 21 square kilometres of land had been destroyed, but St Pierre had taken the worst of it.
Its ruins continued to burn for several days. Bodies were everywhere. The expressions on the faces of those who were not completely charred were calm. Death had obviously struck them before they could realise the agony of endless suffering. The corpses were discovered for weeks. Many could not be identified.
There was not a soul in the city. Hardly. It was the fourth day after the disaster, when they were inspecting the area of the former prisons and heard something unusual. They looked around and found 25-year-old Louis-Auguste Cyparis, badly burned but alive, in an underground cell. Samson, as everyone called him, was buried under a thick layer of ashes.
In April 1902, he attacked his friend with a short curved sword, wounding him and landing him in prison. His sentence was about to expire when the opportunity to escape presented itself, and he took it, if only to dance and drink the night away. In the morning, he handed himself in to the police and earned a week of solitary confinement as punishment.
So there he was, more or less in the basement, in a cell closed with a heavy metal door, with light and air only coming in through a small window at the top of the wall. He was waiting for breakfast when the cell went dark. Hot air mixed with ash began to penetrate the room.
Samson held his breath. He was suffocating. He undressed, urinated on his clothes and tried to fill the window opening with them to prevent the ashes from filling the cell to the top.
The pain was indescribable. It burned all over his body. The hot air made him all toasty. He drank a little water. And after a while a little more. It wasn’t much in one bucket, but it was apparently enough to keep him alive four days later, when the rescuers dug him out of his prisoner’s grave.
“I think he was more horribly burnt than any man I have ever seen”, wrote a shocked American journalist when he saw him. Samson spent several months recovering in hospital before turning his painful experience into a business that marked him for life. He started performing in the circus and marketed himself as the only survivor from St Pierre.
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Three outbreaks in one year
He was trying to put his life back together, but he was far from the only one. The volcano refused to calm down and the authorities evacuated people from nearby towns. Suddenly there were 25 000 displaced people on the island, who had to find shelter and food.
Aid from abroad was initially abundant. Canada, Great Britain, Denmark, France, Italy, Japan and Russia sent packages, and US President Theodore Roosevelt asked Congress for financial aid after “one of the worst disasters ever to hit our neighbouring island of Martinique. The town of St. Pierre no longer exists.”
But sympathy slowly waned and by 15 August 1902 the government had had enough of the refugee burden. It no longer cared that the volcano erupted twice more and that on 20 May it once again engulfed St Pierre. There were no fatalities this time, but only because there was no one in the town. Now people were being sent back, again claiming that life under the volcano was safe.
The town of Morne Rouge is alive again. Léon Compere-Léander, a young shoemaker, has taken up residence there. He had recovered after surviving a pyroclastic flow in St Pierre and was now, on 30 August, “safe” in his new home.
It is not known exactly what he was doing when the volcano erupted again, but it is known that he experienced the same story for the third time in one year. The pyroclastic flow hit the town of Morne Rouge, killing around 1 500 people and sparing it.
Léon Compere-Léander, by some miracle, even bore his skin for a third time, and then lived in seclusion and poverty like many of the locals until 1936, when he died. The French administrators were unable to face reality. Just as they failed to evacuate, they failed to rebuild the town and to build the destroyed homes.
The girl in the boat
The friction between them and the locals intensified, and it was in this atmosphere that Havivra de Ifrile grew up, going to work early in the morning on 8 May 1902, even though she was still a girl. Her mother told her to stop on the way at her aunt’s, who had a shop next to a tourist attraction called the Corkscrew, or opener, the one for bottles with cork stoppers.
The attraction got its unusual name from the spiral shape of the path leading to the ancient or parasitic crater, which was located somewhere halfway up the volcano’s flank.
As Havivra approached, she detected gas. At the target, she looked into the crater. “There I saw that the bottom of the cavity was completely red, as if it was boiling, and there were blue flames coming out of it,” she later explained.
Then she saw three unfortunate people trying to escape. They were not fast enough. They were caught in a “cloud of blue smoke” and “fell as if they were dead”. Now she started to run towards St. Pierre herself.
“I had just reached the main road when I saw that gurgling thing burst out of the top of the Opener and run down the hill. At first it followed the road, then the flow got bigger. It swallowed the houses on both sides of the road. Then I saw this red boiling river coming from the other side of the hill, blocking the way of the people who were fleeing from their houses.”
So Havivra told us later, but the Red River was not lava because there was no lava. Whether the description was a figment of her imagination or her memory, it is true that she ran to the shore and jumped into her brother’s boat. She quickly paddled to the cave where she and her friends used to play pirates and hid in it.
“Before I got there, I looked back: it was as if the whole side of the hill close to the town had opened up and was running fiercely at the screaming people. I was quite burnt, because stones and ashes were falling on the boat, but I got into the cave.”
But even there, she was not safe for long. Debris and wreckage began to fall into the water. The water level was rising dangerously. Finally, it reached almost to the top of the cavity.
Havivra lost consciousness. Later, about three kilometres off the coast, sailors from the French warship Suchet spotted a boat being tossed about by the sea. Inside was Havivra.
She was rescued. She recovered completely and was able to observe a strange phenomenon that proved most credibly that Mt. Pelée will not be asleep for a long time.
The incredible Pelée Dome
In October 1902, a pillar with a domed top began to rise from the bottom of the crater. Built from lava, it grew steadily for a year until it was a huge, breathtaking obelisk.
“None of the magnificent scenes of nature which I have seen so far – the Matterhorn, the Yosemite columns, the giant [Mexican volcano] Popocatépetl looming over the shoulders of [the volcano] Iztaccihuatl, or the Grand Canyon in Colorado – have impressed me as much as the sight of the Pelée Dome,” wrote Angelo Heilprin, an American geologist of Hungarian descent, in 1904.
In the years after the disaster, he explored the mountain and was amazed by the spectacular dome, which measured between 105 and 150 metres at its base and rose proudly more than 300 metres from the crater floor. At times it grew at an incredible speed. Angelo Heilprin reported that the “spine” of the crater grew by 10 metres in eight days and again by 6 metres in four days, and someone reported that it rose by 15 metres in a single day.
The higher it was, the more dome-like it became, and it was called the Dome of Peléea. At night, it glowed brilliantly as the still-hot lava inside shone through the cracks, making it even more fascinating. When it was at its tallest, it was as tall as Keops Pyramid, the oldest and, at around 135 metres, the tallest pyramid in Giza, Egypt.
But the Great Pyramid, or Kufu’s Pyramid as it is also called, has stood upright since ancient times, while Pelée’s dome quickly became too high and too small. Eleven months after it began to grow, in March 1903, it collapsed and crumbled, leaving only photographs and stories from geologists who had never seen anything like it.
But that was not the only shock they experienced those days. When the smoke cleared, they began to investigate what had happened. They knew as much about how volcanoes work as they knew about the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in Italy, so they didn’t recognise any of the warning signs sent by the volcano.
And that’s why they had no idea what that dark gaseous mass was that had descended on the city. French geologist Alfred Lacroix was the first to name it, in 1904, using the phrase nuée ardente, which means shining or burning cloud.
Today, the deadly mixtures of solid and semi-solid particles and hot gases that spew from a volcano are known as a pyroclastic flow. It produces extraordinary shapes that are heavier than air and move like an avalanche. The only difference is that they are usually extremely hot, carry toxic gases and are extremely fast.
Pyroclastic flow is the deadliest of all the phenomena that accompany a volcanic eruption, and St Pierre has learned this the hard way. It was the source of most of the deaths, although earthquakes and tsunamis also took many lives, and in the months and years after the disaster, famine caused by the devastation of nature and displacement also contributed to the death toll.
The worst volcanic disaster in history?
But the disaster also had warning effects. In 1902, the United States planned a canal to link the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans. Congressmen had a bit of a row: should the canal go through Panama or Nicaragua? The latter was famous for its active volcanoes, but was only forced out of the game by the eruption of Mt. It was only then that the Senate voted in favour of the Panama Canal by an eight-vote majority.
Mount Pelée continued to erupt, subsided a little and woke up again between 1929 and 1932, but never again with the ferocity it had shown in 1902. And it was never alone again. A makeshift observatory was set up about three kilometres away. In it, the American volcanologist Frank Perret diligently recorded observations of the pyroclastic flows that poured past his cabin, sparing him a hair’s breadth here and there.
Today, experts disagree on whether the eruption of Mt. Pelée was the most destructive volcano in the last century or in all of history. The 1883 eruption of Krakatoa killed 36 000 people, more than St Pierre. But these people were not killed by the direct eruption of the volcano, but by the tsunami triggered by the eruption. Most of the victims drowned.
The eruption of the Tambora volcano in 1815 also killed more people – 92,000 – but they were not victims of the eruption, but of its aftermath. Lava destroyed rice fields and people died of starvation. Mt. Pelée killed about 28,000 people in a single blast, and about two thousand died from the aftermath.
There were far fewer victims, although still too many, 57, in 1980 in America, when, in a similar manner to Mt. St Helena erupted in the same way as Mt Pelée.
