(Martinique)…Looming high over Martinique is Mount Pelée, which is in the record books as being the third worst volcanic eruption in history. Perhaps there have been worst since, but as—generally—mankind is better able to predict, avoid and plan for such disasters (perhaps), maybe the death tolls have been reduced.
When it last erupted in 1902 (it blew its top twice that year), it killed more than 29,000 people, a tragedy only dwarfed by two 19th-century eruptions in Indonesia, including legendary Krakatoa. I drove up to St. Pierre, the town right beneath it that was swallowed whole.
Tour guides here tell delighted crowds that the only person to survive was a rum drinker who due to intoxication was inside a cell that protected him. Thus, their argument goes, rum can save your life…please buy a bottle in duty-free.
The truth is that this lucky man, Louis-Auguste Cyparis, who went on to be a star attraction in P.T. Barnum’s circus, was in jail because he had inflicted a wound on a friend with a cutlass, a less romantic tale; in fact, a second man survived, too, who was fortunate enough to live on the edge of town.
Today, fewer than 5,000 people live in St. Pierre, and the volcano is deemed one of the world’s most likeliest to yet again explode. I had arrived in the island’s capital Fort-de-France on a Sunday morning, and all was closed, except the large cathedral, the Cathédrale Saint-Louis de Fort-de-France, which was built in the 17th century but has been repeatedly set up again following fires, volcanoes, earthquakes and indifference.
Another more interesting church is just up the inland road on the way to the botanical gardens of Balata. Modeled on the Basilique du Sacré-Cœur in Paris, the Sacré-Cœur de Balata is smaller than the original but to the same scale.
Back in St. Pierre, there are still reminders of that fateful day. An amphitheatre lies empty with scorched walls, inoperable cannons stand facing a sea that provided far less threat than the land behind it and a statue remains headless. In his 1903 book, Mont Pelée and the tragedy of Martinique: A Study of the Great Catastrophes, Angelo Heilprin, who visited in May and August of the fateful year writes that “The landscape was barren as though it had been graven with desert tools, scarred and made ragged by floods of water and boiling mud, and hardly a vestige remained of the verdant forest that but a short time before had been the glory of the land. Great folds of cloud and ash hung over the crown of the volcano, and from its lower flanks issued a veritable tempest of curling vapor and mud. Lying close to its southern foot, and bathed in the flame of a tropical sunshine, was all that remained of the once attractive city of Saint Pierre—miles of wreckage that reached up from the silent desert of stone and sand, showing no color but the burning grays that had been flung to them or that had formed part of mother earth.”
Looking down at the town, the first thing I noticed was a toy train shuttling tourists along the front. Small grey waves lapped at the shore, and a local in a short-sleeved white shirt stood inside a school building and conducted an unseen orchestra. Everything seems normal, but scientists studying this peak—translated literally as Bald Mountain—say that it remains one of the most active volcanoes on the planet, despite not having blown its top for more than a century.
Climbing up the side of the volcano, everything looked green and idyllic. The landscape has names here such as Le Morne Rouge, Le Morne Vert and Gros Morne, monikers that speak of beauty, power and natural colour from the bowels of the planet.
Just before St. Pierre is the seaside village of Le Carbet, where supposedly in 1502, four centuries exactly to the date of the disaster, Christopher Columbus landed on his fourth voyage to what he still might have thought was Japan. A little farther towards the looming volcano are the Pitons du Carbet mountains on which grow ferns reaching more than 30 feet.
Everything is large here. A fantastic—awesome is a better word, in its true meaning—idea of the power of this volcano was that its ash enveloped, destroyed and sunk a ship out at sea called the Roraima, and there were survivors from that, too. One of them described the scene on Martinique—which has a really wonderful flag, by the way, four snakes twirling around staffs on a blue background with a white cross—saying “No darkness was ever like it. Imagine the darkest night you ever saw, imagine it a thousand times darker than that, and then you may get some idea of that the air was like for fifty miles in every direction from the harbour of St. Pierre.”
I walked around St. Pierre for a couple of hours. It does not feel like a town in imminent danger, but what town would? A grey stone house had been made pretty with a thin staircase of the same material bordered with a postbox-red rail, lush, green potted plants, wooden shutters and a mauve door; the main street curves by prim houses and shops of white, blue and yellow.
Only the sight of wetness on the ground (this is the only place in Martinique where the rains fall steadily, the clouds forming over Pelée and dropping their loads on St. Pierre) and a twin-towered church with flaking stone and rusty, squat steeples give a wider picture of any potential neglect that stems from the always possible futility of nature and the idea of the pointlessness of civic pride in the face of sweeping, sudden cataclysm. Bananaquits and Purple-throated carib hummingbirds flitted around, oblivious to the danger but first to leave if conditions change, wondering why the humans cannot pick up on the differences in the atmosphere and the conclusiveness of the catastrophe to come.
When it last erupted in 1902 (it blew its top twice that year), it killed more than 29,000 people, a tragedy only dwarfed by two 19th-century eruptions in Indonesia, including legendary Krakatoa. I drove up to St. Pierre, the town right beneath it that was swallowed whole.
Tour guides here tell delighted crowds that the only person to survive was a rum drinker who due to intoxication was inside a cell that protected him. Thus, their argument goes, rum can save your life…please buy a bottle in duty-free.
The truth is that this lucky man, Louis-Auguste Cyparis, who went on to be a star attraction in P.T. Barnum’s circus, was in jail because he had inflicted a wound on a friend with a cutlass, a less romantic tale; in fact, a second man survived, too, who was fortunate enough to live on the edge of town.
Today, fewer than 5,000 people live in St. Pierre, and the volcano is deemed one of the world’s most likeliest to yet again explode. I had arrived in the island’s capital Fort-de-France on a Sunday morning, and all was closed, except the large cathedral, the Cathédrale Saint-Louis de Fort-de-France, which was built in the 17th century but has been repeatedly set up again following fires, volcanoes, earthquakes and indifference.
Another more interesting church is just up the inland road on the way to the botanical gardens of Balata. Modeled on the Basilique du Sacré-Cœur in Paris, the Sacré-Cœur de Balata is smaller than the original but to the same scale.
Back in St. Pierre, there are still reminders of that fateful day. An amphitheatre lies empty with scorched walls, inoperable cannons stand facing a sea that provided far less threat than the land behind it and a statue remains headless. In his 1903 book, Mont Pelée and the tragedy of Martinique: A Study of the Great Catastrophes, Angelo Heilprin, who visited in May and August of the fateful year writes that “The landscape was barren as though it had been graven with desert tools, scarred and made ragged by floods of water and boiling mud, and hardly a vestige remained of the verdant forest that but a short time before had been the glory of the land. Great folds of cloud and ash hung over the crown of the volcano, and from its lower flanks issued a veritable tempest of curling vapor and mud. Lying close to its southern foot, and bathed in the flame of a tropical sunshine, was all that remained of the once attractive city of Saint Pierre—miles of wreckage that reached up from the silent desert of stone and sand, showing no color but the burning grays that had been flung to them or that had formed part of mother earth.”
Looking down at the town, the first thing I noticed was a toy train shuttling tourists along the front. Small grey waves lapped at the shore, and a local in a short-sleeved white shirt stood inside a school building and conducted an unseen orchestra. Everything seems normal, but scientists studying this peak—translated literally as Bald Mountain—say that it remains one of the most active volcanoes on the planet, despite not having blown its top for more than a century.
Climbing up the side of the volcano, everything looked green and idyllic. The landscape has names here such as Le Morne Rouge, Le Morne Vert and Gros Morne, monikers that speak of beauty, power and natural colour from the bowels of the planet.
Just before St. Pierre is the seaside village of Le Carbet, where supposedly in 1502, four centuries exactly to the date of the disaster, Christopher Columbus landed on his fourth voyage to what he still might have thought was Japan. A little farther towards the looming volcano are the Pitons du Carbet mountains on which grow ferns reaching more than 30 feet.
Everything is large here. A fantastic—awesome is a better word, in its true meaning—idea of the power of this volcano was that its ash enveloped, destroyed and sunk a ship out at sea called the Roraima, and there were survivors from that, too. One of them described the scene on Martinique—which has a really wonderful flag, by the way, four snakes twirling around staffs on a blue background with a white cross—saying “No darkness was ever like it. Imagine the darkest night you ever saw, imagine it a thousand times darker than that, and then you may get some idea of that the air was like for fifty miles in every direction from the harbour of St. Pierre.”
I walked around St. Pierre for a couple of hours. It does not feel like a town in imminent danger, but what town would? A grey stone house had been made pretty with a thin staircase of the same material bordered with a postbox-red rail, lush, green potted plants, wooden shutters and a mauve door; the main street curves by prim houses and shops of white, blue and yellow.
Only the sight of wetness on the ground (this is the only place in Martinique where the rains fall steadily, the clouds forming over Pelée and dropping their loads on St. Pierre) and a twin-towered church with flaking stone and rusty, squat steeples give a wider picture of any potential neglect that stems from the always possible futility of nature and the idea of the pointlessness of civic pride in the face of sweeping, sudden cataclysm. Bananaquits and Purple-throated carib hummingbirds flitted around, oblivious to the danger but first to leave if conditions change, wondering why the humans cannot pick up on the differences in the atmosphere and the conclusiveness of the catastrophe to come.
