confuse various details of the chronology and or the geography. Over the decades following the holocaust, of the colony’s main daily newspaper, Les Colonies. It also had a streetcar line, with women conductors. Writers waxed eloquent about the place; even in France, the city was often referred to as “the little Paris” and “the Paris of the Antilles.” And although the surrounding montains and ravines made it difficult to travel overland to the capital, ferries plied the sea regularly between St. Pierre and Fort de France, a trip that took an hour. For two generations, the mountain had been peace itself. Families picnicked on its slopes, children played on its paths and trails and leeward residents viewed it as a benevolent protector against the fury of hurricanes. The first settlers had named it Bald Mountain in reference to the barren strip of rock that circled its broad summit. Later, whimsical locals began calling it Pele, or French for “peeled” (curiously similar to but having no connection with Pele, the Hawaiian goddess of volcanoes). When an unknown mapmaker added a second “e” to the name in the mid 1700s, the mountain became Montagne Pelee. There is never a clear point when a volcanic eruption begins. Some would claim that Pelee’s devastating explosion of 1902 was programmed by Mother Nature a billion years earlier, when she initiated the shifting motions of our planet’s crustal plates. Others would site the minor eruption of 1851 as the disaster’s beginning, noting that volcanoes live on geological rather than human timescales and that to a volcano a fifty year silence is like a human taking a moment to swallow in midsentence. Others would pick May of 1901. It was then that a young couple strayed from a picnic party at L’Etang de Palmistes and ventured to the edge of the precipice bordering L’Etang Sec. Peering down into the dry crater, they noticed fumes rising from a small opening at the base of a dead tree. The air smelled of sulphur. They shared their observations with the rest of their group, everyone took a look, all shrugged, and no one thought much about it again for nearly a year. At the Lycee Colonial in St. Pierre, Professor Gaston Landes had a habit of training the school’s telescope on pretty much everything within view, including CARIBBEAN LANDFALLS
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Mont Pelée. A few times in late 1901 he thought he had noticed wisps of vapor rising from the Etang Sec crater, and after some faint ground tremors in February of 1902 he began to watch more diligently. Some days the wisps seemed to be there, some days they weren’t, and some days he couldn’t tell, because the mountain was shrouded in clouds. But as a man of science, Landes continued his observations after many others would have gotten bored. And on April 2, 1902, there could be no doubt: clouds of steam and smoke were indeed rising from the upper valley of the Riviere Blanche. During the following week, snakes, rodents, and beetles began abadoning the flanks of the mountain and creating a general nuisance in the villages below. On the plantations, cattle became skittish, and dogs barked through the night. In the cane fields, a change in wind direction sometimes delivered a blossom of sulphur oxides that could knock over a strong man. On Sunday, April 20, Professor Landes hiked close enough to see that fumes were pouring from at least two seperate vents. And in St. Pierre, Clara Prentiss, discovered to her displeasure that her silverwear had tarnished again only a day after her servants had polished it. Thousands of feet beneath the Lesser Antilles, the slow but relentless westward creep of the Atlantic floor was driving a wedge under the Caribbean plate and squeezing a huge bulge of hot magna
toward the surface. The planetary crust here is pockmarked with the old and notso-old volcanoes; sites that have vented geothermal pressures in the past, then were plugged when the upward-swelling molten rock cooled and solidified. In the spring of 1902, on the islands of both Martinique and St. Vincent, a great unplugging had begun. The higher elevations of Martinique get a lot of rain, sometimes as much as two hundred inches in a year. Before it can reach the sea, much of this precipitation seeps into the underground streams and resevoirs inside the island’s ancient volcanoes. As Loius Mouttet grappled with his responsibilities as governor and tens of thousands of his constituents worried about their personal priorities, the magma swelling beneath everyone’s feet was heating those underground lakes and streams to a boil. Monday, May 5. At daybreak, ash was raining over the entire northern half of the island. The Riviere Blanche was acting strangely—oscillating between ebbing and swelling, with an occasional surge that swept boulders along its bed. A few miles upstream of Precheur and three thousand feet higher in elevation, the dry crater lake of L’Etang Sec was growing wider and deeper, its surface licking at the base of the crater’s great southwestwardfacing gash. By 8 in the morning, the misbehaving Riviere Blanche had attracted hundreds of spectators on both of its banks. The flow
A political election, government bureaucracy and fear of being robbed all played into the death of 30,000 people in 3 minutes.
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