Sifting truth from Pelee's ashes: how the real causes of a famous disaster, long misunderstood, became key elements in the modern science of volcanology

Natural History, Oct, 2002 by Steven Soter

On the morning of May 8, 1902, the volcano Mount Pelee, on the Caribbean island of Martinique, vomited a superheated cloud of gas loaded with dust and rock. The turbulent cloud, impelled by its own weight, raced down the mountain faster than a hurricane, hugging the ground and heading for the coastal city of Saint-Pierre, about five miles away. It blasted everything in its path and left a blazing inferno. Within minutes, nearly 30,000 people lay dead--crushed, incinerated, asphyxiated by the scalding gas. The victims included the governor of the island and members of a "scientific commission" assembled to assess the volcanic threat. Only two people within the city survived.

Founded in the seventeenth century, Saint-Pierre had been the cultural and commercial capital of the French West Indies, with a prosperous economy built on sugarcane and rum. American writer Lafcadio Hearn, who lived there for two years, found it enchanting--"the quaintest, queerest, and prettiest withal, among West Indian cities, all stone built and stone flagged," adorned with palm trees, gardens, and fountains, and "a population fantastic, astonishing," which he regarded as the handsomest in the West Indies. In 1902, Saint-Pierre was also the bastion of a white supremacy whose power was being challenged by a populist opposition. Louis Percin, a Radical-Socialist lawyer, was running against Fernand Clerc, a wealthy industrialist, in a highly charged election for a seat in France's Chamber of Deputies, scheduled for May 11. But the inexorable natural agenda of the volcano would render all that irrelevant for Saint-Pierre.

Today we know that Mount Pelee has erupted catastrophically many times in the past 10,000 years. The now-extinct Carib population even called it "the mountain of fire." But in 1902 the people of Saint-Pierre could recall only a single eruption, in 1851, and it had left the city unscathed. Memories of that harmless event contributed to a false sense of security among some of the older residents.

In the week preceding the 1902 catastrophe, the volcano had become increasingly violent. To the accompaniment of thunderous explosions, the crater sent lightning-riven columns of ash towering above the city; a mantle of fine volcanic ash settled over everything; a steaming torrent of mud obliterated a sugar refinery near Saint-Pierre, killing two dozen people; telegraph canes connecting the island to the outside world were severed.

The reaction of the authorities was to prove disastrous. The mayor posted a reassuring proclamation. The leading newspaper derided those who were fleeing in panic. And on the evening of May 7--the last for the doomed city--Governor Louis Mouttet's commission announced that Saint-Pierre was not in danger.

Why had the government not evacuated the city? After the catastrophe, the finger-pointing began. Fernand Clerc, who had gotten out of Saint-Pierre at the last moment, charged that Governor Mouttet had instructions from Paris to keep the population in the city to avoid disrupting the elections. A rumor spread that troops had even prevented people from leaving. But with most of the principals dead, the truth remained obscure. Exploiting the tragedy, several sensational books were rushed into print in 1902, mixing fact and rumor with pure invention.

In 1969, Gordon Thomas and Max Morgan-Witts published The Day the World Ended, presenting it as a nonfiction account of the disaster. They blamed the tragedy on the apathy and duplicity of the governor. Adding to the list of ignored forewarnings from the volcano, they reported that poisonous centipedes and snakes had swarmed over the outskirts of the city and that people had been dying from an epidemic triggered by volcanic pollution. All this, like much else in their book, never happened.

Thomas and Morgan-Witts loaded their narrative with melodramatic fabrications, which so appalled Jacques Petitjean Roget, then president of the Historical Society of Martinique, that in 1972 he published a detailed and scathing critique to expose the nonsense. Unfortunately, his scholarly analysis remained largely unknown outside the French West Indies. Consequently, most subsequent accounts of the tragedy have relied on Thomas and Morgan-Witts, and the mythology continues to propagate.

This year, marking the centennial of the disaster, three books retell the Mount Pelee story. In Vocanoes in Human History, geologists Jelle Zeilinga de Boer and Donald Theodore Sanders cite the 1902 eruption as one with far-reaching effects. Their book is generally good on the geology of volcanoes and the consequences of major eruptions; in their account of what happened in Saint-Pierre, however, they rely on the wrong sources and make a hash of the politics.

In The Last Days of St. Pierre, physics professor Ernest Zebrowski Jr. also uses some unreliable sources but at least attempts to set the record straight. He gives a balanced and sympathetic description of bewildered authorities out of their depth in confronting an unpredictable menace. Even if Governor Mouttet could have imagined what was to happen, he had no means of evacuating 30,000 people. For dramatic effect, Zebrowski contrives detailed conversations among the characters in the unfolding drama, a technique I found distracting.