The day the world ended, p.8
The Day the World Ended, page 8
Later, she was to recall that “the passing of the carriage made no noise. The wheels were well muffled by the ash. The horses, removed from the shelter of their stable, snorted from the effects of the sulphur fumes. The streets were hard to negotiate. People would not give way, and it needed a lot of patience and firmness to force a passage.”
The journey out of St. Pierre was an unforgettable one for the widow. She was to describe it later to Angelo Heilprin, a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society of London. “One can hardly imagine a more hopeless scene of impending ruin; for what the volcano had thus far spared, or seemed disposed to spare, the torrential waters of the descending streams threatened to claim. Birds lay asphyxiated by the ash. The cattle suffered greatly. Children wandered aimlessly about the streets with their little donkeys, like little human wrecks. We passed a group of children going hesitantly down the Rue Victor Hugo. They looked as if they were covered with hoar frost. In the countryside, desolation and aridity prevailed. Little birds lay dead under the bushes, and in the meadows the few living animals were restless—bleating, neighing, and bellowing in despair. But as we traveled deeper into the countryside, an eternal silence seemed to envelop everything. It was all the eerier when viewed by the light of the glowing cone of Pelée.”
The carriage was a quarter of the way to Fort-de-France when the silence was broken by a series of explosions: “They were frightful detonations. And then we observed one of the most extraordinary sights in nature—Mount Pelée awake at night. The glowing cone was soon hidden by an enormous column of black smoke traversed by flashes of lightning. The rumbling grew deeper. A few moments later a rain of ashes fell upon the countryside.”
Without waiting to see what happened next, Philomène Gerbault, her maid huddled in fear beside her, ordered the carriage driver to make all haste to Fort-de-France.
Behind her in St. Pierre anarchy was beginning to corrode the mechanism which kept the town functioning. In the Mouillage and Fort districts of the town, several food and vegetable shops were looted; soldiers were called to evict people from a number of hotels and bars where they had gone demanding free food and shelter; fights broke out between refugees from the countryside and local residents who refused to open up their homes as sanctuaries.
The arrival of a black cloud of warm ash put an end to the looting and fighting. The ash fall had the density of a thick fog, and the effect of a cloud of tear gas. Within moments, St. Pierre was choking in tears.
In the darkness the roar of the water as it swept past the Residency sounded to James Japp, the British Consul-General, as if the “whole world was in flood.”
It would be some hours before he would learn that a miniature tidal wave had coursed down the Roxelane River, wrecking as it passed the power plant half a mile outside St. Pierre which provided the town with much of its electricity supply.
In the town, the red-eyed populace had to cope with a new phenomenon. Through the falling ash they could hear the muffled noise of what sounded like heavy artillery fire. The resemblance to gunfire was heightened by the regular flashes that could be detected through the cinder cloud. Mount Pelée was coughing out red-hot rocks that weighed up to half a ton; they arced through the air, shattering down on the countryside below, setting fire to jungle, brush, and deserted hamlets.
Soon the rain of ash was met by a rising pall of smoke; together, the cloud of ash and smoke drifted slowly over the town.
It took an hour to pass. When it had gone, it was discovered that the cloud had choked thirty people to death.
Its passing marked a return of that same eerie feeling of security. A year later, trying to analyse that feeling, Angelo Heilprin was to write: “In any country but Martinique the symptoms of uneasiness to which Mount Pelée gave expression would have impressively counseled flight. But in this island of tropical dreams and sunshine, the warnings were largely ignored.”
Now, as midnight approached, people from the villages to the south of the town—from such romantically named places as Carbet, Morne-aux-Boeufs, and Gele—began to move into the town, convinced that within its confines they would find the security they sought against the elements.
From his balcony Andréus Hurard, the editor of Les Colonies, watched a fresh group of refugees entering the town. Their arrival gave him a feeling of deep satisfaction, confirming again the conviction that not only had he extricated himself from a difficult situation, but that he had been able to turn it to his own advantage.
A town choked with sulphur, its streets blocked with fallen ash, a burning and thundering volcano standing on its threshold—this was St. Pierre as Saturday drew to a close. This was the town that Andréus Hurard, for a mixture of commercial greed and political chicanery, was determined to hold together until after the impending election.
As he turned to go indoors, the striking of the Town Hall clock announced that it was midnight. Sunday was a few strokes away. In just eight hours, the polling would begin. Hurard had no doubt that at the end of it, Fernand Clerc and Alfred Percin would be the two candidates to go forward to the final ballot a week later. But, like many other people in St. Pierre, he had miscalculated the amount of time left.
Four thousand miles away in Paris, at the aperitif hour of seven o’clock, Pierre Louis Decrais, the Minister of the Colonies, sipped a drink as he studied a summary of the week’s reports from all corners of France’s empire. Born in Bordeaux in December, 1838, he had matured, like many of the wines in the district, early in life. At thirty-three he had been appointed Prefect of Indre-et-Loire; three years later he had become Prefect for the important Alpes-Maritimes; at the age of forty-nine he had become Minister of the Colonies.
He read fast, scanning each page and initialing it at the bottom righthand corner, signifying that it had received Ministerial scrutiny. Occasionally, he penciled in some comment.
Under Martinique was a brief entry: “The election is proceeding. It is too early yet to say how the issue will be decided.”
Decrais initialed the page and turned to another report.
SUNDAY
May 4, 1902
CHAPTER SEVEN
Special Powers
AT TWELVE-THIRTY on this Sunday morning, only one light burned in St. Pierre. It was the oil lamp in the parlor of the American Consul’s home.
For hours Thomas and Clara Prentiss had sat listening to the sounds of eruption coming from Mount Pelée. At one point Thomas Prentiss asked his wife if she would not reconsider going away from the town, if only to stay in Fort-de-France, until the volcano quieted again. She had firmly refused to leave his side. Since then they had said very little to each other.
Life for the Prentisses in St. Pierre was in many ways an unreal one. Though they were important members of the local diplomatic corps, with all the undertones of solidarity that the title implied, there was an ironic ring about the word “corps” when applied to the foreign diplomats posted in Martinique. There was no official Legation quarter, though most lived in the L’Centre district, and there was little social mingling between diplomats and the local population. Prentiss, like his fellow envoys, was insulated from all but the most formal contacts with the populace; only James Japp, the British Consul, maintained any real social liaison with the local administration by virtue of his length of service.
Apart from entertaining the master of an American ship in port, or inviting Japp to dinner, the Prentisses rarely entertained. This Saturday night they had dined alone. Now in the small hours of Sunday morning, Clara Prentiss rose to prepare the café brûlot she had served as a nightcap since arriving in St. Pierre.
She had started to ladle the liquid into two large silver tankards when a loud explosion echoed across the countryside. Moments later a flash of light glowed brightly through the shutters.
Clara and Thomas Prentiss, clutching their tankards in their hands, opened the shutters. An extraordinary and terrifying spectacle greeted them.
As far as their eyes could see, the whole sky, clear now of the last of the dust cloud, was “aglow with fire.”
Looking out through the window, Clara Prentiss felt “as if we were standing on the brink of Hell. Every few moments electric flames of blinding intensity were traversing the recesses of black and purple clouds and casting a lurid pallor over the darkness that shrouded the world. Scintillating stars burst forth like crackling fireworks, and serpent lines wound themselves in and out like traveling wave crests. It was indeed an extraordinary spectacle.”
There was another extraordinary phenomenon nearer at hand. It was the attitude of the majority of the population of St. Pierre. The display of celestial fireworks in the clear sky, far from causing panic, only generated excitement. People leaned out of bedroom windows and stood in the streets, shouting and whooping as the sky was patterned various shades of red.
To Robert de Saint-Cyr, awakened from sleep by the noise, the spectacle was reminiscent of the Mardi Gras of his childhood in New Orleans. He stood for a while and watched the macabre carnival mood which had settled over the town, then closed the shutters and went back to bed. Down in the streets, children, now fully awake, raced around, sending swirls of ash eddying into the air.
St. Pierre shortly before the eruption of Mt. Pelée. The lighthouse at the left is on the Place Bertin. Avenue Victor Hugo cuts diagonally towards the slope of Pelée.
The front page of the last issue of Les Colonies edited by Andréus Hurard containing the false interview with Professor Landes.
Market Square on a feast day, looking towards the Cathedral of St. Pierre.
The Guerin sugar refinery at the mouth of the Blanche River. The summit of Pelée beyond is obscured by fog.
The mouth of the Blanche River after the eruption, choked with mud and forming a clay bluff at the sea. The boulder strewn ledge marks the site of the Guerin property.
St. Pierre on the evening of its last day. Mt. Pelée and the horizon north of the city are darkened by the cloud of ashes rising from the volcano.
A cloud of superheated gas passing over the site of St. Pierre. While this photograph was taken several weeks after the destruction of St. Pierre, it shows major similarities to the death cloud itself.
The theater at St. Pierre.
Radio Times: Hulton Picture Library
The ruins of the theater.
The rubble of St. Pierre, still smoking on the 10th of May.
The site of the Cathedral of St. Pierre.
Partly melted, but unbroken, glasses found in the ruins.
The hulk of the Roraima burns offshore.
The volcanic fireball whose heat and blast waves destroyed St. Pierre might as well have been an atomic explosion.
Two months after the fatal eruption, a tower of volcanic rock began to rise from the Étang Sec crater which had destroyed St. Pierre.
Looming like a monument to the 30,000 dead, the tower of Pelée jutted over 1000 feet above the summit. Created by unique geological forces, the tower destroyed itself within a year and its fragments were scattered around the volcano’s peak.
From his bedroom window, the indefatigable Father Roche carefully recorded what he saw: “The number of forms in which the illuminations appeared were many. Some were short, straight rodlike lines; others were wavy or spirals. There were large stars, and circles with clusters of stars attached to them. And around these zigzagged the lightning. After that first loud explosion, there were no intermittent explosions, but instead a steady roaring that swept around the peak of Pelée, rising and falling almost as if keeping in time with the auroral display, though it is likely that they are the flashes of burning gases escaping from the crater of Mount Pelée.”
Like the lava flow of the previous night, the priest concluded, the flashes “present no danger, and appear to be identical with those which were noted to accompany the great eruption of Tarawera, in New Zealand, in 1886.”
He was still watching this scene of majestic grandeur when a “great pattering of pumice fell upon the town, and for a while it sounded as if we were in a tropical hailstorm. Some of the fragments were an inch or more in size; most were like fine sand grains. But even the smaller particles came down with great force, stinging the flesh as it was touched by them.”
The fall lasted about ten minutes. In that time it had driven all those in the streets of St. Pierre to shelter. When the fall ended, so did the celestial display, and the night returned to normal.
As he dressed on this Sunday morning Dr. Eugenè Guérin saw that the wind had veered; smoke from the chimney stack of his sugar factory was drifting lazily northward. The Blanche River, which the day before had carried a wave of mud down to the sea, was now flowing past the factory wall at a rate no greater than when it was in normal flood; the mud had slopped over the wall in places and congealed to form crude pancakes.
Though he had observed it from childhood, Dr. Guérin had never failed to be impressed by the scene of incomparable beauty that greeted him from the balcony of his home.
To the left and above his factory, its lofty peak now veiled in cloud, rose the wall of Pelée. To his right the hills came down to the sea; a ribbon of curving white surf divided sea and land.
Between the volcano and the sea were massed golden-green regiments of sugar cane, rising to twice the height of a man. Dr. Guérin looked out upon what seemed to be endless square miles of stalk, planted so closely together that their tops formed a seamless carpet. Now, under the repeated ash falls, the pile of that carpet was a dull white.
The dust had settled on the sugar processing factory close to the villa. The storage sheds, great open barns roofed with corrugated iron; the loading platforms, where workmen armed with long-handled rakes guided the cane onto a conveyor belt; the processing building; the enormous storage vats—all were thickly coated with the refuse from Pelée.
The fallout had brought its own special problems to Dr. Guérin. Not only had it ruined part of the cane; it had also produced a reluctance among the pickers to harvest the crop on the slopes of Pelée. Twice in the past few days, during ash falls, they had refused to leave their stonewalled homes.
During the early hours of this Sunday, Dr. Guérin and his son Eugène had been called from their beds to reassure the employees that the detonations they heard, along with the lightning and other celestial trickery, was not a prelude to a major eruption. Unlike their sophisticated cousins in St. Pierre, the plantation workers were simple God-fearing people whose lives were ruled by the threat of Divine wrath and damnation. It was a threat that Dr. Guérin, like his ancestors, fostered; fear of the Almighty was a good way to keep a man at his work. Dr. Guérin knew it was this fear, coupled with the very real fear his own presence instilled in them, that kept his workers from fleeing.
But now, in the light of daybreak, he saw that their fears had not been altogether groundless. The lower slopes of Pelée were dotted with fresh craters caused by the massive rocks which the volcano had ejected; where the rocks had shattered, the fragments had mown swaths through the cane.
Around these paths he could now see bits of bright color moving. They were the canecutters, men and women, and their garments—spots of bright yellow, red, purple, and blue—glowed in the light.
Sunday was normally a day of rest at the refinery and in the sourrounding fields, as it was everywhere else on Martinique. But for Dr. Guérin this was no ordinary Sunday. The previous evening he had heard that the captains of a number of cargo ships in St. Pierre were planning to sail with their holds unfilled if the volcano continued to threaten the countryside. If they did, it would mean that his factory’s output would have to wait another month before fresh ships called, and a month could mean the difference between profit and loss on the sugar crop. Unless reaped quickly, the cane would be ruined if further ash falls came; there was even the possibility that a really heavy fall could clog up the processing plant. So Dr. Guérin had ordered his foreman to have all hands at work this Sunday if the weather, and Pelée, permitted it. Those who refused were to be summarily dismissed.
Dismissal from the Guérin payroll meant not only a loss of free living accommodation for the sacked man and his family, but also a virtual impossibility of employment on any other plantation in Martinique. For Dr. Guérin at seventy-two was the titular head of the oldest ruling dynasty on the island. He was a member of the Ten Families.
The Ten, and only ten, individual families were the island’s social elite. They had their roots in France, tracing their ancestry back to Agincourt when a Guérin, an Aubrey, a Janne, a Hayot, or a Cottrell had distinguished himself. Fernand Clerc, for all his power, was not a member. The Ten Families had two things in common: they never openly became involved in the everyday politics of the island—attempts by the Radical Party to agitate among their workers had been swiftly put down—and they were very rich. The poorest of them had a fortune of around $12,000,000; the richest could command eight times that figure. Their money, like everything else they had, was cautiously handled, invested in the safety of the banks of Paris. They lived, and ruled, by decree.
Nowhere was that autocracy more clearly seen than in the attitude of Dr. Guérin and his family. They brooked no argument or interference from anyone; their two thousand acres of land were virtually a sovereign state.
The center of this state was Dr. Guérin’s home, a Caribbean equivalent of a provincial French château. On two sides it was surrounded by gardens filled with frangipani, orchids, and bougainvillaea. Beside the chateau were the house servants’ quarters; beside them, the factory; behind the factory, his son’s home.
