Martinique and St. Vincent
Saturday, May 10, 1902, will long figure as a day of terror and horror in the news of the world, and notably in the United States. The press report of the matter exceeded in horror any story of battle ever told:
St. Pierre, the principal city of Martinique, the gem of the Windward Islands, has been blotted out under a storm of fire and avalanches of molten rock and ashes.
With a population of upward of 25,000 persons, the city has been totally destroyed, and the survivors are reported to number less than two score, nearly all of them burned, wounded, and suffering awful tortures.
Loss of life in Morne Rouge, and other neighboring towns and parishes, it is feared, will swell the death list to the appalling total of 40,000.
No such calamity has been chronicled in recent times. For anything approximating a parallel in horror and in the extent of the disaster one must hark back to the fate of cities of the plain or to the doom of Herculaneum and Pompeii. Even under that historic outpouring from Vesuvius the loss of life was probably not so great as that which occurred on Thursday in the sun-kissed little island of the Caribbean.
Mount Pelee, a great volcano, long ago believed to be extinct, suddenly awoke from the sleep of many years. Out of the mouth of the treacherous crater, around which nestled the summer villas and the pretty homes of the wealthier of the French West Indian residents, suddenly belched smoke and flame. Then, like the discharge from a Titanic gun, the whole crest of the mountain leaped thousands of feet into the air, and from the awful caldron's mouth poured down rivers of fire, swallowing up everything that lay in their path to the sea.
Torrents of red-hot ashes buried the country road about for miles, covering it as the blizzard blankets the earth in January. Groves, orchards, towns, and city burst into flame under the shower of death, and even the shipping in the roadstead of St. Pierre had no time to up anchor and get to sea.
The Roraima, of the Quebec line, which sailed from New York on April 26th, was lost, and it is believed that all on board perished. Most, if not all, of her passengers from the north had disembarked previously at other ports.
Of the officers and crew of the British steamship Roddam nearly all are reported dead or dying. The supercargo and ten men leaped into the sea and went down as the storm of fire enveloped them.
The Island of Martinique is a French possession and belongs to the Windward group of islands and is about thirty miles southeast of Dominica, and twenty miles north of St. Lucia, has an area of 381 square miles, and a total population of 187,692, only about 25,000 of whom are whites. Although St. Pierre is the largest town, the seat of the government is at Fort Royal, sometimes called Fort de France, which has a population of about 16,000. The disaster now reported is not the first which has occurred on the island.
It was visited in 1667, and history records that 16,000 perished. The disaster now recorded is perhaps the most appalling of the last 125 years, keeping in mind however the loss of 200,000 brown men on the coast of Sumatra and surrounding islands in 1885, when Krakatoa blew up, and the damage wrought in Spain in 1884 when 2,000 were destroyed.
Martinique is of volcanic origin, contains five or six extinct craters, and is subject to earthquakes. In the interior are three mountains, the highest of which is Mount Pelee, 4,438 feet above the sea level. Apparently it is this volcano which caused the havoc now reported.
The island has not always been French property. It was seized by the British in 1762, 1781, 1794, and 1809, and was finally restored to France by the treaty of Paris in 1814. Slavery was abolished in 1848, and since 1866 the island has legislated for itself in regard to customs duties and public works.
It was on this island that Josephine, the first empress of the French, was born, within a few miles of St. Pierre, on the plantation of her father, M. Tascher de la Pagerie, of an old French Creole family. There she met her first husband, Vicomte Alexander de Beauharnais, who had also been born on the island. Josephine died at Malmaison while Napoleon was at Elba. A beautiful statue of her was erected by the people of Martinique in one of the squares of St. Pierre.
In the naval history of this country St. Pierre will be remembered as the place where Cervera's squadron first turned up on this side of the Atlantic after leaving the Cape Verde Islands. Cervera put in there for coal, and within a few hours the Navy Department at Washington, which had been scouring the world for news of him, learned of his arrival.