Martinique And St. Pierre

( Originally Published 1905 )

Roam through the silent city of the dead, Explore each spot where still in ruin grand Her shapeless piles and tottering columns stand.

—Byron.

NOWHERE on the fair face of the earth is there a lovelier or more romantic island than Martinique. Around it poets, historians, novelists and artists have woven a veil of romance and poetry which falls over it and around it in gauze-like tenderness. In France, Martinique has become an enfant gate—a spoiled daughter—dear to the maternal heart by the fascination of its frailties. It is a fetich—an idol, that since the days of the Empress Josephine, who was cradled here, invites the adoration of the sensualist and the worship of the sybarite. They have surrounded it with an aureole of natural and animal beauty, of sensuous romance, of voluptuous delight, and have pictured to the imagination of the sensualist a Mohammedan paradise. Martinique inhaled lovingly the perfumed incense offered to it by carnal Paris, grew more wanton in her pleasures and flaunted her meritorious charms, her infidelities, her contempt for religion and morality, openly and defiantly.

Few West Indian cities could surpass St. Pierre in wealth, commerce, industry and learning. Its buildings were architecturally beautiful and substantial, its churches the handsomest and richest, its public institutions were many and well built and its stores reminded one of the great bazaars of Ispahan. Commercially the city was very prosperous, the Sidon of the Antilles. Her artisans and skilled mechanics were deft of hand, and her avenued streets were ever the scene of gaiety and activity. Her creole population, negroes, mulattoes, quadroons and octoroons, were handsome, shapely and filled with animation and vivacity. In fact St. Pierre was a most charming place for its own people, the wonder and admiration of visitors, and the boast and pride of La Belle France. There were splendid temples built to the honour and glory of God, a devout and zealous clergy, religious communities of pious and accomplished nuns, and a respectable and fairly numerous body of citizens whose lives were religiously and morally irreproachable. "But," writes on May 28th, 1902, the editor of the Dominica Guardian, who visited St. Pierre a few weeks before its destruction, "in the midst of religion the people were extremely irreligious. Some did not believe in the existence of God; many ridiculed His might and power and scoffed at the mention of His name. In a word, the great mass of the people lived in open rebellion against their Creator. Living under conditions similar to the Sodomites of old; revelling in blasphemy and sacrilege, provoking the Divine Hand to wrath—which of us who worships God doubts the cause of the destruction of St. Pierre ?"

In the short space of twelve years preceding the doom of the city the island was scourged with calamitous warnings. Smallpox rioted among the people and ravaged every household. The pitiful wails of mothers bereft of their sons and daughters were heart-rending. Then a devastating hurricane swept the island, killing hundreds of people, impoverishing thousands and menacing the land with famine. Nor was this all. Fort de France, the civil capital, was reduced to ashes two years after the cyclone, entailing enormous losses on its inhabitants. A priest, a prophet who they said was mad with piety and learning, passed from end to end of Martinique, entering the towns and villages and the houses of the people, warning them of God's awful retribution on sin and blasphemy and exhorting them to prayer and penance. " The effect," said Father Mary, the parish priest of Morne Rouge to me, "was only partial. A few—a limited number—gave practical proofs that the good priest's words had not fallen upon barren soil but the majority continued to revel in their irreligious and profane habits."

In company with two gentlemen from St. Louis, I visited St. Pierre on October 18th. Fortunately, we were able to go overland, for the authorities, a few weeks before our visit, had a staff of a hundred negroes and several mule teams clearing the road. Banks of ashes, cinders, lapilli, and arenaceous trap lined the highway, and were piled up many feet high, as with us when the railroad tracks are cleared after a heavy snowstorm. At two P.M. we stood over the site of the lost city. There were no ruins; nothing but a few feet of one of the cathedral towers and that of the Lycee were visible; everything, houses, fine residences, public buildings, convents and schools, and thirty-three thousand human bodies lay buried for all time under sixty-five feet of volcanic dust. Titus plowed up Jerusalem and sowed salt in the furrows; Scipio Africanus, after the senate had voted him a triumphal entry into Rome, shouted on the steps of the Forum: "Carthago fuit," but Jerusalem and Carthage were striking and memorable ruins many years after the Huns sacked Rome. There is absolutely nothing left, if we except the few feet of the cathedral tower, to show that there ever was a city where St. Pierre is buried for evermore.

It is well to remember that a terrible conflagration followed the eruption of May 8th, and that for thirty-six hours the city was a burning pile. On the eighteenth another and fiercer eruption followed, casting down many of the walls which were left. Then, on July 9th an eruption whose detonations shook the houses and rang the church bells at Barbadoes, eighty miles away, and carried fear into St. Lucia and other West India Isles, overturned the remaining walls and buried the ruins. On the night of August 30th, Pelee again broke out, and for thirty-three hours rained upon the site incandescent sand, fine dust and stones.

And now before I advance further I must record some of the awful and painful occurrences that preceded the ruin of St. Pierre. It is well to remember that contrary to nearly all volcanic precedents, the eruption of Pelee did not break out in the old crater, but from the side facing the city. Carbet, a village one and a half miles from St. Pierre was untouched. On Good Friday, April 5th, at three o'clock in the afternoon, the cathedral was crowded with men, women and children who had come together to hear a sermon on the Passion of Our Lord,

to venerate the crucifix and make the stations of the cross. At about the same hour a crowd of mulattoes, quadroons and negroes, led by a French free-thinker—an imported agitator—improvised a socialistic demonstration. The weird nature of their proceedings added additional horror to the coming apocalyptic catastrophe of fiery streams of scalding mud and torrents of boiling water that in a month devastated the unfortunate island—the " Fair Isle of June"—and its capital.

Well, on this Good Friday afternoon, the radical socialists, mestizos, quadroons, octoroons and negroes, accompanied by agitators imported from abroad, formed a sacrilegious procession in parody of the Via Dolorosa from Pilate's house to Calvary. With a rope around its neck they dragged a living pig outside the city. Here they nailed it to a cross, lifted it on high, and with shouts and curses apostrophized it. They hailed it as Jesus Christ, crowned its wretched head with thorns, pierced its side and put a board above it with the inscription " J. C., King of the Christians," and, yelling and dancing like fiends, carried it through the streets.

Then at about the same hour another procession of human devils, lashed into fury by the incitement and harangues of white agitators, ascended Pelee, uprooted a great crucifix that had stood there for many years, and amid obscene rites and blasphemous songs, cast the sacred figure into the crater, their leader yelling, as it sank out of sight, " Go where Thou deservest to go, into Thine own Hell."

I record this as I heard it from the lips of those in Fort de France, who had it from eye witnesses, and I may add that it is corroborated by Colonel Pellhouse, who witnessed the frightful scene. The awful outrage—it may be but a coincidence—lends additional horror to an orgie which could never have occurred in a colony whose home administration entertained a proper respect for religion and its observances. The influential and more sober part of the population pleaded with the citizens, exasperated by the abominable performance, and restrained them from lynching the organizers of so damnable a travesty of the most tremendous of all tragedies.

Commenting on these atrocious indecencies the editor of the Dominica Guardian in the issue of May 28th, 1902, writes : " The profanities on last Good Friday at St. Pierre were but the repetitions of similar profanities and sacrilegiousness of which we know too much. But an outraged Divinity having hushed up the actors forever we will say no more about them."

In the February number of the Fortnightly Review following the disaster, Mr. Richard Davey, an English controversialist and writer of note, writes: " On Good Friday the radicals and socialists of Martinique crucified again the Son of God and made a laughing stock and a mockery of Him."

Nine days after the eruption, August Iaccaci, George Varian and George Kennan collaborated in a description of the volcanic ruin, which they visited in the interest of the Century Magazine. They write: "Before the eruption it was considered silly for the men to keep up these childish practices (prayers to God, to the Blessed Virgin and the saints), and many a young woman waited till the blood had cooled, life lost its savour and death was near before renewing them. But now God, the Virgin Mary, and the saints were the only real powers who could protect one against another eruption. Even the negro and coloured politicians, red-hot socialists—socialism here spells atheism and immorality—were much too wise to neglect such powerful help against the mysterious enemy."

In all the paroxysmal eruptions of Pelee, there was no phenomenon like unto that of May 8th. On April 5th the appalling sacrilege—the sin against the Holy Ghost—was committed. On April 6th Pelee awoke from its sleep of fifty-four years. Situated on the northern end of the island, and rising to a height of four thousand four hundred and fifty feet the great mount was visible forty miles out in the Caribbean Sea. On April 6th it began to emit smoke, and continued to get more and more active until May 8th. On that day at three P.M., a torrent of boiling mud swept down the mountain at a terrific speed, reaching the sea, five miles distant, in about three minutes. On its rush to the open roadstead it destroyed a great sugar factory—the Usine Guerin—the Guerin residence and outbuildings, and devoured every animal on the plantation. The family and servants, after the boiling river had swept past, were never seen again.

I reserve for another chapter the record of the Pelee eruptions, confining myself now to the mysterious phenomena which accompanied that of May 8th. At about half-past six on that memorable Wednesday morning columns of white smoke suddenly began to issue from the side of the mountain in a direct line for St. Pierre. At a quarter to eight an angry, growling rumbling was heard, a colossal fissure appeared, the mountain trembled from peak to base, and a mighty, uniform mass of black smoke burst with dizzy rapidity on the valley. At once an avalanche of incandescent sand was launched against the city, followed immediately by the report of an explosion greater than that of a thousand cannon. Notice that the storm of burning sand travelled faster than the sound. The people of the city nearest the mountain died at once. Then there swept through St. Pierre, so close to the tornado of sand as to be almost a part of it, a cyclone of deadly and mephitic gases, which penetrated walls and closed doors and brought death to man and beast.

With this rush of fatal gases came a river of burning air, wide as the city, and cleaning up what had escaped the storm of hot sand and the hurricane of noxious gases. For nearly all death was instantaneous. The priest with the persons to whom he was giving Holy Communion died together; the nun died at her prayers; mother and babe gasped once and were dead; the wedding party on the way to the altar sank, never to rise again; the young libertine sleeping off his night's dissipation, the family at breakfast, never moved—they had no time to move. "Their bosoms once heaved and forever grew still."