25. A Horrific Caribbean Disaster
At the turn of the twentieth century, the beautiful city of Saint Pierre was the largest settlement in the French colony of Martinique, and in many ways, it outshone the island’s capital city, Fort-de-France. Saint Pierre was the colony’s economic center, with a busy harbor that bustled with ships as they offloaded imports, and carried off the island’s exports of rum and sugar to the rest of the world. Saint Pierre was also Martinique’s cultural center, known as “the Paris of the Caribbean”.
However, the city had a major drawback: it was nestled beneath a massive volcano, Mount Pelee. On April 23rd, 1902, people began to hear the sounds of a series of relatively small but still alarming explosive pops that came from the mountaintop. Over the next two weeks, the volume and vigor of the explosions increased steadily, until they became greater than anything ever heard since Europeans first arrived in Martinique. Then, on the morning of May 8th, 1902, the top of Mount Pelee blew up in a massive eruption. As seen below, the results were horrific.