La Catastrophe: The Eruption of Mount Pelee, the Worst Volcanic Disaster of the 20th Century

by Alwyn Scarth

On May 8, 1902, on the Caribbean island of Martinique, the volcano Mount Pelée loosed the most terrifying and lethal eruption of the twentieth century. In minutes, it killed 27,000 people and leveled the city of Saint-Pierre. In La Catastrophe , Alwyn Scarth provides a gripping day-by-day and hour-by-hour account of this devastating eruption, based primarily on chilling eyewitness accounts.
Scarth recounts how, for many days before the great eruption, a series of smaller eruptions spewed dust and ash. Then came the eruption. A blinding flash lit up the sky. A tremendous cannonade roared out that was heard in Venezuela. Then a scorching blast of superheated gas and ash shot straight down towards Saint-Pierre, racing down at hundreds of miles an hour. This infernal avalanche of dark, billowing, reddish-violet fumes, flashing lightning, ash and rocks, crashed and rolled headlong, destroying everything in its path--public buildings, private homes, the town hall, the Grand Hotel. Temperatures inside the cloud reached 450 degrees Celsius. Virtually everyone in Saint-Pierre died within minutes. Scarth tells of many lucky escapes--the ship Topaze left just hours before the eruption, a prisoner escaped death in solitary confinement. But these were the fortunate few. An official delegation sent later that day by the mayor of Fort-de-France reported total devastation--no quays,
no trees, only shattered facades. Saint-Pierre was a smoldering ruin.
In the tradition of A Perfect Storm and Isaac's Storm , but on a much larger scale, La Catastrophe takes readers inside the greatest volcanic eruption of the century and one of the most tragic natural disasters of all time.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Geology

246 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2002

Reviews

[Ozymandias · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is an excellent and thoroughly engaging account of the volcanic disaster that destroyed the idyllic Caribbean city of Saint-Pierre. This beautiful city happened to sit in the shadow of Mount Pelée and was (at least with hindsight) the amazing “Paris of the Caribbean”. At 8:02 on May 8, the volcano let out a nuée ardente, the French term for a pyroclastic flow (he should really have glossed that) which is essentially a burst of ash, rocks, and burning gas that shoots sideways along the ground at several hundred miles an hour. In this case it came right at Saint-Pierre and within two minutes the city was scoured to its foundations and 27,000 people were dead. There were a total of two survivors. The story always has a mythic quality to it. May 8 was Ascension Day, when all the children would have their first communion. The church bells were ringing and the pews were full. If the volcano had intended to show its disregard for petty human beliefs it could not have chosen a better time. The cathedral was close to where the blast entered the city so it would have been quick for them at least, which is some small mercy (though not to the parents on the surrounding hills who had to watch their children eradicated). Those further from the cathedral sometimes took hours or days to die as they ran screaming through the burning ruins.

The author is a volcanologist and knows whereof he speaks, a marked improvement over most of the uninformed and misleading popular accounts. But he also proves surprisingly good at the historical and human interest side of the disaster. One of Scarth’s main interests is the prevention of volcanic disasters and as such he’s very attuned to the warning signs that a volcano is about to erupt. These warning signs are laid out expertly here, with each new phase in the eruption giving us a little section external to the narrative to tell us what was going on and what the potential dangers were. This makes it feel a bit like a textbook (and such textboxes are frequent for other issues as well) but it helps to keep what we know now separate from what they knew then. This separation will be one of the key advantages of his book.

The basic issue with earlier reports is that their main goal in discussing the disaster was to apportion blame and reassure people that it was human stupidity and not monstrously unpredictable forces of nature that cost 27,000 people their lives. This is nowhere more true than the appallingly inaccurate The Day the World Ended, which is better classed as fiction than history. The only exceptions are the studies by volcanologists published in the immediate aftermath seeking to understand the causes of the disaster and more or less ignoring the question of blame.

While Scarth is a volcanologist he’s keenly invested in this issue of blame. But his conclusions take a different path than most authors. With his deep understanding of the scientific knowledge of the time he repeatedly emphasizes the same refrain: the disaster could not have been anticipated by the science of the time. Geologists had been studying volcanoes for years, but those they focused on were the ones that could be easily witnessed. Vesuvius and Etna were their main examples. Etna erupted regularly but was dangerous only very locally. Vesuvius had been erupting more irregularly, but for the past four centuries it had been limited mainly to lava flows. The story of Pompeii was well known, but until the ‘80s(!) it was believed that it was ash and poisonous gas that slowly smothered the inhabitants. If only a few foolhardy people died in that disaster surely modern man could do better?

I’m not sure I entirely accept all his conclusions. His claim that flight was an essentially irrational behavior based on what was known at the time seems a step too far. The fact that a volcano was actively erupting about three miles from a major city should have caused more alarm than it seemed to. I appreciate that they didn’t know volcanoes could shoot death clouds horizontally, but they certainly knew (or thought they knew) that:
1. Volcanoes could expel poison gas for great distances. This supposedly killed the people of Pompeii as well as Pliny the Elder all the way over in Stabia, ten miles (twice that of Saint-Pierre) from Vesuvius.
2. Ash could destroy buildings and smother people (and indeed it seemed well on its way to doing both).
3. Volcanoes could literally explode and shatter themselves over a wide area. This was supposedly what happened in Krakatoa, only a quarter of a century before.
4. Volcanoes could cause deadly tidal waves in excess of 120 feet tall. This also happened with Krakatoa.
None of these disasters had yet struck St. Pierre, but of course, if they had then what would be the point of evacuating corpses? You plan for the worst with this kind of thing. Or at least we would. But this was the Belle Époque, the same era that demonstrated its full concern for safety precautions in the Titanic disaster just one week shy of a decade later. You prepared for the most likely outcomes and let no man ever concede to fear. The more frightened men get the more determinedly they just brazened it out.

He’s certainly right that there was little that could be done. Evacuating 27,000 people was simply beyond the capacity of a small island like Martinique. Where would they go? Saint-Pierre was the largest city on the place. They would have swamped wherever they were sent and quickly used up all local resources. Did I mention Saint-Pierre was the main port for the island? How could so many refugees have been supported? Facing a choice between a certain chaos, starvation, and riot, that would almost certainly have cost all leaders their jobs, and an uncertain set of risks connected with a volcano that had harmed nobody the last time it erupted and displayed no evidence of the powerful Plinian column of Vesuvius or Krakatoa, I can understand why the leaders made the choice they did. But that doesn’t mean that those in the city who fled once the mountain started belching ash were irrational. In that, I think he goes too far. It’s particularly silly for him to dismiss the panic at Fort-de-France after Saint-Pierre’s destruction as unfounded. As he had been at pains to remind us earlier, what happened to Saint-Pierre was impossible by all scientific laws known to man. Why should people not fear more impossibilities?

The book is structured around a very convenient narrative format clustered around the eruption. The initial chapters detail the early life of the volcano and the colonizing of Martinique. The volcano had actually erupted once before in 1851, although it was just a minor outpouring of ash before it returned to sleep. Then we get to the start of the eruption. The eruption began with a bang on April 23 and continued at a rather minor pace with interruptions for the next week and a half. Only on May 5 did it start eruptions in earnest. Three days later the entire city was dead. Each of these four days gets its own chapter except for the final day which gets five, one on the final moments of Saint-Pierre, one for the nuée ardente’s devastation, one for the survivors’ flight, one on the ships in the bay, and one for the initial rescue attempts and slow recognition of the scale of the disaster. Then we actually get a few chapters on the rescue operations and the final disasters of the eruption.

I found the writing style very compelling. He’s crisp and precise but always willing to turn to the human cost or the human element. The book is also suitably heavy on foreshadowing without reducing it to a blame narrative. Scarth does have a tendency to be a little overprecise. He continuously refers to the belief that there were only two survivors of the great nuée ardente a myth, yet he makes clear that that was the total number of survivors within the city. It’s a casual way people have of referring to the figures but it is accurate. If overprecision is a defect it’s a far better one than vagueness or innuendo. And in many places a clinical detachment is more tolerable than actually imagining the horrid fates of the victims. And it impressed me how he could oscillate between the two without feeling inconsistent. Well… usually.

While this book digs a lot deeper into the condition of the times I do wish it had given more attention to historiography. This is still the best book out there for this, but he dismisses a lot of things without comment that get center stage in other accounts. Of the local election that other accounts place such great importance on he is entirely dismissive. Indeed, he displays great naïveté in some of his comments. The argument that the elections were of no importance because the two rival parties were currently in coalition is both the voice of a man disinterested in politics and the product of the sort of 20/20 hindsight he’s otherwise admirably good at avoiding. These were the years of the Dreyfus scandal, where all of France was riven by passionately-disputed political factions, including those between “allied” parties. It would have been extraordinary if Martinique had been the exception. And this also ignores the generally scientific testimony of visitors like Heilprin, who visited the island that summer to research for his book, and observed that the elections were being contested fiercely even in the aftermath of the eruption. He may have been primed to observe that from newspaper reports, but I find it hard to believe he imagined it. A greater focus on contextualizing the history of the period with events on the island would have made people’s reactions easier to understand. We’re also not given footnotes, so I find it hard to judge the sources he’s using.

While I would never suggest that he is unsympathetic to the plight of the local populace, it’s clear that his main sympathies are drawn to those of a scientific or rationalist mindset. That’s obvious from the more controversial conclusions above, but it also leads to some decidedly warm portraits of people who otherwise come across as villains, or at best tragic sellouts. Governor Mouttet is the chief of these. Scarth is crystal clear just how heavily involved Mouttet was in handling the disaster. He didn’t make all the right moves, but he was in or near Saint-Pierre for most of the final four days. He was proactive, moreso even than might be expected. And he’s right to note that his death by volcano shows that he was at least convinced in the safety of the city. Gaston Landes is the real heroic figure here though. He’s often cast as hiding his true opinions out of a reticence to contradict authority, but in reality there is little reason to suspect he had any change of heart or serious doubts. Indeed, his final moments reveal only confusion (and pain, horrible horrible pain). Claims that he didn’t reveal all he knew came from Le Clerc, a local politician who Scarth despises. This is a place where open source criticism would have come in handy as well because I don’t particularly buy his claims of enormous malice. Like all survivors, Le Clerc remembered only his fears and none of his doubts about those fears. Had Mouttet survived he would no doubt have remembered his actions in the same light. And he would also probably, like Le Clerc, have sought some soothing explanation for the unanticipated disaster. Far safer to believe in others’ incompetence than a force you cannot predict or protect from which could strike you down at any moment.

Still, minor quibbles on the whole and nothing to detract from the fact that this is the best English-language book on the disaster. I found it utterly riveting and especially appreciated all the pictures and asides. You really get a feel for life in this city and the overall state of Martiniquan society.

[Cindy · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a grand narration of the eruption of Mt. Pelee. Takes you back in history to the idyllic French West Indies in 1902 and the lives of the privileged, immigrants, settlers, sailors, rum runners and native peoples as colonial cities thrived. The island of Martinique at the turn of the century had a population of 203,000 with 27,000 residing in St. Pierre (the Paris of the West Indies) at the base of the volcano. On May 8, 1902 at 0802 hours, the nuee ardente (the mother of all eruptions) wiped out all life in St. Pierre within a few minutes. The worst volcanic catastrophe of the 20th century, the story of Mt Pelee has been told many times. This book appeals to our eternal romance with islands and mountains, and how nature rules our lives and charts our history. Beautiful photos.

[Sylvia Snowe · Rating 3 out of 5]

The author said his goal in writing this book was to clear up all the misconceptions about this great tragedy in 1905. I don't know what they are, apparently the government of Martinique was accused of botching the evacuation of St. Pierre, where some 30,000 people perished horribly, in a two minute, fiery blast of ash and vapor.

I was disappointed that the book was less about the geology of the eruption, but more a description, gory and long-winded, about the terrible deaths of so many people. At the same time, it's also a cautionary tale--the people whose gut feeling was that something awful was about to happen were correct. The government officials, respected teachers, community leaders, and even priests continually urged people to stay calm, and not to evacuate. This despite the rumblings, ash fall, smoke, mud flows, and fiery displays from the volcano, easily seen and felt by the population. The author seems to defend these calmers, despite their obvious foolishness. Of course, they certainly had less resources to evacuate so many people, but even then, a volcano is a volcano.

It's probably the best compilation of all the details of the eruption of the disaster, yet the book is no blockbuster such as "Krakatoa" or "Isaac's Storm." Scarth is more an historian than a science writer, so we get a sense of the political climate in France and the Caribbean at the time, but less of the geologic forces that created it.

[Jackie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Turned out better than I thought it would. The introduction was hard to get through and was poorly written. But once the story started to flow, it was a much more enjoyable read. The details of the eruption and how the city reacted are amazingly detailed.

[Boris · Rating 5 out of 5]

A very compelling view of the destruction of St Pierre on Martinique by the eruption of Mt Pelee in 1902 from the various survivors.

[Luke · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book has some serious promise and potential, as a Volcanic history piece its superb, but unfortunately, it seems to be written by a very judgemental smug and self righteous man.

For example, in keeping with the times we live in, the man seems absolutely hate filled when it comes to White Human Beings, so much so that he arrogantly spliced history into his own version of what occured.

A quick spoiler....the writer constantly bangs on about how the "White Colonialists" murdered and slaughtered the indigenous Carib Indians, but doesn't even mention the fact that these Indians had already brutally slaughtered and wiped out the actual original Awarak community and enslaved their women to their own gain. The Awaraks were said to be a gentle peaceful race, the Caribs were known as brutal savages and cannibals and their behavior suited this description

He constantly grinds on about the treatment of the black folks and demonising the whites without ever correcting his SJW rewrite of the Islands past and dangerously misrepresented the actual truth. If maltreatment did occur at the hands of White folks to Black people then a lesson on these travesties is welcome, but be truthful.

Once we get into the mechanics and the daily occurrences of Mt Pelee and its behavior we get an excellent engaging informative read. When I was in the ballpark of the books reason for being written it was excellent. Detailed, dramatic and immersive.

This is what took this book up to 3 stars for me, because when I almost gave up on it and labelled it as just another anti white rant I finally hit some stuff about Volcanology.

Stick to Geology Mr Scarth, in this field you are very strong. In the field of History Revisionusm you badly come up short and as boring as everyone else.