Eruption of Mount Pelée, 1902

Saint-Pierre was the largest and richest town in Martinique, called the Paris of the Caribbean. The volcano above it had been rumbling for two weeks: ash fell on the streets, snakes and insects came down into the town and killed livestock and children, and a mudflow buried a sugar works with about twenty-five workers. An election was due, and the governor set up a commission that declared the town safe; he came to Saint-Pierre himself to prove it, and died with everyone else.

On the morning of 8 May a black cloud burst sideways out of the mountain and reached the town in less than a minute at hurricane speed and several hundred degrees. Ships in the roadstead burned and capsized. Around twenty-eight thousand people died. The survivors were a shoemaker on the edge of town, a young girl who escaped by boat, and a prisoner in a thick-walled punishment cell who was found four days later with severe burns and afterwards toured with a circus. The event gave volcanology the term nuée ardente. Saint-Pierre was rebuilt small; the ruins of the theatre and the cell still stand.