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This book is an account of the eruption of Mount Pelee on the island of St. Pierre in 1902, which was one of the deadliest volcanic eruptions in history. The book provides a detailed chronicle of the events leading up to the eruption and its aftermath, including the death and destruction that resulted from the eruption. It also provides personal accounts from survivors of the disaster and explores the scientific and cultural impact of the eruption. This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work is in the "public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.
Describes the eruption of Mount Pelee in 1902, contrasting life on the island of Martinique before and after the disaster.
This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1902 edition. Excerpt: ... The Destruction of St. Pierre. chapter I. The Lesser Antilles are inconspicuous on the map of the West Indies. Stretching between Porto Rico and the northeastern coast of South America in a line that curves like the crescent of the new moon, they are so overshadowed by Cuba, Hayti, and Porto Rico as to attract little or no attention in a hasty scrutiny of a chart of the Islands of the Caribbean. They have played no great part in the world's history, but what little prominence they have had has been the prominence of misfortune. They have been the scenes of bloody conflicts between Spanish, English, and French colonists. They have been pillaged by pirates, devastated by floods and hurricanes, shaken by earthquakes. Despite the fact that they lie bathed in almost continual sunshine, seeming to be very paradises, with their noble hills clad in vivid greens, with their quaint little villages climbing up the slopes, and the soft breath of the tropics fanning them, they are no favorites of Dame Fortune. The term, Unhappy Isles, is one of the appellations by which they are best known to the world at large. But all the catastrophes that the years have heaped upon the Lesser Antilles have been paled into insignificance by the stupendous disaster that visited the Island of Martinique on the beautiful May morning of 1902. Nature gave but little warning of her gigantic outburst. Mont Pelee, rising to a height of nearly five thousand feet on the northwestern coast of Martinique, looked as peaceful and serene a few days before it belched forth its blast of death as it had looked for years. To passengers on steamers that skirted the long line of coast it was merely one of many lofty peaks, just a single feature of an impressive panorama of mountain...
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.