He thought that the entire outburst that did all the work of havoc did not last more than thirty seconds. Then there was complete darkness for ten minutes, caused by the dense volumes of sulphurous smoke and clouds of dust and shattered rocks. The entire country all about St.
Pierre was turned into a chaotic waste. All the trees were either torn up by the roots or snapped off, to lie level with the ground.
The outlines of the town but imperfectly remained. The tangle of debris was such that after the rescuers came, it was with difficulty that the course of streets could be followed.
In spite of the horrible surroundings, and the universal wave of human sympathy which had been evoked, looting began almost as soon as relief. As soon as it was possible to land, ghouls began to rob the bodies of the victims. The monsters plied their nefarious trade in small boats. Skimming along the sh.o.r.e they would watch for an opening when troops and rescue parties were elsewhere, then land, grab what they could, and sail away again.
The United States government tug Potomac, while on her way to Fort de France with supplies from San Juan, Porto Rico, overhauled a small boat containing five negroes and a white man. Something in the appearance of the men excited the suspicions of the commander of the Potomac, Lieutenant McCormick, and he ordered them to come on board.
When they were searched, their pockets were found to be filled with coin and jewelry. Rings in their possession had evidently been stripped from the fingers of the dead. Lieutenant McCormick placed them all under arrest, and later turned them over to the commander of the French cruiser Suchet for punishment.
Thus it was that no detail of grewsome horror was lacking to make the shocking tale of the destruction of St. Pierre complete.
The hour of the disaster is placed at about eight o"clock. A clerk in Fort de France called up another by telephone in St. Pierre and was talking with him at 7:55 by Fort de France time, when he heard a sudden, awful shriek, and then could hear no more.
"The little that actually happened then can be briefly, very briefly told," says W. S. Merriwether, the New York Herald correspondent. "It is known that at one minute there lay a city smiling in the summer morning; that in another it was a ma.s.s of swirling flames, with every soul of its 30,000 writhing in the throes of death. One moment and church bells were ringing joyful chimes in the ears of St. Pierre"s 30,000 people--the next the flame-clogged bells were sobbing a requiem for 30,000 dead. One waft of morning breeze flowed over cathedral spires and domes, over facades and arches and roofs and angles of a populous and light-hearted city--the next swept a lone ma.s.s of white hot ruins. The sun glistened one moment on sparkling fountains, green parks and fronded palms--its next ray shone on fusing metal, blistered, flame-wrecked squares and charred stumps of trees. One day and the city was all light and color, all gayety and grace--the next its ruins looked as though they had been crusted over with twenty centuries of solitude and silence."
St. Pierre was a vast charnel-house. Skirting for nearly a league the blue waters of the Caribbean, its smoking ruins became the funeral pyre of 30,000, not one of whom lived long enough to tell adequately a story that will stand grim, awful, unforgotten as that of Herculaneum, when the world is older by a thousand years.
St. Pierre was as dead as Pompeii. Most of her people lay fathoms deep in a tomb made in the twinkling of an eye by the collapse of their homes, and sealed forever under tons of boiling mud, avalanches of scoria and a hurricane of volcanic dust.
Over the entombed city the volcano from a dozen vents yet poured its steaming vapors in long, curling wreaths, that mounted thousands of feet aloft, like smoking incense from a gigantic censer above the bier of some mighty dead.
Such was the disaster which burst upon the hapless people of the island of Martinique, while almost at the same moment a sister isle, St. Vincent, was suffering a kindred fate. Similar in natural conditions, these two little colonies of the West Indies, one French and one English by affiliation, underwent the shock of nature"s a.s.sault and sank in grief before a horror-stricken world.