Editorial Review:
On May 8th, 1902, Mont Pelee on the island of Martinique exploded. A deadly cloud of steam and ash churned through plantations and villages, flattened the grand city of St Pierre, then thundered into the bay where it sank 18 ships and hundreds of smaller craft. Within a minute or two, nearly 30,000 people had died. The rubble of their homes and belongings burned for three days and the world began to understand the awesome power of "nuees ardentes", glowing avalanches of hot gas and debris that sweep down the slopes of volcanoes, instantly steaming to death anything in their path. The enormous death toll was particularly tragic because it was avoidable. Had it not been for an unfortunate combination of scientific misjudgment and political hubris, most of the victims would have escaped. In this book, the author counts down the days leading up to the catastrophe, and unfolds a tale intertwining human foolishness and heroism with the remarkable forces of nature. Illustrations contrast life in Martinique before and after the eruption, and eyewitness accounts bring the story to life. Although it seems a long time since the destruction of St. Pierre, it is a mere blink of an eye in our planet's geological history. Mont Pelee will erupt again, as will Vesuvius, Krakatau, St. Helen's, Thera, and most other infamously fatal volcanoes, and human lives will again be threatened. The St. Pierre disaster has taughts us much about the awesome power of volcanic forces and the devastation they can bring.
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A comparative review of two (very good) books about the same event 2006-02-03
This review is unusual in that it compares two books that were published nearly at the same time and both deal with the same event: the devastating 1902 eruption of Montagne Pelée volcano on the Caribbean island of Martinique.
The first of these books is Alwyn Scarth's "LA Catastrophe: The Eruption of Mount Pelée, the Worst Volcanic Disaster of the 20th Century", the second is Ernest Zebrowski's "The Last Days of St. Pierre: The Volcanic Disaster that Claimed 30,000 Lives", published just four months earlier. Both books mark the 100th anniversary of the eruption that virtually exterminated the town of Saint-Pierre along with nearly all of its inhabitants. Both fulfill an important mission: putting an end to the incredible amount and degree of misinformation veiling that tragic event to the present day.
The 1902 Montagne Pelée (commonly translated into Mount Pelée in the English literature) produced a phenomenon called pyroclastic flows (and/or surges), which had until then not been recognized by geologists - although today we know that they occur quite frequently. Just as I write this review (early February 2006), pyroclastic flows are spilling down the slopes of Mount St. Augustine volcano in Alaska. They were produced by nearly all the famous explosive eruptions in history, including Mount St. Helens (1980), Pinatubo (1991), Krakatau (1883), and Vesuvius (79 A.D.).
However, there was no common conscience of pyroclastic flows among scientists and people living on volcanoes in early 1902, when Montagne Pelée stirred and gradually came back to life. What was known at the time about volcanoes was limited to lava flows, ash falls, and tsunamis (the latter are rarely caused by volcanic eruptions). Often, eruptions were confused with earthquakes (which are a completely different geological process). So people in Saint-Pierre most worried about such things, and they had no means to know that Montagne Pelée held something else in store for them.
Many accounts about the 1902 events on Martinique blamed Governor Mouttet for the death of about 28,000 people in the eruption. Some writers accused him even to have posted troops on the roads exiting the threatened town to prevent the inhabitants from evacuating. Just the fact that Mouttet went to stay in Saint-Pierre the night before the tragic eruption says enough - he did not know, and there was no way of knowing, that the volcano would unleash a deadly pyroclastic flow the next morning.
Both Scarth and Zebrowski spend a lot of words and reasoning to clan the memory of Mouttet from these unjustified accusations. They do a lot of similar work concerning the vast amounts of contorted or false information regarding many other aspects of the 1902 events. There are, however, some significant differences between these two books.
Scarth has looked much more profoundly into the French sources of information, which Zebrowski - he himself admits in the introduction to his book that he is not too familiar with French - has done to a much lesser degree. Scarth's slightly higher degree of scrutiny does lead to a more precise result, which goes from the correct spelling of names (e.g., Mouttet's followup governor, whose correct name - as given by Scarth - was Lhuerre, not L'heurre as in Zebrowski) to the numbers of victims of the 1902 events: there were actually three eruptions in that year in the Caribbean that killed each more than 1000 people.
The first, on 7 May 1902, occurred on the island of St. Vincent, where the Soufrière volcano killed some 1560; only 18 hours later, Montagne Pelée snuffed out some 27,000 souls, and the same volcano killed another 1200 on 30 August that year. These numbers are those most likely to represent the real death toll - which is quite a few thousand less than those numbered by Zebrowski. Some of the most accurate scientific accounts of those events are cited in Zebrowski's bibliographic list but little of their information is used in his book. This is most notable in the case of T.Anderson and J.Flett (1903), who wrote a harrowing tale of the Soufrière (St. Vincent) eruption and witnessed one of the major eruptions of Montagne Pelée in July 1902. Interestingly, the most prominent scientist studying Montagne Pelée and its activity in that period was the French professor A. Lacroix, who is mentioned relatively briefly in Zebrowski's book. His monumental monograph "La Montagne Pelée et ses éruptions" (1904) is not even included in the bibliography, which does, however, refer to the less known and somewhat controversial "La Montagne Pelée après ses éruptions", published by Lacroix in 1908.
We find less errors of this kind in Scarth's book. This is partly due to the fact that Scarth has close relationships to volcanologists who have worked, and are working, on the 1902 Montagne Pelée eruption and its effects. Some of them are French. Im am certain that Scarth has indeed read through at least large portions of Lacroix' "La Montagne Pelée et ses éruptions". I know that book fairly well. It does not very much deal with the political and social turmoils preceding and following the eruption. But as for details concerning the eruption itself, and its tremendous effects on human beings and their environment, this is one of the most thrilling things to read - if one is familiar with French. Unfortunately, this makes it quite unaccessible to non-French readers, besides the fact that it is extremely difficult to find (Amazon France has a used copy "in correct state" offered for 995 Euros - more than 1000 US$)...
Without being too critical about the somewhat higher amount of flaws in Zebrowski's book, I find that in the end both Zebrowski and Scarth are definitely worth a read, also because they deal with very different details - so there is not all that much of a repetition there. Both do a precious effort to put things about the 1902 events into the right perspective. I hope that they will help to diminish the vast amount of misinformation currently in circulation.
Catania (Sicily, Italy), 3 February 2006
martique-a nice place to visit BUT 2004-08-30
this is far and away the best book i have read since "krakota" to rebuild a time period. leading up to an historic eruption and its human aftermath which surely altered history. an honest attempt to recreate the human horror and suffering such an event caused. i can only say that as a volcano "fan" i found the book first-class-couldn't-put-it-down-reading. no expert-i, i just enjoyed it. it is enough to make you move inland to an isolated hill free desert. think man is getting smarter ? i believe that no human remains have been found on thera while at st. pierre, many centuries later, about 30,000 died.
A Year on Bald Mountain 2004-02-16
On the morning of May 8, 1902, a massive pyroclastic flow surged down the flank of Mt Pelee on the island of Martinique in the French West Indies. The searing cloud slammed into the city of St Pierre; within two minutes, the city was a pile of smoking rubble and 30,000 people were dead.Asked to name the greatest volcanic disasters in history, most people would probably offer up Mt Vesuvius and the destruction of Pompeii and Herculaneum; they might also volunteer the explosion of Krakatoa or the even more recent eruption of Mt. St Helens. Mt Pelee and St Pierre are usually only vaguely recalled, which is remakable given the sheer size of the human tragedy. Zebrowski's book does a marvelous job of taking the reader back to 1902, when scientists understood far less than they do now about what volcanos can do. The series of eruptions at Mt Pelee were triggered by the rise of a huge bulge of magma from the subduction zone beneath the Lesser Antilles. These forces set off Mt La Soufriere on the island of St Vincent, where pyroclastic flows and lahars killed two thousand people the day before St Pierre was destroyed; the rising magma also erupted in an undersea volcano at a spot called Kick 'em Jenny. Zebrowski describes the weeks leading to the eruption of Mt Pelee and how the local inhabitants and French bureacracy struggled to understand what they were up against. The blame for the disaster is often laid at the feet of Louis Mouttet, the governor of Martinique, but it is difficult to imagine what else he could have done. At the time, scientists thought of volcanic eruptions in terms of slow moving rivers of lava rather than swift and deadly pyrolastic flows and lahars. If Mouttet had tried to evacuate St. Pierre, he would have had very little support; even if he had succeeded, he would have created an enormous refugee crisis. Zebrowski explains what life in St Pierre was like before the disaster, how Martinique's inhabitants coped with the increasingly dangerous volcano in their midst, what happened to the city and its people when the volcano erupted and afterward, how the French government handled (or failed to handle) the aftermath of the disaster, and how a courageous group of scientists and journalists explored the still-erupting volcano to understand what had happened. Zebrowski has chosen a rich canvas for a gripping tale, and he makes the most of it in this well-written book.
Buy & Read this Book!!!! 2003-11-08
An exceptionally well written and documented book. Previously I had read accounts of this disaster, but none had the depth of Dr. Zebrowski's book on the total destruction of the city of St. Pierre and devastation of much of the Islands of Martinique and St. Vincent. He covers the human side of this tragedy with accuracy and compassion. Zebrowski has drawn from many sources and put the accumulated information into a very readable book. Anyone who likes to read about historical/scientific events should enjoy "The Last Days of St. Pierre".
Enthralling 2003-09-10
I recently read Simon Winchester's "Krakatoa", and it put me to sleep. But here is a fascinating nonfiction book on a similar subject--a historic volcanic disaster--that doesn't seem to have gotten much promotion from its publisher, yet has all the elements that enthrall the reader-- tension, character development, suspense, surprise, substance... leading the reader to often gaze up at the ceiling and say "hmmm..." The author has done a marvelous job of bringing alive characters that have been dead for a century. Fundamentally, however, this book is about ignorance-- how a lack of knowledge of natural geological processes led to some egregiously erroneous political decisions that sealed the terrible fate of 30,000 humans on the island of Martinique in 1902. The author, however, does not insult the reader's intelligence, and your conclusions from this fascinating book will be your own.
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