Customer Reviews

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

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Spurred on by Scarth's great 'Vulcan's Fury: Man against the Volcano' and my interest in the Pelée disaster of 1902, I purchased this book from Amazon. First of all, Scarth really knows his business and, just as importantly, he knows how to convey it to the audience. However, there are some stylistic aspects that I have trouble with, most of all Scarth's preference for drama, as witnessed in sentences of the '... but little did he know that in a few days...' variety. Already present in 'Vulcan's Fury', it tends to become very annoying in this book. The story doesn't need it, and neither does the book.
The second problem is something that is hardly Scarth's fault, but Amazon sent me a real monday morning copy: low-res images, smeared print, unreadable text, moiréd photographs, the works. I don't know whether this is a unique problem, but you might want to check out this title in a book store - at least be aware of possible quality issues.
All in all a worthwile book, but I'd go with Ernst Zabrowski's 'The last days of St. Pierre' any day. However, it needs to be said that both authors put their emphasis differently, with Zabrowski giving a detailed picture of the days leading up to the May 8 eruption, and Scarth devoting more attention to the events following the disaster.

The volcano Mount Pelée, on the Caribbean island of Martinique did not behave according to scientific expectations. Almost 27,000 people died on the morning of May 8, 1902 because, according to this book's author, no one had ever heard of a nuée ardente (pyroclastic flow) until after the destruction of Saint-Pierre.

Instead of a relatively sluggish stream of lava, a heavy ash-fall, or the earthquake plus tsunami that many were expecting (including the scientific commission appointed by the island's governor), Mount Pelée exploded in a huge lateral blast of gas, dust, and rock. The superheated cloud raced down the side of the volcano with the speed of a hurricane-force wind and headed directly for the port of Saint-Pierre about five miles away.

At 8:02 A.M., May 8, 1902 a businessman in Fort-de-France (an hour's boat trip down the coast of Martinique) was talking on the telephone with a friend in Saint-Pierre. The businessman relates that his friend "...had just finished his sentence, when I heard a dreadful scream, then another much weaker groan, like a stifled death rattle."

Then there was silence. Nearly 27,000 people lay dead or dying at the other end of that telephone line, crushed by falling masonry, asphyxiated by the scalding breath of the nuée ardente, or incinerated in the resulting inferno. There were only two survivors in the city itself: a shoemaker; and a prisoner in a solitary confinement cell who happened to be sheltered in the lee of a hill at the edge of the city.

Alwyn Scarth, former Professor of Geography at the University of Dundee begins "La Catastrophe" with the founding of Saint-Pierre in 1635, and the slaughter of the indigenous Carib population. Unfortunately, the French settlers never paused to question the original inhabitants' choice of name for the mountain that loomed on their northern horizon. 'Mountain of Fire' was renamed 'Bald Mountain,' and the colonists moved on to develop an economy built on slaves, sugarcane and rum without questioning the lack of vegetation on Mount Pelée's summit.

Minor eruptions occurred in 1792 and 1851, causing occasional curious picnickers to struggle up the volcano's slope for a view of the new sulphur vents (soufrières) and hot springs.

Memories of those harmless volcanic sputterings contributed to a false sense of security among residents of Saint-Pierre when Mount Pelée began hurling columns of ash into the air and steaming torrents of mud down her slopes in the spring of 1902.

When "La Catastrophe" appeared in 2002, along with other, similarly-themed books that were hastened onto the shelves (and the remainder tables) during the centennial year of Saint-Pierre's destruction, its author separated himself from the pack by blaming the non-evacuation of the city on her residents' false sense of security, and on their ignorance of pyroclastic flows. He thoroughly debunks the myth presented by some of his fellow-authors, that the inhabitants of Saint-Pierre were forced to stay in town because of a pending election.

Professor Scarth has produced a meticulously-researched account of the "worst volcanic disaster of the 20th century." It is my favorite among the centennial publications, although I found his exposition of the history and sociology of Martinique to be a bit dry.

Here are some of the other myths he discredits while telling the story of this catastrophe:

* Saint-Pierre was never called 'the Paris of the West Indies'--at least not before the 1902 eruption.

* There were more than two survivors. Over a hundred people may have escaped alive from the August 8th nuée ardente, although only two from the city proper. Many of the survivors died shortly thereafter of their external burns and scalded lungs.

* Governor Mouttet was not a villain. He acted courageously in visiting Saint-Pierre on the eve of the eruption, and died believing that the volcano was harmless. The real villain of this story is the man who succeeded him. The new governor had little sympathy for his constituents, and refused to evacuate the still-inhabited villages lying closest to the volcano. Three months after the destruction of Saint-Pierre, Mount Pelée climaxed another period of eruption with a gigantic nuée ardente that claimed another 1085 victims.

* Don't be fooled by the photograph of the ruins on the back of the "La Catastrophe's" dustcover. Saint-Pierre is not a ghost city on the order of Pompeii. According to the author, "nowadays [it] is a hot and sleepy village of about 5000 people."

It seems there has been a lot of attention focused on the 1902 eruption of Mount Pelee and its destruction of Saint-Pierre recently, and this book stands out as a wonderful account of the events surrounding it. Alwyn Scarth is an exceptionally literate writer and provides a very frank and objective analysis of the events before and after the eruption as well as copious detail on the eruption itself. His writing style is dry at times, but it is enhanced by the occasional wry humor and his portraits of the people of Martinique, especially those of Father Mary and the captain of the cruiser Suchet.

Scarth presents a great number of original documents from a variety of sources (sometimes providing photos of originals such as French naval telegrams), and provides as many eyewitness accounts as possible. Although the eruption of Pelee is the subject of the book, Scarth spends a comparable amount of time on the society of Saint-Pierre and Martinique, particularly the apartheid-based social structure and contentious politics of the colony. He also makes an admirable attempt to show that past accounts that accuse Governor Mouttet of forcing citizens to stay in Saint-Pierre to vote are groundless, and he recounts the political arrogance of the post-eruption administration.

Scarth also refutes several myths about the eruption, especially the belief that Louis-Auguste Sylbaris was the sole survivor and that 30,000 people or more were killed (the likely number is several thousand fewer). He presents Saint-Pierre as a busy and modern colonial city, but vehemently disagrees with any romantic notions of a "Paris of the East Indies."

The geology here seems quite oriented to the European, and Scarth sometimes uses terms that may confuse Americans unfamiliar with volcanoes (he never equates the term 'nuee ardente' with the more common 'pyroclastic flow'), but his descriptions of the nature of stratovolcanoes and their nature is right on; he goes so far as to give Pelee a personality of sorts (describing the murderous volcano as sitting 'innocently under a clear blue sky' minutes after its terrible eruption) that seems to fit in well with the portraits of the other figures on Martinique.

Like many accounts of disasters, there is plenty of 'if only... if only...' here, but Scarth does not seek to blame anyone here: there was simply nothing most residents of Saint-Pierre could do about Pelee. They had no idea what it was capable of, few could afford to move even to other parts of the island, and the city of Saint-Pierre logically seemed the safest place on the island with all of its resources. Nobody knew what a pyroclastic flow was, and the greatest fear was of an earthquake of the type that had damaged the island's capital of Fort-de-France in the past. The only figure to get skewered is the governor who succeeded Mouttet for his awful handling of the terrified residents of La Morne Rouge and his miserable management of the refugees.

The images Scarth presents of the eruption are stark and morbid, and although he sometimes seems to revel in its destruction he never fails to commend the heroism of the survivors. Events slowly build to their climax as Ascension Day dawns and the volcano strikes Saint-Pierre down. The last paragraph is rather morbid, recounting the moment of shock just before the city's destruction, but it rightly illustrates the enormity of the moment as the hapless residents of Saint-Pierre realize something horrible is coming to scribe their names into history.

La Catastrophe is a fascinating read. It is objective, exceptionally detailed without becoming boring, and is a fine account of one of the forgotten tragedies of the modern era. Great for any fan of geology, history, or just those who enjoy stories of people coping with great hardship.

If you want to know about the 1902 volcano, you need to read three books. This one, The Day the World Ended by Gordon Thomas and Max Morgan Witts, 1969; and The Last Days of St. Pierre by Ernest Zebrowski, 2002. Any one of these books is likely to lead to a somewhat skewed idea as in each case the authors have strong opinions.

there is a lot to like in Scarth's book. He was careful with his sources and information, and has a much more academic approach to the background. He also gives more dialogue and original source material than the other two books.
He also gave a much better map of salient features in St. Pierre, which pinpointed where the survivor Leandre's house was (I had always wondered).

However, Scarth definitely is opinionated. He vilifies Fernand Clerk. No academic nuance here:
"Fernand Clerk's assertions were the affirmations of a rather despicable politician out for short-term gain. Such an individual would probably not greatly worry that he had done much to destroy the reputation of an honorable man."

This seems to be not only over-the-top, but completely contrary to the very detailed picture painted of Le Clerc in the other books, both of which portray Le Clerc as a man who while, drafted into politics, was not particularly politically ambitious, who was very straight-laced, and who really cared (as much as any planter did) for the working class. Le Clerc was a much more pivotal figure in the other books and I think they are right. He did after all create the museum which till stands in St. Pierre today.

The reason for Scarth's ire is that after the eruption, Le Clerc criticized the by now late Mouttet for not considering evacuation, and for doing his best to persuade people to stay put.
Scarth wrote: "Fernand Clerc's own behavior does not stand scrutiny. He himself took no steps to save lives. He had ample opportunity to publish his misgivings in Les Colonies, the editor of which Marius Hurard, was one of his strongest political allies".

According to both other books, Fernand Clerk did his best to start a movement for evacuation and was thoroughly rebuffed. Also according to both other books, while Hurard did support Clerc for the election, he was not overly fond of him, and they were diametrically opposed on the question of the volcano and safety. There is no reason to suppose that Hurard would have published such an opposing view.

But where Scarth really seems nuts to me is his idea, expressed more than once, that those who saved themselves were weak-kneed, panicky individuals, while it was the rational, clear-thinking courageous people who got eaten by the inferno. Just one example:
"Thus at St. Pierre, the rational people, with common sense and intelligence, saw less danger from the volcano and died, whereas those who followed their gut reactions and panicked survived, because Mount Pelee produced a weapon that defied all expectation and all the logic that they knew."

To me, the contrarians, like Le Clerc, and the captain of Orsolina were the true heroes. It was not that they were irrational or panicky; it was that they took a good look at the erupting volcano and decided, quite rightly as it turned out, that it was unsafe. This was not irrational; it was based on millions of years of evolution that allows any one of us to make judgments about safety; this is true common sense. There may be occasions where it makes sense to override these instincts in the face of scientific knowledge. But this clearly was not one of them. Science knew little about volcanoes in those days, and in any case there was no scientist around to lend his voice, just Landes, the science teacher at the high school.

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

Volcanoes kill in many ways, and the the 1902 Martinique eruption is one of the rare volcanic eruptions; Pompeii being the other, to destroy a whole city through its eruptive gas cloud. Volcanologist Alwyn Scarth's book concentrates on the science of the disaster and focuses on the aftermath of the eruption. The islands are shown to have been hit by two eruptive blasts even after the main event on May 8th. While I did not find this the thrilling read that the Witts book was, it was certainly interesting enough.

The author seems most eager to correct a number of misconceptions about the tragedy, and this is one of the most noteworthy aspects of the book. He says St. Pierre was not known as the 'Paris of the West Indies' at the time. There just wasn't enough there for anyone to justify such a term. And the prisoner Sylbarris was not in fact a murderer as commonly believed. He was in underground confinement for escaping a work detail earlier in the week.

Scarth then over reaches a bit. The story of the governor trying to stop the populace from fleeing before the island's election is not only wrong, he says, but one of many 'lies'. Lies? This seems a harsh assessment, for though it may well be wrong, it would hardly be impossible or even implausable for this to have happened. What's more, most all concerned were killed and so cannot act to set the record straight. It is a jump indeed to conclude that everything said about them was deliberately falsified. Scarth also insists that there were more than two survivors, indicating a minimum of sixty-four. This is true, but only if you include the city's outskirts. There were indeed only two survivors in St. Pierre as most accounts state.

Overall this is a fine work and is recommended. It gives us a whole new look at a catastrophe we thought we were familiar with. Most readers will want to read the other two books on the disaster mentioned by the reviewers here, at least to start.

Loved this book, could not put it down, felt like I was there. I want to keep reading .