¿ìè¶ÌÊÓƵ

The Last Days of St Pierre by Ernest Zebrowski Jr, Rutgers University Press,
£22.50, ISBN 0813530415

IT IS all too easy, as a geologist, to be so carried away by the fascination
of natural disasters that you forget the human cost. The eruption of Mount
Pelée a hundred years ago on the island of Martinique in the Antilles is
often cited as an example of an eruption producing pyroclastic surges—the
turbulent, hot avalanches of ash and gas that can travel kilometres from
erupting volcanoes at speeds of hundreds of kilometres per hour. One such surge
overran the town of St Pierre, 7 kilometres away, in a matter of minutes,
killing almost everyone in its path. Some 30 000 people died.

Ernest Zebrowski tells the story through eyewitness accounts and contemporary
journalism, interspersed with his own words. His account begins by weaving
together the stories of selected citizens: the colonial governor, Louis Mouttet;
election candidate and plantation owner Ferdinand Clerc; editor of the local
newspaper and political activist Andréus Hurard; and scientists such as
the French volcanologist Gaston Landes, among others. Letters, telegrams and
diaries written by those who subsequently died and the accounts of survivors
give some idea of the impact of this eruption on people whose idea of volcanoes
had been shaped by the relatively benign eruptions of basaltic volcanoes such as
Etna and Stromboli.

For any geologist reading this book, the shadow of what is to come falls
darkly on the scene-setting accounts of everyday life in St Pierre. I found the
first chapters rather like the opening of a disaster movie: they introduce the
main characters and invite you to wonder who will live and who will die. It’s a
very human account. By putting the people and their reactions first, Zebrowski
draws out the common threads in sudden devastation: the difficulty in believing
that anything so out-of-the ordinary will happen, the attempts to carry on as
normal and the anguish, fear and regret in the aftermath.

But this is also a scientific account of geological observation, exploration
and discovery, including the gradual resolution of historical puzzles such as
how the people at Pompeii actually died. The author makes a clear distinction
between explaining how volcanoes like Pelée are now thought to work and
explaining what was known about them in 1902, so that this book also functions
as an introduction to volcanology.

Zebrowski considers what seems a very modern aspect of the eruption: this was
a public disaster, reported around the world, sometimes clearly, sometimes not,
and geologists as well as journalists were dispatched to Martinique. This
allowed geologists such as Angelo Heilprin and Alfred Lacroix to document the
new features of this type of eruption—and Zebrowski reprints some of their
photographs and drawings. But, just as today, the worldwide newspaper interest
and the urge to have the news first meant that mistaken reports were copied and
perpetuated, adding to the confusion over this new type of volcano.

Zebrowski devotes considerable space to the newspaper accounts, giving a
vivid picture of the reaction round the world. He also traces the conflicting
reports about what had happened and the wealth of contradictory evidence about
how people had died. Survivors were horribly burned, yet some of the dead looked
untouched, still sitting down to breakfast or holding a dainty handkerchief to
their mouths.

Volcanology has come a long way in the century since Mount Peleé and
we now know a lot more about the behaviour of such volcanoes, including Mount St
Helens and Mount Unzen. The science is fascinating. What Zebrowski also makes
clear through his account is just how terrifying such eruptions are.