Arriving at the edge, Stuart stepped on the lake with the utmost precaution, for he had read that the lake was both warm and liquid. Both were true. But the warmth was only slight, and the liquidity was so dense that, when a piece of pitchwas taken out, it took several hours for the slow-moving mass to fill up the hole.
"The sensation that walking upon this substance gave," writes Treves, "was no other than that of treading upon the flank of some immense beast, some Titanic mammoth lying prostrate in a swamp. The surface was black, it was dry and minutely wrinkled like an elephant's skin, it was blood-warm, it was soft and yielded to the tread precisely as one would suppose that an acre of solid flesh would yield. The general impression was heightened by certain surface creases, where the hide seemed to be turned in as in the folds behind an elephant's ears. These skin furrows were filled with water, as if the collapsed animal was perspiring.
"The heat of the air was great, the light was almost blinding, while the shimmer upon the baked surface, added to the swaying of one's feet in soft places, gave rise to the idea that the mighty beast was still breathing, and that its many-acred flank actually moved."
The task of taking the pitch out of this lake, Stuart found to be as prosaic as the lake itself. Laborers, with picks, broke off large pieces—which showed a dull blue cleavage—while other laborers lifted the pieces on their heads—the material is light—and carried them to trucks, running on a little railroad on the surface of the lake, and pulled by a cable line.
The tracks sink into the lake, little by little, andhave to be pried up and moved to a new spot every three days, but as they are specially constructed for this, the labor is trifling. The laborers work right beside the railroad trucks. It makes no difference where the ditch is dug, from which the asphalt is taken, as the hole left the night before is filled again by the following morning.
It has been estimated that this deposit alone contains over 9,000,000 tons of asphalt. It is 135 feet deep, and though enormous quantities of the stuff have been taken out, the level has not fallen more than ten feet.
In the lake are certain small islands, which move around from place to place, apparently following some little-known currents in the lower layers of the pitch.
Stuart went on to the factory, hoping to get some further information about Guy Cecil, but met with a sudden and unexpected rebuff. Not only did no one about the place seem to know the name, but they refused to admit that they recognized the description, and seemed to resent the questions.
Trying to change the subject, Stuart commenced to ask questions about where the asphalt came from, and the manager, who seemed to be a Canadian, turned on the boy, sharply.
"See here," he said, "I don't know who you are, nor where you come from. But I'll give a civil answer to a civil question. As for this Cecil, I don't know anything about him. As for wherethis asphalt come from, I don't know, and nobody knows. Some say it's inorganic, some say is from vegetable deposits of a long time ago, some say it's fish. The chemists are still scrapping about it. Nobody knows. Now, is there anything more?"
The manner of the response was not one to lead Stuart to further attempts. He shook his head, and with a curt farewell went back to La Brea, Fernando and Port de Spain.
At the hotel he found a telegram.
"GET—STORY—PRESENT—CONDITION—ST. PIERRE—MARTINIQUE—FERGUS."
"GET—STORY—PRESENT—CONDITION—ST. PIERRE—MARTINIQUE—FERGUS."
Two days later Stuart boarded the steamer for Martinique, the Island of the Volcano.
"Ay," said the first mate to Stuart, as they paced the bridge on the little steamer which was taking the boy to Martinique, "yonder little island is St. Lucia, maybe the most beautiful of the West Indies, though it isn't safe for folks to wander around much there."
"Why?" asked Stuart in surprise, "are the negroes mutinous?"
"No, bless ye!" the mate gave a short laugh. "Mighty nice folks in St. Lucia, though Castries, the capital, is a great fever town. It isn't the folks that are dangerous. Snakes, my bully boy, snakes! It's the home of the fer-de-lance."
"The Yellow Viper?" queried Stuart.
"The same. An' the name's a good one. It's more viperous than any other snake of the viper bunch, an' its disposition is mean and yellow right through. Ever see one?"
"No," said Stuart, "I haven't. I heard there were some in Trinidad, and there have been a few reported in Cuba. But I guess they're rare there. What do they look like?"
The mate spat freely over the side, while he gathered his powers for a description.
"If ye can think of a fish that's been a long time dead," he suggested, "an' has turned a sort of phosphorescent brown-yellow in decayin', ye'll have a general idea of the color. The head, like all the vipers, is low, flat an' triangle-shaped. The eye is a bright orange color, an' so shinin' that flashes from it look like sparks of red-yellow fire. I've never seen them at night, but folks who have, say that in the dark the eyes look like glowin' charcoal.
"If I had to take a walk through the St. Lucia woods, I'd put on armor, I would! Why, any minute, something you take for a branch, a knot of liana, a clump of fruit, a hangin' air-plant, may take life an' strike. An' that's all ye'll ever know in this world."
"There's no cure for it?"
"None. A little while after a fer-de-lance strikes, ye're as dead as if you'd been dropped in mid-Atlantic, with a shot tied to your feet."
"Maybe I'm just as glad I'm not going to land there," said Stuart, "though I guess it's one of the most famous fighting spots of the world. I read once that for a hundred and fifty years there was never a year without a battle on that island. Seven times it was held by the English and seven times by the French."
"Like enough," replied the mate. "It's owned by the English now, but Castries is a French town, through and through. But Castries sticks in my memory for a reason which means more to a deep-water sailor than any land fightin'. We were lyin' in the harbor at Castries when theRoddamcame in, ay, more'n twenty years ago."
"What was theRoddam?" queried Stuart, scenting a story.
"Have ye forgotten," answered the mate in a return query, "or didn't ye ever know? Let me tell ye what theRoddamwas!"
"We were lyin' right over there, in Castries Harbor, dischargin' coal—which was carried down by negro women in baskets on their heads—when we saw creep round the headland of Vigie, where you can see the old barracks from here, the shape of a steamer. She came slowly, like some wounded an' crippled critter. Clear across the bay we could hear her screw creakin,' an' her engines clankin' like they were all poundin' to pieces. What a sight she was! We looked at her, struck still ourselves an' unable to speak. They talk of a Phantom Ship, but if ever anything looked like a Phantom Steamer, theRoddamwas that one.
"From funnel-rim to water-line she was grey an' ghost-like, lookin' like a boat seen in an ugly dream. Every scrap o' paint had been burned from her sides, or else was hangin' down from the bare iron like flaps o' skin. She had been flayed alive, an' she showed it. Some of her derricks were gone, the ropes charred an' the wires endin' in blobs o' melted metal. The planks of her chart-house were blackened. Her ventilators had crumpled into masses without any shape.
"Laborin' like a critter in pain, she managed to make shallow water, an' a rattle o' chain told o' the droppin' o' the anchor. After that, nothin'! There wasn't a sign o' life aboard.
"The harbor folks pulled out to take a look at the craft. As they came near, the smell o' fire an' sulphur met them. A hush, like death, seemed to hang over her. The colored boatmen quit rowin', but the harbor-master forced them on. Her ladder was still down. The harbor-master climbed aboard.
"On deck, nothin' moved. The harbor-master stepped down into grey ashes, sinkin' above his knee. With a scream he drew back. The ashes were hot, almost white-hot, below. The light surface ash flew up about him and half-suffocated him. His boot half-burned from his foot and chokin', the harbor-master staggered back to the rail for air.
"No life was to be seen, nothin' but piles o' grey ash, heaped in mounds. Ash was everywhere. From it rose a quivering heat, smellin' o' sulphur an' the Pit.
"Yet everyone couldn't be dead on this ghost-ship, for someone must ha' steered her into the harbor, an' dropped the anchor. Makin' his way along the rail, the harbor-master made his way to where he could reach the iron ladder goin' to the bridge, an' climbed it. The bridge was clear of ash, blown free by the mornin' breeze.
"The chart-house door was open. In it, lyin'across the steam steerin' wheel, was Captain Freeman, unconscious. His face was so blistered that his eyes were nearly shut. His hair was singed right down to the skull. His hands were raw an' bleedin'. His clothes were scorched into something that was black an' brittle. The harbor-master lifted him, an' laid him on the chart-house bunk."
"What others were there?"
"Pickin' his way, he got to the bow an' found the deck hand who had let down the anchor. He was blind an' his flesh was crisped and cracking.
"From below, crawled up four o' the engine-room crew. Most o' the others aboard lay dead under those heaps o' hot ash on the deck."
"What had happened?"
"This had happened. TheRoddamhad been through the eruption of Mont Pelée, the only ship which escaped o' the eighteen that were in the harbor. She got away only because she made port just fifty-two minutes before the eruption, an' had been ordered to the quarantine station, some distance off."
"Did you see anything of the eruption yourself?"
"We knew that somethin' had happened, even down here in St. Lucia. It turned almost as black as night for a few minutes, an' our skipper, who was ashore, said he had felt a slight earthquake. But we saw enough of it, right after."
"How?" queried Stuart.
"We had a lot o' foodstuff in our cargo, some of which was billed for Caracas. But, as soon as we heard the story, our captain told the engineer to get up full steam an' make for Fort-de-France. He knew the owners would have wanted him to go to the relief of the folks of Martinique. We got there the next day an' saw sights! Sights I can't ever forget!"
The eruption of Mont Pelée and the destruction of the town of St. Pierre, in 1902, over 30,000 people being killed in the space of three seconds, was one of the most tragic disasters of history, and the ruins of St. Pierre are today the most astounding ruins that the world contains of so vast and terrible a calamity, outrivaling those of Pompeii.
The cataclysm did not come without warning. As early as March 23, a scientist ascended the volcano and reported that a small crater was in eruption. By the end of April, to quote from Heilprin, "vast columns of steam and ash had been and were being blown out, boiling mud was flowing from its sides and terrific rumblings came from its interior. Lurid lights hung over the crown at night-time, and lightning flashed in dazzling sheets through the cloud-world. What further warnings could any volcano give?"
On April 25, a crater broke into a small eruption, throwing out showers of rock-material, which, however, did not reach the town, distant a mile from the foot of the volcano. On May 5, anavalanche of boiling mud, many acres wide, tumbled down from the volcano, and went roaring along the bed of the Rivière Blanche at the rate of a mile a minute. A large sugar factory was engulfed and some 159 lives lost. On May 6 and 7, the sulphur fumes were so strong in the streets that horses, and even people, dropped from suffocation.
Again—what further warning could any volcano give?
There were other warnings. On April 30, light ashes had begun to fall. On May 1 an excursion was announced for the summit of Mont Pelée for those who wished to see a volcano in action, but that morning a deeper coat of ashes blanched the streets. The Jardin des Plantes—one of the richest tropical gardens of the West Indies—lay buried beneath a cap of gray and white. The heights above the city seemed snow-clad. The country roads were blocked and obliterated, and horses would neither work nor travel. Birds fell in their noiseless flight, smothered by the ash that surrounded them, or asphyxiated by poisonous vapors or gases that were being poured into the atmosphere.
"The rain of ashes never ceases," the local paper wrote on May 3. "At about half-past nine, the sun shone forth timidly. The passing of carriages is no longer heard in the streets. The wheels are muffled. Many business houses are closed to customers.... The excursion which hadbeen organized for tomorrow morning cannot take place, the crater being absolutely inaccessible. Those who had planned to take part will be informed on what date this excursion will become possible."
On May 4 the paper wrote: "The sea is covered in patches with dead birds. Many lie asphyxiated on the roads. The cattle suffer greatly, asphyxiated by the dust of ashes. The children of the planters wander aimlessly about the courtyards, with their little donkeys, like human wrecks. They are no longer black, but white, and look as if hoar frost had formed upon them.... Desolation, aridity and eternal silence prevail over the countryside."
Next day, May 5, was the day when the mud crater opened. It was followed by an upsurging wave from the ocean, which added to the fear of the people, but which receded slowly and with little damage. On the day following, Pelée was shrouded in a heavy cloud, and ashes and cinders fell over a wide stretch of country. The surface waters had disappeared. Trees had been burned of their leaves. Yet a commission appointed to investigate the condition of the volcano made light of it, saying "the relative position of the craters and the valleys, leading towards the sea, enables the statement that the safety of St. Pierre is complete."
Wednesday, May 7, opened one of the saddest and most terrorizing of the many days that ledup to the final eruption. Since four o'clock in the morning, Mont Pelée had been hoarse with its roaring, and vivid lightning flashed through its shattered clouds. Thunder rolled over its head, and lurid glares played across the smoky column which towered aloft. "Some say," says Heilprin, "that at this time it showed two fiery crater-mouths, which shone out like fire-filled blast furnaces. The volcano seemed prepared for a last effort.
"When daylight broke through the clouds and cast its softening rays over the roadstead, another picture of horror rose to the eyes. The shimmering waters of the open sea were loaded with wreckage of all kinds—islands of débris from field and forest and floating fields of pumice and jetsam. As far as the eye could reach, it saw but a field of desolation." The river of Basse-Pointe overflowed with a torrent of black water, which carried several houses away. Black rains fell.
Again, and for the last time—could a volcano give any further warning?
Yet the governor, a scientific commission, and the local paper joined in advising the inhabitants of St. Pierre not to flee the city, the article closing with the words, "Mont Pelée presents no more dangers to the inhabitants of St. Pierre than does Vesuvius to those of Naples."
Next day the governor was dead, the members of the commission were dead, the editor was dead, and the presses on which this article had beenprinted had, in one blast, been fused into a mass of twisted metal.
Came the 8th of May, 1902.
Shortly after midnight the thunders ceased for a while, but by four o'clock, two hours before the shadows of night had lifted, an ominous cloud was seen flowing out to sea, followed in its train by streaks of fiery cinders. The sun was barely above the horizon when the roaring began again. The Vicar-General describes these sounds as follows: "I distinguished clearly four kinds of noises; first the clap of thunder, which followed the lightning at intervals of twenty seconds; then the mighty muffled detonations of the volcano, like the roaring of many cannon fired simultaneously; third, the continuous rumbling of the crater, which the inhabitants designated the 'roaring of the lion,' and then last, as though furnishing the bass for this gloomy music, the deep noise of the swelling waters, of all the torrents which take their source upon the mountain, generated by an overflow such as has never yet been seen. This immense rising of thirty streams at once, without one drop of water having fallen on the sea-coast, gives some idea of the cataracts which must pour down upon the summit from the storm-clouds gathered around the crater."
"Hundreds of agonized people," writes Heilprin, in his great scientific work on the catastrophe, "had gathered to their devotions in the Cathedral and the Cathedral Square, this beingAscension Day, but probably there were not many among them who did not feel that the tide of the world had turned, for even through the atmosphere of the sainted bells, the fiery missiles were being hurled to warn of destruction. The fate of the city and of its inhabitants had already been sealed.
"The big hand of the clock of the Military Hospital had just reached the minute mark of 7:50 a.m. when a great brown cloud was seen to issue from the side of the volcano, followed almost immediately by a cloud of vapory blackness, which separated from it and took a course downward to the sea. Deafening detonations from the interior preceded this appearance, and a lofty white pennant was seen to rise from the summit of the volcano.
"With wild fury the black cloud rolled down the mountain slope, pressing closely the contours of the valley along which had previously swept the mud-flow that overwhelmed the factory three days before, and spreading fan-like to the sea.
"In two minutes, or less, it had reached the doomed city, a flash of blinding intensity parted its coils, and St. Pierre was ablaze. The clock of the Military Hospital halted at 7:52 a.m.—a historic time-mark among the ruins, the recorder of one of the greatest catastrophic events that are written in the history of the world."
Just before the cloud struck, its violet-grey center showed, and the forepart of this was luminous. It struck the town with the fury of a tornado of flame. Whirls of fire writhed spirally about it. The mountain had belched death, death in many forms: death by fire, death by poisonous gases, death by a super-furnace heat, but, principally, death by a sudden suffocation, the fiery and flaming cloud having consumed all the breathable air.
Whole streets of houses were mown down by the flaming scythe. Walls three to four feet in thickness were blown away like paper. Massive machinery was crumpled up as if it had been clutched in a titanic white-hot metal hand. The town was raked by a hurricane of incandescent dust and super-heated gas.
The violet luminosity, with its writhing serpents of flame, was followed in a second or two by a thousand points of light as the town took fire, followed, almost instantaneously, by a burst of light of every color in the spectrum, as a thousand substances leaped into combustion, and then, in a moment——
Night!
An impenetrable cloud of smoke and ash absolutely blotted out the sun. The sky was covered. The hills were hidden. The sea was as invisible as at midnight. Even the grayness of the ash gave back no light; there was none to give.
Three seconds had elapsed since the violet-gray cloud of fury struck the town, but in those three seconds 30,000 people lay dead, slain with suchappalling swiftness that none knew their fate. No one had tried to escape.
The eruption was witnessed, from a distance, by only one trained observer, Roger Arnoux, and a translation of his record is, in part, as follows:
"Having left St. Pierre at about five in the evening (May 7) I was witness to the following spectacle: Enormous rocks, being clearly distinguishable, were being projected from the crater to a considerable elevation, so high, indeed, as to occupy a quarter of a minute in their flight.
"About eight o'clock of the evening we recognized for the first time, playing about the crater, fixed fires that burned with a brilliant white flame. Shortly afterwards, several detonations, similar to those that had been heard at St. Pierre, were noted coming from the south, which confirmed me in my opinion that there already existed a number of submarine craters from which gases were being projected, to explode when coming in contact with the air.
"Having retired for the night, at about nine o'clock, I awoke shortly afterwards in the midst of a suffocating heat and completely bathed in perspiration.... I awoke again about eleven thirty-five, having felt a trembling of the earth ... but again went to sleep, waking at half-past seven. My first observation was of the crater, which I found sufficiently calm, the vapors being chased swiftly under pressure of an east wind.
"At about eight o'clock, when still watching thecrater (M. Arnoux was the only man who saw the beginning of the eruption and lived to tell the tale), I noted a small cloud pass out, followed two seconds after by a considerable cloud, whose flight to the Pointe de Carbet (beyond the city)occupied less than three seconds, being at the same time already in our zenith, thus showing that it developed almost as rapidly in height as in length. The vapors were of a violet-gray color and seemingly very dense, for, although endowed with an almost inconceivably powerful ascensive force, they retained to the zenith their rounded summits. Innumerable electric scintillations played through the chaos of vapors, at the same time that the ears were deafened by a frightful fracas.
"I had, at this time, an impression that St. Pierre had been destroyed.... As the monster seemed to near us, my people, panic-stricken, ran to a neighboring hillock that dominated the house, begging me to do the same.... Hardly had we arrived at the summit when the sun was completely veiled, and in its place came almost complete blackness.... At this time we observed over St. Pierre, a column of fire, estimated to be 1,200 feet in height, which seemed to be endowed with the movement of rotation as well as onward movement." St. Pierre was no more.
Rescuers were soon on their way. Twenty-three minutes after the clouds had been seen rising from Mont Pelée and the cable and telephone lines were broken, a little steamer left Fort-de-France, thecapital. It reached half-way, then, finding that the rain of stones and ashes threatened to sink it, returned. The boat started anew at ten o'clock and rounded the point of Carbet. The volcano was shrouded in smoke and ashes. For three miles the coast was in flames. Seventeen vessels in the roadstead, two of which were American steamers, burned at anchor. The heat from this immense conflagration prevented the boat from proceeding and it returned to Fort-de-France, reaching there at one o'clock, bringing the sinister tidings.
At midday, the Acting Governor of Martinique ordered theSuchetto go with troops to be under the direction of the Governor, then at St. Pierre. About three o'clock, a party was landed on the shore. The pier was covered with bodies. The town was all in fire and in ruins. The heat was such that the landing party could not endure more than three or four minutes. The Governor was dead also.
"St. Pierre," writes a witness on another rescue ship, which arrived at almost the same moment, "is no more. Its ruins stretch before us, in their shroud of smoke and ashes, gloomy and silent, a city of the dead. Our eyes seek the inhabitants fleeing distracted, or returning to look for the dead. Nothing to be seen. No living soul appears in this desert of desolation, encompassed by appalling silence.... Through the clouds of ashes and of smoke diffused in our atmosphere, the sun breaks wan and dim, as it is never seen in ourskies, and throws over the whole picture a sinister light, suggestive of a world beyond the grave."
Two of the inhabitants, and two only, escaped; one a negro prisoner, who was not found until three days later, burned half to death in his prison cell; and one, a shoemaker, who, by some strange eddy in the all-killing gas, and who was on the very edge of the track of destruction, fled, though others fell dead on every side of him.
A second eruption, coupled with an earthquake, on May 20, completed the wreckage of the buildings. This outburst was even more violent than the first. There was no loss of life, for no one was left to slay.
Five years later, Sir Frederick Treves visited St. Pierre. "Along the whole stretch of the bay," he writes, "there is not one living figure to be seen, not one sign of human life, not even a poor hut, nor grazing cattle.... A generous growth of jungle has spread over the place in these five years. Rank bushes, and even small trees, make a thicket along some of the less traversed ways.... Over some of the houses luxuriant creepers have spread, while long grass, ferns and forest flowers have filled up many a court and modest lane."
Twelve years later, a visitor to St. Pierre found a small wooden pier erected. A tiny hotel had been built. Huts were clustering under the ruins. Several parties were at work clearing away the ruins, but slowly, for the government of the colonywould not assist in the work, believing that the region was unsafe. At the time of this visit, Mont Pelée was still smoking.
This was the ruined city which Stuart was going to see. On board the steamer were the two or three books which tell the story of the great eruption, and the boy filled his brain full of the terrible story that he might better feel the great adventure that the next day should bring him.
The steamer reached Fort-de-France in the evening, and the boy found the town, though ill-lighted, gay. A band was playing in the Plaza, not far from the landing place and most of the shops were still open. Morning showed an even brighter Fort-de-France, for, though when St. Pierre was in its glory, Fort-de-France was the lesser town, the capital now is the center of the commercial prosperity of the island. For this, however, Stuart had little regard. Sunrise found him on the little steamer which leaves daily for St. Pierre.
The journey was not long, three hours along a coast of steep cliffs with verdant mountains above. Small fishing hamlets, half-hidden behind coco-nut palms, appeared in every cove. The steamer passed Carbet, that town on the edge of the great eruptive flood, which had its own death-list, and they turned the point of land into the harbor of St. Pierre.
Before the boy's eyes rose the Mountain of Destruction, sullen, twisted, wrinkled and still menacing, not all silent yet. The hills around weregreen, and verdure spread over the country once deep in volcanic ash. But Mont Pelée was brown and bald still.
Nineteen years had passed since the eruption, but St. Pierre had not recovered. At first sight, from the sea, the town gave a slight impression of being rebuilt. But this was only the strange combination of old ruins and modern fishing huts. The handsome stone wharves still stood, but no vessels lay beside them.
The little steamer slowed and tied up at a tiny wooden pier. A statue, symbolical of St. Pierre in her agony, had been erected on the end of the pier. The boy landed, and walked slowly along the frail wooden structure, to take in the scene as it presented itself to him.
Alas, for St. Pierre! As Lafcadio Hearn described it—"the quaint, whimsical, wonderfully colored little town, the sweetest, queerest, darlingest little city in the Antilles.... Walls are lemon color, quaint balconies and lattices are green. Palm trees rise from courts and gardens into the warm blue sky, indescribably blue, that appears almost to touch the feathery heads of them. And all things within and without the yellow vista are steeped in a sunshine electrically white, in a radiance so powerful that it lends even to the pavement of basalt the glitter of silver ore.
"Everywhere rushes mountain water—cool and crystal—clear, washing the streets; from time to time you come to some public fountain flinging asilvery column to the sun.... And often you will note, in the course of a walk, little drinking fountains contrived in the angle of a building, or in the thick walls bordering the bulwarks or enclosing public squares; glittering threads of water spurting through lion-lips of stone."
Alas for St. Pierre!
Above the pier but one street had been partly restored, and, at every gap, the boy's gaze encountered gray ruins. The ash, poured out by the mountain in its vast upheaval, has made a rich soil. To Stuart's eyes, the town was a town of dreams, of great stone staircases that led to nowhere, of high archways that gave upon a waste. The entrance hall of the great Cathedral, once one of the finest in the West Indies, still leads to the high altar, but that finds its home in a little wooden structure with a tin roof, shrinking in what was once a corner of the apse.
Built as a lean-to in the corner of what had once been a small, but strongly-built house was a store, a very small store, outside the door of which a crippled negro was sitting. Thinking that this might be one of the old-timers of St. Pierre, Stuart stopped and bought a small trinket, partly as a memento, partly as a means of getting into conversation.
"But yes, Monsieur," answered the storekeeper, "it was my wife and I—we escaped. My wife, she had been sent into Morne Rouge, that very morning, with a message from her mistress.Me, I was working on the road, not more than a mile away. I saw nothing of it, Monsieur. About half-past seven that morning (twenty-two minutes, therefore, before the final eruption) a shower of stones fell where I was working. One fell on my back, and left me crippled, as you see. But my four children, ah! Monsieur, they sleep here, somewhere!"
He waved his hand toward the riot of ruin and foliage which now marks the city which once prided itself on being called "the gayest little city in the West Indies."
"Yet you have come back!" exclaimed Stuart.
"But yes, Monsieur, what would you? It pleased God that I should be born here, that my children should be taken away from me here; and, maybe, that I should die here, too."
"You are not afraid that Mont Pelée will begin again?"
The negro shrugged his shoulders.
"It is my home, Monsieur," he said simply. "Better a home which is sad than the place of a stranger which is gay. But we hope, Monsieur, that some day the government of Martinique will accept a parole of good conduct from the Great Eater of Lives"—he pointed to Mont Pelée—"and give us back our town again."
Next morning, studying the life of the little town, Stuart found that many others shared the view of the crippled negro. The little market-place on the Place Bertin, though lacking any shelter from pouring rain or blazing sun, was crowded with three or four hundred market women. Daily the little steamer takes a cargo from St. Pierre, for the ash from the volcano has enriched the soil, and the planters are growing wealthy. There are many more little houses and thatched huts tucked into corners of the ruins than appear at first sight, and a hotel has been built for the tourists who visit the strange spot.
The crater in Mont Pelée is silent now; the great vent which hurled white-hot rocks, incandescent dust and mephitic gases, is now covered with a thick green shrubbery, only here and there do small smoke-holes emit a light sulphurous vapor; but the great mountain, treeless, wrinkled, implacable, seemed to Stuart to throw a solemn shadow of threat upon the town. The secret of St. Pierre, as Stuart wrote to his paper, "lies in the hope of its inhabitants, but its real future lies in the parole of good conduct from the Great Eater of Human Lives, Mont Pelée."
There is not a corner of the world which is more full of historic memories than is the West Indies. Dominica, the next island which Stuart passed after he had left Martinique, besides being one of the scenic glories of the world, described as "a tabernacle for the sun, a shrine of a thousand spires, rising tier above tier, in one exquisite fabric of green, purple and grey," has many claims to fame. Here, the cannibal Caribs were so fierce that for 255 years they defied the successive fleets of Spaniards, French and English who tried to take possession of the island. Some three hundred Caribs still dwell upon the island upon a reservation provided by the government. The warriors no longer make war, and fish has taken the place of the flesh of their enemies as a staple diet.
Under the cliffs of Dominica is a memory of the Civil War, for there the Confederate vesselAlabamafinally escaped the Federal man-of-warIroquois. A few miles further north, between Dominica and Guadeloupe, in The Saints Passage, was fought, in 1782, the great sea-battle between Rodney and De Grasse, which ended in thedecisive victory of the English over the French and gave Britain the mastery of the Caribbean Sea. It ranks as one of the great historic sea-fights of the world.
The next island on the direct line to the north, St. Kitts, is not destitute of fame. As Cecil had told Stuart, St. Kitts or St. Christopher was first a home for buccaneers, and later one of the keys to the military occupation of the West Indies. Its neighbor, St. Nevis, together with other claims to romance, has a special interest to the United States in that Alexander Hamilton—perhaps one of the greatest of American statesmen—was born there.
Near St. Kitts lies Antigua, where theMost Blessed Trinity—despite her name, one of the most famous pirate craft afloat—settled after her bloody cruises. Its captain was Bartholomew Sharp, described as "an acrid-looking villain whose scarred face had been tanned to the color of old brandy, whose shaggy brows were black with gunpowder, and whose long hair, half singed off in a recent fight, was tied up in a nun's wimple. He was dressed in the long embroidered coat of a Spanish grandee, and, as there was a bullet hole in the back of the garment, it may be surmised that the previous owner had come to a violent end. His hose of white silk were as dirty as the deck, his shoe buckles were of dull silver."
Sharp, with 330 buccaneers, had left the West Indies in April, 1760. They landed on the mainland, and, crossing the isthmus, made for Panama. Having secured canoes, they attacked the Spanish fleet lying at Perico, an island off Panama City, and, after one of the most desperate fights recorded in the annals of piracy, they took all the ships, including theMost Blessed Trinity. Then followed a long record of successful piracy, of battle, murder and sudden death, of mutiny and slaughter grim and great. Sharp, who, with all his crimes, was as good a navigator as he was reckless a fighter, sailed theMost Blessed Trinitywith his crew of desperadoes the whole length of South America, rounded the Horn and, after eighteen months of adventure, peril and hardship, reached the West Indies again.
"The log of the voyage," writes Treves, "affords lurid reading. It records how they landed and took towns, how they filled the little market squares with corpses, how they pillaged the churches, ransacked the houses and then committed the trembling places to the flames.
"It tells how they tortured frenzied men until, in their agony, they told of hiding places where gold was buried; how they spent an unholy Christmas at Juan Fernandez; how, in a little island cove, they fished with a greasy lead for golden pieces which Drake is believed to have thrown overboard for want of carrying room. It gives account of a cargo of sugar and wine, of tallow and hides, of bars of silver and pieces of eight, of altar chalices and ladies' trinkets, of scentedlaces, and of rings torn from the clenched and still warm fingers of the dead.
"The 'valiant commander' had lost many of his company on the dangerous voyage. Some had died in battle; others had mumbled out their lives in the delirium of fever, sunstroke or drink; certain poor souls, with racked joints and bleeding backs, were crouching in Spanish prisons; one had been marooned on a desert island in the Southern Pacific Ocean." At the last, Sharp turned over the ship to the remainder of his crew and set sail, rich and respected (!) for England.
On the way from St. Kitts to St. Thomas, Stuart passed the two strange islands of St. Eustatius and Saba, remnants of the once great Dutch power in the West Indies. Statia, as the first island is generally called, is a decadent spot, its commerce fallen to nothing, the warehouses along the sea-front of its only town, in ruins. Yet once, strange as it may seem, for a few brief months, Statia became the scene of a wild commercial orgy, and the place where once was held "the most stupendous auction in the history of the universe."
It happened thus: When the American Revolulutionary War broke out, England being already at war with France, commercial affairs in the West Indies became complicated by the fact that the Spanish, the French and the English, all enacted trading restrictions so stringent that practically every port in the West Indies was closed. The Dutch, seizing the opportunity, made Statia a freeport. Immediately, the whole of French, English, Spanish, Dutch and American trade was thrown upon the tiny beach of Fort Oranje.
More than that, Statia became the center for contraband of war. All the other islands took advantage of this. Statia became a huge arsenal. American privateers and blockade-runners were convoyed by Dutch men-of-war, which, of course, could not be attacked. Smugglers were amply provided with Dutch papers. Goods poured in from Europe every day in the week. Rich owners of neighboring islands, not knowing how the French-English strife might turn out, sent their valuables to Statia for safe keeping. The little island became a treasure-house.
At times more than a hundred merchant vessels could be seen swinging to their anchors in the roadstead. A mushroom town appeared as by magic. Warehouses rose by scores. The beach was hidden by piles of boxes, bags and bales for which no storeroom could be found. Merchants came from all ports, especially the Jews and Levantines, who, since the beginning of time, have been the trade-rovers of the sea. Neither by day nor by night did the Babel of commerce cease. Unlike other West Indian towns, where such a condition led to gaiety and pleasure, Fort Oranje retained its Dutch character. It was a hysteria, but a hysteria of buying and selling alone.
Then, one fine day, February 3, 1781, Rodney came down with a British fleet and captured FortOranje and all that it contained. There were political complications involved, but Rodney bothered little about that. Fort Oranje was a menace to British power. Rodney took it without remorse, appropriated the more than $20,000,000 worth of goods lying on the beach and the warehouses, and the 150 merchantmen, which, on that day, were lying in the bay. Jews and Levantines were stripped to the skin and sent packing. The Dutch surrendered and took their medicine phlegmatically. The French, as open enemies, were allowed to depart with courtesy.
Then came the great auction. Without reserve, without remorse, over $20,000,000 worth of goods were put up for what they would fetch. Boxes, crates, bales and bags melted away like snow before the sun. Warehouses bursting with goods became but empty shells. Traders' booths were abandoned, one by one. Just for a few months the commercial debauch lasted, then Rodney sailed away. Since then, the selling on the beach of Statia has been confined to a little sugar and a few yams.
For the United States, the little fort above Fort Oranje has a historic memory. From the old cannon, still in position on that fort, was fired the first foreign salute to the Stars and Stripes, the first salute which recognized the United States as a sovereign nation.
It was on the 16th of November, 1776, that the brigAndrea Doria, fourteen guns, third of theinfant American navy of five vessels, under the command of Josiah Robinson, sailed into the open roadstead of St. Eustatius, and dropped anchor almost under the guns of Fort Oranje.
"She could have chosen no more fitting name," writes Fenger, "than that of the famous townsman of Columbus.... TheAndrea Doriamay have attracted but little attention as she appeared in the offing ... but, with the quick eyes of seafarers, the guests of Howard's Tavern had probably left their rum for a moment to have their first glimpse of a strange flag which they all knew must be that of the new republic.
"Abraham Ravené, commandant of the fort, lowered the red-white-and-blue flag of Holland in recognition of the American ship. In return, theAndrea Doriafired a salute.
"This put the commandant in a quandary. Anchored not far from theAndrea Doriawas a British ship. The enmity of the British for Holland, and especially against Statia, was no secret.
"In order to shift the responsibility, Ravené went to consult De Graeff, the governor. De Graeff had already seen theAndrea Doria, for Ravené met him in the streets of the Upper Town. A clever lawyer and a keen business man, the governor had already made up his mind when Ravené spoke.
"'Two guns less than the national salute,'" was the order.
"And, so, the United States was for the firsttime recognized as a nation by this salute of eleven guns.
"For this act, De Graeff was subsequently recalled to Holland, but he was reinstated as Governor of Statia, and held that position when the island was taken by Rodney in 1781. The Dutch made no apology to England."
Saba, which lies close to Statia, depends for its interest on its location. It is but an old volcanic crater, sticking up out of the sea, in the interior of which a town has been built. As a writer describes it, "if the citizens of this town—which is most fitly called Bottom—wish to look at the sea, they must climb to the rim of the crater, as flies would crawl to the edge of a tea-cup, and look over. They will see the ocean directly below them at the foot of a precipice some 1,300 feet high. To go down to the sea it is necessary to take a path with a slope like the roof of a house, and to descend the Ladder, an appalling stair on the side of a cliff marked at the steepest part by steps cut out of the face of the rock."
This strange town of Bottom is built with a heavy wall all round it, to save it from the torrents which stream down the inside slopes of the crater during a rain. Its population is mainly white, flaxen-haired descendants of the Dutch.
More amazing than all, most of the inhabitants are shipbuilders, but the ships, when built, have to be let down by ropes over the side of the cliff. These fishing smacks are not only built in a crater,but on an island which has neither beach, harbor, landing stage nor safe anchoring ground, where no timber is produced, where no iron is to be found, and where cordage is not made. The island has no more facilities for the shipbuilding trade than a lighthouse on a rock in the middle of the sea.