MARTINIQUE AND ST. VINCENT. 361 



On the 23d of May the Dixie landed us and a goodly store of 

 supplies for the sufferers, at Kingstown, St. Vincent. There I left 

 her, in company with Dr. Hovey and Mr. Curtis. It was with deep 

 regret that we parted from Captain Berry, whose splendid hospitality 

 had made the entire voyage a pleasure that all the guests on the ship 

 will never forget. It was really the first parting from American 

 territory, for on a man-of-war one feels rather safer than on land. 

 Good friends sprang up, however, among the hospitable English 

 •colonists, and supplies, houses, servants and horses were furnished 

 us before we could ask for them. The government supply steamer 

 Wear was on several occasions placed at our disposal, so that we 

 coasted around three fourths of the shores of St. Vincent before going 

 into the interior at all. We saw the Soufriere in partial eruption in 

 clouds and rain ; we landed at Georgetown on the fatal windward coast 

 and visited the hospitals, where opportunity was given for interviews 

 with the scorched victims of the explosive blast of hot cinders that 

 had burned faces and ears and hands and feet, but curiously failed 

 to burn clothing or houses. The hot sands, when they fell on these 

 people, seem to have been at a temperature hot enough to inflict scald- 

 ing wounds, but not hot enough to ignite anything or burn through 

 •coverings. On May 29 we proceeded in a long dug-out canoe rowed by 

 five stalwart blacks to Chateau Belair, and from that point explored 

 the west coast of the volcano proper and made a successful ascent to 

 the edge of the great crater on a brilliantly clear day. The following 

 week we made a similar ascent from the eastern or windward side, 

 but reached the crater's rim in a most unpleasant black fog after a 

 Tather perilous climb along precipitous wastes. After two weeks of 

 most instructive work at St. Vincent, I came to Barbados, ninety 

 miles to windward, to learn something of the dust which fell here in 

 showers on the evening of the Soufriere eruption. This completes the 

 itinerary of the writer to this date. 



The devastation at St. Vincent does not appear especially different 

 from that at Martinique. The human conditions were different and 

 the destruction of property wrought by the first eruption was much 

 more widespread. In this respect, and from the size of the crater and 

 greater diffusion of the dust, it seems certain that the Soufriere erup- 

 tion was phenomenally much more violent than the eruption of Mont 

 Pelee. The crater is more than twice as large as that crater of Pelee 

 which I saw on May 21 ; the dust-fall has been reported from Trinidad, 

 from Barbados, and from vessels at sea to the east and southeast at 

 distances from one hundred to nine hundred miles from St. Vincent. 

 At Walliabou sugar works southwest of the volcano, and in Richmond 

 next to it, exactly the same fiery blast swept the cliff face as at St. 



