BARBADOS-ANTIGUA EXPEDITION 43 
cave side. The insect grasps a small branch with these caliper- 
like horns and then propels itself round and round with its 
wings whirling like a pin-wheel, cutting a neat girdle around 
the branch, or severing it completely. 
Mr. Henderson’s cold was much worse on this day and the 
doctor declared that he was threatened with congestion of the 
lungs and ordered him to keep to his berth, a real trial when we 
were having so many interesting experiences ashore. 
In the afternoon we passed the island of Martinique, and the 
vast bulk of Mt. Pelée loomed up impressively as we steamed 
along the coast, its top enshrouded in sombre clouds. Of course 
our thoughts were occupied with the awful tragedy of 1902, 
when forty thousand lives were here snuffed out by the huge 
volume of incandescent gas that belched forth from the crater 
of Pelée and rolled down over the doomed city of St. Pierre 
near its base. This is doubtless the only known ease in the 
world’s history where such a large number of human lives were 
lost, probably in the space of a minute or two. The best account 
that I have seen of this catastrophe was written by the Very 
Reverend G. Parel, Vicar General and Administrator of the 
Diocese of Martinique, a translation of which appears in the 
Century Magazine of August 1902, page 610. I quote the fol- 
lowing from his exceedingly graphic narative: 
‘‘Suddenly, at ten minutes before eight o’clock...... a tre- 
mendous detonation shook the whole colony, and an enormous 
mass was seen to mount with virtiginous rapidity straight into 
the air from the mouth of the crater. The black spirals of the 
column, shot through with electrie discharges, unfolded, rolled 
off into space, and, driven by an invisible power, went afar, to 
throw off the incandescent matter contained in their flanks. A 
spout-like column of flame meanwhile had abruptly disengaged 
itself from the great masses, and had burst over St. Pierre like 
a hurricane, enveloping the city, roadstead, suburbs, in one dread- 
ful net. ‘Everything went down and everything caught fire.’ 
Deep night spread over the land, but it was immediately illum- 
inated by the flames of this inferno. From the grass of the 
Savannas to the produce in the fields, from the houses and 
edifices of the city to the ships in the roadstead, everywhere, on 
