LAFCADIO HEARN ON THE ISLAND AND 

 PEOPLE OF MARTINIQUE* 



THE first attempt to colonize Mar- 

 tinique was abandoned almost 

 as soon as begun, because the 

 leaders of the expedition found the 

 country ' ' too rugged and too moun- 

 tainous ' ' and were ' ' terrified by the 

 prodigious number of serpents which 

 covered its soil. ' ' Landing on June 25, 

 1635, Olive and Duplessis left the island 

 after a few hours exploration, or, rather, 

 observation, and made sail for Guade- 

 loupe, according to the quaint and most 

 veracious history of Pere Dutertre, of 

 the order of Friars- Preachers. (Mar- 

 tinique was settled by the French in 

 1665, and with the exception of 22 

 years, 1794-1816, when the English 

 held it, has been a French colony ever 

 since. It sends a senator and two 

 deputies to the National Assembly at 

 Paris. ) 



No description could give the reader 

 a just idea of what Martinique is, con- 

 figurativety, so well as the simple state- 

 ment that, although less than fifty miles 

 in extreme length, and less than twenty 

 in average breadth, there are upward of 

 four hundred mountains in this little 

 island, or of what at least might be 

 termed mountains elsewhere. These 

 again are divided and interpeaked, and 

 bear hillocks on their slopes, and the 

 lowest hillock in Martinique is fifty 

 meters high. Some of the peaks are 

 said to be totally inaccessible; many 

 more are so on one or two or even 

 three sides. Ninety-one only of the 

 principal mountains have been named. 



MONT PELEE 



Is the great volcano dead ? Nobody 

 knows. Less than forty years ago it 

 rained ashes over the roofs of St. Pierre ; 

 within twenty years it had uttered mut- 

 terings. For the moment it appears to 



be asleep, and the clouds have dripped 

 into the cup of its highest crater until it 

 has become a lake several hundreds of 

 yards in circumference. The crater 

 occupied by this lake, called L'etang or 

 the Pool, has never been active within 

 human memory. There are others — 

 difficult and dangerous to visit because 

 opening on the side of a tremendous 

 gorge — and it was one of these, no 

 doubt, which has always been called 

 La Souffriere, which rained ashes over 

 the city in 1851. 



The explosion was almost concomi- 

 tant with the last of a series of earth- 

 quake shocks, which began in the mid- 

 dle of May and ended in the first week 

 in August — all much more severe in 

 Guadeloupe than in Martinique. In the 

 village Au Precheur, lying at the foot of 

 the western slope of Pelee, the people 

 had been for some time complaining of 

 an oppressive stench of sulphur, or, as 

 the chemists declared it, sulphuretted 

 hydrogen, when on the 4th of August 

 much trepidation was caused by a long 

 and appalling noise from the mountain, 

 a noise compared by planters on the 

 neighboring slopes to,the hollow roaring 

 made by a packet blowing off steam, but 

 infinitely louder. These sounds con- 

 tinued through intervals until the fol- 

 lowing night, sometimes deepening into 

 a rumble like thunder. At 11 p. m. the 

 noise was terrible enough to fill all St. 

 Pierre with alarm, and on the morning 

 of the 6th the city presented an un- 

 wonted aspect, compared by Creoles who 

 had lived abroad to the effect of a great 

 hoar-frost. 



A committee appointed to make an 

 investigation and prepare an official re- 

 port found that a number of rents had 

 either been newly formed, or suddenly 

 become active, in the flank of the moun- 



■ From " Two Years in the French West Indies," Lafcadio Hearn, Harper & Bros. 



