Si. Yincent, and Mt. Pelee^ Martinique. 325 



hundred yards wide, continuously from the mouth of the 

 Wallibou River to Morne Ronde village, a mile and a half to 

 the north, and at intervals for two miles farther north. These 

 landslides have left precipitous walls along the shore-line, and 

 deep water is found where villages stood and prosperous plan- 

 tations existed before the eruption. We had no sounding line, 

 but our boatmen could not touch bottom with a twelve-foot oar 

 three feet from shore on the site of Morne Ronde village. The 

 sections left by the slides show that the land which has disap- 

 peared consisted of delta and coast-plain deposits, material 

 which would easily be shaken from the more substantial lava 

 flows and agglomerate beds by the vibrations due to the erup- 

 tions. The eastern, or windward, side of the island is not 

 nearly as steep as the leeward, and landslides have not occurred 

 there as features of this eruption. On the contrary, the wind- 

 ward shore-line from Black Point, a mile south of Georgetown, 

 northward almost to Chibarabou Point, more than six miles 

 distant, has been pushed out by the vast quantities of fresh 

 lapilli which have been brought down from the slopes of the 

 volcano by the rivers and the heavy rains, during and since the 

 eruptions, and distributed by the ocean currents. 



A large amount of material, too, was brought down by the 

 Rabaka Dry River an hour in advance of the great outburst of 

 May 7, which seems to have been due to the bodily discharge 

 of a portion, at least, of the old crater lake into the headwaters 

 of that stream. Survivors who attempted to cross the Rabaka 

 Dry River toward noon of that day report that they were 

 prevented by a torrent of "boiling hot" water and mud rush- 

 ing down the valley, and that a wall of water and mud iifty 

 or more feet high (they compared it with the height of a fac- 

 tory chimney) cam.e out of the upper reaches of the river and 

 swept out to sea. There was no heavy rain that day before 

 the eruption took place, but the lake still was in the crater 

 early in the day, according to the tale of a fish- woman who 

 had ascended the mountain from Georgetown that morning 

 on her way home to Chateaubelair. The trail led along the 

 rim of the crater for half a mile. The woman reached the rim 

 at nine o'clock and found that fissures had appeared in the 

 ground and that the lake was at a higher level than usual and 

 boiling. She rushed back to Georgetown to warn the people, 

 but her tale was discredited. Mr. MacDonald's notes contain 

 the entries : " 12.55 p. M. Enormous discharge to windward 

 side, color darker. 1 p. m. Tremendous roaring, stones thrown 

 out to windward thousands of feet.""^ While this does not 

 prove the bodily outthrow of the lake, it shows that there was 



* Century Magazine, vol. Ixiv, p. 630, August, 1902. 



