348 E. 0. Hovey — Erujptions of 1902 of La Soufriere^ 



crater from the city — were demolished more generally than 

 the north and south walls. The direction in wliich most of 

 the trees were felled indicates the same thing, but the trees 

 in the angle of Morne Mirail, which rises behind the middle 

 of the city, were thrown over at all angles progressively, show- 

 ing that a vortex was formed there. As is indicated by the 

 gradually decreasing degree of destruction in passing from the 

 northern to the southern part of the city, the blast diminished 

 in force as it progressed and expanded, but w4ien it reached 

 Ste. Marthe Point it still had strength enough to throw the 

 statue of Notre Dame de la Garde from its pedestal. The 

 statue, which is of hollow iron ten or eleven feet high, now 

 lies on the edge of the bluff with its foot about fifty feet S. 

 10° W. from its original position on the pedestal, and directly 

 in line with the crater.* The guns in the Ste. Marthe and 

 Morne d'Orange batteries were thrown from their carriages in 

 the same direction. More than once when 1 was on the rim of 

 the crater or on the west flanks of the mountain I saw great 

 clouds of dust-laden steam come out of the gash in the side 

 of the crater with sufficient force to descend the gorge of the 

 E-iviere Blanche with great rapidity a full mile before rising 

 in columns. It was not difficult to imagine that, if this hap- 

 pened when the crater was sending a steam and dust column 

 only one or two thousand feet high, the action would be vastly 

 greater and even like a hurricane in violence when the crater 

 was in full eruption and was sending its ash-laden steam column 

 from five to seven miles into the air.f 



It does not seem necessary to call in any forces new or 

 strange to the history of vulcanism to account for the phe- 

 nomena attending the eruption of Mt. Pelee, or the destruc- 

 tion of St. Pierre and its people. The " flames " reported were 

 perhaps the incandescent stones and bombs flying through the 

 air; and these certainly would set fire to any combustible 

 material upon which they fell. The officers of the French 

 cable-repair ship Pouyer Quertier were eye-witnesses of the 

 eruption of May 8 and describe the cloud as being black when 

 it issued from the crater, but say that it became luminous as it 

 approached the coast.:j: Several times at night during our stay 

 we saw the inner cone of the crater outlined and streaked with 



* See Bill. Am. Mus. Nat. Hist., vol. xvi, pi. xlvi, fig. 3; and Nat. Geog. 

 Mag., vol. xiii, p. 250, for illustrations. 



f Lieut. B. B. McCormick, U. S. N., in command of the Potomac, was 

 on his vessel in the harbor of Fort de France May 20 and made measure- 

 ments of the angular distance to which the steam column rose during the 

 great outburst that morning. The column subtended an angle of about 30° 

 and the tug was thirteen and one-half nautical miles in a straight line from 

 the mountain. 



:[: Heilprin, loc. cit., p. 367. 



