62 SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION 



ago and is now a city of about 10,000. Here we renewed our acquain- 

 tance with Dr. Frank A. Perret, Director of the Martinique Volcano 

 Museum, whom we had met in Fort de France. 



It was a coincidence that the first person to greet me on my return 

 to the Museum after the conclusion of this expedition was J. V. 

 McKeon, of the Museum's mechanical force, who was in St. Pierre 

 the very day after Pelee had broken loose and wiped out the city and 

 its 28,000 inhabitants almost without warning in the space of a very 

 few minutes. A photograph of the city of St. Pierre taken the day 

 after the holocaust and here reproduced was kindly lent to me by Mr. 

 McKeon. 



I have to thank Commander R. M. Wynne, R. N., the harbormaster 

 at Bridgetown, Barbados, for a very unusual and interesting experi- 

 ence. Barbados is capped, for the greater part, by a coral rock forma- 

 tion and in part by a deposit of radiolarian, or infusorial earth deposit, 

 indicative of an ancient and profound submergence beneath the sea. 

 Down at the base of this limestone cap are underground water courses 

 from which are pumped up the greater part of the water supply of 

 the island. One of the largest of the wells tapping this supply is at 

 the Bowmanston pumping station. At the bottom of it the superin- 

 tendent of the station had been kind enough to place one of my baited 

 copper " roach " traps, in the hope that we might discover some sub- 

 terranean crustacea. Some hours later we ourselves descended to re- 

 cover the trap from the stream at the bottom of this deep hole, 260 

 feet below the surface. 



We were let down in a bucket on a steel cable, I sitting on the 

 bucket rim with my feet inside. To get to the trap at the bottom, we 

 had to wade chest deep in water. Retrieving it and following the water 

 course in the opposite direction, we passed through a tunnel so low 

 and full of water that our noses were all but submerged. On the other 

 side of this arch or tunnel was an underground river coursing through 

 a cleft or narrow, irregular-walled canyon in the rock that in places 

 may have been 50 to 75 feet high. The stream, where we stood in it. 

 was 4 to 6' feet wide. I thought that this was about all there was to 

 see, but soon learned otherwise. Using a crazy old craft that one of 

 our guides pulled up from the bottom of the " river " and bailed out. 

 we went on for three or four hundred yards in stygian darkness which 

 was only intensified by the flickering torch I held until we came to a 

 waterfall fenced by a man-made wall, through a gap in the top of 

 which, 2.\ to 3 feet wide, a foot-thick stream of water poured over in 

 a noisy cascade. It dropped down 15 or 20 feet ; that is why we had to 



