On May 7, Mt. Soufrière had erupted on the island of St. Vincent, killing 1,565 people. The next day and again on May 20, Mt. Pelée exploded on Martinique in a cloud of ash, gas, and rock that blew down the mountain at 300 miles an hour, killing 27,000 people within two minutes and leveling the port city of Saint-Pierre, then known as the “Paris of the Caribbean.” The once-bustling hub of trade in rum, sugar, cocoa, and coffee became a smoldering ruin, with barely a brick left standing.
“The devastation wrought by the eruption cannot be appreciated from a verbal description,” wrote Hovey in The American Museum Journal of 1902, “and even photographs do not convey an adequate idea of what has happened.” Lying in a cul-de-sac in the path of incandescent volcanic discharge, Saint-Pierre and its residents had been “as helpless as an animal in a trap.”
The 1902 eruptions were of a type called nuée ardente, French for “glowing cloud,” the same type as those at Vesuvius in AD 79, which killed some 20,000 people in the towns of Pompeii and Herculaneum, and at Mount St. Helens in 1980.
During the expedition, Hovey collected and sent back to the Museum invaluable specimens, molten household objects, pulverized street signs, and lumps of half-melted lava—called “bread-crust bombs” for their cracked tops—which had been thrown out of Mt. Pelée during the eruption.
This stack of café glasses were fused together by the heat of the deadly volcanic cloud.
This Champagne bottle was softened and twisted by heat and pressure.
This glass doorknob was melted on one side, just as trees observed by Hovey were scorched on one side and, on the other, “green as if no eruption had occurred.”
This “bread-crust bomb” was formed when a partly-molten mass of lava cooled and contracted causing the solid exterior to crack.