The Day the World Ended, page 23
Through this floating morass a longboat was pulling steadily for the shore from the Italian ship, Orsolina.
For Auguste Ciparis the hours of darkness had been the longest he had endured. Spent and broken though his body was, his spirit had been revived by a remarkable occurrence. Sometime during the night he had seen “a vision in which there were two men discussing my fate. One of them was older than the other, and the older man said I was not to die after all.” As a piece of clairvoyance this is astounding, since that was the night Louis Mouttet and Edouard L’Heurre had discussed, and settled, the fate of Ciparis.
In his cobbler’s shop Léon Compère-Léandre had also managed to ignore the volcano, concentrating instead on another sound, closer at hand. In the stifling darkness of his retreat, it had taken him some time to recognize it as the gnawing of rats.
“I lay there,” he was to testify later to the official inquiry into St. Pierre, “and I could feel them crawling over my body. They, like me, were starving. I felt a bite on my arm, and then another on my head, and I realized they were prepared to eat me alive. I had always believed that rats would not attack unless cornered, but these rats were attacking.”
As dawn arrived, Léon Compère-Léandre, the normally placid animal lover, found himself engaged in a struggle to kill the rats that now ran openly across the floor and up the walls of his shop.
In his office in Radical Party headquarters, Senator Amédee Knight read the latest issue of Les Colonies with mixed feelings. As he later recalled: “The fiction the newspaper maintained that there was nothing to fear and the preposterous ‘interview’ with Professor Landes were clear evidence to me that the Progressives were in a state of panic. Yet, the very tone of the Landes’ ‘interview’ could have a decisive effect on the electorate. The professor was a respected figure, and there were many, among them Radical supporters, who would believe that if he felt there was no need to fear, they should not worry either.”
The paper also included various incidental information for its readers, not associated with the volcano or politics. On the back page there was an announcement: “Thursday being the feast of the Ascension, the stenographic courses are postponed until next Thursday, May 15. The adult course which was to have taken place Friday next is likewise postponed till May 15.” Further down the page: “Our offices being closed tomorrow, our next number will not appear until Friday.”
For Senator Knight the coming days would be no holiday. This Wednesday he would spend in St. Pierre drumming up the electorate. Then in the evening he would travel to Fort-de-France in preparation for Ascension Day, which he planned to spend canvassing support in the south of the island for the Radical Party. He was scheduled to return to St. Pierre early on Friday.
But there would be no Friday for St. Pierre.
Gabriel Parel awoke late after his disturbed night. When he did, he found that a further change had come over St. Pierre. From his window he saw that “the roadstead as far as the eye could reach was covered with floating islets, spoils of the mountain, the forests, and the fields, with trunks of gigantic trees, pumice stone, and wreckage of every sort discharged by the torrents. All those flood waters, black and laden with mud, instead of covering the sea with a muddy coat as on stormy days, in tumbling into the sea, barely tinged it with a light yellow streak, and then disappeared as if they were molten lead.”
Sometime between celebrating morning Mass in the Cathedral of Saint Pierre and midday, the Vicar-General came to a decision. He felt there was nothing more he could do in St. Pierre. He “believed it my duty to return home,” and “I resisted all persuasion to remain.” Though later pressed to elaborate, he steadfastly refused to explain just what “duty” took him away from a town that was in dire need of spiritual leadership. Was he after the relief money he believed would soon be distributed? Or does the answer lie in the last entry of his diary for this day: “Was my good angel guarding me?”
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
The End of the Affair
AFTER LEAVING THE shore, the longboat from the Orsolina was chased by two other boats. Yvette de Voissous, seated in the prow of the longboat, was the sole passenger. In their anxiety to reach the Orsolina before being overhauled, the longboat crew was paying little attention to navigation; already they had collided with several dead animals, and once an oar had dipped and dragged to the surface a corpse, “bringing shouts of fear from all on board and causing the boat to tilt in the most alarming manner.” The pursuing crews, anxious to gain ground, were also finding that they had continually to fend off all kinds of flotsam that threatened to capsize their boats.
The chase had begun soon after the longboat had pulled away from the water front. It was carrying the last sack of mail as well as the last passenger to leave St. Pierre.
After the voodoo quimboiseurs had committed their desecration at the northern door of the Cathedral of Saint Pierre, Yvette had loaded her baggage on a handcart. As dawn arrived, she had trundled her way down to the water front. Her intention, she was to admit later, was to “somehow get on board the Orsolina.” Arriving at the shore, she found it a deserted ruin. The only movement came from the flares warning of the presence of la Verette. As the sky lightened, Yvette’s problem was solved with the appearance of the longboat. “The crew were surprised to see me. They asked me what I was doing, and I said I was trying to embark on the Orsolina. One of them, M. Contoni (the ship’s mate), said that it must have been divine providence that had brought me to the quayside a day early, as the sailing date had been changed on the Captain’s orders, and the Orsolina would depart as soon as the longboat had returned. I asked about the other passengers, and M. Contoni said there was no time to wait for other passengers, and that anyway he doubted if they would be ready in time, as nobody on the shore had been told of the new sailing date. Later I was to learn that the Captain had refused to stay a moment longer than he had to in the roadstead in view of the eruption. I was also glad to be gone, for St. Pierre was no place for a Christian. One of the crew stowed my baggage and then helped me aboard, while M. Contoni led the others into the town. They returned a short while later with a sack of mail, followed by two men who were very angry.”
The pair were from the shipping agency that handled the Orsolina. Their anger, Yvette later recalled, stemmed from the new sailing date: “M. Contoni was adamant that the new sailing orders would be enforced. At this, one of the men attempted to wrest back the sack, and succeeded only in arousing the anger of the crew, one of whom threw the sack into the boat, narrowly missing me.”
Even so the affair would have probably fizzled out but for the arrival of an official from the harbormaster’s office. By all accounts he was a pompous man, and on hearing of the Orsolina’s change of departure, he started to quote a number of regulations forbidding it. He was still going through his rule book of customs and health clearance when the longboat crew began to shove off. The official tried to stop this by holding on to the boat’s painter, only to be nearly dragged into the water.
“He started to shout, and in no time at all the dock was filled with other officials shouting for us to return. Seeing that we had no intention of turning back, for which I was thankful, they climbed into other boats and gave chase,” recalled Yvette, adding with a certain girlish excitement: “I could not help but feel that they would have to be powerful oarsmen to catch up with the longboat.”
In the end the longboat held its lead until it reached the safety of the Orsolina, where it was hauled up to the deck. There it was met by Captain Leboffe, who to Yvette was a “powerful figure of a man in a great rage. He gave me the briefest of greetings, and ordered a deckhand to show me to my cabin.”
The only surviving record of the scene that followed is in the report to the Orsolina owners by Captain Leboffe. According to his report, the longboat was still swinging from its davits when the ship’s agents and a variety of officials scrambled on board. The Captain “demanded to know why they had pursued my crew going about their lawful duty as if they were common criminals. The agents protested that I could not change my departure date without permission from Naples. I pointed out that as Captain, I, and only I, had the right to decide when my ship was in danger, and I had come to the conclusion that Pelée was a danger to it. An official from the harbormaster said that I would be in breach of contract if I sailed without loading cargo that I was scheduled to carry. Another official said I could not depart without passengers who had paid for the voyage.
“I ignored all these arguments as to why I could not sail, insisting that my only concern was the safety of my ship, and that every minute I stayed arguing, the risk grew greater. The harbormaster’s men said they would summon assistance to stop my sailing. I regarded this as a threat to my ship and to my office as Captain. This I could not allow. I told them that if they remained on board to argue much longer, they would find themselves on the way to Europe. Again the officials ordered me to remain at anchor, and I, in turn, ordered my men to escort them from the deck. At the same time I gave orders for the ship to get under way, and the officials had barely reached their own boats before our anchor was on board.”
Shortly after nine o’clock on this Wednesday morning, the Orsolina started to edge through the debris of the roadstead toward the open sea. Behind her she left eighteen passengers, including the American Consul’s wife, Clara Prentiss.
In his cell at midday, Auguste Ciparis was kneeling and praying. A short while before, the prison governor had come to his cell and told him that after a “careful review,” a reprieve had been authorized. His “vision” had materialized. The governor had added that Ciparis was to remain in the cell until he was transferred to France, where he would serve out his sentence.
The decision to keep him incarcerated in the death cell would mean that in just twenty hours time, he would be the only person alive in the prison.
That afternoon Fernand Clerc called his family and household to a meeting in the villa courtyard. He was brief and to the point. He told them that he could no longer guarantee their safety, so that all but essential members of the household were to leave at once for Fort-de-France; his wife and children would remain with him, but would be ready to move off at a moment’s notice. A carriage would remain harnessed for this purpose.
By early evening the villa was deserted except for the immediate Clerc family and a handful of servants who steadfastly refused to leave until their master departed. He would spend the coming hours seated before the barometer fixed on his balcony, noting every fluctuation of the needle, and at the same time watching the mighty clouds of dust drifting lazily northward in the still air.
Fernand Clerc, like several others, would wonder why the smoke which appeared to stretch unbroken to the horizon had not been seen as a signal for help. He knew that at any given time there were up to a dozen ships sailing within fifty miles of the island, and the sight of that smoke would surely have provoked some interest from them. Nobody on Martinique knew, possibly because of the severed telegraph connections, that the smoke had been mistaken for that emitted by the Soufrière on St. Vincent.
All day, ships had been steaming to that British possession to carry out rescue operations, completely unaware that the island of Martinique was on the verge of a disaster far greater than anything that would happen on St. Vincent. Yet by a strange quirk of nature, the events of this day on St. Vincent would resemble in many ways the fate of St. Pierre.
The Soufrière on St. Vincent had gone into eruption shortly after dawn. It had sent a column of debris shooting an estimated forty thousand feet into the air. By the time the first of the ships coming to the rescue had anchored off Georgetown, the Soufrière had spewed out two great tongues of black mud which rolled down its side. By early afternoon a considerable part of the island was hidden behind the vast reddish-purple curtain that ballooned out of the volcano, remained suspended for a while over its summit, and then spread across the countryside and the southern seaboard.
The Reverend John Darrell, who kept a careful record of the day’s events from his vantage point in the belfry of his church in Kingstown, recorded: “A furious fusilade of stones and boulders, a large part of them intensely heated when they fell, was kept up during most of the time and was doubtless responsible for a considerable loss of life.”
The official estimate of the dead was later placed at 1350. Many of them had died because they refused to take shelter from the Soufrière’s bombardment.
The Reverend Darrell believed that “not one life need have been lost if all had taken refuge in a basement or cellar, or even behind the shutters of a living room. The tragedy was that the Soufrière, in spite of the terror it evoked in some, was for the most part regarded as a spectacle to be observed in the open. Too often those who observed it died for their curiosity.”
It was not curiosity which was to prové so fatal for St. Pierre, but lethargy. There was a hint of it in the behavior in Paris of M. Albert Decrais. On Wednesday afternoon the Minister of Colonies was still trying to find the five thousand francs that Governor Mouttet had cabled for. Just why the French economy should be so hard pressed that it could not immediately find such a trifling sum has never been explained. In the office of the Minister for the Navy, a decision had still to be made whether one of the Republic’s warships, the Suchet, should be put at the disposal of one of France’s more obscure colonies. In the end the office would send no instructions until events had overtaken the situation.
On the Suchet itself, a lethargic attitude also seemed to prevail. All day Captain Pierre de Bries had observed the smoke rising from Pelée seventeen miles away from where he lay at anchor in the roadstead off Fort-de-France. Even allowing for the natural pique he felt at the Governor’s attempt to take over his ship, the captain’s attitude is still somewhat curious. He was apparently aware of the threat a volcanic eruption contained for all in its vicinity, and yet he maintained his station. Though later he was to receive deserved praise for his rescue work, he was never questioned as to why he had not sailed a few miles up the coast to investigate from closer at hand the situation in St. Pierre.
Lethargy prevailed on the ships in the roadstead off St. Pierre. All day, they had remained placidly at anchor, though the departure of the Orsolina had caused brief excitement. Then late in the afternoon, the Pouyer-Quertier and the Grappler had returned from searching for the broken telegraph cables. The two ships had steamed through the little fleet, the Grappler taking up station for the night just north of St. Pierre, ready in the morning to start searching the sea bed near where the mud flow had buried the Guérin estate. The Pouyer-Quertier headed south, prepared to resume searching at daybreak off Fort-de-France. This deployment seemed to have the effect of rousing the other ships to action. One by one they left their safe moorings offshore to anchor closer to St. Pierre.
By nightfall, the Biscaye, the Teresa Lo Vico, the Maria di Pompeii, the Diament, the Fusée, and the R. J. Morse were riding at anchor a few hundred yards from the water front of St. Pierre. Later they would be joined by the Tamaya, a French bark, the Clementina, a French schooner, the Korona, from Hamburg, and the Gabrielle, from Marseilles.
One reason why they chose to anchor in what they must have known was a danger area is that the captains wanted to be close to the shore. It would be easier for them to get to the official banquet and ball in honor of Governor Mouttet and his wife. What they did not know was that there had been a change of plans. The celebration, to the consternation of Mayor Roger Fouché, had been canceled.
The man who has responsible for the cancellation now sat in Fouché’s crowded office in the Town Hall listening quietly to the Mayor’s fury sweeping around the portrait-lined walls. The more he listened, the more convinced grew Edouard L’Heurre that he had been correct in persuading Louis Mouttet to at least postpone the celebration until after the election. It had taken the Administration’s Principal Secretary all afternoon to argue successfully the case for postponement.
“Reports reaching Fort-de-France during the morning made it clear that it would be a major miscalculation to proceed with the celebrations at such a time. At first M. Mouttet would not accept this. But I argued that politically it would be damaging to proceed with the festivities when the town was in such a state. Again, I reasoned that to proceed would allow the Radicals to claim, with certain justification, that the Progressive Party, who principally would support such an occasion, had gravely misjudged the situation. Instead of concerning themselves with a banquet, the Radicals would argue that their concern should be for the people of St. Pierre as a whole.
“Such an accusation would have a decisive effect on the electorate. During the day I had also discovered that a number of guests had declined to attend, pleading that under the circumstances prevailing in St. Pierre, they would be better engaged in more pressing work. Among those who had declined were M. Parel, the Vicar-General, M. Clerc, Senator Knight, and members of the ‘Action Committee,’ who appeared to be in dispute with M. Fouché. From information reaching me from St. Pierre, I believed that the true reason why they were not anxious to be abroad at night was because they feared further attacks from the voodoo bourhousses.
“On all these counts I strongly urged M. Mouttet to order the festivities to be postponed until a more propitious occasion. At last he agreed, and then I proceeded to persuade him that it was his duty to visit St. Pierre to restore confidence in the population. To this he gave his assent, and said that he not only would go, but would take his wife with him. I conceded that this would be a further reassurance, as the sight of Madame Mouttet could only help to placate the population. She was well known to be a nervous lady, and if she was seen in St. Pierre, then clearly many of the population would gain new courage to face the days to come.”
There would be no “days to come.” But late in the afternoon, dressed in the uniform of a French Colonial Governor, Louis Mouttet, his wife, and Edouard L’Heurre set off by coach to St. Pierre. If Madame Mouttet was nervous, she did not show it.
