The Roraima did not immediately sink. ‘After one list to starboard, the ship righted,’ reported Thompson, ‘but the masts, the bridge, the funnel and all the upper works had gone overboard.’ Remembered Scott: ‘The ship was on fire, what was left of it. The stumps of both masts were blazing. Aft she was like a furnace, but forward the flames had not got below deck, so we four carried those who were still alive into the forecastle. All of them were burned and many of them were half strangled.’ According to James Taylor, the ship’s cooper and one of the few crewmen along with Thompson and Scott to escape serious injury: ‘…all around on the deck were the dead and dying covered with boiling mud. There they lay, men, women and little children, and the appeals of the latter for water were heart-rending. When water was given them they could not swallow it, owing to their throats being filled with ashes or burnt with the heated air.’ Clara King vividly described the ordeal of the Stokes family in their cabin below decks:
‘The explosion seemed to have blown in the skylight over our heads, and before we could raise ourselves hot moist ashes began to pour in on us. They came in boiling splattering splashes like moist mud without any pieces of rock. In vain we tried to shield ourselves. The cabin was pitch dark – we could see nothing… When we could see each other’s faces they were covered with black lava… Rita, the older girl, was in great agony and every part of my body was paining me.’
Clara and the Stokes family were eventually found and moved to the forecastle, where Mrs Stokes would shortly expire, along with her youngest daughter, Olga, and her infant son, Eric. This may have been the ‘little shaver’ that Scott, whose own son was lost overboard, witnessed being brought in: ‘His hair and all of his clothing had been burned off, but he was alive. We rolled him in a blanket and put him in a sailor’s bunk. A few minutes later we looked at him and he was dead.’ Thompson estimated ‘only twenty-five of those on the Roraima, out of sixty-eight, were left [alive] after the first flash.’
Badly scorched, half-suffocated, ‘burned inside and out’ by the hot dust, Captain Freeman managed to muster enough crewmen to release the Roddam’s mooring cables. Fortunately, having arrived only an hour earlier, the ship’s boilers were still lit, and the engineers below, having been spared the worst effects of the nuée ardente, were able to respond to Freeman’s order for ‘full speed astern’. However, extricating the ship from the swirling wreck and corpse strewn waters of the bay, proved a painfully slow process:
‘The steering-gear became choked by a mass of debris that bad fallen on the ship, and clogged up every part of her. Accordingly, after running for some time astern rung’ again and went ahead, and continued this until the gear was cleared from the ashes and dust that seemed to block everything, but in this running backwards and forwards it was two hours before we cleared the roadstead.’
As the Roddam pulled away from the harbour, she nearly collided with the stricken Roraima; ‘one mass of flames, with a cloud of steam rushing from the engine-room.’ ‘The screams of the sufferers on the doomed ship were terrible to hear’, Freeman recalled, ‘but it was impossible for us to render any aid. When last seen the Roraima was settling down by the stern.’ It would take the Roddam 18 hours to reach the safety of St Lucia, by which time more than half of her 46 crewmen were dead. Freeman recorded that the formerly ‘spick and span’ vessel arrived in Castries looking ‘more like a phantom ship than anything else – a ghostly, ghastly apparition.’
Those still alive aboard the Roraima hoping for Freeman and his skeleton crew to come to their aid were to be cruelly let down. Parts of the ship were still aflame, and Scott and his men began constructing a raft to take off the survivors. However, conditions were equally treacherous in the water. ‘It is doubtful if we should have survived if we had committed ourselves to it’, recalled Scott, ‘for the flames were dancing over the waters, fed by thousands of gallons of rum from the distilleries alongshore. The casks had burst and the blazing fluid floated on the surface.’ Taylor, who’d jumped overboard to escape the flames on deck, recalled the ‘sea being intensely hot.’ There amid the flotsam he encountered his dying captain, ‘a man so dreadfully burned and disfigured as to be unrecognizable’.
The first vessel in a position to launch a rescue mission was the Pouyer Quertier. Urged on by Emile Bertin, whose family he’d left behind in St Pierre, Captain Thirion turned his ship towards the ash cloud. However, he was forced to reverse course when the ship became shrouded in darkness, and surrounded by whirlpools. Schools of terrified porpoises reportedly fled ahead of the Pouyer Quertier as she steamed towards Fort-de-France.
Salvation for the survivors of the Roraima and the other ships destroyed in the bay would come with the arrival of the French warship Suchet in the afternoon, more than six hours after the initial destruction. Boats from the 3,300t protected cruiser were sent out with orders to ensure no one alive, either at sea or on land, was left behind. Unfortunately, several of those picked up succumbed to their injuries in the warship’s sickbay; her chief medical officer powerless to save the victims who had, as he termed it, ‘swallowed the fire’. Only nine crewmen and two passengers, Clara King and Margueritte (Rita) Stokes, would reach Fort-de-France alive. Late in the evening, after the immediate rescue was complete and the remaining survivors hospitalised, the Suchet’s commander, Pierre Le Bris, sent the following stark telegram the Ministry of Marine:
‘Suchet to Navy Paris: Back from Saint-Pierre, city completely destroyed by mass of fire about 8.00 a.m. Suppose all population annihilated. Have brought back the few survivors, about 30. All ships in bay burnt and lost. Eruption volcano continues. I am leaving for Guadeloupe to get supplies.’
In the days that followed, several foreign warships joined the Suchet and Pouyer Quertier in ferrying supplies to Martinique to assist those who had been less directly impacted by the eruption.[4] A second pyroclastic flow in August killed a further 2,000 islanders and rescue workers in the vicinity. In October, a 300m ‘lava spine’ rose up from the crater floor, collapsing into rubble five months later. Volcanic activity did not cease until the middle of 1905. The May 8th catastrophe, which shocked the French nation, became the subject of one of film-maker Georges Melies’ popular ‘actualities’. Ludgar Sylbaris, the convict whose life had been saved by the walls of his jail cell, went on to make a living by exhibiting his scars for Barnum & Bailey’s Circus. Lurid posters billed Sylbaris as ‘The only living object that survived the “silent city of death”’. Captain Freeman, whose own burns required three weeks of hospital treatment at Fort-de-France, reflected that he had lived through possibly ‘the most terrible, the most horrible event that ever happened in the history of the world.’ ‘The thing was’, he concluded ‘a living picture of Hell.’
[1] Others listed were the schooner E.J. Morse, the bark Albanese; the Misti; Canadian; Raisinier; Sacro Cuore; Dahlia; L.W. Morton; and Clementina.
[2] A blue saltire on a white background with the company’s initials shown in each triangular section.
[3] Scarth, A. (2002) La Catastrophe: The Eruption of Mount Pelée, the Worst Volcanic Eruption of the Twentieth Century: OUP.
[4] These included the USS Cincinnati, the Apollo Class cruiser HMS Indefatigable, and the Danish cruiser Valkyrie.
Bow Creek to Anatahan 