Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 61.djvu/367

Rh On the 23d of May the Dixie landed us and a goodly store of supplies for the sufferers, at Kingstown, St. Vincent. There I left her, in company with Dr. Hovey and Mr. Curtis. It was with deep regret that we parted from Captain Berry, whose splendid hospitality had made the entire voyage a pleasure that all the guests on the ship will never forget. It was really the first parting from American territory, for on a man-of-war one feels rather safer than on land. Good friends sprang up, however, among the hospitable English colonists, and supplies, houses, servants and horses were furnished us before we could ask for them. The government supply steamer Wear was on several occasions placed at our disposal, so that we coasted around three fourths of the shores of St. Vincent before going into the interior at all. We saw the Soufrière in partial eruption in clouds and rain; we landed at Georgetown on the fatal windward coast and visited the hospitals, where opportunity was given for interviews with the scorched victims of the explosive blast of hot cinders that had burned faces and ears and hands and feet, but curiously failed to burn clothing or houses. The hot sands, when they fell on these people, seem to have been at a temperature hot enough to inflict scalding wounds, but not hot enough to ignite anything or burn through coverings. On May 29 we proceeded in a long dug-out canoe rowed by five stalwart blacks to Chateau Belair, and from that point explored the west coast of the volcano proper and made a successful ascent to the edge of the great crater on a brilliantly clear day. The following week we made a similar ascent from the eastern or windward side, but reached the crater's rim in a most unpleasant black fog after a Tather perilous climb along precipitous wastes. After two weeks of most instructive work at St. Vincent, I came to Barbados, ninety miles to windward, to learn something of the dust which fell here in showers on the evening of the Soufrière eruption. This completes the itinerary of the writer to this date.

The devastation at St. Vincent does not appear especially different from that at Martinique. The human conditions were different and the destruction of property wrought by the first eruption was much more widespread. In this respect, and from the size of the crater and greater diffusion of the dust, it seems certain that the Soufrière eruption was phenomenally much more violent than the eruption of Mont Pelée. The crater is more than twice as large as that crater of Pelée which I saw on May 21; the dust-fall has been reported from Trinidad, from Barbados, and from vessels at sea to the east and southeast at distances from one hundred to nine hundred miles from St. Vincent. At Walliabou sugar works southwest of the volcano, and in Richmond next to it, exactly the same fiery blast swept the cliff face as at St.