We were planning on snorkeling today up at the north end of the island, but the waves looked a bit rough and it was raining, so it turned into a two museum day. First stop was the Gauguin Center, devoted to the four months Gauguin spent in Martinique. It may not seem like a long time, especially as he was sick with malaria he had contracted while working as a navvy on the Panama Canal, but it was a critical time in his development. The bright tropical sun, lush vegetation, and brown skinned people changed his work from impressionist landscapes to much flatter paintings where the human figures had far more prominence.

I can’t show you any of that as they don’t allow photos of the reproductions of the artworks that they have, so here instead is a picture of their reproduction of the shack that he and fellow painter shared.

There was also a very strange 3D virtual reality tour through Gauguin’s Martinique, along a coastal path and beach dotted with figures from Gauguin’s paintings. I don’t really see the point of that so here’s a picture of a flower from the museum parking lot.

When I was a kid I remember reading about a massive volcanic eruption that destroyed a town, and the only survivor was a prisoner in a jail cell. Today I got to visit that jail cell.

It’s in the town of Saint-Pierre, formerly the capital of Martinique. In the 19th century the town was regarded as the “Paris of the West Indies”, an important port for trade between the Americas and Europe. In the early 20th century the local volcano, Mount Pelée, began acting up. By early May of 1902 there were mudslides, flash floods, and ash falls several centimeters deep. The town set up a committee of experts to prevent panic. The experts reported that these were perfectly normal things for volcanoes to do, and that the town of Saint-Pierre was completely safe. A couple of days later the town was completely destroyed by a cloud of superheated gas and fine debris moving at hundreds of miles an hour.

Somewhere between twenty and thirty thousand people were burned or suffocated to death in a few minutes. The only survivor in the central part of town was Ludger Sylbaris (aka Louis Cyparis) who was spending a night in jail for reasons nobody could remember.

The jail cell was in a military barracks, and the cell had originally been a bomb proof magazine for storing explosive munitions. Sylbaris was badly burned, and survived by pissing on his clothes and using them to block the hot gasses coming into the cell through the small ventilation openings. He spent another three or four days in the cell before he was rescued by looters. His story generated great interest internationally. He was hired by P.T. Barnum, and was the first black performer to star in Barnum and Bailey’s Circus.

As well as being able to wander through the ruins of the barracks, theater, and waterfront warehouses, there is also a museum to visit. An audio tour (available in English as well as French) has actors reading first hand accounts of life in the town before the disaster, the eruption itself, and the recovery effort. There are many exhibits recovered from the debris, including fossil foods…

… storage jars…

… the bars from Sylbaris’s cell…

… some pre-columbian pottery fragments…

… and a torn and crumpled church bell.

The town has grown up again in the same place, though with only a tenth of the former population. The bulk of the population and the big tourist developments are further from the volcano.