Saturday, April 11th, 2009
My galley day yesterday went by without a hitch.
Luckily Donald was cooking, boo yeah!, so we just had to stay ahead of the dishes. Keeping my freshly
bandaged hand dry was a challenge but a bright yellow rubber glove managed that :-)
This morning I came ashore on the first skiff run for a look around. Being Good Friday it was very quiet
but the museum was open. There were lots of before and after photos of the city in 1908. The most
powerful display to me was the huge bell from the cathedral. This inch thick bronze bell looks like a
squashed beer can! The force of the blast and the extreme heat simply mashed it flat as it fell from the
tower.
There are also examples of things found in the ruins as people began to build anew. Blocks of fused nails
and screws from a hardware store, melted coins and smashed ships portholes plus many ordinary things
made into macabre artifacts by the sheer power of the volcanoe.
Nicko and I wandered through the town and saw the ruins of the theater, a large church and the prison
where one of the only two survivors was in solitary confinement in a small cell deep inside the prison.
The ruins show the power of this event. There are great blocks of masonry piled up like they were
children’s blocks dumped out of a bucket.
The current town, built amongst the ruins, has made no attempt to hide it’s charred and blasted
predecessor. Many of the houses incorporate the walls directly, they are usually blackened bare stone and
mortar whereas the new walls are painted cinder block. The streets are the same as well, many with the
original cobbled surfaces.
All in all St Pierre is a fascinating, if slightly macabre place to see. Rising above it, to the North, is the
grey peaked Mt Pelee still rumbling a bit and being very carefully watched.
The crew has adopted a restaurant bar tattoo parlour called L’ Escapade which has WiFi even :-)
Unfortunately they closed at 3:00 this afternoon as did everything else in town. Apparently this weekend
will be very quiet so not sure what we’ll end up doing tomorrow as we also have it off.
Thanks for reading.
KJ
Here are some pictures from my look around in St Pierre Martinique.
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