Irish writer Lafcadio Hearn spent two years in Martinique, in the French West Indies, and the account of his stay will have a particular poignancy next month, writes John Moran
When Anthony Trollope toured the Caribbean islands in 1859 he found the towns on islands under French administration superior in design, architecture and port amenities to those governed from London. Among these French possessions, the town of Saint-Pierre on the island of Martinique was considered the finest of all and was known as the Little Paris of the Antilles.
On his own Caribbean cruise in 1887, the wandering Irishman Patrick Lafcadio Hearn, who had recently abandoned journalism after a highly successful career in Cincinnati and New Orleans, was also smitten by Martinique. Even the surrounding blue-black sea "bewitches certain Celtic eyes", he wrote. After dropping off in Saint-Pierre during his three-month tour, he decided to return for a longer period to record the tropical beauty and the daily routines of the exotic inhabitants of an island where Napoleon's own Josephine was born.
Lafcadio Hearn stayed in Martinique for two years, sending sparkling and often poetic essays and sketches to Harper's Magazine in New York. These would later form part of his travel classic, Two Years in the French West Indies. He also completed a charming novelette, Youma: the Story of a West Indian Slave. In the foreword to the most recent edition of the travel book, Martinique writer Raphael Confiant notes: "After less than two years of living in Martinique, Lafcadio Hearn had succeeded in penetrating one of the most jealously guarded secrets of our ancient quimboiseurs (witch-doctors). This magnificent traveller was sensitive to colours and sounds and the peculiar way they shape our everyday lives in the Caribbean islands." Confiant also delights in Hearn's "ungovernable tendency to associate with black and mulatto people".
In the two years between 1887 and 1889, Hearn became a familiar sight on the island. He lived mostly in Saint-Pierre in the shadow of its looming volcano, Mont Pelée, which was known affectionately by Pierrotins as La Montagne. To the long-gone Arawaks, and the Caribs who replaced them, it had been known as Fire Mountain. Apart from his watchful ramblings around the streets of Saint-Pierre, Hearn also climbed Mont Pelée and went on expeditions into the interior, recording the customs, culture and place in the social hierarchy of the different ethnic groups. Though he was familiar with high-society colonists and Creoles who possessed the latest fashions and ideas from the Metropole, he chose to live among and write about those of African and East Indian descent. It all reminded him of the old French Quarter in New Orleans. "A population fantastic, astonishing - a population of the Arabian Nights," he noted with delight.
Hearn worked painstakingly, noting the minutiae of the daily routines of the blanchusseuses, women who washed clothes in the euphonious river Roxelane, which flows through Saint-Pierre, just as he did with the porteuses or porter women who, with sublime grace, carried heavy loads on their heads from the port out into distant country destinations; he recorded the routines of the petits canotiers, canoe boys who dived for coins thrown by passengers arriving on visiting ships. He doggedly travelled throughout the pitons, mountains and mornes, past pious little Marian jungle shrines perched incongruously among the strange vegetation of giant plants and exotic tropical trees. He also heard stories of life on the sugar plantations of the days of slavery.
Hearn particularly revelled in the tales of zombies and quimboiseurs, which he gleaned from his neighbours. Echoing his "Period of the Gruesome" as a reporter in Cincinnati, he seemed to possess a desire to wilfully discomfit the comfortably-off readers of Harper's Magazine with occasional grotesque accounts of the island's creepy-crawly creatures, once lovingly detailing the putrefying effects of a bite from the deadly fer-de-lance viper.
Nature was at her most beautiful in the tropics, but also at her most dangerous, Hearn noted: "A paradise this is, but a paradise of fire." During a virulent smallpox epidemic that laid waste to hundreds of lives, Hearn chronicled the horrible, if swift, deaths of friends, acquaintances and strangers. His account of the Saint-Pierre Carnival that went ahead at the height of the plague is both sensitive and macabre.
Though only 5 feet 3 inches in height and having the sight of just one bulbous eye, Hearn's determined spirit was evident in his completion of the arduous climb of the 4,500ft Mont Pelée, the volcanic giant that looms over Saint-Pierre and dominates the landscape. Near the top, Hearn rested with a bathe in a crater named the Lake of the Three Palms. Looking down from the summit, he was overwhelmed by the panoramic view down towards Saint-Pierre and beyond. But he was also struck by melancholy: "For all this astonishment of beauty, all of this majesty of light and form and colour, will surely endure - marvellous as now - after we have lain down to sleep where no dreams come, and may never arise from the dust of our rest to look upon it."
Hearn compared the mountain's contours to an exquisitely printed Japanese fan, and went on: "The artist willing to devote a few weeks of travel and study to Pelée has not yet made his appearance in Martinique." He wasn't to know that by an extraordinary coincidence the French painter Pierre Gauguin lived for four months near Saint-Pierre while Hearn was actually there. Gauguin was there for the same reason as Hearn - the wild, exotic beauty of its landscapes and people. Gauguin completed a dozen works in Martinique and it is a nice irony that one of these, Tropical Vegetation, today adorns the cover of the latest edition of Hearn's Two Years in the French West Indies.
In 1889, Hearn departed Martinique, which he had "loved as if it were a human being". Within a year he was in Japan, a country whose ancient culture was exciting great interest in the West. Rafael Confiant has said that Hearn "spoke with a Martinique voice", exactly the authenticity Hearn said he hoped to achieve in Japan. (Hearn completed 14 books and made an international name for himself as an interpreter of Japan at a time when Japonaiserie was all the fashion in London and Paris and New York.)
Back in Martinique, from late February 1902, 13 years after Hearn left, fumaroles on Fire Mountain began emitting sulphuric gases that wafted down and whorled all around the streets of Saint-Pierre, fouling the air with the noxious pungency of rotten eggs. As the months wore on, there were successions of eruptions of steam and dust, sometimes accompanied by frightening roars and growling earth tremors.
Things got worse for Pierrotins as spring arrived with invasions of the city by yellow ants, large black centipedes and a host of other creatures, fleeing the boiling emissions. Not least among these invaders were the hundreds of fers-de-lances that seethed around the streets and homes of Saint-Pierre striking out at anything that moved, leaving 50 dead, mostly children.
Though some fled the gathering horror, the military forced them back. The majority stayed, having been advised to do so by the town's conservative white politicians who wished them to vote in an important election on May 11th. "Where better could you be than in Saint-Pierre?" asked Les Colonies newspaper in its final Saint-Pierre edition.
Mont Pelée gave its answer on May 8th, 1902, at 7.50 a.m, when two enormous clouds of volcanic material exploded from the side of the mountain, sending smoke and debris hissing down the side of the mountain in a "glowing avalanche" as it gained relentlessly on the port of Saint-Pierre. Within minutes, pyroclastic surges began engulfing the city.
In the harbour, sailors and passengers on board ships had at first cheered the "magnificent spectacle" as the volcano blew, but soon saw "glimpses of hell"; scenes of blind panic on the shore as spectral figures shrouded in ash fled through the suffocating maelstrom of boiling magma, frantically seeking shelter.
But there was none. Even the sea was boiling. Hundreds who sought sanctuary in the town's cathedral died in that hecatomb. In just under an hour all those in the city - up to 30,000 people - were annihilated.
All those in the city save three, that is. One of whom was Aguste Ciparis, aka Ludger Sylbaris, a prisoner in the dungeon of the city jail. Although badly burned, he survived. Within a year Ciparis was the star attraction, in the US, of Barnum and Bailey's freak show as "the evil survivor of the city of death".
On the other side of the world the next day, the professor of English literature at the prestigious Tokyo Imperial University, Lafcadio Hearn - or Koizumi Yukumo, as he was now known - was perusing the foreign shorts in his morning newspaper when a one-paragraph account of the fate of Saint-Pierre shattered his calm. All his friends and those he had written about so affectionately had died in the most appalling of circumstances. A forlorn Lafcadio Hearn recorded his anguish: "But all this was - and is not! Never again will the sun or moon shine upon the streets of that city; never will its ways be trodden again - except in dreams."
For long after the disaster, Saint-Pierre was deemed unsafe and for many, cursed. Fort-de-France became the island's principal town, but in time green shoots began to appear through the carpet of volcanic debris around Saint-Pierre and rebuilding began. Today, Saint-Pierre is a chic Caribbean port and Martinique is a full département of France where now you may buy goods with euro. The town's comeback is marked each year on the anniversary of the disaster with a jazz festival and a candlelit procession of remembrance from the cathedral.
And thanks to the delicate fretful art of that obsessive compulsive recorder, Patrick Lafcadio Hearn - the forgotten Irishman of letters - wherever Two Years in the French West Indies is read, the old city of Saint-Pierre will live again in the imagination, and that generation of Pierrotins who perished in that cruel spring of 1902 will be remembered.