Northern Martinique

There is something strangely satisfying to be at anchor in a requisitioned French boat in the shelter of an active and historic French naval base. We stayed below the fort at Fort de France and were joined by boats of many nations, including a tiny home-built Polish sloop, barely long enough to lie in, that the constructor had just sailed single handed across the Atlantic in. He told us he had taken 33 days from Santa Maria and now intended to give the vessel to a Martinique family before flying home to Poland.

Tiny Polish sloop at Fort de France

We sailed up the Martinique coast to St. Pierre. This was the former commercial capital of Martinique but has a sad history. Firstly, it is where Europeans wiped out the last of the native Carib people in 1658. They say that the last ones uttered curses before they died, invoking the volcano to take their revenge. This it actually did in 1902 when Mount Pelée erupted. After many minor mudslides and small eruptions, the entire side of the volcano burst open, releasing superheated gas over the city with energy 40 times the energy of the atomic bomb at Hiroshima. 30,000 people died and even ships at anchor sank in the harbour. Of only three survivors, one, a prisoner, only escaped with minor burns as he had been imprisoned in tomb-like solitary confinement.

Photo of St. Pierre after one of the 'minor' eruptions

St. Pierre after the devastation that killed 30,000 occupants

St. Pierre is a wonderful anchorage, away from the charter fleets and inhabited by a couple of dive boats, some fishermen and some rather tatty cruising boats. We felt right at home. It used to be “the Paris of the Caribbean” before the eruption, but now is a quiet large village with small amenities and a few street dwellers. The Chamber of Commerce has been rebuilt to the original plan to show the town’s former glory, but most of the other houses are of mixed appearance.

St. Pierre today

By morning, the clear water was glassy calm and we could see our own anchor on the bottom. There are several well marked wrecks to dive in 10m to 60m of water. Most were wooden vessels that burned in the disaster, but the deepest is a large steel ship which sank due to her cargo of potassium catching fire. All ships were lost with all hands and divers still find human bones in the wreckage.