Thursday morning we had to leave and start heading North. We had to say our goodbyes to some very dear French and Swiss friends on “Jambalaya” and “Yapuka”. We have sailed around much of the world with them…Rome, Tunisia, Greece, and now we had met up again on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean…in Martinique. It is amazing how you keep bumping into certain friends as though you are meant to be together 
So we headed North on Martinique to Sainte Pierre. It is a small anchorage because there is an underwater wall that drops from 20 feet (a good anchoring depth) to around 100 feet (not so good). When founded in 1635, this town was known as the “Paris of the Caribbean”. That is far from its image today. This town was hit by a hurricane in 1780 that killed 9,000 persons. This same town lost 30,000 people to the Mount Pelee Eruption on May 8, 1902. It took less than 3 minutes to cover the city in ash and lava. It was a bit creepy as we were trying to anchor noticing the buoys marking the 9 submerged ship wrecks that were anchored in the bay that day.
We walked the beach for a bit (finding a lot of sea-glass) before heading more into town to explore. We found ruins of a market and a theater from the cities hey day. Behind the theater is the prison cell that held the only survivor of the 1902 eruption…being put in the cell the night before for drunkenness. Outside the theater ruins is a statue which to me symbolizes the agony that the people were going through that day.
No comments:
Post a Comment