Mount Pelée: The Prisoner Who Survived the Day a City Vanished
On the morning of May 8, 1902, Mount Pelée erupted and erased Saint-Pierre — the ‘Paris of the Caribbean’ — in under two minutes, killing some 30,000 people. Of that entire city, barely a handful lived. The most famous survivor was a convict locked in a stone cell too thick for the fire to reach. This is the story of the day a city died and the prisoner the dungeon saved.