Mount Pelée: The Prisoner Who Survived

On the morning of May 8, 1902, a volcano called Mount Pelée killed about 30,000 people in the city of Saint-Pierre. It took minutes. One man, locked in a dungeon cell, lived. His name was Ludger Sylbaris, and his story answers two questions. Why was a whole city still standing in the path of a mountain that had been warning it openly? And how did one prisoner come out alive? The first answer begins with an election. An election was due on May 11, and the governor, Louis Mouttet, resisted any evacuation. A commission he had appointed declared the city safe. Later accounts claimed he also posted troops to turn back people trying to leave, but historians have found no good evidence of that. Farmers from the countryside, hearing the city was safe, kept walking in, until the population stood at 30,000.