The Foreign Service Journal, May 2020

54 MAY 2020 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL salary at all. It was so clearly to his advantage that I did not see the necessity of refer- ring the matter to you.” Senator Lodge’s con- cerns over the hardship caused Mr. Prentis were eventually assuaged when Hay agreed to cover the consul’s travel expenses from Batavia to Martinique. And thus a bureaucratic snafu changed the destiny of our star-crossed consul, placing him in the path of volcanic destruction. Disaster Strikes Martinique had been one of the first places where the young United States established a consular presence. On June 4, 1790, President George Washington named Fulwar Skipwith as consul to the island. More than a century later, at the time of Prentis’ appointment, the French island was still an important commercial hub in the Caribbean, and the city of St. Pierre was considered “the Paris of the Antilles.” Ernest Zebrowski, who wrote one of the definitive accounts of the Martinique disaster in his book, The Last Days of St. Pierre: The Volcanic Disaster That Claimed Thirty Thousand Lives (Rutgers University Press, 2002), describes the city as the “gem of the West Indies” and discusses the significant American financial interest in the various commercial enterprises in the city, which included, of course, rum and sugar. (The United States closed its consulate in Martinique in 1993, establishing instead a consular agency whose consular agent reports to Bridgetown, Barbados.) In the weeks preceding the ultimate cataclysmic eruption, Mt. Pelée had issued warning signs. Why didn’t the Prentis family depart when they could? They surely were aware that the volcano posed a danger. On May 3, Mrs. Prentis wrote again to her sister, describing the smell of sulphur in the air, the fire and lava emitting from the volcano. “Everybody is afraid,” she wrote, but later on in the letter reveals that her husband assured her there was no immediate danger and that a ship was in the har- bor that could whisk them to safety should the situa- tion deteriorate further. It is probable that Prentis thought they would have time in such a scenario because, like others, he was unfamiliar with the rapid, devastating effects of a pyroclastic surge. In another excellent book about the tragedy, La Catastrophe: The Eruption of Mount Pelée, the Worst Volcanic Disaster of the 20th Century (Oxford University Press, 2002), Alwyn Scarth reveals how the population of St. Pierre had a vague memory of previous “puny eruptions” that had resulted in minimal damage. These eruptions, writes Scarth, “induced a false sense of security in the minds of the people of Martinique.” According to contemporary newspaper reports, the United States dispatched two ships, the cruiser Cincinnati and the naval tug Potomac , to assist with relief efforts. And on May 20, 1902, crews from the two U.S. warships along with personnel from the British cruiser Indefatigable , came ashore to recover the remains of Prentis, which had been discovered in the ruins of the U.S. con- sulate. Unfortunately, the remains of his wife and daughters were not found, or were so badly burned as to be beyond recognition. Bearing silver coffins, the crews also were in search of the body of James Japp, the British consul. Ernest Zebrowski Jr. offers a vivid account of the rescue mis- sion, which was conducted as Mt. Pelée continued to belch out smoke and ash to such an extent that it imperiled the brave The ruins of the U.S. consulate following the 1902 eruption. COMPLETESTORYOFTHEMARTINIQUEANDST.VINCENTHORRORS, 1902 Mr. Prentis’ posting to Martinique was borne out of a bureaucratic muddle within the context of the old patronage system that governed consular appointments.