The Burned Prisoner of Saint-Pierre Joined a Travelling American Circus and Died in Panama in 1929

Louis-Auguste Cyparis had been arrested for an after-hours bar fight on 7 May 1902 and had been placed in the underground dungeon cell of the Saint-Pierre prison overnight pending his Monday-morning court appearance. The cell was windowless, had walls approximately one metre thick of dressed volcanic stone, and had a small ventilation slot in the heavy oak door. The architectural specification — substantively standard for French colonial prison construction of the period — saved his life the following morning when Mount Pelée’s pyroclastic surge destroyed Saint-Pierre in two minutes.

He spent four days in the cell before rescuers reached him. He had severe burns on his arms and back from superheated air that had reached him through the ventilation slot. He had no water and no food. He could hear nothing from the city above him.

He was 27 years old.

The Barnum recruitment

The substantial news of his rescue reached the international press through the substantial New York and Paris cable services within approximately two weeks of the eruption. The substantive American circus impresario James Anthony Bailey — co-proprietor of the Barnum & Bailey Circus, then the largest travelling entertainment in the United States — sent a substantial recruiting telegram to the French colonial administration at Fort-de-France in February 1903 asking whether Cyparis would be available for an American touring engagement. The French authorities had pardoned Cyparis of the original 1902 manslaughter conviction shortly after his rescue (Saint-Pierre was substantively destroyed, the original prosecutor and judge were both dead, and the extended family of the victim had no surviving witnesses).

Cyparis accepted. He sailed from Fort-de-France in March 1903, arrived in Tampa in early April, and was substantively presented to the American touring public as “the man who lived through doomsday” for the Barnum & Bailey 1903 season opening.

The tour

The Barnum touring set-up for Cyparis was approximately standard for the circus sideshow practice of the period. He was housed in a small reconstruction of his Saint-Pierre cell — substantively a wooden box approximately three metres on each side, with the heavy oak door and the small ventilation slot reproduced to specification. The cell was carried on a Barnum touring wagon. Cyparis sat in the cell during exhibition hours and spoke briefly to paying visitors (in French; a Barnum interpreter translated). His burns were substantive visible.

The Barnum touring schedule covered approximately the eastern and southern United States — cities of New England, the mid-Atlantic, the southern coast — at the rate of approximately one new city per week through the spring and summer touring seasons. Cyparis substantively continued with the Barnum operation for eight tour seasons, through to approximately 1911. The standard sideshow attractions of the period had a typical career length of approximately four to six years before audience interest substantively dropped off; Cyparis’s longer-than-average tenure was substantively a function of the continuing international attention to the Mount Pelée disaster.

After Barnum

The subsequent biographical record on Cyparis substantively thins after the 1911 end of his Barnum engagement. He was reported in the New York French-language press in 1912 working as a labourer on the Panama Canal construction (which was substantively in its peak years through 1911–1914 and was substantively absorbing migrant labour from Caribbean French- and English-speaking communities). The Cyparis surviving Panama records substantively indicate that he worked on the Gatun Locks construction crew through approximately 1914 and remained in Panama after the canal opening in August 1914.

He died at Colón in 1929, aged approximately 54. The cause was substantively unspecified in the surviving Panama French-consular death record. He was buried in the Mount Hope cemetery north of Colón. The grave is substantively unmarked; the cemetery records substantively give his name and approximate dates of birth and death.

The other survivor

The second survivor of the 1902 Saint-Pierre disaster, Léon Compère-Léandre — the shoemaker who had survived on the eastern edge of the destroyed city — remained on Martinique and substantively lived there for the remainder of his life. He substantively died at Fort-de-France in 1936, aged 64. He never toured with a circus and never substantively left Martinique. He gave a small number of substantive interviews to visiting French and American journalists through the subsequent decades and was the substantive subject of a 1932 Paris-Match feature on Mount Pelée survivors.

Cyparis is substantively the substantive better-known of the two only because of the substantive Barnum touring engagement.