A quiz question · medium
Mount Pelée's eruption destroyed the Martiniquan capital of Saint-Pierre in two minutes on 8 May 1902, killing about 28,000 people. How many of the city's inhabitants survived?
Two confirmed survivors. **Louis-Auguste Cyparis** was a young black labourer in the city dungeon awaiting trial for assault; the thick stone walls of his underground cell shielded him from the worst of the pyroclastic flow. He survived for four days with severe burns before rescuers reached him. **Léon Compère-Léandre** was a shoemaker whose house sat on the extreme eastern edge of the city, at the limit of the surge's lethal range. Cyparis later joined Barnum & Bailey's Circus as a sideshow attraction; he died in the United States in 1929. Compère-Léandre stayed on Martinique and died there in 1936.
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Two Minutes, Two Survivors On 8 May 1902 a volcano on Martinique destroyed a city of thirty thousand. Two men lived to tell about it. One was in a dungeon.
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