First, let me welcome you to this initial installment of my brand new blog site. In the future I will be covering a wide range of topics, but the underlying purposes will always be to entertain, inform, stimulate thinking, and most importantly, to hopefully bring everyone somehow closer to the living God. Your participation will be encouraged, as your thoughts quite possibly might also accomplish the same results for others.

Today we will be looking at what may be one of the most incredible events of modern time. I promise that you will be totally amazed, so much so that you will probably never forget this reading. One of the most startling things to me about this story, and there are many, is that although it occurred only about a hundred years ago, and was front page news around the world for months, very few of our generation even know about it. Ponder what could be the reason for this as you read it. That in itself may cause you to shudder.

In my book, Unlocking God’s Secrets, we looked at many exciting “shadows” of things to come that were orchestrated by God in actual historical events. (Learn more by clicking “Home” to the left.) The question for today is whether or not God stopped orchestrating events to show similar shadows, or is He still doing the same thing in modern times. I will not give you my thoughts, although you probably know them already, but I will relate a phenomenal bit of history that will shock you, and then leave it up to you, the reader, to ponder, comment, and discuss.

Please know that I have spent many hours researching what I am about to share with you, to the point of going over such things as old newspaper accounts of the events, and I will tell you that as astonishing as parts of this story may sound, everything I will write did in fact happen. This initial blog report will be longer than most articles to follow, but it will be well worth the reading. I hope you are seated firmly, because you are about to be blown away.

Our story begins on the beautiful Caribbean island of Martinique in 1902. Although traditional Catholic and Protestant churches had been a part of that French island’s culture for many years, what few Christian believers remained had become quite apathetic towards the majority view, which held that the Christian religion was out of date. The dwindling population of believers could be described as luke warm at best. Most of the citizens either did not believe in God at all, or if they did believe He existed, He had just become an object for ridicule and mockery.

There was, however, a small group of new believers who were on fire for God. They had come to their beliefs under the teaching and evangelism of an itinerant missionary from Barbados named John H. Hartman. Several times a year Rev. Hartman would travel from island to island on a small inter-island steamer to visit his various congregations in the Caribbean, including the little church that he had planted on the island of Martinique. This year, though, was different.

In a journal written by Dr. V. Raymond Edman, former missionary to Ecuador, who was for many years the beloved and highly respected president of  Wheaton College, we can read Rev. Hartman’s own words: “Only once did (my wife) Mrs. Hartman ever ask me not to go on one of those trips.  Many a time she was ill with some tropical fever, to be sure; but only on one occasion did she beg me not to go as I had planned.  I explained to her that I had no alternative but to go.  The steamer went only once a month.  The previous month I had sent letters to each congregation along the way to inform them that on the boat’s next trip I would come for some services.  The steamer remained in a given harbor for a day or two, sometimes more.  Each local congregation knew approximately the day of arrival and would send word about my coming to the members and friends scattered in the towns, villages and plantations.  In those days we had no wireless or radio service, and, of course, no air mail.  I had to go, or else disappoint every congregation throughout the islands.”

But on this one occasion, Mrs. Hartman expressed great apprehension for him.  Though she was seldom discouraged, worried, or blue, she had a foreboding about this trip, scheduled for early May, 1902, and she felt that if he started out he would never return.  It was such a strong impression, that Rev. Hartman reluctantly agreed to stay in Barbados.

Back on the island of Martinique, things had progressively gotten uglier. Rev. Hartman later related further to Dr. Edman: “With this mounting wickedness and depravity, there came increasingly violent persecution of the believers.  They were subject to physical harm and imprisonment as well as insolence and insults from their fellow citizens, filled with strong drink and heady with sordid pleasures.  Finally the persecution grew so intense that the Christians felt they could no longer remain in the city.  As a result they gathered together what few belongings they could take with them and went as a group from St. Pierre.  They obeyed literally the words of the Savior, ‘When ye depart out of that house or city, shake off the dust of your feet…  When they persecute you in this city, flee ye into another’ (Matthew 10:14, 23).”

The anti God feelings on Martinique seemed to be played out even  more forcefully during the Christian holiday seasons, and 1902’s season of Lent and Easter saw the depravity hit new lows. The things that happened made some of the shameful things we might see today at Mardi Gras seem tame in comparison.

In fact, we read from Days and Nights in the Tropics, by Dean Harris, which was published 1905, “in parody of the Christ’s journey from Pilate’s house to Calvary, with a rope around its neck they dragged a living pig outside the city. Here they nailed it to a cross, lifted it on high, and with shouts and curses, apostrophized it. They hailed it as Jesus Christ, crowned its wretched head with thorns, pierced its side and put a board above it with the inscription ‘J.C., King of the Christians,’ and yelling and dancing like fiends, carried it through the streets.

Then, at about the same hour, another procession of human devils, ascended the mountain behind the city, uprooted a great crucifix that had stood there for many years, and amid obscene rites and blasphemous songs, cast the sacred figure into the crater, their leader yelling as it sank out of sight, ‘Go where Thou deservest to go, into Thine own hell.”

At the same time that these atrocities were occurring, there were two missionaries in Canada who felt a strong pull to go to Martinique as two witnesses of the Gospel. They boarded a ship and headed for the Caribbean. When their ship reached its destination, the immigration officer naturally asked them what their plans were on the island. When told that they planned to preach about Jesus, he refused their entry, making them remain on board the ship until it left the harbor. Martinique had no desire to hear the Gospel.

Early in the morning of May 8, 1902, the Canadian missionaries’ ship pulled out of the harbor. As it was leaving, the steamship that should have been carrying Rev. Hartman came into port.

It was the Day of Ascension, the day of celebration held annually forty days after Easter Sunday to commemorate the ascension of Christ into heaven. What new ideas the blasphemous citizenry had for that afternoon to try to top their earlier activities during Easter we can not know. What we do know is reported to us by the people on a cable repair ship that had the city in direct view.

At exactly 7:52 that morning of the Day of Ascension, the mountain behind the city violently split in half and a dense black cloud shot out horizontally. A second black cloud rolled upwards, forming a gigantic mushroom cloud, completely darkening the sky for a fifty mile radius. The initial speed of both clouds was later calculated to be over 420 miles per hour.

According to Wikipedia: “The horizontal cloud hugged the ground and sped down towards the city of Saint-Pierre, appearing black and heavy, glowing hot from the inside. It consisted of superheated steam and volcanic gases and dust, with temperatures exceeding 1075 °C. In under a minute it reached and covered the entire city, instantly igniting everything flammable it came in contact with.

A rush of wind followed, this time towards the mountain. Then came a half-hour downpour of muddy rain mixed with ashes. For the next several hours, all communication with the city was severed. Nobody knew what was happening, nor who had authority over the island, as the governor was unreachable and his status unknown.

One eyewitness said “the mountain was blown to pieces, there was no warning”, while another said “it was like a giant oil refinery”. One person even went as far to say that “the town vanished before our eyes.” A warship approached the shore at about 12:30, but the intense heat prevented it from landing until about 3 PM. The city burned for several more days.”

The two missionaries from Canada who were turned away witnessed the unbelievable sight from miles away. The steamship Rev. Hartman was suppose to be on was totally destroyed, as was every other ship in the harbor. Only one resident in the city survived to tell the tale. The rest of the population of over 30,000 people perished, incinerated in the first few seconds, as was virtually all of the animal and bird life. The sea literally boiled for miles out from the island. The lone survivor in the city was a murderer who had been in a dungeon like jail cell under the ground. The air in his underground chamber literally roasted his skin, but he lived to relate his story.

The small Christian church watched the devastation from their new home. The ship carrying the two Canadian Christian witnesses was burning from stem to stern when it reached the next island of St. Lucia; however, the two missionaries were not injured. Fire fell from the eruption down on neighboring islands as far as 125 miles away, from the volcano that was Mt. Pelee, the mountain where the large crucifix had been tossed in six weeks earlier, with the heinous shout, “Go where Thou deservest to go, into Thine own hell.”

The editor of The Dominica Guardian, on May 28, 1902. wrote,  “The profanities on last Good Friday at St. Pierre were but the repetitions of similar profanities and sacrilegiousness of which we know too much. But an outraged Divinity having hushed up the actors forever we will say no more about them.”

Rev. John H. Hartman and his small congregation of believers were reunited, and Martinique is today the lush paradise it was intended to be.

The questions to ponder, dear blog reader, are these: Does God still orchestrate events in the modern day as He did in Biblical days? And if so, does He do it in such a way as to insert shadows of future events as a form of prophecy for modern mankind to learn from? If so, what shadows could be in this, one of the most incredible stories of all time? And since we know that “shadows” in the Bible usually depict events, and a Biblical “type” normally depicts a divine or mortal person, could God have included any “types” in this modern day event?

In my research I was astounded to find that, as far as I know, no other person has ever looked at the events of the Mt. Pelee Ascension Day eruption in this light. Interestingly, you and I may be the first people on earth ever to do so.

I am only the reporter. It is now up to you to ponder, digest, comment, or discuss the thoughts that may be running through your mind.

Yours in Christ eternally,  Bob Morley

This entry was posted on Monday, February 2nd, 2009 at 2:09 pm and is filed under Shadows.