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Updated: May 1, 2025
No one on board had any idea of danger. Captain G. T. Muggah was on the bridge, and all hands got on deck to see the show. "The spectacle was magnificent. As we approached St. Pierre we could distinguish the rolling and leaping of the red flames that belched from the mountain in huge volumes and gushed high in to the sky. Enormous clouds of black smoke hung over the volcano.
I don't know why, but that last glimpse of poor Muggah on his bridge will stay with me just as long as I remember St. Pierre and that will be long enough. "In another instant it was all over for him. As I was looking at him he was all ablaze. He reeled and fell on the bridge with his face toward me. His mustache and eyebrows were gone in a jiffy.
He yelled to get up the anchor, but, before two fathoms were heaved in the Roraima was almost upset by the boiling whirlpool, and the fire wave had thrown her down on her beam ends to starboard. Captain Muggah was overcome by the flames. He fell unconscious from the bridge and toppled overboard. "The blast of fire from the volcano lasted only a few minutes.
I was at once swept seaward by a tidal wave, but, the sea receding a considerable distance, the return wave washed me against an upturned sloop to which I clung. I was joined by a man so dreadfully burned and disfigured as to be unrecognizable. Afterwards I found he was the captain of the Roraima, Captain Muggah. He was in dreadful agony, begging piteously to be put on board his ship.
"Captain Muggah went overboard, still clinging to the fragments of his wrecked bridge. Daniel Taylor, the ship's cooper, and a Kitts native jumped overboard to save him. Taylor managed to push the captain on to a hatch that had floated off from us and then they swam back to the ship for more assistance, but nothing could be done for the captain. Taylor wasn't sure he was alive.
She careened way over to port, and then the fire hurricane from the volcano smashed her, and over she went on the opposite side. The fire wave swept off the masts and smokestack as if they were cut with a knife. "Captain Muggah was the only one on deck not killed outright. He was caught by the fire wave and terribly burned.
"Ben" Benson, the carpenter of the Roraima, said: "I was on deck, amidships, when I heard an explosion. The captain ordered me to up anchor. I got to the windlass, but when the fire came I went into the forecastle and got my 'duds. When I came out I talked with Captain Muggah, Mr. Scott, the first officer and others. They had been on the bridge. The captain was horribly burned.
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