Ludger Sylbaris: The Prisoner Who Survived The Mount Pelée Eruption

On the morning of 8 May 1902, a Caribbean city of roughly 28,000 people was wiped off the map in under three minutes. The eruption of Mount Pelée remains the deadliest volcanic disaster of the twentieth century, and by most tallies only two or three people inside the city survived it directly. One of them owed his life entirely to a drunken brawl. A local troublemaker named Ludger Sylbaris had been thrown into a windowless stone cell the night before, as punishment for a fight. The same walls...