Jasper County Democrat, Volume 5, Number 6, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 17 May 1902 — HAS AN ACTIVE HISTORY, [ARTICLE]

HAS AN ACTIVE HISTORY,

Martinique Under Various Domlna tiona in Past Two Centuries. Martinique has had more vicissitudes of ownership than any one spot of land in the West Indies. During the great wars of the lust century between England and France it was four times taken by the English, being seized in 1702, 1781. 1794 and 1809, and finally restored by the treaty of 1814, only after the most urgent representations on the part of the French that not for commercial nor military purposes, but solely for a sentimental consideration, the island should be returned; that the French people desired above all things to own the little island which had given them their beloved empress. England yielded the point with diplomatic courtesy, and since 1814 the tricolor has- floated over Martinique. Like St. Helena, it is far from the beaten routes of tourist travel; like Elba and the lonely rock on which Napoleon Bonaparte died, it would not be known at all save from the fact of having been made famous by a historic character, who attracted the attention of the civilized world, and after death was the object of lavish sympathy and is still the idol of a nation.

A FERMENT OF TERROR. Inhabitants of the Whole West Indian Group Terror-Stricken. The whole of the West Indies is in a ferment of terror. The inhabitants have given way to insensate panic, fearing eruptions of many of the volcanoes which have been supposed to be extinct. The crater of Mont Pelee, in Martinique, had been extinct for fifty years, and the people in adjoining islands believe that if the Martinique volcano became active all the others will also. Grief and terror have seized the people where earthquakes have begun. Deaths in fifty families, as a result of earthquakes, have already occurred at St. Thomas.