Montserrat, an island in the West Indies’ Lesser Antilles, has long been known as “the Emerald Isle of the Caribbean,” but it has also been labeled “the Pompeii of the Caribbean” since 1995.
For a while, the island was a British colony. It covers around 39 square miles and is presently home to approximately 5,000 people. It was not always owned by the British. Christopher Columbus visited the island in 1493 and gave it the name “Santa Maria de Montserrat,” after the Virgin of Montserrat at the convent on the island. Archaeologists investigating the region believe that the “Tainos,” the oldest known Montserratians, lived in tiny coastal communities on the island between 500 BC and 500 AD. In the 1640s, the Irish moved there and asked the French to seize it, which they did. Soon after, the English defeated the French, and the Treaty of Breda was signed, legally establishing Montserrat as a Crown territory in 1667.
Africans were brought in and sold as slaves as the economy flourished owing to the production of rum, sugar, and sea island cotton on its plantations—a painfully prevalent practice in the Caribbean.
In addition, Irishmen were brought to the island as indentured slaves, and some arrived as exiles after Oliver Cromwell’s rise to power in Ireland in 1649. The Emerald Isle got its name due of the large number of Irish immigrants.
In 1712, George Wyke and Edward Parson, with 400 men, defended the island against 3,500 Frenchmen as the population fled to the hills at Runaway Ghaut.
Slaves organized an insurrection on St. Patrick’s Day in 1768, hoping to catch their owners off guard as they celebrated the occasion. Their plots were discovered, the uprising was put down, and nine slaves were executed.
Olaudah Equiano, a slave of Philadelphia’s Robert King, worked as a sailor and merchant from the Caribbean to North America. Equiano came to England in 1766 after saving enough money to buy his freedom, and his book The Interesting Narrative aided the abolitionist movement. The narrative made the British public aware of the evils of slavery in the same way that Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin did in the United States. When emancipation was announced in 1834, the island’s 6,401 slaves were freed. Apprenticeships replaced slave labor, but landowners continued to exploit employees and pay them very little, resulting in the abolition of apprenticeships in 1838.
Monserrat is one of Britain’s 14 overseas territories. Sir George Martin, the Beatles’ manager, established a state-of-the-art recording facility called AIR Studios Montserrat there in 1979, and it was a favorite of many prominent rock performers, including the Police, Sir Paul McCartney, Sir Elton John, and Eric Clapton. When Hurricane Hugo slammed the island in 1989, it destroyed the studio.
After being dormant for hundreds of years, Montserrat’s Soufrière Hills volcano erupted in July 1995, destroying Plymouth, the island’s capital. The southern section of the island was buried under 39 feet of muck and ash. The region was evacuated, and police clearance is still required before entering the exclusion zone where the volcanic activity occurred.
A pyroclastic flow erupted out of Mosquito Ghaut and flowed down on June 25, 1997, killing 19 people who had not left the Streatham village area. For numerous years, the volcano discharged ash into the exclusion zone in the south, occasionally spreading the ash onto the island’s northern and western regions. The most recent activity at the Soufrière Hills volcano occurred between November 2009 and February 2010, when ash erupted and an explosion generated pyroclastic flows down the mountain’s slopes.
The Montserrat Volcano Observatory monitors the volcano’s activity and is available to the public for a modest price. Visitors can view a brief documentary on the eruption and its aftermath. The Observatory’s balcony offers views of the volcano and the Plymouth ruins.