TEE HURRICANE IN THE WEST INDIES.

Lyttelton Times, Volume C, Issue 11751, 1 December 1898, Page 6

TEE HURRICANE IN THE WEST INDIES.

—o AN APPALLING CALAMITY. ' » SOME OF THE DETAILS. A London contemporary says: —The hurricane appeal's first to have Barbados, where it raged during the night between Sept. 10 and 11. It reached St Vincent on the morning of Sept. 11, and there seems to have exerted its utmost violence. St Lucia is also reported to have suffered severely, and, though much damage was wrought in other of the Windward Islands as far north as Guadeloupe, the main stress of the disaster would seem to have fallen on Barbados, St Vincent and St Lucia. It is stated that in Barbados the velocity of the wind reached seventy-jive miles an hour, equal to 291 bto the square inch. In St Vincent, according to Mr Harry Thompson, the Administrator, there is not a single estate works or house which has escaped injury. and with rare exceptions they are either unroofed or a mass of ruins/. The whole island, says the captain of H.M.S. Intrepid, has the appearance of having had a 1 fire running through it. To understand .all /■- THE HUMAN TERROR AND TRAGEDY '

of the catastrophe we must turn to the heartrending narrative sent to her father (Mr Bo&worth Smith) by. the wife of the Administrator of St Vincent,, and published by the “Times.” It is believed that at least two hundred poor people have lost their lives. “Hundreds of poor souls,” visited by Mrs Thompson as soon as the storm had abated, “have escaped with their lives only in most cases, with only the'wet rags they are wearing. There are many of them cut and mangled as if by shells. It is like an awful battlefield, the houses all unroofed, all the trees unlimbecl or down. One poor old soul I met crying in the road, her husband buried under one house, her son under an?other. One woman, a Mrs Robinson we knew, had

HER HEAD CUT CLEAN' OFF, nnd it was not found till the next day. Oh! it is ghastly, ghastly! " The destitution to come is even more appalling than the immediate devastation wrought. “We have,” says the Administrator, “ a starving population to provide for,” and there are no indigenous resources available, nor is there any prospect of work. “It is impassible to state with any .accuracy the number of destitute people, but there must be at least 20,000 people without means of subsistence and shelterless.” Such is the. official estimate; but Mrs Thompson says, “Here we. have 1 0.000 poor souls who have lost their all, ; nd

THF. PLACE WAS BAN’ERUPT BEFORE.” lore than a year ago the Royal Comhns- ■ who visited St Vincent in February. A : -7. concluded their report on the island ;v saving': “ We. desire to draw special attention to the very critical position of affairs

in St Vincent, where a population, which is not possessed of'property in any form,’and ha.s no land on which it can labour, is threatened with the almost complete loss of the scanty amount of intermittent employment on very low wages which it at present manages with difficulty to secure.”