“I was eleven years old, I say these things at 45. My imagination had been strongly nourished with marvelous legends…” Demesvar Delorme.
Vendredi 7 mai 2021 ((rezonodwes.com))–« 1842 in Cape Town: earthquake“, a small book by Démesvar Delorme witnessing the sinister event, is above all a historical document. This is a testimony about a terrible natural disaster, an 8.1 earthquake triggering a tsunami, which killed almost half of the inhabitants of Cap-Haitien and destroyed almost half of the city, on May 7, 1842, at the start of the evening.
Cap-Haitien was destroyed in a few seconds as were almost all of the coastal towns of the Far North, including Port-de-Paix and Gonaives. The Sans-Souci Palace was not spared.
Today, the book is of considerable importance given the destruction and suffering caused by another earthquake in Haiti on January 12, 2010. ” 1842 in Cape Town ” has reappeared to remind us that those who do not pay attention to history are doomed to relive it once again.
Delorme’s book also contains other content that will interest us. In the final pages, Delorme talks about his own life, his education and his initiation into adulthood. These offer us important perspectives on one of the greatest Haitian thinkers of the 19th century.
7 mai 1842, Cap-Haitien.
The day had been warm, beautiful, dazzling with light: it was May 7, 1842. The sun had disappeared a few moments ago. But the luminous twilight of the Antilles had replaced it, softer, purer, more transparent than it, writes Demesvar Delorme, who was playing marbles with his brother and his friends. Suddenly, he says, “ a dull noise, a distant rumble is heard from the east«.
“The noise became frightening, I was lying on the ground, I was shaking with fear. The bells of the Cap-Haitien Cathedral ring out loudly, like a carillon,” explains Delorme in his book “ 1842, in Cape Town » which saw the colonial Church collapse, “ all this with a nameless noise“. The spectacle of May 7, 1842 was “terrible”. “The trumpet of the Angel was not lacking, nor the cries of distress nor the lamentations.”
My children, get to the mountain as quickly as possible, recommends the parish priest, Abbot Torribio, a Spanish priest, remembers Delorme describing the horrible scene at the end of the afternoon of May 7, 1842 in Cap-Haitien . “ The sea rose, entered the city, drowned the unfortunates whom the walls had spared“. The ground had hollowed out in many places and everyone felt with horror the imminence of a supreme shock which would open the abysses of the earth and swallow up the city with the rest of its inhabitants.
” We went. we went. Night was coming. More horror! we passed among corpses, over corpses, alongside the wounded who were screaming, dying in trances mixed with torture.”
To his anxieties which agitated so many unfortunate people, were joined by heartbreaking pain. Everyone cried, sobbed, screamed from morning to evening and from evening to morning. Everyone had lost relatives and friends in large numbers. On May 7, 1842, Demesvar Delorme tells us, these mourned their fathers, those their mothers. Several, the father and the mother at the same time. Not one, not even a single one of those who escaped the disaster had been spared, not a single one who did not carry in their hearts mourning, distress, affliction, deep pain, the cruel loss of a loved one.
searches: cba
searches: cba
