Grumblings from an ashen island: while residents of Montserrat stoically endure the explosion of a volcano, they are restless over political eruptions that hinder crisis management.

• Author: Lennard, Jeremy

While residents of Montserrat stoically endure the explosions a volcano, they are restless over political eruptions that hinder crisis management

Back in early August an uncanny silence fell over the tiny Caribbean island of Montserrat. Birds stopped singing, dogs ceased barking, and the incessant chirping of insects died away. The silence on this British dependent territory was filled by a deep and ominous rumble.

Within seconds the rumble became a thunderous roar--something akin to a Boeing 747 hauling itself into the air--and the Soufriere Hills Volcano belched a plume of steam and ash tens of thousands of feet into the azure sky. As the mushroom cloud dispersed, the sun was blotted out for fifteen minutes, and ash and pumice pebbles up to an inch in diameter rained down on two-thirds of the forty-square-mile island. Locals watched the destructive beauty of the eruption with cardboard boxes over their heads to protect themselves from the abrasive deluge. "It is a privilege to witness this," said Alfonsus "Arrow" Cassell, Montserrat's leading calypso musician. "A vicious and deadly privilege."

The volcano awoke for the first time in four centuries back in July 1995. It has been erupting sporadically ever since, forcing thousands to abandon their homes. Montserrat's population has dropped from twelve thousand to five thousand in the past two years, but it was not until the past summer that the mountain claimed its first lives. On June 25 Soufriere sent rivers of super-heated gas, rock, and ash--called pyroclastic flows--tearing down its slopes at over a hundred miles an hour. Material heated to 900 degrees Fahrenheit filled farm valleys, leaving ten people dead and another nine missing, believed buried under volcanic debris.

The eruptions at the beginning of August laid waste to the capital, Plymouth, a once-bustling town of five thousand people where reconstruction had only recently been completed after Hurricane Hugo destroyed or damaged much of the island's infrastructure in 1989. Pyroclastic flows deposited rocks the size of small trucks on the outskirts of the town and buried the center under feet of ash. "I doubt Plymouth will be inhabitable for generations," said then-police commissioner Francis Hooper.

"The luck of the Irish," quips Evette Bramble, referring to Montserrat's original colonists. Following Protestant-Catholic tension on the neighboring island of St. Kitts in the early seventeenth century, governor Sir Frank Warren sent the Irish population to colonize Montserrat for the British. They were joined by others exiled by Cromwell's Catholic purges, and soon after, the first African slaves arrived in 1650 to work on the island's cotton, tobacco, and sugarcane plantations. A curious mix of Afro-Irish culture resulted. St. Patrick's Day was chosen by slaves as the date for their rebellion in 1768, and March 17 is still a public holiday on the island. The shamrock is featured on Montserrat's immigration stamp, the phone book is full of Galloways, Cadogans, and O'Briens, and the heel n' toe--an Irish jig--is still danced incongruously to calypso and soca rhythms.

Music has played a prominent role in Montserrat's late twentieth-century history too. The previously untouched island loosened up its real estate laws during the 1960s, selling off land and property to wealthy outsiders. Exclusive retirement...