In Jean Rhys’ short story “Heat”-which tells of her young protagonist’s trauma at the news of the eruption of the Mont Pelée volcano in Martinique in 1902-the narrator visits the tomb of her little sister in Roseau’s cemetery and is enthralled by a recently erected grave to the memory of a young man who had died at the Boiling lake. Rhys’ own “little sister” is buried in the Anglican cemetery of Roseau, near the grave of young Wilfrid Mesey Clive. The headstone reads: -”Sacred to the memory of Clive ______, who lost his life at the boiling lake in Dominica in an heroic attempt to save his guide.” The young Englishman, a cousin to the Earl of Denbigh, and a descendant of Clive of India, had died of asphyxiation by lethal gases during a visit to the Boiling Lake in 1901, some months before the Mont Pelée eruption.
Rhys’s streamlined version of the story speaks of Clive having gone exploring to the Lake with two guides, one of whom, walking a bit ahead of the others, had staggered and fell. Clive, ruching to his aid, was also overcome by fumes. His death and funeral had rocked Dominica’s placid colonial society not quite a year before the Martinican eruption. It had been the first recorded death of a European visitor to the Lake-which in itself was enough to generate broad interest among the members of the island’s small British colonial enclave. Young Clive, however, had been a welcome addition to local dinner parties and picnics, and his popularity had been high when news of his unexpected death had reached Roseau, which added poignancy to an already sad story.
At the end of a long day exploring Roseau, some of us set out to look for Clive’s grave-aided by instructions from Dominican historian Lennox Honychurch. We were seeking additional evidence to confirm the autobiographical nture of “Heat.” For many of the students the search was the first time they had considered a graveyard as a space for research. We found many graves of interest-among them that of Rhys’ father and of fellow writer Phyllis Allfrey. But we looked for Clive’s grave in vain.
