The Last Volcano Read online

  To Joyce and Sarah,

  who taught me the important lessons of life

  CONTENTS

  PROLOGUE A CITY HAS PERISHED

  ONE THE BISHOP’S SON

  TWO YELLOWSTONE

  THREE THE CARIBBEAN

  FOUR CHAMPAGNE

  FIVE VESUVIUS

  SIX ALASKA

  SEVEN THE PACIFIC WORLD

  EIGHT INTO THE CAULDRON

  NINE A DREAM FULFILLED

  TEN A LOVE LOST

  ELEVEN THE SCHOOL TEACHER

  TWELVE THE LAVA LAKE

  THIRTEEN MAUNA LOA

  FOURTEEN THE GODDESS

  FIFTEEN THE LAST VOLCANO

  SIXTEEN A FORGOTTEN LEGACY

  POSTSCRIPT

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  SOURCES

  ILLUSTRATIONS

  INDEX

  NOTE TO THE READER

  I have dispensed with diacritical marks in most Hawaiian words. For example, I use “Hawaii” rather than “Hawai’i.” But when it was necessary to distinguish clearly which Hawaiian word I meant—or to aid the reader in pronunciation—I have used them. An important example is “Halema’uma’u,” which is the name of the large crater at the summit of Kilauea volcano.

  They yearn for what they fear.

  Dante, The Inferno

  The Last Volcano

  PROLOGUE

  A CITY HAS PERISHED

  In the spring of 1902, in the tranquil light of a tropical sunset, a ship, seemingly without purpose or crew, drifted into Castries harbor on the small Caribbean island of St. Lucia.

  The masts and rigging were smashed. The normally crisp white sheets and awnings were hanging loose, torn and burned. A rescue party was organized and several of St. Lucia’s leading citizens were rowed out in a large boat to investigate. One of the investigators was Charles Dennehy, the British colonial surgeon on St. Lucia.

  As Dennehy later told the story, as soon as he stood on deck, all sense of reality gave way. The entire ship was blanketed with a thick layer of fine gray ash. In places, the ash had formed into drifts. And beneath those drifts, as Dennehy and the others soon discovered, were the bodies of dead men.

  Four dead bodies were found on the afterdeck, five more forward. Each one was in a highly contorted state, arms and legs at odd angles, an indication that each man had died in great agony. The faces of the poor victims had all but disappeared, scorched away by intense heat. Only a few patches of flesh and hair still clung to the skulls, making the men unidentifiable.

  The body of one man was found intact, his position so natural that, at first, Dennehy thought the man must be asleep. He would later be identified as the chief engineer. He was found sitting in a chair next to the engine room, his head tilted to one side, his hands resting naturally on his lap.

  As Dennehy continued to search, he heard faint noises coming from below. He descended a ladder and entered a dark room. Inside were a dozen men, still alive. Some were lying on bunks. Others were leaning against walls. The head and clothes of each one were covered with the same fine ash that blanketed the ship. Most of the men were silent. A few gave out pitiful groans. As Dennehy began to examine the nearest man, another one rose and approached him, moving slowly, as Dennehy recalled, “as if suddenly struck by the feebleness of old age.”

  “You don’t know me?” the man asked.

  Dennehy studied the figure. The face was blackened and blistered. The arms and hands were bloodied and swollen to three times their normal size. The man repeated the question. This time Dennehy recognized the voice.

  “Captain Freeman, what has happened? Where have you come from?”

  “From the gates of hell,” he replied.

  Captain Edward Freeman, four years in command of the Roddam, a steamship that regularly carried cargo and passengers between London and the Caribbean, had left St. Lucia the previous night. He had sailed his ship through a raging storm, wishing several times he had never left. But Freeman was anxious to know what had happened on Martinique. Four days earlier, in Barbados, he heard that the volcano on Martinique, Mount Pelée, was erupting. Two days later, in St. Lucia, he was told that an earthquake beneath Martinique had severed an undersea cable, ending all communication with the island.

  By morning the weather had cleared and Martinique was in sight. Freeman could see the island’s main city, St. Pierre, stretched out for two miles along the coastline. Twenty-six thousand people lived in St. Pierre. Another 160,000 lived elsewhere on the small island. And behind the city loomed Mount Pelée, a plume of light gray ash rising from the summit.

  The eruption had started the previous month, the volcano spewing ash into the air. By May 8, the day the Roddam arrived, several inches of the powdery material had fallen over St. Pierre, giving the normally festive city an oppressive look.

  A dozen ships were in port. Each one was tied to a buoy and floating near shore. Freeman recognized the Grappler of the West Indian and Panama Telegraph Company where his brother-in-law served as third mate. The Grappler’s crew was already awake and setting out equipment, probably preparing to find and repair the severed undersea cable. Later, when asked why he had entered the port if a plume of ash was rising from the volcano, Freeman would answer that he had seen other ships. “An indication,” he explained, “that it was safe as they would know the situation better than I would.”

  He saw the harbormaster on shore signaling to him with flags to anchor at the south end of the city. He stopped the Roddam a few hundred yards from shore, then ordered the crew to secure the ship to a nearby buoy with an iron chain. From this close vantage point, he again studied the city. “How pretty and gay St. Pierre managed to look in spite of ash,” he would remember. “The Cathedral glistened in the morning sun. Then from the towers came the sounds of bells calling the faithful to morning Mass.”

  Freeman could see people hurrying between shops. Others were hanging colorful flags and banners between large buildings and across main streets. It was Ascension Day and the people of St. Pierre were preparing their city for a celebration. Normally, he would have ordered the cargo unloaded immediately, but, because it was a holiday, he decided he would let his crew rest and remain at St. Pierre one day.

  An hour after the Roddam arrived, the ship’s agent, a Mr. Plissoneau, came alongside in a small boat. He was climbing an outside ladder and preparing to board the Roddam when the volcano let loose.

  Freeman was on the bridge in the map room. He heard a muffled roar. He leaned out an open doorway and looked at the volcano. He could see a small black cloud begin to billow up from the summit, then spill down the side of the volcano and toward St. Pierre. As the cloud began slide, Freeman called down to the agent. “Come up here. You can see better.”

  In silence, the two men watched as the black cloud approached, holding close to the ground, Freeman describing it as “an awful thing—a fascinating thing.” The front of the cloud was crossed with short bursts of lightning. Occasionally, red glowing rocks were thrown out in front of it. Freeman felt no disturbance in the air. Only a faint rumble could be heard coming from the volcano.

  It took two minutes for the cloud to travel the four miles and reach St. Pierre. By then, the front was a mile wide and rose more than a thousand feet into the air. Freeman now realized it was racing at him at hurricane speed.

  “Take shelter!” he yelled as he jumped back into the map room, diving beneath a stack of empty sacks. Within seconds, the cloud hit the water. As it did, it caused the sea to well up and roll the Roddam far over, almost capsizing it. Then the cloud swept over the ship. The force was so great that the iron chain that held the ship to the buoy snapped. Now adrift, the Roddam was bobbing in a wild and turbulent sea. Then a shower of red-hot ash and cinders
began to fall, blocking all sunlight and engulfing the Roddam in darkness.

  Freeman was still in the map room. He could hear the desperate cries of men caught on deck and dying. “They were weird inhuman sounds,” he would remember, “like the crying of sea birds in distress.”

  The hot ash quickly penetrated his hiding place, the intense heat searing his body. “You can imagine what it was like,” he later told those who were anxious to hear his tale, “if you think of going to a blacksmith’s forge and take up handfuls of red-glowing dust and rub it over your hands and face.”

  Unable to endure the pain, and knowing he had to get his ship away fast, Freeman ran out on deck.

  Men were dying everywhere. Some were on fire and jumping overboard. Others were already dead; their bodies burned beyond recognition.

  The entire ship was in flames, ignited by the fall of hot ash. Within minutes, a foot of red incandescent material covered the deck. As Freeman hurried to see who might be saved, his feet slid into pockets of deep ash, burning away his boots. The pain was unbelievable; the suffocation was worse. With each desperate gasp, he gulped down another mass of hot ash, burning this throat and filling his lungs. All the while, he was thinking, “My god, how long is this going to take to kill me?”

  After several minutes, the air did begin to clear, and Freeman could again see St. Pierre. The city was a blazing inferno, the framework of stone buildings standing out like dark skeletons.

  The volcano was also visible. From the summit spurted a giant fountain, thousands of feet high, of red and orange cinders, the fountain slowly waving side to side. And above the fountain was a colossal tower of black smoke. It was a hellish spectacle that Freeman thought must resemble the Day of Judgment. It was also, as he would later admit, “strangely magnificent.”

  Unbelievable horrors were all around him. Freeman could see hundreds of people running wildly along the shoreline, flames clinging to them, the poor souls looking “like effigies which had been set alight.” Some headed to the sea. Freeman was close enough to hear the bodies sizzle when they entered the water.

  Fortunately, the ship’s engineer was in the engine room and still alive. Freeman ordered him to start the engines immediately. Freeman then tried to steer the Roddam away from shore, but the ship would not turn.

  For two hours, he and the few members of his crew still alive struggled to free the ship’s rudder of debris washed into the sea by the black cloud. Backward, then forward, they inched the ship until it was free. Then the Roddam, a floating furnace, headed for the open sea.

  Severely burned and barely able to speak, Freeman took the wheel. His hands were raw and bloody, and so he used his elbows to steer. A crew member stood next to him to wipe blood and sweat from his face.

  The Roddam passed close to the only other ship still afloat, the Roraima. Freeman could see a few people on the Roraima, itself a burning wreck, waving frantically at him, but it was in vain for there was nothing he could do. He watched as two men on the Roraima jumped overboard and tried to swim for the Roddam. He lost sight of them as they were pulled under by a muddy and agitated sea.

  Away from St. Pierre, the Roddam caught a current and drifted south. After eight hours, just before sundown, the ship entered the harbor at St. Lucia. Chief Surgeon Dennehy and other rescuers boarded the ship and took Freeman and the other survivors to a hospital.

  Later, Dennehy returned to the ship. He noticed a curious thing. Sometime soon after the Roddam had arrived at St. Pierre, someone had stacked cases of safety matches on deck, readying them for landing. Throughout the ordeal, the matches had failed to light, maintaining a reputation, as stated on each case, “to light only on the box.”

  The story of the Roddam and the heroic actions of its captain appeared in newspapers two days after the eruption. That was followed by a barrage of newspaper stories that told of other survivors and of the deaths of tens of thousands.

  In the United States, people responded with great interest—and with great generosity, contributing to relief funds. President Theodore Roosevelt ordered the Navy to prepare a ship to carry supplies to Martinique. Someone thought to invite a few scientists who might want to go and study what had happened. Surprisingly, not everyone was interested in going.

  Nathaniel Shaler of Harvard University, who in an interview for The New York Times was called “the country’s foremost authority on volcanoes,” said that the recent eruption of Mount Pelée had been tragic, but, from the standpoint of science, was of little interest. “A really important eruption,” said Shaler who was then dean of science at Harvard, “should be heard fully 2000 miles away.” He was, of course, referring to the recent eruption of Krakatoa in Indonesia.

  One of the largest volcanic explosions in history, on August 27, 1883, Krakatoa had sent out a series of audible shocks that were heard across southeastern Asia and northern Australia and far out into the Indian Ocean. The explosions also produced giant sea waves that swamped shorelines, drowning thousands of people. In fact, the explosion had been so violent and had thrown so much ash into the air that sunrises and sunsets around the world were turned a deep red for many months. By comparison, as Shaler pointed out, the 1902 explosion of Mount Pelée had been heard no farther than two hundred miles and had not produced any significant sea waves. And ash did not fall farther than a few hundred miles from the volcano.

  Furthermore, according to Shaler, the reports coming from the Caribbean were almost certainly exaggerated, a product of an unbridled press anxious to sensationalize any news story. The sudden and complete destruction of an entire city and the deaths of all of its inhabitants could not have been possible from such a small eruption.

  The distinguished Harvard professor did admit that one thing might be learned if a scientific team was sent to Martinique. The members of the team could examine the bodies that did exist and determine whether they had died by inhaling poisonous volcanic gas or by being suffocated by volcanic ash. But, other than that, there would be little for them to do. And, as Shaler told the interviewer, he was certainly not interested in going.

  Four scientists were found who were willing to join the relief ship, though they, too, on the eve of their departure, expressed concerns about the accuracy of the newspaper accounts and the scientific importance of the eruption. Then a fifth man appeared.

  He was Thomas Jaggar, an instructor of geology at Harvard. At first, he, too, had discounted the importance of the eruption, but, then, after reading of the ordeal of Captain Freeman, he decided to go.

  A week later, Jaggar was standing among the ruins of St. Pierre, shocked by what he saw. The newspaper reports had been devastatingly correct. The entire city had been swept away. And bodies were everywhere. Nothing like this had ever been reported. And it had happened in just a few minutes.

  When he returned to Harvard, he was decided: He would devote his life to a study of volcanoes because, as he told a colleague, “it was a missionary field for in it people were being killed.”

  And so began fifty years of travel to eruptions in Italy, Alaska, Japan, Central America and the Hawaiian Islands. In 1912 he gave up a comfortable life and secure job in Boston and started a small science station on the rim of Kilauea volcano on the island of Hawaii, drawn to Kilauea because of a rare lake of molten lava. Here he developed the techniques used today to predict eruptions: the collection of volcanic gases, the recording of earthquakes and the measurement of a slight rise or fall of the ground surface as molten lava moves inside a volcano. He also learned how to predict tsunamis and was the first person to warn of an approaching wave. He built the first practical amphibious vehicle and used it to explore volcanic islands, his design later adapted by the United States military during the Second World War for beach landing craft.

  All in all, he led a highly accomplished life, though one that is little known today. The obscurity comes from his decision to live the life of a scientific vagabond. It was a decision that ended his marriage and forced him to give up his ch
ildren. He lost the professional respect of his peers. He lived much of his life in near poverty. At one point, it seemed that he would be forced to abandon his work at Kilauea when he met a woman who changed everything.

  She was Isabel Maydwell, a widowed school teacher from California who had come to the Hawaiian Islands to restart her life. And she did—with Jaggar. Together they lived in a small house at the edge of a high cliff that looked toward the lava lake, sharing the work of the small science station started by him, she becoming an astute observer of volcanic activity.

  Jaggar’s decision to dedicate his life to solving the mystery of volcanoes—why they erupt and how they could be predicted and, possibly, controlled—was inspired by his experiences at St. Pierre. But a desire to confront the great forces of nature came much earlier. It began in the most prosaic of ways with a small boy growing up next to a large river, as far from the fiery parts of the planet as one can imagine.

  CHAPTER ONE

  THE BISHOP’S SON

  Rivers exert an almost mystical hold on the human psyche. Mark Twain used the Mississippi to great effect in Huckleberry Finn as a metaphor for free will. The flow of the Jordan River is thought by many to be a pathway to personal salvation. The Rubicon, a small river in northern Italy where Julius Caesar, then a Roman general, crossed with his army, thereby starting a war, is in the lexicon and means to pass a point of no return. Rare, indeed, is the person of a poetic mind who does not see a flowing river as a metaphor for the passage of time or an encounter with rapids as a reminder that life is filled with perils. But to a child a river is exactly what it seems: a place of endless fascination because it is forever changing.

  The river in the life of young Thomas Jaggar was the Ohio where it passes Cincinnati. Loons and coots were still common along the riverbanks. Botany and bird life became as important to his education as geography and history. But the lasting lesson of his childhood came from the river and was taught to him by his father, a bishop of the Episcopal Church and head of the Diocese of Southern Ohio, when young Jaggar was thirteen years old.