The Last Volcano Read online

  Nearly two years passed. Perret was in Naples when the first explosion of Vesuvius happened on May 27, 1905. He heard “a heavy detonation,” then watched, as he remembered it, as “the long imprisoned lava burst forth in a cloud of steam and descended the mountain in splendid rivers of lava.”

  Sensing an opportunity, the next day he traveled up the road to the observatory and introduced himself to the director, Raffaele Matteucci.

  Matteucci was known for his devotion to the volcano. Probably no one had ever been so enamored of Vesuvius and its eruptions. “I love the mountain,” he was once quoted as saying. “She and I dwell together in solitude mysterious and terrible.” Vesuvius, he freely admitted, was his mistress “whose wrath is more terrible than an army with banners.” He vowed never to leave her. “I am wedded to her forever; my few friends say that her breath will scorch and wither my poor life one of these days.” In fact, he had already been seriously injured. In 1900, while standing along at the edge of the summit crater taking photographs, a minor explosion rained hot rocks on him. He started to run, then stopped and turned to watch the action, in his words, courting “fate worse than that of Lot’s wife.” Falling rocks hit him, bruising his face and breaking his right leg. Somehow he managed to crawl down the mountain back to the observatory. He spent months recovering in a hospital, then returned and resumed his affair with the volcano.

  After Perret introduced himself, Matteucci asked the American about his intentions. Perret answered that he knew how to build sensitive instruments that would record the activity happening unseen inside the volcano. He assured Matteucci that his intentions were noble ones. He wanted to understand volcanoes and be able to send out warnings to protect others. And Perret said he was willing to work for free. Matteucci accepted him, creating a new post for him, “Honorary Assistant to the Royal Observatory.”

  Perret moved into a room at the small hotel across the road from the observatory. It was sparsely furnished with two chairs, a table and an iron-framed bed. The legs of the bed had been embedded in concrete so that the bed would not slide across the floor during an earthquake.

  Early one morning, almost a year after he moved into the room, Perret woke up and heard a low buzzing sound. He rose from his bed and leaned out an open window. All was quiet. He lay down again and the buzzing returned. After a brief investigation, he discovered the noise was coming up through his pillow. Using a technique he had learned from Edison, who, because he had lost most of his hearing, often clenched his teeth on a water pipe to determine whether his early phonographs were working properly, Perret got up and set his upper teeth against the iron bed frame. He felt a slight vibration. That morning he told Matteucci and suggested it meant an explosion would happen soon. Matteucci scoffed at the suggestion, answering back, “All you heard was the cook grinding coffee downstairs.” A week later, Vesuvius did explode, the falling debris damaging a flower garden. Perret stood in the middle of the minor ruins with Matteucci and suggested that, perhaps, the cook was responsible for the destruction.

  A few weeks later, on April 7, 1906, Perret was in Naples when he saw a “magnificent” dark cloud rise above Vesuvius. He took a few photographs, and then he hurried back to the observatory. He fought against a desperate crowd of people trying to get away. Some were carrying possessions. Others were clutching small statues of St. Anne, the guardian saint of those who lived around Vesuvius. He watched as some people stopped and prayed, asking the saint to stop the eruption. Part way back to the observatory, Perret paused and leaned against a wall. He felt a vibration so strong that it “moved the entire body to and fro like a pendulum.”

  Perret reached the observatory about midnight. Red-hot volcanic bombs were being hurled out of the volcano at a terrific rate, falling all around the observatory, bounding down the flanks of the volcano. Detonations increased in violence and in frequency. The volcano was pumping out a dust cloud at a prodigious rate, the cloud shot through with splendid electrical discharges. Each discharge had a snapping, spark-like quality. It was at this point in the eruption that Perret, though it was night, decided he would climb up to the edge of the summit crater, his way lit by the light of the eruption.

  He walked almost a mile, but found he could only reach within several hundred feet of the crater’s edge, the ground shaking too violently to allow him to approach closer. Here he turned and looked back down the volcano, surprised at how clear the air was, even though the giant eruptive column was shooting out of the top of the volcano right behind him. As he stood there, quite alone, he envisioned “the entire mountain as a huge boiler shell, humming and palpitating with internal pressure which was increasingly felt the higher one went.” It was “a spectacle the eye could never tire of watching.”

  After an unknown length of time, he left and walked back to the observatory, amazed at how “effortlessly” the volcano had erupted. “Yet, the power was there to do it, and to do it easily and with dignity,” he wrote later that night. “No word can describe the majesty of its unfolding, the utter absence of anything resembling effort, the all-sufficient poetry to do it majestically.” He realized he was witnessing “one of nature’s noblest spectacles; a symphony of violence.” During his descent and return to the observatory, he stopped and looked back at the eruption. At that point, he raised his hand to his mouth and marveled at what he was seeing.

  In addition to the explosions and the surge of material being thrown out from the volcano, there was electrical phenomenon happening all around him. On the observatory building, he saw electric sparks fire off around insulators and across lightning arrestors. The copper telegraph wires leading into the observatory were lit was a faint whitish glow. The eeriest effect, which Perret said he watched in dead silence, were the bright blue auroras that flickered in the air whenever a pocket of superheated air swept down and over the observatory. During such moments, anything metallic hisses and buzzes; everything, including Perret himself, was surrounded by a shimmering ethereal glow.

  At three o’clock that morning, there was a tremendous shudder at the observatory as the eruption suddenly increased in violence as the top of the summit crater seemed to be ripping apart. Perret watched it through an observatory—one of the few windows not yet broken—describing the scene “as like the tearing away of the petals of a flower.” The noise was like of Niagara Falls, only thousands of times louder. This was the critical moment and Matteucci ordered a retreat. He and Perret and four police officers who were still inside the observatory started down the volcano, having only rolled-up overcoats to put over their heads to protect them from falling rocks. At one point, Perret heard Matteucci remark, “This must be how Pliny died,” a reference to the death of the Roman Pliny the Elder who died during the 79 A.D. eruption that destroyed Pompeii.

  They could hear dull thuds all around them as rocks tossed from the volcano hit the ground. One of the police officers stopped to pick up a rock that had just fallen, dropping it because it was hot. He was then hit on the head by another flying rock.

  The rain of stones lessened as the small group went farther down the volcano. Exhausted, they paused and made a fire. The air was unusually cold, thanks to the sea air from the Mediterranean that had been pulled inland by the draft caused by the furiously rising eruptive column. Perret, Matteucci and the four police officers stayed here for the remainder of the night, roasting eggs and eating onions, their only provisions.

  All that night, the people of Naples were in a panic. Refugees from the eruption were crowding the city. Churches were open all night, the clergy doing their best to calm people’s fears. A crowd gathered at the central telegraph station in Naples where Matteucci’s hourly reports were being received. At three o’clock, when the eruption hit its most violent stage, the telegraph wire went silent. Everyone assumed the small party of scientists and police officer at the observatory must be dead.

  But, the next morning, a courier brought news to Naples that the group at the observatory had survived. That evenin
g, Perret sent a wire cable to his mother in Brooklyn, reassuring her that he was alive. Always frugal, Perret wrote: “Safe. In no danger. Frank.”

  Jaggar left Boston on April 10 for New York where he sailed for Italy, arriving in Naples on April 24. Two days earlier, Matteucci had declared the eruption over.

  Jaggar made the trip to the observatory, riding the small electric train of the Vesuvian Railway. The cogged wheels of the train pushed slowly through drifts of volcanic ash. Trees along the way were bent far over, as if after a snowstorm, but these were covered with heavy ash. The gritty material was everywhere and seemed to penetrate everything. Any disturbance, no matter how slight, caused a swirl of the fine material to rise up into the air.

  Just as Jaggar reached the observatory—he had to travel part way on foot—he saw two figures descending from the summit cone. They were Matteucci and Perret. Their faces and clothes were covered completely—as Jaggar remembered it, “picturesquely plastered”—by dust and ash.

  After greeting each other, the three men entered the observatory building. One person who visited soon after the building was open in 1848 described it as “a Romanesque villa with the strength of a cannon-proof bunker.” And so it was. The recent activity had formed a few new cracks in the thick cement walls and ceilings and almost every window had been broken, but the building was still structurally sound. Even the campanile-like outlook tower was still intact, as were the narrow terraces that wrapped around the second floor and provided external observation platforms.

  Inside the building, Matteucci led Jaggar on a tour of the various rooms. One housed a library with bookshelves rising from floor to ceiling. In niches in the walls were paintings of mythical scenes. One showed the Roman goddess Minerva placing a crown on the head of Prometheus, the Roman god of fire. Another had Aeolus commanding the winds and yet another was of Vulcan, the namesake of all volcanoes, busy at his forge.

  A separate room was a museum. Along the walls were shelves with bottles filled with ash. Each bottle was labeled with a date—the date that particular sample of ash had been erupted. In the center of the room were several enormous rocks set on tables. Each rock had a label that indicated when it had been erupted by Vesuvius. “These are very precious stones,” Matteucci once told a reporter. “Some of them have hit me at one time or another. They represent my wounds.”

  The next morning, Jaggar made an ascent of Vesuvius, accompanied by three other visitors, all members of the Alpine Club of Great Britain. They were led by a local guide.

  The wind was at their backs, which meant they were protected, at least, on the climb up, from having cinders hitting and stinging their faces. Nevertheless, the climb was a difficult one. The guide led them on a zigzag course, keeping to the occasional low ridge where the ground surface was compacted and staying away from gullies filled with loose sand. All the while, up and in front of them, steam boiled up silently from the volcano.

  On the way up, they found the wrecked remains of the funicular railway that carried tourists—including Jaggar when he made his trip as a teenager in 1886—up to the summit. Only a few twisted rails could be identified. Everything else had either been blasted away or was buried beneath a new thick layer of ash and cinders.

  After two hours of climbing, covering barely a mile, they stood at the crater’s edge. “The fall-off was startling in the extreme,” wrote Jaggar. The crater was so deep and the walls so steep that it looked as if the entire volcano had been reamed out. The guide cautioned the others that the edge formed an overhang in many places and might cave in.

  The far side of the crater was obscured by smoke and steam. But, from the curvature he could see, Jaggar estimated is must now be about a half mile in diameter. Before the eruption, it was three hundred feet. He used an aneroid to measure the barometric pressure and, from that, determined that Vesuvius had lost four hundred feet of elevation, peeled away by the recent explosive activity. He walked close to the crater’s edge, then lay down on his stomach and crawled to the very edge. He reached out and extended his hand as far as he could, touching the inner wall. It was cold and wet. He smelled the air. There was barely the odor of sulfur. No noise could be heard above the roar of a constant wind.

  He backed away, stood and collected a few rocks from near the crater’s edge. Then he and the others made their descent.

  As they approached the observatory, they inspected themselves. Jaggar thought they looked “ludicrous to the extreme.” Their eyelids, noses, ears and hair were heavily caked with gray ash. It was impossible to identify the color of their clothes. And his new camera, a collapsible Kodak Brownie, was no longer new.

  Jaggar stayed at the observatory four more days, Perret showing him the collection of photographs he had taken of the eruption and the crude devices he had used to record activity. The simplest was a small saucer filled with liquid mercury. Any slight vibration set the heavy liquid to wriggling. Perret had also hung four simple pendulums from a horizontal post. Each pendulum was of a different length, and so swung at a different natural frequency. By watching pendulums swing, Perret concluded that most of the earthquakes coming from Vesuvius shook the ground back and forth at a frequency of about one second. He also showed Jaggar a notebook in which he had kept a record of the intensity of earthquake shaking. He had made the determinations by standing with his back against a cement wall and counting how many times he was pushed back and forth. But the most remarkable record was his eyewitness account of the eruption—the eerie electrical phenomena, the fantastic eruptive column.

  “I knew at once,” wrote Jaggar of their meeting, “that Perret was the world’s greatest volcanologist.” He saw in him a kindred spirit. But there was an important difference between the two men. In his study of volcanoes, Perret was not constrained by the demands of a regular job. It was the life that Jaggar was seeking.

  Three weeks later, Jaggar was back at Harvard. A letter was waiting for him from Gilbert Grosvenor, the president of the National Geographic Society. In the letter, Grosvenor said that an article was being prepared for the Society’s magazine about the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, which had occurred on April 18, while Jaggar was en route to Italy. Grosvenor was writing to ask whether the Harvard professor might write something for the magazine about Vesuvius and its recent eruption.

  The pair of articles about the San Francisco earthquake and the eruption of Vesuvius appeared in the July 1906 issue of National Geographic magazine. Jaggar might have expected praise from his Harvard colleagues for having published a report about his trip so soon, but the man who had funded his trip to Italy was furious.

  Alexander Agassiz was an introverted and dour man who could be gruff and, to most, was a severely intimidating figure. By contrast, his father, Louis Agassiz, one of the great naturalists of the age, was charismatic and robust. He was often animated and always seemed to be good-natured. It was Louis Agassiz who first championed the idea that great sheets of ice had recently covered much of North America and Europe and thereby dramatically altered our view of earth history. As a Harvard professor, Louis Agassiz had founded the Museum of Comparative Zoology and was its first director. After his death in 1873, the directorship passed naturally to his son, Alexander, also a Harvard professor, who not only provided capable leadership and was a well-respected naturalist in his own right, but also contributed much of his personal fortune to maintaining and running the museum.

  Unlike his father, for whom the acquisition of money always eluded him, the son amassed a great deal of personal wealth. It came after he acquired the ownership to two failing copper mines—the Calumet and Hecla mines—in upper Michigan. He turned the mines into highly successful businesses, improving the efficiency of the extraction process and expanding the transportation system. For decades, the Calumet and Hecla mines were ranking among the world’s most productive mines and produced more than half of the nation’s copper. It was with these profits that Alexander Agassiz greatly expanded the museum at Harvard. In 1901, he add
ed a geologic section and began to fund geologic expeditions, including Jaggar’s trip to Vesuvius in 1906. Today Alexander Agassiz is remembered for his great generosity and for his own professional contributions, especially his exploration of coral reefs. For seven years he served as president of the National Academy of Sciences. Today the Academy bestows a prestigious medal for research in oceanography in his name. Alexander Agassiz is also remembered for a personal trait: He was known to be vindictive.

  One of the first to suffer was a promising young zoologist named Jesse Walter Fewkes. Fewkes, a native of Massachusetts and a Harvard graduate, had worked as an assistant at the museum for more than a decade when he decided that his career was going nowhere and decided to explore other options. He made a trip to California where, so it was rumored, though the rumor was never substantiated, he was offered employment. That alone was enough to raise the wrath of Alexander Agassiz who informed Fewkes that his association with the museum was over. Later, in a letter, Agassiz would condemn Fewkes as “a consummate sneak and hypocrite.” Another assistant was Charles Otis Whitman who had worked at the museum for twenty years and was forty years of age when he was summarily dismissed from the museum for his supposed involvement in teaching at another museum. Jaggar, too, was to run afoul of Agassiz.

  In Agassiz’s eyes, Jaggar’s sin was that he had written an article about his trip to Vesuvius for the National Geographic Society without first informing Agassiz. Agassiz wrote to Jaggar, saying that Jaggar’s underhanded deed “smacked of self-promotion.” Agassiz said that he “disliked this kind of advertising.” He then informed the much younger Jaggar that “if you wanted to publish a preliminary notice the Museum Bulletin was accessible to you.”

  Jaggar responded in the way most people would when confronted by someone who was senior to them. He apologized.