The Last Volcano Read online

  I sincerely regret that the narrative in the National Geographic magazine was published, in view of what you tell me. . . . I felt that I could not refuse to send something, because the National Geographic Society sent me money, specially appropriated, while I was in Martinique and I have never done anything for their magazine.

  But that was not enough to placate Agassiz. Less than a month later, two articles published in Boston newspapers about the Vesuvius eruption contained quotes from an unnamed Harvard professor. Again Agassiz wrote to Jaggar accusing him of being the unnamed source.

  I saw the other day, to my great regret, one other of those reportorial articles . . . to which I have called your attention. From internal evidence and quotation marks it is very evident that the foundation of this notice has been supplied by you.

  Agassiz continued by lecturing the assistant professor on the unseemly use of the popular press to report scientific results.

  There are two methods by which a man’s work may be known that of the modest investigator known to his colleagues and peers outside of the institution with which he is connected, and whose name never appears in the daily press. The other is the method which you seem to be devoted to of obtaining through the papers an ephemeral and cheap notoriety which will never bring you the recognition of your scientific colleagues.

  Agassiz concluded the letter by writing:

  I am not in [a] position to waste my time . . . herewith notify you that I cancel all my agreements with you relating to publications of Mt. Pelee and Mt. Vesuvius and waive all claims I may have to publishing your materials. . . . I also withdraw the nomination I intended to make to the Museum faculty to allow you to study the volcanic rocks I have collected at various times in the Pacific. These rocks will remain in my possession as they are my personal property.

  Yours very truly A. Agassiz

  This time, instead of responding directly to Agassiz, Jaggar forwarded a copy of Agassiz’s letter to Harvard President Charles Eliot and added a note of his own. It informed President Eliot that he was resigning his professorship at Harvard, effective September 9, 1906.

  CHAPTER SIX

  ALASKA

  Jaggar’s sudden resignation from Harvard was a mixed blessing. It eliminated a time-consuming commute to teach classes at Harvard in Cambridge and at MIT in Boston. It also reduced his income. With a wife and a son to support, he realized he needed to earn additional money. Yet, he obviously wanted to continue a pursuit of volcanoes and their eruptions. He found a way to do both.

  Alaska was in the minds of many Americans during the first years of the 20th century, in part, because of the recent Yukon gold rush, and because much of Alaska was still unexplored. And so, Jaggar reasoned, as did others, unclaimed mineral wealth must still lie in that vast country. Alaska also has one of the longest chains of volcanoes in the world—more than sixty volcanoes that stretch for two thousand miles from the western tip of the Alaskan Peninsula to Kamchatka at the eastern edge of Asia. These are the Aleutian Islands. And so he organized an expedition to search for mineral deposits on these islands—and to explore the volcanoes.

  In a letter soliciting funds from investors who might be interested in financing such an expedition, Jaggar quoted a recent report from the United States government that suggested both mineral ores and coal might exist on at least two Aleutian Islands, Unalaska and Attu. According to the report, on these two islands, there exists “greenstones, slates and granites of the same age and kind as those which bear copper near Prince William Sound.” Jaggar guaranteed that each investor would share in any claims he might file, the amount of a share to be proportional to the size of an investment. As the expedition’s leader and organizer, he would retain “10% interest in any property developed.”

  To his surprise, he quickly raised the needed money. Years later, he reflected on what he learned from the experience.

  The great revelation of my life I got [in 1907] from the rich copper brokers of the Boston stock market. An MIT official told me to go down on State Street, organize in writing the Technology Expedition to the Aleutian Islands, tell them I wanted ten thousand dollars, that it was mere exploration, that there might be copper or there might not, and that I was going to start in April. He gave me a list of big copper men. There happened to be a scientist Alexander Agassiz at the head of Calumet and Hecla, and he disliked me at the moment. I went into that office with fear and trembling and in three minutes came out with one thousand dollars as a first subscription. In one week I raised $13,000 to my utter astonishment. I made mimeograph reports about every two weeks, told them everything bad or good, bought a schooner, took student assistants, made lots of mistakes, muddled through, struck a huge market depression in the autumn, and published in the Technology Review an adventurous account of the trip which contained precious little geology and a whole lot of Bull.

  With the money in hand, Jaggar next identified his scientific team. He enlisted Arthur Eakle, a mineralogist from the University of California, and Harvard astronomer Henry Gummeré who, years earlier, had helped Jaggar build a water tank to produce ripple marks. Two senior students in mining engineering from MIT, Desaix Myers and Harry Sweeny, joined. To ensure the health of the men, Jaggar included a physician, Dr. Edwin Van Dyke of San Francisco, who would also serve as the expedition’s entomologist and botanist.

  The team assembled in Seattle on April 22, 1907, at the Hotel Lincoln, Seattle’s most luxurious hotel, Jaggar apparently not sparing any expense. He set upon examining all the ships that were for sale in and around Seattle. After almost a week of searching, he settled on a thirty-nine-ton schooner, the Lydia, a sturdy vessel built twenty years earlier for the north Pacific sea-otter trade. He purchased it and all accoutrements—extra sails, cordage, food and medical supplies, fishing gear, bedding, charts, navigational instruments and two fishermen dories, the last to be used to land men in harbors and to explore uncharted bays and islands—for $4,000, almost a third of the expedition’s funds. The man who sold him the Lydia—a Mr. Carl Guntert—had, at first, agreed to serve as captain, but, within a week of the ship’s purchase, he announced his determination not to go, and so a delay followed as Jaggar searched for another captain.

  Jaggar was eventually introduced to George Seeley, a Nova Scotian, who, for the last five years, had captained a small sailing vessel that carried sugar from the Hawaiian Islands to San Francisco. But Seeley had a cloud over him.

  Six years earlier, in 1901, he had been captain of the steamship Oregon when it was carrying three hundred passengers from Nome, Alaska, to Seattle. Three days out, control of the rudder was lost and the Oregon drifted for almost a week. Seeley put the passengers and the crew on short rations—coffee and hardtack for breakfast and an abbreviated meal served in the afternoon. There were the anticipated strong complaints. Fortunately, the captain of a sister ship, the Empress, spotted the Oregon and towed her to a port. An investigation was conducted and Seeley was cleared of negligence with regard to the rudder, though questions were raised about his treatment of passengers and crew. Ship owners in Seattle were worried that Seeley was at the beginning of a streak of bad luck, and so no one in that city had hired him to captain a ship to Alaska since.

  Jaggar did not have a choice. It was mid-spring and those ship captains who were familiar with the treacherous waters and the frequent rough weather of Alaska had either departed already for a summer of sailing or had signed contracts with other ships. And so Jaggar hired Seeley.

  There was a bad omen just before Jaggar planned to sail. Seeley had assembled a crew consisting of a mate, a cook and five seamen. On the night before the Lydia was to sail, two of the seamen slipped off the Lydia, taking their possessions with them. Seeley and Jaggar spent the next morning searching the Seattle waterfront for the missing men, who had already been paid half-wages, but neither man could be found. It was May 20, a late date for a departure to Alaska, and so Jaggar had Seeley call off the search.

  Late that afternoon, the Ly
dia was cast off from a buoy and towed a mile by a gasoline launch until it was clear of shipping. Then, as soon as the sails were set and Jaggar hoisted the MIT pennant, the wind dropped, another bad omen. The crew and the party of scientific men spent their first night on the Lydia bobbing in a calm sea a few miles from Seattle, still within sight of the city lights.

  At sunrise a slight wind came up and the sails were set again. Seeley showed his sailing prowess by taking the Lydia more than a hundred miles the first day to Protection Island at the eastern end of the Strait of Juan de Fuca between Washington State and Vancouver Island. By the morning of the third day the Lydia had covered more than two hundred miles. As planned, Jaggar had the schooner sail into the harbor at Port Angeles where he and his colleagues would spend the next four days on land trying out and reorganizing their camping equipment. (Jaggar had bought the equipment at Abercrombie & Fitch in New York. As at the hotel, Jaggar did not spare expenses.) On May they were back on the Lydia. The next night they were far out at sea.

  Jaggar’s original plan was to wind his way through the islands of the Inside Passage that form the west coast of Canada and include the southeastern part of Alaska. From there, he intended to make a straight crossing to Attu Island at the extreme far western end of the Aleutian Islands where the formal work of the expedition would begin. From there, he could take advantage of the prevailing westerly winds to return, stopping and exploring the volcanic islands as he went. But the late start—and the fact that the Lydia did not have auxiliary power—forced him to change the plan. Instead, he directed Captain Seeley to sail straight across the North Pacific to Unimak Island at the eastern end of the Aleutian Islands. From there, they would sail west and visit as many islands as time and as the weather allowed.

  The passage to Unimak Pass took twenty-nine days, mostly beneath a cloudy leaden sky. Throughout that time, as Jaggar noted, the ship was followed by a “barnyard” of birds, which included gooney and albatrosses. A giant kelp, forty-three-feet long, was picked up on June 6, covered with barnacles, small crustaceans and algae. Whales and porpoises were seen from time to time. One day, a fur seal was spotted far out in the Pacific. The scientific team spent much of their time overhauling equipment, preparing food in sacks for the land trips, reading, and helping the crew to scrape and paint whatever needed to be scraped and painted. On June 22, during a hard blow from the north, the Lydia proved itself tight in weather, but those unfamiliar with the sea were caught by surprise. Once, when the ship heeled far over, Jaggar was in the galley and was caught unaware on the upslope side of the ship. Trying to manage both a cup of tea and a plate of dinner, he lost his grip and slid across the cabin deck into dishes, wrecking his plate and pouring hot tea down his neck. As he later judged the incident, “This was a common diversion.”

  On June 27, at five o’clock in the morning, land was sighted. Seeley’s navigation had proven accurate. It was Unimak Island. The weather was fine, and the wind light. That day, the cook caught two codfish. There were many gulls, puffins and “whale birds” around. Just after noon, the Lydia tacked up against a northwest wind. The snow-covered heights of Pogromnoi volcano came into view.

  Unfortunately, sea conditions were too rough to permit a landing with the dories that the Lydia carried, and so Jaggar instructed Captain Seeley to bypass the island and the volcano and to sail west. The same happened a few days later at the paired islands of Akun and Akutan. Both have volcanoes with steep sides. On Akutan, one of volcanoes was throwing up columns of black smoke. Jaggar estimated the height of the volcano to be four thousand feet, the same as Mount Pelée and Vesuvius. But, again, a landing was impossible. This difficulty in landing would be the great frustration of the trip—to come within a mile or so of an unexplored and steaming volcano and being unable to land and have to sail on. The Lydia finally made its first landfall at Dutch Harbor on Unalaska Island. Here Jaggar hired a guide to lead him and the others fifteen miles overland to Makushin volcano.

  In preparation for the trek, he had the men carefully weigh and apportion the food, then, with tents and kits, they took off, each man carrying about forty pounds in a rucksack.

  They marched all day in the rain, covering several miles. That night they camped on a grassy terrace. Dinner was bacon and flapjacks. The rain continued all night and all the next morning. In fact, it rained so often that Jaggar wrote in a journal that any future reader should assume it was raining unless he specifically said that it was not.

  On the third day, the men started climbing the steep, snow-covered slope of Makushin. “The climb was long and easy,” Jaggar wrote. “The crevasses are few and small.” On the way to the top, they passed several sulfur-crusted patches on top of new snow. In places, they had to detour around deep holes, seeing black mud bubbling at the bottom of each one. At the summit, they discovered a large steaming crater, a feature unknown to the guide. Jaggar named the new feature “Technology Crater.”

  On the way back to Dutch Harbor, Jaggar separated from the others so that he could climb a rock face partly covered with ice and snow. He soon found himself stranded on a ledge barely wide enough to stand. His presence startled two eagles that took flight. They soared around him in great circles, then out over the nearby ocean where Jaggar could see whales sounding, their enormous forked tails rising straight up, then slowly sinking.

  The two eagles soon came back. They circled him again, moving their heads from side to side. “They know I am helpless,” Jaggar thought.

  It then rose in his mind that he might have to stay plastered to the rock face hundreds of feet above the sea until help came. He had an idea. He dropped his pack and watched as it “bounded suggestively from ledge to ledge and rolled in fragments to the water’s edge below.” Then he jumped.

  As it turned out, the downward slide in a leather coat, heavy boots and gloves was not a difficult task. And it gave him a chance to look back.

  “Behold,” he wrote of the minor adventure, “there was the eaglet solemnly cuddled into a corner of the cliff, and all the nature-study stories came back to me with startling vividness.”

  This was the world he had dreamed about during his childhood. Here he was surrounded by wilderness. And that reminded him why he had decided to study geology—because it offered such varied and unexpected adventures in a rapidly modernizing world.

  The better part of the day over, he marched back to Dutch Harbor, now “wiser concerning the peculiarly high grades of Aleutian slopes, masked by long grass.” The weather was calm. He rejoined the others. He spent the evening watching “forty or fifty whales making the bay breathe.” Then he wrapped himself in a sleeping bag and went to sleep.

  The next day, back at sea, Jaggar asked Captain Seeley to make for Bogoslof Island. For two days, the Lydia beat against a strong headwind. The ship making little progress, Jaggar took a measure of the situation, of the price exacted on the men after six weeks at sea. “The mate is prostrate with a strained back, the captain has boils and a wounded hand, and nearly everybody in the cabin is sea-sick.” And so he decided to turn the ship and head back to Dutch Harbor where they would wait for better weather.

  A week later, on July 14, the government revenue cutter McCulloch, which had the dual task of carrying the mail and chasing off foreign ships that were hunting seals in American waters, sailed in Dutch Harbor, having completed a run to faraway Attu. Jaggar talked to the crew. They had passed Bogoslof two days earlier and had seen a new steaming cone. Excited by the report, even though the weather had not yet improved, Jaggar and Seeley set sail immediately. This time the Lydia came within sight of the small barren island, which was steaming vigorously, but the wind was too strong to attempt a landing, and so the volcano was bypassed and the Lydia continued sailing west.

  After three more days of sailing, the Lydia arrived at Umnak Island. Here was a sandy beach with a gentle slope where a landing could have been made, but the wind was strong and the surf was high. And so, yet again, the Lydia and its men turned away.
Jaggar, frustrated by so many missed opportunities, watched as yet another unexplored volcanic island faded into the distance.

  After another four days, sailing under gradually clearing skies, the Lydia arrived at the islands of Amlia and Atka. Amlia showed a long, rugged, though not very high profile. Atka was mountainous, rising from the sea as several large glaciated peaks. Each one was a volcano. The highest was Korovinski on the north side of the island. After some delay because of a lack of wind, the Lydia finally sailed into a cove where there was a village of sod huts and frame houses that contained the whole population of Atka, one hundred and ten souls.

  The scientific party landed and stayed on Atka for ten days. The physician Van Dyke collected plants and netted insects. The mineralogist Eakle and one of the students, Myers, worked on a crude geologic map of the area around the cove, noting the locations of volcanic cinders and of warm water. The astronomer Gummeré set up equipment to measure the direction and intensity of the magnetic field. Jaggar and the other student, Sweeny, packed their rucksacks and set out to climb Korovinski.

  For three days, the pair circled the base of the volcano, looking for a way to the top. The rain and the cold wind were relentless. On the fourth day, they found a hot pool where steam was rising from the rocks. Here they spent a day and rested and ate their meals in the steam bath. “The warmth was very grateful in contrast to the cold wetness of everything else, for we were already soaked to the skin,” Jaggar recorded in his journal.

  On the fifth day, still searching for a way to the summit, the constant rain turned to a dense fog. At midday, Jaggar and Sweeny set up their silk tent and crawled into their sleeping bags, hoping the weather would change. Then the wind came up. For the next two days, they were stormbound, taking turns holding up the center tent pole, even at night. Occasionally, a blast of wind caused one of the tent pegs to pull out of the ground and the sides of the tent to flap. Then one of them had to go out, get wet, and drive the peg in, then pile stones on it.