The Last Volcano Read online

  During the second night, the storm increased. The food was down to some hardtack and dried beef. Both were too tough to chew and too dry to swallow. “It would be difficult to devise a more completely miserable situation,” Jaggar wrote of that night. Here they lay, “baffled, wet, hungry, midway between America and Asia, between the Arctic and the Pacific, between earth and sky, and far from any warmth or any base of supplies.”

  Fortunately, the third day began with gray daylight, though the rain continued. The storm had wrecked the tent, and so Jaggar and Sweeny left it behind and packed the rest of their equipment and marched toward the coast, plunging down steep slopes amid sheets of driving rain and over a plateau of wet and slippery grass. Where possible, they used the wet grass to their advantage to speed their descent to the ocean, each man using his rucksack as a toboggan, careening down slopes, thankful when they were finally in sight of the Lydia—and that they had no broken bones.

  Back on the Lydia, the cook fixed them hot food. That night, they “turned into our beds and slept the sleep of the blissful.”

  Atka is midway along the chain of the Aleutian Islands. It was now midsummer, and Jaggar realized it was time to start the return. Before he left Atka, he gave the islanders whatever cheese they had left and a sack of flour. In return, the islanders handed him several baskets woven from native grass and made by local women.

  The Lydia left Atka on August 4. Three days later, Bogoslof was again in sight. The rocky crags were still steaming. Jaggar instructed everyone to prepare “for a vigorous investigation” of the island.

  The first recorded sighting of the island was in 1769 by the Russian explorers Mikhail Levashev and Peter Krenitzin. Years later, they published a nautical chart that showed the location of the island, depicting it as four small crosses to indicate the presence of precarious rocks.

  The next sighting was by Captain James Cook during his third and final voyage of the Pacific Ocean. He sailed close to the island on October 29, 1778, describing it as “an elevated rock like a tower.” He did not give the island a name.

  On May 8, 1796, people on Umnak Island, thirty miles to the south, saw a column of smoke rising from the sea. Then darkness descended over the island caused by a rain of volcanic ash. That night, after the fall of ash had stopped, they could see a bright red light illuminated on distant clouds and they could hear a terrific roar. Those who went to investigate found a new rocky island about a half-mile north of the one seen by Levashev and Krenitzin, and by Cook. It was Russian traders on Umnak who named the new island Joánna Bogoslova, John the Theologian, because the eruption had started on the feast day of Saint John. Today any land that appears in that part of the chain of Aleutian Islands is known as Bogoslof.

  The eruption that began in 1796 continued for several years. The first people to record an actual landing on the island were sea-lion hunters in 1804. By then, the island was about three miles in circumference and five hundred feet at its highest point. The hunters reported the ground was so warm that it was difficult to walk on it.

  What happened during the next several decades is not well documented, but, in the summer of 1883, captains of passing ships noted that the island was constantly obscured by a combination of steam and ash. Finally, in September, the steam and air cleared and ships were able to sail close to the island. The volcano was still erupting, throwing out masses of red-hot rocks and volumes of ash and steam. A second island, New Bogoslof, was now spotted. This activity ended sometime before the end of the 19th century, the second island separated from the first by a channel about a mile wide.

  Activity resumed in March 1906. By September, someone on a passing ship managed to take a photograph of the island. It showed both New Bogoslof and Old Bogoslof were rocky crags. Midway between them was a large steaming mound.

  Jaggar carried a copy of the 1906 photograph as he prepared to land on Bogoslof. Even from the deck of the Lydia, he could see that dramatic changes had occurred in less than a year. Now two mounds occupied the central part of the island, the newer mound, according to Jaggar, “steaming like a pudding.”

  He and his scientific team made their landing on the morning of August 7, 1907. Hundreds of sea lions, bellowing with voices that justified their name, swam within a stone’s throw of the two dories as the men rowed toward the island. Occasionally, one of the animals would raise itself high from the water to stare, then plunge frantically beneath the waves. Once the men reached land, the sea lions that were on shore hurried into the water, except one immense bull that might have been asleep. Eventually, he, too, headed for the sea, slowly, giving the men ample time to take photographs of him before he slid into the water.

  Each man hurried off to take up his own specialty, knowing he had only a few hours on the island. Jaggar began by drawing an outline of the island, which was now two miles long at its greatest extent. Jaggar also sketched a crude topographic map. Next he measured the dimensions of the two central mounds, determining that each was about two thousand feet across at the base and stood about four hundred feet high. Between them was a crescent-shaped lagoon. Jaggar walked to the edge. The rocks underwater were stained a bright orange. The surface of the water was steaming slightly. He bent down and tasted it. The water was salty. He took out a thermometer. The water temperature was a pleasant 90°F. He then set off to circumnavigate the island on foot.

  At the southern shoreline he found a long rocky terrace. At one end of the terrace was a cave. Both the terrace and the base of the cave were twenty-five feet above sea level. Both had clearly been made by the action of breaking waves. He could identify both on the 1906 photograph he carried, which showed both at sea level. The conclusion was undeniable: In less than a year, this part of the island had risen twenty-five feet.

  He found evidence of recent uplift elsewhere on the island. There were more terraces, raised sandy beaches and notches on rock outcrops that had clearly been cut by sea waves. All were high above present sea level. Had the island been lifted up in one great thrust or had the movement been gradual? Was it rising now as he stood there? Was only the island rising, or was the entire sea floor that surrounded it, carrying Bogoslof and the other Aleutian Islands upward? And where else in the world might such activity be happening?

  To answer such questions, as Jaggar now knew—he had been thinking about it since St. Pierre—required a new type of scientific institution, a geonomical observatory—his term. They would be based on the volcano observatory at Vesuvius, in that they would have a permanent staff of scientists who would be using the best equipment to measure earthquakes, collect gases and record slow crustal movements such as he was seeing at Bogoslof. There would be hundreds of such geonomical observatories to study the earth’s internal activity, in much the same way that hundreds of astronomical observatories already existed to study the stars, and they would be located where the earth’s activity was greatest, that is, in Alaska and along the Aleutian Islands, in Japan, in Italy, along the coasts of North and South America and throughout the Caribbean.

  “The cry of suffering multitudes, which led Pasteur on from ferments and silk-worm diseases to hydrophobia,” Jaggar would write at the end of his official report of his expedition to the Aleutians, “was no more heart-rending than the cry of the terrorized millions who live in earthquake and volcano lands.” To alleviate “the cry,” a worldwide network of geonomical observatories was needed to accumulate critical knowledge about “this old earth, which is pushing up and down its shore lines in a hundred places not yet explored” and where the earth was “building other Bogoslofs.”

  After leaving Bogoslof, the Lydia stopped again at Unalaska to replenish its stores at Dutch Harbor, then sailed east to Akutan Island, the expedition’s last stop. The scientific team landed, but, as would be a persistent theme in this expedition, a terrific storm kept them from reaching the island’s volcano. Instead, they settled for a few days of fishing for salmon in a nearby river, using their knives to stab the fish, sometimes catching
a salmon with their own hands and throwing the fish up onto the bank.

  On August 22, as the storm continued, the crew of the Lydia prepared the ship for the long trip back to Seattle. That night, an earthquake shook the island, a reminder of the geologic activity of the Aleutian Islands. The next morning, the Lydia headed home, an uneventful passage of eighteen days of fair weather and frequent strong winds, the ship sailing along a straight course.

  Soon after he arrived in Seattle, Jaggar learned that, while he was midway across the North Pacific—to be more precise, twenty-four days after he and his colleagues had stood on and examined Bogoslof island—members of the crew of the Pacific whaler Herman, sailing south from the Bering Sea to the Pacific Ocean, were “spellbound” when they passed Bogoslof. A dense black cloud was rising from the island, and the air was filled with the smell of sulfur. The sea for miles around was churning and mixed with “volcanic earth.” From the deck of the Herman, the crew watched as steam shot up, at irregular intervals, from “the ocean’s vital parts.” Several of the crew urged the captain to sail closer, but he refused. By then, ash and sand were falling at Dutch Harbor, forty miles southeast of the eruption, where people were also hearing the clamor of distant thunder.

  On October 15, the cutter McCulloch sailed close to Bogoslof. As the ship approached, the captain recorded in the log that “there was but little steam escaping” from the island. He was unprepared, however, for the changes that had happened since he had seen the island the previous summer. As he recorded his initial view, “the first change to be observed was at such variance with anything that had been expected that it was startling, to say the least.”

  As the McCulloch sailed closer, it was unmistakable. The two central mounds were gone. In their place was a new steaming lagoon, a half-mile in diameter, and the water of the lagoon “in a constant state of ebullition.” Elsewhere, the formerly rugged outline had been “softened by a padding of lava dust that almost disguised the island beyond all recognition.” The captain of the McCulloch estimated that “incalculable tons of material, hundreds of feet in depth, had been deposited over the entire island.”

  In his official report about the expedition, Jaggar wrote that he regarded the hours spent on Bogoslof as “the most interesting of the whole trip,” describing the volcano to a newspaper reporter, after he returned to Boston, as the “island that changed form while you wait.”

  The voyage had been difficult, but deeply rewarding. “Lively the place was in every sense,” he wrote of the experience, “the hot earth alive, heaving and heaping, the sea alive, currents, surf and warm lagoons; the shore alive with the hundreds of immense clumsy leviathans, bulls, cows, pups; and, finally, the cliffs alive with their teeming bird-life.” But, now, it was time for him to return to his life in Boston.

  Jaggar resumed his teaching and administrative work at MIT. A few weeks before Christmas, he received three blue fox skins, which he had bought from a trader on Unalaska and which he would give to his wife as presents, he remarking that the skins turning “out most successfully after treatment by an eastern furrier.” Also, just before Christmas, he heard that President Theodore Roosevelt was sending a battle fleet of the United States Navy on a cruise to ports in South America, a cruise that would eventually take the fleet around the world. Jaggar wrote directly to the President, suggesting that a geologist be included as one of the crew. To no surprise, he volunteered himself.

  “My suggestion is based on the belief that the opportunity is a rare one,” he wrote to Roosevelt, “in which to see comparatively—in a brief space of time—many seismo-volcanic shores and to examine the seismometrical methods of different governments and organizations.” In the letter, he noted that he had succeeded in getting a resolution passed at a general meeting of the Geological Society of America that “strongly recommends to the several North American governments and to private enterprises the establishment of volcano and earthquake observatories.” He reminded the President of the recent destructive earthquake in San Francisco and the fatal volcanic eruptions at Martinique and in Italy and that Panama, where Roosevelt had decided to build a canal, was a region prone to earthquakes, as was the Philippines, where there were also numerous volcanoes, a country possessed by the United States since the end of the Spanish-American War. Sending Jaggar with the fleet of Navy ships—which the press had dubbed “The Great White Fleet”—would be a step toward establishing the volcano and earthquake observatories recommended by the Geological Society of America and bear directly on the prediction of such natural events and on the protection of life and property.

  The Secretary of the Navy responded for the President. He wrote to Jaggar, saying “that it would be impractical to have a geologist attached to the battleship fleet; also that the itinerary of the route was such that very little if anything could be gained by a geologist.”

  And so, yet, again, another opportunity passed.

  In May 1908, his mother, Anna Lawrence Jaggar, became gravely ill. Hoping to improve her health, Bishop Jaggar accepted the mostly honorary position as head of American Churches of Europe, and the two of them moved to southern France where the climate is good. On August 31, Anna Jaggar died.

  Her father had been bequeathed a trust of $25,000 to her with the stipulation that the interest on it would be paid to his daughter as long as she lived, then, after her death, the principal would be divided equally among her surviving children. Jaggar and his sister each received a share. He already had plans on how to spend the money.

  Even before his mother’s death, Jaggar was planning to return to Alaska the next summer. The expedition would be bigger than the first. Both the United States Geological Survey and the Imperial Geographic Society of St. Petersburg in Russia had agreed to contribute to the second expedition. Now, with an inheritance, he envisioned a grander scheme.

  As he saw it, a return to Alaska would be the beginning of “a series of scientific expeditions that, eventually, would cover all of the volcanic regions of the world.” The work would culminate, after a decade of travel, with the publication of a multi-volume work that would recount his many anticipated adventures and include hundreds of photographs to illustrate his work. He estimated that the entire project—the exploration and the writing—would require at least twenty years, the remainder of his professional career. To encourage contributors, he wrote a letter, saying that he was prepared to resign from MIT if sufficient money was raised. To indicate his personal commitment to the project, he also wrote, “I have twelve thousand dollars pledged toward this work in one anonymous gift from my own family.” His wife, Helen, disliked the plan.

  Ever since their marriage, they had shared a house with another family. Helen realized that her husband’s inheritance was probably the only one he would ever receive. Furthermore, he was planning to leave soon on another trip to Alaska. The first one had lasted four months. Additional ones would probably last longer. And they had the future of a young son to consider.

  After what was probably much intense discussion, they came to a compromise. They would use the inheritance to purchase house. The remainder would be used to pay for a trip for both of them.

  Japan was then much in the news, having recently opened its borders to foreign travelers. Also President Roosevelt had just mediated an end to the Russo-Japanese War for which he had received the Nobel Peace Prize. Those two events had sparked a brief craze in the United States for anything Japanese. Magazines often had cover articles that described something about the mysterious and exotic country. American clothes designers were incorporating Japanese motifs in their creations. The most popular wallpaper showed Japanese-inspired designs. Society parties often had Japanese themes with pseudo-tea ceremonies. All things Japanese—Japanese prints and porcelain, judo and Buddhism, geisha and samurai—were suddenly in vogue. And, as Jaggar knew, Japan was also a land of volcanoes and of frequent earthquakes.

  And so he and Helen agreed. They would go on a summer trip to Japan. And, on the way,
they would take advantage of a stopover in the Hawaiian Islands to see the remarkable lava lake at Kilauea volcano.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  THE PACIFIC WORLD

  The Jaggars sailed from San Francisco on March 26 on board the SS Siberia of the Pacific Mail and Steamship Company, “the most Luxurious way,” according to a company brochure, “to travel the Sunshine Belt to the Orient.” They traveled as first-class passengers, as did more than two hundred others. One of the others was Queen Lili’uokalani, the last reigning monarch of the Hawaiian Islands.

  Lili’uokalani and her government had been deposed by a revolution in 1893. Five years later, the United States annexed the islands, making them a territory. Now, in 1909, at age seventy-one, Lili’uokalani was returning home after a trip to Washington, D.C., where she had tried to convince members of Congress to return to her some of the land confiscated during the revolution. Congressional members said no, as they would on each of her subsequent trips.

  The seven-day passage to the islands onboard the SS Siberia was uneventful: It was good weather all the way, which must have pleased Helen Jaggar, who was making her first sea voyage anywhere.

  Early on the last morning at sea, the island of Oahu came into view. The first landmark was Diamond Head, an ancient volcanic crater, its profile already familiar to travelers because it was already frequently reproduced in travel magazines. Next came a stretch of white sandy beaches lined by swaying coconut palms. This was Waikiki, already a tourist destination, home to the first major hotel in the islands, the five-storied Moana Hotel, which still stands today. And beyond Waikiki were the city of Honolulu and its harbor.

  On the day the Jaggars arrived, Honolulu harbor was teeming with moving seacraft, as usual. Ships from a dozen distant ports were waiting to dock. Most were there to load bags of sugar, the islands’ main export. Others, such as the Siberia, had passengers anxious to disembark, though, in these cases, most of the ships had come from Asia and were bringing workers for the cane fields.