The Last Volcano Page 13
As soon as the Siberia docked, there was a surge of people from shore onto the ship. Some were selling flowers. Others had coconuts or stalks of sweet cane to sell. Most were just there to greet passengers. Women were dressed in summertime dresses and carried parasols to protect them from the tropical sun. Men wore white linens and straw hats and canvas shoes. And everyone seemed to be waving, anxious to attract the attention of a relative or a friend.
The Jaggars had no one waiting for them nor did they have plans to meet anyone while in the islands. Their destination was Kilauea volcano, which meant an additional two-day sail to the island of Hawaii and the town of Hilo. They stayed the night in Honolulu. The next afternoon, they returned to the harbor and boarded a small steamer, the Claudine, which had originally been used to ship cattle between the islands, but was now carrying passengers.
The Claudine had no private rooms, only open berths where about three-dozen people could sleep. There was but one lavatory, used by both passengers and crew. It had no electrical lights, only kerosene. No food was served. It also rode low in the water, which meant seawater often washed across the deck and splashed across the faces of those who slept in the lowest berths.
On the first day of the run from Honolulu to Hilo, when the sea was calm as usual, the Claudine made its way along the leeward side of the islands. First there was Oahu, then Molokai, the steamer stopping at small ports to exchange passengers or to take on or deliver equipment for local sugar mills. By sunrise of the second day, the Claudine reached the old whaling port of Lahaina on the west side of Maui. Now it was a fast sail to the east side of the island—with a few stops—the captain anxious to reach the last port on the east side of Maui before noon so that he would have a full six hours of daylight to make it across the strait between Maui and Hawaii.
In the strait, the sea swells were always high and the wind was always strong. As it was often said by those who made the passage frequently, a ship never sailed between Maui and Hawaii, it lurched between the islands. One wonders how Helen Jaggar fared, this being her first time on a small ship in a rough sea.
If the captain was lucky, by sunset his ship was in the calm water of the leeward side of Hawaii. The Claudine made one stop at Kawaihae, then it was off again, this time around the north point of the island—and a twelve-hour sail along a windward coast.
Here sea swells were higher than those in the strait between Maui and Hawaii. Even under the best weather and sea conditions, the Claudine pitched and rolled wildly. Now almost all passengers were sick. But for those who could muster the strength in the early morning hours and stand just before sunrise, the view was spectacular.
The Claudine now passed close to high sea cliffs. Scoured into those cliffs in hundreds of places were narrow gulches where streams cascaded down, dropping the last few hundred feet into the sea. And above those cliffs, as one could see as dawn approached, was a wide swath of brilliant green, a continuous field of sugar cane. And above the cane was a belt of dark forest that, in turn, as one looked higher, graded into barren upland.
That the trip was nearly over—one can almost hear the sigh of relieved passengers—was signaled by an abrupt end of the cliffs and the Claudine’s entrance into Hilo Bay. To the left, forming the distant horizon, was the broad arched profile of the volcano Mauna Loa, still active; the most recent eruption was just two years before the Jaggars visited. To the right, equally majestic, though more conical in form, was Mauna Kea, often with snow on its summit. Its latest eruption was in prehistory. And where the lavas of Mauna Loa and Mauna Kea met at the shoreline was the town of Hilo.
As any resident or visitor could attest, Hilo was a place more readily sensed than seen. Its scores of whitewashed houses and small cluster of commercial buildings were all but hidden by trees and thick foliage. In a few places church spires rose above the foliage. The population of Hilo in 1909 was about six thousand, making it the second largest community in the islands. The bay in front of the town was three times larger than the harbor that serviced Honolulu, which meant Hilo had the potential for growth. And the fact that Hilo was growing could be seen by Thomas Jaggar as he stood on the deck of the Claudine and sailed into the bay.
A stone breakwater was under construction. When finished, it would run for two miles, providing protection again ocean surges, allowing large ships to enter in almost any sea conditions. On shore was a new wharf, also under construction, and a new warehouse where thousands of cases of pineapples and tens of thousands of hundred-pound bags of sugar could already be stored, waiting to be loaded on the ships that were then in the harbor. There were stacks of lumber cut from nearby forests, ordered by the Santa Fe Railway to be used as railroad ties. And cowhides from island ranches ready to be shipped for tanning. And hundreds of barrels of tallow that would be used to make candles. Stacks of wooden crates held a variety of tropical fruit—bananas, mangoes, papayas—and were destined for distant ports. It was all a sign of economic prosperity, a prosperity that, though Jaggar could not have known it, would be a factor in bringing him back to the islands.
The Claudine landed its passengers—there were twenty-five that day—on a small wharf. Nearby was a locomotive, already at full steam. And behind the locomotive were two passenger cars, spartan affairs with straight-back wooden benches and open windows with only curtains to protect those inside from strong sun or from rain.
Though exhausted, passengers from the Claudine boarded the train. It was one more day of travel to reach the summit of Kilauea.
The tracks ran straight through fields of cane, the different heights and different hues indicating different stages of maturity. At five miles, the train plunged into a forest of moss-covered trees and hanging vines. “A burst of tropical jungle,” wrote one traveler who had made the trip many years earlier, “I could not have imagined anything so perfectly beautiful.” Here nature “rioted in the production of wonderful forms, as if the moist, hot-house air encouraged her in lavish excesses.”
At ten miles from Hilo, the train left the forest and entered yet another cane field, making its first stop soon after at the Olaa Sugar Mill, the largest sugar mill on the islands which processed cane from the largest sugar plantation on the islands. Here some passengers left and others boarded. Then the train was off again, this time slower as it started the long climb up the side of the volcano. The rise was gradual, a steady increase in elevation indicated only by a growing coolness of the air. Taking advantage of the train’s slower speed, the conductor often reached out with a gloved hand and snapped off a stalk of ripe cane. He then cleaned it with a machete and handed small pieces to passengers.
At twenty miles, three hours from Hilo, the train again entered a forest. This one was of huge ohi’a trees, a native hardwood, and giant ferns, some of the latter more than twenty feet high. Soon the train reached its last stop. Here volcano-bound passengers boarded a stagecoach, which Helen Jaggar remembered many years later as “a California buckboard affair, but higher and holding a dozen or more passengers.” Here she picks up the narrative.
“The driver’s name was Manuel, a Portuguese man, as lean as his team, swarthy and perched on the extreme front edge of his seat with his elbows out as though to help the poor beasts over the road. Instead of calling to them or swearing at them, he controlled them with a shrill whistle. When he wanted speed, the whistle would be the shrillest, most strident thing ever heard. When he wanted them to slack, his whistle became a caress.”
The last miles were slightly steeper than those after the sugar mill and passed through a forest of scrubby ohi’a trees and thick brush. Open spaces covered with grass were now common. The elevation was nearly 4,000 feet and the air was distinctly cool. Occasionally, a crack could be seen on the side of the road where wisps of steam rose.
As the road finally leveled out, there was a gradual turn to the right, then one to the left. After the last turn was made, a large two-storied clapboard building came into view. The sides were painted a vivid yellow; the r
oof was bright red tin. A row of bushes, always in bloom, lined the road that led up to a portico where a short robust man with a wide handlebar mustache stood. He was Demosthenes Lycurgus, proprietor of the hotel. And this was the famous Volcano House at Kilauea volcano.
Lycurgus greeted the new arrivals as each person stepped down off the stagecoach. Then, with everyone assembled and the bags unloaded, he led them up a short flight of stairs to a verandah. From there, they passed through double glass doors, the panes etched with floral designs, and continued into the hotel lobby. A long elegantly carved reception desk ran along one wall, made of a local mahogany known as koa wood. Through one of the doors, as Lycurgus directed the attention of his new guests, was a ladies’ parlor with a piano. Through another was the smoking room for men. And through a third, off to the left of the lobby, was the main parlor.
Here the floor was covered with fine mats and rugs. Furnishings were mostly sofas and chairs made of rattan. The most striking feature was the far curved wall of windows.
Through those windows one could see that the hotel was built near the edge of a cliff. And that extending away from the base of the cliff was a great sunken plain, devoid of vegetation. Then, if one continued to stare and study the scene, one could see out on the plain, two miles from the hotel, the sharp outline of a circular crater. That, explained Lycurgus, who took pleasure in introducing the feature to new arrivals, was Halema’uma’u, the home of the volcano goddess Pele and the location of the famous lava lake.
The first written use of the name Halema’uma’u was by Count Pawel Edmund Strzelecki, who introduced himself as a Polish nobleman, though no legal claim to the title was ever established. He arrived in the Hawaiian Islands in 1838, visited Kilauea late that summer, wrote a letter about his visit, which was published in the newspaper The Hawaiian Spectator, and then left the islands. It was in the letter that he wrote the name of the crater as ale mau mau, which he said meant “the great Whole of the volcano.”
Hale-ma’uma’u is the accepted name of the crater today, but its meaning is very different from the one given by Strzelecki. Hale is the Hawaiian word for “house.” Ma’uma’u refers to the ‘ama’u fern, a small fern that grows in abundance on Kilauea and is one of the first plants to appear on a new lava flow. And so, the name Halema’uma’u literally means “fern house.” But there is another, more subtle meaning that is difficult to translate. It refers to a continuing battle between the volcano goddess Pele and the pig god Kamapua’a. In the fight, Pele uses the fire of the volcano as a weapon. As a creature of the forest, Kamapua’a relies on ferns to entangle and trap her.*
On a different note and to clarify a common misunderstanding, the great sunken plain at the summit of Kilauea is not a crater. It is a caldera, a term introduced to geology by Clarence Dutton after a visit to Kilauea in 1882. He chose the Spanish word caldera, which means “cooking pot,” to signify that the plain at the summit of Kilauea formed by collapse, much like oatmeal does when it is cooked in a pot and collapses when removed from heat. In this case, as Dutton envisioned it, the sunken plain is the top of a large crustal block that settled downward when a buried reservoir of molten lava was tapped and the lava was drained away and erupted from the volcano.
A mention must also be made of the type of volcano that Kilauea is; why its appearance is so different from the common notion of a volcano as a solitary cone with steep sides, such as Vesuvius or Mount Pelée. In geologic language, those are stratovolcanoes, a term first used in 1866, and owe their shapes to the fall of exploded material and to the eruption of highly viscous lava that can flow only short distances before cooling and turning solid. In comparison, the lava that was, and still is, erupted at Kilauea—and Mauna Loa—is highly fluid and forms broad sheets that can flow for many miles. Evidence of these sheets is clearly seen in the caldera wall at Kilauea that consists of layers of thin lava flows.†
Because of their broad profiles, Hawaiian volcanoes were originally known as dome volcanoes, also first used in 1866, though a more picturesque name has since been adopted. In 1911, two years after Jaggar made his first trip to Kilauea, a German geology student, Hans Reck, went to Iceland to search for a lost friend. He never found the friend, who apparently drowned when his boat overturned in a lake, but, from his wanderings in Iceland, Reck did contribute a new term to geology, Schildvulkane, or “shield volcano,” suggesting the low profile of Icelandic volcanoes resembled a warrior’s shield laid horizontally. Reck even took the next step and applied the new term to Hawaiian volcanoes, noting, as many had before him, that Icelandic and Hawaiian volcanoes were “analogous in all essential characters,” a view that that geologists continue to echo today.
The need to return soon to Honolulu to catch the next scheduled passenger ship to Japan limited the Jaggars’ stay at the Volcano House to three days. On each of those days, Thomas Jaggar made the long trek on foot to stand at edge of Halema’uma’u and see the lava lake. On the third and last day, he was accompanied by his wife.
The path to the crater began a hundred yards from the front of the hotel. Here one made a descent down the cliff, the path following a zigzag course along a series of steep slopes interrupted by an occasional broad shelf. It was a good foot trail maintained by hotel workers. At the bottom, 400 feet below the level of the hotel, one stood at the edge of a vast plain of congealed lava.
Now it was a straight course over two miles of hard lava. In places, the surface undulated, the black lava having frozen into giant waves. Elsewhere, the lava looked as if it had swirled as great eddies. Cracks where steam was rising had to be jumped or bypassed. The surface itself was one of black glass—“not deep black,” Helen would write, “but an iridescence of darkest blues and purples and greens, which might have beauty if it weren’t so devilish.” In spite of the frequent foot traffic, the trail remained rough and uneven beyond belief. And the volcanic glass was still sharp, capable of wearing down all types of footwear, given enough passages back and forth along the trail, even heavy hobnailed boots.
About three-quarters of the way to the crater, a little off a straight path, were the famous “hot postcard cracks” where visitors stopped to singe postcards that were later mailed to friends. The technique to singe a card was a simple one.
A person got upwind of a chosen hot crack, so as not to inhale unpleasant fumes, then, with a wooden stick that had been split at one end, inserted the card firmly and thrust the card into the crack to a depth of four or five inches. Within seconds, the card would either be toasted brown or burst into flames. If the latter happened, a new card was inserted and the whole procedure tried again. For those who had trouble mastering the technique, there was never a shortage of cards or wooden sticks. Each morning, hotel proprietor Lycurgus sent a boy with several sticks and hundreds of cards, instructing him to sell the cards a dozen at a time for 50 cents.
Just beyond the postcard cracks, the trail became steeper and the surrounding rocks were more jagged. Closer still and the surface was a jumble of rocky plates, similar in arrangement to the giant plates of ice that form where ice jams form on a frozen river. But here the rocks were hot to the touch, making it difficult to stand still in one place. Now progress was slow, the edges of upturned plates sharp enough to lacerate skin.
Within a few hundred feet of the crater rim, golden strands could be seen floating in the air. These were strands of volcanic glass, known as “Pele’s hair,” formed when wind blew through and caught molten lava as it spurted into the air. Closer still, and tiny black beads, teardrop in shape, filled the air. These, too, were of volcanic glass—tears of the goddess.
At last, the edge of Halema’uma’u was reached. In April 1909, when the Jaggars visited, the crater was nearly circular in form, about 1,500 feet in diameter. A hundred feet down was a wide ledge of black solidified. Another hundred feet down, covering the bottom of an oval inner pit, was a pool of molten lava, seething and roiling.
“The pit of boiling lava within the crater of Kila
uea is a spot of infinite excitement and fascination,” Helen Jaggar would remember of the experience. “Excitement because of the seemingly imminent danger of having the rim on which you are standing suddenly crumble and catapult you into the pit below, if you don’t lose your balance and fall in anyway—and fascination because of the complete instability of the lava below.”
“There isn’t a second’s pause in the ebb and flow of the lava,” Helen noted, “the satiny, black-grey crust forms only to be broken at once by the lightning-like cracks in the surface exposing the most livid-flame colored molten lava.” She continued. “All around the edge of the lava lake rose sheets of steam, tinted, by the color of the lava, to the most lovely shades of pink from delicate shell pink to deep rose.”
In places, red incandescent lava rose up and broke through the black-grey crust, causing the crust to rip apart and drift away as great detached sheets. In one corner was a jet of lava that spouted at nearly regular intervals of about one minute. With each spout, it flung molten lava nearly a hundred feet into the air. Demosthenes Lycurgus named it “Old Faithful” in recognition of the famous geyser at Yellowstone—and to attract visitors to the volcano and to his hotel.
Helen Jaggar discovered that she had to frequently retreat and sit well back from the edge to keep the radiant heat from the lava lake from burning and blistering her face, crawling forward only occasionally to peek. She and her husband watched the lava lake for more than two hours. Hardly a word was spoken between them. They sat there, she recalled, “with absolute no realization of the passage of time.”
Her husband also recorded the scene. “Looking down into the crater of this active volcano,” he wrote, “the pit presents an orange, almost white-hot bed of undulating lava, pounding on the rock shores and rolling like surf.” He also noted the lake was covered with a thick black crust through which a few fires “flowed with an unearthly gleam.” The crust consisted of a half-dozen sheets, each one slowly shifting. At times, one of the sheets would pitch up suddenly like a giant ship, then slide under the surface of the lake. That would set the entire surface of the lake in motion, transforming what had been a relatively placid dark lake into a mass of red fire as more sheets tipped over and sank, causing the surface to boil at dozens of points, each one spraying molten lava and filling the air with Pele’s tears and hair.