The Last Volcano Read online

  The Hawaiian Islands was then an independent country, a kingdom, and the ruling monarch was King David Kalakaua. In 1875 Kalakaua signed a treaty with the United States that allowed certain Hawaiian goods, mainly sugar and rice, to enter the United States tax-free. In exchange, the Kingdom of Hawaii granted the United States access to Pearl Harbor as a military naval base. The treaty brought economic prosperity to the islands, which strengthened Kalakaua’s political control, allowing him to form and dismiss cabinets and to spend money at will. It was the growing autocracy—and a desire for the islands to have a closer tie with the United States—that caused Thurston to enter politics.

  He became a political firebrand, writing editorials and making public speeches accusing Kalakaua of corruption. In 1886 he sought, and won, election to the island legislature. He then joined a secret organization of like-minded individuals who, on June 30, 1887, acted, forcing Kalakaua to accept a new constitution, the so-called Bayonet Constitution, that stripped the king of most of his executive powers and put the powers in the hands of cabinet members. They then forced Kalakaua to make new cabinet appointments, which included naming Thurston as the Minister of Interior.

  The brash 29-year-old now had considerable control over the daily running of the kingdom. He was in charge of the immigration office. He decided on the location of new harbors and where new bridges and government buildings would be constructed and which new roads would be built.

  In 1889 he began what was, up to that time, the largest construction project in the islands: a thirty-mile-long carriage road that would link Hilo and the summit of Kilauea. A few months after construction was begun, he made a trip to inspect the new road. It was on that trip that Thurston decided to buy the Volcano House hotel.

  The first commercial enterprise to cater to visitors—and to call itself the “Volcano House”—opened in 1846. It consisted of a small thatched hut located close to the caldera rim. A second, larger Volcano House, also a thatched hut, was built in 1866. It had a single main room with a brick fireplace. High grass partitions separated bedrooms from the main room. This was the Volcano House where Mark Twain stayed for a few days and wrote the short story “A Strange Dream” about Kilauea and the search for ancient Hawaiian bones. A third Volcano House, the one that Thurston would buy, was completed in 1876. This one was constructed of wood planks cut from the surrounding ohi’a forest. It, too, had a brick fireplace, as well as wooden doors with brass knobs and window frames with glass panes shipped from San Francisco. There were six guest rooms. Each one contained a single bed. Up to three guests were assigned to a room.*

  As soon as he purchased the hotel, Thurston decided to expand it. He added a dozen rooms, a new kitchen and a dining room and separate parlors for men and for women. Kilauea had been erupting vigorously for years when Thurston bought the Volcano House—a lava lake roiling and surging within Halema’uma’u—and so he had no trouble attracting investors. On May 5, 1891, he was in Honolulu and announced the incorporation of the Kilauea Volcano House Company. That night the floor of Halema’uma’u collapsed and the lava lake drained away. Three weeks later, much to his relief and the relief of his investors, molten rock reappeared—and visitors kept coming to the volcano.

  Earlier the same year King Kalakaua died and his sister, Lili’uokalani, became the ruling monarch. The events that followed have been told many times. Here just a few key ones will be summarized.

  Soon after Lili’uokalani became queen, the islands’ economy collapsed. The economy was based on Hawaiian sugar entering the United States without payment of an import duty. It was part of a reciprocity treaty that allowed the United States exclusive use of Pearl Harbor for its Navy ships. But Congress eliminated the favored trade status of the Kingdom of Hawaii, which collapsed the islands’ economy.

  Thurston was not yet involved in the sugar industry, but he was involved in promoting a new industry—tourism. In May 1891, he offered the first package tours to the Hawaiian Islands: a weeklong stay at his Volcano House. The tour was so successful that, in August 1892, he and others organized the Hawaii Bureau of Information, a forerunner of today’s Hawaii Tourist Bureau. A month later he was in the United States promoting Hawaiian tourism. He took the opportunity to visit Washington, D.C., and meet with several government officials, asking what their reaction would be if action was taken against the Hawaiian government and Queen Lili’uokalani was ousted. According to Thurston, those who he met said they would be “exceedingly sympathetic” if such action was taken.

  On January 14, 1893, after closing a contentious legislative session—the Queen’s supporters and her detractors often trading accusations of favoritism and corruption—Lili’uokalani announced a new constitution that restated her right to rule. Thurston and others saw their moment had come.

  Three days later, on January 17, they confronted Lili’uokalani who, under protest, transferred control of the government to them. Thurston then raced to Washington, D.C., to ask for annexation. But the politics of the United States had changed. The new president, Grover Cleveland, elected the previous November, was not sympathetic to a Hawaiian revolution and thought the revolutionaries should give control of the islands back to Lili’uokalani. Disregarding his advice, the Republic of Hawaii was proclaimed on July 4, 1894. On that day, Thurston and his family were en route to Hilo and Kilauea. He planned to settle at the Volcano House for a long stay.

  The volcano was in a spectacular eruption when he arrived. The level of the lava lake was the highest ever recorded, twelve feet above the rim of Halema’uma’u, held high by a natural levee of solidified lava. People were rushing from Hilo to see the activity. The Volcano House was filled with guests. By July 10, the lake surface was thirty feet above the rim. Then, the next morning, when Thurston awoke and looked out the hotel’s windows, all he could see were great clouds of dust rising from the crater.

  He and dozens of guests rushed to the crater. He would stay the remainder of the day and most of the following night. At the end, after the dust cleared the next morning, he saw that the crater floor was more than six hundred feet down from its previous level, and that no molten rock was in sight. The entire lava lake had drained away, the molten lava flowing back into the volcano through a crack deep inside the crater. In fact, molten rock would seldom be seen at Kilauea for the next several years. And so the Kilauea Volcano House Company became a dead business.

  In 1898, the politics in Washington, D.C., changed again. The United States was at war with Spain and needed a way station for its Navy ships in the Pacific. And so, on July of that year, Congress annexed the Hawaiian Islands. Four months later, now assured of a stable market for Hawaiian sugar, Thurston organized the Olaa Sugar Company near Hilo. His would be the largest sugar plantation and the largest sugar mill in the islands.

  From the beginning, the Olaa Sugar Company lost money. Some of the loss was from a drop in sugar prices. Most of the loss was due to an extraordinary run of wet weather that caused the stalks to rot. Some people said the company was failing because of the name. “Olaa” signified a revered place: a forest that had been used since ancient times for the gathering of medicinal plants and for making the Hawaiian cloth, tapa, from the mamaki tree which grew in the forest in profusion. But, now, where the forest had stood, Thurston had his sugar plantation.

  Company creditors called in loans. Thurston defaulted twice. The third time the creditors stood firm. And he was forced to sell another failing property: the Volcano House.

  He sold the hotel to George Lycurgus, a Greek immigrant who had been a supporter of the Hawaiian monarchy. In fact, Lycurgus had been part of a counterrevolution, an act that led him to being jailed for a year.

  After repairing the long neglected hotel and improving the furnishings—he replaced the old corn-husk mattresses with factory-made, straw-filled ones—Lycurgus reopened the Volcano House on Valentine’s Day in 1905. A week later, Kilauea roared back to life.

  “Two fissures are pounding out hot lava,�
� reported one eyewitness to the unexpected eruption. Another wrote: “Lava overflowing, covering apparently about an acre. Apparently increasing.”

  That night, for the first time in more than ten years, the Volcano House was filled to capacity. There were so many guests that some slept on the new billiard table in the men’s parlor. Others slept on the floor or in hallways, anywhere that could be found. By the third day of the eruption, guests were arriving from Honolulu.

  Thurston’s fortunes also changed after he sold the Volcano House. The price of sugar rose and the weather improved. His sugar plantation and mill was finally showing a profit. And he used the money to expand his influence. He successfully lobbied Congress to build a breakwater in Hilo Bay and to contract with one of his new companies to construct it. The stone came from a quarry owned by Thurston and was carried by a railroad company owned by Thurston. The Santa Fe Railway contracted with him for railroad ties, which were cut at a new lumber mill he owned. And he was building a new wharf and a new warehouse at Hilo Bay.

  He also began to lobby Congress to make the summit of Kilauea volcano into a national park. That way the unique character of the volcanic landscape would be preserved for generations. A national park would also preclude any further commercial development at the summit. Only the Volcano House would exist. And he was already planning on how to get ownership of the hotel back from Lycurgus.

  It was during this contentious political, economic and volcanic back-and-forth in Hawaii that Jaggar appeared with his idea to establish a volcano observatory at Kilauea. Such an observatory would add to the attraction of Kilauea as a tourist destination. By then, Thurston also owned the Pacific Commercial Advertiser, the largest newspaper in the islands. He immediately saw a kindred spirit in Jaggar, as well as another means to expand his influence, and would use the newspaper to promote Hawaiian tourism and his several businesses—and the scientific work Jaggar was proposing for Kilauea.

  Back in Boston, Jaggar did not consider MIT’s decision to keep the money from the Whitney estate for a project near Boston to be a final one. So he went to see the person who ran the estate directly, Anne Rebecca Whitney.

  A tiny woman with short curly silver hair, Miss Whitney, born in Watertown, Massachusetts, in 1821, had accomplished many things. She had been an abolitionist and was now an ardent suffragist. She was a noted sculptress of considerable and controversial reputation. Her first major work was a marble statue that showed a clothed Lady Godiva ready to disrobe. Another early work was entitled “Africa” and showed a recumbent female figure rising and awakening from freedom. Whitney was an advocate of the public financing of education for former slaves. She also campaigned for the conservation of forest long before Theodore Roosevelt entered the White House and made the cause a popular one.

  In 1904, after the death of her aunt, Caroline Rogers Whitney, Anne Whitney inherited the family fortune. She used it to support the performing and visual arts. She underwrote performances of orchestras and the production of stage plays. She traveled to Europe where she purchased paintings, donating many of them to American museums.

  In 1906, after the San Francisco earthquake, she asked one of the trustees of her estate, Charles Stone, what she might do to help prevent such future disasters. Stone was then also a member of MIT’s Executive Committee and he suggested a donation of $750 to purchase a Bosch-Omori seismograph for MIT. One was purchased and it arrived in November 1908. Then, after the Messina earthquake and the deaths of more than 100,000 people, she again asked what she might contribute. This time Stone suggested a donation of $10,000 to establish a laboratory at MIT for the study of earthquakes near Boston. Again, she donated the money. Now Jaggar went to see her and ask for more.

  As expected, he was charming at their meeting, but Whitney was not one who succumbed to charm. She wanted to know particulars. And so Jaggar laid out his plan.

  A laboratory to study earthquakes should be established near Boston. And it would be the headquarters for a worldwide network of stations located at the most dynamic parts of the planet. The next station should be at the summit of Kilauea where earthquakes were numerous and where volcanic activity was continuous. The next logical place was Alaska, then in Panama where the United States was building a canal, then the Philippines and Puerto Rico, recently acquired possessions of the United States where earthquakes were also numerous.

  Whitney asked how much money was needed.

  “$100,000,” he answered.†

  Her reaction is unrecorded. But, the next day, MIT President Maclaurin and MIT Executive Committee member Stone went to see her.

  Stone later wrote to Jaggar saying that he and Maclaurin “discussed the whole matter with her.” She agreed to increase her latest donation to $25,000 to establish “a Research Laboratory of Physical Geology at MIT.” As to work at Kilauea, Stone wrote that he still had “some doubt about the wisdom of an Hawaiian observatory.”

  And so the matter rested—until nature intervened.

  On April 13, 1910, an earthquake shook central Costa Rica, destroying many buildings and killing nearly a thousand people in the capital city of San José. Three weeks later, on May 4, a stronger earthquake struck the same region. It came in the evening when people were at their dinner tables. To at least one who survived, the second shaking had come on “like the snap of a whip.” Again, nearly a thousand people died. The United Fruit Company, which owned much of the national debt of Costa Rica, was headquartered in Boston. Its president was Francis Hart. Hart was also the Treasurer of MIT.

  After the second earthquake, Hart summoned Jaggar to his office and asked him to go to Costa Rica and determine if another disaster were imminent. The United Fruit Company would pay all of his expenses.

  Jaggar traveled by train to New Orleans where he boarded one of the snow-white steamers owned by the fruit company. Six days later, he arrived in Limón, Costa Rica. From there, it was another train trip to San José where he spent the next week making a map that showed the degree of earthquake damage. That was followed by a week climbing two nearby volcanoes, Irazú and Poas.

  After Costa Rica, he went north to Guatemala where he tried to find passage to the Hawaiian Islands, but the closest steamer that sailed to the islands was in California. And so he abandoned the attempt and headed south to Panama where a canal was under construction. After Panama, he returned to Boston.

  He had been away for only a month, but, during the month, the attitude at MIT toward him working at Kilauea had changed. Maclaurin and Stone were no longer opposed to such work, but they wanted it limited. The $25,000 from the Whitney estate would be an endowment. And Jaggar could draw on the first year of interest on the endowment—about $1,000—to work at Kilauea.

  It was a small sum. But it was a start. And Jaggar set upon deciding how to spend it.

  If one consulted one of the popular geology books of the time—Sir Archibald Geikie’s Text-book of Geology, which some still consider to be one of the best geology books ever written, or Thomas Bonney’s The Story of Our Planet or John Wesley Judd’s Volcanoes: What They Are and What They Teach—one would find a consensus of opinion as to what was the most important measurement to be made on an erupting volcano: the temperature of molten lava.

  Thermodynamics—the branch of physics concerned with heat and temperature and how they are related to energy and work—was still in its infancy, its laws having been in development since the 1750s. The originators of thermodynamics naturally gravitated toward volcanoes, nature’s furnaces, to test ideas about how heat was transferred and how heat was related to temperature. It was also understood that a measurement of lava temperature would also reveal the temperature of the earth’s interior. But, by the early 20th century, no one had yet measured the temperature of molten lava where it was spouting out of the ground.

  An early crude attempt to get some idea of the temperature of molten lava was made by Scottish chemist Sir James Hall who, in the spring of 1785, was traveling through Italy when he heard that
Vesuvius was pouring out lava. He hurried to the volcano. He managed to find a way close to a red-flowing river of molten rock, though still miles from where it was being erupted from the ground, and threw coins into it, watching to see which ones melted. The silver ones always did. The copper ones sometimes melted, an indication that the temperature of the lava flow close to where he was standing must be higher than the melting temperature of silver and close to that of copper. Years later, the melting temperature of copper would be determined to be about 2,000°F (about 1,100°C).

  Yale professor James Dwight Dana made a remarkably good guess of the temperature of a lava fountain at Kilauea years after a visit to the volcano in 1840. About forty years later, he was standing close to an iron furnace and decided that the lava fountain he had seen was slightly redder, and, hence, cooler, than the “white-hot” slag being drained from the furnace. The iron slag was known to be about 2,400°F (about 1,300°C). And so Dana guessed the temperature of molten lava at Kilauea must be a few hundred degrees cooler. It was a good guess, about 2,200°F (1,200°C), and that value became the gospel and was reported in geology textbooks. And, yet, it was a guess.

  As his first major experiment at Kilauea, Jaggar decided to settle the issue by measuring directly the temperature of molten lava spouted by Old Faithful. But how could he do it?

  He enlisted the aid of Arthur Day, the director of the Geophysical Laboratory at the Carnegie Institute of Washington and one of the country’s foremost authorities on high-temperature laboratory experiments, having determined the melting temperatures of many metals, including platinum, which has a melting temperature of 3,200°F (1,760°C), the highest melting temperature yet recorded for anything. Day had also measured the melting temperature of several different types of rocks, but all of his work had been done in a laboratory. He would have to design a device that could withstand the severe conditions of an erupting volcano.