The Last Volcano Page 19

  Farley was twenty-seven years old. She was a recent graduate of Vassar College where she had been president of the French Club. She had acted in amateur stage productions, the story of “Pyramus and Thisbe” taken from Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream being one of them. After her graduation from Vassar, she had taught high school for two years in Newton, Massachusetts. Born in Boston, her mother was part Hawaiian and her father was a graduate of MIT. The Farley family had a substantial amount of wealth as owners of a major mercantile business in Boston.

  When she met Jaggar, Farley was on her way to visit relatives in the Hawaiian Islands, where she planned to stay an undetermined length of time. In fact, she visited the Volcano House for a few weeks in July 1912, soon after arriving in the islands. On October 1, Jaggar hired her as his receptionist and secretary.

  In November the two of them traveled together to Honolulu to attend meetings with Thurston and other members of the Hawaiian Volcano Research Association. Emily Farley left Honolulu on the morning of November 26 and sailed back to Hilo. That afternoon Helen Jaggar and the children arrived in Honolulu.

  *Fortunately, when Jaggar returned to Boston, he found that the health of his children was not serious. Both had had whooping cough and his son had suffered from laryngitis, but both were soon in good health.

  †Actually, Bishop Museum had tried to start its own volcano observatory between Perret’s departure in October 1911 and Jaggar’s return in January 1912.

  CHAPTER TEN

  A LOVE LOST

  By the time Helen Jaggar left Boston, both the stone mansion at Brookline and the seaside cottage at Lewis Bay in West Yarmouth had been sold. So had the Peerless Touring Car. Most of the wedding presents and household furnishing had been auctioned off. In September 1912 Helen and the children traveled by train to San Francisco. The Pullman car they rode in was filled with forty-one pieces of luggage, a baby’s hamper, a crib and two refrigerated boxes of milk. While in San Francisco, they stayed with her parents. On the eve of their scheduled departure, she became mysteriously ill and was taken to a hospital.

  Six weeks of recuperation followed. Finally, on November 19, she and the children sailed, arriving in Honolulu seven days later. Her husband was on the dock to greet them.

  The Jaggar family, now reunited, stayed in Honolulu for two days, then left for Hilo. As their ship departed the harbor, her husband pointed to another ship and said that it would soon be sailing on an expedition to the South Pacific and that he expected to be on it. Helen said she was surprised that he had allowed her to leave San Francisco without telling her about the expedition and his departure. She protested vigorously about being left alone so soon after her arrival. Well, he said, she could return to Honolulu. That was nearly as bad, she answered, because she did not know anyone in Honolulu except for a few acquaintances she had just met on the ship. The possibility of him joining the expedition was discussed again over the next few days. In the end, the ship sailed without him.

  The Jaggar family settled into a cottage owned by the Volcano House and located a short walking distance from the hotel. It consisted of two small rooms. The front one served as a parlor and was barely large enough for two chairs. The larger one was the bedroom and came furnished with a dresser, a small table and a bed. The baby’s crib would fill most of the remainder of the floor space.

  They took their meals at the Volcano House restaurant. Helen now saw the hotel as “a roughish place” where “the rooms were bare to barrenness, the food execrable, and the milk supply the worst [she had] ever seen.”

  There was a continuous procession of people who came to stay at the hotel, but few of them interested her. “I was not at all happy,” she would remember of this time. Before she was married, she was living in a mansion in San Francisco, a city of dazzling lights and endless shops and where there was always a party to attend. She had given that up for Boston and its gloomy weather and snowy winters. At least in Boston one could attend a stage play or listen to an orchestra performance. But, here, on an island in the Pacific, at the top of a volcano where it rained frequently and where every night was dark and cold, where she was miles from any town of any consequence and was surrounded by a dense forest, where there was little or no social life and no stage or music performances—this is where she now lived. And her life soon became worse.

  For the past few years, her father-in-law, Bishop Jaggar, had been living in southern France serving in the mostly honorary position as head of the American Protestant Churches of Europe. On December 12, 1912, he died. The news arrived in Hawaii three days later. His son then did an odd thing. The next morning he abruptly left Kilauea and sailed to Honolulu, arriving late the following afternoon. He stayed one night and sailed the next morning back to Hilo. What did he do in Honolulu for one night? From the brief account left by Helen Jaggar, he probably went to see Emily Farley.

  Thomas Jaggar was back in Hilo on December 20. He and Helen spent the night at the Hilo Hotel. The next morning they were out shopping for Christmas presents for their children when they got caught in a torrential rain. As Helen remembered the day, “We had been out driving, and as soon as we got out of the carriage near the hotel the rain pelted on the pavement so hard that it bounced up almost to our knees. We were drenched before we got inside, but that was just the beginning.”

  The rain now fell harder, making it impossible to see the other wing of the hotel a hundred feet away. Then the rain stopped as quickly as it had come. “In that hot climate so much water is distinctly unpleasant,” wrote Helen, “for as soon as the downpour ends, everything steams. And believe me, we steamed that day.”

  As soon as the rain ended, her husband said he had something to tell her. He said that Emily Farley would be arriving that day. What he said next Helen refused to ever reveal, except to write, “From the moment he finished the story I would have nothing more to do with Mr. Jaggar than allow him in the house.”

  Three days later was Christmas Eve. The Jaggars spent it in their cottage at the Volcano House. A native ohi’a tree with bright red blossoms was their Christmas tree. The children received gifts the next morning in their stockings.

  The next day the Jaggar family sailed for Honolulu. Helen and the children settled themselves in a hotel room. Her husband stayed one night. He returned to Hilo and resumed the work of the observatory.

  Exactly a year earlier, the surface of the lava lake had been within thirty feet of the crater rim and the lake had covered more than two hundred acres. Now it was four hundred feet down and covered less than one hundred acres. Over the next few months, it continued to drop and diminish in size.

  On January 7 Jaggar began making hourly measurements of the dimensions and the level of the lake. He did so for twenty-two consecutive hours, forced to end his effort when heavy rain fell, which created fumes that were so thick that he could no longer see the bottom of the crater. He returned the next day and made an additional twenty hours of measurements, again retreating during a heavy rain.

  On the evening of January 18 he was standing at the edge of Halema’uma’u when another rainstorm struck, this one more intense than the previous two. This time he stayed, curious to see what would happen as the cold rain chilled the lake. During the first half-hour of heavy rain, the rate of churning of the lake noticeably slowed. Eventually, it stopped. He remained at his post. An hour passed, then two. Slowly lava started to fountain at one end of the lake, splashing molten rock high on the crater wall. After several minutes, that activity stopped and the scene was again dark. He could hear sputtering and hissing. Then, without any forewarning, a huge lava fountain broke out in the middle of the lake and lit up the entire sky. The entire surface of the lake started to churn again. All the while, heavy rain continued to fall.

  A month later he had a minor mishap at the crater. He was alone and busy making measurements when a wind came up and blew his notes for the last four days into the crater. He knew that one of the long rope ladders used by Lancast
er and others to descend into the crater was stored nearby in a crevasse. He found the crevasse and retrieved the rope. He used it to descend as far as he could. Standing on the bottom rung of the ladder, he could see his notes about ten feet away. He stepped onto a narrow ledge and inched his way closer to the notes. When he had gone as far as he could, he used a long stick that he had brought with him and had prepared with a safety pin tacked to one end to retrieve his valuable notes.

  By mid-March the lake level was five hundred feet down. Now there was only a small pool of lava barely visible from the crater rim. The lake of lava that had originally attracted him to Kilauea had drained away slowly. On April 1 Emily Farley resigned. Six days later, molten lava was last seen in Halema’uma’u. The next day Jaggar left for Honolulu. He had decided to reconcile with his wife.

  Helen had moved into a small house where, as she would write, she and her children “might have been very comfortable if I had not been so distressed.” Her husband visited, but to no avail. He could not persuade her to return to Kilauea. Instead, after another month, continuing to despair over her situation, Helen sent a telegram to the only person she knew she could rely on—her father.

  George Kline arrived in Honolulu ten days later. Helen was thrilled to see him. But the thrill did not last.

  Her father reminded her that he had tried to prevent the marriage, but Helen had refused to call it off. Now she had two children. The possibility of divorce, he said, should not be considered. It was her duty to follow her husband wherever he chose to live and no matter what he decided to do.

  For two weeks Helen argued with her father and her husband. One afternoon she met with them and two lawyers. All four men tried to dissuade her from leaving the islands and returning to San Francisco. But she was determined. Finally, her father gave in. On May 16 she had one last private meeting with her husband. Later that day, Helen and her children and her father departed for San Francisco. Her husband returned to the volcano.

  When the ship arrived in San Francisco, Helen’s mother, her sister and two brothers were waiting on the dock. It was a cold reception and a solemn trip home. Once back, her mother informed Helen that the cook had been dismissed and that Helen would be taking her place. Furthermore, her six-year-old son would be restricted to a room in the attic whenever his grandmother was in the house. “He looks like his father,” Ella Kline said. “I don’t want him near me.” As for the baby girl, she could sleep in a crib in Helen’s room on the second floor.

  For a year there were repeated shouting matches between Helen and her brothers. Helen cried a lot. Finally, her father secreted money to her and she and the two children moved to a house south of the city. A divorce was filed on July 3, 1914, and finalized a year later. Thomas Jaggar seldom saw his children again.

  Though molten lava was no longer visible in the crater after April 1913, Jaggar was not idle after he returned to the volcano. The concrete walls and floor of the Whitney vault leaked during heavy rains, and so all of the scientific equipment had to be disassembled and removed and the walls and floor sealed and repainted. There was also an endless parade of visitors. Most were just curious. Others Jaggar had invited because they seemed to have something unusual to offer in the study of volcanoes.

  One of those who Jaggar invited was Jehu Frederick Haworth of Edgeworth, Pennsylvania, who had made his money in the grocery business and who used it to develop larger and larger kites that could be used to take aerial photographs. Haworth had already done aerial surveys of small sections of two cities, Pittsburgh and Baltimore. He came to Kilauea in the spring of 1913 to photograph Kilauea.

  Haworth arrived with a giant kite that he had designed specifically for use at the volcano. It had an aluminum frame covered with silk. It measured eleven feet in length and nine feet in width and was four feet tall. In a strong wind, Haworth estimated it could lift 160 pounds. It was tethered from a giant reel that held five miles of piano wire, which, when completely unwound, allowed a kite to fly as high as a mile above the ground. The reel was set in a large wooden cradle. It was turned by the operation of a small gasoline engine.

  Haworth and Jaggar chose a site on a small flat of land between the Volcano House and the observatory building to set up the reel and launch the kite. It took two hours to fly it with a camera attached to the desired height. Haworth triggered the shutter by an ingenious device that he had invented and called a “messenger.” It resembled a small umbrella on rollers. When all was ready, the “messenger” would catch the wind and run up the piano wire and trip the shutter. Then it took two more hours to reel the kite back in.

  Haworth took more than a hundred aerial photographs of Kilauea, some showing great detail. Jaggar sent them to George Curtis who he had met when they had sailed to Mount Pelée and whose specialty was making clay models of American cities. Curtis made two models of Kilauea that were on display for years, both in museums, one at Harvard and the other in Washington, D.C.

  The year 1913 ended with a prolonged rainstorm. No molten lava had been seen since early April, and, yet, he continued to make a daily trip to stand at the edge of Halema’uma’u, noting whatever changes, no matter how subtle, had occurred. On New Year’s Day, he noted the crater was shaped like a funnel, the bottom more than six hundred feet down. The previous night a slab of crusted lava had slid down from the wall and was now covering part of the crater floor. He could hear a faint hissing. Puffs of steam were rising from a small hole in the floor. He timed the intervals between puffs and determined they varied from twenty to forty seconds.

  He continued to make a daily trek to the crater, even though the first week of the New Year was windy and cold. And so was the second week. On January 13 the rain increased and seemed to drown everything. Now even the crater floor was not visible because of the great volume of fog the inclement weather had added to the normally thick volcanic fumes. On that day, again standing at the edge of Halema’uma’u, he wrote in his notes that he could not imagine a more miserable condition.

  That evening, back at the Volcano House, he saw a newspaper headline: The volcano Sakurajima in Japan had exploded. More than twenty thousand people were fleeing for their lives. Jaggar left the next day for Japan.

  Sakurajima is an island that sits at the entrance to Kagoshima Bay at the southern end of Kyushu, one of the main islands of Japan. The volcano is almost identical in form and in size to Vesuvius. It exploded frequently during the 18th century, though most were minor ones. Since 1799 the volcano had been quiet.

  That is, until early January 1914 when the people who lived on Sakurajima thought they were feeling slight shakings. They contacted local government officials, fearing an eruption was imminent. The officials contacted local scientists who examined the records from the few seismographs that then existed in Japan and decided that the shaking was not coming from Sakurajima but from other volcanoes that had erupted recently. The scientists announced that there was no immediate concern about Sakurajima.

  At 3:41 A.M. on January 11 the ground shook so violently that people were awakened. A dozen more strong shakings occurred later the same day. The people of Sakurajima wasted no time; they gathered what possessions they could carry and headed for the shoreline where they used whatever means were available—fishing boats, sampans, makeshift rafts—to ferry themselves off the island and across the quarter-mile-wide strait that separated the island from the mainland. The exodus continued the entire day and throughout the next night. At 10:05 the next morning the first explosion rocked the island, an outburst on the west side. Ten minutes later there was a second explosion, this one of the east side where the exodus was still underway. Explosions continued from both sides, building in intensity. The climax came early in the evening when a fountain of fire rose several hundred feet above the west side of the volcano. From the base of the fountain poured a vast Niagara of fire, the brilliant streams of molten rock flowing quickly through orchards of orange and cherry trees and over terraced fields of sugar cane and into the
sea.

  The eruption was still in progress, though much diminished, when Jaggar arrived on February 3. The activity on the west side had ended. The eruption on the east side was still going, three streams of lava pouring into the sea. By the time he arrived, the strait of water between the island and the mainland was already filled. Where the sea had been as much as two hundred feet before the eruption, there now stood a lava flow as much as three hundred feet high.

  He hired a local man who led him up the side of the volcano. Partway up the guide lost his way, the two men blinded by a heavy shower of ash and cinders. Eventually, the air cleared and the guide and Jaggar continued, reaching to within a few hundred yards of the site where lava was gushing out of the ground and flowing toward the sea.

  A few days later, Jaggar and several others rowed out in a small boat to get a close look at the place where lava was entering the sea. As the small boat made its way, Jaggar trailed a thermometer in the water. When the boat was over the edge of the submarine flow and Jaggar and the others could see red incandescent rocks directly beneath them, he checked the thermometer. The temperature was 212°F (100°C), the boiling point of water. Small bubbles and steam were rising all around them. They continued, the boat crossing over the flow. Jaggar continued to check the thermometer. It rose to 240°F, then 260°F. The highest temperature he measured was 280°F (138°C), and then it fell. “It was a singular experience,” he wrote. “With steaming water all around us, we had the unpleasant thought that if we should capsize we would be cooked.” After returning to land, he walked along a beach, finding the carcasses of boiled horses and cattle and seeing thousands of dead fish floating in the sea.

  Jaggar recounted the details of this and other adventures at Sakurajima in an article he wrote for National Geographic magazine. In the same article, he did what he probably considered his professional duty and praised the Japanese government for the quick response in organizing the evacuation of the island of Sakurajima. The success, he wrote, was owed “to good luck . . . to the instinct of people, to the wisdom of government, and to scientific societies.” As already seen, the praise was not truly deserved.