The Last Volcano Read online

  On February 5, 1884, according to a front-page story in The New York Times, “There is much anxiety to-night concerning the condition of the Ohio River.” The story continued. “The Ohio River is full from Pittsburg to Cairo and is rising from Cincinnati downward.” That night a levee broke at Cincinnati and half of the city was flooded. Fortunately, the Jaggar house was spared, the floodwaters rising to within half-a-city block of its location. But a quarter million people were homeless. The rain continued. After another week the Ohio River was at the highest level ever recorded. And then the situation got worse.

  An ice storm unlike any known before or since swept down the Ohio Valley and turned the already swollen river into a raging sea. Waves battered and broke down buildings. The rain changed to sleet, freezing those who were homeless and sleeping outside.

  Young Jaggar watched as his father was stirred to action. Bishop Jaggar organized a local relief committee and issued a nationwide plea: “The river towns in the diocese are submerged. A great disaster is upon us. We need help for the present and coming need. Please speak for us.”

  Today it is all but impossible to realize how unusual—and controversial—such an appeal for humanitarian aid from the entire nation once was, but the United States was then more sectionalized than it is now. Many people felt that communities should provide for themselves, even after disasters. But Bishop Jaggar was a new type of clergyman and he was preaching a new type of doctrine, one that would deeply influence his son and that came to be known as the Social Gospel.

  Born in 1839 in New York City, the future bishop liked to tell people he was the perfect New Yorker, Puritan Long Islander on his father’s side and Dutch New Yorker on his mother’s. He often repeated the story that the Jaggars of Long Island were descended from two brothers who had arrived on the Mayflower, a claim that cannot be substantiated because no complete passenger list is known to exist. What is known is that he was a direct descendant of Jeremiah Jaggar, a master of trading ships in the West Indies who arrived in New England sometime before 1646. Jeremiah fought in the Pequot Wars and was one of the founders of Stamford, Connecticut. He was the first of a long line of Jaggars, each one successful in business and conservative in lifestyle, until the arrival of the first Thomas Jaggar.

  More impressionable than most young men, the first Thomas Jaggar found his inspiration in the speeches of popular clergy, such as Henry Ward Beecher, who railed his audiences against slavery and other evils. That awakened a deep sense of purpose in the young man who, on the eve of the Civil War, gave up a business career and accepted a religious calling. He was ordained a minister in the family’s church, the Protestant Episcopal Church. His first assignment was St. George’s on Long Island. Here he met Anna Louisa Lawrence, she also of an old New England family. They married in 1863 and started a family immediately.

  Soon a son, Harris King, was born. He lived five years. Two daughters followed, May in 1866 and Anna Louise in 1868. Then another son, Henry Anthony, was born and lived six months. In September 1870, Reverend Jaggar was named rector of the Church of the Holy Trinity in Philadelphia. Four months later, on January 24, 1871, after the family had moved to Philadelphia, the last child was born at home, christened Thomas Augustus Jaggar, Jr., by his father at Holy Trinity.

  By then, Reverend Jaggar was embroiled in a test of wills within the Episcopal Church. He was regarded as a low churchman, a derisive term that meant he was less concerned with spiritual matters and sacraments and more concerned with the social work the church could perform, the so-called Social Gospel. And that put him at odds with church officials.

  Throughout the 19th century, most clergy in the United States were preaching a doctrine of self-reliance and rugged individualism, two ideals that had served the country well during its western expansion. And many wanted to maintain such ideals. One prominent voice was William Graham Sumner, an Episcopalian minister and a professor of political and social sciences at Yale University. On one occasion, Graham testified in front of a Congressional committee, urging the members not to commit any money—public or private—for humanitarian work, saying such action would impede the natural progress of society and unfairly punished those who had worked hard and had succeeded. But a new type of poverty was rising in the world, one of total hopelessness and despair, due in large part to the rise of industry and the crowding of cities. And people such as Reverend Jaggar tried to counter it. He spoke in favor of hospitals and schools built specifically for the poor. He advocated for child-labor laws and mandatory attendance of children at school.

  But many church officials were not in favor of such reformist ideas. And so, in 1874, when a new diocese was made of the southern half of Ohio and it needed a bishop, many doubted that Jaggar would be appointed to the new position. But the people of Ohio campaigned in his favor. A council of bishops met. After a week of deliberations and much politicking—and by a margin of one vote—the council elected Jaggar. He moved his family to Cincinnati immediately where he would run the new diocese.

  Within five years, he doubled the number of ministers and increased the number of congregations by half. He organized auxiliaries to raise money to build hospitals and schools. His greatest triumph came in December 1883 when he opened the Hospital of the Protestant Episcopal Church, today the Children’s Hospital of Cincinnati, the first such institution in the country devoted exclusively to the treatment of children. It was the Social Gospel at work.

  And so it was natural that he acted when floodwaters rose around Cincinnati two months later and he made his plea. And his plea was answered. Tens of thousands of dollars were donated from people across the country. In fact, so much money was received that Bishop Jaggar sent aid to other areas devastated by the flood. Remembering the disaster years later, a friend would write, “The Bishop’s high strung and sympathetic nature was intensely stirred. He spared no effort in the work of relief and repair.” His work also had a strong influence on his son. Here, as the son could see, was the highest calling—to sacrifice oneself for the betterment of others—an ideal that he would voice years later as “craving service before self.”

  The Bishop’s fame and influence was rising fast. But there was a demon around the corner. In just a few more months, two more tragedies would strike and leave him a lost and listless man.

  On March 27, 1884, just two weeks after the floodwaters had receded and the Ohio River was again flowing at its normal level, the streets of Cincinnati were filled with rioters.

  The previous day a jury had decided that William Berner, a seventeen-year-old German immigrant, was guilty of murder and recommended the death sentence. Young Berner had, indeed, been part of a robbery, but not of a murder. The murder had been committed by a different German immigrant. But the people of Cincinnati were in no mood for leniency. Their city was in the midst of a crime spree; nearly a hundred murders had been committed the previous year. And so, when the judge saw the jury’s error and commuted young Berner’s sentence to twenty years, his action ignited the anger of the people of Cincinnati and they took to the streets.

  Known as the Cincinnati Riots, what followed where three days and nights of what is still one of the most destructive riots in American history. More than twenty thousand people fought police who were trying to reestablish order and harassed firefighters who were trying to contain the hundreds of fires set by the rioters. After a second night of violence, the governor of Ohio sent the National Guard to restore order. The soldiers did so with bayonets and Gatling guns, killing scores and wounding hundreds. Stray bullets passed through buildings, killing innocents. Some of those bullets struck the Jaggar house.

  After a third night of riots, after the courthouse was burned to the ground and young Berner had been secreted out of the city, Cincinnati was quiet again. Bishop Jaggar then addressed a crowd. He said the recent unrest had been “a concentrated French revolution” and that it had “cleared the political and moral atmosphere.” But now was the time for healing and to rebuild.
r />   He reminded the people of Cincinnati that they had been challenged by a flood the previous month and had survived. The city had then been tested by rioters, and had remained intact. He said he was optimistic and that a combination of preaching and generous donations and leadership could undo the destruction. He would probably have been one of those leaders if a third tragedy, this one deeply personal, had not already begun.

  During the days and nights of riots, both the bishop’s wife and older daughter, May, lay sick and confined to their beds. A doctor was called and examined both patients. He said Mrs. Jaggar was suffering from exhaustion and would recover. But the condition of the daughter was serious. Her illness was unknown.

  The mother did recover, but the daughter did not. She continued to weaken. Two months later, on June 2, 1884, with her father sitting by her bedside, May Jaggar, then nineteen years old, “the light of a refined and cultured Christian home,” died.

  Grieving more than is usual, even after the death of a child, Bishop Jaggar soon became crippled by his own mysterious illness. He went to Philadelphia and consulted Dr. Silas Mitchell, one of the country’s leading physicians, a longtime friend and the doctor who had delivered his son.

  “If you do not cease work instantly,” Mitchell told Jaggar, “you will quit it permanently in less than six months.”

  And so the Bishop made a decision. He would take a leave-of-absence and, seeking his own recovery, lead his family on a tour of Europe. It would be his son’s first great adventure.

  The Jaggar family of four—the Bishop, his wife, daughter Louise and son Thomas—sailed from New York on October 3, 1885, and arrived in Liverpool nine days later. En route, the Bishop organized a talent show among the passengers and sold tickets to a performance on the last night at sea. In Liverpool, he donated the cash receipts to the local seaman’s orphanage.

  In England, his son began a diary. He wrote in it twice a day, summarizing each day’s main events and commenting on the family’s general health. One of the most frequent entries was “Mama not being well.” It would be a common refrain throughout the trip.

  Anna Jaggar was, in fact, unwell most of her adult life, though what was the affliction was never determined. She was a melancholy woman. On the back of a large photographic portrait of herself—she is seen sitting stiffly in an upholstered chair, staring, rather severely, into the camera—she penciled the names of her five children, then circled the names of the three dead ones, writing of them, “My babies in heaven.” While in Europe, she seldom joined the others, choosing to confine herself in whatever hotel or apartment rooms her husband had secured. Meanwhile, the Bishop, despite his own illness and melancholy feelings, was determined to excite the imaginations of their two surviving children, leading them frequently on daylong trips.

  One of the first was to Winchester to see the famous cathedral. Another was to Salisbury to stand among the ruins of Stonehenge. An extended weekend was spent traveling to the Isle of Wight where the father and his two children took a drive to Carisbrooke Castle where, his son noted in his diary, “Charles I was imprisoned.”

  After two weeks in England, the family crossed the English Channel to Calais where they boarded a train that took them through Paris, then Milan, and finally to Florence, the heart of the Italian Renaissance, where they would reside for the next two months.

  The day trips resumed, though young Jaggar reacted with slight enthusiasm. After a day at the Academy of Fine Arts where Michelangelo’s giant statue of David is on display, he recorded little in his diary, except, “a colossal statue with a beautiful expression.” Two entire days were spent at the Pitti Palace, once the residence of the Medici family, now the home of endless galleries of fine art, including paintings by Caracciolo, Raphael and Leonardo da Vinci. Then it was two days at the Uffizi Gallery where, among many other masterpieces, Botticelli’s Birth of Venus is on display. The boy’s lack of enthusiasm is easy to understand. He had pent up energy and was being dragged through long corridors filled with unfamiliar art. But his attitude changed after his father took him to the National Central Library in Florence, one of the largest and most important libraries in the world.

  Here, in a room filled with stuffed animals and other curiosities of natural history, young Jaggar found a shelf of folios. Among them was a treasure: John James Audubon’s The Birds of America, all six volumes, and its letterpress companion, Ornithological Biography. Each volume was exquisitely bound in beautiful leather. And inside the six volumes were more than four hundred carefully etched, hand-colored prints—each one was two by three feet in size—depicting the private lives, in many cases at true scale, of America’s most fascinating birds.

  One notable print showed an osprey in flight, holding a fish in its talon. Another was of seven Carolina parrots clutching branches, their bodies positioned at different angles, their heads looking in different directions, the birds seemingly ready to fly out of the page. Three of the parrots have their mouths open and one could imagine hearing them twitter. To see these prints and page through them is to flood the senses. Added to this were the “bird biographies” in which Audubon recounted how he had made the drawings, interweaved with a personal account of the life he enjoyed in the wilderness.

  “The margins of the shores of the river at this season amply supplied with game,” Audubon wrote when tewnty-two years old and floating on a raft down the Ohio River, passing Cincinnati. It was the 1820s. “We fared well,” he wrote. “Whenever we pleased, we landed, struck up a fire and provided as we were with the necessary utensils, procured a good repast.”

  Here was something familiar to young Jaggar, who had walked the same section of the Ohio River with his father. He also learned that Audubon had lived in Cincinnati for a short time in 1822 while working at a museum stuffing and mounting birds for display and painting backgrounds for exhibits that showed outdoor scenes.

  Jaggar returned to the library often to re-examine the books. As years passed and he reflected on what he had found in the library, he came to idolize Audubon, writing that, in his opinion, Audubon had lived the perfect life, that of “a person who could sit motionless for hours watching birds in the wild, sketching and painting them.” Jaggar tried to emulate the great ornithologist, but without success. His drawings lacked the careful renderings, his lines the broad sweeps that brought life to Audubon’s paintings. Nevertheless, the encounter with Audubon’s books helped to set Jaggar on a path toward a study of natural history. The next stop his family would make in Europe would send him even deeper.

  After two months in Florence, the Jaggar family traveled again by train, this time south through Rome and on to Naples.

  As the train approached the city and its famous bay, Jaggar looked out the window, recording in his diary that “we would pass old ruins; in the distance were snow-clad peaks.” As they continued on, “the country grew more rugged,” and he saw “peasants dressed in white working the fields and peasant women driving very small donkeys with very big sacks on their backs.” Then “all at once we saw Vesuvius,” a high conical mountain with “thick masses of blackish yellow sulfurous smokes” rising from its peak.

  The train passed along the shoreline of Naples Bay “right under Vesuvius.” On the south side of the bay, the Bishop found lodging at a small hotel, securing a room with a view that looked toward Vesuvius. For the son, the choice was excellent. The first night he wrote: “We could see a bright flash come up from the crater every few minutes!”

  The timing of their arrival had been fortunate. Just two days earlier, lava had broken out high on the side of the volcano and was running as two streams down the volcano directly in view of their hotel.

  A recent winter storm had brought snow to the summit of Vesuvius, and so a trip to see the eruption was delayed. In the meantime, the Bishop took his two children to see the ancient Roman city of Pompeii, buried by an eruption of Vesuvius in 79 A.D.

  The exact location of the city had been forgotten until 1748 when the dig
ging of a water well on the side of Vesuvius uncovered several Roman artifacts. More digging uncovered more artifacts. Entire streets and the outlines of buildings were revealed. Eventually, an inscription was found on the side of a stone wall that confirmed the site was, indeed, Pompeii.

  Of the many exciting discoveries that have been made at the ancient site, few have been stranger than one made early in 1863 when workers, excavating a Roman house, broke into a small cavity that was filled with human bones, including a skull. The workers removed the bones and studied the inside walls of the cavity. They noticed a pattern of imprints that could have been made only by clothing and hair. There also seemed to be a facial expression preserved. The director of the excavation, Giuseppe Fiorelli, was called to the site.

  Fiorelli had the workers pour a mixture of plaster of Paris and glue into the cavity. After it set, he had them scrape away the surrounding material. What was revealed was the cast of a woman exactly as she had been at the moment of death. She was found lying on her back with an arm across her face, as if in an attempt to save her life. Other cavities were soon discovered. They, too, were filled with plaster and glue and a cast was made of each one.

  Several of Fiorelli’s casts were on display at a small museum at the entrance to Pompeii when the Jaggars visited. In addition to the woman, another showed a man face down with his robe pulled over his head. Another showed a dog in a contorted position pulling on a chain, struggling to save its life. These casts fascinated young Jaggar—as they do visitors today—and he wrote of them in his diary: “They are about as strange and interesting as anything I have ever experienced.”

  After a day at Pompeii and still unable to make the trip to the summit of Vesuvius because of bad weather, the Bishop took his children on several trips through Naples. They visited a city aquarium where, under the watchful eye of the director, young Jaggar put his hand in a tank and “took a polite shock from an electric ray.” Another day they visited the National Museum where he saw “hundreds of bronzes, statues, bas-reliefs, frescoes, mosaics from Pompeii,” as well as “Pompeian jewels, money-chests, divans, fish hooks, gladiatorial arms, helmets, and shields and spears.”