The Last Volcano Read online

  But, each night, after returning to the hotel, his thoughts returned to the volcano. Once, in an especially poetic mood, he wrote, “The dark blue waters of the Mediterranean stretch away to the right, while on the left looms Vesuvius on whose summit a red flickering light proclaims the presence of unquenchable fires!!!” The three exclamation points were drawn with particular boldness.

  After waiting three weeks, the weather cleared, and the Jaggar family made an ascent of Vesuvius. It was February 25, 1886, “A Red Letter Day,” as Jaggar recorded in his diary using, for the first and only time, a red pencil to highlight an entry. His mother also went. It was the only daylong trip she took with the other three.

  After breakfast, they rode in a carriage toward Vesuvius. They passed through the village of Portici at the base of the volcano. From there, the carriage took them along a paved road up the side of the volcano. Along the way, whenever the carriage slowed, they were surrounded by “beggars, innumerable boys with flowers, musicians who would walk alongside and not stop playing until given something.” At last, after passing through fields of old lava and cinders, close to the summit, the road ended in front of a concrete building that housed a scientific station.

  Officially, this was “a meteorological station,” as Jaggar recorded in his diary, though, in fact, it was much more. It was a volcano observatory, the first such institution anywhere in the world. The building had been completed in 1848, but, because of revolutions and social strife, it was not occupied by anyone or had any equipment until 1856. Two or three people worked inside of it. And, if Jaggar had inquired of any of them what was known about volcanoes, he would have been disappointed by the answer.

  Yes, there was the occasional cataclysmic event—Krakatoa in 1883 and Vesuvius in 79 A.D.—but such explosions were rare. Volcanic activity was not yet seen as a major geologic force. In a popular scientific monograph published in 1881, just five years before the Jaggars’ visit to Vesuvius, the writer described eruptions as “entirely mischievous” and the public’s perception of their destructive effects as “exaggerated notions.” Even at the beginning of the 20th century, a leading geologist would consider volcanic activity to be “local and occasional, not perpetual and worldwide.” Jaggar would be one of those who would change this perception.

  But, now, as a boy of thirteen, he was anxious to reach the summit and look inside the crater.

  Just beyond the observatory building was the famed funicular railway that transported tourists the last thousand feet to the summit. Completed in 1880, it consisted of two large wooden cars, one named “Vesuvio” and the other “Etna.” Each car had wooden benches and was capable of carrying up to fifteen people.

  The two cars ran on separate wooden rails between lower and upper stations. The cars were connected by a long iron cable that ran around a pulley at the upper station, so that, as one car went up, the other came down. The system was powered by a steam engine at the lower station. Jaggar remembered the ride as “rather rickety and very slow.” It took fifteen minutes to make the ascent.

  At the upper station, the Jaggars stepped out of the car. They were surrounded immediately by dense fog, which made it impossible to see more than a few hundred feet. Several men offered themselves as guides. The Bishop chose three men, two to carry Mrs. Jaggar in a sedan chair and the other man to lead them to the crater’s edge.

  “It was a very hard walk,” her son wrote of the adventure, “over rough, jagged lumps of warm lava and sulphur, with now and then a bed of sandy ashes into which we sunk up to the ankles.”

  The air was so heavy with sulfur that he held a handkerchief over his mouth to breath. As he and the others neared the crater’s edge, he heard a “dull puffing or priffing sound.” He looked into the crater. All he could see was dense fog.

  One of the guides said he knew a way down. The Bishop and his children followed the guide, stumbling over a treacherous path, avoiding blocks and rocky overhangs. Finally, on the bottom, more than a hundred feet below the crater rim, they had their first view of red molten lava.

  It is hard to convey to someone who has never stood close to where lava is creeping along the ground the strange mixture of senses it invokes. By sight it resembles the slow movement of thick molasses, but with the blinding red glare of an iron foundry. By smell, it has the acridity of the worst sulfur mine. The searing heat can raise welts on bare skin, and so one must keep in constant motion.

  The guide showed the Jaggar children how to approach the lava and to use a long wooden stick to retrieve a sample and press copper coins into it. Where the molten stuff was removed, there was always a tremendous hiss, one that Jaggar thought was “like a locomotive on a large scale.”

  As they began to climb out of the crater, Jaggar stopped and knelt to feel the ground. He stood up quickly, unable to bear the heat for any length of time.

  After three more weeks in Naples, with spring finally approaching, the Jaggar family left and headed north, making a final stop in the Italian Alps. Here the son had one final adventure.

  One day, he, his father, and his sister had climbed a glacier and were walking across the icy surface. They paused at a high point to admire the view. Just then, they heard a low rumble, “not exactly like thunder,” young Jaggar recorded, “but more like Niagara in the distance.” A few seconds passed. Then, on one side of a nearby peak, they saw what looked like a large waterfall that gradually dwindled away to a fine stream and then to nothing at all. It had been an avalanche. And it had barely stopped when Jaggar turned and looked at his father and said he hoped to see another one when another happened, bigger than the first. Worried that the icy mass where they were standing might give way, the trio hurried back down the glacier to their lodgings, the son “pleased with our first real alpine experience.”

  They had spent an entire year in Europe, though, when they returned to Cincinnati, the Bishop had not recovered from his illness. He wrote a letter to his congregation, ending it with the phrase, “when mind and spirit fail, there is no help.” And there would be none for Bishop Jaggar. He offered his resignation. But it was rejected. Instead, the Episcopal Church appointed an assistant who assumed “all duties, powers and authorities” of the diocese. Meanwhile, the Bishop searched for solace.

  He found it at a remote spot off the coast of Maine across the Bay of Fundy at Digby Cove in Nova Scotia. Here he purchased several acres, which included a large cabin built of logs. He filled the cabin with books and paintings, most of the latter with religious themes. Here he would remain, his wife and daughter taking an occasional trip, his son returning to preparatory school in Philadelphia.

  His son visited during the summer, he and his father taking time to hunt and fish. On a trip in 1888, they shot and stuffed gannet, puffins, ducks and ptarmigan and “caught all the fish we wanted.” Another time it was “just father and I and a canvas canoes.”

  It was the best life the son could imagine. He was living the life of a naturalist, following the lead of Audubon. But it could not last because the father had instilled a deep sense of purpose in his son—a craving of service before self. And to fulfill the purpose the son had to be an educated man.

  CHAPTER TWO

  YELLOWSTONE

  The modern university with its wide-ranging curricula and liberal ideals was first conceived and instituted by Charles William Eliot, the twenty-fourth president of Harvard University. As soon as he was appointed in 1869, he reduced the student rulebook from forty to five pages and eliminated the requirement that students attend church daily and that they wear black on Sundays. He also removed the privies from Harvard Yard and permitted students to smoke on campus.

  As to the curricula, when Eliot arrived, all freshmen took the same courses in Latin, Greek, French and ethics. The second year was filled with physics, chemistry, German and elocution. Before one could graduate, a student had to demonstrate an ability to recite long passages from Gibbon’s History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire or from the works
of one of the writers of the Enlightenment. Among those that were the most popular among the Harvard faculty were the writings of the Scottish philosopher Dugald Stewart who is little known today but who was once highly praised for his verbal eloquence. Eliot changed this. After years of battling with Harvard’s Board of Overseers, he was successful in getting all recitations dropped and in providing students with a list of elective classes, leaving only one that was required to graduate, English composition.

  Eliot also convinced the Board of Overseers to expand greatly the types of degrees Harvard granted. No longer were students limited to theology or the classics. They could chose from a wide range of subjects, including, much to the horror of many traditionalists, science or engineering. It was this liberalism, this wide range of choices, which attracted Thomas Jaggar to Harvard, which he entered in 1889. But it was also the liberalism, especially, the loosening of rules, which almost pulled him away.

  By the time Jaggar entered Harvard, Eliot had removed the ban on students attending theaters in Cambridge and in Boston. And Jaggar took advantage of this—justifying his actions as “an unusual way to further my education”—by attending performances by some of the great actors and actresses of the age, such as Julia Marlowe, known for her interpretations of Shakespeare, and the ever-popular French actress Sarah Bernhardt. But his real interest was elsewhere. He was fascinated by magicians.

  Harry Kellar, who Houdini once proclaimed to be “America’s greatest magician,” was then working a circuit that included Boston. One night, as Jaggar remembered it, Kellar called him out of the audience and onto the stage. The magician then proceeded to pull a rabbit out of Jaggar’s coat and eggs out of his mouth. “Thus I learned the psychology of audiences, how to experiment in public, and how easily deluded is the average mind.” The experience inspired him to start his own magic act, which he performed at private parties, advertising on a small cardboard placard: “The sleight of hand of Tom Jaggar, including the Enchanted Hat, Volatile Money and the ‘Erratic Kerchief.’” And that led him to act on the stage.

  At first, he appeared in crowd scenes, eventually graduating to speaking roles. His first was in Cymbeline, one of Shakespeare’s least remembered plays. He was the Roman Philario and recited the single line, “My Lord, Posthumus is without.” He was thrilled to be on stage and might have made acting his career if a class at Harvard had not attracted his attention.

  During his third year, he took a biology class. One day, he picked up a glass slide and slid it under a microscope. He twisted a knurled knob to bring the tiny specimen in focus. Though, years later, in recounting the experience, he failed to mention exactly what he was looking at, he did say that he was amazed that so many tiny animals had so many delicate parts. Suddenly, natural history extended far beyond Audubon’s birds. He considered making biology his field of study, but thought it too burdened with laboratory work. He wanted to experience the natural world first hand. He soon got the opportunity.

  The next semester he took Geology 4, an introductory class that was popular because it had a reputation for being easy. The professor, Nathaniel Shaler, never took attendance, never gave assignments and required few examinations. In fact, in his first lecture, he advised students not to read textbooks “lest they imbibe wrong notions.” The class was so informal that the students called it “Jolly 4” and referred to the professor as “Uncle Nat.”

  A lecture by Shaler began with hundreds of students seated in a large auditorium waiting for the professor to enter. And when he did, he came into the auditorium through a side door and began to talk immediately. And he talked continuously for an hour. One student, who reminisced about Shaler years later, would say it was the professor’s “vivacious and picturesque personality” that carried a lecture. When the professor spoke of the tragedy of soil erosion, “the dust would blow into the eyes of the students.” When Shaler characterized a volcano, he became a volcano himself, the students glad “that the ceiling had not gone up along with his arms and voice.” But what, specifically, was so special about Shaler? The same student answered. “Well, Shaler aroused enthusiasm.” And he certainly did with Thomas Jaggar.

  After one particularly dynamic lecture, Jaggar approached the professor and asked if he knew of a project that Jaggar could work on. Shaler was then advocating the draining of swamps along the Atlantic coast to provide more farmland. But to drain and use such land a better understanding was needed of the dynamics of beaches. And so Shaler sent Jaggar to the nearby towns of Nahant and Lynn to study the movement of beach sand.

  The young man paced the beaches for weeks, watching the sand form into great scallops whenever the tidewater came in. He then marked and measured the swash marks as the tidewater retreated. Eventually, he settled on a specific topic: He would study the development and movement of ripple marks, the small repetitive dunes that form where water flows over sand. He had watched them form in shallow water along the edge of the Ohio River with his father. Now he had a chance to study them in detail.

  “Go ahead,” he urged others, “lie on your stomach and watch them.” He would kneel down and smooth out the sand ripples with his hand, then watch them reform. He would stand in surf and watch as another wave filled with sand rushed up, cleared suddenly, then retreated, adding yet another thin layer of sand to a growing ripple. For him, the beach became alive, it was “building from the end; it was rippling under wave action.”

  He rushed to build a large wooden water tank. On the bottom he placed a large glass plate. On the plate he carefully sifted a layer of beach sand. Then, after filling the tank with water, he slowly pushed the plate back and forth. It was nature in reverse, the bed of sand moving instead of the water, but the principle was the same. And, before his eyes, tiny sand ripples formed.

  After a year of work, varying grain size, thickness of the sand layer, the depth of the water, and how fast he oscillated the plate, he completed over 130 experiments. After each one, he carefully removed the glass plate—which held one of his “baby beaches”—then made a blueprint of the pattern of regular sand ripples that had formed on the plate. These experiments were the subject of his first scientific paper, “Some conditions of ripple marks,” published in the journal American Geologist. It was a noble, if forgettable paper, detailing the experimental work, but providing no important scientific insights.

  Nevertheless, the experience changed him. No longer was he “an undisciplined student in need of stricter guidance,” as he described himself of his early years at Harvard. Instead, he was enthusiastic about learning—and about geology.

  He filled notebooks with elaborate drawings that he copied from printed colored plates found in geology textbooks. For a class on economic geology, he transcribed long lists of mining production figures. For one on mineral deposits, he drew cross sections of dozens of mines, noting where the most valuable ores had been found.

  His grades were average, but Shaler took note of the budding scholar. And so, in the spring of 1893, when a request came for someone to join a summer expedition to Yellowstone, Shaler sent Thomas Jaggar.

  Jaggar wrote to his father that he was “overjoyed at the prospect.”

  On June 23, 1893, Harvard University awarded Jaggar a Bachelor of Science degree in geology. Six days later, he boarded a train and headed west for Bozeman, Montana.

  Though most of the American West was settled by then, Bozeman was still a wild and raucous place. Founded two years earlier by James J. Hill of the Great Northern Railroad, in 1893 Bozeman had a population of about two thousand and consisted of a few dozen hastily constructed wooden buildings. Several advertised themselves as hotels. Jaggar took lodging in one. He paid the standard rate for a fast-growing western town—a dollar a day for a small private room and a meal. Baths were extra.

  Bozeman was where the expedition would begin. And where Jaggar would meet the expedition’s leader, Arnold Hague.

  Hague knew the geology of the region well. In 1883, as one of five geologists empl
oyed by the federal government, he had conducted the first geologic survey of Yellowstone National Park and its surrounding, the park having been established eleven years earlier.

  Every summer from 1883 to 1891, Hague had assembled a small team consisting of topographic surveyors and field geologists and sent them to work across the area. In 1892, Congressional funds had been cut for such work. In 1893, Hague had found money to continue the survey, though at a much reduced pace. This year it would be him and one other geologist, a field assistant—Jaggar. For Jaggar, it was ideal because he would be able to work closely with Hague who, according to one long-time associate, was “a gentleman temperate in language and habits at all times—even with mules.” Hague was also known to take a particular interest “in the work of a beginner.”

  When Jaggar met Hague, the expedition’s leader was busy hiring men who would do the routine work of tending the pack animals, hunting, transporting the camp equipment and maintaining camp. That day, Hague hired two men who had worked for him before. Both would again prove to be reliable men.

  Next Hague interviewed men who wanted to be the expedition’s cook. The first man to apply had also once worked for Hague, but, according to Jaggar, Hague thought the man was “too consumptive” and refused to hire him. Instead, Hague spent the remainder of the day testing new men. He finally settled on one named John Anderson, a former slave who claimed to have been a soldier in General Custer’s Big Horn expedition. The first night, Anderson prepared a meal that included fresh-baked bread and strawberry shortcake. It was a gratifying meal, but, after two months in the mountains, Jaggar would complain that Anderson’s cooking had become “too economical.”