The Last Volcano Page 7

  Not one single building had survived. The heavy iron sheets that had once served as roofs had been blown away and were found crinkled and bent like cardboard. Only a few walls, none higher than a person’s chest, were still standing. And everything was covered by a thick layer of grayish volcanic ash wetted by rain. At one point soon after he stepped on shore, Jaggar stopped and looked at his feet. His boots were covered with slippery ash, which made them much heavier than usual. He bent down and ran the ash between his fingers. He smelled it. It had the tinge of sulfur. It reminded him of damp gunpowder.

  That there had been a furious wind during the eruption was indicated by bent and twisted rods of iron and by huge trunks of trees that had been torn from the ground. Old cannon used as mooring posts at the quay had been torn up and moved. At one place close to the shoreline, a three-ton iron statue of the Virgin Mary had been swept off its pedestal and moved more than 50 feet. At a distillery, huge tanks made of quarter-inch boilerplate were peppered with holes where rocks had struck and penetrated, giving the impression the tanks had been bombarded by artillery.

  And dead bodies were everywhere. Jaggar found a dead baby in an iron cradle and an old man face down in an empty water tank. At a bakery, he opened the metal doors of a huge oven. Inside were the remains of a man who was found laying on his back, his head on one arm and his legs pulled up under him. The man’s body was so thoroughly cooked and shriveled that his thighs were only a few inches thick. The heat had drawn his skin away from his knees and elbows, exposing the bone. Apparently, the man had climbed into the oven to protect himself when the volcano exploded. Ironically, he had roasted inside his own oven when it was surrounded by hot volcanic ash.

  Jaggar continued to wander through and search the ruins. He occasionally joined others. Deeply disturbed by what he was seeing, he would describe the scene as: “The air was heavy with a haunting odor that one dreams about afterwards; it is a combination of foundry and steam and sulphur matches and burnt things, every now and then a whiff of roast, decayed flesh that is horrible.”

  All life had been extinguished. After years of academic study, Jaggar had never read an account of such sudden and complete fiery destruction—not in war and not by nature. Then he remembered. He had seen this before.

  St. Pierre was a modern-day Pompeii. The two cities had remarkable parallels. Both had been thriving seaports with a lively commerce of exports and both were filled with hotels and restaurants that catered to tourists. The cobblestones on the streets and the layout of buildings with open courtyards and walls of painted plaster were also similar. And the fate of each city had been decided by the sudden explosion of a volcano that had been quiet for many years.

  Two thousand years separated the two disasters—which made Jaggar wonder: Why hadn’t human knowledge advanced enough since Pompeii to prevent a replay of such suffering?

  It was the beginning of the 20th century, and, to Jaggar and many others, science and engineering seemed to be the keys to progress. Already a vast network of railroads crisscrossed the nation, the largest such system in the world. And railroads were becoming faster and more efficient all the time. So were ships, which were larger and faster, and more reliable and safer than ever, designed to ease travel and increase commerce around the world. There was even popular support in the United States for the building of a canal across Panama that would connect the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. In short, it was an age when all things seemed possible.

  But what of the horror at St. Pierre? Some scientists were already talking about predicting and controlling the weather. In fact, a weather bureau had been established in the United States the previous decade and was issuing daily forecasts. Giant dams were being constructed to control the flow of the nation’s largest rivers, thereby ending the threat of floods. Likewise, so Jaggar thought, the fear and destruction brought by volcanic eruptions could—and should—also be alleviated. It should be possible to predict and control such natural phenomenon. What was needed was a better understanding of how volcanoes work.

  Late that morning, Jaggar was on a hilltop outside the city studying the volcano through binoculars. Clouds shrouded the summit. He examined the lower slopes. He noticed wisps of steam rising from several places. As he continued to watch, the steaming became more vigorous. Then more places became active. Eight, ten, then twenty places were emitting steam. Now there were forty scattered across one side of Mount Pelée.

  He looked toward the Potomac. Captain Berry had apparently seen the same thing. The ship’s whistle blew. Jaggar looked back at the volcano. More steam was appearing. And it was becoming more vigorous. In fact, in some places, it seemed to be jetting out of the volcano. Jaggar saw people running for the shoreline. One landing boat had just shoved off when two more people appeared. It went back to pick them up.

  Now Jaggar began to run. Then he stopped. He realized that what he was seeing was the coolness of a sudden rain shower falling on pockets of hot volcanic ash, causing steam to rise, but, at the time, to a group of inexperienced volcano watchers, including himself, it seemed as if the entire volcano was breaking apart and was about to explode.

  The next day, the Dixie left Martinique and sailed for St. Vincent. Jaggar and two other American scientists, Hovey, the museum curator, and Curtis, the cartographer, were onboard. The other scientists had decided to remain on Martinique.

  At St. Vincent, Jaggar and the others met Mr. T. MacGregor MacDonald, a local sugar planter, who had witnessed the May 7 eruption of Soufrière and agreed to guide the three Americans to the volcano’s summit.

  MacDonald hired six islanders to take them by dugout canoe from Kingston, the main town on St. Vincent, to the mouth of the Wailliabou River, a distance of about twelve miles. They made the trip at night, arriving at the mouth of the river at daybreak. The volcano’s summit was shrouded in a light mist. They started an ascent immediately.

  The six islanders worked as porters, carrying instruments, water and food. MacDonald led the way, following what remained of an old trail, first passing through dense jungle, the vegetation heavy with volcanic ash, then across a landscape desolated by the May 7 explosion.

  Progress was slow, made harder by a strong headwind that blasted the men with volcanic sand, forcing them to squint, making it almost impossible to see. Near the summit, the men slogged through knee-deep wallows of mud. They climbed over fields of huge jagged rocks recently blown out of the volcano. At last, after three hours of tortuous climbing, they reached a crest and were within sight of the summit.

  A thick fog surrounded them, blocking direct sunlight. The six islanders decided to retreat. The three Americans and MacDonald remained. After another hour, the fog cleared and the four men crept upward toward the edge of the summit crater.

  At their feet lay a vast opening. The inner walls were sheer precipices of freshly broken rock. On the side opposite them, in clear view, rose a huge chimney of roaring steam. And below, where the steam originated, was a lake of pale green muddy water.

  The surface was bubbling at a hundred points. A small trail of steam rose from each point, the trails coalescing halfway up the wall into the chimney of steam.

  The men set to work scribbling in notebooks, taking photographs and getting dimensions of the crater. Jaggar began by marching off a baseline. Then, with a compass, he measured several angles to distinct points, determining that the crater was more than a mile wide and that the depth down to the lake was more than half a mile. He took out an aneroid and, comparing his reading to the elevation on an old map, decided that at the spot where he was standing, the eruption had blown away the upper thousand feet of the volcano.

  Before they left, the four men built a stone cairn to indicate to anyone who may come later that they had been first.

  Then the four men retraced their steps and went down the volcano. As they passed through the village, Jaggar noticed that women were bringing out their children, so he thought, “to gaze at us, the godlike men who had dared the crater.�
�� It was his greatest performance yet.

  After five days at St. Vincent, the Dixie sailed away. Jaggar and his two American colleagues stayed behind. They continued to explore the island and attempted another ascent of Soufrière, but poor weather forced them to retreat. Their conclusion, after comparing notes with those who had stayed on Martinique, was that the explosive eruption of Soufrière on May 7 had been more energetic—that is, had blasted away more of the volcano’s summit and spewed out more volcanic ash—than the May 8 eruption of Mount Pelée that had leveled St. Pierre. The greater destruction on Martinique had been because of the unfortunate direction of the blast that had swept over St. Pierre and had caused so many horrible deaths.

  After three weeks on St. Vincent, Hovey and Curtis found passage back to the United States. Jaggar decided to stay longer in the Caribbean. He began his extended stay by sailing to several islands to collect samples of volcanic ash that had fallen and to measure the thickness. One of the islands was Barbados. While there, he learned that two survivors of the Roraima, which had been at St. Pierre on May 8, were convalescing at a nearby hospital.

  A dozen passengers had been on the Roraima when Mount Pelée exploded. These included four members of the Stokes family and their private nurse, Clara King.

  The mother, Clement Stokes, had been living in New York, but was recently widowed and had decided to return to Barbados and live with her sister where she could take better care of her children, who were traveling with her. The oldest was nine-year-old Marguerite. A son, Eric, was four. The youngest was Olga who was three.

  On the fateful morning, shortly before eight o’clock, the nurse, King, left the others in the stateroom and stepped outside onto the deck. She saw others gathered along the railing and pointing at the volcano. She heard the ship’s steward call out that something was happening at Mount Pelée. King went to the railing and looked. She saw a black cloud surrounding the summit. Then, seconds later, the cloud exploded and swept down the volcano toward her. Within minutes, it had passed over St. Pierre and had hit the sea.

  King managed to reach the stateroom and close the door just as the cloud hit the ship broadside. She felt the Roraima being lifted high, then rolled over and dropped down.

  King and the others were thrown off their feet. As the ship righted itself, it bobbed as if in a rough sea. Next came darkness, then intense heat and the feeling of suffocation. A skylight broke and hot ash poured into the stateroom and down on the occupants.

  Sometime later, King would never be able to remember how long, the door of the stateroom burst open and a feeble ray of sunlight illuminated the room. King could see Clement Stokes and her son huddled in a corner covered with scalding mud. The infant girl was dead. Marguerite, who had managed to find King in the darkness, was sitting next to her, clinging tightly to the nurse. At one point, the young girl put her hand down to move closer. As she did, her arm plunged up to the elbow into hot ash that burned away much of the skin.

  They left the stateroom and made their way on deck, Clement Stokes carrying the dead infant. Other survivors had already gathered. The lifeboats had been swept away and so several men were trying to build a raft of loose timbers. Someone found a blanket and placed it around the Stokes boy. His hair and clothes had been burned off. He died soon after.

  The ship was on fire and the city was in flames. Clement Stokes turned to the nurse and gave her what money she had and asked King to promise to take care of the young girl. Then the mother died.

  The fall of red-glowing ash and cinders began to lessen slightly. King saw a ship approaching. It would later prove to be the Roddam, captained by Edward Freeman. King thought the ship was coming to rescue them, but the Roddam swerved and headed out to sea. As it passed close to the Roraima, several survivors from that ship jumped into the water and swam for the Roddam. They were pulled under the water by a dark and turbulent sea.

  For six hours, King and the others clung to the wreckage of the Roraima. Finally, a ship arrived and rescued them.

  Jaggar met King in her hospital room. She told him of her ordeal. Jaggar could see that she had bandages around both knees and along one arm. Also in the room was Marguerite Stokes. Burns had left deep scars on her head and along both arms and on her hands. One ear was disfigured. Jaggar knew she would be crippled for life.

  The night before meeting King, Jaggar prepared questions to ask her. How had the plume rising above the mountain appeared just before the explosion? It was gray, mostly white below and black above, she answered, with smoke rolling to the left. She said the sea had been calm before the eruption and that she heard no explosions, just a distant rattling of thunder.

  Of all the things that Jaggar had seen and would do in the Caribbean that summer, it was the meeting with Clara King that made the deepest impression on him. Here was a small frail woman destined for a life of servitude. And she had seen—and survived, at close range—a major volcanic explosion. It was probably more activity than he would ever see.

  “It was the human contacts, not field adventures which inspired me,” he wrote years later when he recalled the meeting. “Gradually I realized that the killing of thousands of persons by subterranean machinery totally unknown to geologists and then unexplainable was worthy of a life’s work.”

  And so he was decided. He would devote himself to a study of volcanoes. It was an ideal—and ideals come at a price. It would take a few more eruptions—and another decade—before he was completely willing to pay his price.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAMPAGNE

  The unexpected appearance of a new volcano in 1831 almost threw the global political world into turmoil.

  On July 11 of that year, in the central Mediterranean, Captain Charles Henry Swinburne, in command of the British sloop HMS Rapid, saw an unusual column of white clouds rising from the sea. He went to investigate.

  Four hours later, now night, Swinburne was close enough to see that, at the base of the column, hot, cherry-red embers were being flung into the air, then falling back into the sea. The column itself was filled with flashes of lightning. Swinburne held the Rapid on station for eight days and nights, he and his crew witnessing a rare sight—the birth of a new island.

  Because no land had been here before, instead of sailing on, Swinburne returned to the headquarters of the British Mediterranean Fleet at nearby Malta to report the discovery to the vice-admiral. The vice-admiral sent out another ship, the St. Vincent, with men and equipment to survey the new island and determine its exact position. In less than a day, it was determined that the island was a third of a mile across, nearly round in outline, and consisted of two prominent hills at opposite ends of the island that were connected by a low area that was barely above sea level. At the top of one hill the Union Jack was raised. With this small act, the vice-admiral claimed the new land for England, naming it Graham Island after Sir James Graham, the First Lord of the Admiralty.

  The Sicilians arrived next, on an appropriately named ship, the Etna. Its crew removed the British flag and replaced it with one of their own. They also rechristened the island Ferdinandea, in honor of the Sicilian king, Ferdinand II. Then the Etna sailed away.

  A French ship arrived. On board was Constant Prévost, a member of the Académie des Sciences in Paris. He spent several days on the islands. On one of those days, he watched as officers of the French Navy lowered the Sicilian flag and replaced it with the Tricolors, Prévost commenting that the effort was “a vain and ridiculous ceremony.” The French also rechristened the island, naming it Guilia because it had been discovered in the month of July. Then the French sailed away. And thus the political wrangling began.

  The sea passage between Sicily and North Africa is of strategic importance because it links the broad eastern and western sections of the Mediterranean Sea. During the 19th century, the Sicilians controlled the area north of the passage, the French controlled the area to the south off the coast of Africa and the British were in the middle on the island of Malta.
The appearance of a new island meant someone might use it to build a new navy base, upsetting the balance of power. And so each government began to make contingency plans. In the end, nature had the final word.

  By winter—the eruption had stopped in August—storms battered the small island, and it was rapidly pulled back under the sea. By the end of 1831 a rocky crag was all that was left. By the end of January 1832, even that was gone.

  As a footnote, when the British landed and raised the Union Jack, someone thought to fill a few buckets with the new volcanic material. That material is stored today in the Natural History Museum in London, all that is left, so some cynics say, of the smallest island ever ruled by Britannia.

  But the island did leave an important scientific legacy. When Prévost visited, there was a small lake of reddish water contained within a circular basin at the center of the island. He took some care in examining the lake, noting that bubbles of gas were rising from the bottom and bursting at the surface. Each tiny burst sent out a small spray of water. It reminded him of what happens when a bottle of French champagne is opened. From that analogy, Prévost suggested that volcanic eruptions were powered by the escape of gas bubbles dissolved in molten rock. On reflection, it was a momentous suggestion—but one that would be forgotten for more than eighty years, eventually revived by those who were present to witness the continued eruptions of Mount Pelée.

  While still in Barbados, Jaggar wrote a letter to The Boston Globe, describing his Caribbean adventure up to that time. He included in the letter the standard explanation for explosive eruptions, that is, that they were the product of massive steam explosions. But he must have doubted whether this explanation was adequate to explain what he had seen at St. Pierre because, at the end of the letter, he informed the people of Boston that he was delaying his return because he wanted to return to Martinique and determine, as best he could, what had powered the explosion that had leveled St. Pierre and had caused so many deaths.