CHAPTER V

Expansion Decade

“_There shall be famines and earthquakes

in divers places._”

The decade from 1921 through 1930 was a period of tremendous events and

of experimentation at Kilauea and Mauna Loa. It was also an expansion

decade for the Observatory, and for me. Additional funds made possible

new buildings and equipment on Hawaii; observatory activity was

established at Lassen Volcano in California; and expeditionary work

included a study of the 1923 Tokyo earthquakes, explorations on Alaska

volcanoes in 1927, and a visit to Niuafoou in Tonga, part of the great

New Zealand-Tonga volcanic chain.

Increased government aid was largely due to the help of the Honorable

Louis C. Cramton of Michigan, Republican floor leader of Congress, who

took great interest in extending activities within national parks.

After we moved from Weather Bureau control to Geological Survey in

1924, Cramton visited our Observatory, concluded that it was an orphan

child of the government, and asked me what I wanted. I told him that

I needed men and machines, and I suggested expanding our studies to

California and the Aleutians.

Meantime, the Research Association was persuaded that we needed a

fire-resistant iron building to house library accumulation, record

books, and photographic negatives, as well as seismograms and lava

specimens. These were precious relics of the very active overflows

and experiments of the 1912–1921 period. With the advice of Walter F.

Dillingham and Engineer John Mason Young of the University of Hawaii, I

built a sheet-iron house with concrete floor and wire-glass skylights,

and installed steel furniture. This became an invaluable office,

drafting room, and workroom, as well as a place for files.

The Volcano Research Association, in cooperation with Hawaii National

Park, built a trail side museum and lecture hall atop the high western

bluff of Kilauea Crater. Later, when the drive was extended completely

around the greater crater, the museum was on the road to Halemaumau.

This museum had a plate glass front, concrete floor, skylight

illumination, and an esplanade looking down on the caldera and across

the vast panorama of Mauna Loa, Mauna Kea, and the Kau Desert. The

building protected the lookout platform from the trade winds.

We housed in the museum a gleaming, nickel-plated seismograph from

Japan, suitable photographs, and the best of our specimens for visitors

to see. This combined with the magnificent views to instruct the public

in volcanology as nothing else could have done. At the same time, I

equipped machine shops and added a first class mechanic to the staff.

It was during this decade and after my New Zealand trip that such

persons as Omori and Nakamura, in Japan, and geologists in Seattle,

Berkeley, and Pasadena began to take an interest in the volcano problem

as dominant in the study of earthquakes.

There were conflicting theories about the earth crust. Earlier, in

Hawaii, Wood was a disciple of the tectonic or contracting theories of

the earth, whereas I increasingly believed volcanism to be profound,

crustal, oceanic, and ancient. It is more fundamental than the strata

and mountain folds of continents.

This conflict extended to the water question in volcanology. I was

inclined to believe the waters of eruption to be oxidized hydrogen,

whereas such physical chemists as Day, Shepherd, and Allen believed

water vapor, like carbon dioxide, to be fundamental in magma.

The whole question of the origin of oxygen--the most abundant element

of the rocks, air, and water--is a matter of startling doubt in

geology. Where oxides are known to exist in lava, flames of oxidation

make the gaseous fires; and underground water full of oxygen plays a

part in steamblast eruption. All the waters of glaciers and oceans are

oxides, and prove that the volcanic oxidation of hydrogen was the most

primitive of the volcanic processes. Dr. E. H. Allen found water vapor

dominant in the Sulphur Bank gas at Kilauea, whereas Day and Shepherd,

who opposed Brun, thought water dominant in the gases of live lava.

Its great preponderance in geological theory for such eruptions as

Vesuvius led Allen to review theories and publish a long paper designed

to refute my notion that oxidizing hydrogen is the primary volcanic

ingredient.

As to earthquakes and so-called tectonic faults, the whole of geology

has its thinking so warped by continents, the dwelling place of

mankind, and so diverted from the great linear trenches and the ridges

of the ocean crowned with volcanoes parallel to the deeps, that I

became incredulous, along with Willis and Oldham, about the textbook

cause of earthquakes.

The fascination offered by fossils, by ages of shellfish and reptiles,

and by mountains of folded strata like the Alps and the Himalaya makes

the votaries of evolutionary science neglect the mud-covered rocks and

oceanic mountain ranges of almost three-quarters of the surface of the

globe. This seventy-two percent they have never seen, nor collected

hard rock specimens from, nor even mapped topographically. They are not

acquainted with it by exploration, and their theories about it are a

blank, except that gravity pendulums indicate it to be basalt.

The so-called geosyncline, or continental basin of sediments, filled

with shells and strata as is the Mediterranean, is at the heart of

all the theories of continents and mountains; and geology expressly

excludes the geosyncline and its strata from the probabilities of deep

ocean valleys. The most interesting subjects of continental geology

are simply banished from conjecture. Interest in deep-ocean geology is

lacking because science has made no field effort to bore or blast into

it, and so extend engineering science to the deep ocean bottoms.

Earthquakes made a theme wherein I instinctively distrusted the word

“tectonic.” For generations the geological mind thought the earth

losing heat, contracting internally, and wrinkling a crust in bumps,

with vast overthrusts of broken strata, thus folding the Appalachians

and the Andes. All sorts of accommodations to a thin crust thirty miles

deep were invented; by Dana and Geikie, by Suess and Wiechert, and

finally by one who should have been the foremost block faulting expert,

Dutton. Hawaii convinced him that volcanoes are only skin deep and that

the thin crust is so sensitive that a shift of the weight of river

muds and sands is enough to push down the great valley of California,

while an underflow pushes up the Sierra Nevada. This is the doctrine

of “isostasy.” It agrees with the Stübel idea of shallow remnant

reservoirs for the lava of volcanoes.

Isostasy was devised by Dutton and pounced upon by the mathematicians,

until they had gravity proving the whole world thin-crusted over an

understratum of plastic lava. The seismologists on continents agreed,

finding a density change, but with no evidence of fluidity. The world

became, mathematically and petrologically, a sphere built of layers

all the way down to the heavy fluid hot core, which was conveniently

imagined to consist of iron and nickel, because some bolides of the

solar system made of those metals occasionally fall on the earth.

All my experience of volcanoes and of deep oceans militated against a

thin crust, a shallow underlayer of basalt to feed volcanoes, and a

nickel iron core. The core is heavy, and sixty-two elements are heavier

than iron. All reason seemed against the notion that the vast volcanic

sea bottoms are a thin crust wrinkling under contraction. Reason found

every evidence on both earth and moon for a thick peridotite or olivine

crust, broken into ancient blocks, bounded by long lines of fracture,

the blocks variously settling and scraping against each other from

time immemorial, actuated by volcanic forces from the core. The whole

of volcanology points toward sinking and down-faulted ocean basins,

alongside the remnant upstanding continents which are the minor feature

of the primitive earth surface. Water condensed and filled hollows.

The processes of the core that made all this were volcanism--mother of

air, ocean, seabottom, land, and life. The crust was thick enough to

make cracks 2,000 miles long on a globe 8,000 miles in diameter. If

there was a balancing of weights as in “isostasy,” it was between high

silica in continental lava and low silica basalt that spread under the

oceans. This is not static, but is a continuing process of a kinetic,

or changing, earth.

This excursion into theory is intentional, so that in the middle

of this book the geologically trained reader will understand that

experience of volcanoes in Hawaii, the Caribbean, New Zealand, Alaska,

Italy, and Japan had made me a rebel against conventional geology. The

reason is that the great submerged mountain range of the long Hawaiian

Archipelago is different from the mountain ranges of Europe and Asia

and must be accounted for in global history. How would the three

decades 1921 to 1950 confirm expectation that the deep ocean bottom is

the most important and volcanic thing in geology, just as it is the

biggest thing?

Routine observation and photography at Halemaumau pit reached a climax

of recording brilliant fiery events in March 1921, and it changed

to the recording of explosive steam in May 1924. The first of these

fireworks, after lava flows from a rift in the Kau Desert, draining the

pit and fluctuating with the ups and downs of the pit lava, occurred in

1919–1920. This was a return to Halemaumau of effervescence in frothy

volumes, so that the pit was overflowing on five sides. On March 20,

1921, occurred the most intense display of brilliancy, culminating the

gradual rising of the lava column to outflow following 1918.

Then came, in the later months of 1921, a sinking away and recovery of

the lava. In 1922 came a sinking again, with the lava breaking out in

the Chain of Craters of the eastern rift, as though it had been blocked

by freezing in the southwest rift and was forced over to split open the

old cracks of the mountain to the east. This was confirmed in 1923 by

another outbreak in the forest adjacent to the sixth crater, Makaopuhi,

which with Napau pit beyond, had been the scene of the 1922 outflows.

This action was all extended in April 1924 to the shoreline end of

the eastern rift, thirty miles away from Halemaumau, when the Kapoho

country cracked open with many earthquakes, and a block of the mountain

settled beneath sea level. Coconut palms at the beach were left in a

lagoon of sea water eight feet deep. Seventy-five earthquakes in a

day frightened away Filipino plantation laborers; railway and roads

were ruptured, with new cliffs forming nine feet high; and all of this

followed a monumental sinking of Halemaumau bottom, from a vast sea of

lava to a tumble of debris in two months.

It was evident that between 1920 and 1924 the fracture of the long

curved rift athwart Kilauea cauldron from the Kau Desert to the east

point of the island was draining the lava out under the ocean to the

east. Forty miles from the shore, the submarine slope is covered by

18,000 feet of water.

What is the result? The whole of Kilauea Mountain is charged with

groundwater, which trickles warm through the beach at Pohoiki and

partly warms ponds near Kapoho. Obviously this groundwater of the

southeastern lobe of the island mountain surrounds the shaft of

Halemaumau at some undefined depth, and the rising and falling glassy

lava in the shaft ordinarily glazes itself with a water-tight skin, and

may be thought of as a crusted tube. About this tube the groundwater

shows only as the lazy steam of the little vents of the pit margins.

On May 10, 1924, came the collapse of the Halemaumau pit walls,

introducing an explosive steam eruption such as had not been seen by

five generations of Hawaiians.

The adventures of this period were glorious ones for the scientists.

First should be mentioned the amazing subsidence which occurred

suddenly at 2 A.M. November 28, 1919, just as Mrs. Jaggar

looked across Kilauea Crater at the outline of crags and lava lakes

making a glowing dome where Halemaumau pit should have been. We felt

a lot of little earthquakes and saw the dome of lava heapings, with

glowing lakes on top, sink slowly and majestically and leave the old

familiar glowing pit. For almost the whole of 1919 this had been a

dome, with overflows, now here, now there. At ten o’clock only the

evening before, old Alec had conducted tourists to the top of the dome,

where they looked down at the clover-leaf lakes. If it had started to

go down while they were there--and any of us might have been there--it

is awesome to think of the inevitable fiery engulfment.

After watching the sinking, which was followed by puffs of dust and

smoke and some avalanche noise, we took a car to the pit at once. And

when we got there in the early morning hours we found the pit enlarged

to 2,000 feet across, with the pattern of the lava lakes still apparent

at the bottom, indicating that the entire cylinder had lowered as a

unit to a depth of about 700 feet. Red hot avalanches were tumbling

inward with a roar, from the veneer of lava plastered on the wall.

By the forenoon of that day the liquid lava started to pour up and

inward as a ring of bubbling fountains all around the edges. What this

ring represented was the wall crack between the subsided cylinder

of semisolid lava, now pushing upward, and the funnel of rock wall

outside. This V-shaped filling grew wider as the uprising progressed,

and so the ring lake became wider, while the top of the harder column

became a ring of crags and the space inside became a quiet lava puddle

supplied by inflow from the ring lake. The whole column of ring crags

with the lagoon inside and the brilliantly fountaining lake outside

rose with unheard of rapidity during the next three weeks.

In mid-December, I took Mrs. Jaggar and a woman friend down to inspect

this amazing corolla, or lily, of hard crags which had blossomed up in

less than a month, so that the outer ring of boiling fluid was less

than a hundred feet below us. We stood at the rift in the Kilauea floor

which heads toward the southwest cliff, and suddenly we felt slight

earthquakes and saw the face of that cliff crumbling in a visible

tumble of rocks. The mountain was quietly breaking open athwart the

Kilauea caldera floor, and while we watched we saw forty or fifty low

lava fountains in a straight line burst up along a floor crack between

us and the cliff.

Remember that this crack traversed the downslope between Halemaumau

edge and Kilauea wall. Looking back at the ring lake, we saw it

beginning to lower and leave a shoreline of black plastering spatter.

When we looked into the rift crack at our feet, only one or two feet

gaping open, the liquid lava showed about twenty feet down. We were

standing on the side of the crack away from the motor car terminus, and

floods of lava on the Kilauea floor were spreading right and left from

the straight line of vents between us and Kilauea wall. We had to get

away from there pronto, as no one could tell what ground might erupt

between us and our car.

I carefully instructed our friend to be deliberate and step across the

fissure; but the girl felt sure that crossing a red hot crack called

for a leap. She stepped on a loose slab at the edge of the narrow chasm

and slipped into the crack, where she was wedged until we pulled her

out. We then stepped across the fissure, for the live lava was far

below, and made our way back to the car without further trouble.

The lake lowered only apportionately to the slowing black outflow on

the south floor, which was short-lived. This was the beginning of a

splitting open of the main Kilauea Mountain flank southwest and outside

the crater which continued for months.

Another adventure, and an important one, happened with the outflooding

of lava in the Kau Desert, where terrace upon terrace of pahoehoe lava

was building up. This finally became a hill over the rift, two miles

long and 200 feet high, which we called Mauna Iki, or little Mauna Loa.

The exploration, day after day, of the extending quiet lava outwelling

along this rift made it necessary to find new trails from the Pahala

roadway and across the desert to the lengthening hillock.

Following the new Mauna Iki trail, Mr. Finch noticed that the ancient

ash beds, two or three feet thick, had surfaces as hard as Portland

cement. And on one of these he, like Robinson Crusoe, found the print

of a naked foot, made when the old ash was a mud. On the trail across

these old surfaces many more hardened, ancient footprints were found,

of men, women, children, and pigs headed both up and down the mountain.

[Illustration: _18. Isabel and Tom Jaggar in woods on Kilauea

Volcano on their return from viewing 1923 eruption in Napau

Crater_]

[Illustration: _19. Lava lake, fountains, and crags, March 20,

1921_]

[Illustration: _20. Footprints in ash west of Mauna Iki, said

to have been made by Keoua’s army during Halemaumau eruption of

1790_]

These prints recalled the story of Keoua’s army when there was a big

explosive eruption of Halemaumau in 1790 and the mud rains of the

period were from ash which had been baked by the volcanic fires. If

roasted and moistened, the chemical composition of powdered basalt

is that of weak cement, and these surfaces were in hollows which had

resisted erosion wash for 130 years. Part of the slopes closer to

Halemaumau had been eroded bare, but they also showed footprints.

Later the trail was followed up the mountain close to Kilauea Crater

and down toward Pahala, and the ash of 1790 was found to be made up of

pisolites, or fossil raindrops, in many places. Evidently the eruption

had been accompanied by torrential thunder storms, and the natives had

walked through the deposits of mud, which had in a century been dried

by the sun into a resistant surface. These fossil footprints were to

become one of the attractions of a tourist trail in the National Park.

One night in 1922, after some earthquakes of the evening, we were

awakened by friends who told us that a glow like a forest fire could

be seen from the high cliffs of Kilauea in the easterly direction of

Makaopuhi. This big crater had a platform at one end and a pit at the

other. We aroused Mr. Finch, then traveled by car as far as we could go

on the truck trail, got lost, and with flashlights made our way on foot

toward the glow and fume in a rugged wilderness, over cracked ground

and old aa lava and obstructing vegetation. We were chilled by a cold

drizzle and not at all sure where we would emerge.

Fortunately, the country is sufficiently open so that we could see the

“pillar of fire by night.” It turned out that the new fire was in the

deep end of Makaopuhi itself. From the western edge of Makaopuhi pit

we looked down on ten or fifteen ribbons of lava, made by a line of

spouting fountains at the top of the talus heap, and pouring from the

top of the big slide-rock slope. We spent the night on the edge in much

discomfort, and watched the puddle of accumulation in the bottom of the

funnel and the glowing streaks which fed it. It was evident that the

eastern rift of Kilauea Mountain had opened, and the lava outflow was

found to extend to Napau Crater, a shallow saucer pit farther east.

At the same time the lava in Halemaumau went down, enlarging the pit,

and cauliflower dust clouds arose from much internal avalanching. This

anticipated and resembled the avalanche steam blasts of 1924.

The adventures of the 1924 explosive eruption were too numerous and

complicated to elaborate here. However, it was a tremendous event in

the history of Hawaii and was totally unforeseeable on the basis of

earlier experience. Mrs. Jaggar and I were in New York writing magazine

articles and I was giving lectures, when word came from Finch and the

newspapers that Halemaumau was caving in and throwing up rocks. We

traveled with all haste to Honolulu, where the Navy agreed to send me

by plane to Hilo, though they refused to take Mrs. Jaggar.

The Admiral’s car took us to Pearl Harbor, where a seaplane was ready

and Mr. Thurston was waiting to see me off, accompanied by a motion

picture cameraman. Then pilot Chourré took me into the sky over Diamond

Head on my first flight. A companion plane was piloted by Lieutenant

Sinton, who had radio communication with Pearl Harbor. Crossing high

above the Molokai Channel, I looked down at the beautiful pattern

of trade-wind formed whitecaps, and was surprised after a half hour

to observe that the wave crests were farther apart. I was even more

surprised to see Sinton’s plane far above us. The mechanic in the

forward cockpit had been putting up his fingers repeatedly during our

flight, to indicate, I later learned, how many cylinders were missing

in the Liberty engine supported above us. Our plane was getting closer

and closer to the waves and flying fish raced beside us. Finally we

felt the bump of wave after wave on the bottoms of the pontoons, and

the pilot brought the seaplane to a squelching stop, close to the surf

of the Molokai reef.

We found ourselves in fifteen feet of water, the coral reef visible

below. I was deputed to throw out an anchor and make the line fast to

a cleat, while pilot and mechanic climbed up to the engine, which had

been losing compression and could not keep up the requisite speed.

Lieutenant Sinton’s pilot plane came down and circled above us until he

saw we were safe, then went on to Maui. Meanwhile, I watched the water

with great interest, for sharks. When our boys got the engine going

with a roar, I pulled up the anchor and we took off against wind and

wave, with the pontoons going bang, bang, bang, against the tops of the

waves. But finally we were airborne and out above the blue water.

Then the engine gave out again and we came down. This time the men

rigged a sea anchor made of buckets with a line attached to the bow,

to hold the ship’s nose up to the wind, and battened the hatches with

canvas covers. We clambered up on top of the upper wing to wait for

rescue. The wind was blowing a gale, the whitecaps hissed by us, and we

lay on our bellies. The aviators told me that this was the first forced

landing they had had. The word landing seemed to me inapplicable.

We drifted for five hours, moving slowly down the wind, before a white

motor boat appeared, coming from Molokai. At the same time smoke showed

from two rescue vessels in the Pearl Harbor and Maui directions

respectively. Sinton, who had radioed for help, flew back and circled

above us, reminding me of the goonies soaring over a wounded bird on a

fish line which I had seen in Alaskan waters. The Molokai boat reached

us first, picked up our sea anchor and towed us into Kaunakakai. We

pitched so and took such a pounding from the gigantic trade-wind waves

that it didn’t seem possible that the mahogany hull and the two lateral

pontoons could hold together. However, we made the harbor and tied up

to the buoy.

I hoped and prayed that the commercial packet, the _Mauna Kea_,

might take me to Hilo. But no, the navy tug _Navaho_ came from

Lahaina, and Captain Green put up his megaphone and announced that the

Admiral’s instructions were that he was to take Dr. Jaggar to Hawaii.

My heart sank because I knew what a seaway would be running against

that little tub. The second rescue ship proved to be the _Pelican_

equipped with a crane to swing the plane on board and take it back to

Pearl Harbor.

On board the _Navaho_ I was assigned a canvas camp cot in the

lower, circular wheelhouse at the bow; and all night long waves broke

over the bow and a foot of water sloshed back and forth under my cot.

The pitching was so heavy and our speed so reduced that it took us all

night to get across the Hawaii Channel, and we didn’t make Hilo until 2

P.M. the second day. After that wet and seasick night, I found

wry humor in our reception at Hilo Wharf, where we were met by Frank

Cody with his motion picture camera and a bunch of hula girls and leis.

Instead of five hours, the journey took thirty and quite failed to make

me air-minded. Furthermore, I arrived at Kilauea Volcano in time for

only the final stages of the explosive eruption.

Finch had organized volunteers, including Oliver Emerson as

photographer, and even our collie dog, Teddy, who could hear and feel

an explosion coming before we had any other warning. All observers

wrote notes and fondled the seismographs during the three weeks of

steam blast and cavings in of the pit, which had enlarged itself by

collapse 700 feet outward radially in all directions. When I got there

it was 3,500 by 3,000 feet in diameters and 1,300 feet deep, the bottom

a funnel of converging taluses, made of avalanches from the pit walls.

The taluses were wet and steaming vigorously in vertical lines, and

at night showed red hot avalanches from the north and west walls,

where two intrusive bodies of hard rock were red hot inside. The talus

below stayed hot, and slides occurred for only a few seconds. The

incandescent matter was not flowing in any sense, but was, rather, the

peeling of a rocky boss of reddish color at the west and a canoe-shaped

ledge at the north about 600 feet below the rim.

This showed the cross section of old screes, revealed above it, and

horizontal basalt flows overlapping above that. It was a beautiful

section of an ancient pit, of the same quality as Halemaumau itself,

and the incandescent canoe sill at the bottom appeared to be an

intrusion of fine-grained gabbro, which had pushed its way in under an

older talus funnel, similar to the present talus cup of Halemaumau, the

bottom of which was 700 feet lower.

On the opposite wall of the pit the Kau Desert rift was displayed as

a vertical cavern or arcade, merging into a group of dikes higher

up and tapering to zero thinness at the top. These same dikes, less

conspicuous, cut the canoe sill on the northeast wall, to indicate

that the ring of the pit was fractured vertically from below. This

fracture is the main deep rift of the mountain which crosses under

Kilauea, bending in the direction of Kilauea Iki, and this it was which

had opened as a curved chasm to let the lava down. Lava had gone down

in a succession of flank outflows, with intervening rises, from the

Kau Desert in 1920 to the final drainage under the sea at the east.

This drainage had let in the groundwater, made a steam boiler, and so

caused the explosive eruption and engulfment of Halemaumau walls as the

mountain yawned open.

A. L. Day made one of his return excursions to Kilauea at this time

and thus saw the extraordinary phenomenon of the hard basaltic

intrusive bodies half way down the walls, caving to a red hot talus.

The explosions, which started with two-hour intervals, gradually

decreased, coming at four hours and eight hours; and on May 18 came the

culminating cauliflower clouds with torrents downward of broken rock,

some of it showing low red heat. At all times the motive power was

steam jets 10 to 15 thousand feet high, which plastered the pahoehoe of

the pit edge with broken wall rock fragments of every size.

There was no sign of pasty lava or glassy bombs in the ejecta, and

the red incandescence seen at night in some of the explosions was the

avalanche material of the western boss and the canoe sill.

It took the pit less than two months, to mid-July, to recover its

liquid lava, which poured through the talus and made aa puddles,

to form a new pattern of cone source and short-lived flows. Then

everything came to rest, and lava activity was not resumed there until

the summer of 1927. However, in 1926 Mauna Loa went into action on its

southwestern rift, and sent an aa flow into the sea at South Kona,

destroying the village of Hoopuloa.

Here was history in the island lava column of majestic decline and

recovery from 1914 onward. Outflow in Mauna Loa crater at 13,000 feet

in 1914 extended to outflow from the southwest rift in 1916 and 1919 at

8,000 feet. Next, in 1920, came outflow in the Kau Desert from Kilauea,

at 3,000 feet. There were alternating spurts upward within Halemaumau

pit, acting as a crater similar to Mauna Loa’s at the lower Kilauea

level of 3,700 feet.

Then this whole progress downward moved over to the Chain of Craters at

2,500 feet, and finally to the ruptured earthquake rift of Kapoho on

the east point of Hawaii and at beach level. Some miles farther east,

on the same rift beneath the sea, the gigantic submarine mountain of

Hawaii drained the last lava from Halemaumau pit and let in groundwater

which caused steam explosions.

July 1924 saw the deep lava recovering in the crack and sealing off the

water, so as to bubble up in the bottom debris of Halemaumau and push

its way upward into the crevices of the island. It reached the top of

Mauna Loa in 1926 and reactuated outflow at the center of the island.

This migration of vents from top to bottom and back again took twelve

years of fracturing, and it relieved from lava this big piece of the

Hawaiian ridge. In reaching the groundwater and steamblast phase, it

accomplished something which had not happened since 1790, making a

supercycle of 134 years.

The decade after explosion at Halemaumau was marked by small lava

gushes in the bottom of the pit, bringing the depth from 1,300 feet in

1924 to 750 feet in 1934. The layers were something less than 100 feet

each, and they were fed by pahoehoe conelets at the slide-rock margin.

As usual, the lava was gushing up the western wall crack along the

margin of the bottom magma cylinder. There was no trace of recurrence

of steam blasts.

Despite the excitement of actual events, experimentation continued; and

I continued working on inventions for the experiments. Two approaches

to our problems concerned seismic recorders which could be put in the

hands of amateurs, and range finders for improving pit surveys. I had

been convinced for many years that the three-component seismograph was

too elaborate to be operated by volunteer school teachers or telephone

operators who have other things to do. Such a seismograph records with

photographic paper the north-south, east-west, and up-down motion of

the ground, on a chronograph which keeps accurate time and registers a

wavy line every second, so that the recording paper has to be changed

and developed every day. Moreover, these instruments are for measuring

distance to earthquake origins by physics of wave motion, and they have

become hopelessly mathematical. Such mathematics makes for assumptions

of uniformity about a rock crust which is not uniform. Qualitative

science wants to know what happens at a specific rock location and

wants the motion recorded by the simplest possible mechanical device.

It also wants a value in number at each location, for size and

direction of the first motion. This is for an earthquake, identified

as one incident, over such an island as Hawaii, where the rock units

are many and different. This is especially true of long periods of time

when there may be no earthquakes to record.

I devised a simple shock recorder, consisting of a horizontal boom of

very light wood attached to a hinged weight which swung like a door,

so that the boom scratched a line on a circular card which was rotated

and moved along by a common alarm clock. The result was a spiral mark

on the card, such that an earthquake interposed would write a zigzag

opposite a place on the clock face appropriate to the time of day. All

that was necessary was to remove and date the card, wind the clock once

a day, and measure the zigzag.

Mr. Ingalls of _Scientific American_ read an article by me in

which I described my shock recorder and thought it would lead amateur

machinists to devise their own machines and to record the vibrations

about them. Numerous amateurs did send in designs for instruments, and

Ingalls believed that the seismograph hobby would become as popular as

the amateur astronomical telescope hobby. But it failed because the

amateurs were waiting for earthquakes, which didn’t happen. They were

not content with vibrations from trucks, railroad trains, waterfalls,

surf on rocks, artillery practice, or wind storms.

My improved shock recorder gained some use later in New Zealand

and Montserrat, after big earthquakes in those places stirred the

authorities to build simple instruments. However, popular seismoscope

simply doesn’t exist.

The range finder I had been working on since my teaching days in

Massachusetts Tech, where I had made an optical device with a traveling

index mirror which moved along an upright scale of centimeters, and

a sextant telescope. The idea was a transit, with self-contained base

line close to the operator. My theory was that in such measurements of

distance as we had to use--to about a thousand feet or less, to the

lava fountains in the bottom of Halemaumau pit--we might read off the

vertical distance from a single station, when all other stations were

enclosed in smoke.

In the Aleutian Islands and elsewhere I experimented with a Zeiss

stereoscopic rangefinder designed for artillery ranges, but it was

not accurate enough for short distances. Everything in my instrument

depended on moving a telescope parallel to itself with superlative

precision, on a scale within the instrument. I finally hit upon using

a track of taut piano wire, probably the straightest line in all

mechanics.

If one first looked at an object twenty miles away (infinite distance),

the telescope could be moved along right and left and the image would

remain immovable on a vertical hair. If it were now focussed on an

object 1,000 feet away, the displacement of the telescope on the

centimeter scale would measure the distance with a high degree of

accuracy. This was the stadia principle inverted to contain the rod at

the observing position.

I also made several graphic devices for surveying Halemaumau daily from

the rim benchmarks. However, when lava overtopped the rim and destroyed

the datum posts, mapping became difficult.

Drilling temperature wells into the floor and rim of Kilauea Crater

was a project I had anticipated when Mr. John Brooks Henderson of

Washington came to Hawaii and offered to help finance it. We had taken

the temperature of hot cracks in many places, and found them to range

from 320° Centigrade at the Postal Card Crack close to Halemaumau, down

to 96° Centigrade at Sulphur Bank, and then on to lower temperatures at

many cracks which yielded visible vapor in damp weather but no vapor at

all in sunshine. A spectacle for tourists was a crack on the Sulphur

Bank flat, where a cigar to windward or the exhaust gas of a car would

nucleate the invisible vapor and cause a big puff of white “steam” to

show. This phenomenon, which depends on smoke particles condensing

invisible water vapor, is well known at Solfatara near Naples.

The experimental approach to finding out what the temperature of the

ground really is, is to drill a hole and keep the temperature measured

repeatedly with a thermometer, and to find out the thermal gradient

change vertically if possible. This means to measure how much the

temperature changes with depth. The whole problem concerns how much

unusual heat energy is released at a place like Kilauea Crater.

With the aid of Hobart, a drilling engineer, I started at Sulphur Bank

with a churn drill. We quickly discovered that we were going through

intensely hard basalt, containing metallic sulfide which appeared to

be pyrite but turned out to be marcasite. After drilling for several

years--with four holes at Sulphur Bank, one sixty-foot hole under

the observatory shop, and about twenty-five holes in the eastern

part of the Kilauea floor over a surveyed map pattern--we changed to

a rotary core drill using steel shot, and then changed again to a

percussion drill actuated by compressed air, for shallow holes to show

cross-country temperatures. Unfortunately core drilling requires large

quantities of water, which we did not have, for the Hawaii National

Park depends upon rainwater collected from roofs in redwood tanks.

Without water cooling, rotary bits heat and expand in hot rock, stick,

and are often lost.

Two seventy-foot holes, one at Sulphur Bank and the other in the middle

of Kilauea floor, showed no definite thermal gradient; and in general

it turned out that drill holes were dependent on steam in the cracks

for their temperatures.

Heat was brought up by vapor, and in a number of ten-foot holes

scattered over the Kilauea floor, the hottest were at the edge of the

floor. The Postal Card Crack, near the edge of Halemaumau and 600

feet above red hot intrusives, was exceptionally hot, and it is not

at all clear how the water made contact with the hot intrusive rock

underneath. This place completely caved in and was lost forever within

the enlarged pit of 1924. Sulphur Bank itself is at the edge of an old

Kilauea floor on a shelf at a high level. The extra heat at floor edges

means a wall crack between the crater fill and the confining funnel, so

that hot gas comes up from intrusive lava somewhere deep down toward

the center.

Thus when a mercurial thermometer was lowered, ten-foot holes would

show a hot place half way down and cold rock at the bottom. Some holes

had no heat at all, which meant that an inclined steam crack was cut

across by the hole or that no steam crack was present. The heat supply

was dependent upon vapor channels from heated rainwater, but we were

never able, owing to lack of funds, to drill a hole deep enough to find

the water supply which made the steam. It is a remarkable fact that the

casings on three wells at Sulphur Bank emit continuously a column of

steam exactly at the theoretical boiling point for this altitude, as

though the groundwater were boiling only a short distance below. Dr.

Allen by his analyses proved that Sulphur Bank vapor was ninety-nine

percent steam and that the remainder contained fractions of a percent

of sulfur and carbon dioxide, but this sulfur was enough in the course

of months to coat the interior of our casings with yellow crystals over

black iron sulfide. It coated the Sulphur Bank with yellow crystals of

sulfur and soaked the rock below to generate brassy iron sulfide.

The result of these experiments was to exhibit the complexity of any

solfatara in its relation to underground lava, and to the soakage

of a volcanic country by rainfall. This is especially important for

Martinique and Montserrat.

Another experiment was conducted by Emerson, who was equipped by the

Observatory with chemical apparatus to make qualitative analyses of

numerous Kilauea products, and he also did critical photographic

work, including some photography in the infra-red. In one valuable

experiment, he melted Kilauea lava in a refractory crucible at a

temperature of about 1200° Centigrade until it was as fluid as honey.

Allowed to chill and harden naturally, it was shiny glass like pahoehoe

lava. If stirred with an iron rod, it made sprouted black needles,

crystallized all through, like aa lava. Thus he proved that stirring

made Hawaiian lava crystallize and sprout like fudge, or like the

solidification of such metals as silver and bismuth. Sudden outbreak

and stirring anywhere will convert pahoehoe to aa; but never does aa

become converted physically to pahoehoe, unless flame melts it. The

standing pinnacles in the midst of an aa flow, which breaks up into

boulders, give evidence of the stirring process.

When Emerson’s discovery is applied to basaltic lava flows, it appears

that the glassy lava of a source, when stirred by gas fountaining or

by flowing, will change from its glassy condition to a sprouting and

crystallizing condition. All flows are glassy pahoehoe pumice fountains

at source vents, and a quarter of a mile away they become aa. Later the

source pahoehoe preserves itself within a glassy skin and pours forward

under glassy shells and frontal toes.

R. M. Wilson’s work supplied proof of a swelling mountain. Wilson

was one of the three leading members of the topographic party of the

Geological Survey. The other two were C. Birdseye and A. Burkland.

Wilson, whom I had known as a student in M. I. T., was a product of

Spofford’s Civil Engineering department and was to become the chief

computer of the Survey in Washington. As levelman in Birdseye’s

organization, he became topographic engineer of the Observatory, and

produced by precise leveling and triangulation the brilliant experiment

which showed [the swelling and shrinking of the mountain during fifteen

years.

By close cooperation with the U.S. Coast and Geodetic Survey we

placed a tide gauge at Hilo, both for a sea level base and to record

tidal waves. Wilson also, in 1921, ran a level line from Hilo to the

Volcano House benchmark, where the Geological Survey had run levels

in 1911. The county roadway was marked with bronze plates inscribed

with leveling heights, and Wilson’s results showed the edge of Kilauea

Crater to be three feet higher in 1921 than it had been in 1911.

Wilson’s determination of heights above sea level certified that the

whole mountain swelled up during the ten years prior to 1921. About

1918, lava and seismographs had proved rising overflow at the center,

while the edge of Kilauea Crater was being tilted away from the

center. This went on during the massive rising of the interior lava

of Halemaumau into a dome where the pit had been, and it proved that

Kilauea Mountain was being injected along cracks, not only under the

pit, but along the rifts, as indicated by outflow on the southwest and

east in the years 1920 and 1924.

But this was not all of Wilson’s work. He revisited all surveying

stations after the big collapse of Halemaumau that accompanied the

explosive eruption of May 1924, and found that the Volcano House

benchmark lowered a little more than three feet during May 1924 and

that places close to Halemaumau dropped nearly fifteen feet. This

lowering of the mountain was graduated outward twenty miles from the

center at trig stations, or concrete posts, in the Kau Desert and at

stations along the road to Hilo. These stations changed altitude to

show that the big mountain tumefied or swelled up to that distance of

twenty miles during the big intrusion of cracks at the overflowing

time, as though the mountain dome were a tumor forty miles in diameter

with Halemaumau at the center. Of course there is no certainty that

the shore line in Puna, or even the Hilo tide gauge itself, did not go

down with the slumping of the mountain, for the thing called sea level

is nothing but an average of tide gauge readings at a fixed wharf.

Remember that the east point of Hawaii sank eight feet on the Kilauea

rift during the April crisis.

Wilson also surveyed by horizontal triangulation in 1921, determining

that stations around Halemaumau had moved inward toward the center,

by a specified number of feet, different at each station, and that

other stations outside of Kilauea Crater had changed position

horizontally on the map, as though the mountain were shrinking. This

entire series of measurements of change between 1911 and 1926 jibed

with the seismograph’s measurements of the tilting of the ground.

The seismograph picked out 1918, when Halemaumau overflowed, as the

swelling year. In 1924 the tilt reversed itself, turning inward toward

Halemaumau, and became tremendous when the pit collapsed and exploded.

It is impossible to accent sufficiently the importance of the discovery

of a measured swelling and slumping of a volcano throughout a lava

crisis occupying fifteen years. It was so tremendous that critical

engineers in Washington refused to believe Wilson’s results. However,

his findings were verified by the contemporaneous lava measurement

results, earthquake enumerations, and tilt meter results. These showed

that earthquake frequency increased when Kilauea slumped and that a

lava mountain had swelled until it was three feet higher at the summit

in ten years and had contracted by a larger amount during the years of

an explosive eruption period immediately thereafter. This all agrees

with the excellent results in Omori’s volcanic and seismic events,

obtained by Japanese army and navy engineers at several volcanoes and

earthquakes. It also agrees with the positive facts of Vesuvius and the

Canary Islands, starting with the controversy about “elevation craters”

started by Leopold von Buch in the first half of the nineteenth century

and carried forward by Mercalli on Vesuvius in 1894 when a lava hill

was seen to swell up. There, too, others would not believe. The

opposition always insisted that a volcano was built by heaped material,

that it could not possibly swell.

Wilson’s results are far-reaching, for the whole of geology depends

on uplift of continents and downsinking of sedimentary basins. Most

geologists account for these things by the theory of weighting and

underflow at a thin crust (isostasy), refusing to grant that volcanic

heat and tumefaction yield intrusive power everywhere through cracks in

the deeper crust.

I wish that I could describe adequately the high adventure of this

fruitful time. We built a vehicle from a model T Ford with a Ruckstell

axle, stripped of mudguards and equipped with balloon tires doubled at

the rear, so as to travel and carry loads over the smooth pahoehoe

of the Kilauea floor. We found that a powerful light rig of this

type, with excessively low gear, could climb up on lava lobes one to

two feet high. But this called for experienced driving and special

methods. Sending a man on foot ahead to pick a way and to drag a

crowbar which scratched a track, we could drive anywhere on the lava.

And we used this rig to haul drums of water and drill apparatus. I once

drove artillery officers out over the rough floor of the crater, and

afterwards saw similar cars used by the army in the first World War as

cross-country transportation for the doctors and wounded in No Man’s

Land.

Before a roadway encircled Kilauea Crater, Mr. Finch and I, carrying

two-inch planks for bridging cracks, made the complete circuit of the

crater by way of the rifted Kau Desert in our special vehicle, which

has now been succeeded by the jeep, the most universal vehicle of World

War II. Volcanology prospected the field of war in more ways than one,

so I named my popular book “Volcanoes declare war.”

Inventions led to expeditions both in Hawaii and in distant lands

during the decade of the twenties, some by invitation, some to offer

assistance at disasters, and some for the natural extension of my own

work. On September 1, 1923, came the big earthquake at Tokyo. With

Mrs. Jaggar, I was permitted to land in Japan and make a study of the

effects of the disaster. The destruction of Tokyo and Yokohama was a

final, sad tragedy for Omori, who for years had worked to protect the

Emperor and Japan by studying earthquake forecasts for Tokyo and by

conducting research in earthquake-proof engineering. It was a cruel

commentary that the disaster came while he was attending a science

congress in Australia, particularly as the great destruction of life

was occasioned by fire and typhoon winds. But Omori’s organization

handled the seismic event admirably. Omori returned at once, but almost

immediately died.

We steamed into Yokohama harbor, were welcomed by Captain Gatesford

Lincoln U. S. N. and his destroyer flotilla. We went on board his

flagship, and were sent in his launch to the broken jetties of

Yokohama, where we found no custom house or police. We walked up to the

camp of United States marines, amid the wreckage of the United States

Consulate, where the Consul had been killed.

Yokohama, which I had known well in 1909 and 1914, was a tumble of

ruins; and the long Bund with its splendid waterfront structures,

including the Grand Hotel, was a heap of rubble. My classmate

Purington, a mining geologist who had been staying at the Grand with

his family escaped with one child and went back to rescue his wife. A

second shock brought down more masonry and crushed him.

We were given a tent and allowed to mess with the marines, and next

day we crowded into a train for Tokyo. It was packed to the doors and

had people seated on the roof. We were warned by Americans to dress

as roughly as possible, as the populace was on edge, and foreigners

must not appear to be tourists. By great good luck we got into the

Imperial Hotel which had withstood the shake and fire, though it was

considerably damaged.

We visited the Honjo district of the river bottom, where the damage

was at maximum, and we saw the remains of a pile of corpses, clothes,

and household goods in one small yard where 30,000 people had been

incinerated. Fire had closed in from all sides, and the shrieking

mob of men, women, and children piled up on top of each other, amid

handcarts and clothing bundles--kindling which added fuel to the horror.

The mayor of Tokyo sent us in a small steamer to the island of Oshima,

on which is the volcano Mihara, close to the earthquake center. We

climbed up and looked down into a glowing pit which was making no lava

outflow at the time, though Mihara is famous for basalt flows.

Water soundings showed 900 feet of subsidence in Sagami Bay opposite

Oshima, and there were changed depths elsewhere, some of them

shallowing by underwater land slips. We went to the Boshu Peninsula

east of Tokyo, where the beach had been rising for many years, and

where the earthquake rising left wharves high and dry. The principal

effect of the earthquake, occurring at noon just when all charcoal

braziers were lighted for luncheon in the flimsy Japanese houses of

wood and paper, was to set fires in an area of hundreds of square miles

and a score of towns. Water reservoirs were destroyed, there was no

adequate fire department to care for a conflagration, and a high wind

was blowing in the bright sunshine. A characteristic of Japanese cities

was the absence of open parkways for refugees, hence the crushing,

burning, drowning, suffocation, and annihilation of hundreds of

thousands of people and the destruction of factories, railroad trains,

water supplies, power plants, and every essential utility in a great

metropolitan area with a population of many millions. The horizontal

movement of the ground in the shock was about eight inches, and

aftershocks kept on for many months.

We explored Yokohama, clambering up to the Bluff where everything was

wrecked and where land slips had tumbled down the precipice. We visited

what remained of a beautiful English type villa with a slate roof,

which had been occupied by two missionary ladies and their numerous

parrots. These people were encamped, along with their parrots, in a

shack built by their yardman, for the residence had tumbled down like a

house of cards. One woman had been imprisoned between her bed and the

wall, and was quite uninjured when the gardener dug her out through

cracks of the roof.

Scientifically, what happened to the ground in this earthquake was

not explained by any single fault. Whatever happened to the bottom

of Sagami Bay was not communicated across the beach to the coast as

any great rift. Small faults were identified in a number of places,

the shoreline in one place lifted a few feet and lowered in another;

but no such movement as the big subsidence of the bottom of the bay

crossed the contact of sea and land. It appeared as though the margin

of the bay itself outlined an area of sudden slumping, somehow related

to Mihara Volcano on Oshima; but the shoreline of that island was not

seriously affected. The great mountains of the foothills of Fujiyama,

and the Hakone district, were shaken to a hash of broken railway

tunnels and land slips, but the topography was not altered.

A resurvey of trig stations west of Tokyo revealed movements that

indicated the country had been spirally twisted. However, it has always

seemed a mystery to me that all the motion on land was so small, when

change on the bottom of the bay was so great.

There was a local tidal wave at the bay shore of Kamakura, but no great

tidal wave from the deep ocean came to Tokyo. Some volcanic effort of

deep lava had wedged open and jolted the sea bottom, but how it acted

is entirely obscure. It was quite different from the San Francisco

quake, with its side slip of twenty-one feet and a crack 400 miles long.

When we returned to Japan in 1926 with the Pacific Science Congress,

the restoration of Tokyo was practically complete and a magnificent

greater city had been built with wide and large parkways. The

government was lavish in its entertainment of the scientists attending

the congress. Dr. Lacroix and I were sent to Osaka to lecture, and to

show lantern slides of Mount Pelée; and expeditions all over Japan were

arranged for the visitors. I had an opportunity to see for the first

time the large basaltic lava fields of the lake district at the base

of Fujiyama, and I was astonished at the similarity of the basaltic

pahoehoe to our Hawaiian outflows and the freshness of the lavas and

the lava caverns. I had never thought of Fujiyama as a “lava flow”

volcano.

My next expedition was in the autumn of 1924, when I was invited by

H. E. Gregory, Director of Bishop Museum, to go on an expedition

on the USS _Whippoorwill_, Commander Samuel King, to Howland

and Baker Islands. Others on the expedition were C. Montague Cooke

(malacologist), George Munro (ornithologist), Erling Christophersen

(botanist), Ted Dranga (marine shell collector), George Collins (Museum

Trustee), and Bruce Cartwright (naturalist). These men were invited to

make up one of several Bishop Museum parties which were sent out to

south sea islands for collection and report.

As geologist, my job was to carry a portable seismograph and record

earthquakes or microseisms and to take photographs. We had made up

at the Observatory a one-component horizontal pendulum, in which

the chronograph drum used smoked paper. In camp I lowered the box

containing the seismograph into a hole in the sand under my cot, with a

view to finding out what tremors occurred on these flat coral islands.

However, no movements were detected during the period of our stay,

within the sensitivity limit of the small seismograph.

Howland and Baker are coral islets, not atolls, close to the equator,

with no lagoons and with deep water all around them. Howland later

became famous in the tragedy of Amelia Earhart, for whom the Coast

Guard prepared an airfield on the island. These islands had been guano

diggings for parties from Honolulu fifty years earlier, and we found

old cisterns and tracks. The islands were inhabited by thousands of

goonies (gannets), man-of-war birds, and terns. In some places they

covered the ground with their nests, eggs, and young, rising noisily

in terrifying swarms as we walked among them. The land was perfectly

flat brown guano and red weeds, with beaches of coral boulders and

_Tridacna_, or giant clams, the highest bit ridges on the windward

side. The easterly trade winds blew a powerful gale most of the time,

and our ship had to land us on the leeward beaches, where we made our

camp in a line of tents. The staff was divided into pairs for each

tent, and Filipino mess boys did the cooking.

Landing was arduous, for there was heavy surf, even on the leeward

side, and it was necessary to have a man swim in with a line in his

teeth. The swimmer, Ted Dranga, made the line fast between a buoy and

the shore, then built a signal fire while the ship stood off. Men and

baggage were loaded into a skiff and hauled ashore by the sailor in the

bow, who pulled, hand over hand, on the rope from the buoy, when the

waves were favorable. The ship had to drift away each night and come

back, as there was no anchorage. A few stunted kou trees still survived

from guano-digging days, and numerous grasses and fleshy-leaved salt

weeds grew. The beaches were covered with rats, hermit crabs, and some

white ghost crabs. The ghost crabs were seen at night flittering down

into the water when a flashlight was turned on the waves.

The hermit crabs, with borrowed shells, came clanking over the canvas

floor under our cots at night; and as one walked along the beach with a

flashlight, Polynesian rats pattered away in all directions. They had

been brought by the guano schooners and doubtless lived on shellfish,

birds, eggs, and fledglings.

The principal products of this expedition were notes, pictures, maps,

and collections.

Within the next few years we were to combine expeditions with

experimentation in the organization of new observatories in California

and Alaska.

California volcanoes as a field of observatory study were an obvious

choice when Judge Cramton proposed enlargement of the volcano

enterprise. He succeeded in getting me a Section of Volcanology in the

Geological Survey, and I sent R. H. Finch to Lassen Volcanic National

Park, where he made his headquarters at Mineral. Lassen had made

steamblast explosions in 1912 through 1914 which had rushed down into

the forest with such horizontal destruction as occurred at Mount Pelée.

It was not realized that this blast was terrible, for it was in the

backwoods on top of the Sierra Nevada and little known. The national

park there was created later. It is an area with a recent (1871?)

cinder cone and rocky lava flow, boiling lakes and mud pots, numerous

solfataras and hot springs, and a lava cavern much like those on Hawaii.

[Illustration: _21. The_ Honukai _on Alaska beach, 1928.

Jaggar on the right_]

[Illustration: _22. The_ Ohiki, _first amphibian truck,

with passengers Isabel Jaggar, Tahara, L. A. Thurston, Jaggar,

and Ted Dranga, 1928_]

[Illustration: _23. Lava flow entering village of Hoopuloa,

1926_]

[Illustration: _24. Lava flow of 1926 Mauna Loa eruption

approaching Hoopuloa Village, which was destroyed. Photo section

U.S. Army Air Force_]

Lassen Peak is the southernmost volcano on the line where the

Cascade Range merges with the Sierra Nevada. The line of volcanoes

extends beyond Mount Baker into Canada. North of Lassen is the Glass

Mountain region where there are obsidian lava flows. Like Mount

Shasta, Lassen is a volcano of very few recent eruptions, but there

were at least two outbreaks in the nineteenth century. These two

volcanoes resemble Pelée and Soufrière. Their linear quality implies

a long ragged rift in the earth’s crust, and south of Lassen there

is suggested an offset rift at Mount St. Helena, near the famous

superheated steam of Geyserville. This is near the northern end of the

great San Andreas rift, which extends many hundreds of miles southeast

of San Francisco. The rift shifted in a north-south direction during

the earthquake of 1906, and is one of the many evidences that the

north-south faults of California are all a part of the faulting up,

over lava, of the Cordillera, relative to downsunken Pacific Ocean

slabs.

I put Finch in charge of Aleutian Islands seismographs, as well as

the one he was to establish at Mineral. With Wilson as seismologist

and instrument designer in Hawaii, we started constructing horizontal

pendulums, like those used in Hawaii, making the weights out of

large iron pipes, to be filled with sand at the place of operation.

These were two-component seismographs, recording on a single

chronograph drum. We sent one to the Coast Survey station at Sitka

and built two more for Kodiak and Unalaska. Finch built and set up

his own seismograph at Mineral. He started systematic surveys of the

temperatures of hot springs and steam jets in different parts of

Lassen Park and kept close contact with the Geological Department of

the University of California at Berkeley. Lassen was the subject of

geological surveys by Anderson and Finch, and later the park area was

studied by Howel Williams.

I went to Washington to see government authorities, particularly

Professor Charles F. Marvin, Chief of the Weather Bureau, and Dr. G.

O. Smith, Director of the Geological Survey. I can never express my

indebtedness to Marvin, a good designer who built an inverted pendulum

seismograph in Washington. Finch had worked with Marvin when he was

weather observer in airplanes based on Ireland during the first World

War. Hence methods of government contact and reports, in the early days

of our Observatory, were kindly guided by Marvin. The Weather Bureau

was a place of self-recording instruments, something new for geology,

and much needed for volcano observation. For weather is a matter of

present changes, whereas geology had long been a matter of ancient

specimens.

Director Smith was instrumental in calling a meeting in Washington,

of scientists of all bureaus interested in the Aleutian Islands. I

was selected to lead the symposium, which included representatives

of climatology, biology and fisheries, geology and geochemistry,

oceanography and geodesy, hydrographic charting, gravity, and

magnetism. There proved to be great interest in the Alaskan Peninsula

and the islands, and the Survey published a special bulletin on the

symposium.

W. C. Mendenhall, who had written a monograph on the volcano of Mount

Wrangell in the great bend of the continent around the Gulf of Alaska,

became director of the Geological Survey and one of my best friends.

In 1927 I was ready with cross-country cars and a seismograph to

explore once more the volcanoes of Alaska. Organizing an expensive

expedition which called for a special ship was obviously out, but

in the years after the Technology Expedition of 1907 I had learned

many economies which I wanted to try out. Also I had two experimental

and mechanical tests to make. The first was to set up in Alaska

a seismograph, the second was to test Alaskan beaches with a

cross-country car, with a view to building an amphibian boat. I had

read in several languages on the subject of motor vehicles with boat

bodies, and my 1907 experience of finding no anchorage on Umnak Island

had convinced me of the need for a vessel on wheels which could climb

up an Alaskan beach and be converted into a camp. So I started from

Seattle with a low gear Ford runabout. I unloaded it first in Kodiak

village, where there were only one or two cars, and made tests of

driving it along beaches.

At Kodiak the Agricultural Experiment Station allowed me to set up the

seismograph in a vacant basement, and I arranged with a local housewife

to operate the instrument. Aided by a sheet of instructions, she made

tests, changed the smoked papers, varnished them, mailing them to

Hawaii, and kept notes on earthquakes which were felt.

The roadster and I then traveled by the local mailboat steamer

_Starr_, Captain Johanssen, and sailed along the south shore of

the Alaskan Peninsula to King Cove, visiting Bradford on the way.

Disembarking at King Cove, I made runs on the beach with the car. With

the aid of the cannery mechanic, I tried attaching winch spools to

drive wheels, in order to haul the car up to grassy land behind the

beach. No car had ever landed at the cannery, there were no roads,

and the problem of getting from the wharf to the tundra, and from

the tundra to the beach and back again, posed practical mechanical

problems, the solution of which was to be useful later. We ran along

the beach as far as a rocky headland, until we needed an amphibian boat

in which to round the point and rejoin the stony beach at some place

beyond. How that boat body should be constructed was planned from this

experience.

The superintendent, the physician, and the boatbuilders of the large

King Cove cannery planned an exploration for me, with John Gardner as

boatman and Peter Yatchmeneff as his mate. These two were on their way

to hunt bears for an eastern museum and were going to Pavlof Volcano,

the Vesuvius of the Alaskan Peninsula. I transferred my baggage to

their motor sloop, the _Plug Ugly_, and we headed for Pavlof Bay.

At Volcano Bay we landed for a bear hunt, which was very exciting for

me. When we found bear tracks in an amphitheater under big mountains,

we climbed toward the divide at the head; but we could find no pass

over it. From the high ground we looked across the river at clumps of

alders. John borrowed my field glass, handed it back, and pointed out

a black spot far away under the bushes. “I just saw it move,” he said,

“that spot is a big brown bear where he has been holed up.”

I remained watching while John and Pete, with their 25-caliber Savage

carbines, crept across the valley bottom, keeping down the wind from

the bear in the shelter of bushes. I saw that they were getting very

close to the game, lost sight of them for a few minutes, then heard two

sharp cracks and saw the bear in violent motion, thrashing around and

tearing up the ground, then quickly subsiding. I made my way across the

valley and found they had neatly shot a year old Alaskan brown bear.

The rest of the day was given to skinning it, and we sank the skull,

tied to a fish line from the sloop, to the bottom of the bay where

marine organisms would eat away remaining flesh and leave the bone

clean.

Next we sailed up to the head of Pavlof Bay and camped at a barabara,

or sod hut, preparatory to a trek to a small volcano that lies near a

shallow lake on the north side of the magnificent pair of snowy volcano

cones known as Pavlof and Pavlof Sister. We were early in the season

and could see a glacier extending down from Pavlof Crater, which is a

cup containing a conelet at the side of the summit. The crater is like

a collar, the conelet like the knot of a necktie, while the glacier

is the ribbon of the necktie, itself, extending down to a jumble of

snowy hills with rocky moraines at the edge of the lake. We made camp

and ran into some adverse weather, and also into a party of mainland

sportsmen. We gave up further hunting and returned to King Cove, for

John had his bear and that was enough. The curved beauty of the Pavlof

cones, with a sweep of lava flows to the west of them, heavily mantled

with snow, was exquisite and a knowledge of the cones was useful when

plans were made for a later expedition.

Mrs. Jaggar, after a trip by way of the Yukon into the interior of

Alaska waited for me at Kodiak while I took Captain Johanssen’s SS

_Starr_ to Unalaska where I saw my friends of the Coast Guard and

received an invitation to go later on the _Unalga_ to Attu. I

stayed on the _Starr_ to Bristol Bay on the Bering Sea side, in

order to see the Alaskan Peninsula from the north.

A rewarding view showed me the almost inaccessible Aghileen Pinnacles,

a marvelous mountain west of Pavlof, consisting of dozens of upright

spires, all covered with ice, and looking like a cluster of cathedrals

in a snow storm. At the head of Bristol Bay I saw one of the government

Indian schools, met some of the teachers, and met trappers who came

on board with interesting collections of fox furs. They told me about

Naknek Lake, which gives access to Katmai from that side by dog sled in

winter. The necessary husky dogs were tied out in the fields around a

mission station.

A rumpus on deck between a storekeeper of the district and the United

States Marshall arose over a feud between two villages which were

quarreling about the placing of a United States post office. There was

no shooting, though it looked bad for a few minutes, and I realized the

far north was a replica of the far west.

On my return to Unalaska, Coast Guard officers and I were invited to

a dinner on board the German cruiser and training ship _Emden_.

I had nothing to wear but a hunting coat, whereas the others were in

dress uniforms, but the Germans didn’t mind. I greatly enjoyed the

_Emden’s_ officers, whom I heard from later, including Captain

Foerster, an acquaintance of my son in Seattle.

On board the _Unalga_ I was given the Captain’s cabin, for he was

absent on sick leave. Executive Officer Perkins, who acted as skipper,

preferred to live in his own quarters. Another guest on the trip to

Attu was Jack McCord, whose interests were sheep herding and whaling,

two industries which were making experimental progress in the islands.

We saw a sheep ranch in the western part of Unalaska Island and learned

that a recent landing on Bogoslof had found the conditions much like

those I had seen in 1907 when I noted the smoking cone, the millions of

murres, the three islands, the connecting beaches, the warm lagoon, and

the dozens of sea lions.

At Nikolski on the west end of Umnak Island, a flat land where

sedimentary rocks appeared, we had to mine and blow up a schooner

recently sunk in the harbor. Going westward, we passed cones in groups

or on individual islands, and we met the usual fogs and gales. The

officers were interested in Adak Harbor, but our plan to enter it was

defeated by storms.

We anchored off Chugul, where two Aleutian men and a boy had been

marooned for months by the non-return of the wrecked schooner. A trader

had leased the island and left them to collect blue foxes for him. When

their supplies gave out, they lived on fish, vegetation, eggs, and sea

birds. They had matches left but no ammunition, so they had loaded

cartridges by assembling match ends. However, they were sheltered in a

sod hut at one side of the grassy volcano, and were living proof that

an Aleut cannot starve. They were fat and healthy and had a good load

of furs. When we transported them to the village on Attu, the first

thing one of these men did was to marry an Attu girl, with the aid of

the local priest.

Chugul was the last of the shapely volcanic cones. Attu geology was

different, with old metamorphic and sedimentary rocks and ancient

lavas, but without any sign of fresh volcanoes. It is a mountainous

island with deep fjords, and we crossed a divide in order to look down

on Sarana Bay, made famous by World War II. McCord and I walked out on

the peninsula west of the village of Chernofski, and saw snowy ranges

beyond the next bay to the west. The Aleutian uplands are covered

with luxurious grasses, many flowers, and much mossy swamp; and there

are signs of terracing in places, as though made by old elevated

beaches. The country is too wet and stormy to be attractive for raising

livestock. However, when we landed on Amchitka Island on the south side

of the chain, we found it drier with fine grassy uplands. We found also

the usual shore cliffs and foxes.

We returned to Unalaska, where I was attracted by the empty hotel

building and wharves at Dutch Harbor, deserted by the Alaska Commercial

Company after the booming maritime trade of the Cape Nome gold days. I

talked to Company officers about using the buildings as a scientific

station. An old powder house would be suitable for a seismograph

cellar; the wireless station was nearby; and there was water, lumber,

and housing for every possible purpose. It was ideal for an Aleutian

geophysical station, if financing and collaboration could be had.

Later, in Seattle, I addressed the Chamber of Commerce and published in

our Bulletin a proposal for an Aleutian Geographical Observatory, but

nothing came of it at that time. The Aleutian Islands became a center

for landing craft, airfields, and defense forces during World War II,

and eventually our men Howard Powers and Austin Jones were employed

there.

In 1928, Gilbert Grosvenor of the National Geographic Society, in

cooperation with the Geological Survey, equipped me with an expedition

to map, photograph, and survey 2,500 square miles in the vicinity

of Pavlof Volcano. Again I had John Gardner and Pete as camp men.

McKinley, our topographer, brought pack animals and Alex Bradford

transported us to our base camp in Canoe Bay. I slept during summer

in the _Honukai_, a twin-screw steel amphibian boat, which was

manufactured in Chicago, after a preliminary vessel made of wood

and impelled by paddle wheels had been constructed at our Hawaiian

Observatory shop and tried out over a 400-mile course along the shores

of Hawaii.

The trial of the preliminary vessel, which we called _Ohiki_,

Hawaiian for ghost crab, took place during the spring of 1928. The

entire staff of our Observatory were engaged in it, with Mrs. Jaggar

as stewardess, as usual. Mr. Thurston went along as a passenger and

publicity man on the trip up the west coast of Hawaii, where I tested

out Kona beaches and checked on the craft’s seaworthiness.

We had misadventure at the start, in that the driving wheels tended to

dig in on soft beaches; and we found it necessary to build washboards

to raise the gunwhale amidships to avoid shipping water in choppy seas.

In the cross country trek from Kilauea, using the boat as a truck, Mr.

Thurston was overwhelmed with admiration for the twenty-one foot work

skiff, thundering down the steep hills of Kona on wheels, controlled by

the low gears of a Ford. Its boat body excited all the roadside kids to

wild antics of delight. My excellent truck builder, Boyrie, used the

same Ford which had run along the beaches in Alaska, reconstructing it

in the observatory machine shop.

Wilson’s photograph of the _Ohiki_, with Mr. Thurston on board,

became the frontispiece of a top secret publication on amphibians of

World War II’s joint army staffs in London. The amphibian war of the

Pacific Ocean and Normandy was to develop dozens of different designs

of landing craft, but war use was unforeseen by me at the time of our

experiments.

With a crew of four we cruised from Kailua to Kawaihae along the west

coast of Hawaii, landing on beaches and lava flows, and camping at

Makalawena, Kiholo, and Puako. We encountered real grief at Kawaihae

against the front of a soft submerged bank in shallow water, where the

front wheels made too much resistance and the rear wheels dug into a

mud bottom. We needed front wheel pull, but we finally got the craft up

the beach by power hauling with gypsy and cable and a tree. More grief

developed on our way up to Waimea when we fractured wooden rear axle

attachments. We went gratefully into the Parker Ranch shop for some

days, until we were able to return to Hilo and the volcano, completing

the circuit of the island.

The National Geographic vessel was built by George Powell who

advertised a Ford “mobileboat,” designed for the use of fishermen to

enter midcontinent lakes. He had started on a larger model, which

Grosvenor accepted for the National Geographic Expedition. Powell and

I tried it out on Bellingham roads and lakes and on beaches of Puget

Sound. We provided everything extra, for Alaska had no roadside filling

stations. A wheeled vehicle on the peninsula was unheard of. We had

elongate steel mats to give traction across the upper sands of a beach,

and this plus bow winch, levers, and manpower enabled us to abandon

beaches and enter the tundra. Our planning paid off, for in the 400

miles along the coast of Alaska from Shumagin Islands to King Cove,

over water, beaches, and tundra, we did not even have to pump up the

tires. The _Honukai’s_ numerous excessively low gears even enabled

us to drive to the snowline and bring out the heavy fur and bones of a

bear that I had shot on a snowy volcano, Mount Dana.

The expedition was very productive. McKinley made an excellent

topographic map; we corrected errors in old maps; we obtained many

photographs through Richard Stewart, who carried still, color, and

movie cameras; and we obtained minerals, fossils, geologic notes, and

many plants which I collected. McKinley used a panorama camera for his

topographic work and his wide photographs were invaluable as a record

of the country.

Meanwhile, I kept in tough with the seismograph station at Kodiak. The

steamers of the Pacific Commercial Company, which owned several of the

canneries and had headquarters in Bellingham, transported us from

Puget Sound to King Cove, and the many tugs for the canneries’ salmon

traps enabled me to make local explorations along the southern coast.

At one trap the fishermen had a tame baby seal, who would eat nothing

but little trout caught for him from the brook. He lived in a box,

and went off to sea by himself at night; but he always came home next

morning.

In 1929 Finch sent Austin Jones, a seismologist, to construct and

establish a hut at the Dutch Harbor radio station for a second Alaskan

seismograph, of the Hawaiian type designed by R. M. Wilson. Jones

taught the wife of a radio operator to manipulate the station and

transmit the seismograms. The women in charge of the two stations at

Kodiak and Dutch Harbor kept their work up for several years, and kept

in constant correspondence with me. Though in the winter time they had

to dig the stations out of snowdrifts, and to cope with all kinds of

damage from rain and storm, they courageously and faithfully visited

the instruments. It is a hellish country for weather.

Although both stations were within fifty miles of active volcanoes,

earthquakes were not numerous, and the story was very different from

that told by our records made at the edge of Kilauea caldera, only two

miles from an active lava center. Thus we have demonstrated that the

only way to study an active volcano is to live close to the crater

itself, even if a shelter has to be built underground.

In concluding this story of our Alaskan expeditions of the twenties, in

contrast to my windjamming experience of 1907, I must underscore the

importance of water transportation and credit those who have provided

it. In fact, all transportation was by water until aircraft became

supplemental. I feel that the U.S. Coast Guard, which takes care of the

Pribilof Island seals, is the supreme achievement of our government in

policing these stormy waters. Their 60-foot motor cruiser, equipped

with sails has come to be standard for such government bureaus as

the Biological Survey and has replaced the earlier, 80-foot sealing

schooner among the traders.

The canneries maintain big boatbuilding yards and operate large and

powerful tugs for visiting the salmon traps. The traps are heavy

weirs made of northwest pine logs, which are battered to pieces by

the winter storms and must be rebuilt with pile drivers every spring.

Thus a by product of cannery activities, and a godsend for trappers,

fishermen, Aleuts, and campers is the pine lumber distributed all along

the beaches from the annual wreckage of salmon traps. It is the only

firewood and construction material of the country to be found anywhere

west of Kodiak, for the land has no forests.

Our contribution to the boating problem was the exhibition of what an

amphibian landing truck will do on Alaskan beaches and its usefulness

along those beaches where a boat may be in difficulties from stormy

weather.

I returned to my Hawaii headquarters in the fall of 1928. The year 1929

was marked by an earthquake crisis which began in mid-September with an

unusual number of shocks in the vicinity of Hualalai Volcano, a place

hitherto notably free from earthquakes. This was of interest because

events on Mauna Loa had shown higher and higher lava sources and quake

centers for the south rift. The 1926 outflow had begun by splitting

northward across the summit crater, and there making a considerable

flow eastward toward Wood Valley while Wingate and his topographic

party were in camp close to the summit. Therefore, when the 1929 quakes

began near Puuwaawaa, it looked as though Mauna Loa eruptions might

begin again at the northwest.

A very strong quake of September 25 was felt all over the island, and

in our seismograph cellar was a peculiar swaying movement that set

all the instruments jiggling, dismantled recording pens, and produced

a queer feeling that the building was floating like a boat in a

whirlpool. Immediately came word that North Kona had suffered heavily,

particularly at Puuwaawaa Ranch near the cone of that name, where the

1859 Mauna Loa flow had swept past.

I motored at once with Mrs. Jaggar to Puuwaawaa, where we were

hospitably entertained by the family of Mrs. Robert Hind. The damage

all about was fantastic, with houses pulled apart, stone walls flung

down in a seaward direction, redwood water tanks wrecked, and shops

on the lower side of the highway moved toward the sea leaving a chasm

between them and the road. Resting in our bedroom, we could hear the

window frames ticking like clocks for long periods of time, then coming

to a sudden wrench which felt as though a lifting wave had passed

through the mountain under us.

I returned to the Observatory to get a shock recorder for use at the

ranch porch to count these strong motion shocks. Meanwhile residents in

Kona jotted down times of the shocks, which were coming by hundreds. On

October 5 at about 6 P.M., as I was returning through North

Kona in my car, I noticed a little unexplained excitement among people

by the roadside. I stopped at the residence of Frank Greenwell, whose

wife was a faithful counter of quakes, to find Mrs. Greenwell and her

daughter on the veranda in tears. They had just been through fearful

earthquakes, which in a moving car I had not felt. Flower vases were

overturned, furniture was disarranged, dishes were flung off the dining

room table, and kitchen utensils and milk were in a jumble. It was hard

to believe that anything so terrific could have happened without my

feeling it.

I found even more dire catastrophe at Puuwaawaa. The stone chimney was

overturned, breakage of china and of glass in the preserve closet in

the basement was severe, a stone bench was flung down and broken on

the lawn, and one side of the cellar was caved in. We took to living

in automobiles, for there had been land slips on the mountain. This

earthquake had been worse than that of September 25. Even hillside

cottages were split apart.

I set up the shock recorder, which registered about 3,000 earthquakes

during the next three months, until mid-December. The intensity and

frequency of these quakes declined, as is usual with aftershocks of

a big earthquake, recalling 1868 and the south end of the island. At

that time both Mauna Loa and Kilauea had had rift outflows, and as the

seismographic center of the new earthquakes was close to the 1800 and

1859 flows from Hualalai and Mauna Loa, everybody expected a lava flow;

but none came. Armine von Tempski who was a visitor during this period

was inspired to write “Lava.” She added a Hualalai lava flow using

material that I gave her to describe it. Her description is magnificent

although she, herself, had never seen a lava flow.

The October 5 shock was bad on the west flank of Mauna Kea, where

water tanks were overturned and the high wireless station was damaged,

and at Kamuela, where plumbing pipes were fractured. Parker Ranch was

damaged, and the constant racking along the entire length of the Kona

settlements caused land slips and broken masonry in many places, always

damaging north-south stone fences more than those at right angles to

the seashore.

This three months of northwest earthquakes, a condition unknown since

1801, the year when Hualalai lava flowed into the sea, indicated that

lava was coming north of Mauna Loa. This had not happened since 1899,

for the flows on the southwest rift, always beginning near the summit

crater, had been during 1903, 1907, 1914, 1916, 1919, and 1926.

Belief was that the southwestern rift of the mountain was filling

progressively higher with solidified redhot cement, not brittle enough

to fracture open easily, whereas the northern rifts--such as the

sources of 1859, 1881, and 1899--were now hard and brittle and ready

for fracture. The fracturing took the form of northwest cracking and

this was lava wedging, confirmed by the summit and northern outflows

which were to come in 1933 and 1935.

July of 1929 produced a new influx of lava into Halemaumau, nineteen

degrees north of the equator. And a curiously simultaneous event

occurred on nearly the same date 2,000 miles away at Tin Can Island

(Niuafoou) in Tonga where the influx broke into basaltic eruption

fifteen degrees south of the equator. Apparently a stress lagging

behind the solstice time had acted on the equatorial protuberance to

release the wedging open of lava fractures on both sides of the equator.

I was pleased when the U.S. Naval Observatory invited me to go to

Niuafoou in 1930 as the geologist on an expedition going to study

the total eclipse of the sun. The expedition, under Captain C. H.

C. Keppler, used the Naval Station at Samoa as a base. Mrs. Jaggar

accompanied me as far as Pago Pago and made trips to Western Samoa,

Fiji, and the Tonga Islands. With other wives of expedition members,

she was allowed to make a short visit to Tin Can Island at the time of

the eclipse in October. Spending some time in Samoa, she listened to

the Congressional hearings under Senator Hiram Bingham, which were to

investigate civil versus naval government. We were delighted to find

our old friend Captain Lincoln, of Tokyo earthquake relief, in command

of the Navy at Samoa, and I also renewed acquaintance with the pilot of

my companion plane in the Molokai forced landing of 1924, Lieutenant

Bill Sinton, and his family, whom we were to meet again in Honolulu.

Prominent on Captain Keppler’s staff was Lieutenant-Commander Kellers,

physician and naturalist, whose enterprise on the Niuafoou expedition,

like mine, dealt with sciences other than astronomy.

From the sea, Niuafoou looks like a hat in shape. It is about five

miles in diameter with eleven villages, mostly along the eastern

shores, and at that time had a population of about a thousand people.

In the center is a circular lake, bordered by cliffs, and much like

Crater Lake in Oregon. Standing about seventy feet above sea level

and 250 feet deep, it has slightly brackish water. The naval camp was

established at Angaha on the north side of the island, and here a new

village housed the refugees from Futu to the northwest, destroyed in

1929 by an aa lava flow. This flow came from erupting cracks trending

north and south, along the west side of the ring ridge around the

crater lake. These lava flows had been liquid pahoehoe at the source;

had poured into the sea in many places; and had made striking tree

molds around coconut palms, which were left as stone trees when the

wood burned and the liquid lava lowered. The western source crack

extends to the south end of the island and has accounted for most of

the earlier eruptions known to history. Futu had been the only western

settlement left.

Angaha came nearest to being a harbor, but was really on an open

roadstead, with a rocky boat landing and copra chute below the village

which stood on a cliff above.

Copra, the only commercial product, is bought and warehoused by two

Australian firms. The two grown sons of the manager of one assisted

me in tramping and photographing all over the island. The landing

at Angaha brought about the name Tin Can Island, for the visiting

steamers stopped a mile off shore and incoming mail, soldered into

large biscuit tins by the steamship engineer, was lowered into the

sea, tied together. The tins were towed in by the village policeman.

Outgoing mail was carried out in paper packages tied on top of sticks

and held aloft by hardy swimmers with hau wood poles, which they held

under their arms as floats. A short time after our trip a shark got a

swimmer, and canoes were adopted.

Thanks to the infrequent visits of vessels, the natives were unspoiled,

splendid specimens of the Polynesian race. The laws of Tonga required

every youth to cultivate an area of coconut trees and vegetables, and

the island was traversed by lovely trails. The houses and churches were

exquisite arched structures with thatched roofs, the beams tied with

coconut-fiber cords. There were native ministers, and the choirs were

superb. Services often started at 4 A.M.

My jobs were to take photographs with three cameras and make a

geological map. Northeast of the crater lake is a cluster of sand

hills, relics of an unusual explosive eruption in 1878, another

Hawaiian eruption date. This eruption was confined to one side of

the crater and came up the wall crack, between the encircling cliff

and the top of the lava plug under the lake. Its description is very

reminiscent of the Kilauea steamblasts of 1924.

We found a remarkable inhabitant of the sand in the malau bird, a small

partridge with big feet, with which it dug a deep hole in the sand for

its large egg which was then covered up. The sun’s heat did the rest,

with the warm sand acting as incubator. The young bird scratched its

way to freedom and flight without aid from its mother. Another item of

Dr. Kellers’ natural history was the flying fox, a giant bat with a

high singing note and odoriferous rookeries in the tops of trees. It

had a heavy flight like an eagle’s. A third item was the tiny black

crab, the size of a ten-cent piece, which lived in the midst of limey

flats at one side of the lake, where there were crusts that suggested

calcareous algae. The little black crabs, which lived by thousands in

the midst of the crust, resembled compact spiders.

An artificial feature of great convenience was a trail following the

top of the ring ridge, all around the crater. The Quensell boys had

a rowboat on the lake, and Dr. Kellers and I were guided by them to

all parts of the island, making the acquaintance of the people in the

villages along the eastern trade-wind shore. Just as in Hawaii, the

trade wind is a controlling feature; and the surf erodes cliffs on

the east, whereas beaches are more common along the lava flows of the

western strand line. These are sheltered from wind but are remote from

habitations. The entire island is made of lava and ash deposits, and is

evidently the top of a volcano cone extending far below sea level. The

lava activity, as shown by the arrangement of the old and new source

cracks, depends on concentric cracking around the caldera, which makes

concentric rifts, rather than the long radial ones found in Hawaii. The

crack along the west side--which had vented the succession of flows

from south to north, ending with the Futu flow of 1929--indicated that

the next flow might threaten Angaha. This is just what happened during

the next decade, forcing the island population to be evacuated.

My geology photographs and pictures of people, ships, and dwellings

were developed in a darkroom tent, which I set up in a copra shed, so

as to keep the development of negatives abreast of the exposures. Copra

bugs crawling over me in the dark and getting into developer added

excitement, and the eternal smell of copra began to tinge my dreams.

The routine of our work was broken by two good fights, a fist fight

between a Filipino steward and a sailor, and a knock-down and drag-out

between two native women of Angaha. The real fun was the row between

the two women. A younger woman who was a loose, shrill character,

disliked by the villagers and the sailors, attempted to attack an

older woman who was a big husky dame. There was screaming and hair

pulling and fisticuffs, while the Navy men stood around and cheered

them on. The younger woman made most of the noise, while the older

woman laughed and ripped off the other’s clothes. Finally the young

woman, in tears and with clothing in tatters, retreated and disappeared.

But to get back to the eclipse, telescope lenses were mounted on high

scaffolds, the ladies arrived in October, and the total eclipse of the

sun happened and was photographed at the time anticipated.

When the time came for us to return to Samoa, some of us were fortunate

enough to get a place on the Flood Brothers’ copra ship _Carisso_,

out of San Francisco. Along with the family of a Navy officer, we went

ashore at Niuatoputapu (Keppel Island) after climbing down a rope

ladder to a bobbing whale boat. We found beautiful mats, which are the

wealth of the people throughout Tonga. The village men and women who

had mats to sell were not so much interested in coins or trinkets and

merchandise as they were in the clothing we wore. I literally divested

myself of a shirt and a suit for a beautiful fringed mat ornamented

with clusters of shells, made to be given to Queen Charlotte on her

next visit. We were fortunate in reaching Samoa in good weather, but

a big storm after we got there wrought havoc with the _Tanager_

carrying astronomical photo plates and bundles of Polynesian mats which

were much damaged by sea water.