The Last Volcano

by John Dvorak

  And there was Thurston whose concern was how to finance the work of the observatory beyond the original five years. He had raised the money to begin the observatory and had kept the observatory running, even contributing his own money when the observatory’s bank account ran low. He had honored his five-year commitment, and the five years would soon be over. After his recent failure to buy the Volcano House, his interest in Kilauea as a commercial endeavor waned. If the observatory was to continue, a new source of money had to be found. Thurston found it in the form of Herbert Gregory, a professor of geology at Yale University.

  Gregory made his first trip to the Hawaiian Islands and visited Kilauea in May 1916. He was in the islands because he had been chosen to be the next director of Bishop Museum, a position he would begin the next year. His first priority as the new director, which he announced publicly during his initial visit, was to take control of the volcano observatory at Kilauea.

  Later, in a private meeting, Thurston and Gregory discussed the future of the volcano observatory. “What should become of Jaggar?” Thurston asked.

  Gregory answered. “He would be a good man for explorations in Alaska.”

  As the fall of 1916 approached, it was the low point of Jaggar’s life. He knew of Gregory’s plan to oust him as director. The floor of Halema’uma’u had just collapsed. And such collapses were often followed by months—or years—of inactivity. But this one was different.

  Two months after the June 1916 collapse a small lake of lava formed 450 feet below the rim. A month later it stood at 330 feet. On November 1, there were nine vigorous fountains creating a tremendous outpouring of lava that covered the entire crater floor. Now the lake level had risen to within two hundred feet of the crater rim.

  On December 20, there came a surprise. Walter Spalding, a 1910 graduate of MIT, stopped at the observatory to see his former professor. He told Jaggar that he had just been to Halema’uma’u and that, without the use of ropes or a ladder, had found a way down and stood next to the lava lake, which was now barely a hundred feet down. Jaggar had waited four years for such an opportunity. It had come just six months before he was to end his five-year leave-of-absence and return to MIT. He had time to begin a new series of experiments.

  There was another reason the next few months would be momentous for him at Kilauea.

  He had met a woman.

  *In 1961 the summit of Haleakala volcano on Maui was made into a national park. At the same time, the name of the park on Hawaii was changed to “Hawaii Volcanoes National Park,” the name that is used today.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  THE SCHOOL TEACHER

  Charles Eagan was in San Francisco and he needed a lawyer, that is, he needed a lawyer who was willing to return with him to the Hawaiian Islands.

  After the revolution of 1893, the forested land along the road that led from Hilo to the Volcano House was opened to settlers, the post-revolutionary government encouraging them to clear the land and grow coffee. By 1896 more than six thousand acres were under cultivation, most of them small, individual plots. The largest one, three hundred acres, was owned by Eagan. The first harvest came in the spring of 1898. It was a dismal one.

  Wet weather caused most of the coffee beans to rot, and a boring beetle ravaged those beans that did mature. And so coffee growers were selling their lands at greatly reduced prices. And Eagan was anxious to buy those lands and consolidate them into a single large sugar plantation, knowing that the growing of sugar was still the quickest way to get rich in the Hawaiian Islands. But there was a problem. The politics as well as the legal system in the islands was under the control of a few people, mostly the descendants of missionaries. Eagan was a newcomer, having arrived in 1895. And that was why he needed his own lawyer to help him expand his holdings.

  Eagan found him in the form of Guy Maydwell, a young attorney from Sacramento who had recently moved to San Francisco. Maydwell was having a difficult time of it. He had his own law office on Sutter Street, but he had few clients. In addition to his law practice, he worked at night as a bookkeeper in an accounting firm. He was open to new opportunities. And Eagan laid out a grand one.

  It was June 1898 when they met. Four months earlier, the battleship Maine had exploded in Havana harbor, sending the United States into war with Spain. Two months later Commodore George Dewey defeated the Spanish Navy in Manila Bay, taking possession of the Philippines. As Eagan pointed out to Maydwell, the United States was in the process of annexing the Hawaiian Islands to provide a way station between the west coast and the Philippines for its Navy. And once the Hawaiian Islands were annexed, those who were already living and working in the islands would be the ones who would benefit most from the economic boom that would follow annexation.

  Furthermore, as Eagan pressed the point, Maydwell would be assured of legal work. He would be Eagan’s personal lawyer, preparing and filing the legal papers that would be required to acquire the land to start the new sugar plantation, a plantation that would be located near Hilo Bay along the road to the volcano because that land had already been cleared.

  Maydwell, it is safe to say, was easy to convince. He contacted his sister, Ollie, who was also working in San Francisco, and she agreed to go with him. He also sent word to Isabel Peyran who he had known for several years and who was Ollie’s best friend. Maydwell told her of the opportunity in the Hawaiian Islands. He also asked her to marry him. She said yes.

  Peyran was the daughter of French immigrants who had come to California during the Gold Rush. She was born in a mining camp on the west side of the Sierra Nevada on August 17, 1874. The year after her birth the Peyran family moved to Sacramento where her father found work as a lumberman and her mother as a seamstress. When Isabel was six years old, her mother, Marie Peyran, citing “a failure to provide,” was granted a divorce from Phillipe Peyran. The family situation grew worse a few years later when her father was murdered by thieves who broke into a house where he was sleeping.

  Isabel attended school up to age fourteen. After that, she began her working career as a teacher. Her first assignment was at Lincoln Primary School in Sacramento where there was another first-year teacher, Ollie Maydwell. Ollie introduced Isabel to her brother. From that, a courtship developed, though exactly when is unknown.

  As soon as he asked her to marry him, Isabel left for San Francisco. They married on July 2, 1898. Five days later, President William McKinley signed the joint Congressional resolution that annexed the Hawaiian Islands. Five days after that, on July 12, the Maydwells sailed for the islands.

  They arrived in Hilo two weeks later. Eagan met them and moved them to what remained of his coffee plantation along the road to the volcano. Later that month, he and Guy Maydwell were in Honolulu where they watched the annexation ceremony and where Maydwell applied for a license to practice law in the islands. The license was granted in December. By then, an unknown buyer had purchased most of the former coffee lands. For months, there was speculation as to who it might be. Finally, in April 1899, he revealed himself. It was Lorrin Thurston.

  Eagan was the sole holdout, refusing to sell his land to Thurston. How Thurston eventually got control of the land is a complicated story. Let it suffice to say that a year of legal suits and countersuits followed. In the end, the matter was settled out of the courts after Eagan purchased a racehorse from one of Thurston’s business partners. Eagan raced the horse in Hilo on July 4, 1900, in a free-for-all race. His horse beat the competition easily. Eagan collected the prize money of $200 and the side bets. Then, after signing ownership of his land to Thurston, he sailed away and never returned to the islands.

  Guy Maydwell was now without a client. What would he and Isabel do?

  The Maydwells moved to Hilo where Isabel and Ollie opened a free kindergarten, the first preschool in Hilo, and Guy opened a private law office. He did divorces and researched land deeds. But whenever he went to court and Lorrin Thurston was the opposing attorney, Maydwell lost the case.

  F
ortunately for Guy Maydwell, the court clerk on the west side of the island in Kailua died and a judge hired Maydwell to be the new clerk. He left Hilo and moved to the other side of the island. Isabel stayed, taking charge of a boarding house.

  As one of two attorneys on the west side of the island, Maydwell soon had most of the legal business offered by local ranchers and shipping agents. He again opened an office. He also entered politics, elected in 1902 as one of the island’s two prosecuting attorneys. He acquired more legal clients. Isabel moved and joined him. They rented a large house in the community of Holualoa, high on the steep slope that looks over Kailua. The house was across the road from the local school where Isabel was hired to teach. They were now at the top of the local social strata. They attended formal and informal dinners. They enjoyed weekend picnics and were invited to taffy pulls. After years of struggling, Guy and Isabel Maydwell had achieved financial stability. But that ended quickly.

  Six people taught at the school in Holualoa, including the principal, Nettie Scott, whose husband had built the schoolhouse. In August 1909, as the vice-principal, as well as one of the teachers, Isabel Maydwell filed charges against Scott with the school board, claiming the principal had acted with “cruel and inhuman treatment of pupils” and had “arbitrarily and arrogantly conducted herself toward her subordinate teachers.” The school board met to consider the matter. Parents and students attended in support of Maydwell, many of them willing to speak on her behalf. But the board members refused to hear testimony. Instead, the members had already made a decision. They charged Maydwell with being insubordinate in filing the charges. And so her position at the school was terminated. That ended her teaching career. She never taught again.

  A month after the incident with the school board, Guy Maydwell complained of headaches. He went to Honolulu to be examined by a local physician, James Judd, who diagnosed a brain tumor. Dr. Judd advised him to go to San Francisco for surgery, but Maydwell refused. Instead, on June 24, 1910, Judd performed the operation, removing a tumor about the size of a small orange that was wrapped around an optic nerve. For days, Maydwell hovered between life and death. Eventually, he grew strong enough to leave the hospital, but the operation had left him partially paralyzed. And so a second one was performed. His condition worsened. On September 10, 1901, Guy Maydwell died at Queen’s Hospital in Honolulu.

  His wife was now alone, widowed at age thirty-five. She returned to the island of Hawaii where she mourned his death for six months. Afterwards, she began a series of quick trips to Honolulu. On one trip she stayed several months, working at a post office, later as a bookkeeper at a small sugar plantation. But she always returned to Hawaii.

  In August 1911 she went to see the volcano, staying three nights at the Volcano House. She took the trip to Halema’uma’u and saw the active lava lake. Frank Perret was then living in a small wooden hut at the edge of the crater. She might have met him—almost everyone did. She did sign a guest book that Thurston had left at the hut. That night, when she returned to the hotel, three quick earthquakes rocked the hotel, the shaking strong enough to rattle the windows.

  She made her next trip to Kilauea in May 1913 and a third one in October 1914. It was during the latter trip that she first met Thomas Jaggar. He had just returned from the eruption of Sakurajima in Japan and probably told her of his recent adventures. She returned to the volcano in February and again in May. By then, their relationship was more than just causal: On his monthly bill, in addition to paying his normal board and room and two dollars for laundry and a dollar for a box of cigars, he also paid three dollars for “half a room for Mrs. Maydwell.” She had stayed at the hotel for three nights, traveling with a female friend.

  Then, after the year 1916 ended and 1917 had begun, there came two catalysts in their romance. One was an eruption of Kilauea. The other was none other than Lorrin Thurston.

  After Spalding had reported to Jaggar that the lava lake could be reached, Jaggar made plans for new experiments to measure lava temperature. In preparation for those experiments, on January 3, 1917, he made his first descent into Halema’uma’u, writing of the day, “I was first privileged to walk over the hot lava and stand on the ramparts a few feet from the surging lake.”

  He was accompanied by William Twigg-Smith, Thurston’s son-in-law and the president of the Hawaii Tourist Bureau. The two men made their descent down the east side of the crater, Jaggar carrying a sledgehammer, which he had named “Excelsior,” a reference to a popular poem by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and which meant “onward and upward,” knocking away overhanging rocks as he went.

  Standing on the crater floor, they made their way carefully, testing with their boots the footing of every step. They found a place where stiff toes of lava were pushing out from the base of a larger molten mass. Here Jaggar used a long wooden stick he had brought with him to poke at the toes, discovering they were covered with a glassy membrane “stiff as leather and flexible.”

  The two men resumed walking, coming to the base of a long low hill that was smoking furiously. They scrambled up the side, a rise of about twenty feet, finding the surface exceedingly slippery and covered with black, glistening shards of fresh glassy lava, the shards cutting and scarring their boots.

  Reaching the top, they saw that they were standing on the crest of a low ridge that was acting as a dam that was holding back the lake of molten lava, the dam keeping the molten material from flooding lower parts of the crater floor. Red churning lava was just a few feet below them. In one direction the ridge ran up against the crater wall. In the other direction it ended at the edge of a large peninsula of solidified rock that extended out into the lake. Jaggar decided it was there at the end of the peninsula that he would measure directly the temperature of the lava lake.

  The idea was a simple one. He would fill one end of a long iron pipe with Seger cones. Seger cones had been used by the porcelain industry for many years to measure the high temperature of furnaces. Each cone had a mixture of clay and limestone and other minerals and was formed into the shape of a small pyramid. The precise mixture determined the temperature when the pyramid would lose its shape and sag, or fuse. By putting Seger cones of different fusible temperatures into an iron pipe, then plunging the pipe into the lava, retrieving it and examining which cones had fused, Jaggar could determine the temperature of the lava lake.

  Two days were required to haul by truck bundles of iron pipe to the edge of Halema’uma’u. Another day was needed to lower the bundles by rope to the crater floor, Jaggar assisted by Twigg-Smith and Lancaster. Thurston, who was financing the experiment, arrived on the last day and also assisted. The next day, January 7, would be a Sunday. Thurston suggested that, instead of beginning the experiment the next day, they rest and bring their families and friends and lead them down into the crater.

  When tracking the progress of a romance, it is important to realize not only what a couple does, but also what they try to hide. In the case of the romance between Isabel Maydwell and Thomas Jaggar, it is what they did not record in a personal diary and in field notes on January 7, 1917, that is important.

  In his notes, Jaggar listed those who were members of “the large party” that descended into Halema’uma’u. There was Thurston and his wife and daughter. There was also Thurston’s business partner, Walter Dillingham, and his wife and son. A Dr. Adams was included. One presumes he was a guest at the Volcano House. And there is Alex Lancaster. At the end of the list, Jaggar wrote “others,” as if to indicate that the others lacked the importance of the other members. Then, sometime later, in the narrow space between lines, he inserted “Mrs. Maydwell.” By itself, the addition would mean little if she had not done something odd.

  In a notebook that she used as a diary, she removed the first few dozen pages by cutting through them with a razor blade as if she was eliminating her past. Then, on what was now a new first page, she wrote an entry for January 7, 1917. She records the names of every person who was on the outing except on
e, Jaggar, even though he was leading the way and explaining the recent activity of the lake and taking photographs. Admittedly, the omission is a minor act.

  And, yet, one feels it was deliberate, perhaps, because this day was an important point in their romance, producing a personal feeling that couples try to conceal. Afterwards, she no longer went on extended trips to Oahu. She lived most of the time at the Volcano House, working as Jaggar’s unpaid assistant, typing notes and learning to read seismic records.

  And he, though immersed in his work at the lava lake, was preparing to do what was necessary to remain at Kilauea.

  Three days of rain followed the Sunday outing. Finally, on Thursday, January 11, the weather cleared. At 9 A.M. Jaggar and four other men stood on the rim of Halema’uma’u and were ready to work. The other four were Lancaster, Thurston, Twigg-Smith and Joe Moniz, a local man.

  Before starting the descent, Jaggar studied the crater floor through binoculars. He could see the long ridge where he and Twigg-Smith had stood the previous weeks and the peninsula that extended out into the lake. Since that trip, much of the peninsula had been spattered by fresh lava. No matter. With a matter-of-fact tone in his voice, Jaggar called to the others. “Come along and let’s get to work.” He led the way down.

  As soon as the five men reached the crater floor, Jaggar had them carry the bundles of iron pipe to a place at the base of the long ridge and near the peninsula, a place he thought was relatively safe from being run over by molten lava anytime soon. The ends of the pipe had already started to corrode. And so Jaggar had the others rub the pipe ends with steel wool while he and Thurston climbed the ridge and walked out onto the peninsula.