The Last Volcano

by John Dvorak

  One tells of a battle between Pele and the pig god, Kamapua’a. Pele sees Kamapua’a in the crater Halema’uma’u, and so she starts an eruption. According to Fornander, Kamapua’a, who is usually in the form of a young man, “changed himself into the form of a giant hog, opened its mouth, showing its tusks, and swallowed Halema’uma’u, taking in Pele and her sisters.” The battle continues as Pele chases him through the forest.

  Such a collapse, or swallowing, of the Halema’uma’u crater followed by the flow of lava—represented by Pele chasing Kamapua’a through the forest—is a familiar sequence. Jaggar recorded such a sequence in 1919, 1922 and 1923. And the sequence has occurred more than a dozen times in recent decades. As the Pele-Kamapua’a story attests, it was also seen and recorded by ancient Hawaiians.

  Another story tells of a confrontation between Pele and one of her sisters, Hi’iaka. In this one, compiled by Nathaniel Emerson, who had stories that had been published in Hawaiian-language newspapers translated into English, Pele has fallen in love with a young chief, Lohi’au, who lives on the distant island of Kauai. She sends Hi’iaka to fetch him, promising her sister that she will not destroy Hi’iaka’s favorite forest during her absence. But Hi’iaka is delayed. As she returns and nears the island, she sees that her beloved forest is on fire. Understandably upset, Hi’iaka confronts Pele who rages by killing Lohi’au and throwing his body into Halema’uma’u. Hi’iaka then digs furiously to recover the body. As Emerson recorded the story, “She tore her way with renewed energy; rock smote against rock and the air was full of flying debris.”

  This story probably records two volcanic events witnessed by Hawaiians—and which can be seen in the geology of Kilauea. The first is a decades-long eruption during the 15th century that burned and covered more than a hundred square miles of dense forest with lava. The second is the subsequent collapse of the summit of the Kilauea to form the caldera, an event that was accompanied by explosions, the “flying debris” tossed by Hi’iaka as she dug for Lohi’au.

  Throughout most of the 19th century, there was a general disregard for any public display of reverence for Pele—or for anything related to ancient Hawaiian culture. Not until the 1870s was there a renaissance of Hawaiian culture, brought on by King David Kalakaua who was trying to establish an identity for the islands separate from the one then dominated by American missionaries. Ancient chants were heard again. Public performances of hula were staged, but still denounced as scandalous by some non-Hawaiians. Ke’elikolani’s trip to Hilo in 1881 was one of those public renewals of faith in Pele—one that illustrates a conflict between Hawaiian and western views of the volcanoes.*

  Through western eyes, a volcano is a physical system that can be understood and, possibly, controlled. To Hawaiians, the volcano is an important part of cultural identity as represented by Pele, and that is understood through analogies. For example, the redness of molten lava is also seen in the redness of the pom-pom flowers of the ohi’a tree and the berries of the ohelo bush, related to cranberry, that grow on Kilauea. When blood-like, red-glowing lava erupts and flows toward the sea, it is the menstrual blood of the goddess Pele, an act that mimics the march, in ancient times, of Hawaiian women who cleansed themselves near the ocean during menstruation. To alter the path of flowing lava is to disrupt a woman’s menstruation, akin to disrupting nature herself.

  On the evening of November 21, 1935, after a day of earthquakes, some felt as far away as Honolulu, lava began gushing from a fissure high on Mauna Loa. The next morning an airplane was sent by the commander of the United States Army Air Corps at Wheeler Airfield on Oahu to take Jaggar on a flight to see the eruption.

  The flight lasted an hour and ten minutes. The pilot flew low and circled as close as possible to the eruption site, the airplane shaking violently in the highly turbulent air rising from the hot lava.

  Beneath him, Jaggar could see a wall of fountains a thousand feet long. Molten rock shot up hundreds of feet. Five ribbons of liquid lava were coursing down the north side of volcano as braided streams. Later, back on the ground, Jaggar could see that the ribbons had coalesced into one broad river. By nightfall, the lava had flowed down the steepest part of the volcano and the front was on the broad plain between Mauna Loa and Mauna Kea. The question now, after only one day of activity, was whether the eruption would continue long enough for the front of the flow to run up against the rising slope of Mauna Kea and turn either to the west and onto vacant land or to the east and toward Hilo.

  The critical point came in late December. For four weeks, the flow had crept over flat ground. The front itself was a continuous wall of stiff lava that acted like a cofferdam, holding back a vast pool of liquid lava. As the eruption continued, the flow front did move forward, the progress measured in a few feet a day, though more importantly the volume of the lava pool continued to increase.

  On December 22 the flow front reached the midpoint between Mauna Loa and Mauna Kea. To continue northward the front would have to move uphill. And so, instead, the flow began to spread both to the east and the west. The westward movement was short lived, halted when that edge of the flow pushed up against the side of an older lava flow, one erupted in 1843. Now there was only one direction for the lava to flow—toward Hilo.

  On December 23 liquid lava did break out and surge to the east, the flow front advancing more than a mile that day. On December 24 it moved another mile and a half. At those rates, lava would flow over Hilo in early January. Jaggar decided that something had to be done, and it had to be done fast.

  Years earlier, at Kilauea, he had watched as a lava flow changed course after a section of the channel the lava was flowing in collapsed. He reasoned that a lava flow could be redirected by controlling where such collapses occurred. But how could the edge of a lava flow be caused to collapse?

  Thurston suggested the use of explosives. His idea was to erect a wooden stand close to the point where one wanted to disrupt the flow, then, with a remote mechanism, drop TNT explosives from the top of the stand. There were obvious practical problems with the idea, such as how to keep the wooden stand from catching fire, but Jaggar thought the idea a good start.

  Guido Giacometti (then the supervisor of the Olaa Sugar Mill and a man of practical experience, having graduated from the Polytechnic Institute in Zurich, Switzerland, in 1901, the year after Albert Einstein had graduated from the same institute) had a solution. The precision of aerial bombing had improved greatly since the end of the First World War. It might provide the means to deliver explosives at the edge of a river of lava. “The more I thought of Mr. Giacometti’s suggestion,” Jaggar decided, “the more I realized that that would be the feasible thing to do.”

  Jaggar sent a radio message to the Army’s commanding general on Oahu describing Giacometti’s suggestion. The same afternoon, an airplane with three officers from a bombing squadron flew over Mauna Loa to see the eruption. At noon the next day, a conference was held in Hilo attended by Jaggar, several local officials and officers of the Army. They issued a joint statement that said: Because the public “demands that something be done to divert or stop this lava flow,” they recommend the dropping of bombs. The statement was sent to the Army’s commanding general who issued orders for the immediate shipment of the needed bombs to Hilo. The request apparently reached all the way to Washington, D.C., because the next day a telegram arrived for Jaggar from President Franklin Roosevelt: “Planes authorized. Good luck on your effort.”

  Fourteen Army planes from Luke and Wheeler airfields on Oahu arrived in Hilo on the morning of December 26 to carry out the bombing of Mauna Loa. The planes included ten Keystone bombers, two amphibious planes and two observation planes, the last to carry spotters and photographers. Twenty officers and nearly forty enlisted men also arrived. An Army transport ship with the bombs reached Hilo that night.

  Work began the next day to locate targets. Jaggar flew in one of the observation planes with Colonel Delos Emmons, who was in charge of the operation. They
decided the primary target would be at the edge of the lava channel near the eruption site high on the volcano. A secondary target would be about a mile farther down.

  That night Thomas and Isabel Jaggar and several Army officers and enlisted men climbed to the top of a cinder cone on the south side of Mauna Kea where they would watch the bombing. Jaggar would talk directly over a short-wave radio with people in Hilo.

  The next morning the weather was perfect, neither wind nor clouds. The first bomber took off at 8:45 from Hilo, followed by four others at twenty-minute intervals. Because the planes were armed with bombs, the pilots were ordered to avoid flying over Hilo. And so they assembled over Hilo Bay, reaching an altitude of twelve thousand feet, then turned toward Mauna Loa.

  In turn, each plane pitched forward and dove at a target, releasing a pair of bombs. As seen by Jaggar ten miles away, when the first bomb hit, it caused a flash, followed a minute later by a deep boom. Minutes later, a second flash followed by a weak column of smoke rising from the impact point. Seven more hits within the next hour, the last one producing a double puff of smoke as two bombs hit together. Then the bombers returned to Hilo.

  A second set of planes left Hilo that afternoon and released their bombs over the secondary target. Then the two observation planes flew over the lava flow the remainder of the day, the crews noting the progress of the flow front by using trees as markers.

  “Our purpose was not to stop the lava flow, but to start it all over again at the source so that it will take new course,” explained Jaggar the next day to newspaper reporters. And it seemed to have that effect.

  On the day before the bombing, the flow was advancing as fast as 800 feet an hour. Hours after the first bombs were dropped, the rate had dropped to 150 feet an hour. And late on December 28, the day after the bombing, the flow front had stopped.

  The experiment seemed to have been a success, but there was also a lessening of the outpouring of lava on the day before the bombing. The last molten lava erupted on January 2.

  Furthermore, a later inspection of the bombsites and explosions on the ground showed that few of the bombs had hit the intended targets. Though Jaggar claimed the experiment had been “entirely successful,” today most people conclude that the bombing had no effect on stopping the advancing lava flow.

  It was, as one non-Hawaiian wrote who witnessed the bombing, “like the time in 1881, when Princess Ruth Ke’elikolani tried to stop a lava flow from invading Hilo by throwing silk handkerchiefs and a bottle of brandy into the molten flow.” In other words, in the view of that particular person, it had been a coincidence.

  Though the roar of the explosions could not be heard in Hilo, those who were in town could clearly see small columns of smoke rising one after the other, the plumes blown steadily away from Hilo by the prevailing trade winds. There was no denying that the lava flow of Pele was under attack.

  “Nothing good will ever come from disturbing Pele,” said seventy-one-year-old Mr. Ebenezer Low, a local rancher and part-Hawaiian, the day after the bombing. “The Hawaiians don’t like it, at least the old folks don’t.”

  One of the pilots, William Capp, would recall, “None of the [bomber] crews went into town once we found out that [residents] were threatening the crew chiefs and ground support.” As soon as the second wave of bombers returned to Hilo, the planes were refueled and flown back to Oahu.

  Delos Emmons, who had flown with Jaggar on the initial reconnaissance flight and had decided on the primary and secondary targets, told an aide years later: “I will always remember it as it was like flying inside a fiery furnace. I was sitting on top of the gas tank expecting it to explode any minute. I was scared as hell.”

  “Didn’t you know of the legend that anyone who interferes with the Goddess Pele when she is erupting must meet a violent death?” the aide asked.

  “Sure I did,” Emmons answered. “Everyone knows that and I did something about it, too. After we came in from the run, I made another with a passenger, a small pig that I bought. When I was over the center of the crater I dumped him out. It was the meanest thing I ever did and I can still remember the poor devil’s screams as he catapulted below.”

  “Did the other flyers do likewise?”

  “No. They gave me the horse laugh.”

  Less than a month after the eruption ended, two of the planes involved in the bombing of Mauna Loa collided over Luke Airfield on Ford Island in Pearl Harbor. It was the worst airplane crash to date in the Hawaiian Islands.

  The two planes were among the last elements of three in a flight formation of nine bombers returning to Luke Field after a brief night flight. The three were flying en echelon, which means two were flying above and slightly behind the leader. When the planes were about a thousand feet above the ground, the two planes that were following touched wingtips. Both burst into flames immediately.

  There were two distinct explosions followed by a mass of metal wreckage falling onto the field. Only two of the eight men in the planes survived.

  One survivor was Lieutenant Charles Fisher. “I was piloting one of the planes roaring over Luke Field with both motors wide open,” the lieutenant told investigators. “Suddenly there was a terrific impact. I turned to see a mass of flames in the rear of the plane and heard a violent explosion.”

  He unfastened his seat belt, then stood in his seat and dove through a hole in the wrecked plane. He remembered passing through the still-whirling propellers. “I don’t know how they missed,” he said. He pulled his ripcord. No sooner had he done that than he felt a tremendous jerk. His parachute, still unopened, had snagged on the steel ladder of an oil tank, leaving him hanging a few feet from the ground. He unfastened the chute, dropped to the ground, and crawled on all fours away from the tank.

  The other survivor was Private Thomas Lanigan who was in the other plane. “We were flying nicely in a routine flight when the crash came. It knocked me to the floor,” he said. He straightened up to see that the canopy was gone. He jumped and his parachute opened. He descended rapidly, heading straight for the flaming wreckage on the ground. At the last moment a burst of hot air from the wreckage tossed him upward, then the wind carried him sideways. He landed about twenty-five feet from the wrecked planes.

  Of the eight men in the two planes, only Fisher and Lanigan had not been involved in the bombing of Mauna Loa. (Emmons, who sacrificed the poor pig, was not involved in the accident.) The other six were. One of those was Private John Hartman who was seen making a clean jump from his airplane, but, as he settled closer to the ground, a gust of wind came up and blew him into the fire.

  An Army board of inquiry met to investigate the accident. The board concluded that the mid-air collision of the two bombers over Luke Field had been due to “extenuating circumstances.” There was no evidence of mechanical defects nor was either pilot guilty of any apparent neglect. Instead, the accident had been caused by the slipstream of air coming off the lead bomber forcing one of the trailing bombers to lurch sideways and collide with the other.

  Ebenezer Low and some other Hawaiians saw it differently. The six dead men had been victims of Pele’s wrath.

  And the story does not end there. The remains of the six dead airmen, which, according to the autopsies, where “burned beyond all recognition,” were loaded onto an Army transport ship and sent to the United States mainland for internment. At the last moment, before the transport left, a seventh body was added. It was the mortal remains of Father Damien, the priest who had run the leper colony on Molokai.† Now, forty-seven years after his death, his remains, sealed inside a coffin made of koa wood, were being transported back to Belgium, the country of his birth. (The bodies of the six dead airmen were in metal caskets.)

  The transport ship left Honolulu on February 4 and arrived six days later in San Francisco. Six hours before it docked, a mystery arose that has never been solved. The ship’s captain, Edgar McClellan, disappeared. Members of a board of inquiry admitted that they were baffled. One theory held
that the captain had committed suicide, but no traces and no notes related to a suicide were discovered. The board closed the investigation stating that it was unable to reach a conclusion as to the fate of the captain.

  *Even though public displays of Hawaiian culture were discouraged in the 19th century, private ones were still conducted, including those that paid homage to Pele. During such private ceremonies, offerings would be made to Pele, which included fish, stalks of sugar cane, taro and flowered leis. During especially important times, the sacrifice of a pig was done.

  †For sixteen years Father Damien cared for the physical, spiritual and emotional needs of those in the leper colony. Eventually he contracted and died of the disease. He was canonized by Pope Benedict XVI on Sunday, October 11, 2009.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  THE LAST VOLCANO

  As Jaggar was fond of telling visitors, the work of a volcano observatory does not start and end with eruptions. There is much else to do. There is the constant readjustment of scientific instruments and the reading of those instruments to decide whether an eruption is imminent. There is the need to prepare better topographic maps, ones that showed more detail, so that the paths of future lava flows might be predicted and so that remote locations may more easily be accessed. And there was a mountain of correspondence that needed to be answered, inquiries about the progress of the science and requests for copies of measurements already completed. There was the need to encourage other scientists to visit and apply their own expertise to a study of the volcano, whether it be a new way to collect and analyze volcanic gases and changes in gravity or magnetic fields or a host of other possible investigations, each one intended to reveal something new about what was happening inside the volcano. And there was the need for Jaggar to develop his own new techniques and invent his own new equipment and to extend his work to other volcanoes. Of this last effort, Jaggar got a surprising boost after the unexpected death of President Warren G. Harding.