The Last Volcano

by John Dvorak

  Most medical experts who have studied the case have concluded that Harding’s sudden death at the Palace Hotel in San Francisco on August 2, 1922, was due as much to a misdiagnosed heart attack of the previous week, which went untreated, as to an increase of personal stress after the recent revelation of financial scandals within the administration. The most famous scandal involved several key government officials—all close personal friends of the president—and the leasing of oil reserves in various places, including Teapot Dome, Wyoming, from which the scandal would get its name. The leasing had been done by the Department of Interior, and so, when Harding’s successor, Calvin Coolidge, took office, he reacted to the scandal by reorganizing the Department and infusing it with new programs. One of those programs was the study of volcanoes, which the Chief Geologist of the United States Geological Survey, Walter Mendenhall, had been proposing for years.* It is through such convoluted politics and historical accidents that the fate of others is determined. For Jaggar, it meant that his dream of a national program to study volcanoes had finally been realized.

  On July 1, 1924, the Hawaiian Volcano Observatory was transferred from the United States Weather Bureau to the United States Geological Survey. Jaggar immediately hired a mechanic, a machinist and a draftsman who would also work as a clerk. Finch, who now had four years of experience at Kilauea, was moved to the small community of Mineral, California, where he started the nation’s second volcano observatory at Lassen Peak. The intention was for Finch to expand his work to include all the volcanoes along the west coast, including Mount Rainier and Crater Lake, both already national parks, and a small mound known as Mount St. Helens. Meanwhile, Jaggar would continue to focus his attention on Hawaiian volcanoes and include those of Alaska.

  Having a mandate to now work in Alaska, Jaggar reflected on his experiences in 1907, especially, the disappointments. The greatest one had been when the schooner Lydia had sailed close to a volcanic island, then, because there was no suitable place to anchor and reach shore, Jaggar had been forced to sail away, unable to set foot on the island. What was needed was a new type of vehicle that could negotiate ocean swells, then run up and onto a beach. Jaggar had been designing such a vehicle for years in his head. Now he had the chance to build and test one.

  He returned to Alaska in 1927, traveling through Seattle where he bought a new Ford Model-T. He had the metal body removed and the transmission replaced with one that had extra low gears. Then, with the help of Ford engineers, he redesigned the rear axle to accept four balloon tires. He had the modified vehicle loaded onto a ship and sailed to Alaska.

  Isabel was traveling with him. At Kodiak Island they separated. She spent the next two months traveling through the Yukon and the interior of Alaska. Her husband stayed a week on Kodiak, testing his vehicle by driving it up and down the beach, much to the amusement of cannery workers and their bosses.

  From Kodiak, he found a ride for himself and his vehicle on a local steamer, the Starr, formerly a halibut schooner, the Starr had been converted so that it now carried passengers and mail once a month from Kodiak to small ports along the Alaskan Peninsula and Aleutian Islands. The passenger quarters were cramped, and the ship’s motion was often violent. Thirty-six bunks were available, arranged in twelve stacks of three. To each bunk was attached an iron bracket that held a large pasteboard cup, in which most passengers rendered up at least a portion of their latest meal. As it was commonly said, few people ever sailed on the Starr for pleasure.

  It was a three-day trip from Kodiak Island to the canneries at King Cove, where a motorized vehicle had never been seen before. And the testing was more rigorous. Jaggar ran the Model-T chassis over sandy beach, grassy flats and hard tundra. He dashed it through the surf. A local mechanic helped him attach a winch spool and the two men tested the vehicle to see over what surfaces and up which slopes the Ford motor had the power to pull itself. After a few days of such tests, Jaggar asked that the vehicle be sent back to Kodiak and shipped to the Hawaiian Islands where he would conduct more tests and make more modifications. In the meantime, for the remainder of the summer, he would see what he could of Alaska’s volcanoes.

  At King Cove, he was introduced to two local men—John Gardiner and Peter Yatchmenoff—who were hunting bears for a museum on the east coast. Gardiner owned a motorized skiff and he took Yatchmenoff and Jaggar thirty miles to Pavlof Bay.

  At the entrance to the bay, the three men camped in a sod hut. To the north were twin snowy volcanic cones, Pavlof and Pavlof Sister. They planned an ascent of Pavlof, the more active one, a steam cloud almost always rising from its summit, but adverse weather kept them away. After a week of waiting, they also gave up hunting and returned to King Cove, then to the larger community at Unalaska.

  At Unalaska, Jaggar was invited to join a Coast Guard crew. For the next month he and the crew sailed the full length of the Aleutian Islands reaching the westernmost one, Attu Island, just two hundred miles from Russia and the Kamchatka Peninsula. Most of the days they sailed through the usual fog and gales. On the return, they anchored off Chugul Island where they rescued two Aleutian men and a boy who had been marooned when their schooner wrecked. They also made stops at Umnak Island, where the Coast Guard set explosives and blew up a schooner that had sunk recently and was blocking a shipping lane, and Amchitka Island, where Jaggar spend a day climbing the shore cliffs, finding only sedimentary and no volcanic rocks. And they made a special stop at Bogoslof Island, knowing that Jaggar had been there twenty years before.

  They landed amid a herd of sea lions, which hustled into the sea, and myriads of sea birds, which took off suddenly, circled once and settled again on the rocks. There was again a central steaming lagoon, though only a foot or so deep, the bottom coated with a thick orange-colored film. And there were impact craters made in the sand by recent volcanic bombs, indicating recent explosions. The most recent explosion reported by passing ships had been the previous November. There was also a craggy mound of lava—as there had been in 1907—steaming vigorously. Over the next few years, crews of passing ships would record its slow rise and, in 1931, report that it disappeared after the next explosion.

  Jaggar was back at Kilauea in October. He and the observatory’s staff set to work converting the Ford Model-T chassis into a true amphibious vehicle.

  They secured two oak beams to the frame, then, to the beams, attached a flat-bottom wooden skiff. The vehicle would be steered in water, as it was on land, by turning the front tires, which acted like rudders. To power the vehicle while in the water, Jaggar had two steel paddle wheels, each one twenty-four inches in diameter, added, driven by a chain attached to the rear power axle of the Ford chassis. The overall length was twenty-one feet. The maximum crossway measurement was five feet, four inches.

  On December 21, 1927, Jaggar drove his boat-car thirty miles south along an unpaved road to the beach at Ninole to make the maiden voyage. The vehicle entered the water on its own power, then, after a wide turn in deep water, climbed back onto the beach. Jaggar would report that his vehicle “went forward and backward as required.” It also rode deeper in the water than expected; the paddle wheels were almost completely immersed and seawater rose almost to the gunwales. To remediate this, Jaggar bought washboards from a local store and added them to the sides of the skiff to give it more freeboard. Another short sail was made around Ninole Bay, then the vehicle was driven back to the observatory.

  The first public test came on January 17, 1928, at Hilo Bay. Hundreds of people lined the sandy shoreline, anxious to see what would happen. Some made wagers that the boat-car would never be able to climb back on shore on its own power. The more pessimistic ones said the first large sea swell would swamp the vehicle and send it to the bottom of the bay.

  Jaggar made a few runs back and forth along the beach, stopping several times to make adjustments. When all was ready, he drove down to the water’s edge and stopped. Isabel took out a bottle of ginger ale—this was the era of prohibition—and broke
it across the bow, christening the vehicle the Ohiki, the Hawaiian sand crab. Then Jaggar waved to everyone and drove it toward the water.

  Just as it touched the water, shouts and cheers rose from the crowd standing on the shoreline. As it got to deeper water, the paddle wheels were set in motion, moving the Ohiki slowly away from shore. Jaggar stopped and made a few more adjustments. Then he headed out into the bay, making a large circle and arrived back up on the beach. Afterwards, he gave rides to those who wanted to go, especially children, taking them out nearly a mile to the breakwater and bringing them back.

  The big test came a month later when Jaggar began a drive-and-sail of the Ohiki around the island. Thurston arrived; he had financed the building of the vehicle. The two men, Isabel and two mechanics left the observatory on February 8. It took two weeks to circumnavigate the island, driving nearly two hundred miles on land and sailing more than fifty miles by sea. They camped as they went. All went well until they got to the west side of the island where the beaches are of loose sand. Here the rubber tires of the Ohiki dug into the loose sand or slipped and spun on mud. The remedy was to use wooden planks and metal gratings, borrowed from local ranchers, to improve the traction. Then, during a slow climb of a long road grade, the rear axle broke. It took an entire week to fix.

  The Ohiki never proved itself to be a practical vehicle; it would never have withstood the rough sea conditions of Alaska. But it was a start. From it, Jaggar had learned much about maneuvering onto and off of beaches, about freeboard and about mechanical propulsion in water. He was ready to design and build his next boat-car when, much to his surprise, in the July 1927 issue of Motor Boating magazine, he learned he could buy a small one.

  George Powell was a self-described “yacht machinist.” He owned several patents, most for devices that stabilized yachts and small boats. He was also experienced at modifying automobile engines and installing them in various types of small marine craft. And that led to his first and only commercial product: a mobile-boat that could be used by duck hunters.

  The mobile-boat that Powell invented was remarkably similar to the Ohiki. Both were based on a Ford Model-T chassis, the mobile-boat using a metal skiff, while Jaggar had used a wooden one. The steering of both was controlled by turning the front wheels, whether on land or in the water. Jaggar had used paddle wheels to propel the Ohiki in water, while Powell relied on the turning of the rear wheels by the Ford engine. Jaggar had designed the Ohiki to travel through ocean surf; Powell’s mobile-boat could travel over swamp grass or shallow ponds. They were clearly thinking along similar lines. Jaggar contacted Powell. They agreed to design and build a larger version of their two vehicles, one that was durable enough to use in Alaska.

  Jaggar was already planning to return to Alaska during the summer of 1928, his trip sponsored by the National Geographic Society. He contacted the president of the Society, Gilbert Grosvenor, who approved the building of the new vehicle. In just three months, Jaggar and Powell had it designed and built. It was the world’s first durable amphibious vehicle.

  It was twenty-one-feet long and five-feet, four-inches wide—the same as the Ohiki—the dimensions limited by what could be transported by railroad car. The hull had double walls of sheet steel that were riveted, then galvanized. Twin propellers replaced the paddle wheels. An engine taken from a Ford Model-T provided power for the paddle wheels. The shifting of a worm drive could direct engine power either to the twin propellers or to the rear wheels, which, this time, were of hard solid rubber. Steering in water was by rudder. There was an enclosed cabin with watertight compartments fore and aft and accommodations to sleep up to three people. Steel mats eight-feet long were included which could be used to cross soft beaches and could be rolled up when not in use. A power winch and an iron bar for heaving were added if the vehicle had to be levered out of soft ground. In all, the basic vehicle weighed nearly two tons and could carry another half ton of equipment and provisions.

  Powell built the vehicle at his shop in Chicago. He delivered it personally to Jaggar in Seattle in April. They took it out on several tryout runs in Puget Sound, and several minor changes were made. Then Jaggar and the new vehicle—again, christened by Isabel, this time with the name Honukai, Hawaiian for sea turtle—headed for Alaska.

  The goal of the expedition, which was sponsored by the National Geographic Society, was to explore and produce a topographic map of 2,500 square miles of the Alaskan Peninsula centered on Pavlof Bay. The existing maps, few in number, were based on Russian charts, some dating from the 18th century. As Jaggar would discover, there were obvious inaccuracies. Some showed bays that did not exist. Others indicated the entrances to small insignificant inlets that turned out to be the openings to large valleys.

  Jaggar began his 1928 expedition at Squaw Valley about two hundred miles from the entrance to Pavlof Bay. Here he met the other members of the expedition. There was the topographer on loan from the United States Geological Survey, Clarence McKinley. The photographer was Richard Stewart, on his first field assignment for the National Geographic Society. In years to come, Stewart would become one of the Society’s most celebrated photographers. John Gardiner and Peter Yatchmenoff—the same two men who Jaggar had traveled with the previous summer—worked as field assistants, as well as hunters and cooks.

  It took a day for a scow from a local cannery to take the men and their equipment and provisions and the Honukai to the entrance to Pavlof Bay. All were unloaded from the deck of the scow. The men would now be on their own for the next three months.

  Their first camp was in a protected cove with clamming flats nearby. Scores of big, olive-drab gull eggs could be found on rocky ledges. When boiled, they were scarcely distinguished from hen eggs in color and flavor. Caribou, seals, red foxes and bears were also abundant. After a daylong trek, Jaggar wondered “whether we could get back to the boat without stepping on a bear.”

  The land was mostly barren ground, except for the occasional patches of grass or belt of thick alders. As soon as they arrived, Jaggar spotted “low ridges of obvious geologic interest” close to camp that he planned to investigate. But in the distance was the main interest: a line of five volcanic cones, each one a potential Vesuvius-in-eruption.

  The two largest and, therefore, dominant volcanic peaks were Pavlof and Pavlof Sister. The origin of the names is not clear. Russian explorers in the 1760s were the first to report the peaks. “Pavlof” is the Russian name for “Saint Paul.”

  The other three slightly smaller cones had not yet been named. And so Jaggar named them. The single one to the east of Pavlof he named Mount Dana after James Dwight Dana who had come to Kilauea in 1840 as a member of the Wilkes Expedition and who was the first geologist to see and describe the volcano. The cone immediately west of the twin Pavlof cones he named Mount Dutton in honor of Clarence Dutton who had written the first long scientific treatise about Hawaiian volcanoes, based on a summer-long trip he had made in 1882. And the fifth cone he named Mount Hague for Arnold Hague, the man who had first taken him into the American West and to Yellowstone and who had inspired him to follow a scientific career by living on a frontier.

  For the first month the weather was raw and cold. It snowed on May 24. Driving sleet fell on the evening of May 27. By morning, the ground was covered with fresh snow.

  McKinley did his work, making barometric readings and taking photographs as he continued to prepare a topographic map. Gardiner and Yatchmenoff assisted him. Stewart worked alone, crossing the countryside, photographing plants and animals, the occasional waterfalls and the spectacular barren landscape. He found that the air was clearest at 9 P.M. when the sun was close to setting. Jaggar, for his part, kept close to camp, collecting specimens of flowering plants and mosses and seaweed and studying the progress McKinley was making on his map. Jaggar also collected fossils, finding that few were of animals. Most were of huge trees—cedars and firs—which meant the climate here was once very different.

  When the weather was good
, he ran the Honukai in high gear on the main beach and in low gear over the rippled low-tide flats. Only once was it stuck in soft ground. The rolled-up steel mats now proved their worth.

  One day when he was alone in camp, he climbed a nearby steep cliff in order to reach a plateau of open tundra covered with violets, buttercups and other types of wild flowers. After a day of collecting, ready to return to camp, he chose a gully and started down it. At the same time, unknown to him, a bear was climbing up in the other direction.

  If each had kept his course, in a second or two, they would have run into each other. But each one stopped. Jaggar slowly raised his rifle while the bear, a two-year-old Kodiak, leaned back, preparing to charge. Fortunately, both man and beast paused to take a measure of each other. Then Jaggar ever so slightly lowered his rifle. The bear, apparently seeing the action, relaxed. For several moments both were still. Then the two turned away, each one retreating in the direction he had come.

  By late June the weather cleared, and Jaggar decided to attempt an ascent of Pavlof volcano. The other four joined him. They rode the Honukai to the base of the volcano. It took a day of climbing to reach the lower snowy slopes. On June 27, 1928, they made a dash for the summit, beginning just after midnight in the eternal twilight of an Alaska summer. The climb was straight up the steep slope. Along the way they startled three Kodiak bears, a mother and two year-old cubs that bounded away, scared by the intruders.

  The five men continued to march upward. By midday they stood at the summit, the first recorded climb of this volcano.

  “No pen can describe adequately the panorama,” Jaggar later wrote of the view. On the north side of the summit crater was a large gash where the whole north rim of a former circular crater had fallen away. The crater itself was about a quarter mile across. A cloud of steam was lazily rising up from the crater floor. The geometry of the scene reminded him of how a man’s waistcoat opens at the collar. The crater rim with the deep gash is the opening of the collar. The waistcoat is the barren lower slope. And coming out through the gash, or collar, was a high lumpy jumble of rock—a cravat—that, on closer inspection, proved to be comprised of volcanic bombs and ash of recent explosive activity, much of it covered with snow and ice.