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.