I hoped and prayed that the commercial packet, the _Mauna Kea_, might take me to Hilo. But no, the navy tug _Navaho_ came from Lahaina, and Captain Green put up his megaphone and announced that the Admiral’s instructions were that he was to take Dr. Jaggar to Hawaii. My heart sank because I knew what a seaway would be running against that little tub. The second rescue ship proved to be the _Pelican_ equipped with a crane to swing the plane on board and take it back to Pearl Harbor. On board the _Navaho_ I was assigned a canvas camp cot in the lower, circular wheelhouse at the bow; and all night long waves broke over the bow and a foot of water sloshed back and forth under my cot. The pitching was so heavy and our speed so reduced that it took us all night to get across the Hawaii Channel, and we didn’t make Hilo until 2 P.M. the second day. After that wet and seasick night, I found wry humor in our reception at Hilo Wharf, where we were met by Frank Cody with his motion picture camera and a bunch of hula girls and leis. Instead of five hours, the journey took thirty and quite failed to make me air-minded. Furthermore, I arrived at Kilauea Volcano in time for only the final stages of the explosive eruption. Finch had organized volunteers, including Oliver Emerson as photographer, and even our collie dog, Teddy, who could hear and feel an explosion coming before we had any other warning. All observers wrote notes and fondled the seismographs during the three weeks of steam blast and cavings in of the pit, which had enlarged itself by collapse 700 feet outward radially in all directions. When I got there it was 3,500 by 3,000 feet in diameters and 1,300 feet deep, the bottom a funnel of converging taluses, made of avalanches from the pit walls. The taluses were wet and steaming vigorously in vertical lines, and at night showed red hot avalanches from the north and west walls, where two intrusive bodies of hard rock were red hot inside. The talus below stayed hot, and slides occurred for only a few seconds. The incandescent matter was not flowing in any sense, but was, rather, the peeling of a rocky boss of reddish color at the west and a canoe-shaped ledge at the north about 600 feet below the rim. This showed the cross section of old screes, revealed above it, and horizontal basalt flows overlapping above that. It was a beautiful section of an ancient pit, of the same quality as Halemaumau itself, and the incandescent canoe sill at the bottom appeared to be an intrusion of fine-grained gabbro, which had pushed its way in under an older talus funnel, similar to the present talus cup of Halemaumau, the bottom of which was 700 feet lower.