My experiments with volcanoesJaggar, Thomas Augustus
Science
My experiments with volcanoes
Jaggar, Thomas Augustus
Geologists -- Biography; Volcanoes
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.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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