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