Shortly after my Vesuvius expedition I moved from Harvard to become head of geology at Massachusetts Tech. My teaching overlapped that of Professors W. Niles and W. O. Crosby at Tech and Wellesley, while for a time I continued my Harvard work. It was at this time that I began to think of possible ways of financing an expedition to the Aleutian Islands and their forty active volcanoes. The year 1906–1907 was a time of financial boom, so I went to Calumet and Hecla, the great copper company of which Agassiz was president. To my astonishment they subscribed $1,000 to start the Technology Expedition. State Street and Wall Street raised this to $13,000 in ten days, and I learned much about the availability of money during a boom of the stock market. President Pritchett of Harvard approved the expedition, and I organized it for a sailing schooner from Seattle, with nine in the crew and seven scientists.
5. Scientists of Technical Expedition to Aleutians, 1907; left to right: Jaggar, Gummere, Vandyke, Eakle, Sweeney, and Myers
6. Captain George Seeley of the Lydia, Technical Expedition to Aleutians, 1907
We set sail in the spring of 1907 and spent four months in that ocean of gales, fogs, rain, and cold between Dutch Harbor and Atka—the eastern half of the Aleutians. One man, Colby, was a bear hunter who explored the Alaskan Peninsula and reported on coal and gold. The scientists were two geologists, two mining students, a physician who was also botanist and entomologist, and an astronomer. They were Eakle, Myers, Sweeny, Vandyke, and Gummeré. The sailing master and mate were uncle and nephew, both Nova Scotians named Seeley. The following poem by the master tells the story better than I could.
AN ALASKAN IDYLL
An Eastern College of renown
Had purchased in Seattle town
The schooner Lydia of ill fame