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.