My experiments with volcanoes

by Thomas Augustus Jaggar

Saba is a startling extinct volcano rising as a steep rocky cone directly from the water, with no harbor but a stop opposite a gully that leads up to the crater. After landing in small boats, we climbed up the gulch to the settlement, a picturesque place, with masonry houses and many flowers, where the government is Dutch but all talk English, and its history goes back to the buccaneers. The village is on a flat in the lowest part of a cup crater, the top of our climb, but the name of the settlement is The Bottoms.

Our little ship joined the main line of the leeward volcanoes at St. Kitts, where we made connections for Antigua and Montserrat. In Montserrat we stayed with Miss Gillie at the Rainbow House and joined the Englishman Powell and the Scot MacGregor. I met Perret at Antigua, and we compared notes on the similarity of the earthquakes and the rotten-egg smell (sulfuretted hydrogen) at Montserrat to the eruptions of Pelée in Martinique, where these phenomena were followed by explosions and lava. The Montserrat authorities justly feared what was coming.

Perret had for two years kept track of events at Montserrat in relation to equinox and solstice. He had built a hut there at the dangerous solfatara near town, had made an instrument shelter with a thermograph, and on a pedestal close to a nearby residence had set up an ingenious earthquake accumulator, which had recorded at the end of twenty-four hours the total expenditure of seismic energy in each direction. As there were hundreds of strong shocks, the instruments recorded total seismic energy per day and its dominant direction.

I found that Powell had set up my shock recorders among volunteers on the island, and a seismograph at the agricultural station. A new form of the Jaggar shock recorder had the weight attached to horizontal flat springs so as to oscillate up and down. I was especially pleased with the earthquake records kept by a Mr. English living in the countryside. Assisted by his wife, he had carefully listed the times and intensities of hundreds of shocks, with notes on important events.

Much help was furnished by the Agricultural Experiment Station, which provided an assistant to take us to many geologic places and to the second solfatara, consisting of hot springs and sulfur in a southern valley of the volcano. The volcano of Montserrat is at the south end of the island, while the northern part consists of older hills. The summit crater is a remote and inaccessible forested area among peaks. The volcano is much like Pelée in size and appearance.

We were allowed to take a steamer to St. Vincent and Barbados, stopping at Dominica. There the Governor kindly entertained us for a few hours, sending the government launch and driving us up the valley on a fête day when the negro women were all in picturesque costume. We saw his summer place with lovely gardens. We had tea with his wife, and I discussed with him the earthquake problem. On the drive we saw a remarkable cliff of hexagonal columns, some of them curved like a fan, representing the old lavas of Dominica.

The administrative problems of the British islands involved not only hurricanes and earthquakes, but tactful handling of the dominant negro, Carib Indian, and mulatto population, which is very ticklish, for there have been riots and labor troubles. I was astonished in several of the islands to learn that distinguished Englishmen in government and planter classes were partly colored. In the society club of Montserrat we met a leading lawyer who was coal black, and we saw London-educated negroes dancing with English girls. We found the same customs in St. Vincent, and to a much lesser extent, in Barbados.

In St. Vincent Mr. Abbot, MacDonald’s secretary, took us to see my old friend T. M. MacDonald the planter, at Chateau Belair on the west side of Soufrière, where Hovey, Curtis, and I had climbed in 1902. We traveled up the west coast by automobile, and saw one of the primitive sugar mills, where the juice is boiled down to a syrup to be shipped to lumber mills in Canada. Nothing could be in greater contrast to the modern sugar factories in Hawaii, and the negro labor gives the industry an entirely different aspect. To get to Chateau Belair we had to motor up a canyon far into the interior, around hairpin turns over vertical cliffs and along a narrow ridge, and then return to shore on the other side of the valley. We rode along the beach under the volcano, and saw the rehabilitated Richmond plantation, with the west flank of Soufrière Volcano under heavy clouds. Owing to torrents of rain, we had to make part of the return to Kingstown in a rowboat.

Later we drove over an excellent road up the east shore to Georgetown, and beyond that on the foot of the volcano slope, where a group of plantations had been purchased after the eruption of 1902 by Mr. Barnard, who with his charming wife, entertained us. Hundreds of acres of coconut trees, arrowroot, and sugar cane had replaced the utter devastation of 1902. Barnard showed us a modern still for making rum from sugar cane, and I was astonished to see that the product is just as clear as alcohol, the rum color being artificial. We rode horseback most of the way to the crater of Soufrière, over a trail through forests and across streams, very different from hiking in horrible desolation and fog up bare ridges covered with volcanic bombs, such as Hovey and Curtis and I had encountered on this same slope at the time of the eruptions.

The trail still followed knife-edge divides with perilous slopes on both sides of the path, but now concealed with mountain growth. We rode nearly to the edge of the crater, now a very different picture, with a large lake only a few hundred feet below, as it had been before the eruption of 1902. Two sturdy native women coming from Chateau Belair appeared with baskets of fruit on their heads, tramping a 3,000 foot height to deliver their goods to Georgetown on the east side of the island. This is an old story for these straight-backed natives, and these treks across mountains were equally characteristic of the creoles in Martinique and the northern islands. These people would spend the night near their market on the opposite side of the islands.