landed on the steaming shores of Martinique some 13 days after the disaster. The same year, he was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In his autobiography published in 1956, Jaggar recounts, It was hard to distinguish where the streets had been. Everything was buried under fallen walls of cobblestone and pink plaster and tiles, including 20,000 bodies....As I look back on the Martinique experience I know what a crucial point in my life it was....I realized that the killing of thousands of persons by subterranean machinery totally unknown to geologists...was worthy of a life work. On April 15, 1903, Jaggar married Helen Kline, with whom he had two children, Russell Kline and Eliza Bowne. The couple divorced in 1914. In 1906 he became head of Massachusetts Institute of Technology's department of geology. The next 10 years of Jaggar's life brought expeditions to the scenes of great earthquakes and eruptions in Italy, the Aleutians, Central America, and Japan. With each trip, Jaggar became increasingly concerned that his field studies were but brief, inadequate snapshots of long-term, dynamic, earth processes. After the 1908 Messina earthquake killed 125,000 people near Mount Etna in Italy, Jaggar declared that "something must be done" to support systematic, ongoing studies of volcanic and seismic activity. He traveled to Hawaii in 1909 at his own expense, and determined that Kilauea was to be the home of the first American volcano observatory. He would work on that project the rest of his life. He married co-worker Isabel Maydwell, a widowed schoolteacher from California, in 1917. Jagger established a volcano monitoring station at Mount Lassen and another two on the Aleutian Islands, though the Mount Lassen station did not survive the Great Depression. To explore inaccessible Aleutian Islands beaches, Jaggar designed amphibious vehicles which would form the basis of beach landing craft used by the United States military in World War II, an achievement for which he received the Franklin L. Burr Prize from the National Geographic Society in 1945. After his retirement from the Hawaiian Volcano Observatory (HVO) in 1940, Jaggar remained active at the University of Hawaii, where he was a research associate in geophysics. He died in Honolulu on January 17, 1953, one week before his 82nd birthday. Hawaiian Volcano Observatory After a lecture on his Martinique expedition in Honolulu, Jaggar was approached by Lorrin A. Thurston, a prominent Honolulu lawyer