2o2 CHALLENGER 



at his desk. 'Sit down and relax, Captain,' said he. 'Why, you 

 sure look all trussed up in that outfit.' 



Hot sun tempered by cool breezes endured throughout the 

 week's visit. The days were spent in visiting the Bernice P. 

 Bishop Museum where Sir Peter Buck, the Maori anthropologist, 

 presided over the finest collection of Polynesiana ; or in attending 

 a scientific symposium to which the Captain and the Senior 

 Scientist went smartly dressed in their Palm Beach suits only to 

 find that from the Chairman downwards the delegates were at- 

 tired in aloha shirts. It was refreshing to see an elderly scientist 

 of serious aspect dressed thus as he propounded his theories 

 relative to the height of the water-table on the Island of Oahu. 



It is on the Island of Oahu that both Honolulu and Pearl 

 Harbour are situated. A party of scientists and officers flew from 

 Honolulu to the Island of Hawaii to visit the volcano observatory 

 on the rim of the crater of Kilauea. This was following in the 

 footsteps of the earlier Challenger, from which a similar party had 

 landed at Hilo, the capital of the Island of Hawaii, and from there 

 had 'a tedious and monotonous ride' on horseback across 'a 

 weary expanse of open country devoid of any fine trees' to reach 

 Kilauea, taking the whole day to get there. Challenger^ s party, 

 alighting from their plane, soon crossed this gently rising land- 

 scape in a hired car, belonging to Mr. Ducky Goo. They did not 

 see the lava fountains in the crater which their predecessors had 

 described, but they were able to see the lava flows from the 

 eruption on the slopes of the higher Mauna Loa which had occur- 

 red about nine months previously, and which had lasted for 2 2 

 days, when 600,000,000 cubic yards of lava, the largest quantity 

 recorded in historic times, was disgorged upon the mountainside. 



There are today a volcanic observatory and five stations around 

 the crater at Kilauea, which are fitted with apparatus to determine 

 the tilt of the ground in both north/south and east/west directions, 

 and these, together with seismographs which record both small 

 and large earthquakes, give indications of impending trouble. As 

 a result of increasing tilt and a number of daily earthquakes a 

 warning of volcano eruption was published in the local paper on 

 the day before the outbreak of lava on the slopes of Mauna Loa, 



Even nine months after this eruption the lava was too hot just 

 below its surface to handle for long, and warm pieces of so called 



