Royal Society Expeditions - Parachute Science?

**What happens when scientists are sent on "expeditions" to investigate volcanic eruptions? Have you heard about Parachute Science?**

"Parachute science" is a term that describes how researchers - often from wealthy Western countries - drop down into a foreign community for fieldwork. They spend a relatively short amount of time there, making observations and gathering data, then return home without engaging with or crediting local researchers (and other observers) in the communities in which they have been working.

Science is a global enterprise, and for a long time has involved travel to distant, sometimes exotic places in order to bring home data, samples, images and observations for analysis back home. Often, ‘home’ meant centres of academic learning in places like Europe and North America. Colonial empires gave scientists unique access to a range of field sites, and careers could be made by contributing to the tasks of mapping, cataloguing, analysing and understanding the environments of colonised lands.

One of the motivations for the ‘Curating Crises’ project has been to think about scientific expeditions from metropole to colony - whose interests did they serve? What kind of data did they gather, and how? And who benefitted? We believe that understanding the workings of past scientific expeditions can help us make sure that science today - in volcanology and beyond - is done in a way that benefits local communities as well as distant institutions.

So what happened in the early 1900s when there was a spate of volcano-related activity in the Caribbean and how did colonial attitudes and practices of "Parachute science" play out?

Photograph of members of the expedition to St Vincent in the aftermath of the 1902 eruption. Tempest Anderson and John Flett are featured as well as unamed local guides.

Science on the move: Royal Society expeditions to the Caribbean

The 1902 eruption on St Vincent and the 1930s seismic crisis on Montserrat both prompted the Royal Society to send teams of experts to investigate. In 1902, the eye surgeon and well-known amateur photographer and volcanologist Tempest Anderson joined government geologist John S. Flett on an expedition to St Vincent and nearby Martinique, where an almost coincident eruption had killed almost 30,000 people. A Royal Society Scientific Commission was set-up 10 days after the eruptions, and Anderson and Flett arrived at St Vincent a few weeks later, with detailed instructions on what data and samples to collect.

Anderson and Flett would, of course, only be able to observe the effects of the eruption on the physical landscape, which they captured in measurements, samples, and Tempest Anderson’s atmospheric photographs. To make sense of how the eruption unfolded in real time, they were dependent on eyewitness accounts. To that end, they circulated a set of questions to ‘educated and reliable observers’ on St Vincent and neighbouring islands. [1] Respondents included doctors, landowners, clergymen, colonial officials - in essence, the colonial elite. But we also have evidence from Flett’s notebooks that they also spent a good deal of time interviewing ordinary folk. From these interactions we learn extraordinary stories such as those of the fisherwomen whose warnings of a boiling crater lake went unheeded. By piecing together all this eyewitness testimony and physical observations, Anderson and Flett were able to describe what volcanologists now call a ‘ground surge’, a devastating part of pyroclastic flows.

Photo showing a man standing on a desolate ridge covered by ash, vegetation flattened and covered by ash and debris. View looks down towards Georgetown from the slopes of the volcano.
Photo showing stripped vegetation on ridge covered by ash. Leeward side on the Richmond Estate (now Richmond Vale)
Men bringing rowing boats ashore on Walliabou Beach (mouth of Walliabou river valley) on the Leeward side of St Vincent. Royal Society scientists are seen in white pith helmets.
Vegetation stripped, ridges covered in ash and steam rising from river valleys. Local men carrying equipment in the foreground.
Expedition crosses a river of boiling mud using large tree trunks as a bridge, possibly near Georgetown.
Three men and a woman inspect a house in Orange Hill that remains standing after the eruption, ash and debris are seen on the floor and surrounding trees have been stripped of vegetation. The house is till there today!

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Things were rather different during the 1930s seismic crisis on Montserrat.

In this case the scientific establishment wasn’t responding to an eruption, but to possible signs that an eruption might be in the offing. Earthquakes had been occurring periodically from 1933; Frank Perret began his investigations in May 1934; but it wasn’t until March 1936 that two British scientists - Cecil Frank Powell and Archibald MacGregor - turned up under the aegis of the Royal Society and the Colonial Office.

What took them so long? Officials in London were somewhat sceptical about the accounts they were receiving from Montserrat. One consequential account was T.M. Savage English’s claim to have identified the crater of the Soufrière Hills volcano. John Flett, veteran of the St Vincent expedition, deemed the report:

"…interesting, but as many such reports come from the West Indies and few of them have proved reliable, it would be valuable to know on what evidence Mr English has founded his opinion."

A shouty, all-caps argument ensued. The official line from London was therefore that:

"expert scientific opinion here considers that PROBABILITY OF VOLCANIC OUTBURST IN MONTSERRAT WHERE NO CRATER HAS BEEN PRESERVED MUST BE REGARDED AS TOO SMALL TO JUSTIFY ANY ALARM (original emphasis)" [1]

On the island, the authorities were keen to add credence to English’s claim so the Agricultural Department dispatched its own expedition into the hills. The expedition was in no doubt:

"THE PARTY AGREES WITH MR. ENGLISH THAT THIS SPOT WAS AT ONE TIME THE SEAT OF GREAT VOLCANIC ACTIVITY" (original emphasis).[2]

Perret agreed as well, “knowing Mr. English as a good observer”.[3] In light of the discovery, and the ongoing earthquakes, a petition was delivered to the Colonial Secretary in London demanding that an expert be dispatched to aid Perret’s investigations and to ensure that any impending eruption from the crater would be foreseen in good time.

By the time Powell and MacGregor arrived things had subsided a little bit, and they busied themselves with distributing instruments around the island, and trying to reconstruct its geological history. Perret had been sceptical of the need for such an expedition, arguing that all that was really needed was more instruments, and it would have been hard for him not to see the expedition as a comment on the adequacy of his own work. It was also, he suggested, characteristic of how ‘official science’ tended to respond to emergencies:

"Everywhere and every time from Vesuvius, Etna, Messina, here in Martinique and on Montserrat, I go through wearing responsibilities; stand by the people in their hours of anxiety and trouble as best I may, try with insufficient means to do the research work, and then - when it is virtually all over but the shouting - then official science steps in - and does the shouting." [4]

Perret complains about the way in which other scientific institutions carry out research into volcanic hazards, not providing enough support to communities during times of crisis, rather focussing on scientific advancements and arriving "too late".

Nonetheless, Perret, MacGregor and Powell cooperated - Perret let them install instruments in his hut, and aided MacGregor’s investigations into the island's geologic history. But unlike the St Vincent expedition of 1902, the Montserrat expedition scientists weren’t terribly interested in the experiences of Montserrat residents. The emphasis was on instrumentation and automated, objective observation, rather than the reports of ordinary folk. It was, perhaps, an early example of what has recently been called ‘parachute science’, where researchers drop in to a location, "gather their data, and then zip off home without engaging or acknowledging the contributions of the local researchers in that community".

Perret’s work and findings, for example, were conspicuously absent from Powell and MacGregor’s reports - he was simply acknowledged as something of a local guide, rather than a fellow investigator. And even though Perret was much more open to the contributions of local communities to scientific investigation, in his reports we also never learn the names of many of the local workers who were photographed aiding the setting-up, maintenance and reading of his various instruments.

The perils of expeditionary science were noted by commentators and participants alike. In a region of profound volcanic risk, only long-term observational science would suffice. As Thomas Jaggar, a long-time acquaintance of Perret put it, a "mere ‘expedition’ will accomplish nothing but a report of hearsay". The need was to “harness Montserrat and St Vincent with two resident physicist brains", with the equipment and resources to keep a permanently close eye on the volcanoes.[1]

But with local colonial governments unable or unwilling to foot the bill, and the home government seemingly content to display its support only through the funding of ad-hoc expeditions, it would not be until the 1950s that an institution for permanent monitoring and research would appear.

References:

Foster to Under Secretary of State, Colonial Office, 23rd May 1902, NLB/24/467, Royal Society Archive
Copy of telegram, Secretary of State to the Governor, Leeward Islands, 30th Sept 1935. Montserrat Public Library, 82/158-175
Report on visits made by the Department of Agricutlrual to the Roaches-Chances mountain group for the purpose of identifying “a preserved crater”’, 24th Oct 1935. Montserrat Public Library, 82/158-175.
Perret to Arthur Day (Carnegie Institution Washington) 7th May 1936