Voyage to the Center of the Earth
by
Jacques Collin de Plancy
translated, annotated and introduced by
Brian Stableford
A Black Coat Press Book
CONTENTS
Introduction
PREFACE
VOYAGE TO THE CENTER OF THE EARTH
FRENCH SCIENCE FICTION & FANTASY COLLECTION
PREFACE
As the work of which we are publishing the translation might appear singular and theoretical to French readers, and the adventures it presents sometimes have a romantic appearance, it is our duty to show in advance, by certain observations, that this voyage in not implausible and is not false.
Every time some important discovery has been made that is outside the normal order of things, suspicion and incredulity have been raised against novelties that surprise the mind too abruptly, and it has only been with difficulty that people have yielded to the evidence and cease to deny the existence of that which is unfamiliar. If America passed for a fable and a heresy until the moment when Columbus’ three vessels had reached that strange land, one must presume that the central planet of our globe will only be recognized when we have established colonies there with good communications.
In any case, the voyage that you are about to read will be no less authentic and true in every detail, in spite of the denials of a few skeptical minds. For men endowed with sound judgment, the simple, naïve manner and the striking character of verity in all the pages of this book will not leave any doubt; for those who hesitate to believe, we shall offer a few proofs.
A few years ago, an American was greatly mocked who wanted to go to the North Pole in order to discover there, he said, a large opening by which he hoped to penetrate into the center of our globe, and find habitable lands there.3 There was nothing ridiculous about that project, however; the success of the voyage that we are publishing proves it, but doubtless the American, who has departed on his expedition, will return to inform Europeans that it is necessary not to judge too lightly that which is unfamiliar.
In 1818 A German scholar, Monsieur Steinhauser, announced in the Halle Literary Gazette a discovery that is in accord with the ideas of the American we have just mentioned.4 In order to explain the declination of the magnetic needle, Monsieur Steinhauser claims that in the interior of our globe, at a depth of about a hundred and seventy mils, there is another small globe, which makes a revolution from west to east around the center of the Earth in an interval of four hundred and forty years. That little globe, endowed with a magnetic attraction, is the cause of the declination of the compass.
What renders Monsieur Steinhauser’s calculations worth of consideration is that they accord precisely with experience. He predicted in 1805 that after having been stationary, the compass needle would move in a retrograde fashion in 1818 toward the east; those two predictions were fulfilled, to the astonishment of the savant Monsieur Steinhauser’s adversaries.
That subterranean planet has been given the name of Pluto, and some people contend that if they studied the movement of that globe, mariners would no longer have any need of any other guide.
Monsieur Steinhauser’s ideas had already been published in various places a hundred years ago, and he is doubtless glad that the journey to the center of the Earth has finally informed us that it is necessary to think correctly about these important subjects.
Naturalists have said that the ice of the poles are always getting thicker, and that at the poles they traverse the depths of the Earth, which would form a glacier three thousand leagues long, but that theory is so absurd that it only needs to be stated in order to fall into scorn. It would be necessary to attribute to ice a magnetic virtue that it surely does not have, and it is certain that there are materials endowed with a magnetic virtue at the poles, since every magnetic object turns naturally in the direction of the pole that is nearer. That is what makes the most judicious scholars believe—and the presumption is well-founded—that the poles are surrounded by mountains of iron.
It has also been claimed that nature is entirely dead in the vicinity of the poles, but that assertion is exaggerated. It is true that the shores of Spitzbergen and everything bordering the glacial sea only offer an inanimate nature, a soul burned by ice, but as one moves inland nature is reanimated and vegetation reappears. Here is something more: the entire crew of a Russian brig that returned two years ago from a voyage around the world saw in the north, more distant than Spitzbergen, a floating island laden with vegetation and springs.
In July 1818 the crews of whaling ships that were trapped in the ice at the sixty-eighth degree of latitude found the sea more open at the seventy-third, and the Eskimos that live at that latitude assured them that on advancing northwards they would encounter even less ice.
On the fourth of August the following year, the expedition that the English government sent in search of a northern passage in America found at seventy-five degrees thirty minutes of latitude, a fresh wind and the disappearance of the ice that gave them the hope that the Eskimos’ promise might be realized. A little later, the expedition discovered an unknown nation between the seventy-seventh and seventy-eighth degrees, isolated from the world and without any communication. The men of the tribe resembled Eskimos in their physiognomy but spoke a different language. Without neighbors and without enemies, they thought themselves masters of the world. They appeared never to have seen a ship, and believed at first that the English vessels were large birds of prey that had descended from the Moon in order to devour them. They had iron knives, and the expedition members deduced that there were enormous masses of iron in the regions neighboring the pole.5
Those same savages made use of narwhal horns to kill small whales. They travel on sleds hitched to dogs in the manner of the inhabitants of Kamchatka. The Englishmen also saw a number of savages departing in sleds toward the north, a circumstance that proves that solid ground extends all the way to the pole and that nature is not dead at the extremities of the world.
That is doubtless enough to show that there is nothing that one can refuse to believe in the work that we are offering to the public. The rest will be self-explanatory, and for those who still doubt, their suspicions will soon dissipate, for it is necessary to expect that the governments will not neglect to exploit the discovery of a globe, undoubtedly smaller than our own, but with which we can form useful links.
Introduction
Voyage au centre de la terre, ou Aventures diverses de Clairancy et de ses companions, au Spitzberg, au Pôle-Nord, et dans des pays inconnus, traduit de l’anglais de Hormidas Peath par M. Jacques Saint-Albin [Journey to the Center of the Earth; or, Various Adventures of Clairancy and His Companions in Spitzbergen, at the North Pole and in Unknown Lands, translated from the English of Hormidas Peath1 by Jacques Saint-Albin] was first published in three volumes in Paris in 1821 by Caillot père et fils. It was reprinted in 1823. I have titled this translation Voyage to the Center of the Earth in order to avoid a clash with the English translation of the novel of the same title published in 1864 by Jules Verne, who might or might not have known that it was second-hand.
The title page of the novel adds to the by-line the advertisement: “Auteur ou traducteur de Contes noirs, des Trois animaux philosophes, des Voyages de Paul Béranger dans Paris, du Droit du seigneur, etc. The Bibliothèque Nationale has no copy of the relevant edition of Contes noirs, frayeurs populaires, [Dark Tales: Popular Horror Stories], although it has a recent reprint. The satirical trilogy Les Trois animaux philosophes, ou Les Voyages de l’ours de Saint-Corbinia, suivis des Aventures du chat de Gabrielle et de L’Histoire philosophique du pou voyag
eur [The Three Philosophical Animals; or, The Travels of Saint Corbinian’s Bear, followed by The Adventures of Gabrielle’s Cat and the Philosophical History of a Traveling Louse] (1819) also represents itself, more flippantly, as a translation. Voyages de Paul Béranger dans Paris après 45 ans d’absence [Paul Béranger’s Travels in Paris after a Absence of 45 Years] (1819) is similarly satirical. Le Droit du seigneur, ou La Fondation de Nice dans le haut Montferrat, aventure du XIIIe siècle [Seigneurial Right, or the Foundation of Nice in the Montferrat mountains: an Adventure of the Thirteenth Century] is represented as a translation from the Italian of Guilio Cordara (1704-1785), a Jesuit long resident in Nizza Montferrato, but no original is traceable and the narrative appears to be adapted from a 1790 French text apocryphally attributed to the same author.
Several more books appeared under the signature of Jacques Saint-Albin, although the author had already signed the version of his own name that he adopted permanently, J. A. S. Collin de Plancy, to several works; his name was actually Jacques-Albin-Simon Collin, but he added the suffix as an affectation, in the manner of Restif de La Bretonne. Those earlier works included the oft-reprinted Dictionnaire infernal, ou Répertoire universel des êtres, des personnages, des livres, des faits et des choses qui tiennent aux apparitions, à la magie, au commerce de l’enfer, aux démons, aux sorciers, aux sciences occultes [The Infernal Dictionary; or Universal Directory of Beings, Individuals, Books, Facts and Matters Pertaining to Apparitions, Magic, Commerce with Hell, Demons, Sorcerers and the Occult Sciences] (1818; augmented in subsequent editions; tr. under various titles, including The Encyclopedia of Demons and Demonology) and its companion volume Le Diable peint par lui-même, ou Galerie de petits romans, de contes bizarres, d’anecdotes prodigieuses sur les aventures des démons, les traits qui les caractérisent, leurs bonnes qualités et leurs infortunes; les bon mots et les réponses singulières qu’on leur attribue; leurs amours, et les services qu’ils ont pu rendre aux mortels, etc. [The Devil Depicted by Himself; or, A Collection of short stories, bizarre tales and prodigious anecdotes concerning the adventures of demons, the features that characterize them, their good qualities and misfortunes, the witticisms and singular responses attributed to them, their amours, and the services they can render to human beings, etc.] (1819).
Collin also put his own name to Mémoires d’un vilain du quatorzième siècle [Memoirs of a Fourteenth-Century Serf] (1820), allegedly translated from a manuscript of 1369, and went on to attach it to many more, publishing a Dictionnaire critique des reliques et images [Critical Dictionary of Relics and Images] in the same year as Voyage au centre de la terre. His frenetic rate of production slowed somewhat thereafter, and he seems to have given up on pure fiction, although many of his pseudohistorical works are presented in narrative form and there are satirical intrusions in his numerous scholarly works, many of which are heavily spiced with skeptical irony. He remained an exceedingly assiduous collector of anecdotes and trifles, especially pertaining to his favorite subject: medieval history, legendry and folklore.
Because it was the Dictionnaire infernal that made Collin famous in his own lifetime (1793-1881) and still keeps his memory alive today, he is described in wikipedia as an “occultist,” but at the time he wrote the above-mentioned texts, he was a thoroughgoing skeptic and ardent Voltairean, who recorded demonological legends in a spirit of ridicule, and allegations of his eventual conversion to devout faith probably need to be taken with a pinch of salt, given that some statement of that kind seems to have been required of him before he was allowed to return to France after seven years in exile in Belgium and the Netherlands from 1830-37. In addition to “Jacques Saint-Albin,” he occasionally put other pseudonyms on his various works, including the pamphlet, Le Marquis de Condorcet, épisode de la grande Révolution, par le neveu de mon oncle [The Marquis de Condorcet: A Episode of the Great Revolution, by my uncle’s nephew] (1847), a signature that might be regarded as provocative, and might also offer some assistance in understanding how Collin not only elected to become an encyclopedist of the Devil’s works but also to be prepared to look at such matters from the satanic point of view.
The uncle to whom Collin refers in that signature was acquainted with the Marquis de Condorcet, the great philosopher of progress, by virtue of having served with him in the National Assembly and the Convention, and being instrumental in his death in prison, while awaiting the guillotine. Any inside information Collin had concerning the Marquis might have came from his mother, née Marie-Anne Danton, who probably knew Condorcet via her brother, the Revolutionary leader Georges Danton—he could hardly have got it from Danton himself, who was guillotined in 1794. It could not have been easy for Collin’s mother to be known as Danton’s sister even under the Directoire, let alone the Empire, and much less the Restoration, and although there is a familiar argument to the effect that the sins of the fathers should not be held against their sons, let alone their nephews, Jacques Collin probably had to face a certain amount of hostility and prejudice himself on account of his relationship with the notorious Montagnard, which doubtless served to hone the scathing quality of his Voltairean mockery to an exceptional keenness.
Voyage au centre de la terre is most evidently Voltairean in its contemptuous attitude to priestcraft and its espousal of a kind of minimalist deism that many Voltaireans adopted, including Restif de La Bretonne, whose utopian writings might well have had some influence on the design of the society of the Alburians. It now belongs to a fairly extensive library of “hollow earth” fantasies, and appeared only a year after the first significant work of that kind written in English, Symzonia (1820) by “Captain Adam Seaborn.” Although Collin had obviously heard of John Cleve Symmes, jr. and his proposal that an expedition be mounted to discover one of the hypothetical openings at the Earth’s poles and perhaps pass through into a world within our globe, he probably had not had an opportunity to read the propagandizing novel popularizing Symmes’ ideas.
If Collin took any inspiration from an English work, it is far more likely to have come from A Voyage to the North Pole (1817) by “Benjamin Bragg”, an odd exercise in mildly comic didactic fiction that was sufficiently highly regarded in France for S. Henry Berthoud to serialize a translation in the Musée des Familles in the 1830s. Collin’s characters follow much the same itinerary as Bragg, reaching the vicinity of the pole via Spitzbergen after a whaling expedition in the environs of Greenland. Whereas the fictitious Bragg turned back after catching the merest glimpse of the warm polar continent and its mermaids, however, Collin’s characters go much further into the hypothetical warm region, and then even further, to the interior globe of the Earth.
In so doing, they were following in the footsteps of Ludwig Holberg’s Nils Klim, whose adventures, first published in 1742 in Latin and rapidly translated, were well-known in France, and the two protagonists of Giacomo Casanova’s Icosameron (1788). Casanova’s population of the inner world with diminutive “megamicres” is echoed in Collin’s depiction of miniature humans, but if Collin had Icosameron in mind while writing his own novel, it was probably in order to oppose himself sternly to the argument that the inner world is the Garden of Eden featured in Genesis—a thesis that Casanova might not have believed sincerely, but certainly argued vehemently and at great length. Indeed, Collin wryly inverts that thesis in the beliefs of the Felinois, which place a paradise of delights on the Earth’s surface.
Although the interval between Icosameron and Voyage au centre de la terre is not so very vast, and both were produced with Bourbons securely on the French throne, a great deal had happened in the interim, and literary manners had changed drastically. Both novels qualify as “utopian” but their attitudes to the notion of an “ideal” society are drastically different, and their narrative methods of presentation are chalk and cheese. Indeed, Voyage au centre de la terre is at least as much of an adventure story as it is a utopian fantasy, and its utopian element is haunted by a skeptical consciousness that, no matter how excelle
nt an ideal society might be in theory, and even in practice, it would be a difficult milieu for ordinary human beings to tolerate for long, by virtue of its tedium if not its awkward restrictions. In that, it sometimes seems a rather modern work, although its closest literary analogues are probably two philosophical adventure stories penned a century before by Simon Tyssot de Passot. Les Aventures de Jacques Massé (dated 1710 but probably 1714) and La Vie, les aventures et le voyage de Groenland du révérend père cordelier Pierre de Mésange (1720), which take a similarly distant and quasi-clinical view of the strange societies they represent.2
Although it places its alien world inside the Earth rather than in the distant reaches of space, and is content to represent it as an Earth-clone populated by humans who only differ from those living on the surface in their size. Voyage au centre de la terre stands at the beginning of a new phase in interplanetary fiction, marking a significant step forward in attempted verisimilitude from the interplanetary fantasies of the 18th century. The means by which Collin’s visitors to the inner world reach it without being injured, and return therefrom, are devoid of any rational plausibility—or, indeed, any real attempt at explanation—but that is inevitable, given the nature of the exercise; the real point is the way in which the “small globe” is designed and depicted.
Although there are satirical elements in the distorted reflection of our world that it provides, the world within the Earth is treated, in the main, simply as another planet, with its own geography and history, a mildly exotic fauna and flora, and nations with different politics and religion. The account of it provided by the self-effacing Hormisdas Peath aims for a level of narrative realism that adds an extra measure of laconism to Gulliverian mock-sincerity, and even though we now know that the attempted naturalism in question is partly based on a number of factual misconceptions, some of which seem glaring to 21st century eyes, we can also still see and appreciate the effect for which the narrative is aiming. Although it pretends to be earnest in order to tell an exceedingly tall tale, the manner of its pretence links it firmly to the tradition of exotic adventure fiction that was to become important in the latter part of the century, when its title had been usurped.
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