Hollow Earth: The Long and Curious History of Imagining Strange Lands, Fantastical Creatures, Advanced Civilizatio

by David Standish

  2

  SYMMES’ HOLES

  THE NEXT MAJOR HOLLOW EARTH EVENT BEGAN MODESTLY on April 10, 1818, in St. Louis, then the westernmost town of any size on the American frontier. Founded in 1764, the former French trading post had grown from a muddy backwater into a booming crossroads, becoming the stepping-off point to the West. The Lewis and Clark expedition embarked from there in 1804, the year after the Louisiana Purchase, an 827,987-square-mile tract of land that doubled the size of the country, bought from Napoleon at the bargain-basement price of a little under three cents an acre. In 1805 St. Louis was made the Territory of Louisiana’s seat of government, and then in 1812, capital of the Territory of Missouri. Between 1810 and 1820 the population increased 300 percent. When the War of 1812 concluded in December 1814 (not counting the belated Battle of New Orleans), people began pouring in there, whether seeking boomtown opportunity or simply stopping to take a few deep breaths and buy some (overpriced) pots and pans before heading farther west. One of the new steamboats first put in there in 1817, beginning a traffic that would give St. Louis a prominence in the West that would last until the coming of the railroad in the 1840s and 1850s, when previously piddling Chicago would eventually steal its thunder. In the years immediately after the War of 1812, St. Louis was ripping and roaring.

  One of those who landed there after the war was Captain John Cleves Symmes.

  On April 10, 1818, he commenced handing out a printed circular of his own composition. It was his bold mission statement:

  CIRCULAR

  Light gives light to discover—ad infinitum

  ST. LOUIS, MISSOURI TERRITORY, NORTH AMERICA

  April 10, a.d. 1818

  To all the World:

  I declare the earth is hollow and habitable within; containing a number of solid concentric spheres, one within the other, and that it is open at the poles twelve or sixteen degrees. I pledge my life in support of this truth, and am ready to explore the hollow, if the world will support and aid me in this undertaking.

  JNO. CLEVES SYMMES

  Of Ohio, late Captain of Infantry

  N.B.—I have ready for the press a treatise on the principles of matter, wherein I show proofs of the above positions, account for various phenomena, and disclose Dr. Darwin’s “Golden Secret.”

  My terms are the patronage of THIS and the NEW WORLDS.

  I dedicate to my wife and her ten children.

  I select Dr. S.L. Mitchill, Sir H. Davy, and Baron Alexander Von Humboldt as my protectors.

  I ask one hundred brave companions, well equipped, to start from Siberia, in the fall season, with reindeer and sleighs, on the ice of the frozen sea; I engage we find a warm and rich land, stocked with thrifty vegetables and animals, if not men, on reaching one degree northward of lattitude 82; we will return in the succeeding spring.4

  J.C.S.

  This wasn’t a stray brainstorm that occurred to him during a nightmare brought on by a bad fish or after getting a little too corned up at the tavern. He had been thinking and thinking on this. How he came to these conclusions—and how he came to believe so passionately and persistently in them—is a mystery. But until he died in 1829 at age forty-eight, the hollow earth was his obsession, his only dream, his tragedy.

  Born in Sussex County, New Jersey, in 1780, Symmes was named for a prominent uncle whose generosity would figure in his future. The older Symmes was a Revolutionary War veteran and chief justice of New Jersey, who in 1787 put together a corporation to buy a 330,000-acre tract of public land in the southwestern corner of the present state of Ohio, between the Big and Little Miami rivers, north of the Ohio River, a deal sometimes known as the Symmes Purchase.

  His younger namesake started out well enough. His father, Timothy Symmes, was a Revolutionary War veteran and a judge in New Jersey who married twice and had nine children altogether. John Cleves was the oldest in the second crop of six. He had the usual semi-haphazard elementary education. Years later he recalled reading, at age eleven, “a large edition of ‘Cook’s Voyages,’” which his father, “though himself a lover of learning, reproved me for spending so much of my time from work, and said I was a book-worm.”5 He added that at “about the same age I used to harangue my playmates in the street, and describe how the earth turned round; but then as now, however correct my positions, I got few or no advocates.” Poor Symmes. Already a visionary pariah in grade school.

  He joined the army as an ensign—the lowest officer rank—at age twenty-two and was commissioned as captain in January 1812, months before war was declared against Great Britain. He did most of his service on the western frontier near the Mississippi River.

  Symmes was at Fort Adams fifty miles below Natchez in 1807, as the final act in Aaron Burr’s delusional scheme of personal empire was unfolding near there. Another dreamer! Burr was on his way down the Mississippi with an armed flotilla, rumored to be planning to seize New Orleans, in cahoots with the territorial governor, James Wilkenson. But Wilkenson got cold feet, ratted Burr out to President Jefferson, and rushed additional troops to several forts along the river, including Fort Adams, ordering those stationed in New Orleans to prepare for an attack. Burr got wind of this betrayal and went ashore north of Natchez, where he was arrested. Managing to fast-talk his way out of the charges, he masqueraded as a river boatman and melted into the wilderness on the eastern side of the river, making his way toward Spanish Pensacola. But as additional information about his schemes came to light, he was rearrested near Mobile and taken to Richmond, where he was tried for treason before Chief Justice John Marshall—and, somehow, acquitted.

  Symmes became involved in his own drama at this time. He described it in detail in a long letter to his brother, Celadon, dated Fort Adams, June 28, 1807. When a fellow officer named Marshall declared Symmes was “no gentleman,” Symmes sought him out to publicly “wring his nose” and provoke a duel. Duels were a capricious business, given the primitive state of the weapons and the dubious skill of the duelists, and this was no exception. With their seconds at hand, the two faced off ten paces apart, standing sideways. “Are you ready?”

  “Yes!”

  “Fire!”

  We raised our arms together deliberately, from a hanging position. My intention was to aim at his hip; his (I learn) at my breast. Consequently, I got the first fire, which drew his shot somewhat at random, though it must have passed within a line of the lower part of my belly, as it pierced through my pantaloons, shirt-tail, and the bone of my careless hanging wrist, close to the joint. He received my ball in his thigh. I wanted to know if he desired another shot, and being informed in the negative, left my second and surgeon attending to him, and, with my handkerchief wrapped around my wound, went home and ate a hearty breakfast.

  So Marshall just barely missed shooting off Symmes’ privates, the shot ripping through his pants and underdrawers and striking his wrist. The wound at first seemed trivial, “little more than a scratch,” but it refused to heal properly, causing him pain, fever, bloating in his feet and legs, and a bout of dysentery lasting six or seven weeks. A biographical sketch in an 1882 history of Butler County includes this letter and says that “Captain Symmes never fully recovered the use of his wrist. It was always stiff and a little awry.” Marshall suffered lasting consequences as well. The wound “disabled him so that he carried the effects of it through life.” But, the sketch writer adds, “he was afterward befriended by Captain Symmes, who always spoke of this duel with regret.”6

  Symmes had married Mrs. Mary Anne Lockwood on Christmas Day 1808 at Fort Adams. She was the young widow of an army captain and brought five daughters and one son to the marriage. To this brood they added four more children, including a son named Americus, born in 1811, who carried his father’s hollow earth banner into the 1880s, giving interviews, writing a book summarizing his theories, and putting up a memorial to him in a Hamilton, Ohio, public park, with a hollow stone globe at the top. It is still there today.

  Symmes left the army in 1816
and worked as a trader in St. Louis, providing supplies to government troops stationed at forts on the Upper Mississippi and trading with the Fox Indians under special dispensation from the governor of Missouri Territory. He probably spent considerable time at Fort Osage, which sat high on a bluff overlooking the Missouri River, both a fortification and an “Indian factory”—a sort of early Wal-Mart filled with goods attractive to the Indians, who would trade deerskins, furs, and other hides for them. Deerskins were so common in the region that they were accepted as currency in lieu of the real thing.

  Two years into this life as a trader, at the age of thirty-eight, Symmes printed up his circular announcing that the earth is hollow and offering to lead an expedition inside to claim the glorious lands lying within for the United States.

  No one seems to know where he got this notion.

  His friend James McBride wrote an explanatory book published in 1826 called Symmes’s Theory of Concentric Spheres and says in the preface, “During the early part of his life he received what was then considered a common English education, which in after-life he improved by having access to tolerably well-selected libraries; and, being endued by nature with an insatiable desire for knowledge of all kinds, he thus had, during the greater part of his life, ample opportunities to indulge it.” But McBride offers no specifics on his reading.7 Similarly, his son Americus writes in The Symmes Theory of Concentric Spheres, published in 1878, nearly fifty years after his father’s death, “During his boyhood and early life he received a good common English education, which, in after life, he greatly improved through his great fondness for reading and an insatiable desire for knowledge. He cultivated particularly mathematics and the natural sciences, and at an early age studied out the curious theory through which he became so widely known.” Seems Americus may have cribbed a bit from his dad’s pal.

  What’s most puzzling, if Americus is right that he figured out his theory of concentric spheres at an early age, is why he waited until he was nearly forty to spring it on the world. Could this be as deep and simple as a midlife crisis? Bookish, dreamy, he found himself with a mob of children, stuck bouncing around the frontier on horseback doing nothing more elevated than buying and selling, and for what? Mere profit? And not even much of that? Polite as they tried to be, all the biographical sketches written about him in the fifty years or so after his death mention that he wasn’t getting rich as a trader. (“Captain Symmes’s trading experience did not result in a pecuniary benefit to him.”) Stuck in a boring dead-end job in St. Louis while continuing lifelong dreams of exotic places and great achievements, suddenly he has a visionary bailout plan.

  But where had he gotten it?

  One good possible starting point is Cotton Mather.

  This will perhaps seem unlikely to those who think of Mather only as the arch-Puritan, the incarnation of all that was intellectually ugly and unappealing about American Puritanism in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, often pointed to as the chief villain in the Salem witch trials of 1692—that Cotton Mather? Yes.

  Born in 1663 into one of Boston’s most prominent families, Mather was not only the strongest voice of old-guard Boston Puritanism and a prolific writer on things ecclesiastical (he and his father, Increase, accounted for 30 percent of the books published in New England during the 1690s), he was also an interested and serious scientist. He read widely in the new science, corresponded with men such as Roger Boyle, performed his own observations, and was named a member of the Royal Society in 1713. Like Burnet and others in England, Mather at first saw no threat in the new science; to the contrary, it seemed to him a tangible further articulation of God’s plan. He welcomed it and routinely wove it into his sermons. The same Cotton Mather who embodied the worst medievalism in New England Puritanism was also an enlightened early advocate for smallpox inoculation. He produced two major works on “natural history,” as the new science was generally called. The first, Curiosa Americana, grew out of a series of letters he had sent to the Royal Society starting in 1712, reporting on a variety of homegrown phenomena.

  Mather’s The Christian Philosopher, a considerable amplification organized by subject into chapters, appeared in 1721. Mather biographer Kenneth Silverman calls it “the first general book on science written in America.” It enjoyed great and ongoing popularity and was almost certainly studied by John Cleves Symmes, since the book had become a staple in popular scientific literature by Symmes’ day. It summarized the best current knowledge on various subjects in order to show “that Philosophy [read: Newtonian science] is no Enemy, but a mighty and wondrous Incentive to Religion.” Maybe. As Perry Miller observes, toward the end of his life, a certain desperation creeps into Mather’s writings, a growing realization that the Enlightenment may be the enemy of religious fervor, after all. Miller writes in The New England Mind: From Colony to Province:

  Mather was no Pascal, but he was imaginative enough, or tormented enough, to realize along with Pascal that the experimental philosophy had opened up an infinity on either side of finite existence, that man was now poised between the mathematical extremes of microscope and telescope, that he no longer stood in the center of a symmetrical system, that he had become a thinking reed hemmed in by two massive enigmas.

  But in The Christian Philosopher Mather reveals no doubts or fears. Instead, there is a certain exuberant delight here, both in all these terrific new ideas and findings and in demonstrating the ways this marvelous complexity absolutely demands a marvelous God behind it all. The chapter on magnetism is the most relevant to Symmes’ theory. Mather begins:

  Such an unaccountable thing there is as the MAGNETISM of the Earth. A Principle very different from that of Gravity. The Operations of this amazing Principle, are principally discovered in the communion that Iron has with the Loadstone; a rough, coarse, unsightly Stone, but of more Value than all the Diamonds and Jewels in the Universe.

  A historical survey of advances in knowledge about magnetism follows, from the “Antients” to Roger Bacon to Henry Gellibrand (who discovered the drift of magnetic variation around 1634) to Edmond Halley. Mather devotes nearly three pages to summarizing Halley’s 1692 paper in Philosophical Transactions, not failing to mention that

  Sir Isaac Newton has demonstrated the Moon to be more solid than our Earth, as nine to five; why may we not then suppose four Ninths of our Globe to be Cavity? Mr. Halley allows there may be Inhabitants of the lower Story, and many ways of producing Light for them.

  Mather concludes the chapter with a certain glee. Given all this knowledge and theorizing about magnetism, he says, practically chuckling, the truth is, “Gentlemen Philosophers, the MAGNET has quite puzzled you.” And its mysterious force leads directly to God. We “see much of Him in such a wonderful Stone as the MAGNET. They have done well to call it the Loadstone, that is to say, the Lead-stone: May it lead me unto Thee, O my God and my Saviour!”

  Though Halley’s paper was reprinted in the century or so after its appearance, The Christian Philosopher seems the likeliest place for Symmes to encounter his ideas. But Halley makes no mention of large holes at the poles, the most singular feature of Symmes’ theory. Symmes may have known Kircher’s Mundus subterraneus, which, as already noted, picked up on the ideas of a medieval geographer in positing a great watery vortex at either pole; but this too is far from the huge gaping “verges” theorized by Symmes. And Kircher’s globe, while having a central fire and other pockets of vulcanism, plus a complex network of subterranean waterways, was primarily solid.

  Many of the articles summarizing hollow earth ideas found on the Internet—and there are plenty of them, ranging from the fairly accurate to the delusional, just like the rest of the Internet—attribute the idea of polar openings and other hollow earth notions to Leonhard Euler. He’s considered one of the eighteenth century’s most important mathematical thinkers, and was until recently on the face of Switzerland’s ten Franken bill. Students of calculus and trigonometry can blame him for their headaches.
He didn’t invent calculus (Leibniz and Newton did, independently, in the 1680s), but Euler “carried [it] to a higher degree of perfection,” as the Encyclopedia Britannica puts it, adding, “He did for modern analytic geometry and trigonometry what the Elements of Euclid had done for ancient geometry.”

  The earliest mention of Euler in connection with the hollow earth appears in James McBride’s Symmes’s Theory of Concentric Spheres (1826), the first extended and (fairly) coherent explication of Symmes’ ideas. Symmes himself never did manage to produce a single document elaborating and putting them in order. Instead he wrote many short shotgun blasts about aspects of his theory that appeared as scattered newspaper articles, and he presented them in a series of ill-advised lectures from 1820 until his death in 1829. So the McBride book is the definitive source regarding his thinking.

  After citing Halley’s theory, McBride says that Euler was also an advocate but differed “as to the nature of the nucleus.” He continues: “Euler believed it to be a luminous body formed of materials similar to the sun, and adapted to the purpose of illuminating and warming the interior surface of the crust, which he supposed might be inhabited equally with the exterior surface.”

  As the UnMuseum website has it, “In the eighteenth century Leonhard Euler, a Swiss mathematician, replaced the multiple spheres theory with a single hollow sphere which contained a sun 600 miles wide that provided heat and light for an advanced civilization that lived there.”8 And a 1909 article about Symmes in the Ohio Archaeological and Historical Publications journal by Cincinnati lawyer John Weld Peck says Euler “accepted Halley’s theory and went further in asserting that the inner sphere might be luminous and thus light and warm the inner surface of the outer crust, and he further inferred that the interior might be inhabited.” Certain (presumably) more reliable writers make similar assertions, such as science popularizers L. Sprague DeCamp and Willy Ley in Lands Beyond (1952). But they don’t cite primary sources for their claims regarding Euler’s beliefs in interior suns and advanced civilizations, and I have been unable to turn up any such proof. Indeed, in Letters to a Princess of Germany, his widely read popularization of current science that appeared in three volumes between 1768 and 1772, Euler is categorically opposed to Halley’s ideas about the earth’s magnetism and the moving interior spheres that he suggests to account for it.