Hollow Earth: The Long and Curious History of Imagining Strange Lands, Fantastical Creatures, Advanced Civilizatio
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Another candidate offered as a likely source of Symmes’ inspiration is Sir John Leslie (1766–1832), a Scottish physicist and mathematician best remembered for his studies of capillary action and as the creator of the first artificial ice in 1810. Leslie had his own convoluted hollow earth theory that derived from his theory of the “compression of bodies.” As Duane Griffin, assistant professor of geography at Bucknell University, explains it, “The theory is based in part on an experiment by British physicist John Canton that Leslie believed established the compressibility of water, an idea Leslie believed his peers had dismissed prematurely (they were actually correct—water is uncompressible). The theory of the compression of bodies holds that the density of any substance is a function of its particular elastic properties and its distance from Earth’s center.”9 This would produce an “almost inconceivably dense” Earth, far denser than it has been calculated to be. The answer to this problem? Leslie says, in Elements of Natural History (1829 edition), “Our planet, must have a very widely cavernous structure. We tread on a crust or shell whose thickness bears but a very small proportion to the diameter of its sphere.” Further, since there couldn’t be a vacuum down there, it must be filled with something besides air, since it too would compress. “The vast subterranean cavity,” wrote Leslie, “must be filled with some very diffusive medium, of astonishing elasticity or internal repulsion among its molecules … [the] only fluid we know possessing that character is LIGHT itself.” He adds, with such verve you can practically hear the stirring organ chords ascending behind it: “The great central concavity is not that dark and dreary abyss which the fancy of Poets had pictured. On the contrary, this spacious internal vault must contain the purest ethereal essence, Light in its most concentrated state, shining with intense refulgence and overpowering splendor.”
This is, however, contrary to another idea about interior lighting that is often attributed to him, one that seems to be another hollow earth equivalent of an urban legend. The UnMuseum again: “Scottish mathematician Sir John Leslie proposed there were two inside suns (which he named Pluto and Proserpine).” And a website reliably named Professor Fringe says, “John Leslie would place 2 suns in hollow earth—named Pluto and Proserpine.”10 These two supposed interior suns of Leslie’s turn up frequently. But if he actually suggested them, neither Professor Griffin nor I have been able to locate the primary source.
So these are the likely influences. But somewhere along the way, Symmes made the huge leap he is chiefly remembered for—those vast holes at the poles. The originality and boldness of the idea no doubt contributed to Symmes’ reticence about announcing it to the public, if, as his son claimed, it had come to him at an early age. The scientific world at the time had no shortage of wacky explanations for just about everything, but these Symmes’ Holes were still pretty far out there. He must have sensed the ridicule he was in for even before he ever opened his mouth.
But he had worked out the theory in minute detail and amassed mountains of data to support it. The whole thing rested on Symmes’ “proof” of a universal imperative toward hollow concentric spheres, from planets down to the molecular level. As McBride summarizes the theory in his book, “The Earth is composed of at least five hollow concentric spheres, with spaces between each, an atmosphere surrounding each; and habitable as well upon the concave as the convex surface. Each of these spheres are widely open at the poles. The north polar opening of the sphere we inhabit, is believed to be about four thousand miles in diameter, the southern above six thousand.”
Tortured logic lies behind this.
In part it involves an “improvement” on Newton’s ideas regarding gravity. If larger objects exert a greater pull on smaller, Symmes asks, why hasn’t everything in the universe collected into a single huge glob? He has a couple of answers. First, the hollow concentric molecules making up everything exert a “repulsive” force on one another; and second, all of space “is filled with microscopically invisible hollow spheres of aether—which by their elasticity hold the planets of the universe in place,” as Peck tries to explain it in his 1909 article. Peck continues: “In other words, we live in a sort of rubber ball universe in which the elastic hollow spheres of aether are so pushed as by their elasticity to hold in place the heavenly bodies. This expansive quality in the molecules which constitutes the aerial fluid creates a pushing instead of a pulling power which is the real principle of gravity.”
(above) Illustration of the northern polar “verge” as if seen from the moon. (Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, 1882)
If this makes much sense to you, you’re ahead of me.
The other operative—and more understandable—principle involved in creating the hollow earth is centrifugal force. Here his argument owes something to the primeval liquid sphere postulated by Burnet and others. To Symmes, this whirling viscous first chaos would generate a hollow center by propelling all the heavier material inside the earth out toward the edges, like a cosmic potter’s wheel. This centrifugal flinging of the earth’s heaviest material would in turn create mountain ranges and other great surface irregularities by unevenly pushing this weighty stuff outward, until it cooled and solidified into the untidy surface as we know it. This process would also produce a landscape on the inside that roughly mirrors the one on the surface, including oceans.
But wouldn’t the water be sucked down to the center by gravity, not to mention any people or creatures inside? No. Here Symmes conveniently returns to Newtonian thinking about gravity. Since centrifugal force has flung most of the earth’s mass toward the outer parts of the sphere, the earth’s true center of gravity lies in some middle ground between the outer surface and the surface of the landscape within, much nearer the edge than the geographical center. No danger of falling off once you’re inside.
He doesn’t suggest an interior sun. The holes, or “verges,” are cut at slight angles, twelve degrees off from being parallel with the equator. The descent into them is gradual, so that a traveler might not at first realize that he has crossed the threshold and is on the way inside. Since they’re angled and several thousand miles across, regular sunlight can get in, and according to some complicated calculations he’s made about refraction of light in the “cold, dense air” of the poles, more is bent downward, so that together there’s enough light to support plant and animal life inside. His prosaic analogy here is a room in a house that only gets northern light; the sun never shines directly into the room, but still it is bright.
Symmes and his subsequent interpreters marshal bushels of evidence pointing to the existence of the polar openings, mostly drawn from accounts of Arctic expeditions—details these earlier explorers had no idea were verifications of polar openings, incidentally. He cites observations of animals and birds heading north at the onset of winter, which he takes to mean that they are heading for the opening, presumably to overwinter in the cozy interior; similarly, he quotes sightings of great numbers of animals appearing from the north in springtime, heading south, fat and happy, as if from nowhere—returning, he knew, from their winter vacation below.
Georges Buffon, the celebrated French naturalist of the eighteenth century, is invoked by P. Clark in an 1873 Atlantic Monthly article, regarding his report that “immense shoals of herrings in good condition come down from the polar seas and are never known to return.” This, Clark says, “renders the solution of the migration of fishes from the north more difficult. If they return [to the north] in the spring, why are they never observed as well as when they go south?” Clark, channeling Symmes, answers “that they make the annual circuit of the earth, over the exterior and interior surfaces and through both openings at the poles.” They were making the same circuit suggested by Kircher two centuries earlier. Symmes and his supporters also note reports of great piles of driftwood found along the northern coasts of Iceland, Norway, and Siberia, which have “every appearance of a tropical production” and are taken to have been produced inside. And not just trees. Clark again: “Vegeta
bles of singular character, and flowers of peculiar fragrance and color, unknown to botanists, are sometimes found in this drift.” The implication, of course, is that these mysterious specimens come from the paradise within.
Symmes, McBride, and others insist that the zone of fierce cold and ice near the poles is merely a frozen ring to be traversed. Beyond it, things warm up, and there is an open polar sea leading to the interior. Again, the anecdotal experiences of many explorers, both north and south, are offered as evidence—among them British explorer James Weddell, who did indeed encounter ice-free conditions on his third voyage into Antarctic waters in 1822–1824, which allowed him to penetrate to seventy-four degrees fifteen minutes south in the sea later named for him, beating Captain James Cook’s 1774 record in the Resolution by more than three degrees. Clark, in his Atlantic Monthly article, offers this typical evidence: “One navigator, Captain Ross, when in high latitude beyond the verge, speaks of the Arctic Sea as being calm and clear of ice, while south of him was a wide belt of ice.11 He describes the currents of air coming from the north as being so warm as to dissolve the snow and ice around him and far to the south.”
This insistence on an open polar sea was far from being the private hobbyhorse of Symmes and his defenders. It had widespread currency, largely because people wanted it to be true. Others didn’t add the imaginative twist about an interior world, but they believed, especially in regard to the Arctic, in part because it kept alive the old dream of a shortcut to Asia—the long sought Northwest or Northeast Passage, a dream that motivated explorers well into the middle of the nineteenth century. As late as 1873, P. Clark’s article about Symmes in the Atlantic Monthly glibly states that “it is now generally conceded that a vast open ocean exists in the polar regions.”
An open sea at the top of the world had been an appealing idea for hundreds of years. No one had actually seen this remote part of the earth, so why not a handy, easily navigated ocean? Greek mythology put the earthly paradise of Hyperborea there, a warm, inviting place of perpetual sunshine hidden behind the back of Boreas, the North Wind, untouched by his chill. Apollo spent his winter vacations there. Even this seems an antecedent to Symmes’ ideas, suggesting that the far north is somehow beyond the cold.
A Greek named Pytheas made the first recorded voyage to the north in the fourth century B.C.E. In a work since lost he told of an island six days’ sail beyond England, on the Arctic Circle, which he called Thule. Though his accounts were later dismissed as fantasy, the idea of a fog-shrouded land at the end of the earth captured imaginations for centuries afterward. In the 1930s it was neatly folded into strange Nazi mythology about a pure Aryan homeland in the north (all that white probably attracted them).
The next known northward incursions came around 800 C.E. as Irish monks fled the marauding Vikings. They made their way north (possibly as far as Iceland and Greenland) to establish brooding monasteries on isolated windswept promontories, where they meditated and kept fragile hold on knowledge. They were also searching for the Land of the Blessed, a mythical northern place where grapevines produced fruit twelve times a year, and there was peace—the unlimited grape supply (all that wine) arguably being as attractive as the idea of peace. One of those Vikings, Erik the Red, was the first colorful character associated with these northern lands. When he was banished from Iceland after killing some of his neighbors, Erik headed west and found a large barren island four hundred miles distant. He poked around there for a few years and then returned to Iceland in 985 with rosy upbeat real-estate-salesman accounts of the land he’d found (he was the first European to make landfall). With a true promoter’s instinct, he named it Greenland. Twenty-five ships set out, and the fourteen that made it established a colony that lasted almost three hundred years, gradually dying off as Europe’s Little Ice Age began in the fourteenth century. Erik’s son, Leif Eriksson, was probably the first European to set foot on the North American continent about 1000 C.E., though some scholars dispute this.
Animals apparently migrating northward. (Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, 1882).
The next round of northern exploration commenced within a few years of Columbus’s epochal (if mistaken) voyage of 1492. As is well known, he was aiming for Cathay, the spices and other profitable exotica of the Orient. Instead he slammed into a New World quite inconveniently in the way. Dreaming of a passage to India, when he reached Cuba he was convinced it was mainland China and sent a full dress party that included an authorized representative of the pope into the interior expecting to find some grand city, and of course he insisted on calling the inhabitants Indians. This was the first attempt in an ultimately futile search that would last another 350 years for that tantalizing shortcut to Asia.
The idea of an open polar sea got a boost when Gerardus Mercator’s revolutionary—and beautiful—world map appeared in 1569. It rendered the earthly sphere into rectangular grids for easier use by navigators, even though the proportions got pretty weird in the north and south, with Greenland looming like Godzilla over puny North America cringing beneath it, one-tenth its size. Showing the arctic regions according to this scheme proved impossible, so Mercator drew another map of the Arctic, from a point of view in outer space above the planet. He combined several traditional elements—including an open polar sea—primarily drawing on a fourteenth-century text, now lost, called The Travels of Jacobus Cnoyen of Bois le Duc. It contained a summary account of travels to the north by an English friar who had gone there for King Edward III and written a book about it, Inventio Fortunatae, also now lost. But Mercator read Cnoyen’s book, and wrote a long letter about it to John Dee, Queen Elizabeth’s astrologer, in which he says the friar, using “magical arts,” claimed to have seen this utmost northerly place in 1360. The friar said that four arms of the sea rushed as torrential rivers between Arctic landmasses to form an ocean at the top of the world. These rivers crashed together at the pole, forming a terrible maelstrom that plunged into an abyss, the foaming water sucked down into the center of the earth. And so Mercator drew it in his polar map. Mercator places as his centerpiece at the pole a dark craggy rock—the legendary Rupes Nigra or Black Precipice, the lodestone mountain toward which all compasses presumably pointed.12 The projection suggests a broken donut, with an inner sea as the hole and plenty of ocean space for navigation between the four northern landmasses and the known continents to the south. Thus his map of polar regions inadvertently served as an advertising poster for the open polar sea and a shortcut to Asia—and one that Symmes certainly knew.
Symmes insisted on this open sea for his own purposes, of course. It was additional “proof” of his polar openings and the idyllic interior that beckoned. But Symmes’ polar dreams were in the mainstream zeitgeist. True, he took his polar fascination one toke over the line, but it was going around. A polar mania in the form of voyages of exploration, both north and south, reasserted itself after 1815 and was going full tilt when Symmes offered his theory to the world and himself as the leader of an arctic expedition. Symmes and his polar holes influenced thinking about the hollow earth from then on. After Symmes, ideas about the hollow earth, in real life and in fiction, become inextricably linked with the poles and polar exploration, right down to the present.
Finding a shortcut to Asia from Europe through a Northwest Passage had initially appealed to the English because the known routes to the Orient—around Africa and South America—had been monopolized by the Spanish and Portuguese. Over time the monopoly crumbled, but dreams of finding the passage lived on. The pursuit of it took on a certain frenzy during Symmes’ lifetime and must have contributed to his polar visions. Many of the polar “authorities” Symmes invokes in support of his theory were involved in seeking this icy grail.
Polar projection from Gerardus Mercator’s revolutionary world map. (Collection of The Map House of London)
The archipelago lying above the North American continent proved both tantalizing and maddening to these explorers. Around every cape might lie an open se
a and a straight shot to Asia—or more bays that finally gave way to a shoreline, more large islands to navigate around, or a wall of ice. But great rewards lay at the end of the labyrinth if it could be found. The names of those who tried and failed ornament the map of northern Canada, a cartographical necropolis of brave futility. They include John Cabot, Jacques Cartier, Henry Hudson, and James Baffin.
Samuel Hearne, a Hudson’s Bay Company employee who made several heroic treks through the Canadian north between 1769 and 1772, became the first European to walk overland from Hudson’s Bay to the Arctic Ocean—and back!—thereby establishing that there was no sea passage through continental North America. His 1795 account of his adventures, Journey from Prince of Wales Fort in Hudson’s Bay to the Northern Ocean, makes stirring reading even today, and is cited repeatedly by James McBride in support of Symmes’ theory, particularly in regard to the abundance of wildlife Hearne encountered, taken as testimony of a mild interior where these creatures presumably overwintered.13