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

by David Standish

  Noted naturalist Daines Barrington published The Possibility of Approaching the North Pole Asserted in 1775. It was reprinted with new material in 1818, the same year Symmes produced his first circular, and is another of the polar authorities McBride quotes in support of Symmes.14

  In 1789 Alexander Mackenzie, working for the North West Company, rival to the Hudson’s Bay Company, made an epic hike comparable to Hearne’s nearly twenty years earlier, from Lake Athabaska in present northeastern Alberta, to Great Slave Lake, where he encountered the beginnings of the river now bearing his name, following it over five hundred miles northwest to its mouth in the Beaufort Sea, above the Arctic Circle. In 1793 he crossed the Canadian Rockies and reached the Pacific; both journeys provided further verification that no continental passage existed. His Voyage from Montreal on the River St. Lawrence, Through the Continent of North America, to the Frozen and Pacific Oceans, in the Years 1789 and 1793 was published in 1801, yet another resource McBride picked over in defending Symmes.15

  Exploration of the far north had almost died out in the early nineteenth century—until about the same time Symmes published Circular 1. Oddly, renewed interest in the Arctic resulted from the end of the Napoleonic Wars and the January 1815 Treaty of Ghent, which concluded the American–British War of 1812. In fighting these wars on almost worldwide fronts, the British had built up a huge naval fleet with hundreds of ships and thousands of sailors. Suddenly they had no one to fight. The result was massive layoffs (just as Symmes had been mustered out shortly after war’s end), officers reduced to half pay, and a splendid fleet lying idle. What to do with all those ships and well-trained officers? Second Secretary of the Admiralty John Barrow had a plan to keep at least some of them busy. Arguing that unlocking the secrets of the north had virtually become a matter of British honor, Barrow set several expeditions in motion that began a renewed effort that ended in 1854 with the first successful navigation of the Northwest Passage, 350 years after the first attempts. However, the route was so far north that it was useless commercially. Barrow, also a founder of the Royal Geographic Society, proselytized for and hyped this ambitious enterprise. In 1818 his A chronological history of voyages into the Arctic regions; undertaken chiefly for the purpose of discovering a north-east, north-west, or polar passage between the Atlantic and Pacific: from the earliest periods of Scandinavian navigation, to the departure of the recent expeditions appeared and sold rapidly.

  Four Royal Navy ships left England in April 1818—the same month Symmes began handing out his circular, offering to lead his own polar expedition—two in search of the Northwest Passage and two in an effort to reach the pole. Commander David Buchan headed the polar voyage, which was a complete bust. North of Spitsbergen they ran into horrific winds and wall-to-wall pack ice. They were back in London drinking hot toddies by October. The other expedition, led by Captain John Ross and Lieutenant William Parry, made some headway, though the explorers turned around for home due to what proved to be a major delusion on Ross’s part. The well-outfitted ships reached the west coast of Greenland by June, rediscovering Baffin Bay and naming Melville Bay just south of Thule. In early August, in far northwestern Greenland, they came upon a small band of Inuits, who were moved and amazed at these majestic creatures—the ships, which the Inuits were convinced must be alive. Awestruck, curious, they approached and addressed the ships, asking them, “Who are you? Where do you come from? Is it from the sun or the moon?” A crew member who spoke their language tried to explain. “They are houses made of wood.” The Inuit refused to believe him, saying, “No, they are alive, we have seen them move their wings.”16 It is the most touching passage in all the arctic annals.

  These were just the beginning of a succession of voyages mounted by the Royal Navy for the next three decades. Symmes must have ground his teeth in frustration at being left out of all this arctic exploration, to be on the sidelines watching. He was in many ways simply a product of the times, as things polar had captured the popular imagination. Eleanor Ann Porden, on meeting John Franklin aboard his ship just before his first voyage, was moved to lyrical ecstasies, publishing The Arctic Expeditions: A Poem in 1818. So moved, in fact, that on his return, she married him. In Scotland, a billboard-sized panorama—those scenic paintings on a roll that were slowly unspooled in theaters to music and commentary, a low-tech precursor to the movies—called The Arctic was playing to a packed house in Glasgow, described as Messrs. Marshall’s grand peristrephic panorama of the polar regions, which displays the north coast of Spitzbergen, Baffin’s Bay, Arctic Highlands, &c. : now exhibiting in the large new circular wooden building, George’s Square, Glasgow: painted from drawings taken by Lieut. Beechey, who accompanied the polar expedition in 1818; and Messrs. Ross and Saccheuse, who accompanied the expedition to discover a northwest passage. Journals and memoirs by arctic explorers became a growth industry in Symmes’ lifetime, and they must have rankled. What to do? Try even harder to get Symmes’ lifetime, and they must have rankled. What to do? Try even harder to get that expedition going.

  Symmes left St. Louis in 1819. The country was experiencing its first serious economic depression, remembered as the Panic of 1819, a postwar slump compounded by a flaky unregulated banking system and greatly reduced foreign commerce. He gave up on Indian trading and moved his family to Newport, Kentucky, just across the Ohio River from Cincinnati. There is no information about what he did for a living there during the two years before he hit the lecture trail, how he supported that crowd of children. McBride says that he completely occupied himself with working out his theory.

  He had already gained a bit of a reputation. Some zealous heartland boosters, eager to claim the frontier contained more than yahoos and grifters, had taken to calling him “Newton of the West.” He could be found some days at the new Western Museum in Cincinnati, hanging out with other esteemed scientists including John James Audubon, who worked there briefly and made a sketch of Symmes in 1820 for Western Magazine. In it he sits sideways at a table salted with several scientific instruments and a journal, a few fat volumes on a shelf, and a large globe with the North Pole cut off behind him. He wears a dark frock coat and a lighter collared vest, collar up, his thinning black hair combed forward to combat a deeply receding hairline, nose a little pointy, eyes a little squinty, brows beetley, mouth a little soft. He radiates a certain innocence and otherworldliness. Symmes shared Audubon’s interest in birds. He wrote a note for the National Intelligencer in 1820 about purple martins, largest of the American swallows, whose nests were everywhere in Cincinnati, so they clearly “delight in the society of man,” but they “migrate in a peculiar manner. It appears to be unknown from whence they come, and whither they go.” His speculation was that they migrated to somewhere else that people congregated.17 Naturally he had a plan to find out—by banding them.

  Birds had been banded for centuries. A falcon of French King Henry IV’s is the first on record, lost in 1595, turning up a day later in Malta, 1,350 miles away. Audubon had been the first in America to do so, tying silver cords to the legs of fledgling phoebes in Philadelphia in 1803 and identifying a few when they returned the next year. Symmes gave specifics about these martin bands: they should contain the date and “a rough drawing of a ship, with the national flag, and drawings of some of the animals of the climate, as a sort of universal language; also, a request for the reader to attach a similar label about the time of the return of the birds in the spring, and to publish the circumstance in a newspaper of the country. If we do not by such means learn, soon or late, where the martins go, it will be inferable that they go to some unlettered people or unknown country.” Sly old Symmes. What unknown country and what unlettered people? He adds, “The more reasons we find for presuming there are unknown countries, the more we will be disposed to exert ourselves in research.” Even sitting on the porch of the Western Museum, idly musing on where martins go in winter, his thoughts turned ever back to the hollow earth.

  During this time in Newport
, 1819-1820, he did accomplish one thing, and it was, in its way, a landmark, though one quickly forgotten. He wrote a novel called Symzonia: Voyage of Discovery. It bore the byline Captain Adam Seaborn, but is universally attributed to Symmes. Seaborn calls the land he discovers inside the earth Symzonia. Lavish praise is heaped on Symmes throughout (“That profound philosopher, John Cleve Symes”). The novel seems a long, sweet dream by Symmes of what he might find and accomplish if only he were permitted to do so. But it is more than that. According to Victoria Nelson in her 1997 Raritan article, “Symmes Hole, Or the South Polar Romance,” Symzonia was the very first American utopian novel.

  All utopian novels ultimately derive from Plato’s Republic, but the term comes from Thomas More’s Utopia—which means Nowhere—published in 1516. Between More and Symmes, many dozens of utopian fictions and treatises had been inflicted on an imperfect world. A selective New York Public Library bibliography lists 153 of them as appearing between 1516 and 1820. But Symzonia seems to be the first homegrown American utopian fiction.

  It wasn’t the first fiction set in subterranean realms. There had been a scattering of these during the eighteenth century, from several countries. The earliest was Relation d’un voyage du pole arctique au pole antarctique (1721), which recounts a Kircherean roller-coaster ride on a whaling ship sucked into a vortex somewhere north of Greenland, racing through the watery bowels of the earth from North to South Pole, where an extraordinary island floating under the Antarctic is found. Luxuriant vegetation reigns among warm-water lakes and waterfalls; the voyagers witness battles between polar bears and seals, encounter giant fish, a volcano, a pyramid with fiery reflections, and a structure of white stones before setting sail for the Cape of Good Hope. Another French novel, Lamekis, ou les voyages extraodinaires d’un egyptien dans la terre interieure (1734), took its characters to a roomy subterranean world beneath Egypt.

  In 1741 came the first novel of an underworld with real literary merit, Baron Ludvig Holberg’s Journey of Niels Klim to the World Underground. The preeminent Scandanavian writer of the Enlightenment, Holberg is claimed by both Denmark and Norway as a literary great. Niels Klim, first written in Latin, owes a considerable debt to Gulliver’s Travels in spirit and shape. Niels enters a cavern and falls toward the center of the earth, thinking as he drops,

  I fell to imagining that I was sunk into the subterranean world, and that the conjectures of those men are right who hold the Earth to be hollow, and that within the shell or outward crust there is another lesser globe, and another firmament adorned with lesser sun, stars, and planets. And the event discovered that this conjecture was right.

  Instead of falling all the way, he finds himself suspended in orbit. On consideration, he decides that’s fine—as a heavenly body he “would surely move with equal solemnity to a famished philosopher.” But then a flying monster approaches, a menacing griffin a little like the one that gives Dante a ride in the Inferno. “So great was my terror that, unmindful of my starry dignity to which I was newly advanced, in that disorder of my soul I drew out my university testimonial, which I happened to have in my pocket, to signify to this terrible adversary that I had passed my academical examination, that I was a graduate student, and could plead the privilege of my university against anyone who should attack me.” Niels’ jaunty insouciance gives the novel considerable charm, though it suffers from the defect common to all utopian fiction: the story repeatedly stops dead in its tracks to explain one or another set of customs. Niels harpoons the griffin and both fall to the planet Nazar below, where he is bothered by a bull and climbs a tree to get away. The “tree” proves to be the wife of the chief magistrate in a nearby city, and Niels finds himself jailed for assault. The creatures are cousin to those in the Forest of Suicides in the Inferno—trees with human heads on top and little feet on which they creep about. Nazar is a topsy-turvy utopia, or rather a bunch of them, where prevailing values on the surface are overturned. Niels spends much of the book traveling from country to country, each one devoted to its particular idée fixe. The novel adds Holberg’s voice to those of Montesquieu and Voltaire in their battle against religious fanaticism, the pious persecution and torture it leads to, doing so with humor, as Klim travels round the planet and encounters countries where the authorities cruelly suppress divergent views. The novel was quickly translated into French, English, German, Dutch, and Danish.

  A whimsical sort-of-subterranean English novel, The Life and Adventures of Peter Wilkins by Robert Paltock, published in 1751, is, as a contemporary critic grumped in the Monthly Review, “the illegitimate offspring of no very natural conjunction betwixt Gulliver’s travels and Robinson Crusoe; but much inferior to the meaner of these two performances, either as to entertainment or utility. It has all that is impossible in the one, or improbable in the other, without the wit and spirit of the first, or the just strokes of nature and useful lessons of morality of the second.” Paltock probably figured that stealing from two best sellers at once doubled his chances at a hit, and Peter Wilkins has a certain mutant appeal. After seducing and marrying a servant girl—there are touches of Tom Jones, published two years earlier, as well—Wilkins signs on a ship, is taken as a slave by Portuguese in Angola, escapes with a resourceful black fellow slave, and has many adventures in Africa before stealing a ship with other English refugees.

  They become lost sailing south, where the ship, reaching the Antarctic, is inexorably attracted to a black lodestone mountain—the looming shadow of Mercator—and all but Wilkins are swept overboard. He begins exploring in a smaller boat, which is caught in a current and yanked down the drain of a maelstrom, bobbing up into an enormous underground cavern. Coming upon a small island, he sets up housekeeping à la Crusoe. Far luckier than Crusoe, who had only unsexy Friday for company, Wilkins meets one of the locals, a beautiful winged young woman with skin like the down of a swan. They marry, after a fashion, and live together for many years as a happy couple, raising several children, until she decides to visit her family. Wilkins helps the king thwart a plot to overthrow him, asking as reward that slavery be abolished and reading introduced to the peasantry—a little utopian nod here at the end. At the last, his wife dead, Wilkins old, he begins longing for England. Borne aloft, homeward, by winged bearers, he is unceremoniously dropped into the sea when a passing ship fires a cannon at this unlikely sight and frightens them off.

  Easily the oddest of these eighteen-century subterranean novels, not to say the creepiest, is Jacques Casanova’s five-volume Icosameron, published in 1788 and running to a little over 1,800 pages. The novel recounts the experiences of a teenage brother and sister who fall into the earth’s interior through a watery abyss. There they find an inner world inhabited by many-colored hermaphroditic dwarves called Megamicres, who live in a color-coded social hierarchy with the red ones at the top of the heap. Their primary method of eating consists of sucking on each other’s breasts. They’re also nudists. Edward and Elizabeth promptly rip off their own clothes, declare themselves married, and set about propagating as fast as they can. Each year during their eighty-one-year stay, Elizabeth gives birth to twins, who in turn marry at age twelve and begin having their own twins. Finally Ed and Liz make their way back to London, leaving behind millions of offspring. Not only do they cause a population glut down there, they screw up a previously balanced society in other ways as well, introducing gunpowder and war, among other things.

  Symzonia, published in 1820, was the first American hollow earth novel and set the pattern for many that followed, right down to the present. It established the usual structure for such books—the trip to the pole, discovery of a land and people/creatures inside, adventures and revelations while there, and a return home, usually to ridicule and disbelief. Later books described alarming dystopias down there, but Symzonia is a voyage into a utopian world—serving as a vehicle for social commentary as well as a 248-page ad for Symmes’ theories. He begins:

  In the year 1817, I projected a voyage of discovery
, in the hope of finding a passage to a new and untried world. I flattered myself that I should open the way to new fields for the enterprise of my fellow-citizens, supply new sources of wealth, fresh food for curiosity, and additional means of enjoyment; objects of vast importance, since the resources of the known world have been exhausted by research, its wealth monopolized, its wonders of curiosity explored, its every thing investigated and understood!

  Far from being some pointless ethereal scheme, his reason for going is pragmatic, useful, and filled with the potential for profit. Symmes succinctly expresses the spirit of the times. One by one the great mysteries of the physical world were being figured out, the earth revealing its last geographical secrets. The poles, a few tangled, uncharted jungles here and there, the odd undiscovered island, were all that remained to be explored—or claimed by some country or other. Even the vast expanse of the American continent was filling up at a dizzying rate. Only three states had been added to the original thirteen by 1800, but by 1820 seven more had joined the ranks, with troublesome Missouri to be added in 1821—all of them, with the exception of Maine, carved out of what had been Indian land and wilderness at the time of the American Revolution. Symmes had seen this happening firsthand after the War of 1812, with swarm after swarm of western settlers using St. Louis as their jumping-off point. One way of viewing this—as Symmes clearly did—was as ever-diminishing possibilities for great blue sky opportunity. The earth’s interior promised virgin land, ripe fruit waiting to be plucked, an unclaimed Eden, and no competition.

  World map from Athansius Kircher’s Mundus subterraneus (1665) showing Terra Australis. (Mineralogical Institute, University of Würzburg, Germany)