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

by David Standish

  Soon the Symzonians conclude that they have to get rid of these Externals, lest their edenic society be infected by them. How do they decide this might happen? By reading our world’s great literature! Seaborn has brought along all sorts of books—including the complete Shakespeare and Milton’s Paradise Lost. The Symzonians have translated them into their own language, studied them carefully, and decided that the Externals are hopelessly corrupt. So Seaborn & Co. are peacefully 86’d and sent on their way. Rather than head home empty-handed, while still in the southern polar regions, they slaughter 100,000 seals for their skins, sail to Canton, exchange them there for “China trade” goods, which they bring home, sell, and become rich—briefly. Seaborn’s broker cheats him and goes under, and he’s broke, so he writes the book in hopes of recouping his losses via a best seller. It didn’t work.

  Few copies of Symzonia were sold, but still he kept at it. Little had changed since that first circular in 1818, which he delivered “to every learned institution and to every considerable town and village, as well as to numerous distinguished individuals, throughout the United States, and sent copies to several of the learned societies of Europe,” according to the 1882 History and Biographical Cyclopedia of Butler County Ohio.20 “It was overwhelmed with ridicule as the production of a distempered imagination,” the entry continues, “or the result of partial insanity. It was for many years a fruitful source of jest with the newspapers. The scientific papers of Europe generally treated it as a hoax, rather than believe that any sane man could issue such a circular or uphold such a theory.” Even so, Symmes continued to produce circulars and publish newspaper articles, and he wrote Symzonia as well. These seem only to have compounded the ridicule, but he wouldn’t quit.

  Writing about it didn’t put his theory over, so in 1820, Symmes began lecturing. Probably no would-be public lecturer was ever worse equipped to do so. A contemporary said of him, “His voice is somewhat nasal, and he speaks hesitatingly, and with apparent labor.”21 A 1909 article by John Weld Peck in the Ohio Archaeological and Historical Quarterly says, “As a lecturer he was far from a success. The arrangement of his subject was illogical, confused, and dry, and his delivery was poor.” Peck adds, “However, his earnestness and the interesting novelty of his subject secured him attentive audiences wherever he spoke.” Train wrecks always draw crowds. Even his friend James McBride, in the biographical sketch appended to his book on Symmes’ theory, admits his deficiencies.

  Captain Symmes’s want of a classical education, and philosophic attainments, perhaps, unfits him for the office of a lecturer. But, his arguments being presented in confused array, and clothed in homely phraseology, can furnish no objection to the soundness of his doctrines. The imperfection of his style, and the inelegance of his manner, may be deplored; but, certainly, constitute no proof of the inadequacy of his reasoning, or the absurdity of his deductions.

  Symmes began this unfortunate enterprise with lectures in Cincinnati and Hamilton, Ohio—his eventual home and burial place. Then for the next several years he took the show on the road, lecturing wherever they’d have him, dragging along a globe customized to demonstrate his polar openings. These appearances seem painful even to contemplate.

  In 1822 Symmes petitioned Congress to equip an expedition, with him as leader, to either of the poles to locate the opening there, urging both the great profit and glory that would derive from it. Somehow he persuaded Kentucky senator Richard M. Johnson to present it. After a few remarks the petition was permanently tabled. He tried again in December 1823, asking for an expedition to test the “new theory of the earth,” adding that, theory or not, “there appear to be many extraordinary circumstances, or phenomena, pervading the Arctic and Antarctic regions, which strongly indicate something beyond the Polar circles worthy of our attention and research.” This met with similar result. In January 1824 he petitioned the Ohio General Assembly to pass a motion approving his theory and to “recommend him to Congress for an outfit suitable to the enterprise,” according to the Butler County history. “On motion, the further consideration thereof was indefinitely postponed.” Then in 1825, hearing of an arctic expedition the Russians were about to mount, he applied through the American minister to go along; approval was granted, but with no money attached, and he couldn’t afford to do so—yet another disappointment in a life full of them.

  John Cleves Symmes’ globe. (The Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia)

  He did make one notable convert in his lifetime—Jeremiah Reynolds. Nearly twenty years younger than Symmes, Reynolds had grown up in southwestern Ohio, attended Ohio University without quite getting a degree, and was editing the Wilmington Spectator, a paper he had started in that small Ohio city, when he met Symmes in 1824. He was so taken with his theory of concentric spheres that he quit his job to join Symmes on tour as a co-lecturer. Given his subsequent career, one has to wonder about his sincerity in this, whether he might not have simply been looking for the main chance, a way out of a small-potatoes job in a small-potatoes town. He’s an intriguing figure, a major footnote in American literature due to his later influence on both Poe and Melville.

  Reynolds, a natural promoter and entrepreneur, seems to have persuaded the reluctant, stay-at-home Symmes that they needed to take the show on the road, to embark on a national lecture tour to promote his theory. They set out lecturing together in September 1825, starting with a few dates in Pennsylvania.22 Where Symmes was halting, often seeming confused, his new partner generally wowed skeptical audiences who had come to scoff. In Chambersburg, the editor of the local newspaper wrote that he’d considered Symmes’ ideas “wild effusions of a disordered imagination.” But on hearing Reynolds, he and the rest of the audience were “completely enchained” because Reynolds presented “facts, the existence of which will not admit of a doubt, and the conclusions drawn from them are so natural, so consistent with reason, and apparently in such strict accordance with the known laws of nature, that they almost irresistibly enforce conviction on the mind.” In Harrisburg Reynolds spoke before the legislature, and, according to William Stanton, “fifty of the lawmakers responded with an enthusiastic letter that urged the government to equip an expedition, for the promise it held out was ‘quite as reasonable as that of the great Columbus’ and ‘better supported by facts.’”

  In Philadelphia, they had a major falling-out. Symmes’ health was tricky, and Reynolds offered to take on the entire burden of lecturing—his way. Reynolds realized the tactical rewards in downplaying the wackier parts of the theory while stumping for a national polar expedition on its own merits, which he wanted to lead. But Symmes refused to compromise about how the theory should be presented, and the brief partnership ended. Symmes packed up his globe and went off lecturing on his own in the northeast and Quebec, giving several talks at Union College in Schenectady and even spoke to a group of students at Harvard University before ill health forced him to stop. Too sick to make it back home, he went instead to his birthplace in New Jersey, where he was the guest of an old friend of his father until he at last recuperated enough for the journey to Ohio. “When he reached Cincinnati in February, 1829,” McBride’s Pioneer Biography says, “he was so feeble that he had to be conveyed on a bed placed in a spring wagon, to his home near Hamilton”—the farm his namesake uncle, Judge Symmes, had given him a few years earlier. He died on May 29, 1829. He was forty-eight years old.

  Of his many children, Americus, born at the Bellefontaine fort north of St. Louis in 1811, tried to keep his father’s light burning. Americus arranged to have a monument built on his gravesite in Hamilton, Ohio, an obelisk surmounted by a stone hollow globe twenty inches across and open at the poles, and in 1878 wrote his explanatory apologia, The Symmes Theory of Concentric Spheres, demonstrating that THE EARTH IS HOLLOW, HABITABLE WITHIN, AND WIDELY OPEN AT THE POLES, a book that elucidated the theory with updated “evidence” from polar exploration that had occurred since his father’s death. At seventy-one, he was still giving int
erviews in support of his father’s theories, telling a Harper’s New Monthly Magazine writer, “If my father’s plan was adopted, the riddle of an open polar sea could soon be solved, the pole reached, and Symmes’s new world found.” Loyal to the end.

  An article by B. St. J. Fry, in the August 1871 Ladies Repository says in summary:

  Captain Symmes deserves a tender remembrance, and his friends never failed to cherish his memory, and regret that his last years were so full of cheerless mortification. Had the opportunity been afforded him to penetrate the polar latitudes, his faith and courage would have made him one of the boldest adventurers, and he would scarcely have failed to return with useful information and the broader and more truthful views that are now held by intelligent men. No man of his day had studied the subject more thoroughly, and his plans for penetrating the icy North were those that later explorers have adopted with advantage. But his theory has so many of the elements that are woven into childish Munchausen stories, that few men could consider it with any degree of seriousness. But the men who so readily discarded them were for a time deceived by Locke’s famous “moon hoax,” which had as little common sense to recommend it, and which was less susceptible of proof. For many of Captain Symmes’s surmises have been proven to be well founded, but they do not in any wise establish his theory.

  Portrait of Edgar Allan Poe (1809-49) (daguerreotype) by Whitman, Sarah Ellen (19th century) © Biblioteque Nationale, Paris, France/The Bridgeman Art Library

  3

  POLAR GOTHIC: REYNOLDS AND POE

  AFTER PARTING COMPANY WITH JOHN CLEVES SYMMES in Philadelphia, J. N. Reynolds continued lecturing on his own for the remainder of 1825 and into the next year. Unlike Symmes, he had considerable success, often charging fifty cents a head—roughly the equivalent of ten dollars today—and usually packing them in.23 But his delivery wasn’t much snazzier than Symmes’. “According to our memory,” wrote historian Henry Howe, “he was a firmly built man, of medium stature, with a short nose, and a somewhat broad face. His delivery was monotonous, but what he said was solid, and his air in a high degree respectful and earnest and withal very sad, as though some great sorrow lay upon his heart, which won our sympathy, and this without knowing anything of his history.”24 Reynolds’s first book-length publication, Remarks on a Review of Symmes’ Theory, appeared in 1827, so his association with Symmes’ ideas continued for a time. But by degrees Symmes’ Holes began to close up or disappear in his talks, as increasingly he discarded Symmes’ theory and warmed to his true subject: the country’s vital need for a polar expedition. It is only a slight exaggeration to say that Reynolds was the one mainly responsible for churning up national enthusiasm for such an enterprise.

  One eager enthusiast was Edgar Allan Poe.

  There is continuing speculation regarding whether Poe and Reynolds knew each other personally. Their careers and interests intersected again and again. Poe took repeated literary inspiration both from Symmes’ theory and Reynolds’s speeches and writings, to the point of lifting certain passages from Reynolds wholesale. The question takes on extraliterary interest because of Poe’s enigmatic final words. On the night of October 7, 1849, Poe lay writhing in fear and pain on his deathbed, a ruin at forty. Over and over as he died, a single word came repeatedly to his lips: “Reynolds … Reynolds … Reynolds …”25 No one knows why. Whether they actually knew each other has never been established, though my guess is that they must have.

  When Reynolds began barnstorming the eastern states, Poe was a sixteen-year-old living in Richmond. In 1826, he spent eleven infamous months at the University of Virginia, chiefly devoting his time to gambling, unsuccessfully. While Poe was at the university, Reynolds wasn’t far away. “The center of Reynolds’s activities at first appears to have been Baltimore,” Robert Almy wrote in the February 1937 Colophon. “He delivered and repeated his course of lectures there in September and October 1826. At Baltimore Reynolds received not only a favorable press but offers of financial aid in fitting out an expedition to the South Pole.”

  Stealing a leaf from his erstwhile mentor, in 1826 Reynolds began agitating for a national polar expedition. His focus was now on the Southern Ocean. The Antarctic was the larger unknown and the promise both of scientific discovery and commerce the greater for it. Although the main goal of such an expedition would be scientific, the scientists might turn up commercially useful information, such as the whereabouts of more seals and whales. New sources were needed to maintain the annual 4 million barrels of whale oil produced by New England. Almost 7 million whales had been killed by then, primarily to keep parlor lights burning on long winter nights.

  Part of his campaign included speaking to state legislatures to persuade them to submit “memorials” to Congress—endorsements of the polar expedition idea urging government action. He also enlisted the interest of the open polar sea crowd. As already noted, the idea that open navigable sea lay beyond an icy rim was an ancient notion that continued to have great currency among prominent scientists and others you’d think would have known better. Like the Northwest Passage, it was an idea that people wanted to be true. Reynolds, like Symmes before him, mined the existing literature on polar exploration for anecdotal gems to place gleaming in his argument for the open polar sea and the bright possibilities it offered.

  Finally, he called on national pride. The American republic itself was a green new enterprise, with many scoffers just waiting for it to fail; a national expedition would be a way to show the world what America was made of. There was no time to waste. Even this great southern unknown was beginning to give up its secrets to others.

  The continent was first sighted in 1820, with three different contenders for the honor. Russians are certain it was their Admiral Bellingshausen, who was the first to circumnavigate Antarctica since Cook. The British are convinced it was Edward Bransfield and William Smith, who were on a mission to chart the South Shetland Islands. And Americans claim it was sealer Nathaniel B. Palmer, who in November 1820, as the twenty-one-year-old commander of the sloop Hero, sailed into Orleans Strait at about sixty-three degrees, forty-one minutes south and came within sight of the continent. The former teenage War of 1812 blockade runner is also credited with discovering the South Orkney Islands and later spent part of the 1820s transporting troops to help Simon Bolivar in South America. British sealing captain John Davis had made the first landing on Antarctica at Hughes Bay on February 7, 1821; but as there were no seals in sight, his party only stayed an hour and then split. That same year had marked the first Antarctic overwintering, when eleven men from the wrecked British ship Lord Melville toughed it out on King George Island. British explorer and sealer James Weddell, in three successive voyages—1819–1821, 1821–1822, and 1822–1824—was almost single-handedly turning the Southern Ocean into his private pond, having surveyed and named a number of the major Antarctic island groups, and, on the third voyage, encountering unusual ice-free conditions (more fodder for OPS believers), reaching seventy-four degrees, fifteen minutes south, beating Cook’s record by more than three degrees, in the sea presently named for him. Even as Reynolds was stumping for an expedition, the French were preparing to mount one of their own.

  Should the United States be left behind?

  On May 21, 1828, a resolution passed the House asking the president to devote a government ship to exploring the Pacific—if it could be accomplished with no extra appropriation of funds. President Adams told Reynolds he was pleased it had passed. Reynolds was named a special Navy Department agent to round up all the information he could. He interviewed every whaling and sealing captain he could find and sought out scientists for the voyage. He oversaw the rebuilding of the war sloop Peacock at the New York Navy Yard, which was launched to great hoopla in September 1828. But then things started to go wrong. A tangled series of reverses followed, due largely to the Adams’ administration’s lame-duck status. On taking office in March 1829, after handily beating Adams in the 1828 election, Democrat Andrew Jack
son killed it for political reasons. Not only was it a leftover from the old administration, but Reynolds had been outspoken about his pro-Adams views. The expedition was canceled.

  But Reynolds had a backup plan. One argument against the expedition during the legislative backpedaling that killed it had been a minimalist construction of the Constitution: it wasn’t the government’s business to be sponsoring and paying for such tomfoolery. As the prospects of a government expedition curdled, Reynolds formed the South Sea Fur Company and Exploring Expedition and went about rounding up backers and interested scientists. He was helped in this by Edmund Fanning, a longtime sealer and explorer (several discoveries in the central Pacific are credited to him) who had been proselytizing for a national Antarctic expedition since before the War of 1812. President Madison had commissioned him to lead a voyage and the ships were about to leave when war was declared against England, putting an end to that idea. Too old now to join himself, Fanning nevertheless helped Reynolds stir up interest in a private expedition.

  A wealthy New Yorker named Dr. Watson came to the rescue, putting up most of the money for outfitting a ship and two small tenders. The kicker was that he got to go along. The Annawan and the Seraph, both brigs, and the Penguin, a schooner, sailed in October 1829 with Reynolds aboard—he’d gotten his polar expedition. Nathaniel Palmer captained one of the ships. Benjamin Pendleton, who as a sealer had often sailed into the unforgiving Southern Ocean, skippered another. James Eights of Albany, an accomplished artist and scientist, was resident naturalist. In a voyage that proved thin on accomplishments, Eights’s contributions stood out. In articles afterward he described a trilobite relative in the South Shetlands that wasn’t described again for seventy years. As they sailed west of the Antarctic Peninsula, he observed erratic boulders that differed geologically from the local rock, correctly surmising that they had hitched a ride here embedded in icebergs sheared from the Antarctic mainland. Eights also discovered the first fossils in the Antarctic, specimens of petrified wood, and a peculiar creature, a pyncnogonid, a ten-legged sea spider, the first so described.