Hollow Earth: The Long and Curious History of Imagining Strange Lands, Fantastical Creatures, Advanced Civilizatio (6 page)
Authors: David Standish
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BOOK: Hollow Earth: The Long and Curious History of Imagining Strange Lands, Fantastical Creatures, Advanced Civilizatio
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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
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.
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.
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.
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:
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:
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
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!”
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.
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.”
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.
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.
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.
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