The Sun and the Moon: The Remarkable True Account of Hoaxers, Showmen, Dueling Journalists, and Lunar Man-Bats in Nineteenth-Century New York (30 page)

the sun and the moon

The
Lunar Animals
lithograph issued by the
Sun
at the end of August 1835,
featuring a variety of man-bats, water birds, and unicorns.

(Courtesy of the Library of Congress.)

Copied from Sketches in the Edinburgh Journal of Science
. It was, the
Sun
assured its readers, “a most splendid and beautiful print.” Baker proved himself worthy of the
Sun’
s praise, in the lushly detailed lunar panorama he produced on such short notice. As was to be expected, the featured players were the man-bats, more than two dozen of whom could be observed flying, bathing, and conversing—though, needless to say, not engaged in any of the activities that had so distressed Dr. Grant. The high stone walls of the Ruby Colosseum formed a natural backdrop for the tableau, with added visual drama provided by a rushing cataract, white foam spraying up from its base. Scattered about the river and hills was a kind of menagerie of lunar animals, including numerous water birds, the blended quadruped with the spiral horns, and, serenely observing the activity from the riverbank, several unicorns. (In this last detail the artist was taking some liberties: the man-bats and the unicorns had been sighted in two different locations.) Baker would shortly produce another lithograph,
Lunar Temples,
depicting the even more extraordinary variety of man-bats later observed by Herschel and his team (which Locke would describe in Saturday’s fifth installment). It is not known exactly how many copies of the lithographs

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were sold, though Horace Greeley, who purchased a copy himself, was stunned by the demand for them, writing in the
New-Yorker
that they were selling “faster than all the Bible Societies in the universe could give away the Sacred Book.” As each lithograph cost twice the price of a pamphlet, the number sold was presumably a good deal lower than sixty thousand, but given the enormous public interest it was certainly substantial. P. T. Barnum, who knew a great deal about the merchandising of hoaxes, estimated in his book
The Humbugs of the World
that the
Sun
ultimately sold no less than fifty thousand dollars worth of Moon Hoax materials—this coming just a few months after Benjamin Day had fretted about spending five thousand dollars to buy out George Wisner’s half share of the paper.

On Friday, the day before the pamphlet and the lithograph went on sale, Benjamin Day led the
Sun’
s news page with an item he called simply “Our Circulation.” He began with the announcement that he would soon be enlarging the pages of the
Sun
. Recently, he lamented, he had been forced by a lack of space to
refuse
(the italics were his) yearly and sometimes even monthly advertisers; there simply was not enough room in the paper to include them. The enlarged
Sun,
made possible by the recent surge in the paper’s circulation, “will at once accommodate our advertising friends.”

The great circulation, however, had brought its own complications, and therefore the
Sun
would no longer be able to accept advertisements that came in after six o’clock in the evening, because a day’s edition required at least ten hours to print. That was a problem he hoped would soon be remedied, as he was presently negotiating the purchase of a new and even faster printing press, powered by a steam engine.

Now Day came to the heart of the matter, the topic promised in the item’s headline. The
Sun’
s total circulation, he proudly announced, had risen to 19,360, with 17,440 of those papers sold in New York and the remainder in Brooklyn and surrounding cities. It was, as he surely knew, a cataclysmic number, one that must have sent shock waves through the city’s newspaper district, where none of the
Sun’
s six-penny competitors had a circulation of more than a few thousand. The readership numbers being generated by the
Sun
had never before been seen in New York, or anywhere else. Even the mighty
Times
of London, Great Britain’s paper of record since 1788, in a city six times larger than New York, could claim a daily circulation no greater than 17,000.

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Founded less than two years earlier by a printer hoping to advertise his struggling print shop, the
Sun
was now the most widely read newspaper in the world.

How many of the
Sun
’s readers truly believed what they were reading in
Great Astronomical Discoveries
? No one can state this with any degree of accuracy, but contemporaneous accounts suggest that the number—at least for a while—was very high indeed. “As these discoveries were gradually spread before the public,” Edgar Allan Poe wrote in his essay on Richard Adams Locke, “the astonishment of that public grew out of all bounds.” Those who doubted the veracity of the
Sun’
s account numbered, according to Poe, “not one person in ten,” and most strangely, “the doubters were chiefly those who doubted without being able to say why— the ignorant, those uninformed in astronomy, people who
would not
believe because the thing was so novel, so entirely ‘out of the usual way.’”

(Poe himself reported that “a grave professor of mathematics in a Virgin-ian college told me seriously that he had
no doubt
of the truth of the whole affair!”)

Poe’s assertions were echoed by Benson J. Lossing in his 1884
History
of New York City
. Lossing was twenty-two years old when the moon series appeared in the
Sun,
and in his history he recalled how “the construction of the telescope was so ingeniously described, and everything said to have been seen with it was given with such graphic power and minuteness, and with such a show of probability, that it deceived scientific men. It played upon their credulity and stimulated their speculations.”

Horace Greeley, who was then editing the weekly paper the
New-Yorker,
remarked on the “unquestionable plausibility and verisimilitude” of the series; those who were fooled by it comprised, in his estimation (like that of Poe), “nine-tenths of us, at the least.” P. T. Barnum declared that “the majestic, yet subdued, dignity” of Locke’s work “at once claimed respectful attention; whilst its perfect candor, and its wealth of accurate scientific detail, exacted the homage of belief from all but cross-grained and inex-orable skeptics.”

Whether or not readers entirely believed it,
Great Astronomical Discoveries
was the first news story to be avidly read and discussed by all New Yorkers—not just the merchants perusing the six-penny papers for the latest currency tables or the mechanics opening the penny papers to the police office reports—but everyone, wherever people talked about
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the news: in the Chatham Market and the Merchants’ Exchange alike, around the cloth-covered tables of Delmonico’s and the pine tables of countless waterfront boardinghouses, on any of the hundred omnibuses rumbling up and down Broadway, in the Bowery taverns where the cart-men and firemen ate freshly killed oxen, and in the more genteel establishments where talk of the moon was punctuated by the delicate clinking of hammers chipping off pieces of ice for chilled drinks. In Bowery Village, at the corner of what today would be Eleventh and Broadway, a nurseryman named Michael Floy noted in his diary on Sunday, August 30: “A great talk concerning some discoveries in the moon by Sir John Herschell [
sic
]; not only trees and animals but even men have been discovered there.” (Floy, who was an amateur astronomer and mathematician, did not believe the moon stories. “It is all a hoax,”

he wrote, “although the story is well put together.”) On lower Broadway, a much wealthier and more prominent New York diarist of the time had recently set down his thoughts on the
Sun
series. Philip Hone—

former auctioneer, former mayor, and perhaps New York’s leading citizen—

had returned on Friday to his mansion near Park Place from a vacation at the Marine Pavilion in Rockaway (where the amusements had included trotting races, sea bathing, and “champaign” dinners). That evening Hone made a lengthy entry in his diary with the heading “Lunar Discoveries”:

An exceedingly well written article is going the rounds of our papers, extracted from the Supplement to the Edinburgh Journal of Science, purporting to be an account of the “Great Astronomical Discoveries lately made by Sir John Herschel LLD—FRL at the Cape of Good Hope.” The astronomer, the son of the great Herschel who gave his name to the last discovered Planet, who if this wonderful story be true is as much greater a man than his father, as the moon is greater than said Planet, was sent to the Cape by the British Government to observe a transit of Mercury and took with him a telescope of his own construction to which the largest instrument of that kind heretofore made bore no more comparison than a pippin to a watermelon. With this gigantic telescope, he and his companions began their operations by peeping in a manner rather indelicate into the moon, that renowned Repository of Lovers’ Vows, and discovered something more than the hoary Sabbath breaker and his wearisome bundle of sticks. For wonderful to relate,
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Mountains of Amethyst, Rivers whose “Sands were Diamonds,” Trees of a grandeur and beauty unknown as yet to mortal Eyes, were rendered as visible as Greenwich Hill, the Thames and Hyde Park to the Cockneys of London, and to fill up the measure of mortal wonderment, Shrubs, animals and even Birds were clearly discerned, and the Reader would hardly be more surprised to learn that the organs of smelling and hearing had been gratified by the magical process of reducing the 240,000 miles which intervene between the moon and our Planet to a reasonable speaking distance.

In sober truth, if this account is true, it is most enormously wonderful. And if it is a fable, the manner of its relation, with all its scientific details, names of persons employed, and the beauty of its glowing descriptions, will give this ingenious history a place with Gullivers Travels and Robinson Crusoe, and the reading world will divide with its author their admiration of the fine writing of Swift and DeFoe and the mendacity of Baron Munchausen and Ferdinand Mendez Pinto.

Up the Long Island Sound in New Haven, Connecticut, interest in the moon story was absolute. On Saturday the city’s
Daily Herald
began running the series—a practice soon to be followed by newspapers around the country—on its front page, under the headline “New Discoveries in the Moon,” crediting the “extraordinary celestial discoveries” not to the
Sun
but to the
Edinburgh Journal of Science
. In publishing the series the newspaper was responding to public demand, for by then the local campus was already gripped by moon fever. “Yale College was alive with staunch supporters,” a student of the time later recalled.

The literati—students and professors, doctors in divinity and law—and all the rest of the reading community, looked daily for the arrival of the New York mail with unexampled avidity and implicit faith. Have you seen the accounts of Sir John Herschel’s wonderful discoveries? Have you read the Sun? Have you heard the news of the man in the Moon?

These were the questions that met you every where. It was the absorb-ing topic of the day. Nobody expressed or entertained a doubt as to the truth of the story.

Yale was then the leading center of American astronomy, the possessor of the Clark telescope, the most powerful in the country. (So great was the

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college’s enthusiasm for astronomy that the tower of its Atheneum had recently been remodeled to serve as an observatory.) Among the distinguished figures in Yale astronomy were two professors, Denison Olmsted and Elias Loomis, who would soon become implicated—rightly or not—

in the clamor surrounding Herschel’s purported discoveries. Not long after the series appeared in the
Sun,
a story began making the rounds that the two learned astronomers had traveled by steamboat to New York, where they showed up unannounced at the
Sun
office to demand that they be given a copy of the
Supplement to the Edinburgh Journal of Science
for inspection. There they were met by Benjamin Day, who, in his typically gruff manner, declared himself to be highly indignant that they should doubt his word on the matter. “I suppose the magazine is somewhere upstairs,” he told them, “but I consider it almost an insult that you should ask to see it.” Instead, he directed them to his editor, who was interested, he said, in “the matter of the moon” and had overseen the publication of the
Supplement;
he could be found downstairs, smoking a cigar and gazing at the crowds.

Richard Adams Locke was by nature more mild-mannered than Benjamin Day, but, in this case at least, no less cagey. Having been apprised by the professors of their mission, he informed them that, unfortunately, the
Supplement
was in the hands of a printer on William Street; he would, however, be happy to provide them the address. The pair immediately set off—but not as fast as Locke himself, who raced to William Street to alert the printer about the arriving delegation.

The printer greeted the Yale professors with the news that he was very sorry, but the
Supplement
had been sent on to another shop for proofreading; perhaps the gentlemen might inquire there. And so it went, with Olmsted and Loomis endlessly frustrated in their quest to lay their hands on the elusive
Supplement,
until finally they had to leave to catch the afternoon steamboat back to New Haven. It was an embarkation they absolutely could not miss, for that very evening they hoped to become the first astronomers to observe the return of Halley’s Comet. (In fact Olmsted and Loomis did claim that honor, sighting the comet on Monday, August 31, the day the final installment of the moon series was published.) The story of the Yale astronomers first appeared in an item that ran the following week in Mordecai Noah’s
Evening Star;
it was then repeated by James Gordon Bennett in the
Herald,
and has since become one of the staples of Moon Hoax lore. Day himself spoke of the incident at some length
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