The seventeenth-century writer Thomas Burnet (1635?-1715) also suggested that water circulated through the body of the Earth, issuing from an opening at the North Pole. In 1768, this idea was further developed by Alexander Colcott, who added an interesting and portentous twist: Godwin suggests that he may have been the first to theorise that, once inside the Earth, the water joined a vast, concave ocean — in other words, that the Earth was actually a hollow globe. (3)
In the eighteenth century, the Hollow Earth Theory carried far more intellectual currency than it does now: even the illustrious Sir Edmund Halley (1656–1742), discoverer of the comet that carries his name, proposed in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of 1692 that the Earth was a hollow sphere containing two additional concentric spheres, at the centre of which was a hot core, a kind of central sun. The Swiss mathematician Leonhard Euler (1707–1783) concurred and, indeed, went somewhat further, stating that there ‘was a center sun inside the Earth’s interior, which provided daylight to a splendid subterranean civilization’. (4)
The apparent credibility of these theories resulted in a brand new subgenre of fantastic literature. Godwin provides a brief rundown, based on the work of the French author Michel Lamy, of the most significant of these tales:
While medieval theology, as celebrated in Dante’s Divine Comedy, had found the interior of the earth to be a suitable location for Hell, later writers began to imagine quite the contrary. The universal philosopher Guillaume Postel, in his Compendium Cosmographicum (1561) and the topographer Georg Braun, in his Urbium praecipuarum totius mundi (1581), suggested that God had made the Earthly Paradise inaccessible to mankind by stowing it beneath the North Pole. Among the early novels on the theme of a Utopia beneath the surface of the earth are the Chevalier de Mouhy’s Lamekis, ou les voyages extraordinaires d’un Egyptien dans la Terre interieure (Lamekis, or the extraordinary voyages of an Egyptian in the inner earth, 1737), and Ludvig Baron von Holberg’s Nicholas Klim (1741), the latter much read in Holberg’s native Denmark. Giovanni Jacopo Casanova, the adventurer and libertine, also situated Paradise inside the earth.
In Icosameron (1788), a work supposedly translated by him from the English, he describes the twenty-one years passed by his heroes Edward and Elizabeth among the ‘megamicros,’ the original inhabitants of the ‘protocosm’ in the interior of our globe. One way into this realm is through the labyrinthine caves near Lake Zirchnitz, a region of Transylvania. The megamicros issue from bottomless wells and assemble in temples, clad in red coats. Their gods are reptiles, with sharp teeth and a magnetic stare. (5) The literature of the Romantic era, needless to say, is rich in fantasies of polar mysteries and lands within the earth. The best known works are probably George Sand’s Laura ou le voyage dans le crystal (Laura, or the voyage in the Crystal); Edgar Alien Poe’s The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym; Alexander Dumas’s Isaac Laquedem; Bulwer Lytton’s The Coming Race [see Chapter Three]; Jules Verne’s Voyage au centre de la terre (Voyage to the Centre of the Earth) and Le Sphinx des glaces (The Sphinx of the Ice). Novels by later and less distinguished authors include William Bradshaw’s The Goddess of Atvatabar (1892), Robert Ames Bennet’s Thyra, a Romance of the Polar Pit (1901), Willis George Emerson’s The Smoky God (1908), and the Pellucidarian stories of Edgar Rice Burroughs, creator of Tarzan. (6)
In view of the exciting potential of the Hollow Earth Theory, not to mention the literary vogue for such romantic fictions, it was only a matter of time before someone had the bright idea of actually searching for the entrances to the mysterious world apparently lying beneath humanity’s feet. Such a man was John Cleves Symmes (1780–1829), who spent a good portion of his life trying to convince the world not only that the Earth was hollow, but that it would be worthwhile to finance an expedition, under his leadership, to find a way inside.
A native of New Jersey, Symmes enlisted in the United States Army where he distinguished himself for bravery in the French and Indian Wars. Evidently a man of considerable personal integrity, he married a widow named Mary Anne Lockwood in 1808, and ensured that her inheritance from her husband was used to raise her five children (he had five of his own). In 1816, he retired with the rank of Captain and became a trader in St Louis. (7) Two years later, Symmes first announced his beliefs to the world, thus:
CIRCULAR
Light gives light to discover — ad infinitum
St Louis, Missouri Territory, North America
April 10, AD 1818
To all the World:
I declare the earth is hollow and habitable within; containing a number of solid concentric spheres, one within the other, and that it is open at the poles twelve or sixteen degrees. I pledge my life in support of this truth, and am ready to explore the hollow, if the world will support and aid me in the undertaking.
Jno. Cleves Symmes
Of Ohio, late Captain of Infantry.
N.B. - I have ready for the press a treatise on the principles of matter, wherein I show proofs of the above positions, account for various phenomena, and disclose Dr. Darwin’s ‘Golden Secret.’
My terms are the patronage of THIS and the NEW WORLDS.
I dedicate to my wife and her ten children.
I select Dr. S.L. Mitchell, Sir H. Davy, and Baron Alexander Von Humboldt as my protectors.
I ask one hundred brave companions, well equipped, to start from Siberia, in the fall season, with reindeer and sleighs, on the ice of the frozen sea; I engage we will find a warm and rich land, stocked with thrifty vegetables and animals, if not men, on reaching one degree northward of latitude 82; we will return in the succeeding spring.
J.C.S. (8)
Of all the academic societies in America and Europe to which Symmes sent his circular, only the French Academy of Sciences in Paris bothered to respond — and that was to say, in effect, that the theory of concentric spheres inside the Earth was nonsense. Undaunted by the total lack of academic interest in his ideas, Symmes spent the next ten years travelling around the United States, giving lectures and trying to raise sufficient funds to strike out for the interior of the planet. He petitioned Congress in 1822 and 1823 to finance his expedition, and even secured 25 votes the second time. (9) Ultimately, the strain of constant travelling and lecturing took its toll on Symmes’s health. He died at Hamilton, Ohio on 29 May 1829. His grave in the Hamilton cemetery is marked by a stone model of the hollow Earth, placed there by his son, Americus.
Symmes’s theory of the hollow Earth is described principally in two books: Symmes’s Theory of Concentric Spheres (1826) by James McBride, and The Symmes Theory of Concentric Spheres (1878) by Americus Symmes. (10) (Symmes himself wrote a novel, under the pseudonym ‘Captain Adam Seaborn’, entitled Symzonia A Voyage of Discovery, published in 1820.) As Martin Gardner notes, in these books, ‘Hundreds of reasons are given for believing the earth hollow — drawn from physics, astronomy, climatology, the migration habits of animals, and the reports of travelers. Moreover, a hollow planet, like the hollow bones of the body, would be a sturdy and economical way for the Creator to arrange things.’ (11)
As we have noted, the Hollow Earth Theory attracted the attention of many writers of fiction. Aside from the best-known mentioned above, a number of minor authors explored the topic. In 1871, for instance, Professor William F. Lyon published The Hollow Globe, or the World’s Agitator or Reconciler that included many bizarre speculations on open polar seas, the electromagnetic origin of earthquakes (which were thought impossible unless the world were hollow) and the theory of gravitation (which needed considerable reworking in view of the drastically reduced mass of a hollow planet). The text of the book was apparently received during mediumistic trances by a Dr Sherman and his wife, with Professor Lyon transcribing the material. Among the many curious revelations in this book is the ‘great fact that this globe is a hollow or spherical shell with an interior as well as an exterior surface, and that it contains an inner concave as well as outer convex world, and that the inner is accessible by an extensive spirally formed aperture, provided with a deep and commodious channel suited to the purposes of navigation for the largest vessels that float, and that this aperture may be found in the unexplored open Polar Sea’. (12)
The Reverend Dr William F. Warren, President of Boston University, published his book Paradise Found in 1885, in which he argued for the origin of the human race at the North Pole. While Warren did not claim that the Earth was hollow, his book nevertheless added to the speculation on the significance of the polar regions, and the
