The Square Pegs (31 page)

Soon enough he was able to redirect his aggressions toward more patriotic ends. In June 1812 Congress declared a war against Great Britain which was to produce the heroism of Captain Oliver Hazard Perry, the legend of
Old Ironsides
, the creation of “The Star Spangled Banner,” the burning of the White House, the loss of 1,877 American lives, and the final capitulation of the British in 1815. It also resulted in a deserved promotion for Symmes. He was made regimental senior captain. At Lundy’s Lane, in a night battle fought one mile from Niagara Falls, Symmes led a company “with bravery, skill and gallantry,” we are told in one of the war’s bloodiest and most confused clashes. At Bridgewater he commanded his company to unload seventy rounds of cartridges, and fought beside his men as they successfully repelled three British bayonet assaults. At Fort Erie, inside Canada, a garrison occupied by the United States Army for several months, he gathered a commando group and sallied forth to surprise and overwhelm an enemy battery and personally spike its cannon.

After the Treaty of Ghent was signed, Symmes retained his rank of captain and remained in the Army in the role of minor hero. For four years he was quartermaster at a military installation on the upper Mississippi. In 1816 he resigned from the service, obtained a government license to sell private supplies to troopers and Indians, and set up shop at the trading post of St. Louis in the Missouri Territory. At this settlement he met and fell in love with the young widow of another soldier. The fact that she had six children did not deter him. He married her and gave her four more children, one of whom he named Americus Vespucius Symmes, which would seem to indicate that he had already acquired more than a passing interest in exploration.

During these postwar years private enterprise and his expanding family interested him less and less. Most often he was found perusing his beloved books of science. His first interest, as later he would recall, was in the worlds of outer space. He purchased a telescope and gazed at Jupiter. He studied charts and drawings of Saturn, and concluded that the existence of rings around Saturn “establishes … that the principle of concentric spheres, or hollow planets, does exist,” He decided that Sir Isaac Newton had been in error and that an atmosphere filled with an “aerial elastic fluid” or “microscopically invisible hollow spheres of ether” accounted for gravity: “the aerial fluid creates a
pushing
instead of a
pulling
power which is the real principle of gravity.” He also decided that formless matter in rotation took the shape of spheres and “therefore a nebular mass in rotation, as our earth during its formation, will not assume the form of a solid sphere, but rather of a hollow one.” The idea of hollow planets seemed perfectly logical to Symmes. Hadn’t nature made the interior of animal bones, wheat stalks, and human hair completely hollow?

With growing confidence in his concept of the universe, Symmes at last came down to earth. He read the writings of a Professor Burnet, who believed that the earth had once been a small core covered with oil to which the fluid of the atmosphere had adhered, thus forming the earth crust. He read the writings of a Professor Woodward, who contended “that the earth is now formed of distinct strata, arranged in concentric layers, ‘like the coats of an onion.’” He read the writings of Whiston, who believed that the earth had been conceived of a comet, and that a liquid abyss had formed on that comet and then been covered by a shell, so that in final appearance the earth resembled the yolk, albumen, and shell of an egg.

Symmes’s vague conjectures gradually assembled themselves into a clear pattern. The earth, like the planets beyond, was hollow, and filled with concentric spheres that is, with smaller globes placed one within the other and all possessing a common center. Excitedly, he reached back into the past for any corroboration. He did not have to reach far. Throughout history there had been those who had supposed that the earth might be hollow and might contain smaller planets within itself. Plato had spoken of “huge subterranean streams” and “passages broad and narrow in the interior of the earth.” In 1692 the eminent Dr. Edmund Halley, later astronomer royal and Oxford professor, who ten years earlier had observed the famous comet that was to be named after him, informed the Royal Society of London that beneath the earth’s 500-mile crust lay a void through which three planets the size of Venus, Mars, and Mercury spun. Halley’s theory was adopted by the great German mathematician Leonhard Euler, who modified the three inner planets to one, and gave that planet daylight and a prospering civilization.

In 1721 Cotton Mather spoke of an interior universe, and two decades later Baron Holberg wrote a novel in which his hero fell inside the earth and there discovered a sun and a solar system and himself became a whirling satellite for three days. In the early 1800’s a Scottish mathematician and physicist, Sir John Leslie, renowned for his work in radiation, speculated on a hollow earth furnished with two blazing planets similar to the sun called Proserpina and Pluto.

These readings gave Symmes the courage to undertake his next step. He needed courage, for while others had spoken of concentric spheres within a hollow earth, Symmes’s thinking had gone much further. He conceived, as no one had before him, of gaping holes at the North and South poles through which he and other bold spelunkers might sail to the five planets inside. In the spring of 1818 he acted. From his shop in the Missouri wilderness he mailed to leading scientific academies of Europe, to presidents and professors of American universities, and to members of the United States Congress five hundred copies of an announcement with the simple heading “Circular,” and the motto “Light gives light to light discover ad infinitum.” Addressed from St. Louis, Missouri Territory, North America, and dated April 10, 1818, the notice of discovery read:

I declare that the earth is hollow, habitable within; containing a number of solid concentrick spheres; one within the other, and that it is open at the pole 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. John Cleves Symmes of Ohio, Late Captain of Infantry
.

To this startling notice was attached another, an afterthought in the form of a postscript, which read:

N.B. I have ready for the press a treatise on the principles of Matter, wherein I show proofs of the above proposition, account for various phenomina, and disclose Dr. Darwin’s “Golden Secret.”

My terms are the patronage of this and the new world, I dedicate to my wife and her ten children
.

I select Dr. S. L. Mitchel. Sir H. Davy and Baron Alexander Von Humbolt as my protectors. I ask one hundred brave companions, well equipped to start from Siberia, in the fall season, with reindeer and sledges, on the ice of the frozen sea; I engage we 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.

With these notices, we are told, Symmes enclosed a medical report testifying to his sanity. This last was wholly unnecessary. For though the French Academy regarded his discovery and proposal with dismay, other recipients were more tolerant. In England, scientists, remembering their own revered Dr. Halley, cautiously withheld criticism. In Russia, scientists were definitely impressed, and eventually, as we shall see, showed their willingness to cooperate. In the United States, scientists, whatever their personal reactions, were loath to poke fun at a war veteran. They withheld judgment, though soon enough large portions of the lay public would voice approval.

His initial circular having brought him no patronage though it had established his priority as author of what he called his “Theory of Concentric Spheres” Captain Symmes decided to appeal directly to the people of his native land. From his St. Louis trading post he issued two more circulars, and in less than a year, three more, one of which elaborated upon his original notion that there were holes at the North and South poles through which an explorer might enter the interior world. Soon these polar openings came to be commonly known as Symmes’s Hole or Symmes’s Cavity.

Obsessed by his theory and the need to prove it, Symmes moved his person, his books, and his large family to Newport, Kentucky. He read heavily, thought deeply, and then began to write numerous articles for the popular press, one of the earliest being a piece entitled “Light Between The Spheres,” published in the
Cincinnati National Intelligencer
during August 1819. In Kentucky he gathered about him his first devoted disciples, citizens who would soon impress their local representative, Congressman Richard M. Johnson, with the necessity of presenting Symmes’s case in Washington. In Kentucky, too, Symmes made the decision to stump the nation on behalf of his theory.

His first lecture was delivered before a large audience in Cincinnati during 1820. Shortly after, he addressed other large gatherings in Lexington, Frankfort, Zanesville, and Hamilton. One of our rare glimpses of Symmes as a human being is of him as a lecturer. “The arrangement of his subject was illogical, confused, and dry, and his delivery was poor,” John W. Peck wrote in 1909. “However, his earnestness and the interesting novelty of his subject secured him attentive audiences wherever he spoke.”

Of his physical aspect in those years we know nothing. We know only that his erudition surprised his skeptics, that his temper flared quickly in the face of ridicule, that his lack of patience did not permit him to co-ordinate his radical ideas into any organized and detailed form, that his old military companions still spoke of him as “zealous and faithful” and that an impressed college disciple thought him “a high-minded, honorable man.” But if his personality made no impression on his time, his imaginative theory certainly did. Through his muddled writings and halting lectures Symmes doggedly spread the gospel of a new world underfoot. Soon few communities in America’s Midwest or South did not have some knowledge of the Captain’s stimulating ideas.

Once, when he attempted to enlighten both the student body and faculty of Union College in Kentucky with a series of scientific lectures, an undergraduate named P. Clark made “copious notes.” It is to Clark that history owes the only record extant of Symmes declaiming his theory in public.

“The earth is globular, hollow, and open at the poles,” said Symmes in his initial lecture. “The diameter of the northern opening is about two thousand miles, or four thousand miles from outside to outside. The south opening is somewhat larger. The planes of these openings are parallel to each other, but form an angle of 12° with the equator, so that the highest part of the north plane is directly opposite the lowest part of the south plane. The shell of the earth is about one thousand miles thick, and the edges of this shell at the openings are called verges, and measure, from the regular concavity within to the regular convexity without, about fifteen hundred miles.”

The details of the projected expedition, by which Symmes hoped to prove his theory, were familiar to all who heard or read the discoverer’s words. Symmes would lead “one hundred brave companions” in two ships equipped with reindeer and sleighs to Siberia, and thence to the hole or verge at the North Pole, which was 4,000 miles in diameter in contrast to the larger hole at the South Pole, which was 6,000 miles in diameter. The great opening would be reached by sailing through the Bering Strait. Every sign, argued Symmes, pointed to its existence. For one thing, explorers often spoke of the brilliant twilight of the Arctic regions. “This twilight coming from the north,” said Symmes, “may be caused by the sun’s rays thrown into the interior through the southern opening, which by two refractions, one at each opening, and two or three reflections from the inner concave surface, would pass out at the north over the verge, and produce there this strong twilight.” Also, explorers often reported that mysterious warm air currents melted ice in the Arctic Sea. The best explanation for these currents would be that they rose out of the North Pole cavity. Finally, the curious migration of wild life birds winging north into the cold regions, instead of south was conclusive evidence “that there is a land beyond the frozen Arctic belt, wither some beasts, fowls and fish go at the approach of winter and whence they return in the spring sleek and fat.”

Symmes was not certain that the members of his expedition would know at once when they entered the earth’s interior. There was probably no dropping-off place. Rather, the curvature of the wide rim might be so gradual as to “not be apparent to the voyager, who might pass from the outer side of the earth over the rim and down the inner side a great distance before becoming aware of the fact at all.” Once inside the earth, the travelers would not tumble off the concave inner shell. Aerial fluid would encompass them and press them safely to water and land.

Symmes did not think that the interior would be a world of darkness. While there would be no dazzling sunlight, there would be a softer, more congenial light, the reflection of the sun’s rays as they slanted through the North Pole opening. The expedition would probably meet a new race of people, of what physique Symmes dared not guess, and it would come across lands that might “abound with animals, with organs only adapted to the medium which they are destined to inhabit.”

Within this spacious earth interior would be five more earths, one inside the other, like the parts of some incredible Chinese puzzle. Each would have an opening “filled with a very light, subtile, elastic substance … of the nature of hydrogen gas,” and this escaping gas would create earthquakes and form volcanic ranges. Ocean currents and marine life would gush through these openings, and the expedition, if not yet unnerved, might continue downward into the inferno from inner planet to inner planet until it reached the very core.

This was the theory. On its behalf, as one critic remarked caustically, “the master and his disciples have traversed the whole country, from south to north, and from west to east, so that all men, in all places, might be enlightened in the truth.” That by now there were influential disciples, there is ample written evidence. The foremost of these was a wealthy resident of Hamilton, Ohio, James McBride, a trustee of Miami University who possessed a valuable library of six thousand volumes. It may have been McBride who encouraged Symmes to move to Hamilton in 1824. Or the move may have been inspired by Symmes’s desire to dwell in a community that had been receptive to his lectures. At any rate, once Symmes was settled in Hamilton, McBride became his patron and collaborator.