The trip began inauspiciously, and got worse. Planning to sail south together, the ships quickly lost sight of each other and didn’t meet up again until they reached Staaten Island (Isla de los Estados), their rendezvous point just east of Tierra del Fuego. As they headed southeast for the South Shetlands, just north of the Antarctic Peninsula now partly named for Palmer, science and commerce found themselves at odds. The sailors had hired on for shares in the sealing take and became increasingly testy as the holds did not fill up. When they got to Antarctica, they found no sign of Symmes’ welcoming verges, open water, and balmy temperatures: “They at length arrived in sight of land,” Robert Way wrote shortly after the expedition, “which they afterward discovered to be a southern continent, which seemed completely blockaded with islands of ice.”26 They attempted a landing in a long boat, but in the rough, stormy water it went careening for a considerable distance, out of sight of the ship, before they could reach the shore. They found themselves stuck there, without provisions. “Starvation seemed to stare them in the face.” Way continues:
But behold! Providence seemed to provide the means of support in the sea lion. He exhibited himself at the mouth of a cave, and ten men, in two squads, were sent out to bring him in. They soon returned with his carcass, which weighed 1,700 pounds. His flesh was excellent eating. By an accurate astronomical observation, they found their latitude to be eighty-two degrees south, exactly eight degrees from the South Pole. After some ten days of anxious delay on land, the sea becoming calm, they put out to sea in their long boat to endeavor to discover the ships. They sailed on and on for nearly forty hours. At length, being very weary, late in the night, they drew their boat upon a high inclined rock. All, in a few minutes, were sound asleep except Reynolds and Watson. They stood sentinels over the boat’s crew, and felt too anxious to sleep. About 2 or 3 o’clock in the morning, they saw a light far distant at sea. The crew was soon wakened, and all embarked in their boat and rowing with might and main for the ships. They soon arrived, and the meeting of the two parties was full of enthusiastic joy. They were convinced that they could not enter the South Pole, as it was blocked up with an icy continent; hence they were willing to turn their faces homeward. Here the seamen mutinied against the authority of the ship, set Reynolds and Watson on shore, and launched out to sea as a pirate ship.
Reynolds didn’t seem to mind. For many months he traveled all over Chile, and earned himself a footnote in American literary history—one of several—by hearing a supposedly true story about a renegade white whale in the Pacific off Chile, which he later wrote up for the May 1839 issue of Knickerbocker magazine under the title “Mocha Dick, or the White Whale of the Pacific.” Guess who read it?27
Reynolds finally joined the warship USS Potomac in October 1832 at Valparaiso, Chile, as the commodore’s private secretary, remaining in that capacity during a two-year voyage and publishing a several-volume account of it in 1835 that made his reputation as an explorer and a writer.
In 1835 Poe was twenty-six years old and had already put together a pretty checkered track record. Born in Boston to a pair of itinerant actors, he lost his mother when he was two and then was bounced around from place to place. He attended the University of Virginia for eleven months in 1826, where he lost so much money gambling that his guardian yanked him out of school. Returning home, he learned that his sweetheart had dumped him and was engaged to another guy. In 1827 Poe landed in Boston, where he self-published a volume of poems, dripping youthful Byronic angst, called Tamerlane and Other Poems, to little notice. Dead broke, he enlisted in the army under an assumed name; his guardian apparently took pity on him, buying him out of the army and arranging an appointment to West Point. Poe got himself expelled by pulling a Bartleby and refusing to attend classes or drills. Before entering West Point, he’d published another volume of poems, Al Araf, Tamerlane, and Minor Poems, in 1829. After leaving West Point he went to New York City, where he published another volume, simply called Poems. These volumes contained some of his best work but nobody was buying, so he moved to Baltimore in 1831 and began to write stories.
By then he’d settled into the peculiar domestic arrangement that continued for many years—living with his devoted widowed aunt, Mrs. Maria Clemm, and his first cousin, her young daughter Virginia, whom he married in 1835 when she was thirteen years old. They had cramped barren rooms in a Baltimore boardinghouse and were desperately low on money. His aunt took in sewing to help pay the bills. Poe had long since begun his fatal dance with alcohol and opium. Certainly his brain was wandering through untraveled realms, but not of gold. His terrain was the “blackness of darkness.”
And he found inspiration in Symmes’ Hole.
Thanks largely to Symmes and Reynolds, the idea of the hollow earth had become linked with the fascinating mystery of the poles. Nobody had ever been there, at least to live and tell about it, so they offered complete artistic freedom, a tabula rasa on which anything could be written—made even more inviting by the imaginative addition of Symmes’ Holes.
Poe entered a literary contest sponsored by the Baltimore Sunday Visiter in 1833. First prize was $50—the equivalent of $750 today. Instead of submitting just one story, Poe sent several, which he had bound together in a makeshift book. The youngest of the judges, delegated as first reader of the “slush pile,” was so knocked out by one of the stories, “Ms. Found in a Bottle,” that he insisted on reading it aloud to the others, who agreed that it was a winner. The prize was announced and the story published in the October 19, 1833, issue. It was reprinted in the December 1835 issue of the Southern Literary Messenger.
Passing strange, this little tale. The world-traveling narrator begins with a disclaimer, saying that he has “often been reproached” for “a deficiency of imagination”—to make his bizarre account the more believable. He sails on a ship from Batavia, Java, bound for the Sunda Islands, “having no other inducement than a kind of nervous restlessness which haunted me as a fiend.” For days the ship is becalmed and then suddenly caught in the mother of all storms, a terrible “simoom”—“beyond the wildest imagination was the whirlpool of mountainous and foaming ocean within which we were engulfed.” Its first blast sweeps everyone on deck overboard and drowns those below, leaving only the narrator and an old Swede alive. The storm rages ceaselessly for five days, driving “the hulk at a rate defying computation” ever south, toward polar seas, “farther to the southward than any previous navigators.” The sun disappears and all is black; the seas remain dizzying, towering watery peaks and great chasms. While at the bottom of one, they spot a huge black ship far above, hurtling downward right at them. The crash propels the narrator into its rigging. He soon discovers the ship’s crew to be ancient ambulatory zombies who “seemed utterly unconscious of my presence” and “glide to and fro like the ghosts of buried centuries.” The floor of the captain’s cabin is “thickly strewn with strange, iron-clasped folios, and mouldering instruments of science, and obsolete long-forgotten charts.” This ship too races due south, borne by wind and a strong current, “with a velocity like the headlong dashing of a cataract.” And then, with just enough time for him to pop his manuscript into a bottle and cork it, the end: “Oh, horror upon horror! The ice opens suddenly to the right, and to the left, and we are whirling dizzily, in immense concentric circles, round and round the borders of a gigantic amphitheatre, the summit of whose walls is lost in the distance … we are plunging madly within the grasp of the whirlpool—and amid a roaring, and bellowing, and thundering of ocean and of tempest, the ship is quivering, oh God! And—going down.”
Poe’s debt to Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner is evident, but he owes his ending to Symmes’ Hole, sending his unfortunate narrator to his reward down its epic drain. Whirlpools seem to have been swirling through his mind at this time because another of the stories he submitted to the contest was “A Descent into the Maelstrom.” In this one, the narrator and a Norwegian fisherman sit high on a cliff’s edge overlooking
the sea in northern Norway, and the tale consists of the fisherman relating how his ship was sucked down into the legendary maelstrom just offshore from where they’re sitting, and how he lived to tell the tale. Poe for purposes of verisimilitude inserts into the narrative a long description by Jonas Ramus, dating from 1715, which was reprinted in the 1823 edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica. The whirlpool here had long been noted by sailors, appearing on Dutch charts as early as 1590 and turning up on Mercator’s 1595 atlas. The Lofoten Islands lie entirely within the Arctic Circle on Norway’s northeastern shoulder, and a treacherous current, frequently whipped into a whirlpool, rushes between two of them, Moskenesøya (north) and Mosken (south). The hydrodynamics aren’t entirely understood—seemingly a combination of the current slamming into tidal shifts, with high winds sometimes thrown in. Poe amplifies the whirlpool to mythic proportions in his tale and suggests it may be the opening to a great abyss—citing no less an authority than Athanasius Kircher: “Kircher and others imagine that in the centre of the channel of the Maelstrom is an abyss penetrating the globe, and issuing in some very remote part—the Gulf of Bothnia being somewhat decidedly named in one instance. This opinion, idle in itself, was the one to which, as I gazed, my imagination most readily assented.” Kircher had argued that the maelstrom marked the entrance to a subterranean channel connecting the Norwegian Sea, the Gulf of Bothnia, and the Berents Sea, believing that such whirlpools were an important part of ocean circulation. “A Descent into the Maelstrom,” for all its stürm und drang, is less exciting than its companion piece, possibly because the fisherman lives through it, something the reader knows at the beginning.
One of the contest judges had been Maryland congressman and author John Pendleton Kennedy, whose Swallow Barn had been published pseudonymously in 1832, and who would become “the Maecenas of Southern letters”—with Poe being the first notable recipient of his patronage. As a result of the contest, they struck up a friendship, and Poe wasn’t shy about bemoaning his financial straits. Kennedy put him in touch with Thomas White, owner of the new, struggling Southern Literary Messenger. Poe began contributing to it. His first story appeared in March 1835 and more tales and poems followed. In August 1835, Poe moved to Richmond to become the magazine’s editor. He also wrote reviews, essays, and stories, as many as ten an issue. Under his editorship the circulation quadrupled in a year to around five thousand.
Poe didn’t last long as editor. Owner Thomas White fired him in January 1837 for erratic behavior caused by depression and drinking, though the parting probably had some mutuality to it. Poe had ideas about establishing a truly national magazine, and the natural place to try that was Philadelphia or New York. In late February, Poe, Virginia, and Mrs. Clemm had taken lodgings in an old brick building at Sixth Avenue and Waverly Place. Reynolds was also living in New York at this time. Poe contributed to the Southern Literary Messenger until he died; his final contribution, the poem “Annabel Lee,” ran in the November 1849 issue, a month after his death.
During his tenure at the magazine, Poe’s interest in Reynolds and things polar repeatedly showed itself. Before he took over as editor, in fact, a favorable review of Reynolds’s Voyage of the Potomac appeared in the June 1835 issue. The anonymous reviewer remarks that Reynolds “will be remembered as the associate of Symmes in his remarkable theory of the earth, and a public defender of that very indefensible subject, upon which he delivered a series of lectures in many of our principal cities.” Though apparently not a believer, the reviewer goes on to note that there’s “very valuable information scattered through the book,” and that “he writes well, though somewhat too enthusiastically, and his book will gain him reputation as a man of science and accurate observation. It will form a valuable addition to our geographical libraries.” The August 1835 issue notes that Reynolds’s Potomac has been “highly praised in the London Literary Gazette.”
The “Critical Notices” in the December 1835 issue—almost certainly written by Poe—contain an extensive detailed summary of what’s in the July 1835 issue of the Edinburgh Review, a standard practice of the time revealing both slim literary pickings to write about and the ongoing American inferiority complex regarding things British. One article summarized is a review of Sir John Ross’s Narrative of a Second Voyage in search of a North-West Passage, and of a Residence in the Arctic Regions during the years 1829 … 1833 … Including the Reports of Commander, now Captain, James Clark Ross … and the Discovery of the Northern Magnetic Pole. The Edinburgh reviewer takes issue with calling it a “discovery,” quibbling in regard to whether his observations are entirely accurate. Poe agrees: “The fact is that the Magnetic Pole is moveable, and, place it where we will, we shall not find it in the same place tomorrow.” He adds:
Notice is taken also by the critic that neither Captain nor Commander Ross has made the slightest reference to the fact that the Magnetic Pole is not coincident with the Pole of maximum cold. From observations made by Scoresby in East Greenland, and by Sir Charles Giesecké and the Danish Governors in West Greenland, and confirmed by all the meteorological observations made by Captains Parry and Franklin, Sir David Brewster has deduced the fact that the Pole of the Equator is not the Pole of maximum cold: and as the matter is well established, it is singular, to say no more, that it has been alluded to by neither the Commander nor the Captain.
This little tirade flaunts a flurry of knowledge about the subject—revealing an ongoing interest on Poe’s part—and echoes Symmes, Reynolds, and others who believed in the warmer open polar sea at the top and bottom of the world, an idea that would figure greatly in The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, his only published attempt at book-length fiction.
Another lengthy notice in the same issue, occupying three columns of eyestrain-size type, is a review of A Life of George Washington, in Latin Prose, by one Francis Glass, published by the reputable firm of Harper and Brothers, and edited, with a glowing introduction, by none other than J. N. Reynolds. One presumes that Poe had his tongue firmly planted in cheek when he wrote, “We may truly say that not for years have we taken up a volume with which we have been so highly gratified, as with the one now before us.” Glass too was from southwestern Ohio—he’d been Reynolds’s mentor. Poe has great (and uncharacteristically gentle) fun here, saying, “Mr. Reynolds is entitled to the thanks of his countrymen for his instrumentality in bringing this book before the public.”
In the February 1836 issue, Poe had asked a number of literary lights to contribute samples of their autographs for sportive analysis; included among James Fenimore Cooper, Washington Irving, and John Quincy Adams was J. N. Reynolds.
A lengthy notice titled “South-Sea Expedition” appeared in the August 1836 issue, commenting on the publication in March of a “Report of the Committee on Naval Affairs, to whom was referred memorials from sundry citizens of Connecticut interested in the whale fishing, praying that an exploring expedition be fitted out to the Pacific Ocean and South Seas, March 21, 1836.” The review enthusiastically endorses the idea, calling it “of paramount importance both in a political and commercial point of view,” quoting Reynolds at length in several places. A news item appended to the end reports that the expedition has been given the go-ahead by the president, and that Reynolds has been named the expedition’s corresponding secretary, which the anonymous reviewer (in all likelihood, Poe) says is “the highest civil situation in the expedition; a station which we know him to be exceedingly qualified to fill.”
In April 1836 Reynolds had made a three-hour address to Congress offering reasons the country should underwrite such an expedition. He had shifted his public arguments to the economic benefits that would accrue. As far as the earth being hollow, “it might be so.” He was no longer very interested in the question. His own “bold proposition” now was that there could be an icy barrier around both poles, but “being once passed, the ocean becomes less encumbered with ice, ‘and the nearer the pole the less ice.’” In May 1836 Congress appropriated $300,000 fo
r the enterprise. Reynolds’s address was subsequently published as a book by Harper’s, which Poe reviewed in a lengthy essay for the January 1837 issue of the Southern Literary Messenger. Again he heaps lavish praise on Reynolds—“the originator, the persevering and indomitable advocate, the life, the soul of the design.” Poe says it is needed because the fishery is of such importance to the country, but “the scene of its operations, however, is less known and more full of peril than any other portion of the globe visited by our ships.” The “full of peril” part suggests what is to come in Pym: “The savages in these regions have frequently evinced a murderous hostility—they should be conciliated or intimidated” (though in Pym those savages will have other ideas). There follows a detailed history of Reynolds’s efforts leading up to this, which notes that “the motives and character of Mr. Reynolds have been assailed.” But “we will not insult Mr. Reynolds with a defense. Gentlemen have impugned his motives—have these gentlemen ever seen him or conversed with him half an hour?” This last is the strongest indication we have that Poe and Reynolds actually knew each other.
Hollow Earth: The Long and Curious History of Imagining Strange Lands, Fantastical Creatures, Advanced Civilizatio Page 9