The Square Pegs

by Irving Wallace

  He would never have a similar opportunity to prove his theory, though it is thought that one of his disciples succeeded in making the grand effort months after Symmes’s death. This disciple, Jeremiah N. Reynolds, a graduate of Ohio University, had been attracted to Symmes’s theory during the earlier lectures. In 1828, when Symmes filled lecture engagements in Pennsylvania, New York, Massachusetts, Maine, and Canada, Reynolds accompanied him on part of the tour. Some time before they reached Canada, Reynolds took off on his own, paraphrased his teacher’s lectures in many public appearances, and quickly raised a considerable sum of money. Then he went to Washington, and, through the good offices of Secretary of the Navy Samuel L. Southard, convinced President John Quincy Adams that a ship should be requisitioned to survey the South Pole and investigate Symmes’s ideas. Adams apparently approved the plan, but before it could be executed, he was out of the White House and Andrew Jackson was in. Jackson considered the project nonsense and canceled it.

  At this dark moment a wealthy New York physician named Watson, his mind filled with concentric circles, offered private financing. In October 1829 the brig Annawan, with Captain N. B. Palmer in charge, and the brig Seraph, under the command of Captain B. Pendleton, sailed out of New York harbor for the South Pole. Jeremiah N. Reynolds, aboard the Annawan as senior scientist, was the lone Symzonian to accompany the expedition. While the publicized purpose of the expedition was discovery, the announcements failed to mention what the explorers expected to discover. John W. Peck, who investigated the effort eighty years later, had no doubts: “It seems to me probable that the sending out of the private south polar exploring expedition of the ‘Seraph and Annawan’ was for the purpose of testing Symmes’ theory either incidentally or primarily.”

  There were eventually numerous reports on the findings and adventures of the expedition, no two of them agreeing. According to the most popular account, the vessels made a landing at latitude 82 degrees south, but the foot party lost its way and was rescued from starvation in the nick of time. A rebellious crew then forced the ships to head for home, mutinied off Chile, put Reynolds ashore, and went on to seek more profitable discoveries in piracy. Less spectacular accounts omit the suffering landing-party, though they mention a minor rebellion off Chile which was quickly suppressed. One account goes so far as to say that the J. N. Reynolds aboard the Annawan was not Symmes’s follower, Jeremiah N., but a more conservative scientist named John N. All histories of the unlucky expedition agree on one point: the southern opening was not found, and the earth’s interior was not visited.

  Symmes was not to witness this fiasco. During his strenuous lecture tour of Canada in the winter of 1828, he had fallen seriously ill. He returned to the comforts of Hamilton, Ohio, where he died on May 29, 1829, aged forty-nine, and was buried with full military honors. His theory had greater longevity.

  Four years after his passing, the twenty-four-year-old Edgar Allan Poe based his short story “Ms. Found in a Bottle” on Symmes’s theory. In this purportedly unfinished piece the hero is aboard a 400-ton vessel drawn toward the South Pole by strong currents, entering a whirlpool, and sinking into the earth’s interior “we are plunging madly within the grasp of the whirlpool and amid a roaring, and bellowing, and thundering of ocean and tempest, the ship is quivering oh God! and going down!” at the narrative’s conclusion. In “The Unparalleled Adventure of One Hans Pfall” Poe described the North Pole as “becoming not a little concave” and in the “Narrative of A. Gordon Pym” he related the story of a voyage that was to have its destination in Symmes’s inner world.

  In 1864 Jules Verne published his widely read novel, Journey to the Center of the Earth, which owed its inspiration to the theory of Sir John Leslie and the ideas advanced by Symmes. Instead of entering an opening at one of the poles, Verne’s Professor Von Hardwigg, his nephew, and a native guide lower themselves into the interior through the crater of an extinct volcano in Iceland known as Sneffels. Following a descending tunnel, they continue one hundred miles beneath the earth’s crust. Soon they stumble upon the mammoth cavern that is the inner world. There are clouds above and there is a sea below. Constructing a raft, they sail this sea, observing a subterranean world still in an earlier stage of evolution. There are mushrooms towering forty feet; there is a boiling volcanic island; there are skeletons of early man; there is an ugly fight to the death between a giant, lizardlike plesiosaurus and an aquatic ichthyosaurus. In an effort to leave the inner world, the fictional children of Symmes attempt to use dynamite to clear a tunnel. The explosion starts an earthquake, and they are erupted to freedom through the crater of the volcano Stromboli in Italy.

  In 1868 Professor W. F. Lyons brought out his book A Hollow Globe, which supported Symmes’s theory of an interior earth, but did not mention Symmes by name. In 1878 one of Symmes’s ten children, Americus Vespucius Symmes, sought to rectify this omission. Americus’s filial tribute consisted of a collection of his father’s writings, notes, and clippings, all gathered between hard covers under the title The Symmes’ Theory of Concentric Spheres, Demonstrating that the Earth Is Hollow, Habitable Within, and Widely Open About the Poles, and published by Bradley and Gilbert, of Louisville. Though Americus credited full authorship to his father, and listed himself only as an editor, he did make one creative contribution to the volume. Symmes had contended that there was a civilization underground. Americus could not resist elaborating. This civilization, he said, was none other than that of the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel, who had been located by others in areas as diverse as Mexico and Atlantis. As to the general content of the book, Americus remained confident. “Reason, common sense, and all the analogies in the natural universe,” he concluded, “conspire to support and establish the theory.”

  In 1920 appeared a book, an enlargement of an earlier publication, entitled Journey to the Earth’s Interior by Marshall B. Gardner, the employee of a corset company in Illinois. Though in his privately printed treatise Gardner spurned Symmes’s inner planets, dismissed the master’s researches as superficial, and regarded his predecessor as merely a “crank,” he was not averse to adopting most of Symmes’s original ideas. Gardner agreed that the earth could be entered at either pole, where there were openings 1,400 miles in width. Inside, beneath the 800-mile earth crust, but brilliantly illuminated by a single miniature sun, would be found a hollow world from which the Eskimos had ascended to the outer surface.

  Beyond these literary monuments to his memory, only two tangible evidences of Symmes’s eccentricity remained. One was a small wooden globe that Symmes had employed in his lectures. This eventually found its way into the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia. The other was a stone memorial erected by his son Americus in Hamilton, Ohio. The memorial, featuring a replica of Symmes’s hollow world, bore inscriptions on two sides. On one side was engraved a story of his heroism: “John Cleves Symmes joined the Army of the U.S. as an Ensign in the year 1802. He afterward rose to the rank of Captain and performed daring feats of Bravery in the Battles of Lundy’s Lane and Sortie from Fort Erie.” On the opposite side was engraved a recognition of his genius: “Capt. John Cleves Symmes was a Philosopher, and the originator of ‘Symmes Theory of Concentric Spheres and Polar voids.’ He contended that the Earth was hollow and habitable within.”

  The tribute he most desired—an expedition into the earth’s interior— he would never receive. For less than a century after his death men had already learned firsthand that Symmes’s Hole existed neither in the Arctic nor in the Antarctic. If Peary’s discovery of the North Pole by land in 1909 had not been evidence enough, then certainly, the flights made by Admiral Richard E. Byrd over the North Pole in 1926 and the South Pole in 1929 would have severely taxed Symmes’s faith. As a matter of fact, soon enough, men would know all they needed to know of the inner world without the use of polar openings. Instead of attempting physical exploration, the engineers and geologists of a new era would sink manmade wells deeper into the ground than the Grand Canyon an oi
l well in Wyoming would penetrate 20,000 feet below the surface, and another in California would reach a depth of over 21,000 feet and through these drillings, as well as by analysis of radioactive rock, heat measurements in mines, and earthquake waves, they would learn much about the unseen world below. Though their borings and instruments would not take geophysicists more than one quarter of one per cent of the distance toward the earth’s center, they would know with some assurance that beneath the earth’s thin granite crust, only thirty-seven miles thick, lay a zone of rock, then one of iron, and then the great core itself, the size of Mars, composed of iron and nickel in a molten, plastic stage.

  In this hot, dense interior, Symmes would have found little room for his five concentric spheres, little comfort for his underworld citizenry. Fortunately, he had died before the final disillusionment or he might not have rested so easily in his hollow and happier earth.

  VIII

  The Editor Who Was a Common Scold

  “… let all pious Generals, Colonels and Commanders of our army and navy who make war upon old women beware.”

  ANNE ROYALL

  Between the years 1825 and 1829 the president of the United States was John Quincy Adams, whose father had been a chief executive before him. Adams was a lonely introvert, learned, austere, honest, and of formal habits except for one. It was his custom, during his single term, to rise before dawn, usually between four o’clock and six o’clock, dress, surreptitiously leave the White House, cross the expanse of front lawn that looked out upon the Potomac River, step behind a growth of shrubbery, remove his clothes, and then, quite naked, step into the water for a relaxing swim. Sometimes he would paddle about for an hour, then crawl up to the bank to dry himself with napkins, slowly dress again, and finally return to the White House fully refreshed and ready for his breakfast, his Bible, and his governmental chores. We do not know when these presidential swims ceased to be relaxing, but we do know when they ceased to be private. They became a spectator sport on that early summer morning, toward the end of the President’s term, when he emerged from the Potomac in his usual state of undress to find a rotund, unkempt, gray-haired woman casually seated on his under-wear, shirt, and breeches. Startled, the President hastily retreated into the river, halting only when the water reached his chin.

  When he found his wits he angrily ordered the lady to leave at once. In a rasping voice she replied that she had hunted down the President so that she might interview him about the controversy surrounding the Bank of the United States, and that she intended to remain until he made a statement. It must be understood that this was an age when the President did not give interviews to reporters or hold press conferences, and that to grant this request John Quincy Adams had to break a precedent of long standing. Yet, he knew that if he did not break precedent, he might remain in the Potomac for the remainder of his administration for he knew the woman on the bank, and knew that if he was the immovable object, she was the irresistible force.

  Her name was Anne Newport Royall. Raised on the Pennsylvania frontier, married to a wealthy and scholarly veteran of the Revolution, she had been deprived of her rightful inheritance and had come to Washington to obtain a widow’s pension. Adams had first met and befriended her the year before he was elected to the presidency, while he was still Monroe’s secretary of State. He had tolerated her obvious eccentricity, ignored her Masonic fanaticism, and promised to assist her in collecting the pension. He had also introduced her to his English-born wife, and had subscribed in advance to a book of travel she was planning to write. The book had since become five books, and her last three volumes, entitled The Black Book, or a Continuation of Travels in the United States, had shocked, irritated, and amused Washington and readers throughout the nation.

  While other lady writers dipped their quills in gentility, Anne Royall more often dipped hers in venom. She, who would meet all fourteen presidents from Washington to Pierce, had already interviewed President Adams’s eighty-nine-year-old father. “When I mentioned his son, the present President and Mrs. A the tear glittered in his eye; he attempted to reply but was overcome by emotion. Finding the subject too tender I dropped it as quickly as possible.” She was less tender with other public figures. She found John Randolph of Roanoke pompous but gentlemanly. “He is said to be immensely rich but not charitable.” A brigadier general, who was anti-Mason, was ridiculous: “He is in height not quite so tall as the Puppy-skin Parson, about five feet, I should think, and about the size of a full-grown raccoon, which he resembles in phiz.” A New Haven attorney who ejected her from his office deserved only ridicule. “He generally wears a blue coat, short breeches and long boots; his body is large, his legs spindling; he wears powder in his hair; his face resembles a full moon in shape, and is as red as a fiery furnace, the effect of drinking pure water, no doubt.”

  Anne Royall was as frank and harsh in discussing the municipalities that she visited, the sectional customs that she observed, and the national issues that she heard debated. In the pages of The Black Book she made clear her distaste for the Bank of the United States. The bank, a powerful monopoly capitalized at $35,000,000, controlled the lion’s share of government deposits. Its president, the socially eminent Nicholas Biddle, of Philadelphia, had once remarked: “As to mere power, I have been for years in the daily exercise of more personal authority than any President.” Upon meeting Anne Royall in person after she had castigated him in print, Biddle warned her with a smile: “Ah, Mrs. Royall, I will have you tried for your life for killing my President.”

  To the relief of a majority of the population, the bank’s charter was to expire in 1836. However, there was a rumor that Biddle might try to force the Congress and President Adams to forestall this expiration by granting a new fifteen-year monopoly. It was to clarify this burning question for a forthcoming book that Mrs. Royall, tugging at her worn shawl and waving her green umbrella, had stormed the White House in an effort to see President Adams. He had refused to admit her. Persistent as an angry bee, Mrs. Royall investigated the President’s routine, learned of the morning swims, and soon managed to secrete herself on the White House grounds. When her prey was in the water she made her way to the riverbank and planted herself upon his clothes.

  As the President impatiently remained immersed in the Potomac, Anne Royall shrilly reiterated her demand for an interview. Wearily, one may be sure, the President gave indication that he would cooperate. Mrs. Royall then asked him several pointed questions about the Bank of the United States. As she was a rabid Jacksonian who wanted the charter revoked, her questions were doubtless irritating. Nevertheless, the President answered them directly and fully. When the interview was done, Mrs. Royall rose, graciously thanked him, and triumphantly hobbled away. And Adams, having dispensed with the first executive press conference in American history, was free at last to wade out of the water and resume the dignity of full attire.

  When someone at a later date asked Adams what he made of the remarkable Mrs. Royall, he ruefully replied: “Sir, she is a virago errant in enchanted armor.” No man ever characterized her better.

  She was born Anne Newport near Baltimore, Maryland, on June 11, 1769. Her father, William Newport, was an offspring of the aristocratic Calvert family, but illegitimate and an embarrassment. He was given the name Newport instead of Calvert, awarded a small annuity, and kept at a distance from the manor house. He married a farm girl, and, mindful of his noble ancestry, named the first of his two daughters after Queen Anne of England. When the colonies seethed with revolt, and men took sides, Newport refused to be linked with the patriotic rabble. He announced himself a Tory sympathetic to the British crown and worked for the Tory cause. When his neighbors made threats, and the Calverts ended his annuity by fleeing to England, Newport realized that Maryland had become uncomfortable.

  In 1772, when Anne was three years old, Newport took his family for a brief stay with his wife’s relatives in Virginia, and then joined a wagon train heading for the wilderness of Pennsylvan
ia. In Westmoreland County, in the vicinity of present-day Pittsburgh, he built a narrow cabin, furnished it with a large bed and four crude stools, and tilled a small farm. He encouraged his wife to practice herb healing on the colonists, and he taught Anne the rudiments of reading by the phonetic method. On some unrecorded date Newport lost his life, probably in an Indian massacre. His widow and two daughters hastily moved to the safety of a fortified settlement known as Hannastown. Anne was twelve years old when her mother, desperately in need of support, married her second husband, a man named Butler. For Anne, the products of this new union were a measure of security and a half brother named James.

  The Indians, attempting to stem the tide of white migration, were on the warpath. Life became a succession of alarms. So frequent were the hit and run attacks that eventually, they became a bore. When redskins approached one cabin outside the fort, as Anne recalled later, the housewife refused to take flight until she had dusted the furniture. “I can’t go off and leave such a looking house,” she said. But the party of savages that advanced on the thirty to forty cabins of Hannastown on July 13, 1782, was larger and more formidable than usual. Anne and her family fled to the protection of one of the three nearby forts. A large crowd of guests, including the settlement founder’s family, attending a wedding celebration at Miller’s Station in the vicinity, did not flee. The Indians fell upon them, slaughtered the men, took sixty women and children captive, put all of Hannastown to the torch, and left.