by Randy McNutt
“Hey, what’s that ball [globe] on the top?”
As I attempted to explain Symmes’s theory in five sentences, the boy grew bored and walked away. “Yeah,” he said.
Over at the Butler County Historical Society (about four blocks north of the park), I asked curator Marjorie Brown if visitors ever stop at the museum to inquire about the captain. She said few people ever come, but just in case she keeps an old copy of his hollow-earth theory on file. “Definitely an eccentric,” she said of the captain, “but a fascinating one.”
His friend and supporter, businessman James McBride of Hamilton, once wrote a paper about the hollow earth’s plausibility, adding a small measure of credibility to Symmes’s idea. McBride was a prosperous and respected citizen, a trustee of Miami University, and the owner of six thousand books. In his paper he described Symmes as a slightly built man with bright blue eyes, a round head, and small, oval face. “His voice is somewhat nasal, and he speaks hesitatingly and with apparent labor,” McBride said. “His manners are plain, and remarkable for native simplicity.”
One night in 1824, Symmes told a Hamilton audience his theory: the earth is hollow, occupied by another people, and ready for exploration. Then he asked for volunteers to accompany him to the new world’s polar entrance. All he would need, he told them, was two big ships and 250 tons of equipment. The proposal made them laugh. It was no way to impress his new neighbors. By then, the world’s leading scientists and politicians had already dismissed the “Theory of Concentrick Spheres.” Soon people started remarking about some long-absent friend, “Why, he must fallen down Symmes’s Hole.” Yet the Captain persisted. “When he had a poor audience at Hamilton, Ohio,” Harper’s New Monthly said in 1882, “he would think of neglected Columbus and trudge on to Gardiner, Maine; unnoticed there, he would console himself over the fate of badly used Galileo, and tramp away somewhere else.”
He maintained that concentric spheres were the natural order of things: “Enquire the botanist, and he will tell you that the plants which spring up spontaneously agreeable to the established laws of nature, are hollow cylinders … even the minutest hairs of our heads are hollow. Go to the mineralist, and he will inform you that the stone called Aerolites, and many other mineral bodies, are composed of hollow concentric circles.”
Symmes believed that concentric circles existed with the planets. As they revolved, he said, they naturally created holes around their axis points, causing the oceans to enter one side and exit the other. His theory was ridiculed widely, and it was not even original. Mathematician Leonhardt Euler once considered it. In Epitome astrononomiae in 1618, early proponent Johannes Kepler claimed the earth was made of concentric shells. In 1692, astronomer Edmund Halley (famous for the comet that bears his name) suggested that the earth had three internal spheres that revolved at different speeds. He said the planet also had an interior sun. By 1716, he was convinced that a luminous atmosphere between the spheres might be the cause of the aurora borealis. Despite Halley’s interest in the subject, the world did not embrace the notion of a hollow earth.
Probably Symmes didn’t know any of these previous theories; he was not well educated, but he was curious and creative. That he could develop such an idea independently makes his work even more impressive. Yet scientists of the day rejected him. Cincinnati mathematician Thomas Matthews called Symmes’s theory “a heap of learned rubbish.” The more criticism he received, the more stubbornly Symmes refused to give up. In 1819 he wrote “Light between the Spheres,” and managed to convince the National Intelligencer to publish the story. The exposure helped attract crowds to his lectures, but they were not always supportive.
In 1820, his ideas inspired a novel, Symzonia: Voyage of Discovery by the pseudonymous Captain Adam Seaborn, who wrote that on his adventures he discovered an island at the earth’s end, where the people were five feet tall and far advanced intellectually. It was widely assumed that Symmes wrote the book, and he did not deny doing it. (When Arno Press of New York reprinted Symzonia in 1975, the company officially assigned authorship to Captain John Cleves Symmes.) Nevertheless, some scholars remain skeptical.
The thinly veiled world of Symzonia referred to the inner territory of the earth, which was inhabited by a race of fair-skinned and peaceful people. As the captain prepared to meet the subterranean people, he said: “I was about to secure to my name a conspicuous and imperishable place on the tablets of History, and a niche of the first order in the temple of fame.” Of course, that also happened to be Symmes’s opinion of himself, as architect of the Theory of Concentrick Spheres (or, as some less charitable people called it, the Theory of Symmes’s Hole).
The author claimed the earth had a shell of about eight hundred miles thick, with openings at the poles that were fourteen hundred miles wide. The book, an early American Utopian novel, was excerpted in various publications. It explained Seaborn’s polar adventures in what he called the Inner World, where he discovered Symzonia. Its inhabitants flew in airships, spoke in a musical language, defended themselves with huge flamethrowers, and lighted their dark world with a series of mirrors that refracted the light coming in through the polar openings. People living on the earth’s surface were the descendants of Symzonia’s exiles. Symzonia was one of the early fantasy books.
Bolstered by publicity from the novel, Symmes started touring Ohio’s cities to seek converts. The book gave him a measure of notoriety, if not credibility. He took with him a polished wooden globe that came apart to reveal the internal spheres and the polar holes. It worked using iron filings, magnets, and sand, and today this rare piece of Americana can be found in the Philadelphia Academy of Sciences.
Despite his fascinating prop, “Captain Symmes met with the usual fate of projectors, in living and dying in great pecuniary embarrassment,” historian Henry Howe wrote in 1898. “In person, he was of the medium stature and simple in his manners. He bore the character of an honest, exemplary man, and was much respected. He advanced many plausible and ingenious arguments, and won quite a number of converts among those who attended his lectures.”
Unfortunately, Symmes lacked a public speaker’s charisma. He was terrified of stepping before crowds. Even McBride admitted: “[There is] scarcely any thing in his exterior to characterize the secret operations of his mind.… Captain Symmes’s want of a classical education, and philosophic attainments, perhaps, unfits him for the office of lecturer.” Yet he began cultivating supporters (if not sufficient donations), and by 1820 he had become recognizable enough for John Audubon to sketch him in pencil for Cincinnati’s Western Museum.
By coming west, Symmes was merely following the path of his uncle, John Cleves Symmes. The captain was born November 5, 1780, in Sussex County, New Jersey, where his uncle served as a state Supreme Court judge. (Their ancestors had come to North America in 1634.) The judge dreamed of going west to speculate on land and becoming rich, and in the process he founded the village of North Bend, near Cincinnati. Unlike his nephew, Judge John Cleves Symmes was a grumpy fellow who angered a number of business clients. Many pioneers— even people today—confused the captain with his uncle because they shared the same name. Actually, the captain was the son of the Reverend Timothy Symmes, a brother of John Cleves Symmes. The young man headed West and, once there, was promptly confused with his irritating uncle. So he joined the army and made sure people identified him as the captain.
At twenty-two years old, he fought bravely in frontier battles and served in New Orleans and at Fort Adams, near Natchez. He once said he joined the military “to merit and obtain distinction, and accumulate knowledge, which I had seldom tasted but in borrowed books.” He wanted to be somebody. While in the army on Christmas Day in 1808, he married Mrs. Mary Anne Lockwood, widow of another captain at Fort Adams. She brought to the marriage five sons and one daughter, whom Symmes came to think of as his own. He fathered five of his own children with Mary Anne: daughters Louisiana (born 1810) and Elizabeth (1814) and sons Americus Vespucius (1811), W
illiam Henry Harrison (1813), and John Cleves Jr. (1824). Adding to the confusion, Junior would become known as Captain John Cleves Symmes Jr., which his father was often mistakenly called.
Eleven children became a financial burden on John and Mary Anne Symmes. For years, John continued to pay the taxes on land once owned by his wife’s first husband, and when the man’s children left home as adults, Symmes gave them the property without charging interest.
During the War of 1812, he was promoted from lieutenant to captain. While in the army, Symmes fought a duel with a fellow officer. The captain suffered a bullet wound to his wrist, which bothered him for the rest of his life. His opponent, whom Symmes shot in the thigh, later became a good friend. Symmes retired from the military in 1816 and settled in St. Louis, then in the Missouri Territory, to sell supplies to soldiers and Indians. He spent his spare time reading about surveying, geography, and philosophy and developing his theory of the hollow earth. On April 10, 1818, he issued the theory’s Circular Number One, which he sent to universities and political leaders across the United States and the world. (Anticipating rejection, he wisely included a certificate of sanity.) He wrote:
TO ALL THE WORLD!
I declare the earth is hollow and habitable within; contains a number of solid concentrick spheres, one within the other; and that it is open at the poles 12 or 16 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 this 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.… I ask one hundred brave companions, well equipped, to start from Siberia in the fall season, with Reindeer and slays, on the ice of the frozen sea: I engage we find warm and rich land, stocked with thrifty vegetables and animals if not men, on reaching one degree northward of latitude 62; we will return in the succeeding spring.
Also in his document, which he sent to every city and village he could find, he claimed that people lived inside the earth in a lush environment, that animals migrated there, and that the new world could be reached through a six-thousand-foot opening at the North. His writings were part mumbo-jumbo, part science, part rambling rhetoric. His theory intrigued a few people, who formed the Hollow Earth Society. They saw logic in Symmes’s idea that “the earth, as well as all the celestial orbicular bodies existing in the universe … are all constituted in a greater or less degree, of a collection of spheres, more or less solid, concentric with each other, and more or less open at the poles.”
In 1819, he moved briefly to Newport, Kentucky, about thirty miles south of Hamilton, across the Ohio River from Cincinnati. Being unsuccessful there, he moved to Cincinnati later that year. A local book editor called Symmes “the most remarkable man who came to Cincinnati this year” and devoted more space to him than the city’s rich and powerful men. He lived in a three-story brick row house on lower Market Street, between Broadway and Sycamore Streets. The dreamer became so obsessed with his theory that he could do nothing but talk and write about it. Newspaper writers enjoyed mocking him. The Academy of Science in Paris refused to discuss the theory. Nevertheless, the odd subject attracted large crowds when Symmes spoke all over the United States. He made good entertainment—sort of an unreality show of his day.
About 1821, he moved to a farm near Hamilton, but he rarely stayed at home. There’s no evidence that Hamilton sincerely embraced him or his idea, although the council did issue a friendly proclamation: “Resolved, that we esteem Symmes’s Theory of the Earth deserving of serious examination and worthy of the attention of the American people.”
On March 29, 1824, an amateur acting group, the Newport Thespian Society, put on a play, The Tragedy of Revenge, to raise money for his proposed voyage to the North. They encouraged him. Also that year, Cincinnati poet Moses Brooks praised Symmes:
Has not Columbia one aspiring Son
By whom the unfading laurel may be won?
Yes! History’s pen may yet inscribe the name
Of Symmes to grace her future scroll of fame.
Other communities proclaimed him crazy. Congress refused his financial requests; so did European monarchs. Even the Ohio General Assembly ignored his pleas for moral support and intervention with Congress. On the road, he suffered from dyspepsia and other illnesses. While on an extended lecture of the East Coast, he ran so low on money that he couldn’t pay his forty-dollar rent, and a New York landlord had him thrown in jail. A Cincinnati resident, who happened to be in New York, heard about Symmes’s plight and paid his bail.
Although unable to launch his own expedition, Symmes did help stimulate interest in the mysterious polar areas. In 1828, several American groups prepared to go to Antarctica, including U.S. Navy officer Charles Wilkes. As a result of these explorers’ findings, the American scientific community gained stature in Europe.
That year Symmes found a young believer in Jeremiah N. Reynolds, a graduate of Ohio University and the editor of the Wilmington Spectator, a newspaper in Clinton County. Reynolds convinced Symmes to embark on an exhausting tour of the East Coast in hopes of raising money for an expedition to the polar holes. While Symmes was not an engaging public speaker, people wanted to see him out of curiosity. As his health declined, he parted with Reynolds, who by this time had noticed a greater interest in the polar areas than in the hollow-earth theory. Symmes ended up in New Jersey, where he stayed with a friend while recovering from various illnesses. After returning to Hamilton, he continued to write. Reynolds and his contacts reportedly convinced President John Quincy Adams to launch an expedition to the poles, but Andrew Jackson canceled the plan after he took office.
A monument to Captain John Cleves Symmes still stands in Hamilton’s Ludlow Park. He is buried beneath it.
Symmes did not live to see any polar exploration. He died in Hamilton on May 29, 1829, at age forty-nine years and six months. To glorify his father, Americus Vespucius Symmes erected the city’s most unusual monument: a five-and-a-half–foot stone marker topped by a twenty-inch globe weighing eighty pounds. (For the next forty-five years, Americus would promote his father’s ideas in vain.)
Later in 1829, Reynolds convinced a New Yorker named Dr. Watson to pay for an expedition to the South Pole. While on the way, the crew mutinied and left Reynolds and Watson in South America. After spending time in Chile, Reynolds served as a U.S. frigate’s secretary, and traveled around the world. In the late 1830s he returned to America and started lecturing on the polar caps and Symmes’s theory. Even then, the polar areas were like other planets today—mysteries waiting to be seen up close. (When in the 1840s a wooly mammoth was found buried in the snow in Siberia, supporters of the hollow-earth theory shook their heads knowingly and said, “Ah-ha!”)
Reynolds found eager audiences when he returned to the lecture circuit. An admirer, Henry Allan, heard Reynolds speak and relayed the ideas to his writer brother, Edgar Allan Poe, who became fascinated. Poe used them in his story “MS Found in a Bottle” and later in his only novel, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym. As he lay dying in 1849, Poe reportedly cried, “Reynolds! Reynolds! Oh, Reynolds!”
The erroneous hollow-earth idea did not die with Poe. It lingered, reviving at times like a scientific plague. Important polar expeditions began in the 1850s and continued regularly for a century. By the 1890s, such trips were attracting major public attention, as explorers pushed their way farther into the snowy polar areas.
After several attempts, American Robert E. Peary finally reached the North Pole on April 6, 1909. He found no hole at the top of the world. No flame throwing little people and no lush gardens. He did find ice jams and cold temperatures, and he lost eight toes to frostbite. On December 14, 1911, Roald Amundsen of Norway reached the South Pole and discovered Queen Maud Land and conducted oceanographic research. He found no hole in the earth, either. From 1914 to
1916, England’s Ernest Shackleton attempted the first crossing of Antarctica. On May 9, 1926, Richard E. Byrd explored the northern arctic region by airplane. On November 29, 1929, he took an extensive nineteen-hour flight over the South Pole, and established America Base on the Ross Ice Shelf.
Of the dozens of important polar explorers through two centuries, only Byrd came close to living out Captain Adam Seaborn’s dream. America gave a returning Byrd a ticker-tape parade and honored him for his achievements, even when the world’s critics questioned his findings. In those happy years before the Great Depression, before so many technological advancements had jaded America’s attitudes, Byrd was the nation’s adventurer and hero.
Although he did not discover any strange race of people, he did reach the top and bottom of the world and became the kind of national hero that Captain John Cleves Symmes always wanted to be—the man who saw the poles.
In the years following Symmes’s death, two of his sons continued their own far-out quests. (Only William Henry Harrison Symmes, a physician, seemed unaffected by his father’s legacy.) They must have inherited their father’s passion for lonely stands, promoting the absurd, and inviting public ridicule. In the 1860s, John Cleves Symmes Jr.—military inventor, former assistant professor of ethics at West Point, and recent émigré to Prussia—designed a flying machine named the Simzee, a contraption that looked like an umbrella mounted atop two flapping wings. (To further add to the confusion, he named his son John Haven Cleves Symmes.) By then an influential friend had finally convinced Symmes Jr. to reject the hollow-earth idea, but he turned around and embraced his own improbable notion of the rickety flying machine. He envisioned sailing the machine to the polar caps to disprove his father’s theory (as if by then it needed disproving) and then flying to Mexico and the United States, where he would surely be elected the next president. In letters to someone named John, he expressed his mounting frustrations and continued confidence against impossible odds. “Oh! For this day have I sought, & prayed, & striven, & fought—fought for patience or success—for 8 long years,” he wrote on May 16, 1869. “For this alone. For this, I rejected your advice to ‘turn my hand to something’ that would help fill purse. For this have I lived so ‘subdued’ … and now I find the greatest place in my land opening its arms to clutch me; and the greatest place in all History—I see it—preparing for me.”