It has never been an entirely comfortabl...

It has never been an entirely comfortabl...

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It has never been an entirely comfortable thought. Cave dwellers sometimes had to wrest their living quarters from ferocious animals, and the fear of yet one more creature in the dark at the back of the cave must have been widespread. Perhaps that is why the nether world came to become closely associated with death and dragons, with Satan and the supernatural.

the Dawn of Science – and the Hollow Earth Fascination Continues Unabated

As the human mind developed and began to ponder the wider universe, the hollow earth beckoned with as much allure as the heavens. While some myths populated the distant universe and the remote mountain tops with gods, others saw a hollow earth below, a realm of similarly potent, though frequently less benevolent, deities. Later, with the dawn of science and exploration, the globe was slowly yielding its secrets to far-flung adventurers. Travelers who reported finding portals to underground worlds were afforded no more credibility than those who spoke of new worlds beyond the seas.

In time, astonishing claims were heard of a mysterious inner earth peopled with benign giants or Eskimo evil dwarfs or prehistoric reptiles. Even today, with the outer world having been thoroughly mapped and explored, photographed, and plumbed by sophisticated electronic instruments, uncertainty remains about the hollow earth. The darkness at the back of the cave has yet to disappear entirely.

the Legend of Agartha

Hidden worlds beneath the surface of the earth figured prominently in ancient beliefs. Central Asian Buddhists spoke in muted tones of the kingdom of Agartha (also spelled Aghartha), made up of a worldwide labyrinth of subterranean passages. Stories of a civilization that dwelt in the hollow earth were passed from family to family for generations before writing instruments facilitated memory.

Agartha was said to be a haven for the population of vanished continents. Agartha was considered a center of intellectual progress and enlightenment. Its holy leader became the King of the World, who, according to one devotee, “knows all the forces of the world and reads all the souls humankind and the great book of their destiny.”

Myths from the Dawn of Western Civilization

The legendary Assyro-Babylonian king, Gilgamesh, was reported to have had a long conversation about the underworld with the ghost of a devil companion. The Greeks were constantly speculating about the depths of the earth; one myth tells how the musician, Orpheus, tried in vain to rescue his wife, Eurydice, from Hades.

The incomparable storyteller/poet, Homer, imagined an underworld waiting to be explored, and the philosopher, Plato, wrote that there were “tunnels both broad and narrow in the interior” and in the center, a god who sits “on the navel of the earth.” Egyptians also believed in an infernal underground kingdom, and later, Christians were told about their hell. We have also read that the Incas managed to thwart the blood-thirsty marauding Spanish conquistadors when they carried their treasures into deep tunnels that have yet to yield their ancient secrets.

First, the Comets, then the Hollow Earth

After the dark ages receded and science ascended in place of superstition and myth in explaining the world, the underground remained a prominent location. One pioneer whose deductions led him below was the brilliant English astronomer, Edmond Halley, discoverer of the comet that is seen yet racing through the heavens and bears his name. In 1672, while still a schoolboy, Halley became interested in the earth's magnetism.

Hollow Earth Scientist

The brilliant English astronomer, Edmond Halley, discoverer of the comet that bears his name

Halley found that magnetic north was not always in the same place. Studying compass readings taken by himself and others over most of the world, he discerned several patterns of error. He recognized that local environments–such as magnetic mineral deposits–might cause a compass needle to deviate. Furthermore, needles deflected downward, away from horizontal, to a degree that corresponded to latitude. At various longitudes, compass readings varied laterally from actual magnetic north, in predictable ways that navigators charted and took into account.

But the real enigma emerged when Halley examined readings that had been recorded in past times. They showed that variation–the lateral deflection that changed according to longitude–was slowly changing. The only way that Halley could explain this phenomenon was to posit the existence of more than one magnetic field.

He suggested that the earth was twinned—with an outer shell within which could be found a separate, inner nucleus. Each of the globes, he proposed, had its own axis, with north and south magnetic poles, and the axes are somewhat inclined to each other. That, along with slight differences in the velocity of rotation, could cause magnetized needles to seek one or another of the poles–hence the slow shift in the position of magnetic north.

Hollow Earth Model

Halley's Scientific Paper on the inner cores of the Hollow Earth

Later, when Halley came across readings that could not be accounted for by one interior earth, he added two more, each nestled inside the other like a set of Chinese boxes. “They are,” Halley told the Royal Society of London in 1692, “approximately the size of Mars, Venus and Mercury.”

Like many other trail blazers of science, Halley felt he had to square his ingenious theory with his religious beliefs. He speculated that since God had stocked every part of the earth's surface with living things, he would not have neglected the inner world.

But this raised another problem, for it seemed self-evident that life requires light. Halley suggested that the interior atmosphere itself is luminous and that the aurora borealis, or northern lights, is caused by the escape of this glowing essence through the thin crust at the North Pole. During the eighteenth century, as other investigators pushed back the frontiers of knowledge, Halley's theory was modified but not refuted. The Swiss mathematician, Leonhard Euler, rejected the idea of multiple planets within, replacing them with a single sun, which he reasoned would provide warmth and light to an advanced inner-earth civilization.

Hollow Earth Theorist

Swiss mathematician, Leonhard Euler

Later, the Scottish mathematician, Sir John Leslie, determined that there are really two interior suns, which he christened Pluto and Proserpine.

Hollow Earth Scientist

Sir John Leslie (1766 to 1832), Scottish mathematician and physicist

But it would not be a European scientist who first brought international attention to the idea of a world within the earth. That distinction would go instead to a hot-tempered American, a career soldier and man of action from the state of New Jersey.

The son of a judge, John Cleve Symmes was born in 1780 and was named for an uncle who had served in the American Revolution. His was hardly the cloistered life of a scholar, although he enjoyed a solid early education and was intensely interested in the natural sciences. In 1802, at the age of twenty-two, he entered the United States Army as an ensign.

hollow earth theorist

Hollow Earth enthusiast, Symmes

From then on, Symmes's life was nomadic and turbulent. In 1807, he insisted on fighting a duel with a fellow officer who had suggested that Symmes was not a gentleman. Both men were shot. Symmes was wounded in the wrist and his opponent in the thigh.

Both suffered from their wounds for the rest of their lives, though we are pleased to report that they eventually became good friends. Symmes fought courageously against the British in the war of 1812, once leading his troops in storming a British artillery battery and spiking an enemy cannon with his own hands.

Symmes left the army in 1816 and established a trading post in St. Louis. There, with little else on his hands to do, he indulged in his lifelong passion for reading about the natural sciences. Symmes was especially fascinated by speculation about the formation of the earth, and he began to elaborate with growing enthusiasm and conviction on a theory that may have occurred to him years earlier.

By the year 1818, Symmes was ready to share his ideas on the international lecture circuit. He did so in a most spectacular manner. In a letter addressed, “To All the World” and sent politicians, publications, learned societies, and heads of state throughout Europe and America, he wrote: “I declare the earth is hollow, and inhabited within; containing a number of solid concentric spheres, one within the other, and that it is open at the poles or 16 degrees; I pledge my life,” he continued, “in support of this truth, and am ready to explore the hollow, if the world will support and aid me in the undertaking.”

Symmes assured his readers that he would prove his case in greater detail with a subsequent publication. For skeptics, he included a character reference and a testimonial to his sanity signed by local physicians and businessmen. That Symmes asked for “one hundred brave men, 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 find 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.”

But instead of the support and aid as Symmes had requested, the public responded with hoots of derisive laughter. He told his theory, and his audacity was ridiculed in newspapers and scientific journals the world over.

hollow earth model

Symmes's model of the hollow earth

Undeterred, Symmes launched a vigorous campaign with newspaper articles, more open letters, and countless lectures around the country. Over and over, he argued that a mass of spinning, unformed matter–such as the earth had once been formed from–could not have organized itself into a solid sphere. Centrifugal force throws rotating matter away from the axis of rotation; gravity pulls it inward. When the forces balance, he reasoned, the result is a belt of material with the densest matter outermost and the axis open. In this way, Symmes claimed, the materials of the earth were organized as concentric, hollow spheres open at the poles.

Symmes marshaled all kinds of evidence, from the astronomical to the commonplace, to support his scheme. Look at the concentric rings of Saturn, the polar caps of Mars, he said. Look how a cup of any liquid material, rotated, will sort itself into concentric circles according to its density. He appealed to religion: Nature, he pointed out, was a great economist of matter, having opted wherever feasible for hollow construction-hollow bones, stalks, quills and hairs.

Furthermore, he said, God would not have created a vast inner world only to have it barren and empty. Symmes reasoned from the general to the particular and developed specific dimensions for the multiple earths he envisioned. The known world, the outermost of five, he said, has an opening 4,000 miles across at the north pole and another, 6,000 miles in diameter, at the South. One could walk into these openings, for they are inclined into the earth's thousand-mile-thick crust at a gentle angle. Anyone who did so would find within a gentle, sheltered land warmed by the indirect rays of the sun shining in at the polar portholes.

Symmes spoke relentlessly to all who would listen to him, poring out great, disorganized jumbles of his thought. His fervent speeches drew large crowds of the curious but, for the most part, elicited only amusement or mild interest instead of cash for his arctic expedition. He did make a few converts, however, among whom the most significant was an Ohio newspaper editor named Jeremiah N. Reynolds. Reynolds began giving his own lectures in support of Symmes's theories.

Hollow Earth promoter

Reynolds, a keen Hollow Earth believer

Jeremiah N. Reynolds, newspaper editor and author of Moby Dick inspiration, Mocha Dick

Another adherent was a wealthy Ohioan named James McBride. It may well have been McBride who requested Kentucky senator, Richard M. Johnson, who later served as vice-president in the Martin Van Buren administration, to introduce in Congress a petition for funding the proposed expedition. It was tabled. McBride then compiled a book summarizing, in a more concise and logical fashion than Symmes ever did, the theory of concentric spheres (which was more popularly and rudely referred to as the Theory of Symmes's Hole). But it was all for naught. The strain of ten years of vigorous proselytizing broke Symmes's health, and he died in 1829 without seeing his theory accepted or his expedition mounted.

Symmes had clearly hoped that his quest would bring him monumental renown. Indeed, using the pen name of Captain Adam Seaborn, he published in 1820 a fictional account of a voyage to the earth's interior, entitled Symzonia — Voyage of Discovery, in which he spelled out the class of glory he hoped would be his.

Hollow Earth account

The book Symmes wrote under his nom de plume, Captain Adam Seaborn

As Captain Seaborn prepared to land at a subterranean utopia peopled with gentle, fair-skinned beings, he mused: “I was about to secure to my name a conspicuous and imperishable place on the tablets of History, and a neesh of the first order in the temple of fame…The voyage of Columbus was but an excursion on a fish pond, and his discoveries, compared with mine, were but trifles.”

We know this was not the way the world remembered him. After his death, Symmes's vision of a hollow earth was nearly forgotten. The polar expedition he had so long espoused, however, was soon given another life.

In fact, Congress authorized such a voyage in 1828, the year before Symmes's death. This was in part the result of vigorous lobbying by Jeremiah Reynolds, who instead of appealing to scientific curiosity, shrewdly stressed the trade to be opened and territory to be claimed. The idea gained support of President John Quincy Adams but not of Andrew Jackson, who succeeded Adams as president in 1829. The expedition would not sail for another decade.

Meanwhile, the impatient Reynolds joined a sealing and exploration expedition to the South Seas aboard the Annawan. (A magazine story that he wrote on his return, Mocha Dick, or The White Whale of the Pacific, may have been the inspiration for Herman Melville's masterpiece, Moby Dick, published twelve years later.) On his return, Reynolds renewed earlier calls to sealers and whalers to add their voices to the clamor for an expedition, now proposed to Antarctica.

Cover of Reynold's Mocha Dick

Mocha Dick,

Melville's inspiration

In an 1836 speech given in the us Capitol's Hall of Representatives, Reynolds conjured a stirring vision of American ships casting anchor at the South Pole, “that point where all the meridians terminate where our eagle and star-spangled banner may be unfurled and planted, and left to wave our axis of the earth itself!” If he still believed in Symmes's theory at that point, Reynolds kept it to himself.

Swayed by such patriotic appeals to the whalers and other commercial interests. Congress then approved the expedition and provided $300,000 for it. However, two years dragged by before it actually departed. By that time, the impassioned Reynolds had so roundly denounced the Secretary of Navy for dawdling that Reynolds was ignominiously struck from the expedition roster when the ship finally sailed in 1838.

Named for its commander, Navy Lieutenant Charles Wilkes, the four-year Wilkes expedition — the first to team civil engineers and scientists with naval crews — did make important discoveries, but not those that Symmes had so fondly hoped for. There would be no charting of a polar opening. The voyagers returned, having mapped thousands of miles of Antarctic coastline, having discovered that this little-known landmass was in fact, big enough to be named the earth's seventh continent.

Like Symmes before him, Reynolds found that the tangible rewards for his devotion were slim. An expedition botanist who discovered a new genus of ivy in Samoa on the southward journey named it Reynoldsia in honor of Reynolds's “unflagging zeal.”

Reynolds also appeared to have wielded considerable influence over the fevered mind of one of America's greatest authors, Edgar Allan Poe. In the short story, “M.S Found in a Bottle,” and his novel, The Narrative of Arthur Gorden Pym of Nantucket, Poe described doomed voyages that ended with ships being sucked into a watery abyss at the South Pole — ideas founded on the hollow-earth writings of Reynolds. Although the two probably never met, Poe was heard calling Reynold's name when he died in a Baltimore hospital in 1849.

early Hollow Earth account

Illustration from Poe's M.S. Found in a Bottle

Such stimulation of fiction writers by scientific speculations was a hallmark of the nineteenth century, and many fictional excursions were so plausibly presented that readers were sometimes hard-pressed to separate the real from the imaginary. Nowhere did flights of literary fancy seem so credible — or foretell the future more accurately — than in the writings of Jules Verne. With remarkable prescience, he envisioned submarines prowling the ocean depths, aeronauts circumnavigating the globe, and astronauts traveling to the moon. One of his first ventures into his special world, where fact and fantasy were nearly indistinguishable, was his Journey to the Center of the Earth.

The story begins in 1863 in Hamburg, Germany, where Otto Lidenbrock, an eccentric professor of mineralogy, has deciphered a coded, runic document from Iceland. It turns out to be directions for reaching the center of the earth. Lidenbrock and his nephew, Axel, immediately go to Iceland, hire a guide, and descend down the chimney of an extinct volcano into the depths of the earth.

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