From: "Terry W. Colvin" 
Subject: IUFO: FWD (forteana) Symmes Hole (1/4)
Date: 25 Dec 2000 16:55:10 -0500
To: Fortean Research ,
        "Forteana [Alternate Orphan]" ,
        "iufo@topica.com" ,
        "skeptic@listproc.hcf.jhu.edu" 

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[From Timothy McSweeney's, Summer 2000. All errors probably mine, or 
more likely OmniPage's. I sent the full thing in one go about seven 
hours ago, but it seems to have been killed by primenet - JM]

Symmes Hole: A man from Ohio, and the distinct possibility of a world 
within this world by Paul Collins

HAMILTON, OHIO, IS A PLACE you could only find by accident, as you're 
unlikely to go there deliberately. In the 1970s, the town changed its 
name to "Hamilton!," a scheme dreamed up by some local Babbitt. When 
the expected vim, vigor, and pep failed to materialize, the 
exclamation mark faded away and the dreariness of the unadorned 
"Hamilton" returned. But Hamilton - or Hamilton! - has retained one 
item of interest to passersby.

Under the shade of an old oak in a weedy town park is a simple if 
enigmatic grave monument - a stone obelisk topped by a granite 
sphere. This sphere has a large hole drilled through the center. 
Underneath, amidst a crazy quilt of patching concrete are several 
bronze plaques, bolted in over original stone inscriptions that were 
scoured into illegibility by over a century of wind, rain, and 
neglect. They read, in part:

"John Cleves Symmes joined the Army of the U.S. as an ensign, in the 
year 1802. He afterwards performed daring feats of Bravery in the 
Battles of Lundy's Lane and Sortie from Fort Erie. Capt. John Cleves 
Symmes was a Philosopher, and the originator of the 'Symmes Theory of 
Concentric Spheres and Polar Voids.' He contended that the Earth was 
hollow and habitable within."

The monument, erected by Symmes's son in the 1840s, is surrounded by 
the sort of wrought-iron fencing typically found around old cemetery 
plots.

Nearby, on hot and dusty summer days, locals play on a basketball 
court. They utterly ignore the old obelisk in their midst - a more 
apt characterization of the life of the man buried beneath it, 
perhaps, than the monument itself ever was.

Symmes was indeed a brave man, although at first this bravery took a 
rather obvious physical form. Born in Sussex County, New Jersey, in 
1780 and the namesake of a famous uncle who had developed the 
Northwest Territory, Symmes received a tolerable if brief common 
school education. He was literate, but hardly polished; he did, 
however, have a love of learning that often drew him to haunt public 
libraries. This was not unusual for the time - other than clergy, 
lawyers, and doctors, few men in the late 18th century had the luxury 
of a formal college education.

In 1802 Symmes enlisted in the army, and first saw action on an open 
field - in a duel, that is, with a bullying fellow officer named 
Lieutenant Marshall. In moments, Marshall was lying on the ground 
with a broken leg and Symmes was bleeding from a shot to his wrist. 
As Symmes reported shortly afterward, "I wanted to know if he desired 
another shot, and being informed in the negative... with my 
handkerchief wrapped around my wound, I went home and ate a hearty 
breakfast." He was no less fearless as a captain in the War of 1812. 
At the Battle of Bridgewater, his company repelled three bayonet 
charges, and at Fort Erie he captured a British artillery position 
and destroyed its cannon.

Retiring as a war hero, Symmes took the well-worn career route of 
becoming a supplier to his old employer, and set up shop as a 
military provisioner and Indian trader in the upper Mississippi. He 
set aside some money, married a widow, and soon the two were living 
in St. Louis and presiding over a brood of ten children. He could 
have retired into the comfortable life of a respectable patriarch 
looking ahead to a lifetime of steady military business. But 
something was eating at John Cleves Symmes.

He had discovered that an entire world lay hidden beneath our feet - 
and only he knew how to find it.

Symmes spent his military retirement in contemplation, observing 
migratory patterns and perusing books on geology and maritime 
exploration in his local libraries. There is no telling how long the 
notion of a hollow earth had occupied his mind, but he had now become 
obsessed by it. Writing up a brief tract in unadorned prose, he 
trudged down to his local printer and ordered up enough copies to 
send to every college, municipal government, senator, and eminent 
scientist in the country - and then some more copies, to go to every 
major foreign university as well. Titled "Circular Number 1" - for 
indeed many more were to follow - the war hero thus introduced 
himself to the world on April 10, 1818:

"I declare that the earth is hollow and habitable within; containing 
a number of solid concentric spheres, one within the other, and that 
it is open at the poles twelve or sixteen degrees [i.e. 4000 to 6000 
miles wide]. 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 my 
undertaking.

"I ask one hundred brave companions, well equipped, to start from 
Siberia, in the fall season, with reindeers and sleighs, 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."

With this, Symmes thoughtfully attached a certificate of his sanity.

The circular was not well received. He was rebuffed by scholars and 
eminent statesmen across the country, and the French Academy of 
Sciences tabled his paper as unworthy of consideration. In a crowning 
insult, the London Morning Chronicle doubted the provenance of 
Symmes's certificate of sanity.

The theory itself was a relatively simple one, even if Symmes was at 
times a little unclear on specifics. Concentric spheres were, Symmes 
pointed out, a most efficient arrangement of natural architecture. 
Bones, plant stems, trees, lava tubes, insect limbs - all show the 
biodesign of hollow tubes or concentric structures.

"Enquire of the botanist, and he will tell you that the plants which 
spring up spontaneously agreeable to the established laws of nature, 
are hollow cylinders... Enquire of the anatomist, and he will tell 
you that the large bones of all animals are hollow... 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 simply applied this structure at a planetary level. And with 
the planet revolving, centrifugal force would fling material out 
along the axis, creating convenient holes at the poles through which 
intrepid souls like himself could venture into the inner world. 
Inside, Symmes believed, were multiple spheres, each accessible via a 
series of polar holes. Sunlight pouring through the holes and 
refracted through a dense interior atmosphere of "aerial elastic 
fluid" suffused these inner worlds with light and heat sufficient to 
sustain life.

Symmes believed this theory could account for all sorts of phenomena 
- magnetic fluctuations, the mysterious migrations of geese, caribou, 
and herring, and even the ocean's currents - for like a gigantic 
Charybdis, the earth's seas poured into one pole and gushed out from 
the other. Moreover, recent expeditions beyond the Arctic Circle had 
found open water where many had expected only frozen tundra. That, 
Symmes said, was from the outrush of warmed air from the interior 
world. After crossing "the icy circle" explorers would find a liquid 
and perhaps even tepid sea all around the poles, thus making for easy 
sailing into the interior realms, or what Symmes dubbed "the 
mid-plane space."

-- 
Joe McNally :: Flaneur at Large
"Uninformed and malevolent" - David Icke
"Probably Andy Roberts" - Green Anarchist
http://www.flaneur.org.uk - massive new London photos section!
-----
"Oh my god, they killed Kennedy! YOU BASTARDS!"

-- 
Terry W. Colvin, Sierra Vista, Arizona (USA) < fortean1@frontiernet.net >
     Alternate: < terry_colvin@hotmail.com >
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As it turned out, Symmes was not the first person to propose a Hollow 
Earth theory, and this was seized upon by learned critics to 
discredit him. In his 1618 work 'Epitome Astrononomiae Copernicanae', 
Johannes Kepler had pondered the notion of the earth and other 
planets being composed of concentric shells. As one reference book 
published by Abraham Rees in 1813, 'The Cyclopedia', put it: "if this 
[Kepler theory] be the case, it is possible that the ring of Saturn 
may be the fragment or remaining ruin of his former exterior shell, 
the rest of which is broken or fallen down upon the body of the 
planet."

The Hollow Earth theory continued to bear a distinguished lineage 
after Kepler's death. In 1692, Edmund Halley, the astronomer of comet 
fame, was confounded by distinct sets of fluctuating magnetic data. 
His ingenious solution was to theorize that three internal spheres 
within the planet, all revolving at different rates, were causing 
these distinct sets of data to appear. Perhaps, he imagined, there 
existed a luminous atmosphere between these shells, giving off 
sufficient light and heat to sustain life. In a 1716 article, he even 
suggested that the aurora borealis was caused by the escape of this 
gas.

Five years later, Cotton Mather cited Halley's theories in his book 
The Christian Philosopher, and by mid - century the Swiss 
mathematician Leonhardt Euler, the court mathematician to Frederick 
the Great of Russia, also lent his support to Halley's theory. But in 
the intervening century, little attention was paid to the notion, 
which never achieved any popular currency in the first place.

Symmes was unlikely to have read these obscure works, and so his was 
an act of discovery made all the more impressive by his humble 
education. Moreover, his theory included a polar opening - Symmes 
Hole, as it came to be widely known - and that meant that contact 
with the interior world could be made. In Halley's theory, the 
earth's outer shell was 500 miles thick and had no hole, which gave 
his readers little reason to pursue the theory much further. Symmes, 
though, had offered them a gateway to new worlds.

Symmes wrote and printed up seven more circulars over the next year, 
applying the Hollow Earth theory to such disparate subjects as the 
migration of caribou, the geometric principle of concentric spheres, 
and the formation of the Allegheny Mountains. After moving to 
Kentucky, he published another circular in August 1819, 'Light 
Between the Spheres', which was then reprinted to a wide audience in 
the National Intelligencer. Symmes was becoming known to the public, 
but mostly through ridicule; in Cincinnati, local mathematician 
Thomas Matthews derided Symmes for having written "a heap of learned 
rubbish." The more he wrote, the more Symme's was ridiculed. And the 
more he was ridiculed, the more determined and angry he got... and 
the more he wrote.

It soon became clear that neither the press nor the scientific 
establishment was going to bother with what they considered to be the 
lunatic ramblings of a half-educated veteran. His only other option 
was to take his case directly to the people. This was not an easy 
decision for Symmes. For all his bravery under fire, he was deeply 
uncomfortable appearing before any crowd, and he lacked magnetism or 
even the most basic qualities of public speaking:

"[There is] scarcely any thing in his exterior to characterize the 
secret operations of his mind, except... the glances of a bright blue 
eye, that often seems fixed on something beyond immediate surrounding 
objects. His head is round, and his face rather small and oval. His 
voice is somewhat nasal, and he speaks hesitatingly and with apparent 
labour. His manners are plain, and remarkable for native 
simplicity... Captain Symmes's want of a classical education, and 
philosophic attainments, perhaps, unfits him for the office of a 
lecturer."

It may be a measure of Symmes's ill-suitedness for the job that this 
description was written by James McBride, who was one of his greatest 
supporters.

Still, he had dedicated himself to spending the rest of his life, if 
needed, to validate his theory. He built himself a polished wooden 
globe, cleverly designed to reveal the polar holes and multiple 
shells within, and in 1820 he set about traveling from town to town 
on the American frontier - first to Cincinnati, and then to Kentucky 
and the small Ohio towns of Zanesville and Hamilton - lecturing 
before any crowd that would listen to him, at times even addressing 
rapt if rather uncritical groups of schoolchildren.

For all his fumbling inability as a speaker, when this modest man 
addressed a roomful of listeners, spinning his cross - sectioned 
globe as he spoke of worlds within worlds, a hush would fall across 
the room. And when he had finished and made a polite plea for his 
listeners to write to their civic leaders in support of his 
expedition, a few members of the crowd would come forth to donate a 
little cash or to pledge themselves as expedition volunteers should 
his ship ever sail. He did not make much money from lecturing - 
scarcely enough to travel on to the next town, really. But he did 
make believers. Perhaps to his consternation, his fame began to grow, 
and by the summer of 1820 the nature artist John Audubon even had him 
sit for a portrait to be displayed in the Western Museum.

It didn't take long for fiction writers to see the value of Symmes's 
theories. The same year that Symmes began lecturing, and just two 
years after his first missive, a pseudonymous "Captain Adam Seaborn', 
issued a science fiction novel titled 'Symzonia: Voyage of 
Discovery'. In it, Seaborn recounts how, in the thrall of the 
theories of the ingenious Symmes, he lured his sealing crew beyond 
the Antarctic rim and into the very bowels of the Earth.

As they approach the icy polar circle blocking the rim of the hole to 
the inner earth, and the ship's compass begins to go haywire, an 
argument ensues on deck. Symzonia is so obscure and difficult to find 
that at this point I must give over the rudder to Captain Seaborn, if 
only because most readers may never have another chance to read any 
part of his book.

"'And a pretty condition we shall be in, Capt. Seaborn, if the ice 
closes the passage after we have dashed through it!' replied Mr. 
Slim. 'We shipped with you, sir, for a sealing voyage; not for a 
voyage of discovery.'

"'You will please to remember, Mr. Slim, that I am expressly 
authorized by articles, to cruize and seek for seals wheresoever I 
may judge expedient and proper, and that any opposition to my 
authority will involve forfeiture of your share - recollect that, Mr. 
Slim.'

"'I do recollect that, sir; but at the same time I do know, Capt. 
Seaborn, that you have no right to hazard our lives, by running into 
dangers, greater than ever encountered by human beings, to gratify 
your mad passion for discovery, instead of pursuing the interest of 
all concerned, by endeavoring to find seals in the usual manner. How 
will you justify yourself to the world, to our families, or to your 
own conscience, if we should, after effecting a passage through this 
'icy hoop' you speak of, find it closed against our return, and thus 
be forever lost to our wives, our children, and society? We must in 
such a case all perish, and our blood would be upon your head.'

"A plague upon your lean carcass, thought I, how am I to answer so 
many impertinent questions. I could not tell him of my belief of open 
poles, affording a practicable passage to the internal world, and of 
my confident expectations of finding comfortable winter quarters 
inside; for he would take that as evidence of my being insane, and by 
means of it persuade the crew to dispossess me of my command, and 
confine me to cabin for the remainder of the voyage.

"After knitting my brows a short time, I replied 'Mr Slim, you are a 
sufficiently capable officer, and can get your duty well enough when 
you choose to do it, but you don't know every thing; your mind is too 
dense to admit the rays of intelligence. I would have you know, Sir, 
that I command this ship, and am not to be thwarted or dictated to by 
any man. I have noticed your rebellious spirit; now mark me, Sir, so 
sure as I have any more of.your opposition to my will, or hear any 
more of your murmuring; the moment I detect you in uttering one 
discouraging word in the hearing of any of my officers or men, - 1 
will confine you, and carry you home in irons, to take your trial for 
conspiring to make a revolt in the ship, which is death by the law; 
remember that, and go to your duty, Sir.'"

With his officers thus disciplined, Seaborn continues on to the inner 
world. There he finds a strange utopian land - Symzonia, he dubs it - 
populated by gravely wise, pale beings in plain white clothing, who 
know little of greed, envy, or vice. Gold and pearls are plentiful in 
this inner world - so much so, in fact, that they are something of a 
nuisance to the pragmatic inhabitants. They travel in airships and, 
for their defense, developed a giant mobile flamethrower of 
near-nuclear destructiveness. But, after much debate, they find the 
Externals (Seaborn and his crew) too corrupt in morals to be trusted, 
and deport them from their realm. A dejected Seaborn returns 
Gulliver-like to Boston, only to have his fortune swindled out of 
him, and he is ultimately reduced to telling his fantastic tale for a 
publisher's pennies.

-- 
Joe McNally :: Flaneur at Large
"Uninformed and malevolent" - David Icke
"Probably Andy Roberts" - Green Anarchist
http://www.flaneur.org.uk - massive new London photos section!
-----
"Oh my god, they killed Kennedy! YOU BASTARDS!"

-- 
Terry W. Colvin, Sierra Vista, Arizona (USA) < fortean1@frontiernet.net >
     Alternate: < terry_colvin@hotmail.com >
Home Page: < http://www.geocities.com/Area51/Stargate/8958/index.html >
Sites: Fortean Times * Northwest Mysteries * Mystic's Cyberpage *
   TLCB * U.S. Message Text Formatting (USMTF) Program
------------
Member: Thailand-Laos-Cambodia Brotherhood (TLCB) Mailing List
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Southeast Asia (SEA) service:
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   (Jan 71 - Aug 72)
Thailand/Laos
 - Telecommunications Center/U.S. Army Support Thailand
   (USARSUPTHAI), Camp Samae San (Jan 73 - Aug 73)
 - Special Security/Strategic Communications - Thailand
   (STRATCOM - Thailand), Phu Mu (Pig Mountain) Signal Site
   (Aug 73 - Jan 74)


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With public sentiment for a polar expedition fired by such accounts 
and by Symmes's lectures, by 1822, members of Congress found 
themselves being beseeched by enough citizens and petitions that 
action needed to be taken. In one of the stranger moments of the 
Senate's history, Richard Johnson, the Senator from Kentucky, took 
the floor with this proposal:

"Mr. R.M. JOHNSON, of Kentucky, presented a. petition from John 
Cleves Symmes, of Cincinnati, in Ohio, stating his belief of the 
existence of an inhabited concave to this globe; his desire to embark 
on a voyage of discovery, to one or other of the polar regions... and 
suggesting to Congress the equipment of two vessels of 250 to 300 
tons for the expedition, and the granting of such other aid as 
Government may deem requisite to promote the object. A motion was 
made to refer the petition to the Committee on Foreign Relations, 
which was refused; and after some conversation, it was decided to lay 
it on the table - ayes 25." (Annals of Congress, Senate Proceedings 
for Thursday March 7, 1822)

The initial suggestion that Johnson's petition first go to Committee 
of Foreign Relations was sensible, as the voyage would surely result 
in establishment of trade relations with inhabitants of the inner 
world. But despite having a number of supporters in the Senate, the 
entire petition was indefinitely tabled by the end of the day's 
debate.

Still more petitions and letters came in. The next January it came to 
a vote again, this time in the House of Representatives, but was 
again tabled. Supporters lobbied hard and in the following month 
seven more bills appeared in the House - five from Ohio, one from 
Pennsylvania, and one from South Carolina. Each was tabled or struck 
down in rapid succession.

Amidst these political maneuverings, ridicule and disbelief dogged 
Symmes in many quarters. The August 27, 1822, issue of the Charleston 
(West Virginia) Courier was fairly typical in this regard. In an 
article titled "The Year 2150 Anticipated," an anonymous satirist 
imagines a world in which Symmes is lauded to a ludicrous extent as 
the greatest genius who ever lived, thanks in large part to the 
usefulness of the inner world as a depository for criminals, the 
insane, and the criminally insane.

Symmes pushed onward. After another fruitless attempt in both houses 
of Congress in late 1823, he moved to a newly inherited family farm 
in Hamilton(!), Ohio, and took his case directly to his new home 
state, petitioning the Ohio General Assembly to pass a bill 
supporting his theory. It failed. Discouraged and nearly broke, 
Symmes's health began to falter, and he spent much of 1824 and 1825 
ill. But his earnest guilelessness had impressed some people so much 
that, whether or not they believed his theory, they would write to 
him or press just enough money into his palm to sustain him. When a 
benefit was held for him on March 24, 1824, .at the Cincinnati 
Theatre, Symmes was even treated to a bit of well - meaning doggerel 
penned for the occasion by local poet Moses Brooks:

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.

Symmes had also attracted a disciple who was to prove both his 
greatest boon and bane in the remaining years of his life. Jeremiah 
Reynolds was an ambitious young editor of the Wilmington Spectator, 
and a great admirer of Symmes's theories, when he approached the 
great man himself with a plan. What good was it, he argued, if Symmes 
only addressed paltry crowds of frontier bumpkins? The places to go 
were the great urban and manufacturing centers of the Northeast - 
rather than nibbling at the margins, to go straight for the financial 
and intellectual heart of the republic.

Symmes blanched at the thought of this. Facing crowds of simple 
homesteaders was nerve - wracking enough for him; the idea of 
lecturing before cosmopolitan audiences of intellectuals was simply 
terrifying. But Reynolds was persistent - they would both go! This 
mollified Symmes somewhat, for Reynolds had the polished magnetism 
and youthful energy that Symmes lacked. With great hesitation, Symmes 
set off for the East with his twenty-six-year-old disciple in 
September 1825.

Their timing was fortuitous, for another Symmes admirer - one who 
perhaps had his best interests a little closer to heart - had during 
Symmes's 1824 illness set about compiling a book that would explain 
Symmes's theory with much greater aplomb and clarity than Symmes 
himself had ever managed. Released just months after the tour began, 
James McBride's "Symmes's Theory of Concentric Spheres" anticipated 
the arguments and examples of nearly every subsequent work on the 
subject. And while McBride does not shy from some of the more arcane 
aspects of Symmes theories, such as the "elastic fluid" aerating the 
inner earth that acts as a sort of antigravity force, it's his homely 
examples that struck a chord with many readers. Any reader could 
ascertain the truth of Symmes's theory within a matter of minutes:

"If you will take the trouble to examine a mechanic grinding cutlery 
on a large stone that is smooth on the sides and has a quick motion, 
you may observe that if a certain portion of water be poured on the 
perpendicular side whilst the stone is turning, it does not settle or 
form itself into a body round the crank or axis, but forms itself on 
the side of the stone into something resembling concentric circles, 
one within another. The surface of the earth, I apprehend, revolves 
with much greater velocity than any grindstone; and the substances 
composing the spheres are much firmer than water."

For the keen observer - or the keen believer, at least - concentric 
circles were everywhere in nature, whether in the ripples propagating 
upon a pond or in the mysterious alignments of iron filings around a 
lodestone.

It was just such devices that Symmes and Reynolds unveiled to 
audiences in their traveling show, playing to packed houses at 50 
cents a head. With magnets, boxes of sand, whirling stones, and 
Symmes's well-worn wooden globe, audience members were brought face 
to face with the laws of the universe...  laws that inexorably led to 
a hollow earth. Skeptics who arrived at a Chambersburg, Pennsylvania, 
lecture in January 1826, one local editor observed, sat dumbstruck by 
the force of the pair's argument - "a breathless silence prevailed" - 
and erupted in applause at the end of the lecture. Even the editor, 
who had before written Symmes off as a loon, conceded the next day in 
his paper that

"Facts, the existence of which will not admit of a doubt, and the 
conclusions drawn from them are so natural... that they almost 
irresistibly enforce conviction on the mind... the cost of an 
experiment [expedition] would be trifling, and discoveries of 
importance would most probably be made, tho' Symmes should be found 
erroneous."

This last sentiment proved to be Symmes's undoing. The pair moved on 
to Harrisburg, where they addressed the Pennsylvania legislature, 
which responded with an enthusiastic letter of support for the man 
who had managed to stand up "in awe of the world's dread laugh." 
Still, Symmes's fragile health was aggravated to the breaking point 
by the touring, and after the two finally reached the apex of their 
tour, Philadelphia, Reynolds had to take on most of the lecturing. 
Reynolds had noticed the audience's enthusiasm for a polar 
expedition, regardless of the veracity of the Hollow Earth theory, 
and simply started omitting Symmes 's theory from most of his 
lecture. The two soon parted.

-- 
Joe McNally :: Flaneur at Large
"Uninformed and malevolent" - David Icke
"Probably Andy Roberts" - Green Anarchist
http://www.flaneur.org.uk - massive new London photos section!
-----
"Oh my god, they killed Kennedy! YOU BASTARDS!"

-- 
Terry W. Colvin, Sierra Vista, Arizona (USA) < fortean1@frontiernet.net >
     Alternate: < terry_colvin@hotmail.com >
Home Page: < http://www.geocities.com/Area51/Stargate/8958/index.html >
Sites: Fortean Times * Northwest Mysteries * Mystic's Cyberpage *
   TLCB * U.S. Message Text Formatting (USMTF) Program
------------
Member: Thailand-Laos-Cambodia Brotherhood (TLCB) Mailing List
   TLCB Web Site: < http://www.tlc-brotherhood.org >[Allies, CIA/NSA,
                  and Vietnam veterans welcome]
Southeast Asia (SEA) service:
Vietnam - Theater Telecommunications Center/HHC, 1st Aviation Brigade
   (Jan 71 - Aug 72)
Thailand/Laos
 - Telecommunications Center/U.S. Army Support Thailand
   (USARSUPTHAI), Camp Samae San (Jan 73 - Aug 73)
 - Special Security/Strategic Communications - Thailand
   (STRATCOM - Thailand), Phu Mu (Pig Mountain) Signal Site
   (Aug 73 - Jan 74)


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Symmes staggered on through the winter of 1826 - 27, lecturing with 
his props and his grand notions throughout New York and New England 
and all the way up into Canada, but the strain of stage fright 
exacerbating his already poor health was simply too much, and he 
called off the rest of his tour. For the next two years, he stayed 
with an old friend in New jersey, hoping merely to gain enough 
strength to go back home to his Ohio farm. When he finally did make 
the long journey back home, his son later recalled, "He was so feeble 
that he had to be conveyed on a bed, placed in a spring wagon, to his 
home near Hamilton."

 From his sickbed he continued to churn out circulars on his proposed 
expedition, but with bitter knowledge that Reynolds, who had once 
promised so much, was now in Washington lobbying Congress to explore 
the South Pole... for whaling and sealing.

In May 1829, Symmes died, believing right up to the end that the 
greatest discovery in the human history had eluded his grasp.

And yet the dream did not die with the dreamer. Although Reynolds 
succeeded in getting President Adams's approval for an expedition, 
successor Andrew Jackson canceled the project, and it was not revived 
for nearly a decade. But in the meantime Reynolds found a sympathetic 
ear in a wealthy New York patron named Dr. Watson and Reynolds 
outfitted an expedition for the South Pole and set off in the SS 
Annawan from New York Harbor in October 1829. Upon reaching sight of 
the shores of Antarctica, they found their way through the "icy 
circle" blocked by towering icebergs and crashing fields of floating 
ice:

"After coasting the base of several icebergs and, making our way 
through the field - ice floating around us, we reached the 
neighbourhood of a long and dangerous reef... The dashing of the 
heavy swell upon the breakers, as it poured from the south, heaved in 
vast quantities of field -ice. As they plunged forward upon other 
floes in advance, the whole body was broken into atoms, and a mist, 
like the smoke from the crater of a volcano.... Let the imagination 
of the reader picture the savage features of the shore, whence the 
overtowering cliffs of ice are not unfrequently separated from the 
main body by the undermining rush of the billows; let him conceive 
the plunge of the disparted ruin; the thundering crash of its 
collision with the ocean; the vortex of foam and spray which mark 
where, it fell; and even then, be his fancy ever so vivid, he will 
fail to realize the sublime realities of the Antarctick."

Sublime as it was, it was also impassable. On their way back, the 
crew mutinied and stranded Reynolds and Watson, and then turned the 
Annawan from polar expedition to a more profitable trade: piracy. 
Reynolds wound up wandering the rocky shores of Chile, briefly served 
as a soldier in a tribal revolt, and eventually joined the passing 
frigate Potomac as a secretary, spending 1831 to 1834 
circumnavigating the globe.

After returning, he quickly published a popular account of the 
Potomac's voyage, and then went back to earning his pay by lecturing 
on the poles and the hollow earth. At one lecture in Baltimore, it is 
thought that Henry Allan sat in the audience listening intently. He 
went home and related all he heard to his adopted brother - Edgar 
Allan Poe - and the greatest Symmes convert ever was created.

The hollow earth became an obsession for Poe. Broke, alcoholic, and 
living on bread and molasses in cramped urban hovels with his 
tubercular teenage wife, the notion of a wide-open frontier beneath 
one's feet had a understandable pull upon his soul. His first 
published story, "MS Found in a Bottle," relates the disastrous end 
of a ship approaching one of the polar holes. In the only novel he 
ever wrote, the "Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym", the titular 
narrator discovers a lost Antarctic island populated by savage exiles 
from Symzonia, and breaks off in the closing lines with a 
kaleidoscopic plunge into the Interior World:

"And now we rushed into the embraces of the cataract, where a chasm 
threw itself open to receive us. But there arose in our pathway a 
shrouded human figure, very far larger in its proportions than any 
dweller among men. And the hue of the skin of the figure was of the 
perfect whiteness of the snow."

When Poe printed the first installment of Pym in the January 1837 
issue of the magazine he edited, The Southern Literary Messenger, he 
pointedly printed it alongside a factual lecture on polar exploration 
by Reynolds.

By mid-century, Jules Verne had steeped himself in the work of Poe, 
Reynolds, and Symmes enough that he wrote three Hollow Earth works - 
a continuation of Poe's Pym, titled "An Antarctic Mystery"; his 1866 
novel "The Adventures of Captain Hatteras"; and his famous "Journey 
to the Center of the Earth". These were not mere works of fancy. Not 
only had no one had ventured far enough south to entirely disprove 
Symmes yet, but the 1848 discovery of a frozen woolly mammoth in the 
Siberian tundra seemed to prove Symmes's contention that just beyond 
the cold polar rim was a world plentifully populated by herds of 
animal life.

And if the ideas of Symmes had not yet faded, it was due in no small 
part to the efforts of his own family. It is a mark of Symmes's good 
nature that even after forsaking a steady career to face a decade of 
poverty, illness, and ridicule, he was most fondly remembered by his 
own family. After his son Americus Vespucci Symmes erected the 
monumental obelisk to his father in Hamilton, he went on to publish a 
booklet updating his father's writings, "The Symmes Theory of 
Concentric Spheres" (1878). He did this in part because Hollow Earth 
theories had now become popular enough that other writers were now 
passing off Symmes's ideas as their own.

For his zealous lobbying for his late father in newspapers and 
magazines, Americus received his own share of ridicule. When he sued 
a company for not fixing holes in the local turnpike, during the 
trial their lawyer turned to the jury and archly remarked, "Mr. 
Symmes could see a hole where nobody else could, like his father 
before him: indeed, it seems to be a family failing."

Symmes's progeny could hardly help inheriting a propensity for 
ambitious pursuits of the impossible; another son, following in his 
father's quixotic footsteps, retired as a captain from the army and 
moved to Germany to build a "flying machine " - which, regrettably, 
did not fly.

By the late 19th century, expeditions had begun to approach the 
poles; the expected holes were not there, and thus the Hollow Earth 
the cry fell in a decaying cultural orbit, sinking from dreamy 
scientific speculation to the discredited obsession of ignorant 
cranks and savvy charlatans. One such fellow was a Civil War veteran 
and quack herbalist bearing the melodious moniker of Cyrus Reed Teed. 
He published a divine vision in 1870, "The Illumination of Koresh: 
Marvelous Experience of the Great Alchemist at Utica, N. Y." It 
argued that the earth was hollow and that we lived on the inner 
surface of the sphere, looking in toward a center filled with 
diminutive planets and stars. At the center of it all was a sun that 
was light on one side and dark on the other, thus producing the 
effect of day and night.

A handsome and charismatic thirty - one - year - old, at one point 
Teed attracted up to four thousand mostly female followers. And like 
any good prophet, he declared himself the messiah and changed his 
name from Cyrus to the Hebrew equivalent, Koresh. He then proceeded 
to move his congregation to a commune outside of Ft. Meyers, Florida. 
He prepared for the arrival of eight million followers in his 
self-proclaimed Capital of the World. Two hundred showed up.

Teed had made a point of sending his key works, like "Cellular 
Cosmogony" (1898), to libraries around the world. These and his 
numerous pamphlets and magazines later turned up in, of all places, 
Nazi Germany. Nazism's anti-intellectual bent made the Reich 
susceptible to pseudo-science, and so when German aviator Peter 
Bender started preaching Teed's "Hohlwelthehre" (Hollow Earth 
Doctrine), it was not too surprising that his theory found some favor 
in the German admiralty. But this interest didn't do Bender much good 
- he died in a concentration camp.

When Teed himself had died in 1908, his followers gathered and 
dutifully waited for him to resurrect himself. After a few days, 
though, the messiah had developed a definite pong, and finally local 
health officials pushed their way through the crowd and 
unceremoniously shoveled the immortal prophet onto a waiting cart. 
Perhaps his ostensive employer was unamused by it all, for Teed's 
body was later swept out to sea in a hurricane.

Still, for a long and charming spell in the history of science, it 
was possible for a reasonable fellow to believe that entire worlds, 
unexplored and teeming with life, existed right beneath our very 
feet. It is not strange that Edgar Allan Poe, who had spent much of 
his final days attempting a sort of Unified Field Theory of the 
universe in his cryptic essay "Eureka," would cling until his last 
desperate moments to the majestic vision of Symmes and his disciples.

Poe had contracted rabies - enemies later claimed alcohol poisoning - 
and was found senseless in the streets of Baltimore. In the final and 
fatal stages of infection, delirious with a fever and maddened with 
the excruciating throat spasms of hydrophobia, he thrashed about in 
convulsions of agony on his hospital pallet. The nurses could not 
understand what he was raving after as he cried over and over for the 
unseen guide to the underworld that awaited him:

"Reynolds, Reynolds... Reynolds!"
-- 
Joe McNally :: Flaneur at Large
"Uninformed and malevolent" - David Icke
"Probably Andy Roberts" - Green Anarchist
http://www.flaneur.org.uk - massive new London photos section!
-----
"Oh my god, they killed Kennedy! YOU BASTARDS!"

-- 
Terry W. Colvin, Sierra Vista, Arizona (USA) < fortean1@frontiernet.net >
     Alternate: < terry_colvin@hotmail.com >
Home Page: < http://www.geocities.com/Area51/Stargate/8958/index.html >
Sites: Fortean Times * Northwest Mysteries * Mystic's Cyberpage *
   TLCB * U.S. Message Text Formatting (USMTF) Program
------------
Member: Thailand-Laos-Cambodia Brotherhood (TLCB) Mailing List
   TLCB Web Site: < http://www.tlc-brotherhood.org >[Allies, CIA/NSA,
                  and Vietnam veterans welcome]
Southeast Asia (SEA) service:
Vietnam - Theater Telecommunications Center/HHC, 1st Aviation Brigade
   (Jan 71 - Aug 72)
Thailand/Laos
 - Telecommunications Center/U.S. Army Support Thailand
   (USARSUPTHAI), Camp Samae San (Jan 73 - Aug 73)
 - Special Security/Strategic Communications - Thailand
   (STRATCOM - Thailand), Phu Mu (Pig Mountain) Signal Site
   (Aug 73 - Jan 74)


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