How One Man Nearly Persuaded the U.S. Government that the Earth was Hollow: The Remarkable Story of John Cleves Symmes Jr.

 

On November 5, 1780 John Cleves Symmes Jr. was born in Sussex County, New Jersey.   He was named after his uncle John Cleves Symmes who had served as both a delegate from New Jersey to the Continental Congress and as a Colonel during the American Revolution.

As a teenager, young John arbitrarily placed the  suffix “Jr.” onto the end of his name so that local residents could tell him apart from his famous patriot uncle. 

John Cleves Symmes was a voracious reader growing up, and the scope of his intellectual interests was wide and varied, ranging from engineering to natural science to philosophy and religion.  It seemed as if John Cleves Symmes Jr. would be destined for a successful career in academia.

 Soon, though at the age of twenty-two, the younger John followed in his elder uncle’s footsteps by gaining a commission as an Ensign in the United States Army in March of 1802.

He went on to receive an officer’s commission as a Lieutenant in the 1st Infantry Regiment in 1804 and was then, thanks in large part to his family connections, promoted to the rank of Captain only three years later in 1807.  

On Christmas Day 1808 Captain John Symmes married Mary Anne Lockwood, a widow with six children.  Mary and John would go on to have one daughter of their own together and throughout his life, Symmes would raise all seven children as if they were his own.

In 1814, at the height of the War of 1812 between the United States and Great Britain Symmes was dispatched to the Missouri Territory with the 1st Infantry Regiment where he served admirably in combat before finally being honorably discharged from the army at the war’s end in 1816.

Upon his discharge from the army Symmes moved with his wife and their seven children to St.Louis and went into business as a fur trader, but by 1819 with his business venture failing, Symmes now near bankrupt and wishing to be able to devote more time to his own personal “scientific” studies, moved with his family yet again, this time settling on farmland owned by his relatives near the town of Newport, Kentucky.

During his time in the army, between helping to defend scattered American outposts across the Missouri Territory and helping to raise seven children, Captain John Cleves Symmes had been hard at work on what he considered to be a new and revolutionary scientific theory.

On April 10, 1818 while still living in St. Louis Symmes published a rather lengthy pamphlet that he entitled Circular No. 1.  

In Circular No. 1 Symmes stated, “I declare 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.”

Symmes illustration from Circular No. 1

To prove that he wasn’t a man to be taken lightly, and that he was in earnest with regards to everything that he wrote, decorated veteran, respected theorist and dedicated family man John Cleves Symmes went on to write that, “I pledge my life in support of this truth, and am ready to explore the hollow earth, if the world will support and aid me in the undertaking.”

Symmes sent 500 self-published copies of Circular No. 1 all on his own to, “each notable foreign government, reigning prince, legislative body, city legislature, college and philosophical society...as far as the 500 copies would go.”

In the process he bankrupted both himself, and his family, and precipitated their abrupt move from St. Louis to land owned by Symmes’ family that had been gifted to him on the border of Ohio and Kentucky.

The world did (somewhat) take notice of Captain John Cleves Symmes and the Hollow Earth Theory he espoused in Circular No 1.  A few, mostly those who had served with Symmes during the War of 1812, hailed John Cleves Symmes as, “the Newton of the west,” but most simply laughed him to shame.

Years later, in 1878, when writing about his stepfather and the “world’s” reaction to the publication of Circular No. 1  Symmes’ stepson Americus would recount, “It’s (Circular No. 1) reception by the public can be easily imagined.  It was overwhelmed with ridicule as the production of a distempered imagination or the result of partial insanity.”

But if nothing else, Captain John Cleves Symmes, was persistent and he remained undaunted despite the fact that Circular No. 1 and the Hollow Earth Theory it proposed quickly became a laughingstock in newspapers across the United States.

Living proof that there is no such thing as “bad publicity” Captain Symmes, through his family reputation and aggressive marketing of  Circular No. 1 was able to scrape together enough money, and accumulate enough supporters and benefactors to be able to produce even more circulars and to go on a lecture tour across the United States attempting to drum up support for his Hollow Earth Theory and gain funding for an expedition to the South Pole, that Symmes was convinced would prove the validity of his theory.

Symmes believed that due to the earth’s centrifugal force our planet was flattened at the poles and that a passage to what he deemed “inner earth” could be reached through either the North or South Pole.  He believed that there was an arctic opening about 4,000 miles wide and an antarctic opening about 6,000 miles that led inside earth.

Symmes drawing of an arctic hole to inner earth

Though ridiculed by most, in 1820 John Cleves Symmes began to travel across the United States, lecturing at colleges, town halls and anywhere else he could find an audience.  Using a wooden globe as a prop to illustrate his Hollow Earth Theory, it seems as if John Cleves Symmes was quite the orator.  In his book Sea of Glory: America’s Voyage of Discovery, the U.S. Exploring Expedition, 1838-1842 author and historian Nathaniel Philbrick reports that Symmes kept audiences, “spell-bound and captivated,” when explaining his Hollow Earth Theory and the need for a polar expedition to be launched to visit inner earth.

It was while on his lecture tour, in Ohio, that Symmes theory caught the attention of well known newspaper editor Jeremiah N. Reynolds.  After hearing Symmes give a presentation on Hollow Earth Theory in 1823 at the University of Ohio Reynolds became an instant convert.  He abandoned his position as chief editor of The Spectator, a newspaper based out of the city of Wilmington, Ohio; sold his controlling interest in the paper and then used the money to join Symmes full time on his Hollow Earth lecture circuit across the country.

Author Nathaniel Philbrick notes of Symmes and Reynolds that, “[T]ogether, this improbable duo spoke to sold old lecture halls across the United States.”

Though John Cleves Symmes succeeded in making many converts to his Hollow Earth Theory, eventually, the more level-headed Reynolds would break with most of Symmes theories.  

Reynolds would disavow Symmes assertion in Circular No. 1 that the inside of the earth was inhabited by a race of intelligent subterranean beings.  And while John Cleves Symmes never stopped believing that there were giant polar holes located at the top and bottom of our planet, Reynolds moderated Symmes message a bit, and instead of calling for a polar expedition to be launched to the center of the earth lectured, rather, on the need for the United States to launch an exploratory expedition to chart the farthest reaches of the south Pacific and gain a better understanding of the earth’s true shape.

In 1828, influential former newspaper editor from Ohio, Jeremiah N. Reynolds successfully lobbied the United States House of Representatives to pass a resolution that would ask then President John Quincy Adams to send a research vessel to the south Pacific for the purpose of investigating the truth behind the existence of a possibly hollow earth.

Jeremiah N. Reynolds

President John Quincy Adams wrote of Hollow Earth Theory in his diary that, “Mr. Reynolds is a man who has been lecturing about the country in support of Captain John Cleves Symmes’s theory that the earth is a hollow sphere….his lectures are said to be well attended and much approved...but Symmes’s theory itself has been so much ridiculed and in truth is so visionary that Reynolds has now varied his purpose to the proposition of fitting out a voyage of circumnavigation to the Southern Ocean…”

It’s unclear whether sitting United States President John Quincy Adams actually believed in any part of John Cleves Symmes Hollow Earth Theory, or whether he simply supported Reynolds only after he had already distanced himself from Symmes, but as it were, President John Quincy Adams was at least intrigued  enough in 1828 to approve federal funding for Reynolds exploratory expedition. But after Adams lost a bitter and heated  Presidential election to Andrew Jackson in November of that year, his successor promptly scrapped all plans and withdrew all funding for a polar exploratory expedition in March of 1829.  The historical record makes it abundantly clear that President Andrew Jackson fervently believed that all theories pertaining to the concept of a “Hollow Earth” were utter insanity.

For his part, Jeremiah N. Reynolds would go on to privately fund his own exploratory expedition to the South Pole in 1829.  Reynolds' privately funded ship left New York City to much fanfare, but his expedition would end in disaster, however, when the crew of his own ship mutinied, on their return journey back to the United States, after having reached the shore of Antarctica and found nothing.  Reynolds, along with the ship’s artist John Frampton Watson, were abandoned and left on shore in Chile.  It would take Jeremiah N. Reynolds and John Frampton Watson almost two years to make it back to New York City.

John Quincy Adams

In 1829, while his former partner was marooned in South America, John Cleves Symmes unexpectedly passed away at the age of forty-nine on May 28, 1829 in the town of Hamilton, Ohio.  John Cleve Symmes continued to lecture on his Hollow Earth Theory right up until his dying day.  Though he left his family in debt, and is largely forgotten by all except the most fringe theorists today, in his time, John Cleves Symmes left a lasting legacy and inspired many of the 19th century’s greatest creative thinkers.

John Cleve Symmes Hollow Earth Theory directly influenced works such as Jules Verne’s Journey to the Center of the Earth and H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine.  Eventually, in 1838 the United States would launch a great exploratory expedition of global circumnavigation across the south Pacific thanks in large part to many of the ideas first proposed by Symmes and Reynolds.

Today, a monument called “The Hollow Earth Monument” stands along Sycamore Street in Hamilton, Ohio on land once owned by the Symmes family near the spot where John Cleve Symmes passed away over one-hundred and ninety years ago.  This monument, and its quirky shape, are a testament to the lasting power of one man’s gift of perseverance and determination in the face of ridicule.  To this very day, believe it or not, John Cleve Symmes, who in many ways is the founder and father of Hollow Earth Theory still has his disciples...