hollow earth essay

[Joseph Tracy]

That article was originally published in McSweeney's Quarterly Issue #4- Late Winter, 2000 .   It is an enjoyable read.
On Jan 20, 2011, at 5:41 PM, Joseph Tracy wrote:

> I was given a collection of stuff from McSweeny's from a friend for christmas and just read a kind of historic essay called Symmes Hole by Paul Collins. It traces the history of hollow earth theories from Johannes Kepler( 1618) through Edmund Halley (1692) to Cotton Mather (1716) to an American  war hero from the war of 1812 named John Symmes. Symmmes took up the idea with a passion and elaborated on the structure of the hollow earth including concentric spheres like an onion. He wanted an expedition to one of the poles where he surmised the opening would be found, and the idea was proposed in the US congress a couple times . Symmes' theory was also taken up by the editor of the Wilmington Spectator , Jeremiah Reynolds,  and a writer named James McBride. Reynolds got John Q Adams to approve an expedition, but Andrew Jackson canceled it . Then a wealthy Dr. Watson funded it and Reynolds sailed for Antarctica. It was impassable and the crew mutinied and took up piracy, stranding Reynolds in Chile, from whence he  ended up circumnavigating the globe and wrote about his adventures. This was read by Edgar Allen Poe who wrote his only novel which ended up with adventurers plunging into the interior of the earth where the inhabitants were white as snow. 
> 
> All these books were read by Jules Verne who continued the theme most famously in Journey to the Center of the Earth. As polar expeditions found no entries to the hollow earth it was relegated to fiction with one final and gloriously weird exception. Cyrus Reed Teed published a divine vision in 1870 arguing that the earth was hollow and that we were looking inward to diminutive stars and planets. He was good looking and got 4000 mostly female followers.  He then declared himself messiah moved his congregation to Fort Meyers Florida and died waiting for the end of the world.   
> 
> Collins will be publishing a book called Loser: A Brief History of Noble Failures.