Transcript
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Speaker: Hello, and welcome to Curious Objects, brought to you by the magazine Antiques.
Speaker: I'm Ben Miller.
Speaker: We hear a lot these days about conspiracy theories.
Speaker: There are the truthers, the birthers, the anti-vaxxers, there's QAnon, Pizzagate, etc., etc., etc., so much so that there's actually now a significant and growing body of academic research on the subject.
Speaker: And while there are some classics like the moon landing being staged by Stanley Kubrick, I think it's fair to say that we mostly think of conspiracy theories as an Internet phenomenon and a product of the modern age.
Speaker: But today's curious object is going to connect us with the conspiracy theory which originates at least as far back as the 17th century.
Speaker: Now, it was debunked in the 18th century, but if there's one thing we know about conspiracy theories, it's that debunking them and getting rid of them are two very different things.
Speaker: So this object is a globe, which dates to the early 19th century.
Speaker: And although that's 200 years ago now, and it relates to an idea that had already been disproven 100 years before that, I'm sorry to say that the theory is still alive and well today in 2020.
Speaker: With me today to talk about this unusual globe and its very stubborn owner is Robert Peck, Curator of Art and Artifacts and Senior Fellow of the Academy of Natural Sciences of Drexel University in Philadelphia and the author of numerous books on the history of natural science.
Speaker: Bob, thanks so much for joining me.
Speaker: Thanks for the invitation.
Speaker: Let's start with this globe.
Speaker: What exactly is unusual about this globe?
Speaker: Well, it's a very modest globe by some standards, but I think a charming one by others.
Speaker: It's made of wood, completely hand-painted, about the size of a cantaloupe, I guess.
Speaker: And it shows all of the parts of the world that were known at the time, not in a great deal of detail, but
Speaker: the gist of them.
Speaker: But what makes it unusual is it's got two huge openings at either end, north and south.
Speaker: And these are what became known as Sims Holes.
Speaker: The globe was created for a man named John Cleve Sims, who had this theory you referenced at the opening to a concept that the earth was hollow.
Speaker: And that if we could just get to the ends of it, north or south, we could get inside and we'd find all kinds of interesting things.
Speaker: Animals, plants, people, you name it.
Speaker: They were all there as far as he was concerned.
Speaker: And this was a globe that he used as he traveled around the country giving talks and trying to convince the public that his theory was correct.
Speaker: So there's a lot to unpack there.
Speaker: This is obviously a bit of an outlandish idea to the modern ear.
Speaker: But let's focus for the moment on the globe itself.
Speaker: What do we know about its manufacturer?
Speaker: Was this a special order for Mr. Sims?
Speaker: No, well, it was definitely made for Mr. Sims, but I don't think we can call it an order.
Speaker: I think it was lovingly made by one of his friends and disciples, a guy named James McBride, in about 1820.
Speaker: Globes generally that period were, the surfaces were from printed material, which could allow a great deal of specificity, and then they'd be applied to the surface.
Speaker: In this case, it's a wooden globe, and all of the cartography is actually just handwritten on it.
Speaker: There's a little bit of color.
Speaker: There's some sort of blue edges along the coastlines of the continents, but mostly it's a calligraphic impulse on the globe itself.
Speaker: And it's rather startling to look at because, you know, when you first mentioned to me the idea of this hollow earth theory and the notion that there are holes in the North and South Pole that open up into this wondrous interior world, I had sort of imagined, you know, a pinprick sized hole on each of the poles.
Speaker: But no, at least on this globe, these holes are really enormous.
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: If you look at the globe itself, the northern opening is about the size of North America itself.
Speaker: In his written accounts of this, he made a slightly more modest description of the poles.
Speaker: He said that he thought they were 12 to 15 degrees or about 4,000 to 6,000 miles.
Speaker: But still, that's far wider than a pinbrick and something not hard to miss if you were traveling up in that part of the world.
Speaker: Yeah, I would think so.
Speaker: And so we're going to get in a little bit, we're going to get to the history of exploration as it ties into this idea.
Speaker: But let's go back to the origins of the theory itself.
Speaker: And I think this is a little bit mysterious, actually.
Speaker: But the idea that there is an interior world, you know, far below the surface, that's nothing new.
Speaker: I mean, you know, the Greeks had had ideas of Hades and
Speaker: We know about hell, we know about Hindu and Buddhist traditions have some kind of underworld concept as well.
Speaker: So this goes back thousands of years in one form or other.
Speaker: I was actually surprised to find that even Edmund Haley, the astronomer, in 1692, he proposed this idea that the Earth is actually formed of multiple concentric spheres.
Speaker: Yes, spheres within spheres.
Speaker: And actually, Johannes Kepler had come up with this same idea even earlier, 1618, he had suggested the same.
Speaker: All right.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So these are not fringe thinkers.
Speaker: We're talking about mainstays of scientific progress who really believed that if you could drill down deep enough through the surface, you would come to some other kind of land.
Speaker: Yes, and by the time Sims came up with this theory himself in the early 19th century, he was probably not aware of those earlier concepts.
Speaker: I doubt he had access to their books or had even heard of them.
Speaker: But it's a theme that keeps bubbling to the surface, if you will, every few generations.
Speaker: Now, that's interesting because, you know, in the early 19th century, when Sims is developing this theory, you know, this is the age of exploration or maybe the tale of what we would think of as the age of exploration.
Speaker: But for the first time, you know, there is actually some sense that there might be a capacity to explore these polar regions where you would expect to find these enormous gaping holes.
Speaker: And there must have been some special allure to the notion that maybe, just maybe, this hypothesis was actually testable.
Speaker: If you could get an expedition together and go find that gaping maw,
Speaker: that there was this land waiting for you.
Speaker: You know, it's one of these sort of theories that's hard enough to prove that it's alluring, but it seems in this period, maybe it's starting to become possible to actually explore those regions.
Speaker: Yes, I think that's it.
Speaker: That was part of the appeal to Sims, certainly, that now the United States had the capacity to send an expedition of its own.
Speaker: And he simply thought other earlier explorers hadn't had the
Speaker: the ambition or the imagination to go looking for it.
Speaker: He was certainly aware of Captain Cook's voyages and knew that he'd been to many other parts of the globe, but he said, no one's really gone north or south, and here's our chance.
Speaker: So who was this guy, Sims, and why did he fixate on this idea?
Speaker: I don't
Speaker: Well, we don't know too much about why he fixated on it.
Speaker: He was a retired military officer who had served in the War of 1812.
Speaker: He was not an academic per se, but he strove to enter into the academic world.
Speaker: And in fact, when he sent out his
Speaker: proclamation declaring this discovery, he sent it to all the sort of academic institutions he could find in the country, colleges, museums like ours, even some government officials.
Speaker: And in it, it was a very short, concise statement.
Speaker: He simply said, and I'll quote him here, 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 12 to 16 degrees, which is about, as I mentioned earlier, 4 to 6,000 miles wide.
Speaker: 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 the undertaking.
Speaker: That is really an extraordinary statement to me because I think two things really stand out to me about it.
Speaker: The first is his incredible confidence.
Speaker: You know, he doesn't say, oh, I suspect there might be a hole in the pole that leads into an interior Earth.
Speaker: He says, I declare that there is.
Speaker: Yes, there's great confidence.
Speaker: That's not ambiguous.
Speaker: Absolutely.
Speaker: And then he also asked for some help.
Speaker: He put sort of a PS at the bottom of his broadside.
Speaker: He said that he, here, I quote him again, I asked 100 brave companions well equipped to start from Siberia in the fall season.
Speaker: with reindeer and sleighs on the ice of the frozen sea.
Speaker: Engaged, we find warm and rich land stocked with thrifty vegetables and animals, if not men, on reaching one degree northward of latitude 32.
Speaker: We will return in the succeeding spring.
Speaker: So he was not just giving out a theory, he was actually offering to put his own life on the line to make this expedition.
Speaker: Unfortunately, he was not in a position to fund it, and so that's where he began to seek out public support.
Speaker: And the globe that we spoke about at the beginning is the thing he used as he went on this lecture circuit, trying to convince the general public that the theory was good and to convince Congress that the expedition should be funded.
Speaker: That feels like more familiar territory.
Speaker: I mean, the promise of wondrous, warm and bountiful lands that anyone who chooses to cast their lot in with him are going to discover along with him.
Speaker: And I'm sure all the riches that come with it.
Speaker: You know, that's a formula that's been tried and true since the early days of European exploration of the New World.
Speaker: You know, if anything, it's a bit anachronistic.
Speaker: I mean, it's the sort of thing you would expect to hear out of a 16th century conquistador, you know, throw in your lot with me and you'll have wealth beyond your wildest dreams.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: Well, Simms had actually already come up with a fairly detailed description of what he imagined the interior was going to be.
Speaker: He wrote it in the form of a book, which he did not assign his own name to.
Speaker: The pseudonym for the author was Captain Adam Seaborne, appropriately enough, and it was called Sinzonia, Voyage of Discovery.
Speaker: And in that book, Captain Seaborn finds one of these holes, goes into it, and meets all these interesting people who are living there.
Speaker: And he appreciates, of course, in the book, Captain Sims for his sublime theory and so on, all this giving credit.
Speaker: But it's sort of charming the way he describes what he finds.
Speaker: These humans who were led by someone called the, quote, best man and a council of worthies and an executive body of efficients.
Speaker: He said that the land was full of gold, which, as you say, is a traditional way of luring explorers, but that the people there showed no sign of greed, vice, or envy.
Speaker: Now, where did he get all this information?
Speaker: Well, it's kind of cobbled together.
Speaker: Some of it is from other exploratory books available, expedition reports and so on.
Speaker: But I think the rest of it, he pretty much made up out of whole cloth.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: But he was, despite sort of the fictionalized nature of this account, you know, he was very committed, as you say, to the extent that he went on a lecture tour, he brought this globe around with him, he tried to rally support.
Speaker: So how successful was he?
Speaker: Well, he was actually quite successful in the long run.
Speaker: There were a total of nine proposals that were submitted to Congress, and eventually one was passed in a resolution of 1828, which authorized the president to send the expedition looking for the
Speaker: holes at the ends of the earth as long as he could do it without a special appropriation.
Speaker: Congress then, as now, is always a little leery of spending too much money.
Speaker: So they're saying it's okay to go ahead and do this, but we'll have to find the money elsewhere.
Speaker: Now, this plan, although it was approved with the encouragement of John Quincy Adams, it was squelched during Andrew Jackson's administration.
Speaker: I see.
Speaker: So John Quincy Adams was a fan, but then he left office and Andrew Jackson did not continue the executive branch interest in the project.
Speaker: Exactly.
Speaker: So it took another 10 years, but eventually the...
Speaker: Congress did support an expedition, the United States Exploring Expedition, or sometimes called the Wilkes Expedition, because Captain Charles Wilkes was its leader.
Speaker: And that was a four-year expedition that involved six ships and included nine sort of citizen scientists, if you will, who were charged with surveying some of the world's uncharted coastlines.
Speaker: And Nathaniel Philbrick has written a wonderful book about this called Sea of Glory, which I recommend to people.
Speaker: It was a fascinating expedition and they did accomplish quite a lot, including getting to the Antarctic.
Speaker: They did reach the Antarctic continent and never found a hole, of course, but they did cover a lot of new ground.
Speaker: And it was the first big U.S. exploring expedition.
Speaker: after Lewis and Clark, and certainly the only one to include the Navy.
Speaker: We'll be back in a minute with Robert Peck.
Speaker: If you'd like to see images of The Globe and of Syme's Broadside, I encourage you to go to themagazineantiques.com slash podcast or check out my Instagram at Objective Interest.
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Speaker: Thank you so much.
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Speaker: Well, now I want to go back for just a minute because we sort of alighted this fact that, you know, Congress was somehow persuaded to support Sim's proposed expedition.
Speaker: And I just want to ask about, I mean, this is a crazy idea, right?
Speaker: I mean, let's be honest.
Speaker: He pulled out this theory, this hollow earth theory, essentially out of nowhere.
Speaker: He proclaimed that there was gold and, you know,
Speaker: utopian civilization, etc., etc., with no evidence whatsoever.
Speaker: In fact, with all the physical and scientific evidence suggesting that this was a total impossibility.
Speaker: And yet Congress agrees to support this expedition, and the president, John Quincy Adams, actually seems to be interested in funding it,
Speaker: How does that happen?
Speaker: I mean, I'm not going to suggest that Congress is incapable of bouts of insanity, but was this some kind of collective delusion or was there something else going on?
Speaker: Was there some other motivation or incentive for them to support that kind of exploration?
Speaker: I think there was quite a lot going on behind the scenes, and some of it was nationalistic and
Speaker: It was the thought of having the United States willing and able to send an expedition of this magnitude kind of on a par with Captain Cook, granted many years later, but still it was a coming of age for young America.
Speaker: There was also some economic incentive.
Speaker: Traders, particularly the people involved with the whale industry, were lobbying Congress to make some of these trips to the north and south because they wanted to know more about those seas.
Speaker: Was there a big open polar sea as had been speculated?
Speaker: And if so, does it contain whales and other maybe even fur-bearing animals like the sea otters that they'd been bringing back from the Pacific Northwest?
Speaker: There was lots of economic...
Speaker: incentive, quite apart from the gold that Sims said might be inside the earth.
Speaker: These traders were pretty convinced that there were other things to be found.
Speaker: And if these could be discovered at government expense, then they could quickly follow up with the commercial enterprise.
Speaker: I see.
Speaker: That's a good old public-private partnership.
Speaker: So what's...
Speaker: Was this at all related to the interest in finding a Northwest Passage?
Speaker: That came a little bit later in the middle of the 19th century.
Speaker: But there certainly was speculation about that.
Speaker: And this would have fed into that general interest in just simply parts of the world that we didn't know anything about.
Speaker: So it seems like Sims was really, maybe this is unfair, but he was sort of a useful idiot.
Speaker: Or at least that was Congress's idea, was here's this eccentric fellow with wacky ideas.
Speaker: They probably didn't expect him to find the land of milk and honey.
Speaker: But they thought maybe in his pursuit of that, his sort of monomaniacal interest in this theory, he could actually uncover some other information which could be useful to the United States commercially.
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: And I think because of his lecture circuit, he was able to build up enough public support for this.
Speaker: I mean, everywhere he went along the frontier and talked about this, that local newspapers would be big stories about it.
Speaker: And so it was kind of a groundswell of support with the hollow earth being just the sort of single point of interest, but so much more at stake.
Speaker: So he must have been quite a persuasive speaker then.
Speaker: was and he had quite a few disciples who also went on lecture tours about it for him on his behalf.
Speaker: His surrogates is not unlike a presidential campaign now where members of the cabinet and others are sent out to kind of fan the flames of the support base.
Speaker: Fascinating.
Speaker: Was he, I mean, did he rise to any kind of serious fame?
Speaker: Was he ever a household name?
Speaker: I think on the frontier he was probably a household name, but not in the East Coast.
Speaker: And most of the academic institutions to which he had written disregarded this and put through them away.
Speaker: So this broadside that he had printed up at his own expense, only a handful of them have survived.
Speaker: Almost all the others were destroyed as sort of crackpot letters usually are.
Speaker: Sure.
Speaker: But despite that, you know, he did have some kind of a legacy.
Speaker: I mean, here we are talking about him today.
Speaker: But you've mentioned that there are actually some literary figures who seem to have drawn some inspiration from him.
Speaker: Tell me a bit about the sort of second life of this theory.
Speaker: Absolutely.
Speaker: No, it's quite amazing and well-known names.
Speaker: I mean, Edgar Allan Poe was fascinated by this story, and he wrote two articles about it, one of which won a prize, and then ultimately a book called The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket, which was published in 1838.
Speaker: And in that, and in one of his articles, a bottle is found washed up on the beach and it has a note in it from someone who's aboard a ship and they have just discovered this great opening in the south.
Speaker: with equivalent of waterfalls going into the center of the earth and he's about to follow it.
Speaker: So he writes this note and throws it out.
Speaker: And when the article first appeared in newspapers, everyone read it as a true news story, not as a fiction that Poe had written.
Speaker: Really?
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Sort of like the War of the Worlds read over the radio.
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: Yeah, it had that kind of impact.
Speaker: Absolutely.
Speaker: And then a little bit later, Jules Verne, who we all know well, wrote A Journey to the Center of the Earth.
Speaker: which he published in 1864.
Speaker: And that was based on similar ideas coming from Sims.
Speaker: Yeah, yeah.
Speaker: The sort of allure of the mysterious underworld.
Speaker: And then on a more trivial, or at least more humorous level, Lewis Carroll wrote Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, where she goes...
Speaker: through the rabbit hole and down into the earth.
Speaker: And then a little bit later in the early 20th century, Edgar Rice Burroughs, who we better know as the author of Tarzan series, wrote a book called At the Earth's Core, which continued the same story.
Speaker: So it's definitely intrigued people and continues to to this day.
Speaker: Well, yeah.
Speaker: And in fact, Bob, I have to tell you that this is sort of a little bit embarrassing, but...
Speaker: I actually have a client in the silver trade who continues to espouse this theory today.
Speaker: Now, I don't know if she has read Robert Sims' broadsides.
Speaker: I don't know if she's familiar with the source material.
Speaker: I don't know if she studied Edmund Haley's
Speaker: writings on the subject but she does actually believe that there is such a thing as an interior world um that there's a sun shining brightly inside the center of the earth that it's illuminating this wondrous interior land full of you know carefree people and plenty and and um
Speaker: I don't think that she has devoted her life to this idea in quite the way that Sims did, but it's certainly something that intrigues her, that motivates her, and to the extent that she is willing to
Speaker: talk with a silver dealer about it.
Speaker: You know, I'm not exactly an intimate friend of hers.
Speaker: And yet, it's important enough to her that, you know, she's brought it up with me.
Speaker: And she says that, you know, this is where it becomes more of a, less of a sort of
Speaker: crackpot theory and more of a proper conspiracy theory, because she maintains that the polar explorer Admiral Byrd kept a diary, which is, you know, it's a secret diary that's been hidden from public view, I guess, by the government or something.
Speaker: And that in this secret diary, he recounted flying on an airplane, I guess, above the North Pole and flying through this vast opening and into a wondrous interior world.
Speaker: So this is a real historical figure, Admiral Byrd, who was a real polar explorer.
Speaker: Yes, and who also ran both North and South Pole.
Speaker: So that would fit into the Sims theory.
Speaker: Yeah, absolutely.
Speaker: Although there is a bit of an issue with the chronology here in that I believe the secret diary was ostensibly written in 1947.
Speaker: And at that point, Bird was actually exploring the South Pole rather than the North Pole.
Speaker: But, you know, what's 15,000 miles between friends?
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So I just found this absolutely fascinating.
Speaker: I mean, it's sort of on the level of believing that the earth is flat.
Speaker: It's that degree of scientific denialism.
Speaker: And yet, you know, here she is walking around and telling me about this theory.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And, you know, it's also a kind of a cross-cultural one because there was also a German sailor in the 1940s who claimed that he was on a U-boat that entered the Earth through a hole in the South Pole.
Speaker: And apparently Hitler was something a believer in this same thing.
Speaker: And there's some conspiracy theorists who think that Hitler actually escaped Germany at the end of the war and made his way to this inner earth where he continued for many years.
Speaker: So, yeah, I mean, I've heard that he went to Argentina, but... He may have gone a little further south, according to this theory.
Speaker: Lord.
Speaker: Well, and I came across it, you know, I have to admit, it's been sort of fun poking around the Internet, you know, looking for evidence of the modern incarnation of this theory.
Speaker: And I came across this fascinating article in The Telegraph.
Speaker: by a writer named Will Storr.
Speaker: And he describes, among other things, a fellow named Rodney Clough.
Speaker: And Rodney Clough, I guess, comes across this theory and is persuaded by it and becomes quite adamant that it's correct.
Speaker: And so he's living in Texas with his family, but he decides that he needs to explore this theory for himself.
Speaker: So he packs his bags, he gets his family to move with him up to Alaska.
Speaker: I think his wife is not terribly enthusiastic about this idea, but they go anyway.
Speaker: And he sets off.
Speaker: He drives north, expecting at any moment to encounter this gaping hole.
Speaker: And instead, what happens, and this is just the most extraordinary thing, it says he drives north until he comes across a sign along the road.
Speaker: And the sign says, this is a private road.
Speaker: Don't go any further.
Speaker: And then according to this article, he stops and turns around.
Speaker: And the full duration of his exploratory mission was about an hour.
Speaker: And that was all it took to make him give up on the idea of ever finding this hole.
Speaker: And so he moves back to Texas.
Speaker: And here John Cleve Sims was prepared to spend a year and risk his life going crazy.
Speaker: to the north on reindeer, this fellow could only drive an hour and then turn around when he saw a sign.
Speaker: Exactly.
Speaker: Well, I guess, you know, maybe we've lost something in 200 years.
Speaker: Quite a lot.
Speaker: So anyway, I guess the, you know, the duration of this podcast is about the same amount of time that it took at least one guy to decide that this theory wasn't worth pursuing anymore.
Speaker: Well, it's a fascinating concept, and I'm charmed by the physical production of this globe.
Speaker: Whether or not Sims was a crackpot, he certainly must have had a wonderful stage presence, an ability to convince audiences that his ideas were worth listening to.
Speaker: And he had this beautiful globe at his side to help bring it all to life.
Speaker: Well, it's a fascinating story, and it's something I'm definitely going to be keeping my eye on.
Speaker: I imagine there are many more Hollow Earthers out there that I have yet to encounter.
Speaker: You'll probably be hearing from them after this broadcast.
Speaker: I hope I will.
Speaker: Maybe I shouldn't be wishing for that, but it's a great story, Bob.
Speaker: I appreciate you telling me about it.
Speaker: And, you know, let me know if you uncover any further evidence about this wonderful subterranean universe.
Speaker: I'd really like to know.
Speaker: We'll keep you posted.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: Thank you so much.
Speaker: Good.
Speaker: Well, thanks for the invitation.
Speaker: Great to talk to you.
Speaker: That's our show.
Speaker: Thanks for listening and joining us on that little adventure into the land of conspiracy.
Speaker: Thank you, of course, to Robert Peck for talking with me.
Speaker: Today's episode was edited and produced by Sammy Delati.
Speaker: Our music is by Trap Rabbit, and I'm Ben Miller.
