Free Hollow Earth: The Long and Curious History of Imagining Strange Lands, Fantastical Creatures, Advanced Civilizatio by David Standish

a day later in Malta, 1,350 miles away. Audubon had been the first in America to do so, tying silver cords to the legs of fledgling phoebes in Philadelphia in 1803 and identifying a few when they returned the next year. Symmes gave specifics about these martin bands: they should contain the date and “a rough drawing of a ship, with the national flag, and drawings of some of the animals of the climate, as a sort of universal language; also, a request for the reader to attach a similar label about the time of the return of the birds in the spring, and to publish the circumstance in a newspaper of the country. If we do not by such means learn, soon or late, where the martins go, it will be inferable that they go to some unlettered people or unknown country.” Sly old Symmes. What unknown country and what unlettered people? He adds, “The more reasons we find for presuming there are unknown countries, the more we will be disposed to exert ourselves in research.” Even sitting on the porch of the Western Museum, idly musing on where martins go in winter, his thoughts turned ever back to the hollow earth.
    During this time in Newport, 1819-1820, he did accomplish one thing, and it was, in its way, a landmark, though one quickly forgotten. He wrote a novel called Symzonia: Voyage of Discovery. It bore the byline Captain Adam Seaborn, but is universally attributed to Symmes. Seaborn calls the land he discovers inside the earth Symzonia. Lavish praise is heaped on Symmes throughout (“That profound philosopher, John Cleve Symes”). The novel seems a long, sweet dream by Symmes of what he might find and accomplish if only he were permitted to do so. But it is more than that. According to Victoria Nelson in her 1997 Raritan article, “Symmes Hole, Or the South Polar Romance,” Symzonia was the very first American utopian novel.
    All utopian novels ultimately derive from Plato’s Republic , but the term comes from Thomas More’s Utopia —which means Nowhere—published in 1516. Between More and Symmes, many dozens of utopian fictions and treatises had been inflicted on an imperfect world. A selective New York Public Library bibliography lists 153 of them as appearing between 1516 and 1820. But Symzonia seems to be the first homegrown American utopian fiction.
    It wasn’t the first fiction set in subterranean realms. There had been a scattering of these during the eighteenth century, from several countries. The earliest was Relation d’un voyage du pole arctique au pole antarctique (1721), which recounts a Kircherean roller-coaster ride on a whaling ship sucked into a vortex somewhere north of Greenland, racing through the watery bowels of the earth from North to South Pole, where an extraordinary island floating under the Antarctic is found. Luxuriant vegetation reigns among warm-water lakes and waterfalls; the voyagers witness battles between polar bears and seals, encounter giant fish, a volcano, a pyramid with fiery reflections, and a structure of white stones before setting sail for the Cape of Good Hope. Another French novel, Lamekis, ou les voyages extraodinaires d’un egyptien dans la terre interieure (1734), took its characters to a roomy subterranean world beneath Egypt.
    In 1741 came the first novel of an underworld with real literary merit, Baron Ludvig Holberg’s Journey of Niels Klim to the World Underground. The preeminent Scandanavian writer of the Enlightenment, Holberg is claimed by both Denmark and Norway as a literary great. Niels Klim, first written in Latin, owes a considerable debt to Gulliver’s Travels in spirit and shape. Niels enters a cavern and falls toward the center of the earth, thinking as he drops,
    I fell to imagining that I was sunk into the subterranean world, and that the conjectures of those men are right who hold the Earth to be hollow, and that within the shell or outward crust there is another lesser globe, and another firmament adorned with lesser sun, stars, and planets. And the