On 10 April 1818 John Cleves Symmes Jr. printed a circular in St. Louis and sent it to the world. The earth, he said, is hollow and habitable within, open at the poles 12 or 16 degrees, and he was ready to explore the hollow if the world would support the undertaking. He asked for one hundred brave companions, well equipped, to start from Siberia in the fall season with reindeer and sleighs. This page is a copy of that circular, kept open for signatures. Sign the roll and you are enrolled. The record below is honest about what happened to the voyage.
TO ALL THE WORLD!
I declare the earth is hollow and habitable within; containing a number of solid concentrick spheres, one within the other, and that it is open at the poles 12 or 16 degrees; 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.
Jno. Cleves Symmes
Of Ohio, late Captain of Infantry.
The circular asked for one hundred brave companions, well equipped, to start from Siberia in the fall season, with reindeer and sleighs, on the ice of the frozen sea, and to return in the succeeding spring.
The one hundred were never mustered, but this copy of the circular is still open, and the roll will hold your name next to the outcome. Sign, and the record files you. The record already knows what it will write.
| No. | Name | Residence | Enrolled | Outcome |
|---|
The roll is kept in this browser. The original expedition kept none, so this page keeps its own, and every copy of the page keeps a separate one.
Symmes’s Circular No. 1 was printed at St. Louis, Missouri Territory, on 10 April 1818. He sent copies “to each notable foreign government, reigning prince, legislature, city, college, and philosophical societies, throughout the union, and to individual members of our National Legislature, as far as the five hundred copies would go.” The reception, his son Americus wrote in 1878, “can easily be imagined; it was overwhelmed with ridicule as the production of a distempered imagination, or the result of partial insanity.” A few supporters called Symmes the “Newton of the West.”
In March 1822 Symmes wrote a petition that the state of Kentucky presented to Congress. It declared “his belief of the existence of an inhabited concave to this globe” and asked for “two vessels of 250 or 300 tons for the expedition.” Congress tabled it.
In 1824 Symmes gained the support of Jeremiah N. Reynolds, twenty-four, editor of the Wilmington Spectator, who took the theory on the road and then turned it south, toward the Antarctic, away from the polar openings Symmes had promised.
Symmes died on 28 May 1829 in Hamilton, Ohio, aged 48. He is buried in Symmes Park there, under the Hollow Earth Monument.
The voyage that finally sailed went south, not into the interior. No ship entered the hollow earth. No one set out from Siberia on the ice of the frozen sea with reindeer and sleighs, and no one returned in the succeeding spring.
The circular, the petition and the dates are the record’s. The muster roll is the page’s own: it accepts the names, files them, and stamps the outcome the record already knew. The page says so because the circular cannot: it was printed in 1818, and the expedition it asked for never happened.