Read Hollow Earth: The Long and Curious History of Imagining Strange Lands, Fantastical Creatures, Advanced Civilizatio for Free Online Page B

“wring his nose” and provoke a duel. Duels were a capricious business, given the primitive state of the weapons and the dubious skill of the duelists, and this was no exception. With their seconds at hand, the two faced off ten paces apart, standing sideways. “Are you ready?”
    “Yes!”
    “Fire!”
    We raised our arms together deliberately, from a hanging position. My intention was to aim at his hip; his (I learn) at my breast. Consequently, I got the first fire, which drew his shot somewhat at random, though it must have passed within a line of the lower part of my belly, as it pierced through my pantaloons, shirt-tail, and the bone of my careless hanging wrist, close to the joint. He received my ball in his thigh. I wanted to know if he desired another shot, and being informed in the negative, left my second and surgeon attending to him, and, with my handkerchief wrapped around my wound, went home and ate a hearty breakfast.
     
    So Marshall just barely missed shooting off Symmes’ privates, the shot ripping through his pants and underdrawers and striking his wrist. The wound at first seemed trivial, “little more than a scratch,” but it refused to heal properly, causing him pain, fever, bloating in his feet and legs, and a bout of dysentery lasting six or seven weeks. A biographical sketch in an 1882 history of Butler County includes this letter and says that “Captain Symmes never fully recovered the use of his wrist. It was always stiff and a little awry.” Marshall suffered lasting consequences as well. The wound “disabled him so that he carried the effects of it through life.” But, the sketch writer adds, “he was afterward befriended by Captain Symmes, who always spoke of this duel with regret.” 6
    Symmes had married Mrs. Mary Anne Lockwood on Christmas Day 1808 at Fort Adams. She was the young widow of an army captain and brought five daughters and one son to the marriage. To this brood they added four more children, including a son named Americus, born in 1811, who carried his father’s hollow earth banner into the 1880s, giving interviews, writing a book summarizing his theories, and putting up a memorial to him in a Hamilton, Ohio, public park, with a hollow stone globe at the top. It is still there today.
    Symmes left the army in 1816 and worked as a trader in St. Louis, providing supplies to government troops stationed at forts on the Upper Mississippi and trading with the Fox Indians under special dispensation from the governor of Missouri Territory. He probably spent considerable time at Fort Osage, which sat high on a bluff overlooking the Missouri River, both a fortification and an “Indian factory”—a sort of early Wal-Mart filled with goods attractive to the Indians, who would trade deerskins, furs, and other hides for them. Deerskins were so common in the region that they were accepted as currency in lieu of the real thing.
    Two years into this life as a trader, at the age of thirty-eight, Symmes printed up his circular announcing that the earth is hollow and offering to lead an expedition inside to claim the glorious lands lying within for the United States.
    No one seems to know where he got this notion.
    His friend James McBride wrote an explanatory book published in 1826 called Symmes’s Theory of Concentric Spheres and says in the preface, “During the early part of his life he received what was then considered a common English education, which in after-life he improved by having access to tolerably well-selected libraries; and, being endued by nature with an insatiable desire for knowledge of all kinds, he thus had, during the greater part of his life, ample opportunities to indulge it.” But McBride offers no specifics on his reading. 7 Similarly, his son Americus writes in The Symmes Theory of Concentric Spheres, published in 1878, nearly fifty years after his father’s death, “During his boyhood and early life he received a good common English education, which, in