No Journey to the Center of the Earth

From Munsell’s “Annals of Albany,” under Notes from the Newspapers we find this brief item from 1828:

Oct. 7. Reynolds, who advocated the theory of the interior of the earth being hollow, delivered a lecture at the Atheneum, on the utility of a voyage into the interior of the globe by an entrance at the north pole.

This would have been Jeremiah N. Reynolds, a newspaper editor, explorer and author who adhered to the thoughts of John Cleves Symmes, Jr., that the earth is hollow. They lectured together for some time, and eventually Reynolds went on lecturing on his own. Unfortunately, we’re not certain of the location of the Atheneum, which was a literary society but clearly also a meeting space used by a number of organizations. Unfortunately for those of us who love a good folly, by the time Cook or Peary or somebody got to the North Pole around 1909, the theory had long fallen out of favor and no one tried to drill an entrance.

Reynolds had another Albany connection, almost as tenuous as his likely single night of lecturing. In 1839, in The Knickerbocker, he published an account of a white sperm whale who bedeviled a generation of whalers for thirty years before succumbing to one of them (sez Wikipedia). “Mocha Dick survived many skirmishes (by some accounts at least 100) with whalers before he was eventually killed. He was large and powerful, capable of wrecking small craft with his flukes.” Reynolds’s tale was titled “Mocha Dick: Or, the White Whale of the Pacific.” In 1851, former Albany resident and Lansingburgh teacher Herman Melville published “Moby-Dick; or, The Whale.” A famously white whale.