Or A Certain Concatenation of Concomitance (Or Convolutions of Coincidence, It All Depends)
In 1870, Napoleon III had a problem with Prussia. After having declared war on those pesky Prussians, he was preparing to mobilize 400,000 troops, and of course had to provision them adequately. So he wrote to suppliers across the Channel, with an order for one million tins of beef.
Now, food in tins had been around for a while by then; British merchant Peter Durand registered a patent for tin cans in 1810 and the first commercial canning factory followed in 1813. Early tin cans weren’t the easy-open affairs we know now; they were sturdy affairs, welded shut, without pull-tops or roller keys. American inventor William Lyman patented the rotary can opener in 1870, but it’s unlikely Napoleon III’s troops benefited from it. One imagines the French soldiers crouching around campfires struggling to open their cans of beef with bayonets, boot heels and rifle butts.
If the French troops did indeed get their million cans, they may well have discovered something new when they managed to get them open. Because there was not enough beef in the British Isles to fill such a colossal order on short notice, an enterprising Scottish butcher named John Lawson Johnston came up with a recipe for a meat extract, which he initially called “Johnston’s Fluid Beef”. Admittedly not a great brand name (would you buy a foodstuff that is basically named “runny meat”?) but Johnston had a better idea. He had just read a novel.
The novel in question was “The Coming Race”, published anonymously but transparently by Edward George Earle Bulwer-Lytton in 1870 or 1871. (There is a slight problem here with the later date, as the Franco-Prussian War was a short and disastrous one for the ill-prepared, outnumbered French, who were captured en masse at Sedan, along with the Emperor, in September 1870. It was all over but the shouting by May 1871, leading to the loss of the Alsace and the Lorraine and the creation of a united German Empire. Whatever the case, Johnston must have had the book pretty much to hand as he was puzzling out the formula to his new product.)
The novel is written in the first person, and recounts the adventures of a young gentleman who, following a substantial windfall inheritance, abandons the pursuit of the “almighty dollar” and embarks on a life of enlightened wandering. In the company of an engineer he descends down a mineshaft deep into the crust of the Earth. There he encounters a race of angelic winged humanoid beings that call themselves the Vril-ya and dwell in a subterranean utopia. It is a futurist cautionary tale, as the narrator predicts that one day this peaceful but redoubtable race will emerge and eradicate humanity unless mankind takes its destiny rather more firmly in hand. The central element of the plot is the “all-permeating fluid” Vril. What it is exactly is at best unclear and at worst skillfully elusive nonsense.
“What is the vril?” I asked.
Therewith Zee began to enter into an explanation of which I understood very little, for there is no word in any language I know which is an exact synonym for vril. I should call it electricity, except that it comprehends in its manifold branches other forces of nature, to which, in our scientific nomenclature, differing names are assigned, such as magnetism, galvanism, &c. These people consider that in vril they have arrived at the unity in natural energetic agencies, which has been conjectured by many philosophers above ground, and which Faraday thus intimates under the more cautious term of correlation: “I have long held an opinion,” says that illustrious experimentalist, “almost amounting to a conviction, in common, I believe, with many other lovers of natural knowledge, that the various forms under which the forces of matter are made manifest, have one common origin; or, in other words, are so directly related and mutually dependent that they are convertible, as it were into one another, and possess equivalents of power in their action.” These subterranean philosophers assert that by one operation of vril, which Faraday would perhaps call ‘atmospheric magnetism,’ they can influence the variations of temperature—in plain words, the weather; that by operations, akin to those ascribed to mesmerism, electro-biology, odic force, &c., but applied scientifically, through vril conductors, they can exercise influence over minds, and bodies animal and vegetable, to an extent not surpassed in the romances of our mystics. To all such agencies they give the common name of vril.”
The book is floridly pedestrian and archaically discursive to a fault (style of the times) and while Johnston may not have really cared what vril was, he liked the flavour of it, so took another word, “bos”, sliced off the s, and pasted the two together. Bovril was born. Much catchier than Fluid Beef, to be sure.
If you’ll excuse an aside, bos of course comes from Latin bōs (cow, bull, or ox) and is a taxonomic genus, simply meaning cattle. Modern cattle are all thought to be descended, more or less, from Bos primigenius, the aurochs. The last aurochs, a female, was killed by poachers in 1627 in Poland’s Jaktorów Forest, possibly one of the last truly prehistoric creatures to disappear from Europe. The Bronze Age had already seen the last of them in the British Isles. Julius Caesar speaks of them in Chapter VI of the Gallic War, they run rampant on the walls of Lascaux and share top billing, along with dragons and lions, on the Ishtar Gate. The leering bull’s face on the flag of the Swiss Canton of Uri is even possibly an aurochs, which adds an unexpected dimension to their prim cantonal number plates and tidy signage. The skull of the last aurochs was taken as booty by Swedish troops 30 years later as the Deluge swept through the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, ad victorem spolias. It is now the property of the Royal Armoury in Stockholm. Extinction always seems to happen in the wings of history somewhere, well off stage, and quietly. Some of the sturdy bovines in the Bovril advertisements do seem to have something of the aurochs in them, though it’s likely unintentional.
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From left to right: Napoleon III, Edward Bulwer-Lytton, Bovril advertisements, an aurochs from Sigismund von Herberstein’s book published in 1556 (the caption reads “I’m ‘urus’, tur in Polish, aurox in German (dunces call me bison)”), an aurochs from Lascaux, detail of the Ishtar Gate, title page of an early American edition of “The Coming Race”, The Last Day of Pompeii by Karl Pavlovich Bryullov, omnibus edition containing “Paul Clifford’, Symmes’ Hollow Earth and his monument, Hanebau IV.
While Bulwer-Lytton’s beings live in caverns, his invention caught on like wildfire with Hollow Earth proponents, who did not hesitate to borrow the conveniently vague vril power, which provided a most useful explanation as to how on earth (and especially inside it) the various superior (yet so strangely elusive) races scooted about and kept themselves warm and well-lit.
The Hollow Earth idea had been around a century longer than tin cans, but had not caught on so well. By the beginning of the 18th century, much of the world’s surface had been explored, measured and mapped, or at least had been encircled by surveyors and chopped up into empires. While portions of the world’s oceans still were largely unexplored, it seemed there was not much left to discover above ground. Telescopes were turned to the night skies, the Montgolfier brothers had made the first public demonstration of a lighter-than-air machine, speculation began in earnest on the nature of the Moon (it was variously considered inhabitable, inhabited and hollow) but could there be a world beneath?
The idea was not new, ancient myth is riddled with underworlds. The worlds below are traditionally those of the dead and the damned. Orpheus braved the Underworld to rescue Eurydice. Plato spoke of enormous subterranean tunnels both broad and narrow filled the earth’s interior. Dante wandered through the levels of Purgatory in Virgil’s company and Christ Harrowed Hell for good measure. There has always been a lot of activity underground. The actual physical location and nature of Hell was hotly debated, and learned tomes penned on the subject, outlining depths, temperatures and access points.
But then Science came along and scientific speculation began in earnest as to what was really down there. The Plutonists, who held fast to the volcanic origins of the Earth with a molten core, hurled epithets at the Neptunists, who believed rocks had formed from the crystallization of minerals in the ancient oceans.
Astronomer Edmond Halley believed that all heavenly bodies were hollow, stating “Beneath the crust of the Earth, which is 500 yards thick, is a hollow void”. He based his theory on changes in the Earth’s magnetic field, and believed that the aurora borealis consisted of luminous gas escaping from inside the globe. Since his calculations remained annoyingly unsatisfactory, he eventually affirmed that the Earth contained 4 hollow spheres, one inside the other. (Happily for his posterity, he is better remembered for the comet that bears his name than for his curious theories.) Swiss mathematician Leonard Euler (1707-1783) concurred, adding “mathematically the Earth has to be hollow”. (Next time you have a ten franc Swiss banknote in hand, do remember that the man on it thought the Earth was hollow.) Euler also stated that inside there was a central sun 600 miles in diameter, which provided daylight for the people who lived there. Another mathematician, John Leslie, claimed there was not one, but two suns inside the Earth. He named them Pluto and Proserpina. (This approach also had the merit of explaining why the temperature rose the deeper one descended underground.)
But, the first true campaigner for a Hollow Earth was still to come.
Captain John Cleves Symmes was born in New Jersey in 1779. A soldier from 1802 to 1816, he distinguished himself in the war of 1812 and went on to become a trader in St. Louis. In the spring of 1818, he published the following announcement:
ST. LOUIS, (Missouri Territory,)
North America, April 10, A. D., 1818
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 this undertaking.
JOHN CLEVES SYMMES,
Of Ohio, Late Captain of Infantry.
Symmes further proposed gathering “100 brave companions” for a polar expedition to prove his theory. The widths of these holes, said Symmes, were 4000 (for the North Pole) and 6000 miles (South Pole), meaning that an explorer on foot would not notice his gradual progress over the rounded lip of the aperture until he was inside the Earth. The centre of Earth’s gravity, he added, was in the middle of the Earth’s crust or skin (which was 500 miles thick). In 1822, Symmes petitioned Congress to finance the expedition. His proposal received twenty-five votes. Alas for Symmes, his ambitions attracted more mockery than money, and he died an embittered man in May 1829 at the age of 49. His son, Americus Symmes, erected a Hollow Earth monument (it looks rather like an ambitious doughnut) above his grave in Hamilton, Ohio. However, if he never saw his dream come true, historians agree that he did contribute to public interest in, and ultimately exploration of the polar regions, rather in the same fashion that the anonymous author of Prester John’s famous letter (or the equally anonymous author in the shadow of Sir John Mandeville) contributed to the Portuguese drive to find a route around Africa to the Orient in the 15th and 16th centuries. One of Symmes’ followers, a certain Jeremiah Reynolds, successfully lobbied Congress into agreeing to finance the 1838 Wilkes Expedition to the Antarctic. (Reynolds also penned a novella called “Mocha Dick”, about the legend of a white whale, which certainly inspired a certain Herman Melville to write a tale which would become far better known.)
Sometimes fiction and fact are so intertwined they cannot truly exist without each other.
Shortly after, a New York herb doctor named Cyrus Teed proclaimed that Earth was indeed a hollow sphere but that humanity lived not on the surface of the globe, but inside. (Teed was given to fooling around with electricity, and at one point shocked himself into unconsciousness. He was then visited by a “divine being” who revealed to Teed that he was the next messiah after Jesus and gave him the task of revealing to the world the true nature of the Earth.) In the center of the hollow sphere was the sun, which was half dark and half light, giving the appearance of sunset and sunrise as it turned. Only the dense atmosphere in the center of the sphere prevented observers from looking up into the sky and seeing the other side of the world. Teed changed his name to Koresh, bought 300 acres of land in Florida, moved there with his several hundred followers and declared himself the messiah of a new religion, Koreshanity. He died in 1908. (He did not rise from the dead as he had announced beforehand, and after three days propped up in a bathtub in the hot Florida weather, his followers discretely inhumed him.)
In a book called “The Phantom of the Poles”, published in 1906, author William Reed stated: “The earth is hollow. The Poles, so long sought, are phantoms. There are openings at the northern and southern extremities. In the interior are vast continents, oceans, mountains and rivers. Vegetable and animal life are evident in this New World, and it is probably peopled by races unknown to dwellers on the Earth’s surface. …I am able to prove my theory that the earth is not only hollow, but suitable in its interior to sustain human life with as little discomfort as on its exterior, and can be made accessible to mankind with one-fourth the outlay of money, time and life that it costs to build the subway in New York City. The number of people who can settle in this new world (if not already occupied) will be billions.” When asked to elaborate, he hinted at a government conspiracy to cover up the truth. But of course. (Nor did it help that Peary and Henson reached the North Pole in April of the same year.)
Enterprising authors brought vril into it. French author Louis Jacolliot claimed to have found vril being used by the Jains in India. Helena Blavatsky inserted vril into “Isis Unveiled” (1877) and again into “The Secret Doctrine” eleven years on. Happily, according to Blavatsky, the terrible power was in benevolent hands, whosever they were. Since then, it has been part of the fringes of Theosophist doctrine. In “The Story of Atlantis & the Lost Lemuria”, published in 1896 by William Scott-Elliot, the Atlanteans have airships propelled by vril-force.
Marshall Gardner claimed that the discovery of a frozen mammoth in Sibera in 1846 was proof of a hollow earth. According to him, the creature had wandered out through the hole at the North Pole and frozen solid, proof that mammoths still survived inside. His book “A Journey to the Earth’s Interior” was first published in 1913 and again in 1920, years after Robert E. Peary had reached the North Pole. It was not taken seriously.
United States Navy Admiral Richard Byrd flew over the North Pole in 1926 and the South Pole in 1929. He reported no holes leading to a world inside, though the cryptically vague entries in his diaries have fueled much hollow earth speculation.
In a curious episode of WWII, accounts tell of an expedition sent in April 1942 by the Nazi command to the Island of Reugen in the Baltic Sea. The commander, Dr Heinz Fischer, an expert on infrared rays, intended to photograph the British fleet by turning his cameras upward and shooting across the centre of the hollow Earth, certain that infrared ray could more easily penetrate the atmosphere between. A secret Nazi base also apparently built flying saucers, powered by vril. Naturally, it was all hushed up after the war.
But of course.
By the way, there is a Nazi connection with Shambhala and Aghartha too. Covered up, possibly by the same Nazis who escaped in vril-powered saucers to underground refuges. The Haunebu III, built in 1944 by the Secret Vril Society, measured 70 meters in diameter, and could fly at 7000 kmh close to the ground (at 24,000 meters it did much better: 40,000 kmh). It had an autonomy of 8 weeks in flight and could transport 32 people. (Which of course makes good enough sense, since according to Jacolliot, the Aryans had originally migrated south from subterranean Thule to begin with. They were channeling the technology from an alien race near Aldebaran.)
Shhh. Conspiracy. Cover-up.
It doesn’t really even make good science fiction.
The Hollow Earth at last became a destination of choice for writers of utopist fantasy and science-fiction. Even Tarzan of the Apes has been there (it is populated by dinosaurs and cave men, who call it Pellucidar) The most popular novel is naturally enough “Journey to the Center of the Earth” by Jules Verne. From myth, with a brief detour into the realm of scientific speculation, the Earth is now hollow only in fiction.
Which was what Bulwer-Lytton was writing in the first place, though of his novels, none have retained the savour of Bovril or the persistence of vril. He coined many phrases, though. “The great unwashed”, “pursuit of the almighty dollar”, “the pen is mightier than the sword” are three well-known ones. But perhaps the most famous, thanks to a beagle who is able to balance a typewriter atop his kennel, is “It was a dark and stormy night.” I didn’t even know that Snoopy’s novella existed beyond that first line. Here it is:
by Snoopy
Part I
It was a dark and stormy night. Suddenly, a shot rang out!
A door slammed. The maid screamed.
Suddenly, a pirate ship appeared on the horizon!
While millions of people were starving, the king lived
in luxury. Meanwhile, on a small farm in Kansas, a boy was
growing up.
Part II
A light snow was falling, and the little girl with the
tattered shawl had not sold a violet all day.
At that very moment, a young intern at City Hospital was
making an important discovery. The mysterious patient in
Room 213 had finally awakened. She moaned softly.
Could it be that she was the sister of the boy in Kansas
who loved the girl with the tattered shawl who was the
daughter of the maid who had escaped from the pirates?
The intern frowned.
“Stampede!” the foreman shouted, and forty thousand head
of cattle thundered down on the tiny camp. The two men
rolled on the ground grappling beneath the murderous hooves.
A left and a right. A left. Another left and right. An
uppercut to the jaw. The fight was over. And so the ranch
was saved.
The young intern sat by himself in one corner of the
coffee shop. He had learned about medicine, but more
importantly, he had learned something about life.
Bulwer-Lytton’s opener, in context, went thus: “It was a dark and stormy night; the rain fell in torrents – except at occasional intervals, when it was checked by a violent gust of wind which swept up the streets (for it is in London that our scene lies), rattling along the housetops, and fiercely agitating the scanty flame of the lamps that struggled against the darkness.” The rest of the novel, entitled “Paul Clifford” (1830), is more in the same vein – except at occasional intervals, when the reader nods off. Snoopy’s certainly reads better – and quicker.
Bulwer-Lytton’s other novels are now all largely forgotten. The only one which is apparently still read (besides The Coming Race”, which has a passionate if ever so slightly crackpot following) is “The Last Days of Pompeii”, an allegorical epic. Bulwer-Lytton wrote the novel (published in 1834) after seeing a painting by the Russian romantic artist Karl Pavlovich Bryullov entitled “The Last Day of Pompeii” in Milan. Bryullov, like Bulwer-Lytton, was famous in his day, though he too is now largely forgotten. Sir Walter Scott is reported to have spent an hour in front of the monumental canvas (4 and a half by 6 and a half meters) and declared that it “wasn’t a painting, but an epic”.
Whatever he may have meant by that, he neglected to write a novel about it. Perhaps it’s just as well. Here is the opening line of Bulwer’s novel: “’HO, Diomed, well met! Do you sup with Glaucus to-night?’ said a young man of small stature, who wore his tunic in those loose and effeminate folds which proved him to be a gentleman and a coxcomb.” From there on it continues in the same delightfully florid fashion until the eruption, with Glaucus (who represents the downtrodden Greek culture), his nemesis Arbaces (the deeper-trodden Egyptian legacy), Olinthus (up-and-coming Christianity), the whole chaperoned by the Witch of Vesuvius (!) Here is a passage from near the end:
“As he spoke there came that sudden illumination which had heralded the death of Arbaces, and glowing over that mighty multitude, awed, crouching, breathless—never on earth had the faces of men seemed so haggard!—never had meeting of mortal beings been so stamped with the horror and sublimity of dread!—never till the last trumpet sounds, shall such meeting be seen again! And above those the form of Olinthus, with outstretched arm and prophet brow, girt with the living fires. And the crowd knew the face of him they had doomed to the fangs of the beast—then their victim—now their warner! and through the stillness again came his ominous voice:
‘The hour is come!'”
For an author’s legacy to be summed up by a ubiquitous meat extract in a potbellied jar and a philosophical beagle’s one-liner seems a little unjust*, but that’s the way things go and indeed it is not a negligible patrimony compared to those whose work is quite simply forgotten. And why all this concatenation of circumstance? Well, it just seems that sometimes history makes memorable fiction and vice-versa.
It makes them both far easier to remember, at any rate.
* His name also lives on (though he might well have not much appreciated the homage) in the annual Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest, held by San José University’s Department of English. The prize goes to the contestant who can pen the worst opening phrase of an imaginary novel.
SMAUG THE WOODEN
Wanted to share this: the work of Jérome Braure. Take a look at his web site. Exquisite work for someone who considers it as a hobby.
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