The Hollow Earth, page 11
It was clear that the sight of his neglected Sissy filled Eddie with agonies of shame and self-loathing. So strong were these emotions that he often spoke sharply to her, sometimes even screaming with what seemed like hatred. Though his tirades were not wholly comprehensible, it was evident that Eddie regretted his decision to marry instead of traveling with us beyond the pole. Under the stress of his neglect and his attacks, Virginia once again took on the greasy, unattractive appearance that she’d had back at the boardinghouse. Once again her voice grew tense and shrill, and our boatyard echoed to the mournful mewling of her songs.
Finally, our preparations were done. We stowed hardtack, pemmican and bottled drinks in the wicker cabin with its instruments, stuffing the folded balloon in there as well. With its doors and shutters sealed, the cabin made a massive crate six feet by six feet by ten. Working together, Otha, Eddie, Jeremiah, and I were able to inch it across the big room’s floor to the great side door. With the help of two more men and a wagon, we would be able to get it to our ship.
For our trip, Jeremiah Reynolds had chosen a fast-sailing schooner called the Wasp. Veteran of several trips to the antarctic seas, the Wasp was laying in provisions for a sealing voyage and would be leaving Norfolk on June first. Invoking the captain’s duty to American science—and additionally promising to tell him first of any fine sealing islands we flew over—Jeremiah convinced him to transport the three of us and our wicker balloon box to the very edge of the antarctic wall of ice.
On Tuesday the thirty-first of May 1836, the day before the Wasp was to sail, Jeremiah, Otha, Arf, and I walked down on the docks of Norfolk to examine our ship. I asked Virginia to come with us, but she tearfully insisted she must wait in her room for Eddie. She said that he must take her home to her mother today. When I tried to comfort her, she said that I was a silly yokel and that she was sorry she’d ever let me touch her. She blamed me for her troubles with Eddie and said that if only she could be alone with him and her mama, then everything would be arcadian again.
It was a lovely day outside, with a clear sky and a light breeze. Jeremiah pointed out that the horizon was hazy; this meant, he said, that tomorrow the weather would be fine as well. We found a man willing to row us out to the Wasp, which was anchored in Norfolk harbor a few hundred yards west of Town Point. Arf liked the boat ride, but Otha was in an agony of fear.
“We got to learn how to swim, Mase!”
“Praying’s more help than swimming if the Wasp goes down at sea,” laughed Jeremiah. “Hell, man, we’re going in a balloon later on even though we don’t know how to fly!”
The Wasp’s Captain Guy, was too busy to see us, but one of the mates, a tall, well-formed Virginian named Bulkington, advised us that the Wasp would be sailing on tomorrow’s ebb tide, half an hour before dawn. We and our cargo had best come on board today. Yes, the dog was welcome, especially if he could kill rats. Bulkington lent us three crew members and the ship’s heavy sealing yawl, which rowed back to the dock behind us.
While Jeremiah, Otha, and the three crewmen rode a flat freight wagon, or dray, to our lodgings, I stopped by the Hotel Norfolk to rouse Eddie. In keeping with our plan of keeping Eddie’s Kentucky colonel persona distinct from our expedition’s outfitting, I had not yet visited the hotel. It was a comely sandstone structure, several blocks from the wharf. When I told the man at the desk I had an account to settle with Colonel Embry, the clerk gave a little whoop.
“You a card player, too? You’d better throw in with Lieutenant Bustler; he’s already gone upstairs. One flight and then to the right.”
I went up the hotel’s richly carpeted stairs and took the hall to the right. A hubbub of sound drifted from an open door. Inside, I found three men in naval dress. One of them had the muttonchops and pie face that I remembered from the locket portrait Lucy Perrow had shown me... how long ago? Only a month? I resisted a crazy impulse to introduce myself as Lieutenant Bustler.
“I’m Mason Bulkington,” said I. “Where’s Colonel Embry?”
“Are you a friend of his?” demanded Bustler, too pig-arrogant to introduce himself. I resolved to rag him.
“Everyone honors the colonel,” said I. “Though I don’t have the breeding to call him a friend. I’m here from the confectioner’s to present a bill. The colonel had me take a pound of chocolates to a lady this morning.”
“What lady?” demanded one of the navy men. “Where?”
“A belle named Lucy Perrow,” said I glibly. “She’s here in this very hotel with her father. Touchy man, Judge Perrow. When I delivered the chocolates just now, he said he’d horsewhip the colonel as soon as he got through taking the starch out of some damn ponce called Lieutenant Bustler.” I laughed easily, pretending not to notice the cloud on Bustler’s face. “The judge meant business, too, I can tell you. He had a brace of pistols on, and a big black whip slung over his shoulder. Do you fellows know any Lieutenant Bustler?”
“Don’t you be asking us questions, boy,” blustered Bustler. “Your fine colonel cheats at cards!” The next minute, he and his friends had hurried off down the hall and out of the hotel.
I looked around Eddie’s room. There were a few empty bottles, but the carpetbag he’d kept here was gone. I hoped with all my might that Eddie had taken Bustler for plenty of gold and that he and Virginia were safe on their way back to Richmond. Bustler wasn’t in the lobby, but the sheriff was. He was deep in conversation with the clerk; they were leaning over a couple of Bank of Kentucky bills and jabbing at them.
“Counterfeit?” said the clerk unbelievingly. “Counterfeit?”
“No such bank!” said the sheriff. “We just found out!” Eddie’d cut his departure mighty fine.
I ran all the way to our boatyard. Otha, Jeremiah, and the three crewmen were struggling to get our wicker box up onto the wagon, while Arf barked furiously. I added my strength to the task, and the drayman got down off his wagon seat and joined us as well. The box was heavier than I’d expected, but finally we had it on the dray.
I whispered to Jeremiah that things were unraveling, and ran into our home of two weeks to see if Virginia or Eddie were there. The big room was empty, and the rooms upstairs were empty of life as well. Virginia’s things were still lying about. I cast about for some message from her, but there was nothing. Perhaps she’d been too rushed to pack. I prayed she and Eddie were well on their way, and hurried after our slow-moving dray.
7: Aboard the Wasp
Writing this account of my adventures is slower work than I expected. If it weren’t for all the tekelili I shared with Eddie Poe down in the Hollow Earth, I don’t think I’d be able to do it at all.
I first set pen to paper on October 10, the day after Eddie’s funeral, and here it is Christmas Day, 1849. My skin remains very dark; I’ve found work as a waiter in a Negro restaurant. Seela and I have a Christmas bird and a hot stove to roast it in. We have much to be grateful for.
When I began this narrative, I supposed it possible to produce a simple consecutive listing of one’s memories, but I find, in the writing, that memory is a feathery branching tree. The dray that bore our box—should I mention that its wheels were hooped in iron, that these wheels clattered terribly on the street’s cobbles, and that the sound reminded me of the first machine I ever saw: a crank-operated com shucker belonging to Cornelius Rucker, owner of the farm next to ours in Hardware? Do I have time to mention the walk Otha and I took on the beach one day earlier, and to tell of the segmented leathery object we found, a mollusk’s egg case, with scores of perfect tiny shells in each of its membranous disks? Can I mention that Virginia’s last words to me were I’m just a girl?
I must prune and press forward.
On board the Wasp, our balloon box was stowed down in the hold, Jeremiah and I were shown to a cabin, Otha was lodged with the crew, and Arf was given the run of the ship. We set sail at dawn, June 1, 1836.
Given the prevailing trade winds, the natural course for a ship running for the South Seas is to sail southeast to cross the equator near Africa, and then to sail southwest to hit South America near Rio de Janeiro. This is what we did. The Wasp crossed the equator on the twelfth of July in longitude 26° W and we reached Rio on the fourth day of August. Rio was a revelation, a truly interracial city. I slept with another prostitute there, also wrote Pa a letter telling him I’d gone to sea. Though it was winter in Rio, flowers were blooming; more than anything, I was struck by the sight of the hummingbirds feeding on the blossoms. Otha and I took advantage of the good weather and calm waters by finally learning how to swim.
We replenished our stores and traveled down the coast past the Rio Negro, crossing 40° southern latitude. The wild South American coast of this region is known as Patagonia and is inhabited by a shy, gray-skinned race of men. Our sealing yawl landed in several of the bays, taking a few score of sealskins.
These takes were by no means satisfactory, as several thousand sealskins were needed for the Wasp’s voyage to be a success. Bulkington told me that Captain Guy had plans to eventually shape our course in search of untouched sealing islands presumed to exist beyond 65° S, the antarctic circle.
For those as ignorant of navigation as I was at the start of the Wasp’s journey, I should explain that every point on the equator has 0° latitude, and that the southern pole is the unique point with 90° southern latitude. The 90° symbolizes the fact that from the center of the Earth, there is a ninety-degree angle between a line to the equator and a line to the South Pole. A drive for the Pole is a drive for higher and higher latitudes.
Longitude, I may as well add, is a measure of one’s angular deviation east or west from the prime 0° meridian, which runs north-south through Greenwich, England. South America lies in western longitude; most of Africa is in eastern longitude. Near the Pole, the longitude lines get so bunched together that one can effect large changes of longitude rather easily. But changing one’s latitude stays just as hard.
On September 19 we reached the Falkland Islands, at lat. 52° S, long. 57° W, near the tip of South America. The Falklands are of good soil, with luxuriant meadows and many head of wild cattle. Though there are no trees, the lowlands supply an excellent peat or turf for burning. No humans live here, but the feathered tribes are very numerous, particularly the penguin and the albatross.
These two dissimilar birds form huge rookeries together—temporary camps for hatching their young. The chief rookery on the Falklands was nearly bigger than our farm back in Hardware. It was set on the rocky shore by the water. The birds had smoothed out their rookery by moving all the loose rocks out to form the walls of three sides of a square. The big square was divided up like a checkerboard, with alternating nests of penguins and albatrosses. The arrangement struck me as a symbol of how the two races, black and white, lived together in the south.
We stayed in the Falklands till September 26: overhauling our sails and rigging, obtaining a new supply of fresh water, and taking on board twenty-eight barrels of albatross eggs packed in salt. The plan was to run southeastward before the prevailing winds until crossing the latitude of 60°, and then to head back westward, beating our way as far south as the ice would allow. Captain Weddell of the English navy had achieved a latitude of 74° S in February 1822, and Captain Guy felt we might be able to do as well. If we could find a new, untouched seal rookery, we could well harvest as many as five thousand pelts.
Though Jeremiah was a pleasant, good-humored cabin mate, he had an annoying tendency to give me advice. I soon wearied of his homilies. I think he felt I was a bit of a criminal, not quite worthy of bearing the Reynolds name. He dined each day with Captain Guy, leaving me to share the mates’ mess. Of all the mates, I got on with Stuart Bulkington the best.
Like me, Bulkington had grown up on a farm between Lynchburg and Charlottesville. He had a deeply tanned face and brilliant white teeth; it was a joy to see him laugh. For reasons he was unwilling to divulge, Bulkington had been steadily at sea for seven years now. He filled me with tales of the lands he’d seen, and though I had few adventures to reciprocate with, he seemed satisfied by my willingness to listen and to comment. We were kindred spirits, I felt: two men with troubled pasts.
Since Otha was not strictly bound to work, he stood somewhat apart from the crewmen. And in any case the handful of black crew members were near savages: Tasmanians and Feejee islanders with sharpened teeth and tattoos on their faces. Otha’s best friend on the Wasp was a half-breed fellow called Dirk Peters, son of an Indian squaw and a fur trapper. When Otha was not with me, he was likely to be practicing knife throwing with Peters, who was a great one for whipping a bowie knife out of his boot top and flinging it at his target. He’d killed a penguin on the Falklands this way, sticking him right through the heart, which feat had impressed Otha mightily.
This Dirk Peters was short and ferocious-looking, with snaggleteeth that peeked out through thin, unbending lips. The straight mouth gave him an air of sadness, while the dancing teeth suggested he was merry. In truth he was, so far as I could tell, an empty-headed drifter who lived only for the moment. Not only Otha but Arf as well took a liking to Peters, who liked to pull the dog’s ears and talk to him in a dialect he said came from the Missourian tribe of the Upsarokas. Over my great protests, Peters and Otha passed one idle afternoon by tattooing a spiral Upsaroka good-luck symbol around Arf s navel, on his belly just above the tip of his penis sheath. Tranced by Peters’s chants, or by some of the opium that Otha still seemed to have about him, Arf endured the ordeal with no complaint.
We spent a week sailing about southeast of the Falklands in search of the missing Aurora islands. These small, round islands had been sighted in 1774, 1779, and in 1794, but no one had been able to find them since. We were unsuccessful, and on October 18 we made South Georgia island in lat. 53° S. long. 38° W. This is a steeply mountainous island, with its peaks perpetually snow covered and its valleys overgrown with strong-bladed grass. Captain Guy sent the yawl and two boats ashore in search of seal, but after three days they returned empty-handed. We circumnavigated the whole island without spotting a single seal.
We continued our course due east, driven by the powerful prevailing westerlies, with strong wind and much heavy weather, including snow and hail. We often spotted the free-floating islands of ice that are known as icebergs. On October 24 we reached Bouvet’s Island, in lat. 54° S, long. 3° E. A boat went ashore and returned the next day with eighty fur-seal skins. The sailors had clubbed twice as many to death but had not had the time to skin them all. Arf and I rode to shore with Bulkington’s boat the next day to watch the men taking the skins off the remaining seals. The procedure was to cut off the flippers and tail, make an incision around the neck and along the belly, and then to peel the skin off like a jacket. Arf nosed the fresh carcasses with interest, but he was not bold or hungry enough to tear a piece off.
It was a melancholy view on the beach there, two thousand miles from Cape Horn and a thousand from the Cape of Good Hope. I felt dizzy and unsteady on the unrocking land. The raw red flesh of the flayed seal carcasses was the only vivid color in sight. The sky and sea were gray, and the island was a mass of glassy blue-gray lava. The beach was of pale, crumbling pumice stone.
Out past our ship were scores of antarctic ice islands that had come aground in the shallows around Bouvet Island. Some of these huge icebergs were as much as a mile in circumference. In the slow spring warming (remember that seasons are reversed in the southern hemisphere, so that their October, November, December, January, and February are as our April, May, June, July, and August), pieces of the ice islands were occasionally dropping off and crashing into the sea with eerie roars that mixed with the cries of the seafowl feeding on the dead seals’ flesh.
It seemed strange and cruel for men to come all this way and slaughter wantonly. Even if it were possible to reach the Hollow Earth, would it be right for us to pave the way for our civilization’s further depredations? Or, more horribly, what if those inside the Hollow Earth were to come out and treat us the way we treated seals? I spoke with Jeremiah about these questions that evening, but he seemed not to take them seriously.
“This is a pretty fair sort of world, Mason, if you don’t expect too much. There are a great many good fellows about. Captain Guy, for one, is a brick and a jolly toper. And your friend Bulkington seems right enough. Quit your vaporing! Don’t you think those seals’ jackets will look better on the pretty Knickerbocker ladies in the city of the Manhattoes? And as for Hollow Earthlings coming out after us—I wouldn’t worry. It’s likely as not to be dark in there, with nothing but mushrooms.”
“I thought Symmes said there’s a sun inside,” I protested. “Right in the center.”
“Yes, but our Newton of the West hadn’t much of a head for mathematics.” Reynolds grinned. “I have it on the authority of a professor from Johns Hopkins that there’s no weight on the inside of a hollow sphere. If we could get past the ice and sail over the South Hole’s lip into the Hollow Earth, we’d soon enough float off the ocean’s surface in there. And if there was a sun in the middle, we’d fall into it and burn, and so would anyone on the inside who didn’t cling fast.”
There was a half-gale blowing outside and our porthole was battened shut. A flickering light of seal oil lit our little cabin with its table, chair, and two bunk beds. Arf lay sleeping on the floor. Puzzled by what Jeremiah said, I drew a diagram on the flyleaf of the atlas he’d brought along. The picture I drew was what you’d see if you could take a thin vertical slice right through our Hollow Earth. You’d see a big ring of matter, broken by two holes at the bottom and top: the North and South holes that Symmes postulated. My picture showed two thick semicircles on the left and right, like parentheses not quite meeting at the bottom and the top.
