The Sun and the Moon: The Remarkable True Account of Hoaxers, Showmen, Dueling Journalists, and Lunar Man-Bats in Nineteenth-Century New York (3 page)

The promoter was only twenty-five years old, but he had already been a grocery clerk, general-store proprietor, lottery agent, bartender, owner of a porter house, and newspaper publisher. As a newspaperman, he had been sued for libel three times, and he once spent sixty days in jail for accusing a minister of usury. Although he had already made—and squandered—a good deal of money, none of his occupations had yet been
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able to satisfy what he liked to call his “organ of acquisitiveness.” As he would write twenty years later in his autobiography, “My disposition is, and ever was, of a speculative character.” Like thousands of other young men of the time, he had come to New York with a wife and child to seek his fortune. Each morning he read the “Wants” column in the
Sun,
hoping to find something that might suit him. He answered numerous advertisements, made his way up the narrow stairways of countless shabby buildings, but each time he discovered that the prospect was not as bright as had been claimed. Then one day in late July 1835, a former business associate offered to let him purchase the contract of an old black woman for one thousand dollars. Immediately he understood that he had at last discovered his true vocation: he was a kind of sorcerer, making desire appear out of thin air.

His name was Phineas Taylor Barnum, and in the summer of 1835, Joice Heth had shown him the future.

That summer in New York, one of the most highly anticipated attractions was celestial. After an interval of seventy-six years Halley’s Comet was due to arrive soon, and its reappearance was being awaited with great excitement as well as national pride, as this was the first time the comet would ever streak through the skies over the United States of America. By August some enterprising businessmen had placed a telescope in the park by City Hall and were charging six cents a viewing for those hoping to catch a glimpse of the famous comet—although, from his observatory in South Africa, the British astronomer Sir John Herschel had predicted that it would not be seen until September at the earliest.

In New York attention was turning skyward, to the heavens and, without aid of telescope, to the balloonists—aeronauts, as they were then known—who were lately thrilling large crowds with their ascents into the upper atmosphere. Some three hundred miles to the south, in Richmond, Edgar Allan Poe had just published a story entitled “Hans Phaall—A Tale” that described a balloon journey to the moon made by a Dutch bellows mender. The story was loaded with scientific detail, much of it taken directly from John Herschel’s
Treatise on Astronomy,
which had been published to great acclaim in the United States a year earlier. “Hans Phaall” was lengthy (it occupied fifteen of the
Southern Literary Messenger
’s densely type-covered pages), but its narration of Hans’s arrival on the moon fulfilled only half of Poe’s original conception of the story. The
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second part, which he had not yet started, was meant to describe the lunar scenery encountered by his hero. Poe, who had been fascinated by astronomy since his boyhood, had high hopes for this endeavor, but in September, when he read the
Celestial Discoveries
series in the
Sun,
he abandoned his plans for good. The articles, he believed, had stolen his idea and, worse, had supplanted it. “Having read the Moon story to an end and found it anticipative of all the main points of my ‘Hans Phaall,’”

he would write years later, “I suffered the latter to remain unfinished.”

“Suffered” was the proper term: Edgar Allan Poe was nothing if not prideful, and being trumped by the
Sun
was a wound from which he would never fully recover. Nine years later, when he settled in New York in 1844, Poe’s first order of business was to place his own scientific hoax in the pages of the
Sun,
one modeled on the moon stories of 1835. Two years after that (only three years before his death), in his series of written portraits of thirty-eight New York writers entitled
The Literati of New
York City,
Poe would allot the greatest space not to such well-known authors such as Fitz-Greene Halleck or N. P. Willis, or even to his own recent love interest, Frances S. Osgood, but rather to the author of the moon stories, an enigmatic Englishman named Richard Adams Locke.

In August 1835, Richard Adams Locke was a thirty-five-year-old itinerant journalist who just two months earlier had been hired as the editor of the
Sun.
Born into a prosperous family in the southwest of England, Locke had arrived in the city (like P. T. Barnum, accompanied by his wife and infant daughter) in 1832 looking for newspaper work.

In the succeeding three years, Locke had become known in journalistic circles as a clever, versatile writer, as comfortable handling crime stories as he was literary reviews, possessed of a formidable intellect and a good deal more sophistication than the average New York newspaperman.

Not so well known was that Richard Adams Locke had left England because of his political radicalism, and that his background and education were not exactly as he liked to claim. Nor was it known—at least for several crucial days at the end of August 1835—that he was the man behind the
Sun
series that reported how intelligent life had been discovered on the moon.

Locke was the author of the eleven-thousand-word account (which the
Sun
attributed to the
Supplement to the Edinburgh Journal of Science
) revealing the remarkable lunar discoveries made by Sir John Herschel from his observatory at the Cape of Good Hope, including lakes, waterfalls,

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forests, beavers that walked on their hind legs, and unicorns. The crown-ing touch was the discovery of four-foot-tall “man-bats”—Vespertilio-homo, as Herschel was said to have named them—apparently rational beings who conversed, constructed temples, and fornicated in public (though the articles remained decorously mum about these particulars).

The
Sun
’s articles would seem to defy credulity, but such was Locke’s erudition—and the sheer bravura of his enterprise—that public opinion on their veracity was sharply divided, with, by all accounts, a significant majority of New Yorkers leaning toward belief.

Whether or not they took the stories to be true, everyone in New York wanted to read them. Edgar Allan Poe deemed the series “decidedly the greatest
hit
in the way of
sensation—
of merely popular sensation—ever made by any similar fiction either in America or in Europe.” Echoing Poe, P. T. Barnum declared, “The sensation created by this immense imposture, not only throughout the United States, but in every part of the civilized world, and the consummate ability with which it was written, will render it interesting so long as our language shall endure.” No other newspaper story of the age was as broadly circulated as Locke’s moon series. A pamphlet containing the complete series sold twenty thousand copies in its first week, an exhausting but highly lucrative one for the
Sun’
s newsboys. The articles were reprinted in many of New York’s competing newspapers, and later, in newspapers across the country. Illustrated editions were published in Great Britain, Italy, Germany, France. By the time the series had run its course, the
Sun
had become the most widely read newspaper in the world.

The Moon Hoax (as it came to be known) was among the most sensational stories of the age, but it also had a greater resonance, for Locke’s time and for ours. It tells a story about the moment New York first came to see itself as not just one city among many, but as the leading city in the United States, and indeed one of the world’s great cities. New York was also a city divided against itself, by class, by ethnicity, and by social conflicts over deeply contentious issues such as slavery. In that crucible a new kind of newspaper was born, one that was not merely an organ of the commercial elites, but rather a mass-market medium—politically independent, designed to be read by the average person, and featuring exactly the sort of reporting that continues to mark most newspaper journalism today: crime, scandal, sports, entertainment. It was a revolution in journalism, one that started in New York in the mid-1830s and then spread to cities across America, creating a nation of newspaper readers.

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Richard Adams Locke’s moon series was also a profound though little-known battle in the ongoing struggle in America between science and theology. Too often the pursuit of science has been inhibited by the power of religious authority, free inquiry forced to conform to the dictates of established belief. As Locke himself would write years later, “
theological
and devotional
encroachments upon the legitimate province of science”

will, if unopposed, “bind in the chains of sectarian faith and conventional dogmatism, inquiries into matters of fact that should be free as the mountain air and unchartered as the light of heaven.” That age-old conflict too was bound up in Locke’s fanciful stories of lunar unicorns and man-bats.

Needless to say, Richard Adams Locke could hardly have imagined all this when he sat down at his desk in the summer of 1835 and began to write. Nor could he have foreseen the impact that the series would have on his own life. Even though he would go on to edit two other major daily newspapers, including one that he founded, Richard Adams Locke would always be known as “the man on the moon.” His life was forever defined by those weeks in the summer of 1835, when the largest part of the nation’s largest city came to believe that the moon was inhabited, and that this most ancient of questions—whether we are alone in the universe— had finally been laid to rest. The moon series would be his singular distinction, but it was, in his mind, a mistake. Richard Adams Locke had produced the most successful hoax in the history of American journalism, and yet he had not intended it as a hoax at all.

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c h a p t e r
1

Benjamin Day’s

Whistling Boy

The room in which journalistic history would be made measured twelve by sixteen feet, on the ground floor of a trim three-story brick factory building at the north end of William Street. It was Monday, September 2, 1833, and the young printer Benjamin Day had stood for hours at his composing table, working as the late-summer light bloomed orange and then dwindled to gray. He was setting advertisements that would run in the first issue of the newspaper he had named the
Sun:
notices for steamship passages to Albany and Hartford, for a writing academy and a piano forte warehouse, from employers seeking cooks and grocery clerks, insurance companies informing the public of attractive new rates for fire risks. In fact Day had not yet received a cent from these businesses, nor did they even know that the advertisements would appear in the
Sun;
he was simply copying ads that had already run in the city’s six-penny papers. None of the firms would complain about the free publicity, he knew, and the advertisements would lend the
Sun
the prosperous appearance of a real newspaper.

The room was crowded with stacks of paper he had purchased at a discount from his brother-in-law, Moses Yale Beach, who owned a paper mill up the Hudson in Saugerties. His printing press, an awkward assemblage of cranks and levers, waited in the center of the room. At full speed, the press would throw off two hundred impressions in an hour as it printed one thousand copies of the newspaper—Day’s ambitious plan for the first issue. With one impression for the front and back pages and another for
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pages two and three on the inside, the job would require at least ten hours of printing.

A boy whose name has been forgotten served as Day’s printer’s devil, mixing ink and fetching paper; a journeyman printer remembered only as Parmlee helped Day feed and crank the press. The three worked through Monday night into the next morning. Outside, the leisurely clop of the carriage horses gave way to silence, broken only by an occasional rumble from night carts racing over the cobblestones. The press whispered and clicked, as steady and rhythmic as the threshing of a loom. The small room was suffused with the smell of sweat and burning candle wax and the ripe-pineapple scent of printer’s ink.

Before dawn Day went out and bought a copy of New York’s largest morning newspaper, the
Courier and Enquirer.
Back at the office, he clipped and rewrote several of the news items and set them into type alongside the pieces he had already written. When pages two and three had been finished, he and Parmlee handfed the sheets back into the press to print the reverse sides. At some point one of them might have noticed that Day, in his exhaustion, had misset the date below the masthead as 1832 instead of 1833, but it was too late now to change it.

By noon the last of the pages had been printed and folded. Bleary with lack of sleep, blinking against the bright light of the day, Day and his assistants carried the papers out of his office and into the city.

To a modern reader, a six-penny newspaper from Benjamin Day’s time would look very strange and unwelcoming: large pages divided into columns as long and narrow as stovepipes, and made nearly as black by row after row of minuscule type. The print was broken only by small woodcuts illustrating advertisements for steamboats and ladies’ corsets and houses to let. Photographs, of course, were still decades away. Perhaps most strangely, news stories appeared not on the front page but inside, on page two. Headlines generally ran in the same size type as the text of the stories and consisted of a few words set off as italicized or capitalized print:
Coroners Inquest.
—The body of a miserable looking man, apparently aged about 34 years, was found yesterday in Baker’s wharf, near Catharine market. The deceased was attired in a coarse blue jacket, yellow vest, and a black striped fustian pantaloons.