The Sun and the Moon: The Remarkable True Account of Hoaxers, Showmen, Dueling Journalists, and Lunar Man-Bats in Nineteenth-Century New York (33 page)

Thomas Dick was not at all frightened by the prospect of actually meeting the inhabitants of distant worlds; indeed, he seemed to relish the thought of it. Like the other pluralists of his time, he acknowledged that there might be marked physical differences between extraterrestrials and the people of earth, but he did not recoil from them. “It is not improbable,” he wrote, “were we transported to those abodes, that we should feel more at home in their society and arrangements than we are now apt to imagine.” Nor did he believe that we would encounter any difficulties in communicating with the extraterrestrials, once we came to understand their language (or, in the absence of language, other means of communication), because, as he put it, “certain relations, sentiments, dispositions, and virtues” must be held in common by intellectual and moral creatures everywhere in the universe. All had been made by the same God, and all were rational enough to behold his work and bestow on him their love.

To nineteenth-century readers, it was a profoundly comforting sentiment. Man was
not
alone in the universe, as had been preached for centuries, not a solitary pilgrim traveling through a vast, cold, windswept realm; those lights off in the distance were the warm glow of untold hearths. Better still, our new neighbors were friendly. (It is not hard to fathom how Dick’s readers might have harbored a fear of being colonized or enslaved by a distant, more powerful race.) And even if the extrater-

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restrials were not yet practicing Christians, one can imagine a bevy of church societies, like that of John Herschel’s putative American clergyman, buying subscriptions to send Bibles to the inhabitants of Mars or Jupiter, who already upheld the traditional Christian virtues and prayed to the God of the Christians. However initially strange or unsettling the inhabitants of other planets might seem, there was no reason to fear them; they were, Thomas Dick assured us, “beings not much unlike ourselves.”

Although Thomas Dick’s books were highly popular in his native Great Britain, his message found an even more receptive audience in the United States. In his book
The Humbugs of the World
P. T. Barnum described how Dick’s writings

were read with the utmost avidity by rich and poor, old and young, in season and out of season. They were quoted in the parlor, at the table, on the promenade, at church, and even in the bedroom, until it absolutely seemed as though the whole community had “Dick” upon the brain. To the highly educated and imaginative portion of our good Gothamite population, the Doctor’s glowing periods, full of the grand-est speculations as to the starry worlds around us, their wondrous magnificence and ever-varying aspects of beauty and happiness, were inexpressibly fascinating. The author’s well-reasoned conjectures as to the majesty and beauty of their landscapes, the fertility and diversity of their soil, and the exalted intelligence and comeliness of their inhabitants, found hosts of believers; and nothing else formed the staple of conversation, until the beaux and belles, and dealers in small talk generally, began to grumble, and openly express their wish that the Dickens had Doctor Dick and all his works.

Thomas Dick’s extraordinary appeal for the Americans of the time is not surprising, given that the United States was among the most thoroughly Christianized nations in the Western world, the place, observed the young French writer Alexis de Tocqueville, “where the Christian religion has kept the greatest real power over men’s souls.”

In the years since the American Revolution, religious denominations had founded virtually all of the country’s private colleges, organizing them to meet the “spiritual necessities” of the new nation and supporting them as a “child of the church.” Well into the nineteenth century, their

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character and curriculum were still determined by their denominational parents; in science courses, William Paley’s
Natural Theology
was the standard text. As a modern historian of the subject has observed, in the American colleges of the time “the forces of irreligion, of rationalism, and of deistic thought were effectually checked on a hundred fronts,” thus ensuring that “the menace of free thought no longer threatened the citadels of faith.” This was true throughout the country, from the newly founded frontier colleges of the West to the most well-respected institutions of the East. In the early years of the nineteenth century, the president of Yale, the Reverend Timothy Dwight, had successfully suppressed ideological challenges launched by freethinking students inspired by the French Revolution, turning the college into what one observer approvingly called “a perennial fountain of orthodoxy.” (Not surprisingly, Dwight was a confirmed pluralist who once noted of the moon, “It is most rationally concluded that Intelligent beings in great multitudes inhabit her lucid regions, being probably far better and happier than ourselves.”) For much of the rest of the century, American science would labor under the fundamental precept of natural theology: that the proper function of science is to illuminate God’s design. As late as 1854 Benjamin Pierce, the distinguished Harvard mathematics professor and founder of the college observatory, could confidently assert that he and his fellow scientists were capable of providing eternal proofs of God’s existence. Science is “the history of the works of the Deity,” declared Edward Hitchcock, longtime professor of natural history at Amherst College and later its president. The scientist, he added, “receives with gratitude and joy those richer disclosures of truth which revelation brings. To its authority he bows reverently and rejoicingly, and counts it the best use he can make of science to render it tributary to revelation and to the cultiva-tion of his own piety.”

Of all the sciences, only astronomy was widely understood to be spiritually ennobling. Edward Everett, the Harvard professor turned congressman, declared that astronomy in particular is “well adapted to arrest the attention of minds barely tinctured with scientific culture, and even to touch the sensibilities of the wholly uninstructed observer.” No other science, another lecturer told a class of “young ladies” in 1833, was “more calculated to exalt the soul and fill it with sublime conceptions of the great Author of nature, than Astronomy.” It was, agreed other lecturers, “the queen of the sciences,” “the only
perfect
science.” Geology carried the
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whiff of heresy; biology was not for the squeamish; chemistry required too much knowledge to be comprehended. Astronomy, however, demanded little more than a telescope and an artistic soul. The young Brooklyn poet Walt Whitman captured the popular temper when he wrote in
Leaves of
Grass
of listening to “the learn’d astronomer” present his proofs and figures. Although Whitman “became tired and sick” from the presentation (ever the experientialist, he preferred just to look up in silence at the stars), he reported that the rest of the audience greeted the astronomer “with much applause in the lecture-room.”

The public’s fascination with all things astronomical only intensified with the publication of John Herschel’s
A Treatise on Astronomy
in 1834

and reached even greater heights the following year, thanks to the imminent arrival of Halley’s Comet. In the summer of 1835 a group of entrepreneurs, seeking to cash in on the excitement, set up a telescope in the Park and charged six cents for a view of the night sky unmatched anywhere in the city. Years later P. T. Barnum would recall the “peculiar mania of the time,” in which “the whole community at last were literally occupied with but little else than ‘star-gazing.’” The excitement came to a crescendo at the end of August, when Richard Adams Locke introduced his man-bats to New York.

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c h a p t e r
12

“The Astronomical

Hoax Explained”

Locke’s man-bats made their New York debut on Friday, August 28, and by Saturday they were the talk of the town. Temporarily forgotten were the tales of abolitionist outrages, reported in the merchant newspapers and taken up on countless street corners: abolitionists seating blacks next to whites in church, encouraging blacks to dress as dandies and parade up Broadway, asking their own daughters to marry blacks.

Even the ancient slave Joice Heth, whose unlikely appearance had amazed the city just two weeks earlier, seemed nearly as remote as George Washington himself. Now crowds of excited New Yorkers thronged the
Sun
offices, laying down their shillings for the
Complete Account of the Late
Discoveries in the Moon
pamphlet, their quarters for the
Lunar Animals
lithograph, or their pennies for the current issue of the
Sun,
to read about the latest discoveries from the moon.

Saturday’s installment was relatively brief, most of it taken up by Andrew Grant’s close descriptions of the moon’s surface. The writing was vivid enough, and contained much that was unexpected, but it was not what the
Sun’
s readers were hoping for, not after the much more sensational material, some of it so racy as to require expurgation, that had been presented in the previous installment. The man-bats, having taken their star turn the day before, now delayed their second entrance while the astronomers continued their survey of the lunar world.

Even without the immediate presence of living creatures, the moon presented a magnificent spectacle, and from their distant observatory the

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astronomers took it all in with what Grant called a “reverential confidence in the illimitable power of the Creator.” (Here Richard Adams Locke was again making sly reference to the theological assumptions un-derlying the work of many of the day’s leading scientists.) The telescope’s gaze traversed a magnificent lunar ocean, the Mare Serenitatis, and then passed along Bullialdus, an active volcano standing at the edge of another large lunar sea. To the west the astronomers came upon a ring of bright hills, composed of either white marble or semitransparent crystal, which bounded a patchwork of green valleys that were “of paradisiacal beauty and fertility, and like primitive Eden in the bliss of their inhabitants” (as Locke pointedly characterized them, using another bit of religious imagery), for it was in one of those idyllic valleys, at the culmination of a long night of observing, that Sir John and his cohort once again discovered intelligent lunar life, or at least the vestiges of it. There they beheld an immense stone structure, a perfect equilateral triangle; and though the building’s function could not have been immediately evident, Grant at once pronounced it to be a “temple.”

Locke’s decision to introduce a lunar temple was surely prompted by the German astronomer Franz von Paula Gruithuisen’s earlier claim to have observed one on the moon. (Gruithuisen had figured prominently in the
Edinburgh New Philosophical Journal
article, “The Moon and its Inhabitants,” that had inspired the moon series in the first place.) In his description of Grant’s subsequent attempt to make sense of the temple, Locke again invoked the prevailing creed of the time, natural theology, in which the scientist’s proper role was to reveal the presence of God through a greater understanding of his works. Unsure about the exact purpose of the building, whether religious or scientific in nature, Grant dodges the question by pronouncing it “a fane of devotion, or of science, which, when consecrated to the Creator,
is
devotion of the loftiest order; for it exhibits his attributes purely free from the masquerade, attire, and blasphemous caricature of controversial creeds, and has the seal and sig-nature of his own hand to sanction its aspirations.”

The lunar “temple” was made of polished sapphire, its lustrous blue flecked with gold that shone in the sunlight. Huge square columns, seventy feet high, stood along the temple’s three sides, but even more remarkable was the roof, made of some kind of yellow metal and encircled by a series of triangular planes, set at various angles to resemble flames; from the center of the roof rose a large copper-colored sphere, around which the fire raged “as
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if hieroglyphically consuming it.” It was a disturbing tableau, made especially so by the absence of any living creatures in the vicinity of this carefully wrought structure. Shortly afterward the astronomers found two other buildings nearby, each of them exactly like the first. What, they wondered, had become of the makers of these huge, elaborate temples? And what was the meaning of the central image displayed there, a globe engulfed by flames? Was it a memorial for a catastrophe that had befallen their world, or—more troubling to contemplate—an augury of one yet to arrive on ours?

With these questions, Locke brought Saturday’s installment to a close, leaving readers to ponder the answers they hoped would be revealed on Monday, when the
Sun
would publish the last of the excerpts from the
Supplement to the Edinburgh Journal of Science.

On Saturday the echoes of Benjamin Day’s thunderclap item of the day before, “Our Circulation,” were still reverberating through New York’s newspaper district. After less than two years of publication (its second anniversary would arrive the following Thursday), the
Sun
had achieved a paid daily circulation of almost twenty thousand—nearly five times greater than that of its largest six-penny rival, and nearly ten times that of the majority of the city’s daily papers. Just who, Day’s competitors must have been asking,
were
all these readers? Some, undoubtedly, were readers of the six-penny papers, who now took the
Sun
in addition to their morning copy of, say, the
Journal of Commerce
or the
Courier and Enquirer.
But far more numerous were those who had never before thought of themselves as newspaper readers, the very people Benjamin Day had hoped to reach when he first conceived of his new penny paper back in that tiny William Street print shop. Though New York had grown dramatically over the previous decade and a half, its population more than doubling (from 123,000 to 270,000), the circulation of the merchant papers had remained essentially constant.