The Sun and the Moon: The Remarkable True Account of Hoaxers, Showmen, Dueling Journalists, and Lunar Man-Bats in Nineteenth-Century New York (34 page)

The thousands of new arrivals to New York had been drawn by the city’s rapidly expanding economy, but they had little interest in the economic news offered by the six-penny papers; on the other hand, they were extremely interested in reports of life on the moon. New York’s proud merchant editors must have bitterly resented the fact that this sensational and clearly lucrative story (one that had been extracted from a foreign journal, no less, which was their own specialty) had been discovered by the penny
Sun.
It was a galling development—but not so galling that they would, as a consequence, deny themselves the most talked-about news story of the age.

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Before the week was out, many of the city’s six-penny newspapers had begun to reprint the moon series on their own front pages.

Among the first to do so was the largest evening newspaper in New York, the
Evening Post.
On Friday, the day Locke introduced the man-bats to New York, the
Post
ran the first installment of
Great Astronomical Discoveries.
Inside, an editorial explained that the paper was copying the series just as it had been presented in the
Sun,
without feeling the need to “accompany it with any comments to shake the faith which credulous readers may be disposed to place in its authenticity.” For the moment, at least, the
Post
was maintaining a position of neutrality about the veracity of the articles, stating that “The story is certainly, as the old newspaper phrase goes, ‘very important, if true.’ And if not true, the reader will still be obliged to confess that it is very ingenious.”

On Saturday the
Commercial Advertiser
began running the series as well, in deference, noted its editor William Leete Stone, to “the request of many friends.” Stone apparently felt obligated to print the moon story despite the fact that he personally disbelieved it; in the item accompanying the first installment he pointed out that the construction of such a massive and expensive telescope could not have escaped the notice of the British press.

Still, Stone praised the story as “wonderful” and “ingenious,” and suggested, in a sort of backhanded tribute to Locke’s work, that it was not original to the
Sun
but had come instead from Great Britain. “We think we can trace in it marks of transatlantic origin,” he wrote. (The merchant editors’ many misjudgments about the moon series can be traced at least par-tially to their long-standing underestimation of the writers for the penny papers, whom they regarded as hacks possessing little culture or erudition; as Horace Greeley of the
New-Yorker
admitted, “We did not dream that any of the ordinary penny literati were capable of so magnificent a hoax.”) The city’s oldest daily newspaper, the
Daily Advertiser,
likewise began running the series on Friday. “No article, we believe, has appeared for years, that will command so general a perusal and publication,” stated the editorial that accompanied the first installment. “Sir John has added a stock of knowledge to the present age that will immortalize his name, and place it high on the page of science.” A rival morning paper, the
Mercantile Advertiser,
quickly followed suit, declaring of the
Supplement,
“It appears to carry intrinsic evidence of being an authentic document.” The
American,
an evening paper, ran the series as well, and another morning paper, the
Journal of Commerce,
began making its own plans to reprint it.

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One of the city’s smaller dailies, the
Spirit of ’76,
generously complimented the
Sun
on its success: “Our enterprising neighbors of the
Sun,
we are pleased to learn, are likely to enjoy a rich reward from the late
lunar
discoveries. They deserve all they receive from the public—‘they are worthy.’”

The
Sunday News,
for its part, believed that John Herschel was the source of the story, but admitted to some skepticism about all he claimed to have seen; still, Sir John’s reputation preceded him, and the paper was willing to withhold judgment until more information was available. “Our doubts and incredulity may be a wrong to the learned astronomer,” wrote the
News
editorialist, “and the circumstances of this wonderful discovery may be correct. Let us do him justice, and allow him to tell the story in his own way.”

At the
New-Yorker,
Horace Greeley informed his readers (many of them, presumably, from out of town and not regular readers of the
Sun
) that John Herschel had been “successful in constructing a telescope of extraordinary power,” with which “he has been enabled to discover not merely land and water, but clouds, tides, trees, verdure, rocks, and at last animals, in the moon, and to examine them carefully and almost minutely.” Greeley concluded the item by declaring, “The promulgation of these discoveries creates a new era in astronomy and science generally.”

Among the city’s major six-penny papers, only the largest—the
Courier
and Enquirer—
remained silent about the
Sun
series. This was not surprising, since the
Courier’
s editor, James Watson Webb, was unmatched in his disdain for hoi polloi who read, and wrote, the penny papers. For many months after the
Sun’
s founding Colonel Webb had refused to mention the new paper in his columns, as though it simply did not exist.

Finally, in April 1834, when the pretense could no longer be sustained, Webb had composed an editorial lamenting the success of the newspaper he referred to as “penny trash.” As late as February 1835 Webb had maintained in print that the
Courier and Enquirer
had the largest circulation of any newspaper in the city. (An indignant Benjamin Day offered Webb a wager of one thousand dollars that the
Sun’
s circulation was not just larger than the
Courier and Enquirer’
s but twice as large; Webb never took Day up on the bet.) At the time of the moon series Webb was occupied with important matters of his own, chiefly the Native American Democratic Association, which he had helped found a month earlier to aid in the fight against immigration and, he contended, the subversion of American political institutions by agents of the Roman Catholic Church.

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Besides the
Sun
there were two other penny papers in New York, although only one of them was able to publish. As August drew to a close, James Gordon Bennett was still tending to his beloved
Herald
in the wake of the fire that had devastated the printing district earlier that month. (No longer, he had decided, would the paper be called the
Morning Herald;
just the
Herald
would do splendidly. His was a newspaper to be savored all day long.) Bennett had found new offices in the basement of a building on Broadway, and it is not difficult to imagine his frustration as he awaited the installation of his double-cylinder printing press. Just when he was catching up to the
Sun,
the Ann Street fire had wiped him out; and then, when he could not respond, the
Sun
had come up with this new bit of crowd-pleasing humbug. Bennett was certain that he knew who was behind the moon series, and it was not John Herschel.

The city’s other penny paper, the
Transcript,
was more fortunate than the
Herald,
as it had managed to survive the fire and keep publishing. The
Transcript
had been founded the year before by two former
Sun
printers; they had learned well from Benjamin Day’s example, and for a while their paper had been able to keep pace with the
Sun
through lively local news and sports reporting, as well as police court coverage by the blustering Englishman William Attree. Now, thanks to the moon series, the
Sun
had shot ahead once again and the
Transcript
needed to respond. It chose to do so not with condemnation (of the sort that James Gordon Bennett would so richly dole out) nor with duplication, but with satire. By Saturday the
Transcript
was lavishing tribute on John Herschel’s wonderful discoveries, about which only a few persons in the city—“we believe a very few”—harbored any doubts. And why should they? “The account, we confess, is marvellous,” declared the
Transcript,
“but not therefore necessarily false.” In fact the
Transcript
knew the story to be true, for it had its own Cape correspondent, a man who, like Dr. Andrew Grant, had been with Sir John Herschel at his observatory; his name was Captain Thomas Tarbox. Captain Tarbox confirmed the story told by Andrew Grant, though he had some discoveries of his own to reveal, which for some reason had been overlooked by the
Edinburgh Journal of Science.

According to Captain Tarbox, the intelligent creatures who had so enchanted the astronomers were not in fact man-bats but rather human beings, and their “wings” were really nothing more than large sleeves, which were worn, according to contemporary lunar fashion, by males as well as females. The men and women addressed each other by leaping up and
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striking the soles of their feet with their hands; one especially eager young gentleman, on meeting a young lady, leaped so energetically into the air that he managed to disarrange her dress, a faux pas for which she boxed his ears, making them ring so loudly that the captain swore he could hear them all the way down at the Cape of Good Hope.

By the second installment of Captain Tarbox’s account, editor Asa Greene was in full voice, creating a pitch-perfect lampoon of Andrew Grant’s highly precise, occasionally orotund style. Tarbox had been present when the astronomers encountered that first poppy field, but unlike Dr. Grant he opted to close his eyes, fearing the sleep-producing effect of the
Papaver somniferum.
When he was sure the poppies were safely out of sight, he opened his eyes again, whereupon I beheld the most magnificent flower that mortal eye ever rested upon.

At least, I have seen nothing like it, though I have circumnavigated the globe seven times, and have visited every land from Dan to Beersheba, and from Kamtschatka to Terra del Fuego. It was a most gorgeous flower, waving on the top of a stalk seventy-seven feet high, and as large as the main-mast of the ship Sally, in which I made my last voyage to the East Indies. Its petals were of a beautiful and most dazzling white, interspersed here and there with stripes of yellow and purple; each petal being two feet six inches in width and eight feet ten inches in length. It belonged to the thirteenth
class
and first
order,
of Linnæus. The
stamens
were two feet in length, and about the size of my wife’s pudding-stick, the shape whereof they very much resembled. The
pistil,
in size, would have served as a club for Hercules.

Captain Tarbox’s account (entitled
More Lunar Discoveries, NOT contained in the Supplement to the Edinburgh Journal of Science
) was published in three installments, and for the first week it constituted the
Transcript’
s entire response to the
Sun
series. Unlike so many of the six-penny papers, the
Transcript
resisted reprinting the series until the following Wednesday, September 2, when it ran the opening excerpt of
Great
Astronomical Discoveries
on its front page, alongside the first installment of a story that had not previously been seen in a New York newspaper.

That story, which now bore the simple title
Lunar Discoveries,
presented a lengthy account of a balloon trip to the moon; its author was given as

“Baron Hans Phaall,
the celebrated Dutch Astronomer and Aeronaut.
”

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On Monday morning, the last day of August, Locke’s man-bats made their final appearance in the pages of the
Sun.
At the edge of the forest surrounding the valley where the three triangular temples had been found (now dubbed by Sir John “the Vale of the Triads”), the astronomers came upon several groups of winged creatures that closely resembled the ones earlier seen in the Ruby Colosseum. These man-bats, however, were taller than the others, somewhat lighter in color, and according to Andrew Grant, “in
every respect
an improved variety of the race.” They were highly sociable creatures and pleasingly well mannered; the astronomers observed many instances of a man-bat selecting the choicest specimen from a pile of the gourdlike fruit that constituted their diet and then tossing it to another who had none. As far as the astronomers could tell, these man-bats did not engage in any activities of art or industry, but rather spent their time happily collecting fruit, eating, bathing, and, as Grant remarked, “loitering about upon the summits of precipices.”

Although the man-bats were unquestionably the highest order of creature in the valley (at one point Grant refers to them as “semi-human beings”), they were not its only denizens. Many of the animals that had been discovered elsewhere on the moon Sir John and his assistants found here too, as well as several new species of quadrupeds, the most impressive among them being a large white stag with antlers as black as ebony. Several times that elegant creature trotted over to nibble some vegetation alongside a group of seated man-bats; on those occasions the astronomers could see not a trace of fear in the stag or animosity in the man-bats. Indeed, all the creatures of the moon seemed to be living in what Grant termed a “universal state of amity,” the contemplation of which gave great pleasure to the astronomers watching from earth, that larger but evidently less favored world. Thomas Dick and his fellow religious astronomers had apparently been correct in their suppositions about the moon being a kind of paradise, its inhabitants as blissful as those of “primitive Eden,” in Andrew Grant’s telling phrase. Now, in reflecting on all he had seen there, Grant found himself turning to the aid of the poets.