The Sun and the Moon: The Remarkable True Account of Hoaxers, Showmen, Dueling Journalists, and Lunar Man-Bats in Nineteenth-Century New York (35 page)

When in the future, he wrote, he would “eye the blue vault, and bless the useful light” (as Alexander Pope had rendered Homer’s line from the
Iliad
), he knew that he would recall the scenes of beauty and grandeur he had witnessed on the face of the moon; and never again would he think of Lord Byron’s couplet, “Meek Diana’s crest/ Sails through the azure air, an island of the blest,” without exulting in the knowledge of its truth.

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Exhausted by their evening’s labors, Herschel and his three assistants made some final notations and then retired to their nearby bungalow. The next morning the astronomers were awakened by the excited shouts of some passing Boer farmers that the “big house” (as they quaintly termed it) was on fire. Sir John leaped from his bed and ran to the window, where to his horror he saw the observatory enveloped in thick black smoke. The telescope’s great lens, which as a rule was lowered during the day, had unaccountably been left in a vertical position, which concentrated the rays of the sun. Everyone rushed to the burning observatory, whereupon the lens was immediately turned and the fire extinguished with water from a nearby brook. Fortunately, the building had been covered in a thick coat of Roman plaster or it would have burned to the ground. As it was, by the time the last of the flames had been put out much of the plaster had vitri-fied into blue glass, the hydro-oxygen microscope’s reflectors had fused into useless clumps of metal, and the observatory’s viewing wall, “on which had been exhibited so many wonders that will ever live in the history of mankind,” had been totally destroyed. Masons and carpenters were summoned from Cape Town, and within a week the telescope was again ready for use, but by then the moon was invisible and John Herschel had redirected his attention to the planets.

Not until March was the weather again favorable enough for lunar observations, by which time Herschel was too absorbed in his cataloguing of the southern skies to explore the moon further. However, his assistants were eager to reacquaint themselves with their newly discovered lunar world, and on one of those clear nights, when Sir John was otherwise occupied, they turned the gaze of the retooled telescope back to the moon. In one of its northern regions they found several new species of horned animals and the ruins of three more triangular temples, but they made their most exciting discovery near the Atlas crater, where they found a third, highly superior variety of Vespertilio-homo. Though these man-bats were no larger than those seen earlier, they were far more beautiful: “scarcely less lovely,” noted Grant, “than the general representations of angels by the more imaginative schools of painters.”

Their social life seemed to be regulated by rituals like those of the man-bats living in the Vale of the Triads, but their works of art were far more numerous, and executed with such skill that only the most expert of observers would be capable of describing them. As a result, Andrew Grant had decided to bring his correspondence to a close, and “let the first detailed
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account of them appear in Dr. Herschel’s authenticated natural history of this planet.”

So concluded the
Supplement to the Edinburgh Journal of Science,
but for an additional forty pages of mathematical notes that the editor of the
Sun
—that is to say, Richard Adams Locke—chose to omit because they did not add to the story’s general interest. However, he included as an ad-dendum a page from those notes, presenting a new geometrical approach to calculating the height of lunar mountains, so that the newspaper’s readers might have a look at the great astronomer’s work. “For ourselves,”

admitted the
Sun’
s editor, “we know nothing of mathematics beyond counting dollars and cents.”

On the last morning of August, James Gordon Bennett awoke early, as he always did. He washed with cold water, a practice he had learned as a boy on a farm north of Aberdeen.
Cold water ablutions over the whole person
every morning, cold or hot, summer or winter, wet or dry:
it was one of the rules for living that he would share with his readers a few years later, after the
Herald
had achieved its well-deserved success, that they might become as healthy and happy as he was. At five o’clock the sky was just growing pink; within the hour the sun would appear beyond the river, gilding the masts of the ships berthed at Peck Slip. To all outward appearances it was a morning like any other, but inside, surely, he felt that his birthday had come a day early, because today, at long last, the
Herald
was returning to New York.

Bennett took his usual breakfast of tea and a biscuit (
Strict temperance
in eating and drinking, but not tetotalism toward good cooking and
choice wines
) and set to work. Early morning was when he wrote his lighter paragraphs, the ones that so amused New Yorkers with their in-souciance and daring. Among today’s items was the case of a local barber pleading for leniency from a judge on the grounds that he had been shaving him for nearly two years. “He was dealt with,” remarked Bennett, “with the keenness of razor, and compelled to pay a fine for his
barbar
ous actions.” A geranium, he had heard, was growing on Broadway that had been taken from the tomb of Napoleon on St. Helena. Elsewhere on Broadway, at the City Saloon, the artist Hanington was still pleasing the crowds with his peristrephic dioramas, the latest of which was a representation of the Great Deluge, complete with waters and rainbow. Now, Bennett informed his readers, “Hanington has some idea of getting up a
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diorama of Herschell’s lunar discoveries.” (He proved to be correct about this: the new diorama would premiere before September was out.) When his work was completed, Bennett left his room on Nassau Street and strode around the corner to his office at 202 Broadway, a former coal cellar that managed to retain its impressive dankness even in the heat of the summer. There he joyfully received his first copies of the newly reborn
Herald.

“We are again in the field,” he had proclaimed in the lead editorial,

“larger, livelier, better, prettier, saucier, and more independent than ever.” He reminded his readers that before the fire the
Herald
had reached a daily circulation of nearly seven thousand; soon, he vowed, its circulation would soar to twenty-five thousand, and that was “no astronomical dream—no Herschell discovery in the moon.” He bade his readers a cheerful good morning and urged them to bring him the latest news on any subject, “barring always discoveries in astronomy, which our friends of the Sun monopolize.”

Several times in that maiden issue he referred to the series that had propelled the
Sun
to such an unprecedented circulation—it was clearly working on his mind—as in one of the financial articles, when he reported that

“a few large capitalists” were causing fluctuations in the stock market by making unscrupulous offers to young or otherwise naive merchants, attempting to “dazzle them with such visions as Doctor Herschell says he saw in the moon.” This, however, was but little in comparison with the long item that ran below the headline “The Astronomical Hoax Explained,” in which Bennett offered his readers what he claimed was the real story behind the
Sun
series. Like so much of James Gordon Bennett’s
oeuvre,
the story was an intoxicating mixture of truth, half-truth, and outright libel.

The revelation came right at the beginning: “The town has been agape two or three days at the very ingenious astronomical hoax, prepared and written for the Sun newspaper, by Mr. Locke, formerly the police reporter of the Courier and Enquirer.” As Bennett well knew, this was a bombshell sentence, for it was the first time Richard Adams Locke had been publicly named as the author of the moon series. “Mr. Locke is an Englishman by birth,” continued Bennett, warming now to his subject, “a graduate of Oxford or Cambridge—was intended for the Church, but in consequence of some youthful love affair, getting a chambermaid in some aukward [
sic
]

plight, abandoned religion for astronomy.”

Having thus made free with the facts of Locke’s history, Bennett next related how he and Locke had become acquainted when they both

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worked for the
Courier and Enquirer.
He had been impressed with Locke’s talents and sympathized with him in his conflict with the
Courier’
s managing editor, Edward Hoskin, “a man,” Bennett noted, “utterly incompetent to measure the extent of Mr. Locke’s genius and acquirements.” After Locke was dismissed from the
Courier and Enquirer
he had come to see Bennett, who was just starting up the
Herald.
Now Bennett claimed, astonishingly, that he was the one who suggested to Locke the idea of writing about Matthias the Prophet (“I told him a famous thing might be made out of the affair of Matthias”). During that conversation, Locke said that he had recently been “engaged on some scientific studies. He mentioned optics, and I think astronomy, as the particular branches.” The two men saw each other again shortly afterward, Bennett said, at which point Locke was already busy “concocting his recent ingenious discoveries in the moon.”

Still, Bennett continued, despite its “superlative drollery” Locke’s work contained several telling mistakes, including a description of shadows on the moon (“incorrect on mathematical principles,” he asserted) and the identification of John Herschel as an LL.D., a degree that the great astronomer did not possess. Perhaps most egregiously, the alleged “supplement” was said to have been issued by the
Edinburgh Journal of
Science
—a publication, Bennett pointed out, that no longer existed.

In fact the
Edinburgh Journal of Science
had ceased publishing three years earlier, in 1832. It is possible that Richard Adams Locke was un-aware that the journal was defunct, as he had left for New York in 1831, before it stopped publishing. However, in his 1852 account
The Celebrated “Moon Story,” Its Origins and Incidents,
William Griggs suggested that Locke had simply erred in setting down the journal’s name, and that he had really meant the
Edinburgh New Philosophical Journal,
the peri-odical that had published the views of Gruithuisen and his colleagues about the habitability of the moon. In either case, the misattribution was a major blunder on Locke’s part, one serious enough to have derailed the moon series before it even began; but as Griggs pointed out, the series was so sensational, and Locke’s writing of it so convincing, that no one seems to have noticed the mistake until James Gordon Bennett did—after
Great
Astronomical Discoveries
had already concluded its run.

Despite his criticisms Bennett was unstinting in his praise of Locke’s literary ability; “ingenious,” he called him, “original,” “brilliant.” He always maintained a respect for his rival editor—this was, for Bennett, highly un-

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characteristic—as well as a certain empathy, for though the two men could not have been further apart on the contentious issue of slavery, nor more different in their personalities, they had an unusual measure of shared experience, even beyond the odd coincidence that both were cross-eyed. (Locke’s strabismus had resulted from a case of childhood smallpox; Bennett claimed that his had come from reading too much as a boy.) Both men were expatriate Britons; both had grown up on family farms; both resisted the careers urged on them by their fathers; both emigrated to America to find work as journalists; and both condemned the undue influence of religious authorities.

The respect Locke had earned was indicated by the fact that Bennett (who had earlier called Benjamin Day and George Wisner “the garbage of society”) referred to him always as “Mr. Locke” or, more familiarly, “Richard.”

So concluded Bennett’s exposé of the “Astronomical Hoax”:

Mr. Locke, however, deserves great credit for his ingenuity—his learning—

and his irresistible drollery. He is an original genius, and very gentlemanly in his manners. If he would come out and tell the public frankly the whole secret history of the hoax, he would lose nothing in character or in talents. We tender to him cheerfully the columns of the Herald for that purpose.

By the end of the day James Gordon Bennett had received his response from Richard Adams Locke, by way of an open letter delivered to the editor of the
Evening Star.
“SIR,” it began:

Some paragraphs, written by Mr. James Gordon Bennett, were put into my hand this morning, which, strangely enough, attribute to
me
the astonishing astronomical discoveries lately made at the Cape of Good Hope by Sir John Herschel. Mr. Bennett, in seeking for notoriety has found a mare’s nest. I beg to state, as unequivocally as the words can express it, that I did
not
make those discoveries, and it is my sincere conviction, founded on a careful examination of the internal evidence of the work in which they first appeared, that, if made at all, they were made by the great astronomer to whom all Europe, if not incredulous America, will undoubtedly ascribe them. I have sought in vain for those discrepancies in the account which some half informed persons pretend to have detected. Nothing is said about those “shadows in the Moon,” which Mr. Bennett, with an affectation of science says “are mathematically
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incorrect”; and in the full work published this morning in the Sun office, the most scientific reader will find ample internal evidence to demonstrate its consistency and plausibility. . . .