But on investigation it turns out that Shenton, too, thought that there was a barrier of ice around the earth’s circumference, presumably between the earth and the walls of its surrounding pit.Īnd Charles K. He thought that the earth floated at the bottom of a deep pit in an endless plane, and so I assumed that the walls of the pit, rather than a barrier of ice, held the oceans on the earth. I used to think that Samuel Shenton (1903–1971), who founded the International Flat Earth Research Society in 1956, was the exception. Garwood quotes a homely metaphor he used with reporters: the earth is like “a steak on a circular plate surrounded by a rim of mashed potato.” But there’s no hope of discovering the mashed potato, for “the weather is too cold and would stop any foolish travelers who want to go too far.” In the early twentieth century, Wilbur Glenn Voliva (1870–1942) similarly believed in a southern barrier of ice, as revealed by a map used in the schools of Voliva’s home of Zion, Illinois, shown above. No less a figure than Alfred Russel Wallace accepted, eventually winning ₤500 from Hampden, who nevertheless refused to acknowledge defeat. It was Hampden, by the way, who in 1870 issued a challenge to the British scientific community to prove the “rotundity” of the earth. Thus, for example, Parallax’s disciple John Hampden (1819–1891) agreed that the earth was a flat disk bordered by giant icebergs (although Garwood says that Hampden located Hell as beyond the ice barrier, a doctrine that I don’t see in Parallax).
Parallax acknowledged, however, that “How far the southern icy region extends horizontally” is a question “which cannot yet be answered” and that “there is no practical evidence as to the extent of the southern ice.” The existence of these outstanding questions and the non-existence of actual observations of such a convenient barrier notwithstanding, Parallax’s southern ice barrier became received wisdom among flat-earthers into the dawn of the twenty-first century. When it is seen that the Earth is not a sphere, but a plane, having only one centre, the north and that the south is the vast icy boundary of the world, the difficulties experienced by circumnavigators can be easily understood. … But if the southern region is a pole or center, like the north, there would be little difficulty in circumnavigating it, for the distance round would be comparatively small. That the south is an immense ring, or glacial boundary, is evident from the fact, that within the Antarctic circle the most experienced, scientific, and daring navigators have failed in their attempts to sail, in a direct manner, completely around it. The main evidence he cites for the existence of a barrier of ice at the world’s rim, however, involves the inability of mariners to circumnavigate the Antarctic circle: Well, actually, observations, variously showing that the surface of standing water is not convex, that the horizon is always horizontal, that the surface of the earth appears concave to balloonists, and so on. The main evidence Parallax cites for the flatness of the earth involves, as the subtitle indicates, experiments. Garwood suggests, “The South Pole was naturally non-existent in this scheme, and the circular plane was bordered with an immense barrier of ice,” although perhaps it would be fairer to say that the South Pole was identified with the barrier. “If then we adopt the zetetic process to ascertain the true figure and condition of the Earth,” Parallax wrote in the second, expanded, edition of Zetetic Astronomy (1865), we discover that the earth is a flat disk with the North Pole at its center. The standard answer was proposed by Samuel Birley Rowbotham (1816–1884), who, under the nom de plume of “Parallax,” launched the modern flat-earth movement back in 1849, with his book Zetetic Astronomy: A Description of Several Experiments which Prove that the Surface of the Sea is a Perfect Plane and that the Earth is not a Globe! “Zetetic” means pertaining to inquiry or investigation in contrast, the idea that the earth is spherical is, in Parallax’s view, based merely on speculation. As long as I have my copy of Christine Garwood’s excellent Flat Earth(2007) at hand, having retrieved it from the bookshelf to consult it for details about the flat-earther Wilbur Glenn Voliva, who hoped to be called to testify for the prosecution in the Scopes case (see “Voliva!”), I thought that I might take the opportunity to address a weighty question for flat-earthers: what keeps the ocean from cascading off the earth faster than it can be replaced by rain?
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