Item #7776 Royal Despatch of Her Majesty to Hon. John Merrill, Flume House, N.H. By Lord Drapier, British Minister. pseudonym Albert, John Merrill?
Royal Despatch of Her Majesty to Hon. John Merrill, Flume House, N.H. By Lord Drapier, British Minister.

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Victoria by Albert, pseudonym [John Merrill?].

Royal Despatch of Her Majesty to Hon. John Merrill, Flume House, N.H. By Lord Drapier, British Minister.

East Canaan, New Hampshire: G. F. Kimball, Printer, [1857].

Broadside, 23.875” x 10.75”; sheet size: 24” x 13.25”. CONDITION: Good, occasional minor discoloration, old folds and 1” tear to lower center, three miniscule losses at center creases affecting only one letter.

[offered with]

Soule, John P., photog. The Philosopher of the Pool, Franconia Notch, N.H. John P. Soule, 199 Washington Street, Boston. Stereoview, 3” x 5.5” on larger yellow paperboard mount with printed verso. CONDITION: Very good, light wear to edges.

An absolutely bonkers broadside printing the text of a letter addressed to White Mountains legend John Merrill (but quite possibly written by him), also known as “the Philosopher of the Pool,” bearing supposed commendations and further information from Queen Victoria and the “Grand Lama” on Merrill’s theory of a hollow Earth.

“A man of transcendental prognostications,” John Merrill (1802–1892) was a New Hampshire eccentric who became a tourist attraction in his own right as a feature of “The Pool,” a cliff-rimmed natural basin in the White Mountains’ Pemigewasset River. From about 1853 to 1890, Merrill charged a small fee to ferry visitors around the Pool—and to propound his theories on the hollow Earth hypothesis, which, despite having been definitively disproved in 1774, circulated in mid 19th century America through the persistent and widely ridiculed efforts of John Cleves Symmes Jr.

Merrill’s “charts”—diagrams of the hollow planet painted on the basin’s granite walls—appear in numerous photographs, as well as Thomas Hill’s 1870s oil painting “Merrill’s Pool, Franconia Notch,” and traces of them were apparently still visible in the early 2000s. Often known simply as the “Man at the Pool,” Merrill also went by “the Arctic Philosopher” because of his contention that “at the north and south extremes there are open places letting air and space inside, for the Earth is a hollow globe” (McGrath, p. 142). Merrill, whom one author described as “a queer combination of the hermit and the prosperous Yankee” (McGrath, p. 143), apparently took home enough from his summer ferrying to live comfortably for the rest of the year.

The broadside offered here prints a “facsimile” of a letter, purportedly in the hand of Lord Napier and written on behalf of a dizzying array of personages: Queen Victoria, Prince Albert, and Alid El Kader, and even “the GRAND LAMA.” Addressing Merrill as “His August Highness…Director of the Pool, Arctic Philosopher, Practical Philanthropist, &c. &c. &c. &c. &c. &c.,” it confirms the Grand Lama’s support of Merrill’s “views” and adds that the hole in the Earth was likely “caused by a derangement of the North Pole—affected by the scintillations of the hyperborean Aurora Borealis which”—referring to the disappearance of Sir John Franklin’s 1845 North Pole expedition—must “have ‘shaken the bark of Sir John Franklin from the outside into the inside of the pole,’ as you say.” Beneath facsimiles of the recto and verso of Lord Napier’s envelope—the verso complete with the royal seal—the letter appears first in facsimile of Napier’s handwriting and then in type, and is bordered with a foliate design.

Although this “Royal Despatch” is framed as a reply to a “most learned, antiloquent, and circumambient State Document, dated August 28th, 1854,” we have found no traces of such an early document by Merrill—if it ever existed. Since it is printed by the same G. F. Kimball who published his later Cosmogony: Or Thoughts on Philosophy, the first edition of which appeared in 1860, it was likely composed by Merrill himself in order to promote his image. Another broadside—bearing praise from Louis Napoleon—is dated 1860 as well, and an earlier work, entitled Lecture delivered at the Flume House Parlor, before a company of editors, on the system of the Earth’s being hollow, appeared in 1858. If the date of 1857 on this broadside is to be believed, this may be the earliest of Merrill’s known publications.

An example held at Dartmouth bears a manuscript note on the verso indicating that Merrill sold copies of the broadside to supplement his ferrying earnings, a suggestion that is supported by the letter’s exact reprint in a November, 1861 edition of the Yale Literary Magazine. In the course of a summer excursion with the Yale choir, the article’s author encountered Merrill and describes his experience at the Pool as follows:

Here is an old man in a barge, into which you enter, and he paddles you around the narrow circuit of the Pool. When you have reached the side toward the Falls, where the water is from twenty to thirty feet deep, but clear as crystal, he begins to unfold to you his favorite theory; (for you must know that, is his own estimation at least, the old man is quite a philosopher;) that the earth is a hollow sphere, inhabited on the inside, as well as the outside. He maintains his position by arguments entirely original and irrefutable; has an answer ready for every question, and seeks to proselyte you. He reads a letter he pretends to have received from Queen Victoria, which I here insert…

The text of Lord Napier’s letter is then printed in full. Not all tourists were as entertained by Merrill’s activities, and characterizations of him in guide books and accounts of Franconia Notch range from “an oddity” to “the ferryman of Hades” (McGrath, p. 143).

OCLC records just three copies of Merrill’s “Royal Despatch,” at Dartmouth, Boston Public Library, and the Peabody Essex Museum.

This broadside is offered with a stereoview of “The Philosopher of the Pool” by John P. Soule of Boston showing Merrill, dressed all in plaid, gazing into the middle distance as he reclines in his boat. The Pool’s crystalline surface and rocky waterfall are visible in the background.

A delightfully harebrained broadside on the hollow Earth theory of New Hampshire’s “arctic philosopher,” a true New England original.

REFERENCES: H. K. “A Summer Experience,” The Yale Literary Magazine Vol. 27, No. 2, pp. 66–67; McGrath, Robert L. Gods in Granite: The Art of the White Mountains of New Hampshire (Syracuse University Press, 2001).

Item #7776

Price: $3,500.00

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