FLAT EARTH: The History of an Infamous Idea by Christine Garwood

Macmillan £20 pp436

Up until 1492, when Columbus sailed the ocean blue, everyone believed the earth was flat. Since then, everyone has known better. In fact, as Christine Garwood demonstrates in this quirky and highly entertaining slice of intellectual history, both these statements are false. The Ancient Greeks knew very well that they lived on a globe, while the Flat Earth News ceased publication only in 1988.

Not the least attractive thing about Garwood’s study is her criticism of modern scientists whose arrogant assumption that the present always trumps the past only flatters their self-esteem. She dismisses “supposed Christian closed-mindedness” as a post-Enlightenment myth. The Church was at the forefront of intellectual and scientific discovery for centuries. Indeed, it’s really quite stupid and credulous of us now to believe that most medieval people thought Columbus would fall off the edge of the world. They could see as well as you or I that a ship disappears over the horizon after a few miles, or that during a lunar eclipse, the shadow of the earth on the moon is round. Duh. There was “no mutiny of flat-earth sailors on the Santa Maria”.

Plato, Aristotle, Euclid, Archimedes, Ptolemy, St Augustine and Bede were all firm “globularists”, in Garwood’s pleasing neologism, while Newton refined things still further by showing that we really lived on an “oblate spheroid” (the earth bulges in the middle, to you and me). As with scientology, belief in alien abduction, or wildly overpriced face creams containing such bogus substances as “micro-oils”, for real stupidity you need a dash of dodgy modern science.

Recent flat-earthism was revived by an awkward Lancashireman (if that’s not a tautology), one Samuel Birley Rowbotham of Stockport, a radical socialist, quack doctor and all-round pain in the neck. With scant education concealed by tremendous energy and self-belief, Rowbotham started touring England in the late 1830s, arguing that the earth was a flat disc, the sun was 400 miles from London, and that we age only because we ingest too much “phosphate and sulphate of lime”. He comes across as a Victorian hybrid of David Icke and Dave Spart. Garwood vividly evokes this milieu of bolshy, furiously autodidactic working-class men in their splendid Mechanics’ Institutes and Owenite Halls of Science, determined to prove those toffee-nosed boffins down in London wrong. Even if they were spectacularly wrong themselves, there’s something appealing about their stubborn contrariness, as with global-warming sceptics today. Unquestioning herd-like consensus is never a healthy state of affairs.

The tone of their scientific debates was also vigorous. They dismissed each other’s arguments as “loquacious twaddle and milk-and-water moonshine”, and their opponents as “brainless boobies, infidel upstarts, swaggering freethinkers, knavish professors and the scum of the literary world”. It all makes contemporary scientific debates seem a little anaemic, except perhaps those featuring Richard Dawkins. (There is no God, and Dawkins is his Prophet.)

Further up the social scale, and some decades later, there was Lady Elizabeth Blount, the wife of Sir Walter de Sodington Blount Bt, and ardent campaigner for flat-earthism, vegetarianism, and the “Protection of the Dark Races”. She frequently broke into songs of her own composition during her lectures, and in her wide-ranging inquiry, The Origins and Nature of Sex (1923), she covered such topics as eunuchs, masturbation and hermaphrodites, as well as, inevitably, the continuing flatness of the earth. This in the age of manned flight, remember. At the age of 73, Sir Walter having long since passed on, Lady Elizabeth married a 40-year-old builder from Portsmouth, and wrote no more.

Certain Americans then took up the torch of flat-earthism, convinced that the globularists were out to undermine the Bible. There was Wilbur Glenn Voliva, who lived on a diet of buttermilk and Brazil nuts but still died at 72; John Alexander Dowie, who founded the rigorously flat-earthist Zion City on 6,500 acres of prime Illinois farmland in 1899, a heaven on earth from which pigs, oysters, tobacco and trades unions were all excluded; and Charles Kenneth Johnson, who was still warning about the falsehoods of “evilution” and “Copernicious” as late as the 1970s. Their intellectual heirs are the dogmatic, secretly terrified creationists of the Bible Belt today: the Tennessee preacherman shrieking “I ain’t descended from no monkey!” into his microphone, while unfortunately looking exactly like an overexcited chimpanzee as he does so.

Garwood’s history elicits plentiful laughter and astonishment, and even a degree of pity. Her exceptionally polite conclusion is that “personal perceptions are not necessarily ordered according to external reality”. There’s no quarrelling with that. Tom Cruise believes that the world is cluttered with the disembodied souls of those murdered by an evil galactic warlord called Xenu 75m years ago. Icke believes that both the Duke of Edinburgh and the singer Kris Kristofferson are 13-ft lizards from the constellation Draco. And “a few old-timers” in Zion City, Illinois, still insist that the earth is flat. For a brusquer conclusion, Garwood quotes a certain king from around 1000BC, noted for his timeless good sense. “The way of a fool is right in his own eyes” (Proverbs 12:15). This book is one long QED to that.

Shape shifters

It’s easy to mock flat-earth belief, harder to eliminate it entirely — given our natural inclination to trust the evidence of our senses until persuaded otherwise.

A 1996 study by geographers at the University of Sussex revealed that a fifth of children in British primary schools believed the earth to be flat. In America and Israel, surveys of children aged 10 and younger showed that almost half thought the earth was a plane. Of those who accepted that the earth was a globe, most believed that humankind inhabited a flat platform inside a ball-shaped earth.

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