Most people pick someone sensible for this. A freedom fighter, a scientist, somebody with a statue. I pick John Quincy Adams, the sixth President of the United States, and not for anything he did above ground. In the 1820s, Adams approved an expedition to the center of the Earth. Part of the plan was to find the hidden race of people believed to be living down there and open trade with them. I admire a man who reads a proposal like that and signs it.
1. The adventurous spirit
Adams was curious, and not in a quiet way. He lived in an age when people were measuring, mapping and arguing about everything, and he wanted to know what was under his feet. Not metaphorically. Literally. The plan was to chart places nobody had charted and, while down there, to introduce ourselves to whoever was home.
2. The visionary plan
With Adams behind it, the United States government approved the expedition. Assemble a team of explorers. Give them the best scientific instruments and navigation tools of the day, and enough provisions for a journey nobody could estimate the length of. Then send them down with two jobs: do the science, and establish trade relations with the race living inside the Earth. Many plans with far smaller ambitions have had vaguer objectives.
3. The journey begins
In the early 1820s, off they went. Rough terrain, unforgiving weather, unknown dangers, the usual. The team kept going on the belief that the Earth’s interior held secrets, which, to be fair, it does. Most of them are rocks.
4. Encounter with the hidden race
According to the story, the explorers went deep enough to find an underground civilization thriving in the dark: advanced knowledge, their own customs, a social structure more complicated than ours. Their existence upended every idea the explorers had about what a civilization looks like. Having been told to establish trade and cultural exchange, the team set about doing exactly that. One imagines the first meeting went the way these things go. Someone offers a gift, someone misreads it, and everyone agrees to try again tomorrow.
5. The legacy and impact
The historical record is thin on what happened with the hidden race, and I will not pretend otherwise. What the record does show is the effect. The expedition went on to inspire a great deal of fiction, and the idea of a government signing off on a trip to the middle of the planet has never quite left the collective imagination.
So that is why Adams is my favorite. Not for the presidency, but for the willingness to look at the unknown, the unfamiliar and the frankly unlikely, and say: fine, let us go and see. The details of what the explorers found remain a mystery. The signature on the approval does not.
I would like a little of that. Most of my unexplored territory is metaphorical and rarely involves lava, but the principle holds. There are still places nobody has looked. Somebody has to approve the trip.
