S6 Ep1: Unreal Hollow Earth Drawings, Part 2

There’s Admiral Byrd’s strange stories with a lot of ties to sci fi and politics of the time, and then the imaginings of John Symmes drawn as a kind of diagram of the workings of his “Symmes holes” and the subsequent five “liveable” or inhabitable concentric levels of his fictional version of planet earth. Was he trying to put his stake in the ice to be involved in the race to explore the poles? The great polar adventure?