The Map That Changed the World (12 page)

Armed with his theodolite and his chain, his trenching tools and his shovels, Smith thus began the long process of slicing through Somerset. Each day he would venture out from Rugborne on his horse, making his way slowly and methodically a few hundred yards each day, from the mines of Camerton eastward toward the thatch of Limpley Stoke. He would set up his theodolite and his marker pole and his compass and his chain, he would measure out a section, he would write his notes about what he found and would speculate on the projected ease or difficulty of digging a canal along the path he had chosen; and then he would pack up all his kit and, piling it onto the back of his long-suffering nag, would move forward another few hundred feet and begin it all again.

Unwittingly he managed to create in his design for the route of the canal a device that would help him enormously in his geological inquiries. He and his colleague engineers decided that for most of the route west of Midford there should actually be
two
near-parallel canals—there should be a northerly route, the Dunkerton Line, and a more southerly, the Radstock Line. By this arrangement of double-branching the canal, the coals from the entire coalfield could be collected with a minimum of effort, and funnelled eastwards towards the junction with the Kennet & Avon Canal just by the huge aqueduct at Dundas.

The arrangement made good sense from the coal-barons’ point of view. It also made good forensic sense for William Smith—for it meant that whatever observations he might make in one branch of the canal, he could check in another branch that ran only a mile or so away, in an almost precisely parallel direction. He had always wanted Somerset to be sliced open: Now it
was being sliced and filleted twice over, and all his work could be compared, checked, and confirmed.

The Somerset Coal Canal, showing the two near-parallel branches that later helped Smith in confirming his theories.

It was as he worked patiently forward in this fashion that he first noticed something. He was surveying a stretch of the proposed northern route, between Dunkerton and Midford, when he saw exactly what he had been hoping for:

“I observed a variation of the strata on the same line of level, and found that the Lias
*
rock which about three miles back was a full 300 feet
above
this line was now 30 feet
below
it, and
became the bed of a river, and did not appear any more at the surface,” he wrote.

This, it can be argued, was Smith’s most momentous early realization. It was an utterly simple observation—that when going from Camerton to Limpley Stoke southeastward along a line that was both continuously straight in direction and consistently horizontal in attitude, the old rocks that he had been accustomed to seeing in Dunkerton fell away and then vanished beneath his feet, while as he approached Midford newer and newer rocks appeared in the cliffs and cuttings before him, only to fall away and vanish and be replaced in their turn. These layers of rock, he said, were arranged “to resemble, on a large scale, the ordinary appearance of superposed slices of bread and butter.”

He took notes, and he drew sketches—none of them too clear today, none of them too confident. Those who look at his drawings fancy that they see narrow shaded bands that they imagine mark the outcrop of the coal measures and their unconformable relationship with the Triassic rocks above—and one would-be biographer thinks this might fairly be called the first true geological map. But it isn’t, not really—and all one can truly say of the cartography Smith did during his canal days was that he was most definitely thinking about it. He began, he wrote in his diary, “to delineate on maps the courses of the strata, and constantly traced and retraced the order in which they would be intersected in making the canal.” His greatest achievement at this stage was not that he drew any maps—that would all come later—but that he noticed things, drew conclusions, and laid plans. He became uncannily able to perceive the spatial geometry of the world beneath his feet—to imagine, on the basis of what he saw above ground, just what the world looked like underneath.

Today some critics remark sniffily that all this came too easily. That Smith was merely lucky, in that his chosen layers of rock all had a uniform dip to them, and they varied along their outcrop in interesting and obvious ways—he could with no difficulty recognize how the limestone turned to clay and then to shale, to oolite and so on—and so the layers revealed themselves to him quite plainly. Some also say that other surveyors had noticed much the same thing many years before Smith did—an amateur member of the local gentry named John Strachey, it is argued, who worked in much the same part of the world, spoke of the layers of rock looking like “the leaves of a paper-book.”
*

Some also point out, quite fairly, that Smith came at first to
some naively rash conclusions about the easterly dip of the rocks he examined. It occurred to him, for instance, that since the oolites and the Lias and the Trias and the chalk of southwestern England had this convenient attitude, then probably
all the rocks in the world
were arranged likewise. The strata, he wrote, “form a set of lines extending from Pole to Pole with a regular inclination to the East. And the motion of the earth, which probably commenced while these strata were in a soft state or of a pulpy consistency, would naturally place them in an inclined curvilineal position.”

He realized before long that he had misjudged this badly; and he made a host of other errors besides, with which his critics make hay. But William Smith was the one man who took his observations and formulated his idea and wove the whole cloth of new theory from it. Maybe the local geology did make his task relatively easy. Maybe he wasn’t the first to notice the arrangement of the local rocks. But he saw the rocks, he made a deduction—and he then took that deduction to its logical and, as we shall see, its astonishingly beautiful conclusion.

A
fter six months of heavy labor in the river valleys south of Bath, with the initial survey almost done, Smith’s employers suddenly decided he should interrupt his work and take part in a brief expedition. Before the first sod was dug and the first layer of stone laid—matters that were in any case the business of engineers, not surveyors—Smith was to go off on tour and take an instructive look at how other people were routing and then building canals. So in the late summer of 1794, along with two members of the canal committee, Samborne Palmer and Dr. Richard Perkins, William Smith was instructed to set out in a post-chaise on a journey that would last two months and would take him on an expedition over more than nine hundred miles of England and Wales.

He now knew that the colliers’ rules for coal, and his own ideas from High Littleton, applied more generally to the hills and valleys he had surveyed elsewhere in Somerset. Was there any chance that they applied, as he thought they might, to the nation as a whole? In the Rugborne stable yard, as the postilion saddled up the horses and Smith clambered up into the cart alongside the driver while Palmer and Perkins sat in the carriage behind, he must have felt a welling sense of apprehension, of the excitement of his confident certainty. He already knew he could draw a map of a coal mine. His surveying work showed he could draw a map of North Somerset. Now, as the horses struck sparks on the coachyard cobblestones, he knew he might soon have the opportunity to do the same for England.

Stephanoceras humphriesianum

H
is excitement and his apprehension were still very much a secret. For the first few days in the coach he vowed to say nothing to his traveling companions. William Smith, all of a sudden, was worried.

Earlier in the year he had become gripped by an anxiety that is all too common among discoverers who work alone—an anxiety that must have been even more frequent in times when communication was so restricted. For although he was by now quite confident that his assumptions about the order and regularity of stratification were right, he was frantically concerned in case others might be thinking along the same lines.

He had no intention of announcing his ideas to Palmer and Perkins. He would not in fact for the moment disclose his theories to anyone. He was still not wholly certain he was right, and he had no intention of blurting out an unformed set of ideas and thereby making a fool of himself. Nor did he want to claim as his own notions that might rightly belong to others—and yet at the same time he hoped against all hope that he had originated these
ideas, that he truly was the first to think them.

Shortly before setting off on the trip he had managed to dispel at least some of these doubts. The canal committee had traveled to London en masse to give evidence before Parliament—a bill was needed before the construction of any canal could begin, and though the questioning tended to be perfunctory, MPs needed to know that all was in order, the money had been raised, all opponents duly heard, all process duly done. William Smith was a witness, and recalled with some awe that, even though he was only twenty-five, he was summoned to the bar of the House, sworn in by bewigged jurists, and compelled to play a significant part in the democratic proceedings of the time.

But aside from a day or so giving testimony, he had little else to do. All his expenses were paid, and he was on salaried commission with precious few duties to perform until sent back to Somerset. So he decided he would go burrowing and scavenging through the libraries and bookshops of the capital, searching for anything that might show him what he feared—that like-minded others were on the case, that in creating the still-unchristened science of stratigraphy, he was not entirely alone.

We have no firm idea of what he found. There was, however, a lot on offer. We do know he acquired at about this time some basic reference books—Plot on
Oxfordshire
and again on
Staffordshire
,
*
John Morton on
Northamptonshire
, and John Woodward’s majestic
Catalogue of English Fossils
. We know he was assiduous in his searches, and that he came home with a considerable library.

Almost certainly he would have come across John Strachey’s
Observations on the Different Strata of Earths and Minerals
, written in 1727, and with the engaging theory that all rocks are spinning when laid down, and so are revealed as outcrops as they solidify, their edges like an unrolled sheaf of papers. Maybe he
saw John Woodward’s other great work, his
Natural History of the Earth
, published in 1695, which revealed his fascination for “speluncae, grottoes and wells,” and his unshakable belief that “the circumstances of these things in remote countries were very much the same as those of ours here.”

He would perhaps have gained considerable insight had he found a copy of
An Inquiry into the Original State and Formation of the Earth
by John Whitehurst, which was popular enough to have two editions, in 1778 and 1786. Though the book put great emphasis in Derbyshire (still one of the counties most useful to teachers of geology, and so swarming each year with students, equipped with magnifying glass, compass, perhaps a now-environmentally-incorrect bottle of hydrochloric acid, and an Estwing hammer), it laid out a more general program that Smith himself would follow, almost to the letter:

But we have little clear idea of his reaction to anything he discovered. Would Whitehurst have inspired him right away? Or would he have been depressed on reading it, suspecting that he had rivals? Would he have been dejected to read Christopher Packe’s 1743 description of the geology of Kent, his so-called Philosophico-chorographical Chart, since the author insisted that his was “a
real
scheme, taken on the spot with patience and diligence.” Or by
The Course and Phenomena of Earthquakes
, published in 1760 by the Reverend John Michell, who took Strachey’s rolled-up-papers view of the world and,

Would he have been dejected by such thoughts and such writings? Intimidated? Apparently not in the slightest. Indeed, he seemed almost smug. “Although several authors had noticed the thickness of some strata in succession in various parts of the country, their resemblance to others was never noticed—none were collated, and
for want of comparisons there could not be any reasonings on the subject
[emphasis added].” By the time he had left London and was back at Rugborne readying himself to set out for the Bath post-chaise terminus, he was displaying a remarkable equanimity. No such observations as he had made, he wrote, had ever been placed on record. At least—not yet, and not in England.

Yet as the party trotted off northward from Bath, he still steadfastly kept his own counsel. He was, he would later write,
overjoyed
to be going on the journey. It would go everywhere he wanted—they would pass northeastward through the English Midlands up to Leeds and York, along the east coast up to Newcastle-upon-Tyne (where there were no planned canals—none north of Leeds, in fact). Then, after a brief halt in an inn, they would cross back over the Pennines and head home via Lancashire and Shropshire and the borders with Wales. Perkins and Palmer sat inside the carriage, chatting endlessly about the possibilities for profit: They were interested only in using the tour to find out more about the mining and carrying of coal—Samborne Palmer was a landowner and suspected his estates contained abundant riches, if only they could be transported to market swiftly and cheaply.

But Smith, though professionally interested in all matters flammable, had grander designs. He sat invariably out in the open, perched beside the driver and his blunderbuss-equipped guard
*
constantly scanning the horizon, continually asking to be allowed to get down and flail away at some roadside exposure “with the small hammer he seemed always to keep with him,” as his nephew was later to write, and to bring specimens of rocks, fossils, crystal, and minerals back into the coach with him.

“The slow driving up the steep hills,” he noted in his diary,

Outwardly he was there for Perkins, Palmer, and the Somerset Canal Company. But “the most important [of my interests] I pursued unknown to them; though I was continually talking about rocks and other strata, they seemed not desirous of knowing the guiding principles.”

More than likely the couple thought of him as a fusty old bore, and laughed at him a little from behind their Woodstock gloves. But it has to remembered too that people, especially those older than Smith and the small army of similarly curious and inventive younger people who were coming to the fore in the England of these times, were likely to be as much perplexed as wearily amused.

Their world that had seemed so stable for so long was now changing all too rapidly, and men like Palmer and Perkins only half understood what was happening. They might have recog
nized in their strange companion what some of today’s middle-aged recognize in the young electronics visionaries—that Smith was a man who, though part of their world, still had a view that was somehow much larger than theirs, that he had firm sight of a future that he somehow
knew
was better, as well as being a future that was definably different and, most crucially, utterly unlike the world of the present. William Smith knew that he stood on the edge of something; and that knowledge, that certainty, set him somehow apart and made other, more ordinary men uneasy.

They crossed the Cotswolds, put down at Tetbury, and again at the head of the river Thames, and took time (as Smith had already done with Edward Webb) to see the huge canal tunnel at Sapperton (because the initial plans for the coal canal called for a long tunnel to be built near Combe Hay). They looked at the Kingsnorth Tunnel on the Worcester & Birmingham Canal—Palmer remarking disdainfully (according to Smith’s diary) that the young surveyor spent an unduly long time inspecting the walls of the tunnels, gazing intently at the rocks through which they had been bored, hammering bits from the sides, and taking away fossils and samples until the coach groaned under their weight.

They passed on through Derby and Ripley, dropped in to look at the great palace of the dukes of Devonshire at Chatsworth, went on to Matlock; and at Lord Fitzwilliam’s mine at Hisley Wood, Smith and Dr. Perkins were lowered deep into the pit in a basket, suspended as at High Littleton from a quintainlike crossbar worked by a steam engine. And then at Leeds, at the outer edge of the Yorkshire coalfield, from which point north there were no more canals, they decided to transmute themselves into tourists and visit the three cathedral towns of York, Durham, and Newcastle, and thereafter call it a day.

Some like to say that it was high in the tower of York Minster that Smith first broke his silence and told his traveling companions about his bold ideas. There is little hard evidence for this, but it makes for a compelling tale—written most recently as fic
tion in a remarkable book,
The Floating Egg
, by a keenly original Yorkshire geologist named Roger Osborne.

According to his account the three men climb the 290 steps from the nave to the top of the tower—Smith bounding ahead, the others panting damply and having to pause to catch their breath on the transept roof. When finally they reach the top, where there is a view for thirty miles in each direction, they find the young Smith standing transfixed as if in a dream, bright eyed with obvious excitement, caught in the headlights of a remarkable idea. They ask him what excites him.