The Map That Changed the World (18 page)

Richardson heard that Smith was passing through Bath on one of his countless freelance excursions, found out that he was putting up at “the Pack Horse, in the Market Place,” and penned him a hurried warning, a document that later turned out to be as prescient as its language was orotund. “My dear friend,” he wrote:

There was more in this vein—but the intention was clear. Someone—and yet most decidedly not the worthy Joseph Townsend—was onto William Smith’s ideas and might well write about them and claim them as his own. It stimulated Smith to action within the month, as we shall see; the dangers it suggested were becoming more evident by the day.

It is possible to speculate at this distance that the plagiarist-in-waiting was that other Bath clergyman, fossil collector, and by all accounts, colossal bore
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Richard Warner. The man had already been in hot water with the architect John Carter, who accused him of stealing a print of one of his engravings and using it without permission or acknowledgment in a book of his own: He was fined twenty pounds and ordered to pay more than three times the fine in costs. He got into trouble with critics: Once, after writing a two-volume work of
Literary Recollections
, he was dismayed to find that a reader had himself published a twenty-one-page monograph listing all the book’s mistakes. And the printers did not smile on him either: His was the book
Topographical Remarks Relating to the South Western parts of
Hampshire
that was delayed by a fire at the engravers’, which melted all the plates into an immense ball of copper alloy.

But the Reverend Warner’s
History of Bath
did appear in 1801, with no outward trouble hampering publication. Not a few eyebrows were swiftly raised when it was noticed that the book included a copy of William Smith’s “Table of Strata”—the document that the geologist had dictated after dinner at Townsend’s house two years before—incorporated into Warner’s book without any indication of either permission sought or payment made. Most probably Smith would not have minded—Townsend himself noted “the open liberality peculiar to Mr. Smith,” and recalled his desire “to make so valuable a discovery universally known.” And in any case, it was making him more widely known, which for a freelancer can have been no bad thing.

But ten years later still, Warner came out with another book, and with it another purloined map—this time a direct copy of the circular map of Bath that had been made by Smith in 1799. Warner had this time renamed it, inelegantly, “A Fossilogical Map of Bath and Its Environs.” It was crude but useful, in that it showed all the local villages and beside each name, the stratum that was most commonly evident there. It was a naked example of plagiarism. Smith never complained: No doubt he found it too vulgar a creation to raise objection.

He would make a very great fuss, though, in later years, when still others stole his work. “Men of scientific eminence,” he would later write, famously and scathingly, in a letter to a friend, were all “pilferers of information,” who saw it as their right to regard all unpublished observations as “lawful plunder.”

In due course—fifteen or so years following this first brush with a small-time plagiarist—such pilfering and plundering, though on a far grander scale than the Reverend Warner’s, would help consign William Smith to debtors’ prison and to years of homelessness. It would leave him embittered toward
Londoners, toward the city’s intellectual and social elites, and toward those in the science who, he felt, rarely ventured out of their drawing rooms, rarely dirtied their soft pink hands, rarely muddied their fine leather boots. In 1801 he did not see in Warner’s peccadillo any indication of the sorrows to come. He was at thirty-two still something of an innocent, successful and of sunny disposition, and the world seemed a kindly place. But it would not be too long before all this would change.

He was by now fast building up an impressive circle of friends and was winning commissions that would take him clear across the British Isles, satisfying his goading urge to travel, to keep moving. The Bath Agricultural Society was the key: Its membership reflected the extraordinary reputation of the region for comfort, beauty, wealth, and style, and it exposed Smith to a range of men of money, leisure, divinity, and science, as well as to men of the same kind of rudely practical bent as himself.

Each group of men was peculiarly useful to him. The gentleman amateurs, the fossil collectors, and the natural philosophers who invited him to their vicarages and country cottages encouraged him in his studies and helped him with his ideas. The practical men, the coal borers and drainage engineers and well sinkers he met, taught him new techniques and allowed him to make the best use of his time in the field. But it was really the aristocrats, the members of the landed gentry, who at this stage in his life were to provide him with both the work and an entrée into ever-widening network of influence.

There now came a sudden acceleration in William Smith’s ambitions and desires, and central to this change were the brief friendships he enjoyed with three famous men of the day: Thomas Coke of Holkham, the duke of Bedford, and Sir Joseph Banks. Considering Smith’s later belief, when he was imprisoned and in trouble, that it was the English aristocracy that had treated him badly, and that his humble beginnings had counted heavily against him in a society so class-obsessed as nineteenth-century
England, it has to be remembered that the nobility assisted mightily in bringing his early ideas to fruition. His early sponsors were indeed members of the English upper class, writ large.

The chain of introductions to these sponsors was brought about by way of Smith’s unusual expertise not with rocks or fossils, but with water.

Canals, with which Smith now had a good deal of experience, are essentially enormous and elongated repositories of water. They are not rivers: The water in them does not have a natural source, does not flow from one end to the other, and is not continually refreshed from a spring. All is artifice, a complex and cumbersome arrangement of planning and engineering that allows a very large body of water to exist in a series of deep horizontal chambers along which vessels may glide, passing uphill and downhill by way of long cascades of locks, in order to move goods, or people, or to undertake commerce.

It is central to the design of any canal that it retain its water as best it can, since water is costly and has to be brought into the canal from rivers or lakes or purpose-built reservoirs. Smith came to know very well—almost uncannily, his admirers said—just how to route a canal so that it lost as little water as possible. He saw to it that wherever practicable it passed over beds of impermeable rock—and in those places where it did not, that its bed and banks were lined and proofed so that the water standing inside stayed where it was.

In accumulating what would later become his nationally known expertise in keeping water where it needed to be, and removing it from where it shouldn’t be—William Smith came into sudden demand by farmers, who saw in his skill a way for them to turn their profitless marshes into workable farmland. Up to this point he had been known for his skills as a surveyor and a cartographer; now he was changing, chameleonlike, with the addition of this new and very marketable skill, into the unglamorous but, to postenclosure England, essential figure of a drainage engineer.

Recognition of his growing mastery was one reason why the chairman of the canal company, James Stephens, had in 1799 hired Smith to help him drain his own farmland. No matter that Stephens had fired Smith from the canal that very June: So bad was the rainfall that autumn, and so uselessly boggy did the Stephens family farm become, and so in need of employment was Smith himself, that a deal was struck—in which Smith was paid to drain, dredge, and dike the Stephens fields for the highly respectable rate of two or sometimes even three guineas a day. And Smith, clearly burying his pride, worked well: The Stephens farm was promptly drained, any number of cuts and culverts were made and pipes and bores laid, and the farmland was made ideally suited for agriculture for years to come.

This was the time of the “improving farmer”—of the agriculturist who, now that the enclosure acts had brought some sanity to the fields of England, was intent on making as much as possible from the land he worked, by using newfangled fertilizers, by mixing soils, by judicious draining projects, by breeding new strains, and by sculpting the land and creating new environments. Thomas Crook, a typical improving farmer of the day, who lived in the Wiltshire village of Tytherington, saw what Smith had done to the Stephens farm nearby, and hired Smith to do much the same for him a year later.
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And then, once the drainage work was successfully completed, Crook invited for an inspection tour the man who is quite probably still regarded as the greatest agriculturist of his or of any age—Thomas William
Coke of Holkham, or as the Prince Regent later liked to have him known (since Coke took the title with great reluctance) the Earl of Leicester. For Smith the meeting presented an opportunity of inestimable value.

Coke of Holkham, as he was generally known, was a man with initially no practical knowledge of farming—he simply owned farms, placed tenants in them, and lived off the rental income. But in 1788 one of his tenants refused to renew his lease, and Coke decided that, rather than let the land lie fallow, he would make an attempt to farm it himself. Since he knew so little he took the radical step of organizing a huge seminar, which he called a sheepshearing, and to which he invited all the local farmers and practical men and landowners so that they could inspect his land, crops, and livestock, and make recommendations. The event was enormously useful to him and, since he laid on huge lunches and dinners and had experts offer speeches and demonstrations, great fun for those who came.

In due course his own farm flourished. He experimented with new soils and fertilizers, he replaced the normal Norfolk crop of rye with wheat; he decided to buy and crossbreed sheep, and to introduce into his fields large numbers of sturdy, fat, wool-covered animals that would replace the scrawny, doglike specimens with which Norfolk was then usually populated. He bred Suffolk pigs with Neapolitans, and within two years was producing massive porkers that delighted markets and trenchermen alike. The sheepshearings—known across the land (and through much of farming Europe) as Coke’s Clippings—became hugely popular: One of them, held in the early summer of 1818, attracted seven thousand people, with Coke offering hospitality to more than six hundred in Holkham Hall, no matter what their rank, station, or nationality.

Thomas Coke’s reputation rests today largely on the outward appearance of his great farms, and on the now-widespread knowledge of his techniques of breeding and feeding. What is
not so often recalled, about Coke, nor indeed about any of the other great improving farmers of the day, is that almost all these men, before they sowed a single seed or bred a single animal, had first to prepare their lands.

Before the enclosure acts, English land was in a hopeless mess. Unfarmed, the newly enclosed fields were still merely boggy patchworks of mud and sedge, with barely any meadows suitable for workers to work them with plows and seed drills. Very few of the new estates were unencumbered by piles of rocks or clumps of trees. Fewer still, more important, were properly drained.

The enclosure acts changed all that, by prompting the newly empowered owners to recognize the need for efficiency and careful husbandry, to come to grips with their individual agricultural shortcomings, and to begin shaping the tidy and mannered English countryside that we see today—fields laid out neatly, sedge trimmed back, bogs all drained. The fact that all is so impeccably and memorably attractive today stems in great part from the work of men like William Smith, who were called in by landowners like Coke to change out of all recognition the appearance of their vast acreages.

William Smith was called in to Holkham specifically because the work there was difficult, and because he had evidently been so successful in performing drainage work on the canal, as well as for Stephens and for Crook. In Norfolk he was asked to dry out the huge flat fields that stood beside the North Sea shore, to make productive the salt marshes that lay behind the dunes, to channel a network of wayward rivers, to dredge and drain and otherwise hydraulically improve the lands. His work remains intact today—hundreds of adequately dry and highly productive flatland acres that surround what is now recognized as one of England’s most enchanting stately homes.

A year after Smith had accepted the commission, and at about the time he was coloring his geological discoveries on the Cary maps of England, Thomas Coke introduced him to one of those
figures of whom Lloyd George was later to be so rudely disapproving—the vastly wealthy and hugely influential Francis Russell, the fifth duke of Bedford. “Deficient in wit and imagination” though he may have been regarded (by Emma Louise Radford, who wrote his entry in the
Dictionary of National Biography
), the duke was a great agriculturist,
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and his enormous estates at Woburn—now a three-thousand-acre deer park for tourists, with nine species of especially adorable animals—were made into a model farm along Coke’s lines, and supported vast herds of cattle and flocks of sheep.