The Map That Changed the World (19 page)

The Duke’s four-day sheep-shearings were so popular as to make even those at Holkham look like village fetes: thousands came, and there were ploughing contests and cattle sales, wool auctions and dances, and banquets for many more hundreds than even the Earl of Leicester could afford. “To see a Prince of the Blood Royal and many great Lords sit down to the same table,” wrote Arthur Young,
†
one of those who went, “and partake of the conversation of the farmer and the breeder; to see all animated in the spirit of improvement, and listening with delight to the favoured topic of the plough, is a spectacle worthy of Britain, and in her blest isle alone to be beheld.”

A suitably massive oil painting survives, by the noted animal artist George Garrard, of the great shearing held at Woburn in 1804. Partly a record, partly an allegory, it shows eighty-eight “agricultural personalities” grouped around the base of a massive limestone column capped by the “Ship of Commerce.” The duke is there, top-hatted and, suitable to both his
gravitas
and
dignitas
, the only figure on a horse. Around him are the great and the good of the English rural universe: smocked farmers and shepherds, impeccably dressed gentleman farmers, roughly
dressed blacksmiths and farriers, men fat and thin, jolly and severe, ill-born and noble, of practical or professional appearance, all busy in conversation, or gazing in rapt attention at the tups being shorn in a pen before them, or at the elongate cattle standing patiently at center stage.

Garrard’s painting seems to show that, despite this being June, the shearing was held on a wild and cloudy day. The buildings in the background are severe and practical, all stables, byres, and dairies, and none of the Inigo Jones–designed masterpieces in which his grace lived (as a lifelong bachelor) visible. To judge by the trees alone it is a very English painting: One of them is an age-gnarled oak—perhaps the very tree, which still stands at Woburn to this day, where a Cistercian abbot, one Hobbs, was hanged in the sixteenth century for making (according to the court records) “treasonable utterances” against the king. It was his supposed crime that led to his abbey being confiscated and handed to the determinedly Protestant Russell family, which has lived there ever since. Of such events, William Smith may have thought, has England’s aristocracy been made.

For Smith was there, and he is included both in Garrard’s painting and in an aquatint engraving the artist made seven years later. He is only barely discernible, however—still regarded as only a peripheral member of the ducal elite. He is just visible on the picture’s upper left, amid a crowd of others of equal honor and distinction: a bluff-looking man of middle height, wearing a black broad-brimmed hat, looking away, barely recognizable. The artist helps by providing us with a key: his figure is shown as number 10, against which is written the simple and almost vaguely insulting rubric, damnation with the faintest of praise: “Mr. Smith,” says the note. “The drainer.”

Matters of rank and propriety probably meant little enough to Smith at this stage in his career: He was as close to nobility and power as an Oxfordshire countryman could expect to be. And besides, the links he had forged in the brief time since his
removal from the canal company—from James Stephens to Thomas Crook, from the Thomas Coke to the duke of Bedford—were proving both profitable and, as it happened, enormously useful. Moreover, further links in the chain were to be forged through his passing acquaintance with the duke: Not only did he meet and present his card—“Wm. Smith, Surveyor and Drainer”—to still more noblemen, like the duke of Manchester, the earl of Thanet, Lords Talbot and Somerville—but he also engaged his first apprentice, the first man who became a geologist as a direct result of working for Smith.

This was the duke of Bedford’s land steward, John Farey—a figure who would champion his mentor’s work, play a vitally important role in his affairs, and lead him still further into a world of influence and connection that would enable him, finally, to produce and present the great map that would render him famous.

The story of John Farey (and his own introduction of Smith to one further world-renowned figure who would become the map’s greatest and most influential patron) belongs properly a little later in the tale—except in one respect. For when the two men first met, at Woburn in October 1801, William Smith had something to show him.

B
enjamin Richardson’s stern warning—that if Smith didn’t begin committing his thoughts to paper, someone else would beat him to it—had apparently sunk in.

He had indeed embarked on the publication of his ideas. He had accepted the good doctor’s advice not to publish merely a new map, or a list of strata like the one he had dictated at Pulteney Street, or even a cross-sectional portrait of the English underground—but a proper book.

And so on June 1, barely two weeks after receiving Richardson’s letter, Smith surprised and delighted everyone by publish
ing a document—a four-page prospectus for the book he was now determined to write. It had a title that, back at the beginning of the century, might have sounded more tempting than it does today:
Accurate Delineations and Descriptions of the Natural Order of the Various Strata That are Found in Different Parts of England and Wales; with Practical Observations Thereon.

There was a closely formulated financial model: Two thousand copies of the final book would be printed, and they would be sold at two guineas each, with Smith taking a 50 percent cut of the expected profits of £3,200. The prospectus—which Smith showed to an impressed John Farey in 1801—was a suitably handsome creation: Printed in Covent Garden, it was ambitious enough to include a stratigraphically apposite epigraph from Alexander Pope: “All Nature is but Art Unknown to Thee./All Chance, Direction which thou canst not see.” The hope was that those who saw the elegant little document would be seized with a burning desire to own the eventual book.

It seemed at first to have the required effect. Letters rained in, all enthusiastically asking to be put on the list. “I have distributed your Prospectus amongst my friends,” wrote one Richard Gregory from Coole, in Ireland, quite typically, “and have the pleasure to request you will add to the list of your subscribers the name of my father. Robert Gregory, of 56 Berners-Street, London, and the Hon. Richard Trench, MP, Spring Garden Terrace, London.”

Smith had a publisher all lined up, supposedly one of the best. He was John Debrett, who had already made his name and might well have made a fortune as the most noted cataloguer of the peers of the realm. He was Piccadilly’s most celebrated Whiggish biographer, a man curiously obsessed with publishing books about Australia and by all accounts an amusing and unreconstructed snob.

So everything thus far seemed set. Even the normally cautious Dr. Richardson appeared delighted, and he wrote an overjoyed
letter to his young friend—a letter that reminds us today both of the antiquity of the moment and of the lingering hostility and suspicion felt toward France, so soon after the fall of Napoleon. Richardson advises Smith to:

But Debrett, who might well have made a fortune, was not to do so with this particular volume. His finances, spiraling out of control, turned out to be the cardinal problem both for the firm itself and, rather more ominously, for William Smith. For though the celebrated
Debrett’s Peerage
was soon to become a reference book of biblical standing among the aristocracy (and always regarded as a considerably more venerable text than its rather
arriviste
rival, Burke’s), John Debrett himself was not the man to make money from it, or indeed from any of his publishing ventures. He was described simply as “a kindly, good-natured man but without business aptitude,” and he lived well only because of moneys inherited by his wife. He went bankrupt twice; the entire project, along with many others in which he was involved, was soon mired in crisis.

Smith himself set to work with a vengeance. “I have just come off a long and troublesome journey through Somerset, South and North Wales, Chester and Lincolnshire…a distance of about 800 miles,” he wrote Debrett from Woburn, six months after issuing the prospectus.

But soon John Debrett was making it clear that Smith did not have a prayer of making anything like the sixteen hundred pounds he had naively anticipated. Smith was disillusioned—and devastated. He sent Debrett an understandably churlish note.

Although money was the most visible problem in the making of the book, it was not the only one. Smith’s lack of literary confidence contributed too, as did his curious indecisiveness, his seemingly pathological need to procrastinate. It was to become a lifelong affliction.

On some days he would decide to abandon the whole affair: “Making little progress from not being able to please myself in the mode of expressing my thoughts,” he confided to his diary, “and from foreseeing great difficulty in arranging such matters for a book, and also from considering that I was losing two guineas a day for the chance of a small profit by the book, I wise
ly decided to stick to my profession.” Yet on other days he would seem reenergized, eager to start afresh: In May 1802, for example, we find pages from his daybook recording a number of small victories over his indecision:

Yet it was not to be. The relationship between Smith and Debrett deteriorated fast, with the geologist asking far too much, the publisher offering far too little, the project becoming subject to interminable delays and snared in arguments between the pair. In the end it was the money that did it in: Debrett went bankrupt in 1802 and then again in 1804, and Smith’s hopes of having his work offered between hard covers to his enormous list of subscribers, or to the public at large, swiftly died. The book was never to appear. And Smith was not to write anything of geological importance for nearly a decade.

But the setback then seems to have infused him with a new but very different sense of purpose. Although he had been forced to abandon his writing, his new circumstances served to provoke him into a new frenzy of travel. All of a sudden he was accepting commissions throughout the length and breadth of the country—Norfolk one week, Dorset the next, Yorkshire today, Shropshire tomorrow, and, with the duke of Bedford’s ready help, Ireland too. He began a period of intense restlessness, burning up the stagecoach miles like a traveling salesman, seeking out the work, and at the same time seeking out the rocks and fossils that unrolled and unraveled themselves before him.

T
he notion of publishing
something
still nagged persistently at him like an aching tooth. Maybe it should be a book, or maybe it should be something far grander, far more ambitious—maybe some document that demanded less intellectual energy, less cerebration, but that could perhaps emerge as a direct consequence of all his wandering, his collecting, his fieldwork, his observing. Maybe, if it was not to be a book, then it could and should be a truly wonderful, majestic, all-encompassing map.

And thus, by circumstantial happenstance, was the plan for the great map formally conceived. It was an idea that had nudged at him for years, ever since his first youthful attempts in Bath. The maps he had made in those early days were rudimentary enough, either devoted only to discrete localities or performed over a larger scale with a broad-brush vagueness that made them relatively simple to complete. But now it began to seem to him that a grander, more ambitious map could properly memorialize him—a map of the whole country, closely detailed and highly accurate. This new map, he thought, would reflect, in so much more appropriate a manner than a book, his special talents.

To make such a thing would require a great deal of time and a lot of money. And so he set about to gather the funds and rally yet more public support for this new project, and at the same time accelerated once more his determined wanderings. He traveled on commission, draining, surveying, mapping—and gathering as he did so yet more and more information.

“I intend to come through a part of Hampshire on my way westward,” he wrote to one Samuel Collett in May 1802, “for the purpose of seeing a few places where the chalks and clay strata turn round the end of your hills.” And to Richardson back home in Bath: