The Map That Changed the World (2 page)

The map that was to become “the map that changed the world.” Completed in 1801, this very basic sketch still has an uncanny accuracy.

Echioceras raricostatum

T
he last day of August 1819, a Tuesday, dawned gray, showery, and refreshingly cool in London, promising a welcome end to a weeklong spell of close and muggy weather that seemed to have put all the capital’s citizens in a nettlesome, liverish mood.

Anyone trying to hurry along the cobbled and granite-paved streets that day was still certain to be frustrated, despite the improvement in the weather: The crowds! The crush! The dirt! The smell! More than a million people had lately been counted as living within and beyond London’s city walls, and each day hundreds more, the morning papers reported, were to be found streaming in from the countryside, bent on joining the new prosperity that all hoped might soon be flowering now that the European wars were over. The city’s population was well on the way to doubling itself in less than twenty years. The streets were in consequence filled with a jostling, pullulating, dawdling mass of people. And animals, too: It seemed of little matter to some farmers that there had long been laws to keep them from
driving cattle through the center of town—so among the throngs one could spot mangy-looking sheep, more than a few head of cattle, the odd black pig, and of course horses, countless horses, pulling carriages and goods vehicles alike. The stench of their leavings, on a hot week such as this had been, was barely tolerable.

Since it was very early in the morning, there were, of course, fewer crowds than usual. Fewer, that is, except in one or two more notorious spots, where a sad and shabby ritual of the dawn tended to bring out the throngs—and where this story is most appropriately introduced.

T
he better known of the London sites where the morning masses gathered was in the rabbit warren of lanes that lay near Saint Paul’s Cathedral, to the east of where the river Fleet had once run. Halfway along the Fleet Market a passerby would have noted, perhaps with the wry amusement of the metropolitan sophisticate, that crowds had gathered outside a rather noble, high-walled building whose address, according to a written inscription above the tall gateway, was simple: Number Nine.

An onlooker would have been amused because the address was a mere euphemism, the building’s real purpose only too well known. The streets to the west of Saint Paul’s were one of the two districts of nineteenth-century London where a clutch of the capital’s many prisons were concentrated: the Newgate, the Bridewell, the Cold Bath Fields, and the Ludgate jails had all been built nearby, in what in winter were the chill gloom and coal-smoke fogs of the river valley. And Number Nine was the site of the best known of them all, the prince of prisons, the Fleet.

There was another, precisely similar, ghetto of prisons on the south side of the Thames, in the area that, then technically beyond London, was the borough of Southwark: another small huddle of grim, high-walled mansion houses of punishment and
restraint—the Clink, the Marshalsea, the Bedlam prison-hospital, and, formidable in appearance and reputation, just like its sister establishment back at Number Nine, the infamous barrackslike monstrosity of the Prison of the King’s Bench.

The principal prisons—including those for debtors—in London, 1819. Smith was languishing in Southwark, in what is noted here as King’s Bench Prison II.

• 1. Cold Bath Fields
  
• 2. Clerkenwell Bridewell
  
• 3. New Prison, Clerkenwell
  
• 4. Fleet Prison
  
• 5. City Bridewell
  
• 6. Ludgate Prison I
  
• 7. Newgate Prison
  
• 8. Giltspur Street Compter
  
• 9. Wood Street Compter
  
• 10. Poultry Compter
  
• 11. Ludgate Prison II (after 1760)
  
• 12. The Tower
  
• 13. Borough Compter
  
• 14. The Clink
  
• 15. Marshalsea Prison
  
• 16. King’s Bench Prison I
  
• 17. White Lion Gaol
  
• 18. County Gaol for Surrey
  
• 19. King’s Bench Prison II (after 1758)
  
• 20. St. George’s Fields Bridewell
  

The King’s Bench, the nearby Marshalsea, and the Fleet were different from most London prisons. They were very old, for a start, and were privately run according to a set of very strange rituals. They had been instituted for a sole purpose—the holding, for as long as necessary, of men and women who could not or would not pay their bills. These three institutions were debtors’ prisons—and the reason that crowds formed around their entrances each sunrise is that, every morning just after dawn, it was the policy of their wardens to free those inmates who had discharged their obligations.

Of the three the Fleet had the most intriguing entranceway. On either side of the gate was a caged window, and above it the motto “Remember the Poor Debtors, Having No Allowance.” Through the grate could be seen a small and gloomy chamber, with nothing inside except a wooden bench. A doorway beyond, locked and barred from the outside, gave access to the main cellblock. Each day a new impoverished prisoner would be pushed out into the cage—to spend the next twenty-four hours on begging duty, pleading with passersby for money to help in his or her plight. Debtors were obliged to pay for their time in prison; those who turned out to be totally out of funds were forced to go into the grated room and beg.

The crowds outside the Fleet and the King’s Bench prisons on that cool August Tuesday morning, and that so interrupted the progress of men of affairs on their ways along the granite setts with which the road in Southwark and Saint Paul’s had recently been paved, were there to see a spectacle. Tourists came to the jails to see the beggars; the merely curious—as well as the small press of family and friends (and perhaps some still-unsatisfied creditors)—came to greet with amiable good cheer
the small group of inmates who each day would emerge, blinking, into the morning sunlight.

A
ccording to the prison records, one of the half dozen prisoners who stepped free from behind the high walls of the King’s Bench Prison on that Tuesday morning was a sturdy-looking yeoman whose papers showed him to have come from Oxfordshire, sixty miles west of London. Those few portraits painted of him in his later years, together with a single silhouette fashioned when he was in his dotage, and a bust sculpted in marble more than twenty years later, show him to be somewhat thickset, balding, with a weatherbeaten face.

Some less charitable souls might call him a rather plain-looking man, even, in truth, a little ugly. His forehead slants backward, a trifle alarmingly. His nose is somewhat too large for comfort. His mutton-chop whiskers are wayward. But in most of the pictures he seems to be wearing an expression that serves by way of compensation for the facial shortcomings: He seems, from his looks, at once tolerant, kindly, and perhaps even vaguely amused by the droll complexities of his life.

At the time of his release from jail he was fifty years old, and he must have emerged from the main gate into the Southwark crowds that day in an embarrassed and fretful state. He had good reason to be anxious: The previous four years of his life had been trying, racked by debt and uncertainty, by privation and public humiliation. And, as he was soon about to learn, only a matter of hours after his release, his trials were far from over.

The address of his lodgings was given in bankruptcy court as number 15, Buckingham Street, and it was to this imposing stone mansion, in which he had lived for the previous fourteen years, that he now walked, alone. He had spent the better part of the last ten weeks in the miseries behind the bars of the King’s Bench, living for most of that time in a crowded cell, a chum
mage, with two or three others similarly ruined. Now he had his freedom and the pleasure of his own company. He quickened his pace—he was a staggeringly fast walker—as he strode steadily westward to his house.

It was a short enough walk. He had his choice of bridges across the Thames, and had only to turn left when he had made it over the fetid and polluted river with its muddily inelegant banks. He walked steadily along the entire length of the Strand—newly outfitted with the cast-iron lamps of the Gas-Light and Coke Company—and past familiar churches, shops, tailors, and alehouses.

The streets here, by now some distance from the prisons, pulsated with all the elegance and gaiety of Regency times. This, after all, was the day of Beau Brummell (though Brummell himself had only three years before left London for France, preparing for his own date with debtors’ prison—and his subsequent death in a French lunatic asylum). The street that morning would have been crowded with the dandies who (their newly invented umbrellas sheltering them from the showers) followed the strict particulars of his style.

The entire stretch along which the glum but relieved Oxfordshire convict walked spoke all too gaudily of money and amusement and
brio
—a sharp contrast, no doubt, to the grim mood of the man who passed among them. In ordinary circumstances he might have stopped at number 181, the elegant bow-windowed building where his best friend, the noted cartographer John Cary, had his offices; but this particular morning he was in a hurry and eager to move on.

It took him ten minutes to pass the length of the Strand, after which he turned off left—Trafalgar Square had not yet been built to act as a landmark—and into that small maze of fashionable Georgian neoclassical houses that had been put up by the four Adam brothers half a century before and that they had named, after
adelphoi
, the Greek word for brothers, “the Adelphi.”

Down he strode, past the Savoy, along John Adam Street, and finally into Buckingham Street itself, and up to the front door of number 15.

The door to his house, he was shocked to find, was shut and bolted. A tipstaff stood outside, on sentry duty, and there was a notice pinned to the woodwork: The landlords had repossessed the house and had emptied it of much of its furnishings and papers. Work was still going on; the officer was on hand to ensure that no one—and in particular this one man—attempted to gain entry.

To make doubly certain, the bailiff asked for the man’s name. William Smith, the arrival replied. There was an expression of mumbled regret, and the burly sentry took up a stance with his arms folded in front of him, brooking no argument. No, he could not come in. William Smith, beaten down yet again, but now determined not to suffer the indignity of confrontation, turned away.

There was a particularly cruel and desperate irony in this situation. On the following morning, the Wednesday, the same John Cary at whose offices Smith might well have chosen to call, was due to publish in book form the second part of a formidable new collection of geological maps, the latest volume of what was coming to be recognized as one of the most profoundly important books ever made.

Cary’s great new
Geological Atlas of England and Wales
had been begun four years before, when the cartographer and his apprentice son, George, had labored mightily to issue a work that was as scientifically epochal as it was physically majestic—the finely engraved, hand-colored map, the eight and a half feet high by six feet wide triumph of cartographic brilliance that was formally called
A Delineation of The Strata of England and Wales with a part of Scotland
, but that has been known ever since as the first large-scale national geological map.

It was a document that was to change the face of a science—
indeed, to create a whole new science—to set in train a series of scientific movements that would lead, eventually, to the inquiries of Charles Darwin, to the birth of evolutionary theory, and to the burgeoning of an entirely new way for human beings to view their world and their universe. The inevitable collision between the new rationally based world of science and the old ecclesiastical, faith-directed world of belief was about to occur—and in the vanguard of the new movement, both symbolically and actually, was the great map, and now this equally enormous atlas that John Cary of the Strand was about to publish, and the revolutionary thinking that lay behind their making.

Both works were the creations of William Smith, the yeoman from Oxfordshire, who, on the very eve of publication, was now being turned away from the marble steps in front of the house in which he had lived and worked for so long. And yet, however much of an embarrassment this must have been, the situation was not wholly unfamiliar to him. For although William Smith’s years of careful observation and his wholly innovative ways of thinking were about to alter the course of scientific inquiry forever, he had at the same time been forced to wage what must have seemed a ceaseless war against his own humiliation and ill fortune, forced to waste his energies raging against the cheating and class discrimination that seemed, time and again, to frustrate him.