The Map That Changed the World (24 page)

That so mighty a figure should apparently overlook in his choice for a county survey a member of the Oxfordshire peasantry, and give the task instead to an apparently learned man working on a duke’s estate, was perhaps not all that surprising in the class-ridden days of the early nineteenth century. But to Smith it was a considerable slight, of a kind to which he would never become accustomed.

In the case of his relations with John Farey, though, the situation was later helped when Farey, too, was to feel the crushing weight of English snobbery—most notably being denied membership of the newly formed Geological Society, because he was merely the son of a farmer. In later years both Farey and Smith clung together in their mutually held opposition to what they saw as the lofty
hauteur
of the gentlemen rock collectors. So close was their relationship in those early days that Farey came to be regarded by friends as Smith’s Boswell—a chronicler and lifelong advocate of all his master’s works.

It was at about this time, too, that Farey introduced to
William Smith the one figure of great national repute who was going to be singularly important in the making of the great map—and the man who was to figure prominently in this growing dispute between the practical and the gentlemanly students of earth science. For Smith was not alone in regarding himself as a victim caught in the crossfire of a British class warfare: The entire and newly fashionable discipline of geology was about to be riven by arguments between the horny-handed toilers in the fields and the more fragrant dilettante practitioners, between amateurs who specialized in studying the land below and those regarded by the former as worthless dandies whose interest was more in owning and exploiting the land above.

The man who would try to mediate this dispute, and who would at first do his level best to accelerate Smith’s progress in making his new map, was the then president of London’s distinguished Royal Society, the influential and farseeing botanist, Sir Joseph Banks.

Banks—after whom an Australian flower is named, and whose reputation in New South Wales, of which he was a principal founder, is huge—is perhaps best known for being the moving force behind the notorious
Bounty
expedition of 1789,
*
which culminated in Fletcher Christian’s mutiny against Captain William Bligh, and his subsequent establishment of a settlement on Pitcairn Island. He was not known to be especially interested in geology (other than being remarkably impressed by the columnar basalts of Fingal’s Cave on the Hebridean islet of Staffa)—until he came into the ownership of a Derbyshire estate, Overton, near Ashover, that had valuable lead deposits.

But the lead mines were running out—Overton’s famous Gregory Mine, which had once turned an annual £100,000 profit was now suffering losses of £23,000 a year. When Sir
Joseph borrowed John Farey from Woburn in 1797 to help drain his Derbyshire land, he mentioned his problem with the lead. At first there was nothing Farey could do—he was not very interested in geology and didn’t know anyone who was.

But then he met William Smith at that great agricultural gathering known as the Woburn sheepshearing. He learned about Smith’s planned book outlining the new principles of stratigraphy, which at that point John Debrett still seemed keen to publish. Smith, he felt sure, would be just the right person, and he explained this to Banks: If anyone could predict whether more lead might be discovered at Overton, it would be William Smith.

Banks was delighted with the encounter, which appears to have first come about in the summer of 1801—that, at least, was when it is first known (from John Phillips’s later biography) that Sir Joseph “favoured Smith with an interview, and from this time until his death [in 1820] remained a steady friend and liberal patron of his labours.” Farey encouraged Banks to help: In February 1802, after taking an expedition with Smith and another of Smith’s pupils, named Benjamin Bevan, he wrote a long letter to Overton, insisting that Smith’s findings were of paramount importance.

He explained to Sir Joseph, patiently but from the tone of his letter not at all condescendingly, that he believed Smith had made two great advances: He was able to document the
sequential
order of British rocks, and he was able to
identify
the rocks that made up the sequences, by examining the fossils found within them. Smith, to put it more simply, could both tell
where
rocks were, and
what
they were: And, by dint of an energetic and systematic program of observing, surveying, measuring, and marking, he could draw—as indeed he was now in the middle of drawing—a proper, detailed, and accurate geological map of the nation.

Sir Joseph took the bait. Smith first noted the likelihood of winning the great man’s support—support that would prove
invaluable, if it came—when he wrote, in May 1802, to a friend from his office in Bath:

By the following month a new map—not much better than the first small-scale attempt he had made in 1801, presumably—was beginning to take shape, and he felt confident enough to show a version of it to Banks at the Woburn agricultural meeting. The
Agricultural Magazine
for the month reports the fact dryly: “Smith…exhibited his map, now in very considerable forwardness, of the strata of different earths, stones, coal & which constitute the soil of this island. He was particularly noticed by Sir. J. Banks.”

The following October he wrote to Banks at his country house in Lincolnshire to bring him up-to-date, and then again in spring (all according to his journal, which he was now writing at a furious rate) he took the latest version up to London, to show it off to Banks in the Royal Society suite at Somerset House, off the Strand. The encounter was a small triumph of assurance and optimism. Banks would support a subscription for the new publication, and wrote a check for fifty pounds to get the project off the ground.

As he left his great patron’s chambers, Smith must have felt that he now had every reason to believe he had won the support and the enthusiastic backing of the most powerful figure in British science: If he had until this moment from time to time felt overlooked and wronged, then at this juncture in his career he had precious little cause to do so. Later on, when Banks
became increasingly exasperated with him, he might have some cause, but not now. Just now he could savor the sweet smell of impending success.

As it happened, though, the Somerset House meeting, which took place on April 21, 1803, turned out to be rather less propitious than Smith’s delighted diary entry might make it seem—because it laid Smith open to a temptation to which he should not have succumbed: It seduced him into taking an apartment in London.

It was a woefully imprudent decision. Smith was not a well-off man. It had been nearly ten years since he had been in full-time employment, and although he was being paid handsomely enough for his work as a drainer or mineral surveyor, the work was typical of the freelance trade: days of feast followed by weeks of famine. And in between the episodes of paid work, he had to continue his journeying to make his endless geological surveys—journeying by stagecoach (for a not inconsiderable fee), lodging at coaching inns (for substantial sums), wolfing down pigeon pie and porter and the big breakfasts that his energies demanded. He asked the Society of Arts if they might help him out with an occasional supply of funds: They apparently turned him down, as did all too many others whom he approached. And now he was embarking on a program to spend even more.

He had an office back in Bath to run; a partner (the long-forgotten Jeremiah Cruse) to pay; and an estate at Tucking Mill to keep, with its stable and garden and a manservant on constant hand. On the face of it Smith was heading into deep financial waters—and yet at precisely the time when he should have been trying to keep his expenses down, he was suddenly seduced, presumably by the magnificence of Sir Joseph’s own grace-and-favor
*
lodgings off the Strand, to take with effect from that same April day a permanent and costly lodging place just around the
corner, at number 16, Charing Cross. He rented rooms from a Mr. Tapster—the building was called Tapster’s Baths. He shared it with his landlord and with one Francis Place, a mysterious man described in the
DNB
as a “tailor and radical reformer.”

The accommodation, though expensive, was small: Smith spent most of his London days at the Craven Coffee House close by, which he used almost as an office. His initial plan was to engage an assistant who could stay in the Tapster’s Baths rooms during the day, and begin work on designing the final version of his map, as well as starting a program for drawing all his fossils. But for the time being he decided to leave his actual collection behind in Bath, at the offices on Trim Bridge.

It turned out to be one of the very few prudent decisions he was to make during this frantic period in his life. It was just as well that he never brought his fossils to town—for just a few months after he had moved in, and as a harbinger of other disasters to come, his building and the one next to it caught fire and burned to the ground. Smith’s assistant, who would almost certainly not have been able to carry hundreds of pounds of boxes of precious samples out of a blazing house, managed to save most of his papers. They were removed “in a hurry and in disorder,” according to John Phillips, but they were at least safe. Smith was in any case not there: Once again he had been afflicted by his persistent wanderlust, and when his house burned down he was out of the city, on yet another mapmaking field excursion.

The fire did not deter him from his grand plan to have an address in London: quite the reverse. He now took an even larger establishment—an entire five-storied mansion at number 15 Buckingham Street, in the Adelphi, an impeccably sited house standing beside the Thames, beautifully designed, conveniently located both for the Society of Arts and for Sir Joseph Banks’s office at the Royal Society. He paid a rent of eighty guineas a year—far too much for a man with such slender resources, with
rent to pay in Trim Bridge, a mortgage to pay on Tucking Mill, and with a wildly varying income—and added to his bills a further pound a month for a housekeeper, the charmingly named Mrs. Kitten.

A house in the Adelphi development was indeed a wonderful place for a man of means to live. The Adam brothers had designed them, and imported Scottish laborers, kept content by having bagpipes played to them, had built them. The houses, which went up on the site of the old riverside mansion of Durham House (immediately upriver from Somerset House) were spacious and elegant, and known by the clever honeysuckle motif on their stucco frontings. But the development was not a success, and the brothers only avoided bankruptcy by selling them off at bargain prices in a lottery. Not that Smith had the money to buy: For all his sojournin Buckingham Street, he was obliged to rent.

Smith liked the place enormously—so much so that in late 1804, after the duke of Bedford had made an inspection tour of his fossils down in Bath, he had them all moved up to London—thousands of specimens, wrapped in paper or in small packets, and by now displaying no fewer than 720 different species. As with the scholar whose home is considered
to be wherever his library stood, so it was with William Smith and his collection: This is where his fossils would lodge from now on; it was to be his official residence, a suitably grandiose symbol of the work in which he was now engaged. “I am happy to inform you that my fossils are now safely arrived in London,” he wrote to a friend in South Wales in June 1805, “and are now arranged in the same order as they lay in the earth.”

Smith’s principal home in London’s Adelphi, at number 15 Buckingham Street.

He liked the notion—erroneous, as it happens—that Peter the Great of Russia had stayed at number 15 when making his celebrated tour of England in 1698. And he would have thought it eminently suitable that the young Charles Dickens lodged there in 1833, by which time it had been converted into flats. But when he was there alone—except for Mrs. Kitten—he sported none of the trappings suitable either for a Romanoff emperor or a writer of great fame. Inside the house everything was modest to the point of monasticism. He was becoming fearful, evidently, of the possible financial consequences of yet more extravagance. In later, wiser times when he experimented with an autobiography he was to write: