The Map That Changed the World (25 page)

He had indeed no time to devote to the comforts of housekeeping. His travel diary for the years between taking up resi
dence in Buckingham Street in 1804 and in 1812 making his first real breakthrough in the publication of his map, reads like that of a Fury.

His business as a drainer kept him traveling incessantly between Norfolk and Kent, between outposts in Wales and northern Yorkshire. The owners of the Hickling Marshes, for instance, had him stopping inundations from the sea between Yarmouth and Happisburgh. He was asked to go to Dolymelynllwyn, near Dolgelly in North Wales, to look at the slate quarries and inspect the soundness of a new embankment. He went to the top of Snowdon, the highest mountain south of the Scottish border; he examined the copper mines near Llanberis.

We find his diary telling us he is variously in Yorkshire, Lancashire, Somerset, Gloucester, Devon, Rutland, Nottingham. Here he is opening a coal mine at Torbock, near Liverpool, here he is directing a trial boring at Spofforth, there he is off looking at the cliffs of Witton Fell in Yorkshire. He examined coal outcrops at Newent, at Nailsea, and in the Forest of Dean; he built a series of sand-dune-mimicking embankments, all shells and marram grass, to help protect the South Welsh coast from flooding at Laugharne. He worked on planning another big canal, the Ouse Navigation in Sussex; he was called in to help because the Kennet & Avon Canal, in his old stamping ground near Bath, had begun to leak. A landowner in Buckinghamshire tried to find coal on his land and called in Smith, who put down some bores and told him he was wasting his time.

Scores of other would-be coal millionaires demanded his time, which he willingly gave for his customary two or three daily guineas, if only to prove the pointlessness of their hopes. He was persuaded, despite offering the advice that owners were squandering their money, to conduct a survey in Herefordshire, another near Wincanton, and a third within sight of the towers of the Oxford colleges, at Bagley Wood—knowing on each occasion, as no other person in Britain could possibly know, that there was as much chance of discovering coal as there was of striking gold. It
came as a pleasant diversion when he was asked to perform a task that would not end in disappointment—as when he planned a series of improvements to the harbor at Kidwelly, a little Welsh port well known to later readers of Dylan Thomas,
*
or when he completed work on the Minsmere Drainage Scheme in deepest Sussex.

Occasionally there were more amusing or rewarding tasks, which brought him more than his simple
per diem
fee. In 1810 the Bath Corporation called him in because of an unparalleled calamity: The hot springs, which had provided the town with a
raison d’être
since before Roman times, suddenly failed, and no one knew why. (No one knew why there were hot springs in Bath anyway, considering the city’s location on top of thousands of feet of congenially stable sediments, with not a volcanic fissure in sight.)

He rushed from London to the Bath Pump Room, examined the situation, and declared that the only way he could find out the reason for the failure was to dig a bore into the very spring itself. The city fathers were appalled: Never had an excavation been performed in these most hallowed buildings. But in the end, faced with the prospect of a well gone dry, they reluctantly agreed—and William Smith and a gang of navvies hired by the day burrowed down through the familiar limestones and clays of the Middle Jurassic until, after suffering in temperatures of 119 degrees Fahrenheit and melting all the candles they had used to light their way, they found the problem.

It was all the fault of the large bone of a great ox—or, as the official city report of the time put it, “some large ruminant.” Somehow the bone had fallen into the spring, had become crystallized with pyrite and flint, and had rolled itself into the channel and blocked it. The waters promptly made another channel
for themselves, as waters do, and flowed out into the Avon somewhere else.

A few of the more suspicious members of the corporation said it was all really the fault of a new coal mine that was being dug at the time three miles away, at Batheaston; and there was a very angry movement to have this mine stopped up, to protect the integrity of the springs. But Smith went to Batheaston to have a look and decided that the two were not connected in any way. Bath’s hot springs had failed because of a pyritized ox bone, and nothing else. He removed it, the hot and healing (and vile-tasting) waters began to flow again with greater vigor than before, and Smith became, just as he liked, the hero of the hour. And for good measure, he plugged the hole in the coal mine as well.

Much the same happened when he drained the infamous Prisley Bog, on the duke of Bedford’s estate at Woburn. This he managed with such speed and ingenuity—and, moreover, published a brief monograph in 1806 on how he had done it
*
—that the Society of Arts awarded him a medal. He was naturally delighted—except that it gave him good reason to remember, since this was the same Society that was offering a premium for making the great map, that the years were ticking on, and still nothing had been published.

Sir Joseph Banks was also beginning to wonder why his golden boy had not delivered. It was now five years since the men had first met, and since the day John Farey had told Sir Joseph—with some prescience, seen in today’s light—what a stellar figure Smith was destined to be. Banks had already contributed the sizable but quite easily affordable fifty pounds. He had persuaded
dozens of his friends and acquaintances to subscribe to the impending publication. He had seen Smith at least three further times—at the 1804 Woburn sheepshearing, at the Smithfield Cattle show six months later, and in London early in January 1805. There had been much talk of the map, “soon to be exhibited for the information of the curious” according to an optimistic publisher’s notice in the newspapers, in Banks’s very own London library.

But since then there had been nothing, and influential men were beginning to grow impatient and exasperated. Smith had been expected both to prepare a great map, and to continue work on the treatise on strata that Debrett had been hoping to publish. But neither book nor map showed the slightest sign of being readied for an appearance, even in rough draft. Richard Crawshay, the Welsh landowner who had been an early supporter and who had promised money, wrote sharply about this to Smith in February 1806: “I am sorry to find that your promise of and my reliance on you for a publication of great importance is totally vanish’d. You will excuse my interfering any further in your affairs. I wish you well.” It was a considered and stunning insult. Smith wrote a spluttering explanation, but Crawshay never replied.

Even the tolerant old Sir Joseph was worried. He wrote Farey to the effect that he “[did] not feel himself so interested in encouraging any new work” of Smith’s. Other potential subscribers were holding back, worried that Smith might never complete his work. They knew that he traveled widely, that he worked furiously, that he constantly promised visible progress: But nothing emerged—nothing from the Adelphi, nothing from Trim Bridge, nothing from Tucking Mill House.

It was, for Smith, a terrible time. His book on draining had brought in no money. His most loyal supporter, John Farey, had been appointed, rather than Smith, to make an official survey of Derbyshire. It seemed suddenly as though there might be a con
spiracy waged against him, a sudden drying-up of commissions, the beginnings of a muttering campaign. He had fallen out with the assistant at Buckingham Street, a man named Roope, whom Smith now described as “a book-learned, paragraph-writing coxcomb”—a remark that was about as rude as one could be in the London of the day without risking a duel.

Then there had been an innovative suggestion from Sir John Sinclair, the president of the Board of Agriculture, that Smith might become associated with army engineers, might organize them into a mapmaking organization like the one that was eventually to be created, the Ordnance Survey: But Smith was not interested, or the board not interested in him, and a once-exciting-sounding project that would have been ideal for Smith eventually came to naught.

But, most significantly hurtful of all, there came the formal foundation in 1807 of a new and vitally important London learned association, the Geological Society—and with it the wounding realization that despite all his evident contribution to the science, William Smith had pointedly not been invited to join. The impact of that decision was to rumble thunderously down the years—and it was to culminate, as we shall see, in the most delicious of ironies; but for the moment, in 1807, the news, when it was transmitted to Buckingham Street by friends, must have made it seem to Smith as if the whole basis of his professional existence was being lost.

H
is personal life, too, suddenly seemed to be spiraling out of control. He was so short of funds that he began to consider selling his property to keep himself afloat. What little land he still had left from his family back in Oxfordshire had already gone. The Trim Bridge offices were now gone, rented to another tenant. All that remained that he could call his own was his mortgaged home at Tucking Mill. But try as he might, it wouldn’t sell; and
the owner of the mortgage, Charles Conolly of Midford Castle, was making it abundantly clear to Smith that he would not release him from the mortgage debt or buy back the house himself.

I
t was at about this time in Smith’s life that he made what appears to have been another woefully bad decision—and that was to get married. A sensible and ordered marriage might of course have been a good thing; but from all the available evidence—and there is very little; much seems to have been destroyed, and perhaps deliberately—it seems that his union was anything but sensible and ordered.

We know little about his wife, other than her name, Mary Ann. No records have so far come to light about her origins—except for the assumption, calculated from her death record, that she had been born in 1791 or 1792—or of the date of the wedding, or when (since it seems unlikely there was in fact any ceremonial) he became formally married. Everything that can be deduced stems from the fact that his diary for the year 1808 is missing, and that there are occasional references to “M.A.” in the journals for many of the years that follow.

The first mention of what is probably her comes in a diary entry written in August 1809. Smith was in Norfolk, from where he wrote a note in faint pencil: “said per M.A. letter to come away Tuesday evening” and did indeed arrive in on that day—apparently telling his wife to expect him. On September 26 he records paying “Mrs. K. two months wages, £2, M.A. £2.” In April 1811 he notes that he “wrote a letter to M.A.” from Bath. In December 1815, more ominously, “At home all day with M.A., taken ill with pain in head.”

In 1815, if her birth date is correct, Mary Ann Smith would have been twenty-four—and yet already perhaps seven years married. Smith seems to have started to live with her, almost cer
tainly married, when she was only seventeen. And by such accounts as exist, it was a terrible marriage, with his wife neither educated nor stable enough (following the 1815 headaches, which began to worsen and transmute into more sinister ailments) to have been much of a support during these grim years.

Indeed, Mary Ann seems to have been little more than a burden to Smith for most of his life. Her death, which happened some long time after that of her husband, came about in the very saddest of circumstances. During her life she fell victim to all manner of illnesses, physical and mental. Her case notes, kept in an asylum where she was later lodged, record her as having suffered from many things—not least the pathological need for sexual intercourse that is a common-enough side effect of some of the more florid mental illnesses, and which was known then, as it still is now, as nymphomania.

Meanwhile Smith continued to try to have something—anything—published. He got into his head the notion that he might write a short description of Norfolk, a county whose geology he knew well; and he took advantage of a parliamentary election campaign in Norwich to circulate among the crowds of voters, offering them cards advertising the forthcoming book, and talking up the impending publication of his greater works. But the Norfolk booklet or map never appeared either. Smith was losing his sense of self-esteem and self-worth, suddenly reckoning himself a presumptuous intruder into the learned world—remembering that he was merely a yeoman and an orphan.

“I could previously write some sentences very well,” he was to reminisce, as an excuse, “but never with sufficient confidence, and I often found a difficulty in carrying on properly the continuity of a subject.”

And so those nightmare years continued, from 1806 until 1812—six miserable years when nothing seemed to go right for him, when his friends were beginning to desert him, when his muse had apparently fled, his money was trickling away at an
alarming rate, and the only thing he knew how to do was to travel, take samples, make notes, and cram into his grizzled head more and ever more information about the underside of England. It fascinated and drove him still; but there seemed no future in it, for him or for his supporters, allies, and backers.

Old Dr. Richard Warner of Bath chose this time, most inappositely, to publish a guide to the city and its surroundings, making ample use of the geological information provided by his neighbor Smith, and to which he had referred generously when he wrote a Bath history ten years before. But on this occasion, in 1811, he stole freely from his onetime friend, drew a map that was an almost exact copy of one of Smith’s earliest experiments, and made no acknowledgement of him at all—another example of the plagiarizing and pilfering to which the poor stratigrapher was having to become accustomed.

But then one old friend did eventually prove to be true. The Reverend Joseph Townsend, in whose house Smith had originally dictated his famous table of strata, published a book in 1812 with the curious title
The Character of Moses Established
—which set out to prove, scientifically, that the Mosaic view of the world’s creation, in which of course the Flood, the Deluge, figured prominently, was still the right one. No matter the prelate’s clouded scientific vision: The important feature of
Moses
is that it included, at length and in great detail, the essence of William Smith’s work. It showed him to have a unique vision of the underside of the earth. It gave him all the credit that had been due and, because Townsend was a well-known and well-respected man, it placed William Smith back in the minds of the nation’s chattering classes.