The Map That Changed the World (26 page)

And whether it was because of this book or merely coincident with its publication, one key figure in this story suddenly and enthusiastically—and unexpectedly—came back into the Smiths’ life.

John Cary, the country’s foremost cartographer, announced that he would print and publish William Smith’s great map. The
two men had met some twenty years before, when Smith was working on the survey of the coal canal in Somerset. Now, without warning, this distinguished mapmaker suddenly agreed to come on board—a move that everyone knew would now guarantee that this extraordinarily ambitious work would at last see the light of day. Why Cary agreed no one knows: It is convenient to assume, however, that he came across Townsend’s curious book, and was impressed by the evident importance of a man who he remembered well from their canal-making days. Yet the reason matters much less than the outcome: In the blink of an eye, Smith’s fortunes were changed, and, on this singular occasion, very much for the better.

The first task was for Cary—working at his offices at 181 Strand—to make a wholly new topographic map of England and Wales. On this William Smith—who was working nearby on the floor of the main dining room at 15 Buckingham Street—would superimpose his geological information—information that he had now spent more than fifteen years, and hundreds of thousands of lonely miles accumulating. Smith decreed from the start that the scale should be five miles to the inch—meaning that the map itself, if fitted up in one sheet, would measure 105 inches by 74 inches, or 8 feet 9 inches high by 6 feet 2 inches across.

Smith had no doubts at all: What he was making was going to be mightily impressive—it was going to be a grand, grand map, big, eyecatching, memorable, and entirely appropriate to the majesty of the topic that it would picture. It was, after all, the first-ever map of the geology of an entire country, and not just a country but the most important kingdom, as Britain saw itself, on the face of the civilized planet. There was no other such map of an entire country anywhere in existence. What was being created in London was to be the model that the rest of the nations would have to follow. This map was to be a world leader, in every conceivable way—and it was to look magnificent too, so that no one would ever have cause or occasion to doubt its excellence.

Cary performed the outline drawing; one of Smith’s lawyer
friends, Henry Jermyn of the ancient Cistercian abbey at Sibton, in Suffolk, was chosen to help perform the engraving, which included the writing of place-names, numbering in the thousands. It was evidently a pleasurable time. “I have a copy of Cary’s map spread out on the carpet,” wrote Smith, “he turned to his valuable collection of old authors—and thus did we proceed in marking the names…in those gleams of light thrown on the dark pages of our history we had many pleasant discussions.”

The task was performed with infinite care, and yet at a rollicking pace. By February 1813, of the sixteen copper plates
*
on which the topographical map was being engraved, three had already been finished. A year later and the remaining thirteen were done, and Smith could now begin the equally painstaking task of colouring the individual strata, the key ingredient of a geological map. As he explained in his diary on the day he started, it was his wish “to render the map as interesting as possible to those who are desirous of knowing all they can of their country….”

He now knew by heart, from all his years of travelling, the geology of a handsome proportion of England’s secondary rocks. His knowledge of the Jurassic, for example, provided him with a core of stratigraphical information that allowed him to colour in lines of strata from the south coast of Dorset to the east coast of Yorkshire—he could provide a swathe of information that more than justified his ambition to create a map of the whole country. His time in Norfolk had allowed him to add details of the Cretaceous, too. To the oolites and clays of the Jurassic he could now add his new and formidable knowledge of the Chalk—a rock which, together with the honey-hued limestones of the Cotswolds, is perhaps the country’s most distinctive outcrop, a potent symbol no less (in the White Cliffs of
Dover) of the insular nature of the island kingdom.

On April 18, 1814, Smith was interested indeed when he passed Cary’s shop in the Strand, and saw that in the bow windows of the store were four of his sheets completely finished, and fully coloured. Cary had chosen to surprise and delight the forty-five-year-old mapmaker—he had placed the finished sheets (which included sheet XI, the area around Bath)—in the window without telling anyone. Smith, who became as excited as a schoolboy, snatched up the sheets and immediately—his first reaction, and a noble one—took them over to Somerset House to show to Sir Joseph Banks. Sir Joseph had been the project’s first supporter. He had given Smith fifty pounds to begin the subscription. And yes, maybe he had harrumphed with exasperated impatience eight years before, when there seemed no end to the project in sight. But now all was coming to fruition, and, Smith reasoned, Banks should and would (especially as a near-neighbor) be the first to see the finished sheets. If he agreed, then he would be named on the completed full-scale map as the person to whom the entire project had been dedicated—the person to whom Smith owed most of all.

Banks agreed readily—for the map, he declared, was a most handsome thing. He would tell his friends, urge them to offer their support even at this late stage. And so it came—six weeks later, in June, and William Smith was being summoned by no less a figure than Lord Hardwicke to present the completed sheets to the leaders of the Board of Agriculture. They agreed wholeheartedly with Sir Joseph: the map was already magnificent, and once finished, excellent, in every way.

Smith was told to make sure that he sent a prospectus for the map to every member—and he promptly wrote as polite a solicitation as could be imagined, indicating that

Implicit in this letter was a powerful sales pitch. Everyone who could buy one of these maps, an example of (as purchasers were not allowed to forget) this
great national work,
should now sign up to do so. It mattered little how much people could afford: there was, as John Cary had decreed, a convenient spectrum of tariffs. All depended on whether a buyer preferred the keenly priced edition, with the sixteen unmounted paper sheets and a memoir all bound up in a box of stiff blue board for five pounds; whether he opted for the standard full-size canvasmounted map, ready for placing on a wall, and which would set him back seven pounds; or whether he decided to splash out and buy the deluxe version, the edition that was offered on canvas, mounted, varnished, set on spring rollers and issued with a fitted leather carrying case—for which the price was the not inconsiderable sum of twelve pounds. Cary and Smith were open to all kinds of financial models. And William Smith reckoned, with Cary’s implicit agreement, that he should make about twenty-five shillings on every copy sold.

Ten months later and all was quite ready. On March 15, 1815, we have him writing in his journal that he had “finished corrections of five western sheets of the Map, which now completes the general corrections required….”

It remained only for three crowning moments.

The first came in mid-March 1815, when the prime minister himself, the great reactionary figure of Lord Liverpool, came to Buckingham Street to inspect the immense map; he pronounced himself well pleased, and congratulated Smith. That, considering Smith’s background, was no small feat indeed.

The second came later that spring, in May, when Smith went to the Society of Arts and formally presented to its president, the duke of Norfolk, the completed map for inspection. Smith, stony broke as always, was at this time only too well aware that thirteen years beforehand the Society had offered a prize of fifty guineas
*
for the first mineralogical map of the nation. He was eager that the Society should now inspect his work, and decide whether to pay up: they did, two weeks later. Smith records the moment matter-of-factly in his diary entry for June 16—“Received from Dr. Taylor, Secretary to the Society of Arts, their premium of £52.10s.0d. for my Mineralogical Map of England.” Guineas, the money of the upper classes, clearly did nothing for him.

And the third crowning moment came on August 1, 1815—the official date for the formal publication of the map, its distribution to those who had subscribed, its offering to bookshops around the land. The coloring was all done and dried; all copies were now numbered and signed, and in most cases had been colored, by the hand of William Smith.

It was then, and it remains now, a truly magnificent thing—huge, beautiful, and filled with absorbing and elegantly managed detail. And, by comparison with modern maps of the geology of the country, in the very broadest sense, uncannily
right
. It is also, as well as being a scientific document without peer, tremendously attractive as a piece of art. It is highly colored in a way that mimics the colors of the rocks below, so that one can almost imagine that Smith was painting a portrait of the country, with all the foliage and topsoil stripped from it, such that only the rocks remain—green for the chalk, blue for the Lias, and a honey-colored, orange-hued bright streak of evening sunshine for the outcrop of the Middle Jurassic that he loved so much.

The map is entitled with suitable grandiloquence, “A Delineation of The Strata of England and Wales with part of
Scotland; exhibiting the Collieries and Mines; the Marshes and Fen Lands originally Overflowed by the Sea; and the Varieties of Soil according to the Variations in the Sub Strata; illustrated by the Most Descriptive Names.”

And there is the dedication too, as promised, to the man who stood by him—impatiently betimes, but who had stood true until the end. “To the Right Hon
^ble
Sir Joseph Banks, Bart., F.R.S., this Map is by permission most respectfully dedicated by his much obliged servant, W. Smith.” And there is the date, “Aug
^st
1, 1815.” As John Phillips, his nephew and first biographer, was to write: “From that hour the fame of its author as a great original discoverer in English geology was secured.”

Four hundred copies of the map were printed, numbered, and signed. About forty of them are known to remain in existence. Collectors today regard them as valuable beyond price. Huge sums are commanded for those very few copies that come onto the market. They are renowned within the rarefied world of the map dealer. There are several copies in London. One of the finest is the one that hangs behind the blue curtain beside the main staircase of the Geological Society of London, in Burlington House, Piccadilly.

I
t is a concealment that abets a kind of shame. For considering what happened next, and considering how members of the Geological Society of the day dealt so cruelly with this man who had created so magnificent a testament to the science they were following, it is remarkable that the map is permitted in the building at all. It is in a way a haunting reminder, rarely seen now, of the way in which scientists, and especially British scientists of an era long past, behaved quite unforgivably toward one who was so self-evidently not one of their own.

For although the map that was about to change the world had now at last been published, and although the great and the
good of the land—the prime minister himself included—had seen it and marveled at it and had pronounced it a wonderful creation, the man who had made it was about to begin the most wretched of all the times of his life. And it was men who even now were professing themselves to be geologists who were almost wholly to blame.

Macrocephalites macrocephalus

T
he roots of the tragedy that were to befall William Smith go back some years before the moment during which he briefly savored his great cartographic triumph. It was a morning during the early spring of 1808, seven years before publication day, when a small delegation of worthy and distinguished Londoners arrived at the front door of William Smith’s riverside house on Buckingham Street. He had invited them there to make an official inspection tour, to see for themselves two things that were currently setting all scientific London on fire—and this at a time when geology, suddenly, was a new, exciting, and very fashionable science.

They had been asked first to see the enormous collection of fossils that Smith had brought up from his former home in Bath and had cleverly arranged “in the order of their appearance in the strata,” as he put it, in cabinets in his otherwise empty dining room. And they had been invited also—or maybe this was their own idea; the records do not say—to make, at least ostensibly, a critical appraisal of the great new geological map on which Smith was then said to be engaged.

If they had secondary reasons for examining the map, they did not let Smith know. It was for him in any case an important and an intimidating encounter—a formal examination of his half-made map by members of the newly instituted Geological Society of London, of which as yet William Smith had not been invited to become a member. It was crucial, at least from Smith’s point of view, that the meeting went well: Not only could the society’s members help him—they could also welcome him into their congenial midst, and accelerate his progress into the very center of Britain’s geological establishment.

The visiting party was led by a young man of undoubted distinction. His name was George Bellas Greenough, and the lacquered brougham that brought him and his companions to the Strand had come from the House of Commons, where he was, though only thirty, a sitting member for a comfortable Surrey constituency. He was a man of immense wealth, and was at the time building for himself a large Italianate mansion on the fashionable west side of Nash’s newly laid-out Regent’s Park.

Everything about Greenough, from his dandyish clothes and comportment to his formal manner and conversation, marked him as a gentleman. He was in rank and reputation as different from William Smith as it was possible to be. Yet few knew the source of his family fortune, and the man who would be the first president of the new-formed Geological Society (and was for the time being chairman, a post long since abolished) was at pains to conceal his ungentlemanly origins: In fact his maternal grandfather had been in trade as a quack apothecary, and Greenough’s Liver Pills were a popular remedy for a range of maladies from chronic flatulence to simple low spirits. But they made him a fortune, all of which was in due course passed on to George, while he was a student at Eton, when the grandfather died. There had been only one condition attached to the will—that though George had been born a Bellas, his pill-maker-grandfather’s gift was accompanied by a request that the boy bear the Greenough name in perpetuity.

George Bellas Greenough was an archetype of the small group of men that had come together, six months before, with the aim of creating a social and dining club to be called the Geological Society of London—“for the purpose,” as the original manifesto proclaimed, “of making geologists acquainted with each other, of stimulating their zeal, of inducing them to adopt one nomenclature, of facilitating the communication of new facts, and of contributing to the advancement of geological sciences.”

The society today is immense—it has nine thousand members—and is generally reckoned to be authoritative, academically rigorous, and contentedly catholic in its membership. Back when the society was formed at the Freemason’s Tavern, on November 13, 1807, it was anything but. Its thirteen founding members—“we are forming a little talking geological Dinner Club, of which I hope you will be a member,” went the invitation written by Sir Humphry Davy—were first and foremost cultured dilettantes (though admittedly visionary ones). Most of them were wealthy, all were possessors (though mostly for their value as modish drawing-room accessories) of cabinets of fossils and collections of pretty minerals, and in the fields of geology and mineralogy, all except one were rank—if leisured—amateurs.

Four of them were doctors. Three were chemists (one of them was William Allen, cofounder of the firm of Allen & Hanbury, which still makes cough lozenges; another was Davy, the isolator of sodium and potassium and inventor of the miners’ safety lamp). Two were printers and booksellers (these were the brothers, Richard and William Phillips—the latter being the society’s actual founder). One was a minister in the Unitarian Church. (At least several of the other founders were Quakers—suggesting a degree of freedom from the intellectual strangle-hold of religious dogma, even in those early days.) And there was one wealthy and entirely independent man: George Bellas Greenough.

The only one who was a practicing mineralogist—geology
had generally been called mineralogy until the middle of the eighteenth century—was Jacques-Louis, comte de Bournon, a Frenchman who had fled to London during the Terror, had changed his name to James Lewis, and had established a profitable business organizing and classifying the mineral and fossil collections of London’s great and good (as well as laying out the diamond collection of the fabulously wealthy collector, Sir Abraham Hume).

Of this group at least the Unitarian minister, a man named Arthur Aikin, knew William Smith and his work. Aikin was himself something of an amateur cartographer, and had a good knowledge of the topography of Shropshire and of its outcrops of minerals. There had been a halfhearted attempt by John Farey to bring the two men together, in the hope of speeding up the progress of the map—it came to nothing, however. But it was quite probably Aikin who proposed to his brother members that, having received the invitation from Smith, they go down to Buckingham Street and see exactly what he was doing—even though, quite pointedly, they had not invited him to join the society in the first place.

It seems appalling and cruel, from this viewpoint, that Smith was not seized upon as an ideal member of the early society. But a roll call of men who were offered membership in those first few years indicates why: Greenough, Aikin, Babington, Pepys, and their colleague founders wanted men very much like themselves to join their “little talking dinner club”—elegantly distinguished men such as those who were speedily admitted, men like Lords Oriel, Seymour, and Seaforth; the bishop of Carlisle; Sir James Hall, Sir Abraham Hume, Sir Thomas Sutton, and (the soon-to-be) Sir Francis Beaufort; the Right Honorable George Knox; David Ricardo (later an MP); the Reverends Edward Burrow, Matthew Raine, George Sampson; and—the greatest humiliation of all for Smith—his old friend and benefactor from Bath, the Reverend Benjamin Richardson.

But Smith himself simply would not do. In the eyes of the
Greenoughs and Sir James Halls of the world, he was unpolished and ill educated. He did not know how to dress or to dine. His accent had the common and rounded vowels of Oxfordshire. His efforts, however laudable, had not rendered him sufficiently wealthy—he would probably find it difficult to manage the fees and certainly would not wish to spend the regular fifteen shillings charged for a society dinner. Neither, it was noted with asperity, had he married well enough
*
to counter the unfortunate circumstances of his rustic birth.

The simple fact that he was dependent for his living on the practical applications of geology—on drainage and surveying and the holding back of the sea—meant that he was wholly unsuitable to mingle with men who liked to debate in contented languor over the competing virtues of Neptunism and Plutonism, or who looked at fossils for their beauty rather than for their usefulness in determining, as Smith did, which rocks were older than others.

Nor, it was charged, was Smith an admirer of Abraham Werner, the Saxon geologist whose theory that all rocks had been precipitated from the sea—Neptunism—had convinced many of the founders of the London-based society. There was a good chance, Greenough and his colleagues believed, that Smith had never in fact heard of Werner—a further indication of the rough-hewn, artless ways of the man, which would sit ill with the manners of such learned figures as had already been asked to join. The fact that Wernerian theory was soon shown to be arrant nonsense cut little ice: His methods—the so-called
continental
methods—were those followed by a large number of those London geologists who thought of themselves as
au courant
: Rude provincials like Smith were condemned by the Wernerian elite, and generally regarded with contempt.

And if all this were not enough—why, Smith was a friend and protégé of Sir Joseph Banks! And Banks had argued long and loud that the Geological Society should not be separate from the Royal Society itself, the grandfather of all London learned societies, and the one of which Banks was still the president. He tried to change the Geological Society’s constitution and, when he failed, resigned his membership and walked off in a huff. Certainly, Greenough and Hall were to say, no friend of Sir Joseph Banks should thus find it easy to become a member of their dinner club—particularly if he was socially unacceptable and not a true believer in the ways of Herr Werner of Freiberg.

There was tension, then, when Greenough jangled the doorbell and Mrs. Kitten allowed the members of the delegation inside. Smith was ready, and brought the party smartly upstairs to see his work.

It was all a terrible disappointment. The men spent only a short while looking, muttering among themselves, offering Smith merely curt pleasantries. They seemed not to be in the slightest bit impressed. In fact, they appeared almost bored.

Smith was candor itself.

“I scrupled not,” he wrote in his diary,

That first visit had resulted in what was, all told, a humiliating encounter. John Phillips, later reading between the lines of Smith’s melancholy diary entry for the day, notes scathingly that the visitors offered him “only paltriness and condescension, such as they might have offered a grocer.” They walked out within the hour, leaving Smith with the firm impression that he could expect neither help nor sustenance from the society, nor would he ever be invited for membership. The meeting convinced Smith that rigid class distinction lurked deep within the very science of which he was a practitioner—“the theory of geology is in the possession of one class of men, the practice in another.”

That was a polite way of explaining to himself and his friend that he had been most cruelly snubbed. A terrible wrong had been done to him; it would be nearly a quarter of a century before the Geological Society, by then purged of its dilettante beginnings, realized the error and acted, dramatically, to make amends.

But there turned out to be far more darkness and menace about Hall and Greenough’s behavior on that spring day than their mere contemptuous dismissal of their host. Precisely coincident with the encounter with Smith, they embarked on the plan that was eventually to destine him to ruin. They decided—and it is not unthinkable to suppose that they did so in Greenough’s brougham as it clip-clopped back from the Adelphi down to Parliament that lunchtime—that they themselves should create a great new geological map. They would harness the efforts and expertise of the entire society and its growing corps of members. They would make a huge map that would become the official, definitive geological portrait of the nation, and would thereby deal a fatal blow to any further hopes of the ignorant rustic who had been so impertinent as to dare make one first.

Moreover, in constructing their new map they could, if they played their cards shrewdly, have access to the one impeccable source of the information they needed: William Smith’s great map itself. They could find additional geological data elsewhere,
of course; but the simplest and most direct way to discover the core material needed for a new map—though no one would ever say such a thing openly—would be to
copy
the very work that Smith was doing. They could turn themselves, unbeknown to Smith, into the very “scientific pilferers” that he had long suspected were working against him. They could become, in short, cartographic plagiarists.

And in short order, this is what—under the leadership of George Bellas Greenough—they became. They saw to it—by means unspecified but certainly devious—that copies of Smith’s work fell into their hands, they pored over them, they traced the lines of the strata onto outline maps they had acquired for themselves, and then, year by year, they added information of their own, such that their end result would have the appearance and the utility of something entirely new.