The Map That Changed the World (28 page)

When Smith’s friends rallied to his side and accused the society’s president
†
of theft, Greenough issued a bleating statement of apology. He had been charged, he wrote, with

Out of what the Geological Society tactlessly called “professional courtesy,” William Smith was sent a copy of the map that Greenough had, in the view of many, stolen from him. He was presented with it at the cheap inn in which he was living in Ferrybridge in Yorkshire, where he was taking a respite from the financial trials that had so afflicted him in the capital. He was almost overwhelmed with financial and domestic difficulties—he had no money, his wife was evidently going insane, he had no job and no apparent future.

And now this.

“The copy,” he later wrote in his attempted autobiography, “seemed like the ghost of my old map, intruding on business and retirement, and mocking me in the disappointments of a science with which I could scarcely be in temper. It was put out of sight.”

N
early half a century was to pass before the society finally made full amends. They did so in 1865. William Smith himself was long dead. An entirely new generation of geologists now held the reins in Burlington House—men and women who were simply devoted to the betterment of the science, and who were in no sense class obsessed, were not dilettantes, were not given to drawing-room pleasantries and dandyish conceits. Their immediate predecessors had already gone some way to restoring Smith’s reputation. But in the specific matter of the map the society members of 1865 recognized there was one further step they could take: On all further editions of the society map, it was unanimously agreed, were to appear the following words: “A Geological Map of England and Wales, by G. B. Greenough, Esq., FRS (on the basis of the original map of Wm. Smith, 1815).”

Sigaloceras calloviense

W
ell away from the throngs of tourists, in a highly secure back room the size of an aircraft hangar, on the third floor of a modern annex to the great Victorian palace in South Kensington that is London’s Natural History Museum, are more than sixty rows of cabinets, many of them locked with double doors of steel. Inside the cabinets are hundreds upon hundreds of low and wide mahogany-faced drawers, each labeled, each with polished brass handles. From a distance the drawers look as though they should be in a safe-deposit vault and hold diamonds or the deeds of houses, or maybe an immense collection of antique maps or naval charts.

In fact, as befits the biggest natural history museum in Europe, they contain fossils—more than nine million fossils ranging from the most complex animals and plants ever known to the merest smudges of discoloration that are said to be the first single-celled hints of ancient life. In the drawers are countless specimens, perfectly selected, impeccably maintained, of
once-living matter of all ages and of all types, making up what is possibly the finest and most definitive collection of paleontological remains anywhere in the world. Researchers come from all over the world to consult what is still an ever-expanding collection, doing so under the congenial invigilation of the staff of specialist curators whose job it is to manage and protect one of Britain’s most important and yet unsung national treasures.

Almost all the fossils have been taken from their original collections, examined and classified and placed—most usefully for researchers—in boxes and drawers according to their age and type. All trilobites have been placed
here
, all ammonites
there
, all Jurassic dinosaurs in
that
section, all Cretaceous echinoids in
those
drawers, all gymnosperms and conifers and hexacorals in
these.

There are a very few collections, however, that have been allowed to stay as they were and always have been—collections that have been made by truly great scientists and which are important today both for the individual fossils they contain, and, notably, for the overarching historic importance of their having been assembled together in the first place. Specimens collected and kept by Charles Darwin are to be found in the museum drawers, as are the entire amassments of early geologists like Sir Roderick Murchison, the fossil sponges of James Bowerbank, and the plants and cetacean bones of James Sowerby,
*
as well as some of the amazing Lyme Regis monsters eased from the Dorset Jurassic by Mary Anning.

One of these collections, which still has all the perfect integrity—the same handwritten labels, the same pen-and-ink sketches, the same accompanying notes—as it had when it was handed over, was that which now rests in the eighteenth row of the cabinets on the museum’s third-floor repository, and is so large and
extensive that it occupies no fewer than twenty-nine drawers. There are twenty-four drawers full of fossils and a further five drawers of interesting rocks—all of them carefully amassed and fastidiously cataloged during thirty years of working and traveling by William Smith.

Except that there is a difference: While the collections of scientists like Darwin and Sowerby and Murchison came usually to the museum as part of a bequest or as a gift, and at the end of their collector’s life, William Smith
sold
his fossils to the museum, and did so while he was still a middle-aged man.

No matter that he had so painstakingly and single-handedly collected all 2,657 of them. It counted for little that his study of them and where they had come from formed the foundation of his theories, of his writings, of his great maps and of the entire science of stratigraphy that he had helped invent. It seemed to be of no consequence that these thousands of fossils were every bit as important to Smith as though they were part of his very person. The fact is that he sold them all, and he let them vanish into the vaults of the British Museum and he did so because, quite simply, he had to. For by the time he handed them over, in 1818, William Smith was a deeply desperate man.

Ever since the turn of the century he had been in financial trouble. A freelance life—which is what he had chosen for himself after being dismissed by the Somerset Coal Canal—inevitably dictates a precarious existence. In Smith’s case, it need not have been so. Smith was very good at his job: whether he was called in to make a survey, to drain a field, to prospect for coal, to shore up coastal defenses, to repair hot springs, or build a mill, or install a winding engine, he performed his task superbly, easily earning the two or three guineas that he charged each day, each time adding to his reputation, each time making fresh contacts with men who would give him more and yet more work. Moreover, he had some rentable property: the long-ago death of his father meant that he had title to his old cottage and the
neighboring field in Churchill, and when his uncle William had died in 1805, he came into some nearby lands: from both he managed to win an income of about £100 a year. Added to his professional payments his income was at times, very considerable, and might well have kept him in funds indefinitely.

But Smith was a spendthrift, too—spending in large measure in an attempt to gild the impression he would make on the noblemen for whom he so often worked. Not that he spent money on fine clothing, or on entertainment, or wine. His particular vice seems to have been the collection of good addresses—the purchase of the estate at Tucking Mill House, the office at Trim Bridge, the town house on Buckingham Street, all grander and more costly premises than necessary, but all with the sufficiency of style and élan that meant he could ask the likes of Sir Joseph Banks to come calling, could entertain the Chairman of the Geological Society, or have the Prime Minister himself drop round for tea.

The costs of the ceaseless traveling needed for making the map mounted over the years—although in the early days some of these expenses were borne by his clients, as he piggy-backed some of his map work on commissions he won, quite reasonably. “Everyone who travels,” he wrote, “knows that ready money must be provided for the road. There is no credit at the coach offices. A man’s hand is constantly draining his pocket, and so pressing for fees were all the lackey attendants…that I used to say a civil answer could scarcely be obtained on the road for less than sixpence. In taxes and tolls alone the man obliged to travel much pays heavily, however abstemious and economical he may be. No man may take less on the road than I did: for, 20 years since, I used to go from London to Bath without tasting anything.”
*

To compound his woes, and in the saddest of ironies, he also made one celebrated and unpardonable geological error, which was to cost him dear.

In 1807, hoping to supplement his income with a steady flow of funds without having to do much work, he bought himself an old quarry on Combe Down, one of the hills above his home at Tucking Mill. The idea was to prise out of this quarry chunks of high-quality Bath stone—the oolitic limestone then so favored for building across the country (and which he knew was just then being used to refurbish Henry VIII’s tomb in Westminster Abbey). He would take these immense pieces on a small specially built light railway down to the coal canal, have them band-sawn into building stones, and ship them off on barges to the Kennet & Avon Canal and thence via the Thames to the masons’ shops in London.

It took him some while to get the scheme off the ground. To buy the new land he needed to sell a small part of the Tucking Mill estate—already he had been obliged to raise a second mortgage from the owner, a Mr. Conolly of Midford Castle, to raise the ready money needed to pay for his travels—and that sale took rather more than four years. But by 1811 he was ready. He had made £1,330 from selling part of his land, found £500 by mortgaging a little more, plowed some into paying back rent and taxes, and then paid to have the light railway built, and the stone wharves erected on the coal canal’s banks. By 1814 stone was being cut, the sawmill was in full swing, and narrow-beamed barges, heavy with William Smith’s oolites, were being horse-heaved slowly toward the capital.

Good fortune lasted for no more than a year. Two events—one outwardly irrelevant, the other directly related—conspired to put a sudden end to the project. Come the following June—when Smith’s map was all but complete—the duke of Wellington defeated Napoleon at Waterloo, the wars at last were over, and England was forced to count the cost of all the fighting. It was a
vast sum. The nation went into a prompt and deep financial tail-spin. People stopped spending large sums of money: They halted building projects halfway through, they abandoned plans, they deferred decisions.

Already, in the spending of comparatively small sums, a new mood of postwar fiscal prudence had settled on the land—one can infer that much from the sparse list of paying subscribers who actually put down the relatively small sums of money that Smith was asking for copies of his map. But in the spending of larger sums—also cut back, hugely—the problem for Smith was an even greater one: For, with their new fiscal prudence, Britons who had lately been so careless about putting up grand houses and the newfangled structures known as office buildings all over the place, all of a sudden stopped doing so—and not only did they put a stop to erecting new real estate, but they also put a stop to buying stone with which to build it. And that suddenly sounded the death knell for the quarry Smith owned in the hills above Combe Down.

Not that they now would have bought Smith’s quarry stone anyway. From 1815 onward it had become abundantly clear that the Combe Down quarry possessed an unusual quantity of very poor stone—an outcrop of Oolite that was, in more ways than one, very decidedly Inferior. The quarry went immediately and spectacularly bust. The workers were laid off, the railway closed and left to the rust and the willow herb. And William Smith was swiftly to realize that the hundreds he had spent—and, more important, the new mortgages he had incurred—were all for naught. He was spiraling out of control, and it seemed that nothing could be done for him.

And not only was he now married, to a woman who was by all accounts going spectacularly crazy, he had also taken in tow a relative—a young man who would be his apprentice, helpmeet, and student for most of the rest of his days. He has been mentioned in passing before: He was called John Phillips, and he was
William Smith’s orphaned teenage nephew.
*
The fact that he would one day go on to be professor of geology of Oxford University, and president of the Geological Society—astonishing and delightfully ironic testimony to Smith’s magic as a teacher and kindly mentor—meant little as the storms began to gather: In 1815 John Phillips was, to put it bluntly, a financial burden to Smith too. His school fees—thirty pounds a year—and his food and clothing bills can only have added to his uncle’s savage decline in fortunes.

Twice during 1814 the bailiffs had been to the Buckingham Street doors, hammering for settlement, demanding back taxes and unpaid rent, threatening prison. Twice during that year Sir Joseph Banks, now convinced that the map he had helped sponsor truly was going to be published, had bailed Smith out with a check and a word in the ear of the vexed collectors. Now, come 1815, with the map almost done, with Combe Down collapsed, with John Phillips in residence, with Conolly of Midford Castle pressing for funds, the situation was far worse than even Sir Joseph could imagine. Smith knew there was only one course of action left open to him, and with this Banks himself concurred: He must sell his fossils, and if not privately, then to His Majesty’s Government.

The negotiations for the sale, which Smith initiated the summer of 1815, turned out to be painful, humiliating, and protracted in the extreme. They began when Smith asked for help from a Welsh farmer, James Brogden, for whom he had done
some drainage work near Kidwelly. Brogden was now a member of Parliament and the chairman of the Commons Ways and Means Committee; Smith told him the situation and asked if the government might be able to help.

A steady stream of officials then began to call at the Adelphi house to see what was on offer. The fact that the prime minister had visited the house that same Easter, and that Sir Joseph Banks was telling everyone in earshot of Smith’s eminence, must have helped, for the visitors were a distinguished group: Nicholas Vansittart, the chancellor of the Exchequer, came by, as did a wealthy landowner named Sir John Stanley, and one of the secretaries of the Treasury, Charles Arbuthnot. (Smith went back soon after to see Vansittart at his office in Downing Street—his diary shows that he gazed longingly at the huge belemnites in the flagstones lying outside the waiting-room window.)

A few days later William Huskisson,
*
who had the grand title “Surveyor-General of Woods and Forests,” made his inspection; as did another MP friend of Smith’s (who had employed him on restoring a mill in Kent) with the improbable name of Mr. Barne Barne. The conclusion of all these visitors was that Smith should write a formal memorial
†
to the very Gilbertian-sounding lords commissioners of the Treasury, pleading his case.