The Map That Changed the World (3 page)

And here he was now, without a home, without possessions, without any evident future—and yet with his new book, his new great work of science, his masterpiece of craftsmanship and endeavor, about to be offered to the public once again. His situation must have seemed grim indeed, and the brutality of coincidence can hardly have escaped him.

P
recisely how William Smith reacted during the rest of that wretched day goes unrecorded. It would be tempting to suppose that he marched swiftly back up to John Cary’s office that
very afternoon and borrowed money, taking an advance against the sale of his atlas, which would be published the following morning. All that is known, however, is that he decided there and then that he would turn his back on the London that, in his view, had so contributed to his ruin.

So he found and collected his wife, he found and collected the nephew who also then lived with them, and he gathered together what few possessions the two of them, in being turned with evident haste out of the Adelphi house a few days before, had managed to save for him. He made his way across the crowded capital to the Black Swan Inn at Holborn, which was known as the principal stagecoach terminal for travelers making their way to Edinburgh via the Great North Road.

During the summer there was a northbound coach every other day, and if he was lucky
*
he might even on that same night have won three seats and have been thundering northward in a rocking carriage behind the four great fire-breathing horses of the Northern Mail. His driver would carry him and his fellow passengers maybe sixty miles a day, and so the next morning would see him at Peterborough, then Stamford, then Grantham.

Finally the coach reached the small Yorkshire post town of Northallerton, and this is where, bone weary and hungry, William Smith finally got down and began the process, much like any itinerant tradesman or journeyman, of looking for custom and for work.

“The man might be imprisoned—but his discoveries could not be,” he was to write some years later.
†
“London quitted with disgust. The cheering fields regained.”

I
t was to be twelve years before William Smith returned to spend much time in London. The man who was hurtling and banging his way northward on that summer evening stagecoach, was then at the low point of his life—a life that, when recounted in as full a manner as the evidence allows, turns out to have been more honorable, more deservedly honored, and on a world scale much more important than he, at that moment, could have imagined.

Amaltheus margaritatus

W
illiam Smith was born into a world of dogma, faith, and certainty, into a conservative English society that his own discoveries and theories would one day help shake to its very foundations.

And yet already—however conservative the mood of the early eighteenth century may have seemed—there are signs that, viewed from today’s perspective, suggest that even at the time of his birth it was imperceptibly readying itself for all that discoverers like Smith would find and do. In countless ways, both great and small, the faiths and certainties of centuries past were being edged aside, and the world was being prepared, if gently and unknowingly, to receive the shocking news of scientific revelation.

Not that any of the vague subtleties of coming change had reached very far. William Smith was born, the first son of the local blacksmith in the hamlet of Churchill in Oxfordshire, on March 23, 1769. It was a measure of the rigor and certitude of both the place and the times that there could be great canonical
precision about such a moment. To religious folk—and most English country folk of the time were religious, their daily rhythms set by the steeple bell, their manners regulated from the parsonage—the event that gave a firstborn child to John and Ann Smith in their cottage on the edge of the green in Churchill took place, according to their implacably held beliefs, exactly 5,772 years, four months, and sixteen days after the creation of the world.

Any student of the Bible could have been quite certain about this figure—in fact he or she could have been quite certain as to the very number of
hours
since the Creation, had the Churchill midwife been scrupulous enough to note the time of the infant’s birth. A quick calculation could be made on the basis of an almost unchallenged belief about human origins that was then held by most men and women who lived deep in the English shires—the notion that the world had been brought swiftly into existence exactly 4,004 years before the birth of Christ.

L
est anyone forget, all the Bibles that were in use at the time had dates printed in bold scarlet letters in the margins, annotations to the verses of the Old Testament, designed to act as a gentle reminder. “In the beginning, God…” had the number “4004
B.C
.” written beside it; the text of the Holy Scriptures’ subsequent dramas, from Cain and Abel onward, had progressively lower and lower red-printed figures in the margin, until the events in the manger in Bethlehem, by which time the figure had been cycled down to zero.

The dating of the Bible was very much an idea of the later Middle Ages. It had taken decades for anyone to come up with credible numbers. In an effort to do so, scores of scholarly zealots had carefully analyzed the basic biblical idea—which had never, after all, volunteered an age for the earth, merely the manner in which it had come about—by sedulously counting the
number of human generations they believed to have come and gone between the making of Adam and the begetting of Christ. On the basis of their workings it was reckoned, at the close of the sixteenth century, that the world was, give or take, six thousand years old.

It was left to the genial Irish prelate James Ussher, while he was bishop of Armagh, to fix the date with absolute precision. According to his workings, which he managed to convince his clerical colleagues were impeccably accurate, God had created the world and all its creatures in one swift and uninterrupted process of divine mechanics that began on the dot of the all-too-decent hour of 9
A.M
., on a Monday, October 23, 4004
B.C
.

The cynical and the skeptical may need some reminding of the fine print—of just what was preached in the church in which William Smith was baptized, of the kind of firm beliefs with which his community was invested. Whatever interest Smith the man might later develop in fossils, geology, and the makings of
humankind, at the time he was born there was no question: The entire process of Creation had taken God the familiar six days, and he had begun it 5,772 years before.

James Ussher’s dating of Creation is part of the rubric of a Bible from William Smith’s lifetime.

At the start of that late October week, in the year that a modern Christian calendar would style 4004
B.C
., the Deity organized the basic concepts of light and dark, sun and moon, wet and dry. He then made every ocean, inlet, river, sandbar, meadow, desert, mountain, icecap, and fjord: The structure of the world, its topography, and the geology that forms the core of this story were complete. By the morning of the twenty-sixth, the Thursday, God had seen to it that life had been begun, and by that evening every first microbe, newt, spider, serpent, eagle, cat, horse, and monkey had been duly set in place, to creep, crawl, swim, fly, leap, spring, and deploy its opposable thumb to climb.

By the following day the botanical phyla were all in place: Every rain forest, grassland, savanna, peony, orchid, rose, palm, apple, pine, and daisy had been left on earth, contentedly to bloom. All of Milton’s “rocks, caves, lakes, fens, bogs, dens” were now fully accumulated: An earthly paradise was set, ready to be lost.

And by the Saturday, most important of all, emerged those creatures who would lose it. The first two examples of
ur
-human, in the bipedal and upright (but otherwise subtly different from each other) forms of Adam and Eve, had been created in the Garden of Eden. They were at this stage blissfully unaware, of course, and therefore untroubled by the Fall (which would come later, via the agency of the already created serpent and apple).

Recorded history could now formally begin. Human beings were in place, made in the image of their Maker, and they could do with their world more or less as they and their Maker between them pleased. Thus was it all done. Come midnight on the Saturday, with all this frantic labor done, the weary Divinity slept, having declared that all he had created was good, and fully
ready to begin the adventuring he had ordained for it for the next six thousand years and more.
*

Yet, when William Smith was born, the unquestioning acceptance of a notion such as this was beginning to change. There were vague stirrings of enlightenment from among the nation’s chattering classes. Some cynical views—in law, criminally heretical ones—that wafted up from the fashionable salons and drawing rooms of London challenged the very likelihood of Divine Creation. Among them was a new notion, still curious and outrageous to most in the eighteenth century, that Earth might in fact be a very good deal older than the human race that inhabited it, such that humankind and its planet might not in fact have been of near-simultaneous origin.

There was no evidence whatsoever for such views—those who doubted Creation were indulging in little more than inspired hunches. In later years the hunches became more certain, and indeed it would be William Smith’s discoveries that would go some long way toward confirming them. But at the time he was born they were very much the idle speculations of a tiny group of sophisticates in London. And the capital was a very long way from northwestern Oxfordshire, both in distance and in temper. The muddy and rutted roads that passed across the ridges of the Chiltern Hills, between Oxford and London, did much to keep at bay any such wild and disagreeable ideas as these.

Where Smith was born, among that small muddle of warm-colored stone cottages, with thatched roofs and climbing roses, the village green and the inn and the duck pond and the old
steepled parish church, beliefs about such weighty matters as humankind’s beginnings were unburdened by the complications of too much thought. They were taken on faith as the revelations of Scripture, and when and if they were recounted, they were larded with appropriate and long-remembered quotations from the Book of Genesis.

The infant Smith, whose father and mother were an essentially unremarkable country couple
*
was thus born into a world of which at least the basis of existence had a certainty. The origins of the planet, just like the origins of mankind, were assumed to be fixed, uncomplicated and divinely directed.

But all such assumptions were to be assaulted, and shockingly so, before the next hundred years were out. To no small degree it was to be William Smith’s geological findings, along with a raft of other discoveries, that were to change things. His findings were to prove vitally important in triggering the collision that was eventually to take place between the religious beliefs that were in the ascendant at the time and the scientific reasoning that would provide the spur for the intellectual activities of a century later.

Science was the key—along with the scientific method, with all its underpinnings of observation, deduction, and rational thought. The consequence, once the theories of Charles Darwin in particular had begun to sink in, was a profound modification of the way in which people thought of nature, of society, and of themselves. Which makes it all the more appropriate, given the impact his ideas would have, that it was into a time of suddenly accelerating scientific achievement and technological application that William Smith was born.

For, at the very moment that he was born, things were chang
ing, and changing fast. In the year of his birth—which according to parish records at Churchill was 1769—there were, for example, three developments, nicely coincident, that in retrospect suggest all too powerfully that change was in the wind. As indeed it was: For the first time in British history the word
industry
was no longer being used simply to describe the nobility of human labor and had come instead to mean what it does today: the systematic and organized use of that labor, generally with the assistance of mechanical devices and machines, to create what would thenceforth be called
manufactured goods
. The Industrial Revolution, in short, was at hand, and three creations from Smith’s birth year are well worth noting, since they more than anything suggest the temper of the times. As it happened, for instance, 1769 was the year of grant of patent for James Watt’s first condensing steam engine—perhaps the most important invention of the entire era. Josiah Wedgwood, who had been busily making fine pottery in Staffordshire for some years past, opened his great factory, known as Etruria, near Hanley, also in 1769. And the great field of textile making, which was being steadily revolutionized by a cannonade of new inventions, was most notably advanced by the creations of Richard Arkwright—who made the first water-powered cotton-spinning frame, also in 1769.
*
Watt, Wedgwood, and Arkwright—a holy trinity from the brave new world that was coming into being—were now unknowingly ushering in the man who would change the view of that world for all time.

In all corners of the industrial world there was change, development, innovation, the shock of the new. Coal, iron, ships, pottery, cloth, steam—these were the mantras of the moment. The great English ironmasters, for example, were approaching their zenith: Cranage, Smeaton, and Cort were developing the processes for “puddling” iron and rolling molten metal.
Abraham Darby and John Wilkinson were constructing the first iron bridges in the world. Wilkinson, unarguably the greatest of all eighteenth-century champions of things ferrous, was making the first mine railway in 1767, then the first iron chapel (for a congregation of Wesleyans), and was using iron lighters to shift coal to his three furnaces (and, to cap it all, had himself buried in 1808 in an iron coffin).

Iron production was on the way to doubling every twenty years when Smith was born, and coal was too; and—in what would prove of the utmost significance to William Smith by the time he was a grown man—the mania for canal building, to provide a means of transporting all the coal and iron and finished goods, was teetering at its beginnings.

If there were hints of a coming change in the long-held systems of belief; if the industrial world was accelerating out of all imagination; then so also, and as an obvious corollary, social change was underway as well. And when William Smith was born, the rate and scale of alteration to society was such that even those in so small and isolated a settlement as Churchill, Oxfordshire, would be bound to notice.