The Map That Changed the World (4 page)

Parliament, for example, was in the last decades of the eighteenth century passing enclosure acts at the rate of one a week. The formerly common-held land was now gradually being fenced and hedged, and farmed in a way—with the use of new machines and according to the principles of crop rotation—that led to the creation of the English countryside that we still see today, mannered, orderly, and inordinately pretty.

The village of Churchill itself was still unenclosed in 1769. The local farmers worked the fields as most of England had for centuries, taking for themselves alternating strips of the common-held land and on each strip growing crops, or setting each to pasture, or leaving each fallow, as individual mood and season suggested. The method was woefully inefficient, the landscape it created plain and uninteresting.

But then in 1787, under the usual pressure from the local squirearchy and the more powerful farmers, an enclosure act was passed for both the village and its surrounding countryside. Gone, within a year, were the ragged strips of new-plowed land and the mean acres of wood. The gently dipping fields and meadows that are still to be seen today were all hedged and ditched and ha-ha’d into existence when Smith was still a youngster. It was a development that had profound importance for the English farmer and the English countryside. It was also to be of profound importance for the beginning of career and inspiration for the young William Smith.

There was more to the farming revolution than the fashioning of a handsome landscape. To add luster to the newly made meadows there came new breeds of cattle and sheep—Hereford cows, Southdown sheep among them—that started to be introduced in the late eighteenth century, with the animals at last approximating in appearance (fatter, sturdier, and healthier than their bony and goatlike forebears) the look of the breeds to be seen today. Well-to-do farmers were so proud of their new beasts that they had paintings of them commissioned, and by doing so founded an entirely new artistic school of domestic animal portraiture.

Farming methods improved at a staggering rate, and in consequence the output of grain and potatoes and meat rose hugely. White bread became a commonplace in the diet of rich and poor. Cheese became hugely popular. An abundance of cattle feed all year round meant that at long last the winter ritual of eating only salted beef—the cattle hitherto had all died in the first cold snap for want of feed—could now be ended: A joint of roast beef promptly became a central feature of the national dinner table, part of England’s national mystique (and, of course, the Englishman’s French nickname,
Le Rosbif
).

And this all led to something else. In fact it was during the late eighteenth century—most probably for the first time—that
society suddenly seemed to realize it had become a vastly complicated entity, its characteristics linking and interconnecting with one another in wholly unexpected ways. Such domino effects first became apparent when it was revealed, at the turn of the century, that Britain could no longer feed itself.

The consumption of white bread and roast beef, for example, led indirectly to a set of completely unanticipated consequences. Although the nation’s farmers certainly produced a lot—being armed with such weapons as the crop-sowing inventions of Jethro Tull, and the revolutionary land management methods of Thomas Coke, all the benefits of enclosure—and although what they produced, like the bread and the meat, was a delight to eat, it became an unfortunate reality that from that moment on until today, they could not produce enough. England became during this period and for the first time a net importer of wheat and corn.

This was due to the simplest of Malthusian reasons—the fact that the country’s population had begun to rise significantly since midcentury. But figures had begun to inch up not because of an increase in birthrate going hand in hand with the rising prosperity, but mainly because of a small but important fall in the nation’s death rate. And that was due, in no small part, to the better diet of white bread and roast beef. An unexpected interplay of factors, indeed—all part of the making of Britain as a modern, complicated society, a society readying itself for modern, complicated ideas.

There were other factors in play as well. Health was improving, for example. A child like young William Smith could be more assured than ever before of survival: There was better midwifery, a relative abundance of doctors, the construction of lying-in hospitals for women in labor, the introduction after 1760 of smallpox inoculations, the widespread opening of dispensaries, and a general agreement that fresh air was good for one and that hygiene and ventilation should be regulated—all
such developments, all occurring in the latter half of the eighteenth century, helped to ensure that childbirth was far less risky an adventure than before.

Moreover, people simply knew much more than before. Their lives were more efficient and comfortable than they had ever been. There was ample reason for a new degree of physical contentment—an atmosphere that, for those who were so predisposed, was highly conducive to study, to pondering and wondering. There had been steady improvements in education and literacy (Samuel Johnson’s great
Dictionary
had been published in 1755). There was now a mature newspaper industry. The postal system was becoming reliable and even efficient—a letter mailed in London could reach Chipping Norton, which was close to Churchill, the afternoon of the following day, “on every day except Monday”—meaning that people, even in so remote a part of the country as Oxfordshire, could now keep abreast of national developments, could tap into an ever-running wellspring of advice and information.

They could learn, and by comparison with what had gone before, they could learn in double-quick time, something of the trivia of trends—as when eighteenth-century gentlemen farmers were beginning to buy pianos for their newly carpeted living rooms. They could know how a Mr. Chippendale began to turn out enchanting new styles of furniture from a new wood, mahogany, which had been discovered in South America. They could read how ladies in Liverpool, Manchester, and Edinburgh were starting to supplement their inelegant skirt pockets by carrying with them what they would call “indispensables,” which would be later called handbags. People in Churchill knew that young ladies of fashion, reading the new colored style journals, were now preferring to sport interestingly pale faces instead of the sunburned cheeks of the peasantry. The women of Churchill could learn all too rapidly how—in part to achieve this look—the recently invented parasols and umbrellas were becoming “quite the thing.”

And they could learn of foreign developments—the rising agitation in the Americas being the most vexing—or of the minutiae of their own national government (George III, the capricious and unstable farmer-king who had assumed the throne in 1760, oversaw no fewer than seven governments during just the first decade of his reign).
*
The population now could and did display its anger and its pleasure at matters of which it came to know. The people could rant against unfairnesses—the naval press-gang, say, which was still much in operation in the port cities. They could cheer and argue over the spread of civil rights—John Wilkes, the “Friend of Liberty,” was a prisoner in the Tower
†
when Smith was born; Thomas Paine was marshaling the ideas that would eventually lead him to write
The Age of Reason
; Edmund Burke was well into his career as the foremost liberal thinker of his time.
‡

By 1781—by which time William Smith was a twelve-year-old boy—Samuel Johnson was calling the English “a nation of readers.” Few were the major towns that did not have a library. Few were the shop signs in the streets that did not show the name of the merchant instead of merely a picture of what he sold. It was assumed, and with reason, that sufficient numbers of passersby would have no difficulty reading the words on the boards—something that preceding generations (and many on the Continent even then) would have found a considerable challenge.

No matter the outcry that allowing the working classes to become educated was to debauch them and tempt them to abandon the manual labors for which they were best suited. “Nineteen in twenty of the species were designed by nature for trade and manufacture,” said a writer in
The Grub-Street Journal
at the time of Smith’s birth. “To take them off to read books is the way to do them harm, to make them not wiser or better, but impertinent, troublesome and factious.” That kind of thinking was rapidly to become outmoded during the years when Smith was growing up: Whatever the political outcome—whatever the effect of the new phenomenon of public opinion, which literacy, communication, newspapers, and libraries encouraged—the nation, save for its most reactionary elements, seemed generally prepared to come to terms with the new mood for change.

W
illiam Smith’s formative years unrolled through a period that was both astonishingly vibrant and deeply challenging. Advances were firmly under way in almost all applied areas of science and philosophy, and in social change and artistic endeavor as well. But there was still a terrible hesitation about humans’ understanding of the most fundamental questions of why they were where they were, who had placed them there, what was the point, what were their origins, what was their fate?

The hesitation was deep rooted; it stemmed, at least in part, from the frank reluctance of eighteenth-century men and women to accept that there even
was
a need to know and wonder at such things. To inquire with true rigor into matters that lay at the heart and soul of his and all society’s beliefs smacked, indisputably, of heresy. Even by the time that young William Smith was starting to take advantage of the world’s new and inquiring mood, there was still the wide acceptance—not yet contradicted by any evidence that seemed to matter—that God had created both human beings and all the world in which they
lived. That was that: No more needed to be said.

And yet. A very few bold and more radically inclined thinkers—Joseph Priestley, one of the discoverers of oxygen, and Erasmus Darwin, Charles’s grandfather, among them
*
—were beginning, in these same extraordinary years, to take a more muscular and skeptical approach to the received wisdom of the Church. By the time Smith was coming to his maturity, questions about these fundamentals were being asked by more than the mere metropolitan sophisticates. The hunch that God might not have done precisely as Bishop Ussher had suggested, or during the time he calculated, was beginning to be tested by real thinkers, by rationalists, by radically inclined scientists who were bold enough to challenge both the dogma and the law, the clerics and the courts.

There was in those early days much more questioning than there was answering. It was a period more marked by bewilderment than certainty. While most still believed that the Scriptures could comfortably provide answers to all the questions about earthly origin and human purpose, there was a growing and more frequently admitted sense of puzzlement as well—a puzzlement that seems to have been most keenly felt among those scientists and engineers who were observing the natural laws of physics and chemistry, who were working with steam or fashioning iron or digging cuts through cliffs. Among those and others who knew something of the newly formulated laws of science, there was a new mood of questioning that hinted that maybe, just maybe, the old beliefs, rooted in the blind acceptance of churchly teachings, might not have been wholly true.

A febrile fluttering of questioning began—about what exactly
was
the world? How had it, and all that was in it, really come about? Was it sacrilege to wonder such a thing? Was it blasphemy to ask? Would lightning strike down anyone who questioned the likelihood of James Ussher’s numbers being correct? Would plague and boils tear at the vitals of anyone who asked out loud just what story might it be that lay buried in the stones beneath our feet?

And all this questioning tended to coalesce around one new and barely structured field of study and fascination. Could it perhaps be that
geology,
*
the frail and stripling science that had first been established to inquire into the nature of the earth before and after the Deluge, could it be that
geological
inquiry might hold the answer? This was a science that, after all, had at least the potential—if it could be divorced from churchly dogma—to at least define and then ask the questions to which answers now seemed so urgently needed.

At the time of Smith’s birth, geology and those few men who called themselves geologists saw it as no part of their duties to inquire more fully, to delve more deeply, into what were still seen as the realms of the Divine. And yet some scientists were beginning to wonder if geology really was to be confined like this—if it was obliged to function only within the framework of faith, and not to challenge it one whit—then was it truly worthy of being called a science at all?

Maybe, though, it could rehabilitate itself. Maybe geology was the one new scientific discipline that, if applied courageously, might be able to help answer the fundamental and unasked questions that were beginning to trouble those tentative, nervous questioners. Perhaps geology could be the key for those who, in
the enlightened, wondering spirit of the times, were at last beginning to tap their fingertips on the stout door of received belief?

M
any Europeans who found themselves in England in the closing decades of the eighteenth century talked of seeing a country “waking itself from sleep.” Many in England agreed and wondered out loud: Could it be that in shaking and worrying and waking from its sleep the very land itself, by asking at last what exactly
was
that land, and how it had first come into being—could it be that by doing this they might answer questions that would help lay bare the very core of knowledge?

That was what a few men were at the time beginning to wonder. In turn the wonderment of some of them—a country surveyor here, an Oxford-educated priest there, a fossil-collecting dilettante in this city, a radical-minded landlord in that—would be passed down to the intelligent and inquiring young Oxfordshire lad, who would before long help lay the foundations for a brand-new science that would inquire, quite fearlessly and, eventually, scandalously into the foundations of just about everything. William Smith appeared on the stage at a profoundly interesting moment: He was about to make it even more so.