The Map That Changed the World (9 page)

He finally arrived in Somerset in 1791, on another mission from Edward Webb of Stow. Here he was to make a valuation survey, on his own, of an estate in the pretty village of Stowey that had recently been willed to a local grandee and coal mine owner named Lady Elizabeth Jones.
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Characteristically, it being a warm and fine summer, the fares on the trans-Cotswold post-chaise being higher than it seemed prudent to pay, and, since a trek of fifty miles seemed to Smith no more than a casual stroll (as it would to most hardened geologists even now), he decided to walk.

He traveled along the roads the Romans built: After making southbound along the country roads he struck southwest along the remains of Akeman Street first, which took him from Burford down to Cirencester, and then turned on a more southerly route, via the Fosse Way to Tetbury and the old Roman settlement and pleasuredrome of Bath. After that, keep
ing to the hills to the south and west around the spa, he walked by way of Radstock, Odd Down, Stoneaston, and Temple Cloud—coalfield villages all—until, finally, he reached the vast acreages of the Jones estate.

He was to remain in this part of England, at first working for his patron and then later for the Somerset Coal Canal Company, for the next eight years—eight years during which he would make the discovery, come to the realization, announce the deduction—and begin the hard grind—that would earn him his place in posterity.

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T
he village of High Littleton is a gritty, windy, hilly, and generally unlovely place, almost as far removed from the traditional imagery of Somerset—no cider apples, no jolly farmers, no thatch or maypole or cricket on the green—as if it were near Nottingham or on the country fringes of industrial Lancashire.

Much the same might be said of the entire swath of countryside that lies ten miles to the south and southwest of Bath. It is pinioned between some of the loveliest and most measured architecture in all of southern England. Wells Cathedral, with its statues and gargoyles, is the spiritual and aesthetic mooring point to the west. The ordered, bewigged, and precious life, the powdered and pomaded air of England’s once-second city, Regency Bath, wafts in from the east. But between lies an area that still today looks curiously out of place, architecturally, atmospherically, socially, commercially: It has smaller houses, meaner shops, grubbier streets, a spoiled and ragged landscape.

All is a direct consequence of geology. These fifty square
miles or so of Somerset, bounded by the red-brick villages of Clutton in the west and Combe Hay in the east, Priston in the north and Kilmersdon in the south, lie on top of a score of complex, broken, twisted, and contorted seams of coal, which until as late as the 1970s were worked by as independent and militant a band of English mining men as might ever have stepped out from beneath the winding gears of the coalfields of Durham or Lanark. Maybe their militancy had arisen because of the unusual proximity, in these parts, of their class enemies—all around them the great limestone houses and mannered city terraces were occupied by soft-handed gentleman farmers and sportsmen, philosophers and squires, artists and divines. There was no other local industry to provide brotherly support: In the fifty square miles of country that unrolled itself around where the twenty-two-year-old William Smith came to live and work, the laboring classes were coal miners, to a man.

The mines were owned privately, usually by whoever owned the land under which the coal was first found. Of the Lady Jones who first employed William Smith to landscape the estate around her house in Stowey we know very little; but she and her late husband, Sir William Jones of Ramsbury, certainly owned a great deal of land other than the immediate neighborhood of her house, which included both a large number of the neighboring coal mines and a collection of farmhouses. It was into one of these, Rugborne, which stood on the eastern outskirts of High Littleton, that she allowed her new young employee to move.

Smith had good reason to remember this house vividly. It was, he wrote, a large old manor house, three-storied, solid, and foursquare, sheltered by lime trees, and with a walled courtyard in front, and steps leading up to handsome gates and walls (now gone) that were thick enough to have a series of rounded niches in which Smith liked to sit and study his books. The house had once belonged to a Major Britton, who, the locals said, had ruined himself financially by working the coal seams that ran
beneath the house. But when Smith moved in it was occupied by a tenant farmer, Cornelius Harris, who gave him board and lodgings for half a guinea
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a week, and took in his horse for an extra ten shillings a month.

He remembered the house not so much for its architecture or its comfort or the eminently reasonable price of the accommodations, however. He remembered it because of the work that he was to engage in, first in a mine less than a mile away to the north, and later in the canal that he was to help build a little farther afield. It was work of staggering significance.

And because of it, Rugborne Farm, High Littleton, deserves a memorial. The work that Smith undertook there, and the results that he achieved and pored over there, led ultimately to the creation of an entirely new science. For years afterward he looked back on his time at Rugborne as the most important in his life, and the house as the crucible of the new discipline he believed himself to have created. “The birthplace of geology,” he later said, grandly. But there is no memorial—not a plaque on the house, nothing—just an incorrectly dated sign erected by the local council back in the thirties, at the entrance to a lane, pointing halfheartedly to where the house still stands.
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He worked there first for Lady Jones—surveying, planning, draining—in her capacity as director of the High Littleton Coal Company. He was not without a greater ambition: A letter found in the files showed that he tried hard to persuade her to allow
him to become a shareholder in one of her newer mines, and to be its general manager. There is no record of a response. Instead he was compelled to work at one of her older pits, which had been first excavated in 1783 and which was to have nearly thirty-five years of working existence. The mine was called the Mearns Pit, and though it was certainly one of the less familiar and less prosperous of the hundreds of mines and shafts that had been sunk over the centuries into the coal measures of North Somerset, its importance on the global stage is quite inestimable.

Rugborne Farm, Smith’s first true home near High Littleton, which he called “the birthplace of geology.”

For the Mearns Pit at High Littleton has a standing in the history of geology that is comparable to the one that Gregor Mendel’s Moravian pea garden has in the science of genetics, the Galápagos Islands in evolutionary theory, and the University of Chicago football stadium in the story of nuclear fission. Yet this
Somerset coal mine also goes unremembered today, just like Rugborne Farm. There is no blue plaque, no brass plate, nothing. Just a small lump in a field that marks a scarified hillock of grassed-over mining waste, a mound that Somerset people still call a batch. And a scrap of paper in the University Museum in Oxford, recording what William Smith saw, felt, thought, and concluded when first he ventured into the dripping darkness of that dreary little West Country colliery.

A section of the Mearns Pit in Somerset, where Smith first noticed the succession of rock and fossil types.

To describe exactly what Smith did at Mearns, and why his working and thinking there marked the beginnings of something important, we now have to descend, rather like a miner nervously waiting his turn beneath the winding gear, into the half-illuminated and technically tricky gloom of the scientific underworld.

The rocks that contain winnable coal in North Somerset belong to what are known, perhaps not surprisingly, as the Upper, Middle, and Lower Coal Measures. The rocks that belong to this period were deposited during what in today’s Britain is called the Westphalian stage of the Upper Carboniferous period, which in turn is classified as having occurred over a period of about twenty million years during the closing billennia—the upper end, in other words—of that immensely long chunk of geologic time (an “era,” in the vernacular) known as the Paleozoic.

Modern radiometric dating shows that the Coal Measures were laid down between 310 and 290 million years ago. The world had by this time already seen and welcomed the appearance of such living complexities as ferns, sharks, and winged insects; it already disposed, by extinction, of less complex life forms, such as stromatolites and graptolites. Before the end of the Upper Carboniferous it was also about to do away with that most attractively lovable lobsterlike Paleozoic arthropod known as the trilobite.

None of this—neither the names of the geological eras, nor the age of the rocks, nor the existence of a fraction of the life forms within them—was known to Smith or to anyone who
worked with or around him. When he climbed down into the dark mine on a cool summer’s day in 1792 he knew just about nothing about the sorts and conditions below—nothing except that there was definitely coal in these hills, and the miners who clawed it out of the ground knew only too well how it was organized, and how to make some kind of sense of the chaotic state in which it existed.

Several shafts made up the Mearns Colliery, and Smith went down every one of them—clambering down slippery ladders and ropes or being taken down with the chain of one of the dredgers that was powered by a Newcomen steam engine. He would write that he looked closely at the walls of the shaft, and noticed the succession of layers of rock as they slipped past his eyes.

At first he was rather puzzled. “The stratification
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of the stones struck me as something very uncommon,” he was to write a short while later,

His paper plan—the first he is known to have written, and preserved in the great Gothic cathedral-museum in Oxford—is merely a scrap, titled “Original Sketch and Observations of my
First Subterranean Survey of Mearns Colliery in the Parish of High Littleton.” It records, without comment, what he saw of the technology that was employed to bring the coal up from below. Horses that were harnessed to a windlass lifted the coal from the three-bushel carts on a tramway “that are wound up the second gugg [an underground incline], drawn along here to the bottom of the first by a man down on his hands and feet, bare, with a cord round his waist, to which is fastened a chain that comes between his legs and hooks to the forepart of the cart.”

Then he went down into the pit and noted exactly what he saw. First, there was the grass and gravel of the surface, which blended seamlessly into topsoil, eight or ten inches thick. Next came a more solid rock—at first broken into small chunks, then progressively more solid, and generally red in color, though with layers that were strangely green. It was, so far as he could make out, an earthy limestone, a marlstone, interspersed with shales—the marlstone being very red, the shales having a green tint. Overall, though, it was red and earthy—and similar, so far as he could see, to other red marls, other red earths, that he had seen around Bath on his walk there from Oxfordshire.

Then he noticed something very important. These marls, he wrote, were not laid down horizontally—but seemed to slope very gradually away to the east. They had a dip, an angle from the horizontal, that seemed to Smith to be about three degrees. They also had a strike, which is the compass direction of the line drawn where the dip intersects with the horizontal, and which in this case was aligned about 95 degrees from due north. The marl beds were sloping, in other words, in the general direction of London, and if their strike continued on the same general heading, in the direction also of Europe. Whether they continued to slope away in this direction and at this rate, and whether the marls were thus eventually buried deep below the capital or beneath the hills of France, Smith could neither tell nor imagine. But what was obvious to Smith is that they pointed in that general direction, and that they did so on a very gentle downgrade.