The Map That Changed the World

by Simon Winchester

  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 changing, 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.

  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.

  William 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 beg
inning, 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?