The Map That Changed the World

by Simon Winchester

  Except that in retrospect there appears to have been more than a touch of hubris about him. For below the surface matters were beginning, if slowly, to unwind. His financial affairs were starting to unravel. Those who would eventually come to cheat him, and try to deprive him of the honors he was rightly due, were beginning to gather, and to circle. He would never have full-time, fixed employment again—his six years with the canal company marked the summit of his career as a company man. From now on he would be in the perilous position of the freelance mineral surveyor, earning as much as his wits and his contacts might bring him.

  He did not know it yet, but he was fast standing into danger. And yet it was just at this time, when matters were beginning to go awry, that he began work on the biggest project of them all. He had made the first geological map in the world, of the country around Bath. Now he began to consider the possibilities of making a map, not just of a region, but of an entire country. He wanted nothing less than to know and map the underworld of all of England.

  10

  The Great Map Conceived

  Tulites subcontractus

  Each age has a set of defining reference books, that small collection of timeless volumes that is deemed essential to any household that considers itself intelligent and civilized. Today, it might include Britannica, the OED, or Brewer’s, with, additionally for the more specialized mind, perhaps Wisden, the Statesman’s Yearbook, or the Cook’s Continental. A century ago the moderately curious household might have had on hand volumes of Whitaker’s, Pears, or Cruden’s Concordance, and most certainly a dog-eared edition of a Bradshaw. In the eighteenth century the choice would necessarily have been more limited. One would certainly possess (after its midcentury publication date) the two-volume edition of Johnson’s Dictionary. And if one ever contemplated taking a post-chaise and venturing from home, it would be essential also to have access to a copy of the best-known atlas of the day, what was widely known as a Cary.

  John Cary, little known today beyond the rarefied world of the antiquarian map dealer, occupies an ineradicable reputation as the leading mapmaker of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. He was only twenty-four when he created his first engraved plan, in 1779, a starkly beautiful, rather plain design that offered something very different from the gaudy, curlicued, and highly confusing maps and charts that were the fashion of the day. His work proved popular, so much so that by 1787, when he produced his first map collection, The New and Correct English Atlas, it became the essential reference volume that households were to possess well into the next century. Servants in London were commonly sent out to Hatchards in Piccadilly, their masters demanding simply that they collect a Cary. So many editions were produced of the Atlas that the printing plates had to be reengraved more than once, so worn with demand did they become.

  The creator of these elegant and highly accurate works achieved a towering reputation. The General Post Office (GPO) was one of the first to recognize John Cary’s cartographic brilliance: In 1794 it commissioned him to make a comprehensive survey of all main roads in England and Wales, a task that required him to walk the length of each, pushing a measuring device—a stick with a four-inch wheel at the business end—in front of him. The resulting book—Cary’s New Itinerary—was published in 1798.

  It was while Cary was working on the GPO commission that he and William Smith first met. It would be pleasing to imagine that they encountered each other out in the field—the Oxfordshire blacksmith’s son, hammer and acid bottle and compass in hand, meeting the Wiltshire maltster’s son, with his measuring rod and notebook. Perhaps they would have met somewhere near Midford, where the Fosse Way (which was being surveyed by Cary) crosses the coal canal (which was being surveyed by Smith). But it seems more likely that they actually met in London; perhaps they did so during the 1794 parliamentary inquiry that resulted in the grant to the canal company of the right to begin excavation.

  But whenever and wherever it was that the two men first met, Smith and Cary began in 1794 in Somerset a collaboration that was to last, happily if not necessarily profitably, for much of the next forty years. It was a collaboration that began with the quarter-inch survey charts of the canal itself, which were engraved by Cary (the canal company’s obvious choice, since he was so well known and well regarded) and had engineering and some geological details superimposed by Smith;* it culminated in publication of the great national geological maps and atlases that lie at the heart of this story.

  Wisely, or perhaps timorously, William Smith decided to begin his efforts to map the entire country in a relatively small way. By this time in his life he had a fair knowledge of the countryside and the geology of the counties in which he had worked, either for the canal company or for Edward Webb: He can fairly be said to have known, well enough to make a stab at some rudimentary geological cartography, the lie of the land in Oxfordshire, Warwickshire, Worcestershire, Gloucestershire, Wiltshire, and Hampshire.

  He knew very well indeed the deep geology of northeastern Somerset. He had been to the capital many times, and he could tell at a glance, by the dramatic gradations (dramatic to him alone, perhaps) in scenery, soil, and vegetation, the progress he was making from the Lower Jurassic to the Upper Cretaceous each time he journeyed by coach from the Circus in Bath to Charing Cross in London. He had been to Newcastle-upon-Tyne, too, and had a passing acquaintance with the underpinnings of Rutland and Lincolnshire, Northamptonshire, Yorkshire, Durham, and southern Northumberland. Enough knowledge, in short, to have a tentative go at making a map of the whole country, albeit on a very small scale.

  He chose as his base map a copy of, not a real map at all, but John Cary’s index sheet to the second edition of the seventy-sheet New and Correct Atlas of England and Wales, published in 1794. On this sheet, which displayed Britain up to the Scottish borders at a scale of about forty-seven miles to the inch (and on which it is possible to see the superimposed numbers of the sheets to which the index refers), Smith colored in what he imagined to be the extents of a number of geological formations—the Tertiaries, the Chalk, the Coral Rag and Carstone, the Oolites, the Lias, the Red Ground, the Magnesian Limestone, the Coal Measures, and the Carboniferous Limestone.

  On his map and in his notes he gave names to those rocks that did not already have the dignity. The Cornbrash, the Forest Marble, the Lias still survive—“a system of names almost barbarous to ears polite,” wrote one critic. Years later, when the honors began to cascade down on Smith, a distinguished professor offering him a medal was tactless enough to remark on the “uncouth” names he had given to the rocks. Yet some of the more barbaric and less couth names have gone, mercifully: The horizon that is now known as the Oxford clay was in Smith’s notes called the Clunch Clay, surely one of the least agreeable rock names that can be imagined.

  He worked on his map through the early months of 1801, coloring it in with the information he had gathered on his stagecoach and post-chaise and walking journey, using the same system of coloration he had initiated with the circular Bath map—though as he was now dealing with six or seven formations, not just the three he had colored before, so he had to be more chromatically creative. He chose gray bands for the Tertiary outcrop, blue-green for the Chalk, brown for the Coral Rag and Carstone, yellow for the Oolites, prussian blue for the Lias, and red, not surprisingly, for the Red Ground.

  In addition to the simple fact of coloring the strata (admittedly most boldly so), he also incorporated a further device that, he felt, would make an even greater impression on the eye. He shaded each of the colors away from the lowest part of their outcrop—so that at the base (as in the Oolites, where they rest on the next lowest, or next most westerly bed, the Lias) the color is strong, and fades slowly away until the junction with the rock stratum above it, which is similarly strongly colored and fades away. So the Lias is dark blue at its lowest point, faded to pale blue; there is an inked-in line and suddenly there is the Oolite, bold yellow and joining starkly and suddenly with the outcr
op below. It then fades slowly away until, after a further inked-in line, there, in a deep chocolate brown, stands the Coral Rag, which fades in its own turn until it encounters the vivid blue-green of the Cretaceous, and so on. The technique was time consuming and is not used today: That Smith decided on it suggests that, with a limited budget for colors and plenty of time on his hands (in the aftermath of losing his job with the canal), he did his best to make his map dramatic looking, even if it was not the kind of technique that would ever lend itself to mass production or publication.

  He completed his work by writing, in his best copperplate, the map’s title—adding to Cary’s engraved phrase “General Map” the words “of Strata in England and Wales” and signing the work “by W. Smith, 1801.” It all looks more than a little rough-hewn, embryonic. As indeed it was: This map was only a sketch, a cartoon for a major cartographic task that Smith knew he was not yet up to attempting.

  He made at least two further experiments with small-scale maps later in the same year. Each one was a little more advanced, with Smith either remembering new details, or finding in his notebooks fresh data, or hearing from Richardson or Townsend or his other amateur geologist friends some new piece of information, or being given some new fossil sample or some new piece of outcrop, with a good fresh edge, weathering-free, and from a known and fixed location—all information from which he might make some useful identification* that would further enrich the information on the chart.

  Perhaps the best of these three 1801 ur-maps—which can surely count as being Britain’s first-ever national geological maps, and thus the first useful such documents made of any country, anywhere—is the one which Smith formally presented to the Geological Society of London in 1831. It hangs there still, honored but essentially forgotten—for, though very old indeed, it is much duller in aspect and very much smaller and less distinctive than the giant map of 1815, which hangs nearby and for which Smith is more deservedly famous.

  The small map at the society’s headquarters does not use a Cary sheet as its base, but a rather larger-scale chart (about thirty-seven miles to the inch) of England and Wales that was taken from a world atlas published by one of Cary’s rivals, Robert Wilkinson. On this Smith has colored seven strata: the Chalk is in green, the Coral Rag in purple, a stratum that he calls the Clunch Clay is colored here in a gray wash, the Oolite Freestone in its now-traditional yellow, the Lias–Carboniferous limestone in blue, the Red Ground in red, and finally a hodgepodge of pre-Carboniferous strata that would now be equated with the Old Red Sandstone of the Devonian (which Smith calls by its Welsh name, Red Rab), colored in a burgundy-brown wash.

  These early Smith maps may in some ways look—especially to the pedantic-minded critics—rather vague, and in truth on close examination they are not at all accurate. There are mistakes: One limestone is confused with another, areas (like the Weald, say, or the North Yorkshire Moors) are left tantalizingly blank, or colored like rocks that don’t outcrop within fifty miles.

  On the other hand, step back for an instant, and the three maps suddenly look utterly remarkable. They do so principally because they display a pattern, simplistically reasoned maybe, crudely executed surely, but a pattern that is boldly representative of the direction and outcrop of England’s main clutch of middle-age sedimentary rocks, and portrayed in a way that has been confirmed time and again in the two succeeding centuries since their publication. Set a copy of a Smith map of 1801 alongside a British Geological Survey map of 1979, and the pattern looks just the same: The underground of the nation is shown in a broad outline that has hardly changed at all, much like the unvarying outlines of the overground.

  Viewed from this perspective William Smith’s first national map is quite uncannily accurate, and an astonishing achievement. Long swathes of color sweep northeastward up from Dorset to Yorkshire, from Portland Bill to Flamborough Head, from Bath to the Humber, displaying almost precisely where the chalk, the oolite and the Triassic marls outcrop across the heartland of England. The fact that one half-educated Oxfordshire yeoman, working alone—with compass and notebook and clinometer and an abiding appreciation of the beauty and importance of fossils—could surmise with such accuracy what a thousand surveyors and professional geologists have in the decades since really only succeeded in confirming, is little short of a miracle.

  Yet at the same time as this triumph, the two scourges that were to afflict William Smith’s life—penury and plagiarism—were beginning to signal their distant presence. Since his dismissal by the canal company he had already endured nearly two years without formal full-time employment—although he was by now charging two guineas a day (and sometimes three) for his freelance services, and so was still making a superficially decent living. But frustration—a slowly developing curse—was beginning to become the leitmotiv of his existence: And the first hints were emerging that he might be rather less appreciated than his achievements seemed to warrant, that while he might well be a prophet of a brand-new science, he might also be denied the full honor that prophecy generally deserves.

  He was first warned in May 1801 that others might be onto his ideas, and might steal them away. His old friend Benjamin Richardson was the first to make his concerns known, the first to stir Smith into a brief period of literary enthusiasm. Richardson himself was first set to wondering by his colleague Joseph Townsend, who had idly remarked that he thought he himself might write a short treatise on his own huge collection of fossils. If Townsend could do such a thing, Richardson suddenly thought, then perhaps some less scrupulous men—maybe numbered among those who had been so generously sent details of Smith’s thinking—might also be drawn to publishing, and to stealing Smith’s glory for themselves.

  Richardson heard that Smith was passing through Bath on one of his countless freelance excursions, found out that he was putting up at “the Pack Horse, in the Market Place,” and penned him a hurried warning, a document that later turned out to be as prescient as its language was orotund. “My dear friend,” he wrote:

  To prevent the first admission of the ideas of your communication being turned to another’s advantage (which however I cannot injure our friend the Rev. Jos. Townsend by supposing him to have entertained), I assured him before he left Bath that you had determined instantly upon giving it to the public yourself, and that you meant to publish it….

  It may be worth pursuing for several reasons: 1st. The printed proposals would secure the discovery for yourself. 2ly. It might be an eligible means of gaining time to go on progressively as your knowledge increased. 3rdly. It would make some returns for the expense of publications as you proceed. 4ly. It would make the work most perfect.

  There was more in this vein—but the intention was clear. Someone—and yet most decidedly not the worthy Joseph Townsend—was onto William Smith’s ideas and might well write about them and claim them as his own. It stimulated Smith to action within the month, as we shall see; the dangers it suggested were becoming more evident by the day.

  It is possible to speculate at this distance that the plagiarist-in-waiting was that other Bath clergyman, fossil collector, and by all accounts, colossal bore* Richard Warner. The man had already been in hot water with the architect John Carter, who accused him of stealing a print of one of his engravings and using it without permission or acknowledgment in a book of his own: He was fined twenty pounds and ordered to pay more than three times the fine in costs. He got into trouble with critics: Once, after writing a two-volume work of Literary Recollections, he was dismayed to find that a reader had himself published a twenty-one-page monograph listing all the book’s mistakes. And the printers did not smile on him either: His was the book Topographical Remarks Relating to the South Western parts of Hampshire that was delayed by a fire at the engravers’, which melted all the plates into an immense ball of copper alloy.

  But the Reverend Warner’s History of Bath did appear in 1801, with no outward trouble hampering publication. Not a few eyebrows were swiftly raised when it was
noticed that the book included a copy of William Smith’s “Table of Strata”—the document that the geologist had dictated after dinner at Townsend’s house two years before—incorporated into Warner’s book without any indication of either permission sought or payment made. Most probably Smith would not have minded—Townsend himself noted “the open liberality peculiar to Mr. Smith,” and recalled his desire “to make so valuable a discovery universally known.” And in any case, it was making him more widely known, which for a freelancer can have been no bad thing.

  But ten years later still, Warner came out with another book, and with it another purloined map—this time a direct copy of the circular map of Bath that had been made by Smith in 1799. Warner had this time renamed it, inelegantly, “A Fossilogical Map of Bath and Its Environs.” It was crude but useful, in that it showed all the local villages and beside each name, the stratum that was most commonly evident there. It was a naked example of plagiarism. Smith never complained: No doubt he found it too vulgar a creation to raise objection.

  He would make a very great fuss, though, in later years, when still others stole his work. “Men of scientific eminence,” he would later write, famously and scathingly, in a letter to a friend, were all “pilferers of information,” who saw it as their right to regard all unpublished observations as “lawful plunder.”

  In due course—fifteen or so years following this first brush with a small-time plagiarist—such pilfering and plundering, though on a far grander scale than the Reverend Warner’s, would help consign William Smith to debtors’ prison and to years of homelessness. It would leave him embittered toward Londoners, toward the city’s intellectual and social elites, and toward those in the science who, he felt, rarely ventured out of their drawing rooms, rarely dirtied their soft pink hands, rarely muddied their fine leather boots. In 1801 he did not see in Warner’s peccadillo any indication of the sorrows to come. He was at thirty-two still something of an innocent, successful and of sunny disposition, and the world seemed a kindly place. But it would not be too long before all this would change.