The Map That Changed the World

by Simon Winchester

  And yet this was as yet a wholly unknown area of imaginative deduction—there were no teachers, no guidebooks. Just one man, doing it all by himself, imagining the unimaginable. Small wonder that the map of these new underground dimensions took fourteen long years to complete, years more than it was supposed to. It proved to be the financial ruin—at least in the short term—of the man who had the vision to see it made. But when it was done it all proved to be so very good, so revolutionary, so filled with potential for profit and fame that it was stolen, copied, pirated, and the man who had made it overlooked, ignored, and forgotten for years.

  When the project was begun, at the very start of the nineteenth century, it was just like so many other vast and ambitious schemes of the time, instilled at first with sunny optimism and good humor. There was an absolute certainty that it would be done, and done very well. And it would indeed be done and done well—but, as it turned out, at what a cost!

  William Smith, who would come to be known all across the country as the strangely driven and ever-wandering maker of this map, had ended the eighteenth century with a reputation for scholarship and brio. By the time the nineteenth century was properly under way, he was fast becoming something rather different: an all-too-familiar, hale, and friendly figure in the post-houses and inns along the English stagecoach routes. He was a very talkative man, with all the enthusiasm of the slightly dotty. He chattered so much about the passion for landscape and rocks that drove him that he soon picked up a nickname—“Strata” Smith—from the barmaids and fellow passengers and those who dined beside him.

  And though to some he might have been a bit of a bore, he was by most accounts well liked—a bluff and hearty, muscular-looking man, full of energy, restless, talkative, jumpy, untidy—and invariably to be spotted scurrying hither and yon, always scurrying, and carrying great bundles of papers, maps, and charts under his arm.

  Maps, indeed, were an abiding passion. Like many uncontrollable passions, they proved a burden too. Money was a constant trial. When Smith was out working he had at least forty maps on the go at once, all of the largest scale and greatest accuracy he could find. And he found his need to have them dismayingly expensive. Because of the time-consuming way maps were engraved in the early nineteenth century, they were much more costly in relative terms than they are today—and Smith’s purchases added significantly to what he was coming to realize was the very high cost of his own hugely ambitious cartographic enterprise.

  More trivially he was to write that the simple business of carrying maps as he bought them, rolled up in tubes, made the practical side of his work very difficult. He was always spotting interesting pieces of rock beside the roadway—always jumping down from the driving seat of the chaise and clambering back up to sit beside the coachman (he had this childlike wish to sit up there in the wind, no matter the weather, the better to see the landscape). But the rolls of maps made this near-impossible: To make matters simpler he carefully cut the larger maps into small squares, bound them into a green morocco carrying case, and then was able to write in his diary much later, and quite smugly, that even after travelling thousands of miles with them the maps were “in pretty good preservation, though disfigured in some parts by speculative attempts at the delineation of strata ranging through parts I had not then seen.”

  He must have cut an eccentric figure. People were said to have been frequently rather frightened by him—he was enormously strong looking, and wore a rather stern expression, such that strangers would ask him if he had ever been a boxer or a soldier. In his journal he quotes a man remarking to him that he was “so damned good built” that it was likely he must have been a great walker in his time—which, given Smith’s passion for strolling, clambering, marching, pacing and trolling across countless meadows in search of outcrops, was perhaps only the half of it.

  He kept himself dressed ready for the moor, in brown tweeds and with a remarkable broad-brimmed hat (to keep off the sun). This, he wrote later, often prompted Dissenters—those religious nonconformists and free-thinkers who were flourishing in the fast-changing, fast-industrializing world of the time*—to stare at him, thinking he might be one of them (which, given that he was practicing a science dealing in large part with the evidence for and against Divine Creation, he was most certainly bound to be). The Quakers in particular liked to assume that “from a resemblance in habiliment” he was a member of their church, and they would wave as he passed.

  Smith’s motive for making a proper geological map of England was more complex than it seems. On one level he was driven by simple intellectual passion. He had discovered in Somerset that the rocks were spread out in historical order, and that their fossils allowed their underground arrangements to be delineated and predicted—and the corollary of these findings was quite obvious to him: He should make a map. He should make it if for no other reason than that his discoveries now meant that he could. But there were other reasons too, and these he spelled out from time to time in his writings: He had a deep, obsessively felt need to be given wider recognition for what he was sure were profoundly important discoveries.

  By the time he ran into the difficulties with John Debrett, and was forced to abandon the book he had expected Debrett to publish, he was puzzled to find that this recognition was proving to be more elusive than he expected. That the general public was less interested in him and his ideas than he thought they should be, bothered him deeply. He wanted to be immortalized: He would become so by creating a truly impressive piece of work, one that would last as a memorial for generations.

  And there was a financial incentive, too. Landowners, among whom his reputation was spreading like bindweed, were set to wondering whether there might be mineral deposits on their estates: Smith, who men like the duke of Bedford were saying had an uncanny way of predicting what kinds of rocks might lie where, might hold the key to the gentry’s further amassment of wealth. Lord Egremont wrote to Smith to inquire if coal was likely to be found on his land at Spofforth; Thomas Johnes, a landowner and Member of Parliament in mid-Wales, offered a reward of five hundred pounds if he could show where he might find lime on his lands; and others deluged him with letters asking if he suspected there might be lead, or tin, flints, clay, marl, or sand.

  And then there was the newly formed Society of Arts, which took the long-term, national view. In 1802, at the time when Smith’s efforts were getting into high gear, William Shipley’s “Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures & Commerce,” which, as its name suggests, had been founded to support all manner of worthy schemes, offered a fifty-guinea bounty for anyone who might make “a mineralogical map of either England, Scotland or Wales.” The society’s leadership knew now that such a thing could be done: It was up to someone—someone with time, energy, knowledge, and, though it was never openly stated, sufficient funds—to take up the challenge and satisfy a demand that was now clearly swelling up from the country’s body politic. England wanted a geological map. Rivalry was in the air. The country’s cartographers were in the traces. A race was under way.

  The society’s challenge prompted Smith to lever himself out of his base in the countryside—where, he reasoned, he would win relatively few commercial commissions—and set himself up in an office in town. Accordingly, on April 3, 1802, he placed an advertisement in the Bath Chronicle, announcing his partnership with Jeremiah Cruse, one of the men who had subscribed to his proposed Debrett book, and the subsequent formal opening of the firm of Smith & Cruse, Land Surveyors:

  Having opened an office at No.3, Trim Bridge, the corner of Trim-Street, Bath, for the purpose of carrying on the above business in all its branches, we take this opportunity of informing the Nobility, Gentry and Public in general that attendance will be regularly given at the above Office, where orders will be thankfully received, and executed with accuracy, neatness and punctuality.

  He brought his (by now enormous) collection of fossils up from Tucking Mill House and arranged them in their stratigraphical order
, at first in boxes on the floor, then on a set of specially constructed sloping shelves. The duke of Bedford came to see them, and so did the duke’s land steward, John Farey. And although Messrs. Smith & Cruse was not to be an entirely successful firm—Smith resigned from the partnership early in 1804—its existence consolidated his friendship with Farey, who was to become one of the most conscientious supporters, both of Smith himself and of the map he was set upon making.

  In John Farey he could not have had a sturdier ally—although the relationship got off to a rocky start. Farey’s initial career as the duke’s land steward had been hatched mainly because he had been born on the Woburn estate, where his father had a tenant farm. But the young man’s interests were in fact wider and more catholic by far than those of a typical ducal employee: He soon left Woburn (sacked by an incoming duke) and became an expert musician (and a chorister of note), a mathematician whose work (on the curious properties of vulgar fractions) is still known today, and a contributor to encyclopedias on such topics as astronomy, engineering, the history of pacifism, the design of steam engines, the decimalization of currencies, and the population theories of Thomas Malthus.

  He was also hugely interested in and stimulated by Smith, and traveled with him frequently as a devoted acolyte and apprentice in those early years of the century, learning theories and techniques that he was eventually to put to good use on his own account. Rather too good, Smith was eventually to complain bitterly—in an incident that illustrates the growing problems, some real, others merely the consequence of his perception, that were beginning to cloud Smith’s life.

  The falling-out between Smith and Farey began when the editors of Abraham Rees’s New Cyclopaedia turned to the highly literate Farey, and not Smith, when they wanted articles to illustrate words and concepts of geology such as clay strata, coal, colliery, and extraneous fossils. The choice greatly injured Smith’s self-esteem, even though Farey was at pains to make generous mention in each article of his mentor’s name, his achievements, and his theories.

  But when Smith found out that the entry on canal had been cut back by the editors so as to exclude the entire account of his contribution to the building of the Somerset Coal Canal, he was cut to the quick. And then again, when, shortly afterward, Farey wrote to say that he had been asked by the national Board of Agriculture to prepare a survey of the county of Derbyshire, and was writing to ask whether, to save time, he might see Smith’s own drawings of the strata so that he could trace them onto his own map, Smith became incandescent with rage.

  No, he fumed, Farey most certainly could not see the map! If he wanted to survey Derbyshire, then he could do it himself, no matter how long it might take. And in any case, his letter continued, he, Smith, should have been the one asked by the board—not this “scientific pilferer,” as John Farey, now a turncoat, had in his eyes become.

  It was a brief-enough tiff—the men were the best of friends once again soon after, with Farey ending up as the most loyal of Smith’s many supporters. But at the same time the argument shows once again the degree to which Smith felt he was being overlooked and shunned by those in society who were reckoned to be more gentlemanly than himself. The Board of Agriculture, for example, was composed of grand landowning men; their president, Sir John Sinclair, though ostensibly a friend of Smith’s, was an indefatigable Scottish aristocrat, a man of vast wealth, who had raised his own regiment (the Rothesay and Caithness Fencibles), had become a world-class expert on sheep, and was interested enough in numbers to introduce the word statistics into the English language.

  That so mighty a figure should apparently overlook in his choice for a county survey a member of the Oxfordshire peasantry, and give the task instead to an apparently learned man working on a duke’s estate, was perhaps not all that surprising in the class-ridden days of the early nineteenth century. But to Smith it was a considerable slight, of a kind to which he would never become accustomed.

  In the case of his relations with John Farey, though, the situation was later helped when Farey, too, was to feel the crushing weight of English snobbery—most notably being denied membership of the newly formed Geological Society, because he was merely the son of a farmer. In later years both Farey and Smith clung together in their mutually held opposition to what they saw as the lofty hauteur of the gentlemen rock collectors. So close was their relationship in those early days that Farey came to be regarded by friends as Smith’s Boswell—a chronicler and lifelong advocate of all his master’s works.

  It was at about this time, too, that Farey introduced to William Smith the one figure of great national repute who was going to be singularly important in the making of the great map—and the man who was to figure prominently in this growing dispute between the practical and the gentlemanly students of earth science. For Smith was not alone in regarding himself as a victim caught in the crossfire of a British class warfare: The entire and newly fashionable discipline of geology was about to be riven by arguments between the horny-handed toilers in the fields and the more fragrant dilettante practitioners, between amateurs who specialized in studying the land below and those regarded by the former as worthless dandies whose interest was more in owning and exploiting the land above.

  The man who would try to mediate this dispute, and who would at first do his level best to accelerate Smith’s progress in making his new map, was the then president of London’s distinguished Royal Society, the influential and farseeing botanist, Sir Joseph Banks.

  Banks—after whom an Australian flower is named, and whose reputation in New South Wales, of which he was a principal founder, is huge—is perhaps best known for being the moving force behind the notorious Bounty expedition of 1789,* which culminated in Fletcher Christian’s mutiny against Captain William Bligh, and his subsequent establishment of a settlement on Pitcairn Island. He was not known to be especially interested in geology (other than being remarkably impressed by the columnar basalts of Fingal’s Cave on the Hebridean islet of Staffa)—until he came into the ownership of a Derbyshire estate, Overton, near Ashover, that had valuable lead deposits.

  But the lead mines were running out—Overton’s famous Gregory Mine, which had once turned an annual £100,000 profit was now suffering losses of £23,000 a year. When Sir Joseph borrowed John Farey from Woburn in 1797 to help drain his Derbyshire land, he mentioned his problem with the lead. At first there was nothing Farey could do—he was not very interested in geology and didn’t know anyone who was.

  But then he met William Smith at that great agricultural gathering known as the Woburn sheepshearing. He learned about Smith’s planned book outlining the new principles of stratigraphy, which at that point John Debrett still seemed keen to publish. Smith, he felt sure, would be just the right person, and he explained this to Banks: If anyone could predict whether more lead might be discovered at Overton, it would be William Smith.

  Banks was delighted with the encounter, which appears to have first come about in the summer of 1801—that, at least, was when it is first known (from John Phillips’s later biography) that Sir Joseph “favoured Smith with an interview, and from this time until his death [in 1820] remained a steady friend and liberal patron of his labours.” Farey encouraged Banks to help: In February 1802, after taking an expedition with Smith and another of Smith’s pupils, named Benjamin Bevan, he wrote a long letter to Overton, insisting that Smith’s findings were of paramount importance.

  He explained to Sir Joseph, patiently but from the tone of his letter not at all condescendingly, that he believed Smith had made two great advances: He was able to document the sequential order of British rocks, and he was able to identify the rocks that made up the sequences, by examining the fossils found within them. Smith, to put it more simply, could both tell where rocks were, and what they were: And, by dint of an energetic and systematic program of observing, surveying, measuring, and marking, he could draw—as indeed he was now in the middle of drawing—a proper, detailed, and accurate geological map of the nat
ion.

  Sir Joseph took the bait. Smith first noted the likelihood of winning the great man’s support—support that would prove invaluable, if it came—when he wrote, in May 1802, to a friend from his office in Bath:

  I have been obliged to have recourse to an uninterrupted pursuit of my subject, with all my plans and papers together here, and I shall call on Sir. J. Banks in London to settle about bringing my papers before the Publick in much better form than if they had appeared last year. I am now confident they are correct, and my map begins to be a very interesting History of the Country.

  By the following month a new map—not much better than the first small-scale attempt he had made in 1801, presumably—was beginning to take shape, and he felt confident enough to show a version of it to Banks at the Woburn agricultural meeting. The Agricultural Magazine for the month reports the fact dryly: “Smith…exhibited his map, now in very considerable forwardness, of the strata of different earths, stones, coal & which constitute the soil of this island. He was particularly noticed by Sir. J. Banks.”

  The following October he wrote to Banks at his country house in Lincolnshire to bring him up-to-date, and then again in spring (all according to his journal, which he was now writing at a furious rate) he took the latest version up to London, to show it off to Banks in the Royal Society suite at Somerset House, off the Strand. The encounter was a small triumph of assurance and optimism. Banks would support a subscription for the new publication, and wrote a check for fifty pounds to get the project off the ground.

  As he left his great patron’s chambers, Smith must have felt that he now had every reason to believe he had won the support and the enthusiastic backing of the most powerful figure in British science: If he had until this moment from time to time felt overlooked and wronged, then at this juncture in his career he had precious little cause to do so. Later on, when Banks became increasingly exasperated with him, he might have some cause, but not now. Just now he could savor the sweet smell of impending success.