The Lost World of James Smithson

by Heather Ewing

  Smithson was the youngest of the party, two years younger than Count Andreani, and he was, as William Thomson had noted, "very young" in general.16 But he was hungry for new information and eager to establish himself. He was already diligently keeping a notebook of observations. As they left London in the bright summer evening light, the four men—Faujas, Count Andreani, William Thornton, and Smithson—were split between two carriages, with their servants together following in a third post-chaise. The roads outside London were so good—like "the avenue of a magnificent garden"—and the moonlight so fine, they continued until four in the morning before resting at Stevenage. There, Faujas noted—in remarks that typified the kind of observations the men made throughout their journey—that "the air [was] quite pure" and the mercury stood at "half a degree below the freezing point."17

  Their first important stop was at Newcastle, where coal and lead were king, and which was already becoming an important center of heavy chemical manufacture. "Brick-fields, potteries, glass-houses, earthenware-works, and works for making white-lead, minium, and vitriol" crowded one bank of the River Tyne, facing an equally vigorous line-up on the other side of "manufactories of sheet-iron, of tin, of all kinds of utensils, brass-wire mills, flattening mills, &c." The men descended several coalmines, recording the strata that they passed through as they went down the pit, making notes on the steam engine pumping out water and the ventilator purifying the air, and regretting the twenty horses that "live in this profound abyss" hauling the coal through the underground passages—evidence to this group of the reliance still on some benighted age-old practices, despite so much progress.18

  They devoted about five days to the study of Newcastle and its environs, and Faujas' extensive description of the region's commerce was indicative of the focus of the trip. Conversation was wide-ranging amongst these philosophers—all of them shared an interest in architecture, for example—but central to their thoughts were the concepts of utility, science as an engine of progress, and the role good government played in the wellbeing of society. Newcastle, to Faujas' eyes, represented "a magnificent picture, wherein so many useful men can be seen to find ease and happiness in work, while at the same time, they promote the well-being of others; and, as the last result, they contribute to the prosperity of the government, which watches over the safety of them all."19

  In the evenings they drank toasts: "To liberty. To the happiness of mankind in general. To friendship." The newly minted government of the United States, triumphant following the signing of the Treaty of Paris the year before, supplied to these idealistic men a model for their musings. William Thornton was so enthusiastic about America that he emigrated to Philadelphia in 1786, became a citizen two years later, and a few years after that submitted the successful design for the new U.S. Capitol in Washington. Smithson was coming to this group from the stimulus of Pembroke under Master Adams, where America's unique political experiment was probably a topic of spirited discussion. Faujas, prior to his Scotland tour, had spent time in Paris at Benjamin Franklin's, where he met "several Americans of exceptional ability, who … have since played a distinguished part [in the founding of the United States]." His conversation with his travel companions seems to have been littered with references to Franklin's philosophies; in Newcastle, admiring the abundance of coal and the ingenious road system developed to bring it to the wharves, Faujas recalled the sage old Philadelphian's dictum that "those who assist in constructing them [roads and canals for the cheap transport of vital combustible materials] ought to be ranked among the benefactors of mankind."20

  Just thirty miles north of Newcastle, directly on their route to Edinburgh, loomed Alnwick Castle, the sprawling crenellated seat of Smithson's father, the Duke of Northumberland. Virtually all of the land in the region lay under the control of the duke, whose wife's family had long been known as the Kings of the North for the tireless battles they had waged against the Scots on behalf of the Crown in centuries past. It would have been virtually impossible for Smithson not to have crossed his father's land, and equally unlikely that a stop at Alnwick was not at least discussed by this group.

  Anyone in a position to obtain an invitation to the castle angled for entry. Samuel Johnson, on his way to meet Boswell for their Scottish tour in 1773, passed an afternoon at the castle, where he boasted of being "treated with great civility by the Duke"—a passage that, poignantly, Smithson marked in the copy of the Works of Johnson he acquired in the 1820s.21 The duke, in resurrecting Alnwick as the Percy family seat after three hundred years of decay, had spared no expense to restore the castle's ancient splendor. Some 1,480 books of gold had been used to enrich the Gothic decorations in the chapel, and even the nails in the stables out in the courtyard had been gilded. He had hired the best, most fashionable architects and designers—Robert Adam in the castle and Capability Brown out in the gardens—and put hundreds of men to work. Thousands of trees had been added to the lush, rolling landscape, and the river had been dramatically widened to make it more picturesque.22

  The duke, with his "enlightened" bearing, was exactly the kind of man that the people with whom Smithson was traveling would have admired and courted and generally esteemed. Even with his extravagant outlays—"expenditure unexampled in his time" according to one contemporary—Northumberland greatly augmented the Percy fortune, shrewdly exploiting the coal seams on the property to underwrite his many improvements to the land and the laborers' cottages.23 He was a founding trustee of the British Museum, and vice president of the Royal Society of Arts, an organization founded to promote the prosperity and ingenuity of English manufactures. He was a commissioner of the first bridge of the eighteenth century over the Thames, the elegant engineering feat of Westminster Bridge—and he commissioned Canaletto to paint it for him. He was also a sponsor of the first successful balloon flight across the Channel, which took place shortly after Smithson's trip to Scotland; the story of the American adventurer John Jeffries desperately shedding the bunting, tassels, anchors, and even his own clothing as he and his mate tried to stay aloft long enough to reach the shores of France—they landed in a forest in France "almost as naked as the trees"—was trumpeted in a letter to the duke written while still in the air.24

  The Duke of Northumberland was, in short, a great appreciator of beauty, a canny assessor of business, and a man utterly unafraid of the new. Smithson naturally wanted to claim him. But most of all, though, he must have wished to be claimed, to be acknowledged by his father and receive his approbation. Others were beginning to recognize Smithson for his scientific talents and enthusiasm; the duke of all people was a man capable of appreciating such qualities. If a stop at Alnwick Castle was discussed, or if the subject of Smithson's paternity came up in conversation, Faujas declined to write about it. In his account the party departed reluctantly from Newcastle, wishing for more time to study the area but conscious that as the season advanced the likelihood of reaching Staffa diminished.

  Although Staffa was their much-anticipated destination, Edinburgh held equally tantalizing riches for the group. For Smithson in particular the visit to Edinburgh was a watershed; it was the place where he built the first of his many relationships with powerful, internationally respected figures in the world of science. Enlightenment thought in Britain had reached its fullest flowering here in Edinburgh. It was the seat of a famous university, the center of one of the most prestigious medical faculties in the world, and the playground of a group of philosophers renowned for their sociability. In clubs, pubs, and at each other's houses, these men immersed themselves in discussions on the moral progress of society, the role of the individual within it, and the great project of organizing human knowledge in all its many disciplines.

  The group arrived in Edinburgh late in the evening towards the end of the first week in September, their carriages rolling up to an elegant inn fronting one of the expansive squares that anchored the neoclassical wonderland of the New Town. Across a ravine the medieval old city perched high on a forbid
ding outcropping, its ancient blackened castle towering over the scene, its narrow, dark streets vertiginously lined with tenement houses. Their first visit, the next morning, was to this crowded old part of the city, where the university was sited, to meet the chemist Joseph Black, a revered teacher then at the height of his renown. In his mid-fifties when Smithson met him, Black was tall and thin, with a low, clear voice and luminous dark eyes that danced out from his parchment-pale face.

  Black, together with William Cullen before him, had moved chemistry beyond the province of artisans and medical men and into the realm of patronage and power. It was here in Scotland that chemistry had first become part of a gentleman's education, and here too that the aristocracy and landed gentry had embraced chemical innovation in agriculture and industry.25 Black's research into the nature of heat had helped James Watt to see how to improve the steam engine, and his investigation of Henry Cavendish's work on the density of "inflammable air" (hydrogen), which had shown for the first time that the gas was lighter than air, had led to the idea of the balloon. He hardly published anything, however, and he was famed most of all for his teaching; many of the students he taught became professors themselves and spread their enthusiasm for chemistry to all the corners of the world. Black filled his lectures with clear, unshowy demonstrations. The Whig MP Henry Brougham years later would recall Black's "perfect philosophical calmness," and how he could "pour boiling water or boiling acid from a vessel that had no spout into a tube, holding it at such a distance as made the stream's diameter small, and so vertical that not a drop was spilt. "26 His emphasis on quantitative work and precise measurements, his dismissal of conjecture, and his reluctance to profit from any of his research were lessons that Smithson likely took to heart.

  Joseph Black saw in Smithson a young man to encourage; Smithson in his turn saw an opportunity to cultivate a mentor. He began a correspondence, offering himself up as a conduit for news from London. "If I can do any thing for you in this part of the world I beg you will command me Sir," Smithson later wrote to Black, "as I shall be happy of any opportunity [sic] of testifying my gratefulsence [sic] of the many civilities I received from you while at Edinburgh."27 Smithson remained incredibly proud of this connection his whole life; in 1825, more than four decades after his first meeting with Black and already a quarter-century after the old man's death, Smithson resurrected a letter Black had written him and published it with annotations in the Annals of Philosophy. 28

  James Hutton, who at that moment was immersed in the writing of his Theory of the Earth, the publication that would later make him known as the father of modern geology, was equally impressed by the young Oxford student; he gave Smithson a plum assignment, a commission to collect some specimens for him from Stonesfield, an area near Oxford rich in slate where fossils had been discovered in the 1750s. Hutton had turned Edinburgh into his own geological laboratory; at the Salisbury Crags, below the twisted swirl of Arthur's Seat, he discovered evidence that the formation had once been molten rock, forced, he imagined, by the internal heat of the earth into a much older strata. His fieldwork led him to theorize an expansive new history for the earth, a world with "no vestige of a beginning, no prospect of an end." The idea of an endless cycle of geological change was a radical diversion from traditional biblical interpretations of the earth's short timeline. Hutton's theory offered a key to interpreting the geological evidence of the land that Smithson and some of his peers found feverishly exciting. "The mind seemed to grow giddy," John Playfair exclaimed, "looking so far into the abyss of time."29

  Smithson's stopover in Edinburgh was not an extended one. "We took a rapid view of the town," Faujas noted. They planned instead to return after the Staffa expedition. Smarting from the gouging they received at the hands of their fancy Edinburgh hotel, they departed for Glasgow. (Faujas in his published account did not fail to mention the fee charged for the half-sheet of paper, "which one of us had called for, to save the trouble of opening his portfolio"—as much a barb at his travel companions as it was at the landlord, and evidence at this early stage of friction already in the party.) In Edinburgh they hired a draftsman to accompany them, "to take such views as should appear to us the most important for the advancement of the natural history of volcanoes in the part of the Hebrides which we were going to visit."30 For Smithson it was the beginning, finally, of the big adventure, the reason for the journey in the first place: the trip to Staffa.

  They passed quickly through Glasgow, where "natural history is not so much cultivated … as it is at Edinburgh," explored Dumbarton for a day, and finally entered the outsized landscape of the Highlands at Loch Lomond. The rugged, unforgiving Highlands, full of melancholy mists, were only just becoming an object of touristic attention. An extensive network of roads had been built following the defeat of the Jacobite rebellion in 1746, making the area much safer and easier to access. There was a growing fascination too for raw and brutal scenes such as those the storm-tossed western coast of Scotland offered up; Edmund Burke's theory of the sublime had transformed how the English perceived beauty in nature, and travelers now sought out majesty in the fearsome rather than the picturesque.

  And the Highlands were also the home of Ossian, the third-century warrior poet whose ancient Gaelic epics captivated Europe in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The poems were eventually determined to be the fabrication of their discoverer and "translator," James MacPherson, but their popularity remained undimmed. William Hazlitt's list of the "four of the principal works of poetry in the world" featured Homer, the Bible, Dante, and Ossian. Napoleon would later carry his Italian translation onto the battlefields, and have scenes from Ossian painted on the ceiling of his study. The rage for Ossian spread even to America, where the city of Selma, Alabama, took its name from one of the poems, and Thomas Jefferson declared, "I think this rude bard of the North the greatest Poet that has ever existed." Smithson and his group were focused on Scotland's geology, but they were traveling through the landscape of Ossian, Scotland's own home-bred Homer, and the fascination was inescapable.31

  It was 10.00 p. m. when they arrived at Luss, wet with the rain and weary with the road, only to be shooed away by the landlady. The circuit judge, Lord Braxfield, was fast asleep, his party occupying all the rooms. Off they trundled once more, the drenched postilions cursing in the darkness, and it was half past three in the morning before they came upon another lodging, further up the western edge of the loch, at Tarbet. Here too it was full, but there was room at least to stable the exhausted horses. They were saved from sleeping in their carriages by the landlady, who gave up the mattresses from her own bed. The lordly Count Andreani, who traveled with two servants, still chose to sleep in his carriage, Faujas reported, and "M. de Mecies kept one of the mattresses; Thornton and I shared the other. We slept three hours wrapped up in our cloaks, and our fatigue disappeared." When the morning dawned, the sun glinted off the silvery loch and the snowcapped Ben Lomond in the distance. Shepherds sheltered under the pines, their white sheep aglow against a verdant ground. The scene, sweetened with the perfume of fresh tea brought by their hostess, endeared Tarbet to all of the men. "I shall often dream of Tarbet," mused Faujas, "even in the midst of lovely Italy with its oranges, its myrtles, its laurels, and its jessamins."32

  At Inveraray the group was again turned away at the only inn on account of the imminent arrival of the circuit judge. Faced with another night in their carriages, they sent a letter to the Duke of Argyll apologetically explaining their situation. An invitation to Inveraray Castle soon arrived, carried by a French painter employed at the castle, and they traipsed around the mirror-still waters of Loch Fyne to their regal new home. The duke was so delighted with his guests that he urged them to stay several weeks. Like a number of Scotland's aristocratic landowners, the duke had a personal interest in chemistry, especially as regarded its potential for agricultural improvements. Conversation at the castle was refined and learned, and often conducted in French for the benef
it of Faujas and Andreani. The food was delicious and "prepared after the manner of an excellent French cook." Dinners lasted long into the evening, as the ladies retired to a separate room and the men continued to drink and talk, relieving themselves—as was the custom, to Faujas' astonishment—in the chamber pots in the corners without ever letting up their banter. Eager though they were to get to Staffa, the party nevertheless passed "three whole days in this delightful retreat, devoting the mornings to natural history, and the evenings to music or conversation."33

  Already, however, relations in the traveling party were becoming problematic. Smithson, the youngest and the last to join the group, seems to have been the odd man out, though there was no love lost among any of them by the end of the journey. Here at Inveraray Castle the travelers apparently encouraged Smithson to remain behind with the duke's family while they continued on to Staffa, convinced he was too "delicate" for the treacherous sea voyage. Smithson was, unsurprisingly, angered by their plan to abandon him, and he probably nursed his wounded pride into a full-blown grudge. Throughout his life his behavior seems often to have been driven by a need for vindication and validation, a pattern that might well have been impressed upon him by his mother's behavior. In this case the affront seems only to have hardened Smithson's resolve to reach the pillared isle.34

  As they left the castle and journeyed on towards the coast, tensions continued to simmer among the band of explorers. For eight long hours the group's three carriages jostled their way through a narrow, inhospitable pass, surrounded by "arid mountains of the most savage aspect," until they reached a little cluster of civilization called Dalmally, lying along a river in a pretty valley. There they were introduced to the village schoolteacher, an energetic twenty-eight-year-old named Patrick Fraser, whom the men hired as their guide in the Highland region. Fraser, an Ossian devotee, provided the group with an entertaining cultural detour from the route to Staffa. He ushered them into a humble stone cottage to meet MacNab the blacksmith, where they could hear "the sublime verses of this ancient poet" sung in the Hebridean singing tradition passed from generation to generation. The blacksmith, however, could not be found, and so the men never heard the Ossian poems, but the rest of MacNab's family gathered to honor the visitors nearby at MacNab's brother's house. Inside, clustered together by an open peat fire, and bathed in the light of an unusual iron shovel-like lamp, they all drank from a wooden bowl of milk ceremoniously passed around. The primitive smoky scene, at once intimate and sacred, struck Faujas as particularly memorable; he ordered the Edinburgh draftsman to sketch it. The resulting picture shows the four travelers together with Patrick Fraser at the left. Dressed in their long coats, hats and riding boots, they look on wryly as one of them—presumably Faujas—accepts the wooden cup from a barefoot woman in Highland dress. Two of Faujas' party stand apart, bemused, quietly talking. The other, small and focused, sits alone staring intently at the event; this one may well be Smithson.