The Lost World of James Smithson

by Heather Ewing

  The next morning, at the rather late hour of ten o'clock, the party set off for Oban, twenty-four miles distant on a terrible road. They were intent on completing the journey before nightfall, but this group of savants, preoccupied with observing the changing geological character of their surroundings, had never been one to pass quickly through a region. Busily making notes and collecting specimens as they advanced, they lost a further hour and a half studying an ancient "Druidical circle" they chanced upon. Darkness fell and brought with it a torrential thunderstorm, and the party became hopelessly lost. In complete blackness they stumbled on, the horses skittish and the road dropping off precipitously around them, the "frightful uproar" of the sea far down below. One of the carriages overturned in a stream; soaked and shivering, they finally found Oban completely by accident when an old man with long, white hair and "floating drapery of the same color" answered their cries for help. "It is Ossian!" cried out a giddy, exhausted Thornton. "Let us fall at his feet."35

  When the bedraggled travelers awoke late the next morning, they discovered that the village's four fishing boats had already departed for the day's work, and only "two wretched boats" remained. Whatever tensions had been brewing exploded now as the men prepared to embark on the final leg of their journey. The passage to the island of Mull comprised at least thirty-three miles in treacherous reef-filled waters, according to Faujas, and he refused to make it in such a tiny boat, "with herring-fishers who did not understand a word of English."36 Smithson and the others were nevertheless anxious to press on to Staffa and Fingal's Cave. In the end, a petulant Faujas alone among the men refused to get aboard. He promised to meet up with them within a few days, when he could catch a ride with a larger boat.

  Faujas' tour stops at a Druidical circle, 1784.

  The arguments did not end with the loss of Faujas, however. Smithson, Andreani, and Thornton arrived on the island of Mull, but it is not at all clear that they stayed together thereafter. From Faujas' sunny account of their adventure, it would appear that the three men carried on together to Mr. Maclean's at Torloisk, set off eventually for Staffa, were forced by the weather to stay on there after a perilous sea voyage, were besieged by lice, had hardly any food, and returned to Mr. Maclean's for a jovial reunion with their French friend. Smithson's own diary of the trip, which seems to have been very thorough, perished in the Smithsonian fire of 1865. The American scientist Walter Johnson, wishing to highlight Smithson's adventurous spirit, published a few excerpts pertaining to the Staffa trip in his 1844 article—and these are the only parts of Smithson's diary that survive today. Most importantly, Smithson sent a letter to London recounting what had happened. The letter itself no longer exists. Charles Greville, its likely recipient, however, excitedly transmitted the details amongst the London cognoscenti. He and his uncle Sir William Hamilton had made an unsuccessful stab at reaching Staffa just a few months earlier and had been humiliated by Faujas' taunting. With relish did he learn of Faujas' cowardice. "You remember," he told his uncle, "when we were at measuring of the base on Hounslow Heath, I was informed of Faujas de St. Fond's exultation over you that he should get to Staffa, which you could not do, & heard my lamentations on that occasion. I had the ill-nature to rejoice at the failure of his excursion; it convinces me he is a Gascon." Smithson's letter had apparently detailed the quarrels and breakdown of the rest of the party, too, such that Greville concluded: "these 4 philosophers, whose joint labours were to have been recorded in a folio volume, will return with the inclination of describing each other better than they will be able to do the country they have passed."37

  According to the excerpts of Smithson's diary, Smithson landed at Aros on the east side of Mull and crossed overland to Torloisk, the closest point on Mull to Staffa. Torloisk was home to Lachlan Maclean, a member of the leading family on the island, and it seems that all the men ended up here eventually, despite their quarreling. From Maclean's austere stone house, high on a bluff over the sea, they gazed out on a breathtaking carpet of water dotted with rocky outcroppings and islands, including the one they had come all this way to visit: Staffa.38 They probably waited for Faujas, eyeing the weather impatiently, until finally they decided they could wait no more. But the three—Smithson, Andreani, and Thornton—unable to reconcile their differences, did not head off together. Smithson set out on his own—in "a separate boat"—into the pitching waters:

  Mr. Turtusk [Torloisk] got me a separate boat,—set off about half-past eleven o'clock in the morning, on Friday, the 24th of September, for Staffa. Some wind, the sea a little rough,—wind increased, sea ran very high,—rowed round some part of the island, but found it impossible to go before Fingal's cave.39

  The little boat, filled with Smithson, his servant, Mr. Maclean's nephew, and the sailors, was tossed and smacked on the waves as it made its way out towards the islands. Soon the men left the relative shelter of the coast and emerged in the open gusting sea, where they attempted to round Staffa. Reluctantly, Smithson was forced to relinquish the idea of viewing Fingal's Cave, which was located on the far side of the island, from its best vantage—out on the open sea. They were "obliged to return," he confided to his diary. Among the men, there can be little doubt that it was only Smithson who wished to be out on the waters that day. Staffa presented an almost unbroken line of cliffs, a forbidding prow of rock that seemed eager to dash a boat to pieces. On the northeastern corner of the island lay a small rocky beach, the only possible landing place—and one usually only successful with the help of the few island residents, who threw ropes to visitors and hauled them in. They "landed on Staffa with difficulty," Smithson reported dryly. Predictably, the "sailors press to go off again immediately." This imperious nineteen-year-old, however, replied he was "unwilling to depart without having thoroughly examined the island. Resolve to stay all night."

  The island was uninhabited, except for one family living in a smoky stone cottage and eking out an existence on the land. Inevitably, Smithson encountered Andreani and Thornton, who had also landed on the island, but it seems at this point that the men were barely on speaking terms. Smithson pointedly did not refer to them by name in his diary, coldly noting only that "the other party which was there had already come to the very same determination" to spend the night. And so it happened that some fifteen people—the geologically minded visitors, their servants, and the family members—were "all crammed into one bad hut … [and] supped upon eggs, potatoes, and milk."

  The ocean pounded the island so ferociously throughout the stormy night that no one could sleep. The little hut shook and the pot rattled on the fire as the waves concussed the land. As they listened to the roar and felt the sea thrashing against the rocky cliffs, the frightened visitors sensed the real brute force of nature. If the earth was the creation of a series of catastrophic events, or even if it was the result of a more gradual cycle of constant change, as James Hutton proposed, then might not such a raging ocean have the power to reshape the rocky cliffs or consume whole some section of the place? "The recollection of [Staffa's] ponderous masses of basalt, its confused heaps of bending pillars, its vast cavities, and all those signs which characterize it as the mere fragment of a mighty ruin," one visitor wrote in 1818, "would suggest the possibility of a similar visitation."40 Geological change, so imperceptible to the human eye, seemed overwhelmingly visible here.

  In the morning the unlucky sailors soon realized they were trapped for yet another day, for as Smithson recounted: "Got up early, sea ran very high, wind extremely strong—no boat could put off. Breakfasted on boiled potatoes and milk; dined upon the same; only got a few very bad fish; supped on potatoes and milk; lay in the barn, firmly expecting to stay there for a week, without even bread."

  Interestingly, Smithson's diary entry as excerpted by Johnson includes no rapturous description of Fingal's Cave. Nor does it make any mention of the fieldwork Smithson must have undertaken on Staffa that blustery Saturday. Smithson sent an entire hogshead or barrel of material on to Edinburgh o
nce he landed on the mainland; so there is little doubt that he did do some collecting on Staffa. Faujas complained on Mull of the difficulty of finding good cabinet specimens, on account of the "moss, lichens and heather" that covered everything. But while Faujas praised the "fine zeolites" that William Thornton brought back from Staffa, Smithson was not so lucky. Smithson evidently wrote to Charles Greville that he had been unable to find any good exemplars at all on the island. The swarm of naturalists who had descended on the island in the space of a few short years had practically denuded it of specimens. As Greville told his uncle, "The poor man I sent had been on Stafva, where he executed his orders so well that Massie could not find one piece of cubic Zeolithe, for which Stafva is most famed after the Collumns." When Smithson finally published his analysis of zeolite in 1810, he covered up this awkward fact and simply boasted of having collected his specimens on Staffa. By that time his friend Greville was dead, so there was no one left to dispute this little reference to the heroic adventures of his youth.41

  On Sunday morning around 5.00 or 6.00 a.m. Smithson was awakened with the news that "the wind was dropped, and that it was a good day." His party, laden with all his finds, "set off in the small boat, which took water so fast that my servant was obliged to bail constantly—the sail, an old plaid—the ropes, old garters." Thornton and Andreani and the others had to wait the return of their two boats, which had pushed off to the safety of Iona after dropping them on Staffa.

  Faujas had in the meantime arrived at Maclean's, and he spent the weekend anxiously scanning the raging seas with his telescope looking for his companions. He caught sight of them finally on Sunday afternoon around 1.00 p. m. If Smithson had left Staffa at dawn, he would surely have already have fetched up at Torloisk by mid-morning, hours before the others. Perhaps back at Mull Smithson did have one last final reckoning with his fellow tour members; it is here at Maclean's that Faujas reported "Monsieur de Mecies" left the party. However, in Greville's telling of it—which came from Smithson—Smithson "returned to another part of Mull" and carried on to the mainland, never turning back. No one's account seems wholly reliable; the squabbles amongst the party seem to have so poisoned relations that each had reason to inflate or gloss over certain events. Smithson, in any case, separated from the group.

  He reached the mainland at Oban, where he stayed a night or two before leaving the town on September 29. Here at Oban he finally had an opportunity to lay out all his specimens, catalogue them, and wrap them carefully with hay or paper, before sending them on to Edinburgh. The innkeeper was horrified by the operation. "Mr. Stevenson charged half a crown a night for my rooms," Smithson grumbled to his diary, "because I had brought 'stones and dirt, ' as he said, into it." Smithson undoubtedly battled with recalcitrant innkeepers throughout his life; such encounters were a staple of the Englishman's Grand Tour. But this incident at Oban is more revealing as an example of how single-minded Smithson was about his collecting, and how incomprehensible that pursuit was to outsiders. He was like the young American explorer Ferdinand Vandiveer Hayden, caught up in the crossfire of the Sioux Indian wars of the 1850s, whose steadfast pursuit of specimens led the incredulous Indians to christen him, "He who picks up stones while running."42 Smithson, too, remained doggedly bent on building a comprehensive mineral cabinet—despite his "delicate" constitution, and even as he found himself swept into what he called "the hurricane of war" during the turbulent years of Napoleon's domination of Europe.

  Smithson spent more than a month making his way back down to London. He probably returned to Edinburgh—as the rest of the group later also did—to spend more time in the company of that city's philosophers. Anecdotal family history, passed down through the generations, has Smithson stopping to stay for a while with a schoolteacher living on the main street in Doune, near Stirling.43 He also explored the rich mineral deposits in the mines at Leadhills, one of the most important ore deposits in Scotland, high up on the estate of the Earl of Hopetoun, where James Watt and Joseph Black and others had advised the operations.44 By October 28, 1784, he had arrived in Northwich in Cheshire—the center of England's salt trade.

  Rock salt occurs naturally in Cheshire, laid down some two hundred million years ago when the region was a wide, shallow sea. An "open pan" method of collecting salt by heating brine had been practiced in the region since before the arrival of the Romans. Mining for rock salt was, on the other hand, a much more recent development, the inadvertent discovery of coal prospectors in the late seventeenth century. Top-bed mines, lying approximately one hundred feet below the surface, had been worked for several decades by the time Smithson arrived in Northwich. He was most keen, however, to see the new bottom-bed mines, some three hundred feet below the surface, which had only been operational a few years. "They let me down in a bucket," he wrote in his diary, "in which I only put one foot, and I had a miner with me. I think the first shaft was about thirty yards, at the bottom of which was a pool of water, but on one side there was a horizontal opening, from which sunk a second shaft, which went to the bottom of the pit, and a man let us down in a bucket smaller than the first."45 This primitive transport, by which one lurched precariously down into the dark airless pit, gave way within a few decades to a much more comfortable passage. The absence of the thick black dust found in coalmines and the spectacular effects of light on the lustrous, faceted, cathedral-like chambers below, with their giant supporting salt pillars, soon drew tourists from all over the world. In 1844 Tsar Nicholas was the guest of honor at a banquet in the bottom bed of Northwich's Marston mine, the crystalline vaults above illuminated by the sparkle of one thousand candles.46

  By the time Smithson returned to London at the beginning of November, the scientific community had spent two weeks squawking with delight over the humiliating turn of events for Faujas' heavily promoted tour. Opinion on Faujas had universally turned. Scientific London had discovered that the Frenchman whom they had received so decorously a few months earlier had been playing many of them for the fool, borrowing indiscriminately to satisfy an unquenchable thirst for luxury. A wounded William Thornton complained that Faujas "is entirely led by Interest and to it would sacrifice the dearest Friend—he is a total Stranger to delicacy … Nothing but treachery has marked his behaviour yet, and treachery of the most base kind."47 The news that a cowardly Faujas had stayed behind on the mainland while the rest of his party forged ahead tickled the imagination of the cognoscenti in London.

  It was Smithson's letter to Charles Greville that initiated all this talk. Greville's membership in the Dilettanti, the Royal Society, the Society of Antiquaries, and a number of gentlemen's clubs provided him with a variety of forums for the liberal exchange of gossip. The stories contained in Smithson's letter rapidly circulated in London. Sir Joseph Banks, as the one who had first brought Staffa to the scientific world's attention and who as the president of the Royal Society was patron and arbiter of discovery, was naturally the first person to whom everyone wanted to pass on the delicious tale. "Faujas de St. Fond has made a ridiculous figure in Scotland," Charles Blagden, secretary of the Royal Society, wrote to Banks, with some glee. To which banks replied, "How Faujas is ever to shew his Face again I do not easily guess … those who see him will not easily forget his Conduct in his Scotch Tour."48 A few days later Jonas Carlsson Dryander, Banks' librarian at Soho Square, also wrote to relay what he had heard: "Faujas, who is not yet come back, has not been to Staffa; but, when he came to the place where they were to cross over to Mull, he considered that the passage was dangerous and the vessel bad, and staid behind on the main: when the other three were come over to Mull they quarrelled; and Massey went by himself to Staffa. I don't know if Thornton and Andreani went to Staffa or not; but I heard from Mr. Greville to day that even they had quarrelled, and that Thornton was gone by himself to Glasgow. So much for the issue of this great company of travellers!"49

  The form of both Blagden's and Dryander's stories was identical to Greville's. Blagden's letter confirmed that
the source of the news was Smithson. He told Banks, "Luckily, Thornton, whose drawings will furnish a record, I have reason to believe, found courage enough to venture over [to Staffa]: the only person I am sure of having gone, however, is Mr. Massey, whose letters are come to town with this account."50 The dissemination of this news marked Smithson's real initiation into the world of scientific London. Still only a nineteen-year-old student at Oxford, he was heralded, at least initially, as the only member of this famed party to have successfully ventured to Staffa.

  In the half-century that followed, Fingal's Cave became one of the most important pilgrimage sites of the Romantic Age. It inspired countless poems and other works of art. Keats heralded the cave as "this Cathedral of the Sea," and Wordsworth called it the work of "the Sovereign Architect." Turner painted it dashed by great bursts of white water and blustery light, and Mendelssohn captured its shimmering beauty in his Hebrides Overture of 1832. It retained this mystique for years afterward; Queen Victoria felt compelled to make a visit in 1847, and the science-fiction writer Jules Verne chose the island as the setting for the dramatic finale of his romance The Green Ray. 51 Smithson's journey, one of scientific discovery, was among the earliest, presaging all the excitement to come.