The Lost World of James Smithson

by Heather Ewing

  Many of them declared their love for Lady Webster, who sat at the heart of this set. She had arrived in Italy with the man she called "her tormentor," her depressive husband Sir Godfrey Webster, whom she had married when she was fifteen and he thirty-eight. Another of the figures Smithson came to know well was Mrs. Wyndham, the wife of the new envoy. She left her husband for Lord Wycombe, the first son of Lord Lansdowne—but he, as it turned out, was "not an enthusiastic admirer" of the state of marriage and eventually grew tired of the affair. It was Wycombe's cousin, best friend, and traveling companion, the gregarious twenty-year-old Henry Fox, the third Baron Holland and nephew of the legendary Whig leader Charles James Fox, who ultimately captured Lady Webster's heart. He had arrived in Italy fresh from an exotic tour around Spain, his complexion "partak[ing] of the Moresco hue." Lady Webster thought him "not in the least handsome," but she was soon won over, finding "his gaiety beyond anything I ever knew." It was not long before these two quietly began to court.65

  It was a time of tremendous optimism and happiness for this set of friends, a time in which their own self-discovery coincided with a Zeitgeist of hunger for knowledge and improvement. Lord Holland, like Smithson and most everyone in this set, was utterly in thrall to the French Revolution. Holland had been sent abroad to quiet the fires of his political enthusiasms, but the diplomat Earl Macartney, passing through Florence, reported that he was still "a little of a democrate." Lady Webster teasingly called Wyndham, who had spent time in Paris in 1791, "ce petit Jacobin." Lord Wycombe had recently returned from a great voyage around the United States and was full of stories. In 1791 he had met with George Washington and toured the site just chosen for the new capital, to be called after Washington, on the undulating marshy ground on the eastern branch of the Potomac, near the port towns of Georgetown and Alexandria. America was building an entirely new city, of immense classical grandeur, a bold manifestation of its unique experiment in democracy. "The plan exhibited [for the capital]," Wycombe told Lord Holland, "is on a most extensive scale. I know of no criterion of success except the price of lots [which were going for about one hundred pounds each, eight to an acre]." He likened the experience to "purchasing a ticket in the lottery" and confessed he "was not far from buying one, but happily escaped the scrape."66

  The friendships Smithson forged in Florence continued much of his life. He carried on socializing with what became known as the Holland House circle back in London, though there is no evidence that he ever carried on amorously with any of them. Smithson's position in their world seems to have been primarily as a kind of scientific cicerone.67 He was the one to whom they turned for news of the latest discoveries; he animated their understanding of new scientific principles, shared tales of travails from the laboratory, and helped organize their budding mineral collections. In a poem Lord Holland wrote in 1795 for Lady Webster's birthday, Holland ribbed her about her abundant passion for scientific knowledge, suggesting she would forsake her youth and beauty for a better understanding of the laws of nature: "In short for each enquiring wim / I'd sacrifice a sense or limb, / For beauty fades and youth decays, / But learning lasts me all my days!" The poem opened with Lady Webster calling upon the Muses, and upon her scientist companions, including Smithson:

  Give me, indulgent Genius give

  'Midst learned cabinets to live

  'Midst curiosities, collections

  Specimens Models, & dissections

  With books of every tongue & land

  All difficult to understand!

  With instruments of various sorts

  Telescopes, air pumps, tubes, retorts

  With friends, fair wisdom to pursue

  Fontana, Macie, Blagden,

  Drew. Give me in common sense defiance

  Secure with Macie and his

  Science On floating bricks superb to ride

  O'er angry Oceans wandering tide … 68

  The poem, which carried on for many more lines, was only the first in what became an annual tribute to Lord Holland's love for Elizabeth Vassall, otherwise Lady Webster (and soon to become Lady Holland). Every year on her birthday Lord Holland penned another panegyric, even from Woburn Abbey when he was attending the deathbed of his friend the Duke of Bedford and could not be with his wife. Thirty-six years after this first tribute in Florence, his celebration of Lady Holland's sixtieth birthday tenderly concluded: "I loved you much at twenty four / I love you better at threescore."69

  The "floating bricks" that provided Smithson and Lady Webster their seafaring carpet were yet another passing obsession of Smithson's during his Italian sojourn, apparently gleaned from research undertaken by Giovanni Fabbroni. Many of Smithson's contemporaries attempted to divine the recipe for the cement the Romans used in their construction, which was far superior in strength to anything the eighteenth century had produced. Fabbroni in his investigations of building materials had noted also that Pliny referred to bricks made in Asia and Spain which floated on water. Thinking that this invention might have useful contemporary applications, Fabbroni decided to try to reproduce them. Using Strabo as his guide—for he complained that no modern source provided him any useful guidance—he succeeded in finding the same chalky argillaceous earths—which had to have some plasticity and become hard under fire—that the ancients had employed, near Santa Fiore (Monte Amiata) in the Sienese countryside.

  Fabbroni saw great potential for these bricks, especially in the construction of ships. His publication, read to the Accademia dei Georgofili in 1794, concluded by musing on the fate of the Spanish ships at the siege of Gibraltar a little over a decade earlier. All ten of these specially designed floating batteries had burned or exploded when subjected to the withering red-hot shot of the British, despite being fortified with six or seven feet of iron, cork, and rawhide; perhaps, Fabbroni suggested, floating bricks might have saved them.70 Smithson, fascinated by the subject and eager to make himself useful, tried to aid Fabbroni in his experiments. "Mr. Macie passed this morning by the Public Cabinet, and also by via Cocomero [Fabbroni's house] without having the good fortune of finding Mr. Fabbroni," Smithson wrote (in French) to Fabbroni one evening. "Mr. Macie, when he was at Paris a year and a half ago or more, read in one of the English papers a notice on floating bricks, made in imitation of those of the ancients, but he has forgotten the details."71 He clearly also shared his excitement over Fabbroni's research with his English bon ton companions.

  Most of all, however, Smithson aspired to travel and live in the same aristocratic grandeur as these young English lords and ladies did. He had been schooled in similar circumstances and partook of their political and cultural outlooks. He would have claimed William Wyndham as a cousin, since Wyndham was part of the Seymour clan—Wyndham's brother George was Lord Egremont, heir to Petworth, the estate shaved off the Percy estates by the Proud Duke. And he shared the bond of illegitimacy with Wyndham's wife, who was the illegitimate daughter of Lord Baltimore. He was an Oxford contemporary of Lord Wycombe, and their two families owned neighboring estates in Wiltshire. Smithson, however, remained something apart. Lady Webster thought he was a bit strange; "ha una testa curiosa," she told Fabbroni—but Fabbroni, the scientist, who saw things differently, said in reply that he found Smithson to be a man of "rare merit," in whose company he would have happily passed whole days had time permitted.72

  While in Italy most of this group of English aristocrats commissioned portraits from the French painter Louis Gauffier, who had settled in Florence after the guillotining of Louis XVI. He painted Lady Webster reclining in a chaise, her dog Pierrot at her feet; Lord Holland in an elegantly turned chair, a bust of his heroic uncle, Charles James Fox, beside him on the table.73 Smithson, too, might have commissioned a portrait of himself on the Grand Tour. There is a Gauffier painting from Florence, dated 1796, whereabouts currently unknown, which shows an unidentified young English gentleman who appears uncannily similar to Smithson.74 The young man has the same very long nose, full lips, and distinctive brow. H
e also has the same wry, languid gaze that Smithson had at five (if the Romney is counted as a Smithson portrait) and at fifty (in the portrait made at Aix-la-Chapelle in 1816).

  The portrait, if it is Smithson, does not, as one might have expected, give any indication of the abiding passions of Smithson's life—chemistry and mineralogy. There are no scientific instruments, no cabinets of crystals, no library of learned information in the background. There is not even the slightest hint in the setting of that pastime which probably occupied so much of his travel—the exploration of an exposed cliff or cave or river bed that might have yielded novel mineral specimens. Instead he presents himself as a confident young Romantic, lace handkerchief in hand, his coat nonchalantly abandoned atop a ruined column. The distinctive skyline of Florence is visible in the distance, and his faithful dog peers up at him devotedly. Smithson had been rapturously received by the scientific community in Italy, and yet it seems that it was as a wealthy English gentleman on the Grand Tour that he wished to memorialize himself.

  As if on cue, the volcano that was a metaphor for the era erupted in the most spectacular manner in June 1794. This explosion of Vesuvius was the biggest since the seventeenth century and one of the most massive ever in its history. Multiple torrents of lava coursed down the flank of the mountain, Sir William Hamilton reported to the Royal Society, uniting in a molten wave half a mile wide and some twelve to forty feet deep. The lava rushed towards the sea, swallowing vineyards and houses in its wake and finally engulfing much of the town of Torre del Greco as it slid into the bay.75

  For William Thomson the event was exciting beyond imagining. At the very center of Torre del Greco, houses were buried up to their roofs, and only the church towers peeked out above the ruins. The town had become a mini-Pompeii for their own time, and he was poised to be its Pliny. Thomson clambered all over the ruins, scavenging the site with the idea of creating a cabinet of curiosities to illustrate the chemically transformative powers of the mountain. He found window glass that had folded in the heat and lost its transparence, becoming almost like porcelain of Reaumur. He collected iron window mullions that had mineralized and which under the microscope revealed nearly transparent rose-shaped crystals in vivid red and orange. In part of the church wall he discovered that ancient lava, used as a building material, had re-melted; once light and airy, it had become heavy and had sprouted crystal needles on its surface. Copper coins had been oxidized by the vapors of the lava, and he found specimens of the mineral olivine that had changed from green to red in the fiery heat. Thomson sent a complete set of his finds to his friends the Pictets in Geneva, who published his discoveries in their new journal, the Bibliothéque Britannique. He also sent Smithson a case of material. Among the treasures inside was a fragment of a bell from the church tower, encrusted in tiny brilliant crystals.76

  On the day after the eruption of Vesuvius, many miles north of Naples a curious white cloud appeared around sunset, high in the sky over the little town of Lucignan d'Asso, in the Tuscan hills near Siena. Seven tremendous explosions, like the cannon fire of the gods, rocked the valley. The rumblings multiplied and a hailstorm of stones pelted the earth. Terrified peasants reported that they whizzed to the ground like rockets, some of them landing in water and emitting billows of smoke.

  Word of this phenomenal event spread quickly through the network of scientific laborers and their patrons. Smithson immediately rode over the Chianti hills to Siena to see the fruits of the spectacle for himself, according to a published account of the Siena fall. Massimiliano Ricca's book on the Siena meteor shower reads in parts like a fairytale, in the way it evokes Smithson's arrival, underscoring at the same time how heralded Smithson was among his scientific contemporaries in Italy: "There was in this year also traveling in Tuscany the illustrious Chemist, J. L. Macie, today J. Smithson, whom I personally introduced to Father Soldani." Father Ambrogio Soldani, a Sienese naturalist best known for his studies of fossils from Tuscany's ancient seas, had quickly become the central figure collecting and studying the strange black stones. Ricca related that Smithson studied the specimens that had been brought together and penned a description of his findings "to his friend Mr. Cavendish" back in London, to spread the word of this extraordinary happening—a letter of which, of course, no trace remains.77

  Everyone puzzled over where the pebbles had come from. The extravagant Earl of Bristol, Lord Hervey's father, was another who promptly arrived in Siena to view the stones. Bristol had long been passionate about geology; he had even singed his foot on a trip up Vesuvius in the 1770s. Like many, he was already convinced that the rocks that fell from the sky had actually been catapulted up the length of Italy from the Vesuvian eruption. William Thomson, who could hardly tear himself away from his study of the effects the lava had wrought on the ruined city of Torre del Greco, soon ventured up to Siena as well. He wrote back to his Neapolitan friend Scipione Breislak that he remained unconvinced that the stones could have come from Vesuvius. He believed instead that they must have been thrown from some extinct Tuscan volcano, which had inexplicably reawakened from centuries of slumber. He fingered Santa Fiore (Monte Amiata) or the heights of Radicofani as possibilities. Further study revealed, however, that neither place boasted any opening in the earth that might have emitted such stones. Thomson then worked up an idea that many found preposterous—that the stones had come from space, emitted from a volcano on the face of the moon.

  Difficult as it was for some to accept that the stones' origin was extraterrestrial, the idea nonetheless began to gain currency. Soldani in his Sopra una pioggetta di sassi, which was dedicated to the Earl of Bristol, put forth the idea that the stones had condensed from the atmosphere. The Abbot Domenico Tata's Memoria sulla pioggia di pietre, which included Thomson's analysis of the stones, agreed that the stones had come from the sky; and Thomson himself suggested that the substance of the stones be called soldanite, in honor of Soldani's tireless researches.

  Smithson was as confused as the rest by the mysterious stones. He clearly took seriously his friend William Thomson's hypothesis, even if much of polite society still found the suggestion laughable. Back in London in 1797 the subject of the Siena fall came up at a dinner party. "Macie is my delight," Dr. William Drew recounted afterwards. "His Brain, like my own, is fruitful in Whimsies, and then he is of such easy faith! I gigled [sic] inwardly at his credulity about the Sienna Pebbles … the dear Pebbles—how innocently he fell into my hypothesis that they were projected from the Moon."78

  The Siena fall was the first meteorite shower to be observed by such a large number of people that its authenticity could not be challenged. Smithson, though not an eyewitness, was there from the very beginning. Despite never publishing on the subject, he seems to have followed developments very closely. Over the course of his lifetime Smithson enjoyed friendships with many who played a prominent role in the foundation of what became known as the science of meteoritics. It was William Thomson who actually first identified the Widmanstatten pattern, the signature internal crystalline pattern visible in meteorite metal. Another of his acquaintances, Edward C. Howard, published a ground-breaking chemical analysis of samples from numerous different suspected falls in the Royal Society's Philosophical Transactions of 1802. and smithson's European friends Jean-Baptiste Biot and Martin Klaproth were others who published important contributions on meteoritics.

  Smithson's collection as it came to the United States in the 1830s contained "a valuable suite of meteoric stones, which appear to be specimens of most of the meteorites which have fallen in Europe during several centuries."79 In the years after the Siena shower an astonishing number of other notable falls were witnessed: the stone which fell like a "Phaeton from heaven" at World Cottage, Yorkshire, of 1795; one at Evora, Portugal, in 1796; the spectacular Benares, India, fireball of 1798; the shower of some three thousand stones at L'Aigle in Normandy in 1803. The French scientist Fleuriau de Bellevue gave Smithson a personally inscribed copy of his pamphlet on the 1819 meteo
r fall at Jonzac. Through his wide network it would not have been difficult for Smithson to obtain specimens from these falls and from earlier meteorite falls as well. As the acceptance of meteorites became widespread, scientists scoured historical treatises to identify possible falls from earlier centuries. Samples from many of these soon made their way into the hands of scientists and collectors. Charles Greville's collection contained a specimen, once part of the Viennese mineralogist Ignaz von Born's cabinet, from a stone said to have fallen in 1754 near Tabor, Bohemia. The British Muséum had among its meteorites an example from the mythic Meson de Fierro stone in Argentina, first reported by European travelers in 1576. From Peter Simon Pallas, a professor at St. Petersburg, Smithson had obtained some mineral specimens; he may well have also acquired a sample of the famous Pallas Iron from Siberia, which William Thomson analyzed.80 Perhaps Smithson's cabinet even included an example of the then oldest known meteor, the thunder stone of Ensisheim, which for three hundred years had sat in a local church—before it was briefly appropriated during the Revolution for display at a new National Muséum at Colmar—near an inscription that proclaimed the year of its arrival, 1492. Today the Ensisheim meteorite is the only known example from a pre-eighteenth-century European fall. Had Smithson's collection survived the Smithsonian fire of 1865, his suite of meteorites from "several centuries"—with its handwritten catalogue notes indicating each stone's provenance—would surely have proved of immense value.81

  Both Lady Webster and Lord Holland on separate occasions in 1794 and 1795 went south to consult with William Thomson regarding their health. Smithson continued to travel in Italy through late 1794 and 1795 (and probably even into 1796)—he was in Venice briefly in July 179482—but he did not return to Rome or Naples. Petrini in his letters to Fabbroni and others in Florence endlessly sent his compliments to the "noble," the "worthy," the "splendid" Mr. Macie. At the end of March 1795, though, he confessed to Fabbroni that neither he nor Thomson had heard from Smithson since Smithson had been in Rome more than a year earlier.83