The Lost World of James Smithson

by Heather Ewing

  Smithson was a notoriously irregular correspondent. Thomson, frantic to discover back in 1793 when he might finally see his friend after he had learned that Smithson had arrived in Italy, got no answer to his frequent pleas for information. "Since it always takes a century to hear from Mr. Macie," he beseeched Ottaviano Targioni-Tozzetti, "won't you please tell me where he is headed, Rome or elsewhere." When, weeks later, he had still received no response, he chastised Targioni-Tozzetti in a letter full of playful profanity: "You still haven't told me … when is Macie leaving Florence and where is he headed? Many are the positive qualities of this gentleman [Smithson], but I wouldn't like to see you copying his trascuratezza on this stupid affair! Razza di cose! Buona crusca!" 84 It's difficult to understand Smithson's insensitivity to these friends. Perhaps he felt some need to keep Thomson, who could well have been in love with him, at arm's length. But with the mild, self-effacing Petrini, Smithson's silence seems particularly strange or cruel.

  At some point, perhaps in the summer of 1795, Smithson set out to pass some time in the Alps. Intending to return "to spend the winter at Milan," Smithson left a large box of books in the care of the Auberge Royale in that town. He wasn't ready to leave Italy just yet. "But," as he wrote to an Italian friend nearly a decade later, "the French deranged all my plans, and I have not heard a word of my case of books since."85 There were still plenty of English in Milan through the winter of 1795–6; Smithson, however, seems to have grown into a very cautious traveler. France's bedraggled Army of Italy lurked in the foothills of the Ligurian Alps. In March 1796 they gained a galvanizing young commander named Napoleon and proceeded in a matter of days to capture the kingdom of Piedmont. Infused with money, supplies, and confidence, Napoleon's troops pressed on to victory at Lodi and the occupation of Milan. Leery of the political situation, Smithson had already headed up towards Germany.

  III. Germany

  Germany? But where is it? I don't know how to find such a country?

  - Goethe and Schiller, 1797

  It was not easy to travel in the Germany that Smithson visited in the mid-1790s. One's passport and papers had to be in good order. Border crossings were frequent, since the territory, ruled by the Holy Roman Empire, was divided into some three hundred principalities. Travel was slow and difficult. Rivers were only partly navigable; sandy roads turned to mud with the rain, creating great ruts that engulfed carriage wheels. A trip from Frankfurt to Berlin took nine days. Even the modest distance from Berlin to Potsdam was made by a coach only once a day and lasted six hours. Walking was hardly better, as notorious thieves and gangs roamed the byways and highways.86

  Smithson did not develop any great love for the region. He told Lady Webster, when he finally returned to England in 1797, that while in the German states "among twenty-six million people he found only one with common sense, that one being an unknown chemist."87 Smithson's perceptions reflected popular prejudices amongst the classically minded English, who on the whole disdained both the country and its inhabitants; they found that the happy intersection of court life and cultural discourse common in England and France did not really exist in most of the German states. The chemist Richard Chenevix told Sir Joseph Banks, "I define a German thus—German is the passage from man to brute. Man is capable of manual and intellectual operations: Brutes incapable for the most part of either. Germans capable of the former, incapable of the latter."88 A new book reviewed in the September 1797 issue of the Monthly Review, a magazine Smithson regularly read, stated that Germany was "an immense country, composed of a little magnificence and a wide extent of misery; a country where you travel a hundred miles without finding a town in which a person of any taste or spirit could bear to reside, or a single villa like those which so much abound in England."89

  Despite the desolation that the English perceived, the country was highly literate; it boasted some thirty universities compared with England's two.90 And as Romanticism took hold of the English imagination, the long-standing dismissal of German culture began to yield; poetic pilgrims like Coleridge sought out the wild and lonely Harz mountains, its mossy slopes carpeted with pines and haunted with witches and spirits. Smithson toured these mountains, too, but his exploration was, unsurprisingly, more grounded in his study of the country's centuries-old mining traditions (some "slag from off the copper works, Hartz" became specimen No. 1401 in his collection).91

  This region boasted some of the earliest mining academies in the world, and in the mining regions of the Harz, the Erzgebirge, and Slovakia, chemical instruction—as related to metallurgy and minerals at least—had been a fixture since the second quarter of the eighteenth century. Many of the members of this burgeoning German chemical community had ties to England and to Smithson's old mentor Richard Kirwan in particular, and Smithson presumably carried letters of introduction to many of them. Intent on building his mineral collections, Smithson was also keen to inform himself on the state of scientific instruction and learning in Europe.92

  Members of the Society of the Dilettanti, with Sir Joseph Banks at far right, clinking glasses with Charles Greville, who looks back at him; Lord Carmarthen sits in the right foreground, showing off a gem.

  Upon leaving Italy, Smithson might well have first headed east, perhaps to the mining academy of Schemnitz (today in the Slovak Republic). His itinerary is not known.93 His mineral collection included specimens from "Chemnitz in Hungary" and a "small group of native gold in 24-sided crystals from Vorospatak in Transilvania" (Verespatak or Rosia Montana, in Romania, one of the most famous gold crystal localities in the world). It also featured "White Calamine" from Bleiburg and Hiittenberg in Carinthia (a mining area in southern Austria), specimens that became central to one of Smithson's most significant investigations: his identification of hydrozincite and the mineral that was later named smithsonite in his honor.94

  One of Smithson's principal stops was in Dresden, hailed as Florence on the Elbe for its elegant and picturesque architecture. The city was the capital of Saxony, seat of the electors, and home to one of the oldest and richest mineral collections in the world. Smithson had an excellent entrée to Dr. Karl Heinrich Titius, the curator of the royal mineral cabinet. He arrived in Dresden armed with a commission from Lady Webster for a set of wooden crystal models. These large-scale blocks were used to demonstrate the principles of crystallography and were popular as erudite displays in European salons.95

  Dresden boasted a large community of English, whose activities were often coordinated by Hugh Elliot, the British envoy to the Saxon court. Smithson lodged at the Hotel de Pologne, one of the most fashionable hotels in the city, where Mozart and also Sir William and Emma Hamilton had stayed a few years earlier. Among the English present was Lord Carmarthen (Francis Go dolphin Osborne, fifth Duke of Leeds), the former foreign secretary. Carmarthen was part of the Wiltshire elite that Smithson claimed; his aunt the Duchess of Newcastle had lived in a house at Queen Square near to Elizabeth Macie in the 1760s, and both families employed Elborough Woodcock as their solicitor.96 Carmarthen was also a member of the Society of the Dilettanti, and thus a friend of Smithson's friends Charles Greville and Sir Joseph Banks.

  Here in Saxony, then, a good way to be remembered to Sir Joseph Banks presented itself. As Smithson was not especially knowledgeable about botany, and Sir Joseph Banks not that interested in mineralogy, Smithson had not felt able to curry favor with the president of the Royal Society as much as he might have liked during his travels. But he had noticed an unusually vivid blue flower en route into town, and Carmarthen obligingly agreed to carry a small packet back to England. So Smithson collected a few specimens for Banks' herbarium and sent them along with a letter:

  I hope my total ignorance of botany will plead my excuse for troubling you with them & that you will see in the action only the evident desire to be of use to you, and wh[ich] of it has not more shown itself during my travels has been occasioned by the fear of being more troublesome than useful from the extreme wealth of your collection and
my entire unacquaintance with the subject. I have met during my journeys with a good many new substances which had escaped the notice of mineralogists, but will not fatigue you at present with any account of them as it is not I know, the part of natural history to which you are partial. If I can be of any sort of use to you in this country I beg of you to command me and to believe me to be

  Dear Sir

  yr most obdt servt

  James L. Macie97

  While in Saxony, Smithson also toured Freiberg, the home of the first mining academy in Europe. He presumably met Abraham Werner, director of the academy and renowned as the founder of the Neptunist theory of the earth. Smithson obtained a number of specimens, including a "Feldspat crystal not mackled" and "Five crystals of sulphate of lime" from Johann Friedrich Wilhelm Toussaint von Charpentier, director of the mines at Freiberg. In nearby Meissen, home of the famous porcelain factory, he collected a suite of pitchstones (the dark, glassy, igneous rocks called pechstein in German) and sent them off to his friends back in Florence.98 And at Berlin, the seat of the Prussian Academy of Sciences, Smithson became good friends with one of the most respected analytical chemists in Europe, Martin Klaproth. Klaproth, who by the late 1790s had already discovered uranium and zirconium, gave Smithson some "crystallized antimony" for his cabinet. Berlin, presumably on account of Klaproth, became a place Smithson returned to a number of times in his life, when because of the wars he found himself passing entire years in the German states.99

  Smithson was forced, because of the war with France, to travel home via the turbulent North Sea, a much longer and more unpleasant crossing than that of the Channel, especially in early March. Many English travelers were not above trying to find a way through enemy France, so preferable was it to the lengthy passage and sickeningly rough waters of the North Sea. Smithson's friend Sir Lionel Copley was one of many who found himself stuck in Switzerland unsure of how to get home. According to Lord Wycombe, who wrote a droll account of his encounter with Copley to his father Lord Lansdowne, Copley learned that a fellow Englishman had applied to the French government "for a passport to go home through France, alledging [sic] his wife's ill health as a reason. The passport was given. My friend Sir Lionel a newly elected Member of Parliament without a wife thought this scheme convenient; he has accordingly written to Paris and is waiting for an answer."100

  Smithson, not so crafty, found himself thoroughly miserable on the interminable, storm-tossed crossing. It was a trip so devastating that, when faced with making it again six years later, he would instead wait four years on the Continent, endlessly postponing the journey in the hopes of a development in the war that might afford him an alternative route, a decision that in the end nearly cost him his life.101 If Smithson ever contemplated a visit to America, this North Sea voyage probably confirmed that as an impossibility. James Smithson and sea travel did not mix.

  SEVEN

  London: Citizen of the World, 1797-1803

  Of Mr Macie I still expect much. How can a person of his ardour ever be idle?

  -Richard Kirwan to Sir Joseph Banks, a few weeks after Smithson's return from the Continent, April 1797

  "OUR FRIEND THE philosopher Macie is here, come from Germany," Lady Webster wrote to Giovanni Fabbroni in March 1797.1 Smithson, ravaged by the rough sea crossing, had stopped to rest en route back to London with his Grand Tour friends from Florence, Lord Holland and Lady Webster. The trial Lord Webster had brought against his wife for her scandalous adultery with Holland had recently concluded, clearing the way for her future as Lady Holland; the marriage took place in July. Smithson's presence must have stirred memories of their courtship—heady, happy days spent in the city of the Medici, times that now in the face of interminable war seemed distant and blissfully untroubled.2

  England in the spring of 1797 was in a state of crisis. Everyone was terrified of an invasion. The French were on the doorstep, their troops massing across the Channel. Only a few months earlier they had nearly succeeded in landing in Ireland, where they had hoped to convince a restive populace to turn with them against England. There had been a run on the Bank of England in late February, and, as fears grew for England's finances, the Bank suspended specie payments for the first time in its history. The unprecedented stoppage, followed by the introduction of an emergency paper currency, seemed to augur the crumbling of the country. The King on his way to open the parliament the previous season had been greeted with hisses and hoots instead of huzzas, an immense mob crying out, "Peace! Peace! Give us bread! No Pitt! No Famine! No War!"3 There were food riots and demonstrations, and protests against new registration laws for the military. The Royal Navy, the mightiest aspect of England's defense, mutinied at Spithead and at the Nore in the Channel in April and May, further shattering the country's sense of security and prestige. Everyone seemed exhausted with the war. Lord Holland, who had been so passionate an admirer of the French, wrote: "I know not which way to direct my wishes for both sides seem equally dead to all feelings of humanity & all sense of their real interests and welfare, which can never be found in bloodshed massacre devastation & misery."4 Smithson caught up on the state of affairs in England while staying with his friends, in conversations that evidently included advice on the most reliable financial investments at the moment. Not even back in London yet, he sent directions to his bankers to purchase £1,000 worth of the Bank of England's 5 percent annuities.5

  Smithson returned to his mother's house on Upper Charlotte Street, off Fitzroy Square, where he seems to have based himself for about a year and a half before setting up his own residence. As word of his return spread, there were probably many reunions with family and friends, and letters of congratulations and welcome arriving by post. Smithson's Cornish friend John Hawkins, upon his return from the Continent in 1798, received at least twenty-four such letters, which are still carefully bundled together in the Hawkins Papers at the Cornwall Record Office. Randle Wilbraham, one of those who sent Hawkins congratulations, was another young man who had himself only recently returned from a similar tour, where he had obviously imbibed all the new thoughts stirring the Continent; his hair, he warned his mother before he arrived home, was now stunningly free of powder and at Naples he had cut it short "a la Brutus."6 Reading these letters, glowing with friendship and adventure, provokes yet another pang-filled reverie for the losses in the Smithsonian fire of 1865. Who was waiting at home for Smithson, and how had the Continent transformed him?

  One of the first people Smithson apparently contacted was his old mentor Richard Kirwan up in Dublin—since Kirwan immediately wrote to Sir Joseph Banks, full of enthusiasm for Smithson's "ardour" and prospects.7 Kirwan had grown increasingly eccentric in his old age. He spent his time now bundled in front of his fire, his hat on regardless of the company, surrounded by Irish mastiffs and a pet eagle. Although the letter from Smithson is lost, it was probably filled with breathless tales of collecting escapades, new specimens discovered, great personages met, and alliances kindled.

  Smithson's Grand Tour from a scientific point of view had been a tremendous success. At his mother's house, he organized the great hoards of material that he had collected on his travels, writing up a "Catalogue of Some Fossiles from Journey Abroad." (In Smithson's lifetime, the word "fossil," from the Latin fossus, meaning "dug up," encompassed everything from underground—minerals, fossils, bones, and more.) There were specimens of Carrara marble containing pyrites, iron crystals from Stromboli, and colored iron crystals in quartz from Altenberg ("neat bit," Smithson wrote in the margin); there were crystals of mica from Rome, yellow porphyry from Freiberg, and a "bottle of the residuum of the water from Dresden." He had Siberian topaz, tourmaline from the Harz mountains, and a crystal of carbonate of lime given to him by the pharmacist Bertrand Pelletier in Paris ("bad," Smithson commented). Most importantly, Smithson had also amassed an enormous network of colleagues with whom he could now make exchanges of duplicates and rarities. Peter Christian Abildgaard, a Danish mineralogist whom Smithson
had met in Venice, sent a case full of mysterious unidentified stones; Smithson added "unknown green grains from Ahrendal [Arendal in Norway]" and "black, plated, unknown matter from Ahrendal" to his collection. William Thomson, too, from Italy sent a box of treasures for Smithson to examine—including "vitriolated tartar, probably with copper, spewed out liquid f[ro]m a small aperture in the cone of Vesuvius" and "a bit of Egypt[ia]n brick, evidently made with straw, why?"—via a mutual friend named Dr. Robertson.8 Now that Smithson was home he could pick up his correspondence once more. "The times have passed, my dear Sir, when I had the good fortune to enjoy your company and talk with you about chemistry and mineralogy," he wrote—in French—to Ottaviano Targioni-Tozzetti in Florence. "Now our conversations can only take place over the lengthy route of letters!"9

  One of the first people he probably saw upon his return was Margaret Marriott, his father's old lover. She was now grieving the loss of both her daughters, his half-sisters. Dorothy had died in 1794, three years after her sister Philadelphia, having endured, as one newspaper solemnly opined, "the slowly consuming ravages of that most painful of all poisons grief—with almost unexampled resignation."10 In the newspaper accounts Smithson would have seen that Dorothy and Philadelphia were openly referred to as children of the Duke of Northumberland, as both girls' obituaries named them as half-sisters to the current Duke of Northumberland and the Earl of Beverley. They had those things that Smithson most craved: support from their father, who had financed their education in Paris; the carrying of the family name; and public acknowledgment of their relation to the duke, at least insofar as being afforded the opportunity to be buried practically at his side in Westminster Abbey.