The Lost World of James Smithson

by Heather Ewing

  Vivant Denon in Kassel examining pictures to take back to Paris for the Musee Napoleonienne (the Louvre), 1807.

  By the beginning of November 1806 the French had taken Kassel. Prince Wilhelm fled up into the Schleswig-Holstein peninsula, to his brother's castle at Gottorf. His abandoned citizens watched as a French general installed himself in the palace. In January 1807 Dominique-Vivant Denon, the acclaimed head of the Musee Napoleonienne and one of the savants who'd accompanied Napoleon to Egypt, arrived in Kassel to survey the pictures. Fresh from his plunder of the royal collections at Potsdam and Berlin, where he had also stripped the Brandenburg Gate of its golden quadriga, he found an unexpected world of riches in Kassel. Over the course of nearly a month a delighted Denon selected his spoils from the picture gallery and the Fridericianum and shipped the material off to Paris.40

  Where Smithson spent the winter of 1806-7 is a mystery. Only one clue sheds any light: a pamphlet in his collection on the November sack of Lübeck.41 It recounts the final chapter in the humiliating destruction of Prussia, the story of how Blücher, unable to cross the Elbe and driven back by the French, took refuge in the free Hanseatic city of Lübeck, only to see the town invaded and pillaged. Was Smithson there? Why did he own this particular pamphlet? And why, if he had already made his way up into Schleswig-Holstein, did he not decide finally to brave the North Sea and attempt the journey home?

  NINE

  Vibrating between Existence and the Tomb, 1807-1810

  I have been above a year, since the middle of August last year, always in hot water, & without one single moment of real peace & quiet. So much worry is more than my constitution in its present enfeebled state will be able to endure much longer. When I came here my wish, in conformity to the orders of my physicians, was to have gone to Aix la Chapelle, & the south of France in Winter, but I have totally lost all inclination to stay among the French. My wishes are now to return to England; or at the least to get set at liberty & be the master of my own person and motions.

  —James Smithson to Sir Joseph Banks, September 1808

  IN THE SUMMER of 1807 Smithson reluctantly turned, finally, to the North Sea passage. He had already delayed his journey several years in order to avoid the stomach-churning violence of that itinerary, which had proven such an unpleasant experience in 1797. He had lingered too long, though, and the wait would nearly cost him his life. Most of continental Europe was now under French control. In July 1807 Napoleon had met Tsar Alexander on a raft in the middle of the Niemen River to sign the Treaty of Tilsit, in which all of Prussia's territories west of the Elbe were yielded up, cementing Napoleon's dominion of northern Europe. The route Smithson had taken home in 1797 was no longer even an option for him. Napoleon's Continental Blockade prevented any English ships from docking in ports like Hamburg, and England in turn had instituted its own counter-blockade, ruthlessly patrolling the mouth of the Elbe. All trade and travel had been shunted north into the Schleswig-Holstein peninsula, territory controlled at that time by neutral Denmark. It was there that Smithson headed.

  Smithson's destination was the medieval walled village of Tönning, perched at the mouth of the Eider five miles from the open sea on the western coast of the Schleswig-Holstein peninsula, which at that moment was functioning as the unlikely epicenter of commerce for northern Europe. While Hamburg and other bustling trading metropolises shuddered to a painful halt with the war, the quiet fishing village of Tönning found itself instead in the midst of the most extraordinary boom time it ever experienced, before or since. Over the course of nearly five years between 1803 and 1807, Tönningenjoyed a fleeting golden age, when it essentially assumed the work of the massive commercial port of Hamburg. A stately new customs house was built, and wooden shacks on stilts sprang up at the exit of the harbor, bringing all the debauchery of a large port—five dance halls alone—to the village. Between March and early summer of 1807, nearly three hundred ships left Tönning's harbor for England. Americans too were actively using the route, and in August, around the time Smithson arrived there, some twenty American ships were at anchor in the port.1 The passage was safe and flourishing. No wonder then, that Smithson, despite his reluctance to be buffeted about the North Sea, eventually turned to this route as the way home.

  The harbor at Tönning, 1805.

  But as Smithson made his way up through the marshy fenlands of Danish Schleswig-Holstein in the long, still days of early August, a menacing flotilla of English ships of the line simultaneously sped across the North Sea towards an unsuspecting Denmark. England, operating on intelligence that Napoleon intended to coerce neutral Denmark into joining the French, had decided to strike preemptively—a second chapter, of sorts, to the Battle of Copenhagen Nelson had fought in 1801. Fearful that France would gain an insurmountable advantage with the control of Denmark's large navy, England began to mass troops in the area immediately following the signing of the Treaty of Tilsit. In the first days of August, George Ill's fleet—twelve ships of the line and numerous other smaller vessels—arrived in the sound by Elsinore.

  On August 8 the British envoy Francis James Jackson met the Danish foreign minister to unveil England's ultimatum. The English tried to argue that they had been left no other course of action. Their demands, they explained, were simple: if Denmark would permit England to carry away the Danish fleet, England promised to take good care of it until the cessation of hostilities, at which time it would be promptly returned—"with all its Equipments, in as good State as it is received."2 Denmark, a neutral sovereign state, unsurprisingly found the request outrageous. Denouncing the unparalleled arrogance and perfidy of the English, the Danish minister repaired to Copenhagen to prepare for battle. Overtures were made immediately to Paris, and on August 13 the Danish King issued a proclamation, alerting his countrymen that hostilities were imminent. Within a few days Denmark ordered its men to take arms. The English diplomacy had gone so abysmally wrong and relations had deteriorated so rapidly that Charles Fenwick, a Foreign Office attache in Elsinore, abandoned his post for the safety of Helsinborg in Sweden.

  Thirty thousand English troops landed on the mainland and began to close in on Copenhagen. Denmark reacted swiftly, issuing another proclamation on August 17, ordering the sequestration of all British property. Simultaneously, throughout the region, regardless of circumstance, the English were arrested. There was, shockingly, no warning given, no order to leave the territory. Smithson, newly arrived in Tönning, found himself seized along with dozens of others. He was thrown into a barren warehouse on the edge of town that was pressed into service as a makeshift prison.3

  Smithson had long believed himself a victim of "the hurricane of war," tossed aggrieved onto an unwelcoming Germany back in the first days of his tour through France. But despite having been accused of being a spy in 1805, he hardly seems to have traveled with much urgency or fear. During the summer of 1807, en route to Tönning, he apparently stopped in Kiel for some time, where he found a congenial philosophical community and the facilities to conduct some chemical experiments. With his arrest in Tönning, however, must have come the realization that he had in fact been traveling these last few years as if becalmed in the eye of the storm. This desolate village in the fenlands of Schleswig-Holstein—"whose climate," Smithson railed, "is highly prejudicial to all foreigners whatsoever"—was the blinding maelstrom on the other side.4

  On September 1, 1807, the commanders of the British sea and land forces wrote to the governor of Copenhagen offering one last opportunity to surrender the capital, to avoid "the further Effusion of Blood." The indignant city replied: "If you are cruel enough to endeavour to destroy a City that has not given any the least Cause to such a Treatment at your Hands, it must submit to its Fate; but Honour and Duty bid us reject a Proposal unbecoming an independent Power; and we are resolved to repel every Attack, and defend to the utmost the City and our good Cause, for which we are ready to lay down our Lives."5

  A day later England began the bombardment. It lasted th
ree days and nights and wrought devastation on Copenhagen. Two thousand were killed, and much of the city—including the cathedral and the university area—was lost to fire. Desperate to stem the civilian casualties, Copenhagen yielded up its ships. The English took control of all those that were serviceable, burned the ones in process of being built, and confiscated stores worth some two million pounds. On September 7, Jackson wrote back to his superiors in Whitehall that the capitulation of Copenhagen was complete. Papers had been signed and he was now headed home. He told the Foreign Office that he would take a boat from Tönningback to England. When Jackson tried to land at Tönning, however, his flag of truce unfurled and waving high, he was rebuffed. The English assault on Copenhagen had hardened the spirits of the Danes, and no one was permitted to come ashore.6

  As it turned out, the capitulation in Copenhagen had been signed in ignorance of the Danish King's declaration of war. The Danes were bitterly defiant of the English presence and the enforced ceasefire mandated by the September 7 document. Even George III had questions about the morality of England's actions in Denmark. Throughout September and October Denmark seethed, and English travelers such as Smithson, caught by chance in the middle, received the very worst of this pent-up fury.

  In early October the English imposed a blockade on the Eider as well, and all neutral traffic ceased. In Tönningthe whaling ships bound for Greenland that had clustered at the mouth of the harbor disappeared, as did the men crowding the docks loading up provisions in barges headed for the new Schleswig-Holstein canal. Smithson and the rest of the town fell into utter isolation. Tönning's brief moment exultantly shouldering the weight of a continent's trade vanished as rapidly as it had arrived. By the end of the month an angry Denmark joined the side of the French with the signing of the Treaty of Fontainebleau, and a few days later England officially declared war on Denmark.

  Throughout Denmark all the English had been swept up in the net. The arrests were violent and chaotic, and as Smithson reported, "the vigorous manner in which the English were treated … occasioned the death of several."7 A mild-mannered English teacher who had been resident in Hamburg without incident throughout the French occupation was seized in neighboring Danish-controlled Altona, where he had gone to teach lessons; his arrest occasioned an impassioned twelve-page letter from a concerned Hamburg citizen. In Tönningitself, Smithson's fellow prisoners included the Englishman George Harward, a former Consul General to the Austrian Netherlands who had been unable to resist imprisonment despite broadcasting his Foreign Office connections, and an American sea captain named Reuben Smith. Harward spent fully two years as a prisoner in Denmark before finally being given permission to return to England.8 Reuben Smith probably fared better, having the power of an indignant U.S. consul in Hamburg on his side.9

  Letter upon letter wended its way to Danish authorities, each calling for mercy and justice. Prisoners clutched at any connection, no matter how meager, to gain a chance at freedom. The clerk to the Scottish consul to Denmark, swept up while returning from a trip to Norway, sent a plaintive message to Count Weddel jarlsberg. "If Your Excellency recollects," the clerk beseeched him, "I am the same person who had the Honour to wait on You, when Your Excellency was in Edinburgh, to inform You about the Ship Your Excellency was to Embark in at Grangemouth."10 Some went so far as to decry their own "vile" governments. One Englishman ingeniously offered as a condition for release to "exert every means of returning in one month afterwards to Norway unless my beloved sovereign will consent to the immediate release, as exchange for me, of one hundred of your Majesty's subjects now detained in Great Britain."11 Another begged only, on behalf of her husband and children, to be permitted "the consolation of being Prisoners in the same House." She pleaded for compassion "for a poor family who never knew what it was to be in want of the necessaries of Life till very very lately."12

  James Smithson was no different. His letters likewise would have appealed to a sense of honor and decency, to the old code of warfare. He was the son of a peer and a brother to a current duke. He had a fortune and a family through his maternal line that was of equally important and ancient lineage. He was, in short, an English gentleman. These distinctions had once counted for something; he believed he should have been considered above reproach. "Since equality [sic] is abolished in France I should have expected to have met with something more regard here than I have done," he wrote indignantly, "owing to the situation I hold in life from the rank of my mother & my father."13 He was, furthermore, desperately sick. The chaos of the arrest brought on once more his bronchial afflictions, and Smithson began frequently spitting up blood. Darkness arrived earlier each day. Rain lashed at the warehouse prison, and the wind whistled across the flat, marshy lands, bringing a damp chill to the air. Deprived of fresh air and exercise, the prisoners languished in this limbo, easy prey to the twin demons of depression and illness. Smithson knew he needed to find a way out of Tönning. "My life depended on my immediately quitting the Danish territory," he later said.

  He had a doctor draw up a report documenting his poor health, which he included with his petition for freedom. Smithson asked for permission to travel to Kassel, where he still had contacts who could help him. From there, he apparently wished to go on to Paris, perhaps in the hopes of gaining safe passage to England.14 This idea was only one of several he entertained, however; he also contemplated retiring for a while to the baths at Aix-la-Chapelle (Aachen) and then eventually passing to the south of France for the winter, places where he hoped to recover his strength after the punishing dampness of Denmark.15 But the bleak and frigid winter months advanced, and he heard nothing about his case. Desperate for help, Smithson sought some consolation in the arena that had brought him the most happiness in his life: the pursuit of knowledge.

  Portrait of a Mother and Child, by George Romney, c. 1770; possibly a picture of a young James Smithson with his mother Elizabeth Macie.

  Northumberland House at the head of the Strand, by Canaletto, 1752.

  The first Duke of Northumberland, dressed in the robes of the Order of the Garter, by James Barry, c. 1784.

  Margaret Marriott, one of the duke's mistresses and the mother of Smithson's half-sisters Dorothy and Philadelphia Percy, by Angelica Kauffman, c. 1773.

  The sons of the Duke of Northumberland: (top left) Smithson's half-brother Hugh Percy, later the second Duke of Northumberland, in Italy on the Grand Tour with his tutor Rev. Lippyat, by Nathaniel Dance, 1763; [top right) Smithson's half-brother Algernon Percy, later Lord Beverley, by Pompeo Batoni, 1769; (bottom left) Smithson in his Oxford robes, by James Roberts 1786; (bottom right) Smithson's brother Lieutenant-Colonel Henry Louis Dickenson, by Jacob Spornberg, 1805.

  Paolo Andreani, the first Italian aeronaut, who accompanied Smithson to Scotland, ascending from the garden of his villa outside Milan on March 13, 1784.

  Smithson and his tour companions in MacNab's Hut, en route to Staffa in 1784.

  A salt mine in Cheshire.

  Portrait of a Young Man in Florence, by Louis Gauffier, 1796; possibly a picture of Smithson.

  Elizabeth, Lady Webster (later Lady Holland) in Naples, with her dog Pierrot, by Robert Fagan, 1793.

  The Vesuvius eruption of 1794, which engulfed the town of Torre del Greco, by Giovanni Battista Lusieri.

  Gillray's caricature of "An Experimental Lecture on the Powers of Air" at the Royal Institution, with Humpliry Davy behind the table holding the bellows and Count Rumford standing off to the right.

  The fire of 1865 at the Smithsonian, in a photograph taken and retouched by Alexander Gardner.

  James Smithson, around age fifty, in a portrait painted at Aix-la-Chapelle by Henri Johns, 1816.

  "You will readily believe that under such circumstances I have not been able to do much for Science," he wrote to Sir Joseph Banks. "However," he hastened to add, "I wrote a paper at Tönningen a little before being taken ill, which I have promised, in a letter to M. Greville, to send him the moment I can hunt for it.
I have several others in some forwardness, I have also collected a considerable mass of detached notes & observations, & I have a certain number of new substances. I have besides with me many of the papers of two more considerable works on which I have been long engaged. I wish much to get to England to arrange & finish them, as I should be sorry that they were all lost by my death after all the pains & time they have cost me." In a letter focused on securing his own release, Smithson went to great lengths to show how he continued to dedicate himself to useful research, even in the most challenging and inhospitable environment. He did not want to be forgotten by the world of science.

  Unless this Tönningpaper he promised to Greville is one that was lost and never published, it can probably be identified as Smithson's "On the Composition of the Compound Sulphuret from Huel Boys, and an Account of its Crystals," which was read to the Royal Society in London on December 24, 1807, and published shortly thereafter in the Philosophical Transactions of 1808. It was based on research he had conducted in Kiel en route to Tönning, a continuation of an analysis of the compound sulphuret of lead, antimony, and copper that had been put forward in the Philosophical Transactions of 1804 by his colleague Charles Hatchett. Smithson's next paper was not published until 1811 and was clearly based on work done in London. Smithson was apparently so distraught when he wrote to Banks that he forgot that he had already mailed this paper.16

  Finally, in early spring 1808, Smithson's luck turned with the acquaintance of John Thornton, a well-connected English merchant operating in Hamburg. Thornton offered to help Smithson, and "powerfully desired to do so"; he submitted an appeal on Smithson's behalf to the French in Hamburg. But because Smithson was still under the control of the Danes there was little that could be done until he secured his own traveling papers.17