The promise of a plan in Hamburg seems to have effected his release. Smithson gained papers to travel and made his way towards Hamburg, clutching a letter of invitation from the French minister to the city, the venal Louis Antoine Fauvelet de Bourrienne. He was probably the "Herr von der Smissen" who checked into the Paetzhold guesthouse in Kiel on May 8, 1808.18 During Smithson's stay in Kiel in the summer of 1807 he had probably become friends with the Danish physician Joachim Dietrich Brandis, then professor of medicine at Kiel and later physician to the royal court in Copenhagen. Brandis was in all likelihood one of those doctors Smithson referred to so proprietorially in his letter to Sir Joseph Banks—where he casually boasted, "My breast being thought in the greatest danger, my physicians were all of opinion that my life depended on my immediately quitting the Danish territory …" Brandis was an authority on dangerous illnesses, and he seems to have developed a special regard for his knowledgeable English patient. In the midst of chaotic and desperate wartime, the two of them found solace in each other's conversation. Brandis left Smithson with a particularly treasured token of his esteem—a bust carved by Denmark's greatest living sculptor, Bertel Thorvaldsen, then the toast of artistic circles in Rome. It remained with Smithson all his life.19
Weakened and sick, Smithson finally limped into Hamburg at the end of June 1808, anticipating only a brief stay to sort out his papers. Hamburg, overrun with French soldiers, was by then a city on its knees. It had been greatly affected by the blockade of the Elbe, and its coal, which traditionally came to the city from England, was in low supply and very hard to come by. Prices had skyrocketed; Edward Thornton, Britain's minister at Hamburg, had been constrained to maintain a tiny establishment, not even allowing himself an equipage.20 Even before the crisis, Hamburg had not impressed some; Linnaeus, for one, had referred to the city as an open sewer. One Englishman believed it needed large impressive buildings; to describe the city to his mother, he compared it to London: "If London had not Westminster and Southwark, no docks, and only one-eighth part of its shipping, if the town were also sunk below the surface of the earth, Hamburg would be like it. In other words, London was like Hamburg three or four centuries ago."21
Smithson promptly presented himself in person to Bourrienne, a former schoolmate of Napoleon's and a man notoriously amenable to bribery. He assured Smithson that he "might stay in the town in perfect safety and quiet." Smithson, however, on his very way back from meeting the minister, was promptly arrested. Locked in a room with two boisterous guards, he soon relapsed into the worst of his illness, repeatedly coughing up blood. The guards stayed on through day and night, week after week, behaving "in a very riotous manner," according to Smithson, who grew weaker and more disturbed by the day. From the confines of his crowded, unpleasant room he watched July turn into August, bringing with it the ominous first anniversary of his status as a prisoner. Irrepressible embitterment clouded his thoughts. He had placed all his faith in John Thornton—a man "much employed by Government & whom I thought that I could trust"—and he had been abandoned. "I am really here in a most untoward situation," he complained to Sir Joseph Banks, "in fact an utter stranger to every body, deserted by those on whom I had depended, not perhaps to say worse, & vibrating between existence & the tomb."
Thornton's supposed betrayal played into all of Smithson's historic anxieties—his feelings of abandonment and his belief that he was entitled to special treatment but often denied it. One senses that behind the little phrase "not perhaps to say worse" lies all the venom and despair that Thornton's disappearance unwittingly unleashed in Smithson. Smithson could not have known, however, that Thornton had in April 1808 found himself, like Smithson, in hot water. Napoleon, placing the Hanseatic cities under his special protection, had specifically ordered the dissolution of the banking house Thornton & Power. The French secret police were convinced that the company, with branches in Paris, St. Petersburg, Constantinople, and Spain, was a cover for the English government, disbursing money to foment dissent and fund émigrés, spies, and recruiters. They speculated, too, that Thornton was illegitimate, from a disreputable branch of the family that had furnished Edward Thornton, England's minister to Hamburg. In Hamburg the police readily relieved John Thornton and his partners of any special privileges and immunities they had previously enjoyed. Thornton was denied access to his country house and found himself the object of particularly zealous scrutiny by the local authorities, who were eager to carry out Napoleon's wishes. In order to regain his country house, Thornton was ordered to renounce all relations with England. Smithson was an inevitable casualty.22
While Smithson was trapped in Hamburg, the English lurked in the waters to the north, just beyond the horizon. The coast was extensive and porous, and Napoleon, despite his conquest of northern Europe, was stretched thin, having opened up another front in the Spanish peninsula. As contraband slipped through the blockade, so too did information. English agents quietly stirred ideas of insurrection. The red-cliffed island of Heligoland, not far off the coast from Tönning, became their command center. Small boats launched frequently for the mainland, bringing papers, pamphlets, and other supplies to shopkeepers and agents throughout the north of Germany. News of Spain, news of Napoleon losing his footing infiltrated the towns; insubordination mounted, and desertions increased. The French in the summer of 1808 grew skittish and uneasy. Bourrienne in Hamburg, alarmed at the insolence of two soldiers who refused to salute their officers, ordered all who were denounced to him to be executed.23 Prisoners were a burden, especially English gentlemen prisoners. Some years earlier, in December 1803, Napoleon had decreed that all well-born détenus should be concentrated at the depot of Verdun. Smithson's handlers undoubtedly felt Verdun was the sensible place for Smithson, too. The guards continually harassed their frail, scholarly charge with the threat of an enforced march. Smithson, "vibrating between existence and the tomb," believed that being dragged off to Verdun meant certain death.
Into the breach stepped another English merchant and banker, Richard Parish. Parish's family was, like Thornton's, actively working the trade routes around Europe. They had even begun to focus on developing business in the United States, which Parish's brother David was convinced was "the only country where a person could look forward to enjoy for half a century at least, a state of tranquility and security."24 Richard Parish, as Smithson told it, "hearing of my situation was indignant at it, & answering in his person & property for my not quitting the territory of Hamburg got the guard removed." Smithson thus found himself "again at liberty to take a walk & a little air when my strength & state of health will allow of my doing so, but I still remain in the very disagreeable situation of a prisoner."25
Now able to move about some, and bolstered by the goodwill and energies of Richard Parish, Smithson made strides to help himself. Soon, in London under the sign of the Golden Bottle on Fleet Street, "postage of a packet to Heligoland" began to be charged to Smithson's accounts at Hoare's.26 His bankers finally knew his whereabouts; they funneled correspondence to him, paid his bills. They stood ready to aid his efforts to get released. Smithson, apologizing for his pathetic state—"I am so weak & my head is so confused"—penned a long letter in September 1808 to Sir Joseph Banks. He hoped that Sir Joseph would put in a good word with the Prince de Ponte Corvo, the head of the French military command in the region, as he remained "always in apprehension of their dragging me off to France." It was, however, only one element of his efforts to gain his own freedom. He did not expect, as he confided to Banks, "that it [a letter from Banks] would be sufficient for my entire release."
Smithson underestimated the strength of the international scientific community. For nigh on a decade now Banks had been laboring to keep channels of communication open between French and English men of science. Single-handedly, he had tirelessly dedicated himself to securing the safety of Royal Society members all over Europe and aiding in the release of French savants imprisoned in England. By the time Smithson wrote, Banks' efforts h
ad gained him the unshakeable admiration of the French scientific community. He had managed to secure release of the vast natural history collections amassed by the botanist La Billardiére, which had been impounded by the British after La Billardiére was detained in Java with all his scientific colleagues. He had also worked every imaginable channel to free the highly regarded French geologist Déodat de Dolomieu, whose imprisonment at Taranto on his way back to France in 1799 following Napoleon's expedition to Egypt had caused a "sensation … in the Literary world" of London.27 In 1801, when France's National Institute (the reconstituted Académie des Sciences) elected their new foreign associates, Sir Joseph Banks was the first to be chosen.
Smithson and his scientific colleagues had long decried the difficulties that the war had placed on their communications. When Lavoisier had been guillotined on May 8, 1794, his fellow scientist Joseph Louis de Lagrange had famously mourned, "It took them only an instant to cut off that head but it is unlikely that a hundred years will suffice to reproduce a similar one."28 Although it was Lavoisier's work as one of the loathed tax collectors, or fermiers généraux, that had been predominantly responsible for his sentence, his correspondence with numerous members of the Royal Society had played no small part in his condemnation "for conspiracy with the enemies of France against the people."29
Despite the dangers, scientists around the world embraced their foreign correspondence with increasing urgency amidst the complications and senselessness of war. They railed against the strictures placed on their work and reaffirmed their devotion to a higher calling—the increase of knowledge and the advancement of society as a whole. "The Sciences are never at war," the English physician Edward Jenner wrote to the French Institut around 1803. "Peace must always preside in those bosoms whose object is the augmentation of human happiness." And Faujas de St. Fond, when in 1797 he finally published his account of the trip to Staffa he had taken with Smithson back in 1784, added a little postscript. Discussing the atmosphere of cordiality at the Royal Society, he noted: "The sciences, like the muses, should be sisters, and ought to know no distinction of country or of government."30
James Smithson ardently espoused this fraternity of science. While in Kassel in 1806 he had eagerly advanced some research for the prominent French zoologist Georges Cuvier. The work gave Smithson a chance to affirm his commitment to scientific cooperation despite the fact that their countries were at war with one another. "It seems to me, Sir," he wrote to Cuvier, "that the man of genius who through his important discoveries extends the realm of the human spirit is entitled to something more than a simple and sterile admiration. … The work of savants being for all nations, they themselves should be considered citizens of the world."31 This creed, which had already sustained Smithson many years, soon took on ever more talismanic power. For it was the universal brotherhood of science in the end that finally secured Smithson his freedom.
Having received Smithson's letter, Sir Joseph Banks wrote off to the astronomer Jean-Baptiste Delambre, secretary of the French Institut, to plead "the case of James Smithson Esqr. a gentleman of property and of letters & c. and Fellow of the R. S. [Royal Society] of the class of those who labor effectively for the promotion of science." Only a few months earlier the men had been in communication regarding the plight of the French scientists François Arago and Jean-Baptiste Biot, captured in Spain while on their expedition to measure the meridian.32 Banks lamented the restrictions that the English government had recently placed on his ability to help foreign savants. "I cannot however resist cherishing the pleasing hope," he concluded, "that my friend [Smithson] will in some way or other find an amelioration of his destinies through the intercession of those who as friends of science must also be friends to him." Banks' letter was read out to the Institut in March 1809. The following month Delambre relayed Banks' "pressing letter in behalf of his friend, reminding us of the various reasons why M. Smithson is entitled to the esteem of savants," to the minister of war. The plea of clemency for this Hamburg prisoner slowly traversed its way through the halls of government. On June 19, 1809, at the Institut meeting, Delambre was pleased to read into the record the response from the minister of war. Napoleon had formally approved Smithson's release.33
Smithson was once more the master of his own person—and he seems to have audaciously tested the fullness of that liberty. Remarkably, after all that he had been through, Smithson does not appear to have taken the first boat home for England. According to Walter Johnson's review of Smithson's journals (before their destruction in the Smithsonian fire), Smithson traveled between Berlin and Hamburg in 1809. Apparently, rather than scurry home to the safety of England once he'd secured permission to travel, Smithson took one last journey on the Continent, to the city of his old friend Martin Klaproth.
Why would he possibly have undertaken any travel that might have further endangered him? Prior to his arrest he apparently toured fearlessly around much of France at a time when virtually all Englishmen were locked up in depots like Verdun. With his aristocratic bearing and his excellent French, Smithson easily passed for an émigré, as the police officer Mengaud who trailed him in 1805 attested. And he had tampered with his passport, changing the issue dates to times well after the outbreak of the war, which probably gave him a feeling of invincibility. Perhaps he felt that he traveled with the status of one protected, an Englishman who had been singled out for special treatment by the French, honored with permission to pass through enemy lands—as Humphry Davy would be with his assistant Michael Faraday in 1813, or as the American diplomat Ninian Pinkney did in 1807-8. Smithson owned the book Pinkney later penned of his tour through France "by a route never performed, made with permission of the French Government," and he may even have come across Pinkney in his travels; he Uttered the margins of the book with pointed and vitriolic criticisms that seem motivated by real personal dislike.34 Smithson had even been stopped by the French police and released. But all that travel had taken place before the shocking arrests in Tönning. Why Smithson, after having learned the terrible consequences of truly being caught up in the hurricane of war, would have taken any additional risks by traveling to Berlin remains a mystery. But it seems also to be a pretty telling measure of his self-assurance, determination, and bravado.
He traveled to Berlin at a pivotal moment in that city's cultural and intellectual history, and the events that occurred during this time may well have contributed in some way to Smithson's future dreams of a Smithsonian Institution. Berlin's French occupying forces had vacated the capital at the beginning of 1809. But the timid King Frederick William and his court were still sheepishly ruling from the relative security of Königsberg and continued to do so until the end of the year.35 Inside the parlors of the city's many intellectuals, however, the air bristled with new prospects, the stirrings of Romanticism and the birth of German nationalism. Classical Berlin was a melting pot of widely varying cultures and influences. Jewish women ran some of the most learned and prominent salons in the city; the philosophers Schleiermacher, Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel were challenging the limits of Enlightenment, laying the groundwork of their idealist philosophy; reformers were setting down the tenets of the Prussian civil code; and Schinkel and other architects were designing a modern city that drew obvious parallels with classical Greece.36 Much of the talk in this so-called Athens on the Spree was of the plan for a new university. Wilhelm von Humboldt, brother of the explorer Alexander, had recently returned from Rome to take up an appointment as head of Prussia's educational system. The German states had long been strong in learned endeavors. Humboldt's ambitious plan, however, was unlike any other. It became profoundly influential, serving as the very model of the ideal university for much of the nineteenth century, all over Europe and the United States.37
Humboldt's radical idea was to gather together all the learned societies and institutions of the capital under one umbrella. The new university at Berlin was to form part of an organic whole that would include the academy of sciences, t
he academy of arts, the observatory, the botanical garden, and the state's collections of art and of natural history. Research, for the first time, was to be included as part of the essential work of a university. Humboldt's university would be, in essence, a single, enormous foundation dedicated to the increase and diffusion of knowledge.
In the process, Humboldt envisioned that this revolutionary educational institution, this Lehranstalt, would restore Prussia's wounded pride. Officials planned to revitalize the state and counter the dominance of Napoleon's empire by cultivating German intellectual creativity. Humboldt hoped it would "exert a significant influence on all Germany."38 Once given the go-ahead, Humboldt immediately began selecting the faculty for this new enterprise. He was determined to secure the cream of each profession; he wanted his choices to show that the university would be the finest ever seen. Smithson's friend Martin Klaproth was offered a prominent role. Klaproth became the head of chemistry, a position he held until his death in 1819. Lectures had already begun by the summer of 1810, as the university took firm root. Here in Berlin Smithson had first-hand exposure to the creation of a brilliant new institutional endeavor, one intended to advance knowledge and at the same time lift the spirit and life of a country.
It is unclear when exactly Smithson made it back to England. News of Napoleon's approval of Smithson's release was read into the record at the Institut in Paris in June 1809, so it is likely that sometime in the months thereafter he was given permission to travel. Assuming he then made his improbable trip to Berlin, it may well have been close to the end of 1809 before he returned to London. By what route he returned is unknown; there are few indications of Smithson's movements in these years. His bank records remain practically the only source of information regarding his activities during this time.
The Lost World of James Smithson Page 26