It was a slip of the divine compressing machine which decreed that the treasure hidden in the hills of the British Lake District should not be diamonds but a black carbon cousin known as graphite. It may not have been useful for cutting or for dazzling, but it too was valuable in its own way. Not, in the beginning, as a drawing material, however. The big money from graphite in the sixteenth century (when it was called plumbago, blacklead or wad) was in ammunition. Rubbing a thin layer of graphite around the inside of a cannonball would make the finished missile pop out of the cast like a cooked cake from a buttered tin. It was only much later— at the end of the eighteenth century—that this oily stone was renamed “graphite” for its potential for making marks on paper.
There is a Pencil Museum in Keswick, in the heart of the Lake District, built to celebrate the area’s famous graphite deposit and its later reputation for world-class crayons. It has a mock tunnel with life-size models of miners extracting plumbago with pickaxes, a full-scale diagram of the three-hundred-year-old trunk of a Californian cedar (thousands of which are felled to keep the world producing six billion pencils a year) and even an example of the only painted pencils to be made in Britain during World War II. They were green (every other British pencil was left plain because of the war effort) and they contained silk maps and even a tiny compass hidden under the eraser, for use by airmen flying over enemy territory. They were invented by Charles Fraser-Smith, who was the inspiration for the character Q in the James Bond films. The museum is full of information, but when it came to actually locating the mine itself—which was not on my Ordnance Survey map— nobody could help. “No point in going there,” said the friendly woman at the desk. “All you’ll find is a hole in the ground.” I explained that this was exactly what I wanted. She wasn’t sure where it was, so I drove to the place where graphite was first discovered— a hamlet called Seathwaite—and then I looked around the steep fells to see what I could see.
At first it was hard to see anything: snow had fallen all morning, and the whole landscape looked like a pencil drawing—a few black lines on white. This was the wettest inhabited place in England, with 3.5 meters of rain a year, a National Trust information board told me: it was enough water to cover the board three times over. I knocked on the door of what in summer is a tearoom and in winter is closed, and a woman almost toppled off her ladder. The mines are up there, she said when she had recovered herself, and she pointed to a steep peak on the road toward another hamlet called Seatoller. “Can you see those slag heaps?” I could: they were three great white mounds in the snow that looked as if they had been made by a monster mole—but more alarmingly they seemed awfully far up. “Be careful,” she said. “You can fall a long way.”
There was an upturned tree on the path—and I looked carefully at the roots, to see whether there was any graphite shining there. One legend of Borrowdale’s graphite is that the treasure of the valley was uncovered in 1565 when a traveller noticed what seemed to be silver caught up in the roots of a storm-damaged tree. I saw nothing on my tree, but that earlier discovery caused a flurry of interest in London. Queen Elizabeth I was particularly keen to hear all about the new discovery in the Lakes, and ordered a Company of Mines Royal to be set up at Keswick, employing German miners (accustomed to working in the small Bavarian graphite mines) to tunnel into the volcanic mountain.
There is another Borrowdale legend which had caught my attention. It suggested that the earliest use of graphite was long before 1565, and it was neither for drawing nor for cannonballs, but for marking sheep. However, I wonder now whether those writers who have repeated this story had ever been to Seathwaite. Because when I arrived at the remote valley I laughed aloud. All the sheep looked as if they had been painted with gray graphite, which covered their bodies naturally in uneven markings, as if God had been absentminded with his shading. Why should people mark sheep with graphite when there were perfectly good dyes like walnut available? It would be much easier to daub a colored solution than to hold down a bleating animal and rub it with a great heavy silvery stone. But more importantly why should they do that to sheep that were already naturally marked with gray patches? Surely it was a joke told to gullible visitors which eventually, as these things do, became taken as truth. Later that night I tried painting my sheepskin slippers with a small lump of greasy graphite I had bought from the museum. It was possible but it took quite a lot of time. And my slippers weren’t wriggling.
“I’m curious about the sheep,” I said to the local farmer, when I passed him on the path. “They’re a strange color,” I elaborated. “They’re not strange, they’re beautiful,” he said, correctly. “They’re the color of these walls,” he continued, pointing at the mossy dry-stone boundaries of his land. They are called Herdwicks, and sheep like that have been in the area since the Norsemen. The tragedy, he said, is that the market thinks they’re odd too: farmers can’t sell the gray wool for as much as it costs to shear it.
To get to the plumbago slag heap I had to cross many little streams covered by the snow, and by the time I reached it my right glove was dripping with icy water and my left boot was full of brown bog. But it was worth it: there was the promised hole in the ground—not used for a hundred years or more, ever since the graphite ran out. It had not been blocked, but I didn’t go inside. It was very low—no more than a meter high—and very wet, leading to a nearly horizontal tunnel. But when I threw a stone along it, it sounded as if it were falling into an underground lake. Flanking the mine shaft were two ruined stone rooms, and (standing in one of them) I tried to imagine what had happened in this place, 250 years before. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, graphite was worth hundreds of thousands of pounds—and a considerable defense advantage—to the English Treasury, and the operations of the mine were kept as secret as if it were a military base. At one time there were plenty of mysterious comings and goings around this desolate place—which was open for only about seven weeks a year (and at the end of the seventeenth century it was closed for several decades) to keep the international price of graphite high. Armed security guards used to stand in those two rooms, forcing the men to strip and allow their clothes to be examined at the end of each shift to check they weren’t concealing valuable nuggets. Wad was worth the equivalent of £1,300 a ton, and some people felt it was worth risking a whipping to smuggle it out.
Some of the thieves became legends in their own lifetimes— one woman who became known as Black Sal was one of the most efficient wad smugglers in the Lakes, although myth has it she was hunted to death by the mine owner’s wolfhounds. And a man called William Hetherington resourcefully opened a small copper mine on the same mountain in 1749, with a secret passage leading straight to the wad.10 He was lucky—had he been caught three years later he might never have seen Borrowdale again. In 1751 there was a particularly violent showdown between the guards and one especially notorious gang of smugglers, who were stealing the modern equivalent of about £150,000 a year. The following year Parliament passed an act decreeing that anyone caught in possession of illegal graphite could face a year’s hard labor, or be transported into slavery in the colonies.
Although the war industry was where the big money was, some graphite was always used for drawing. The Keswick museum reports how in 1580 Borrowdale graphite was being sent to the “Michelangelo School of Art in Italy” (Michelangelo died in 1564, but that evidently didn’t deter an art school from taking his name). The artists would wrap the graphite with string or wool: it was too brittle to hold in the hand and nobody thought of putting it in a hollow stick of wood until the seventeenth century. By the time of the Napoleonic wars the British army was using dry sand to cast its bullets, and graphite became less important. But, curiously, just as it started being more useful in art than in war, blacklead was to be the cause of a different row between the British and the French. It is not a well-known feud, but I like to think of it as the War of the Pencil.
The battle lines were drawn, so to speak, in 1794,
when a Frenchman called Nicolas Conté was asked to find a substitute for the English pencil. Inventors had spent years trying (and failing) to stop the British near-monopoly on pencils, but Conté managed it in just eight days. He took low-quality graphite—which could be sourced in France—and found a way of powdering it and mixing it with clay so that not only could it do justice to the sketches of the most prestigious French artists, like the portraitist Jacques-Louis David, for example, but it could also be made in different grades of softness. It is ironic that Conté, whose inventions included hot-air balloons for military reconnaissance, should best be remembered for the humble pencil. Although he probably would have been pleased: his first job, before the French Revolution in 1789, was as an artist.
The grading system came later, but it is because of Conté’s discovery that today we can select our pencils depending on how much clay was used in the recipe. In English the grades are given in Hs and Bs. H refers to hardness while B is a measure of a pencil’s “blackness.” The more Hs there are, up to a maximum of 9H, the lighter the pencil mark and the easier to erase, while 9B pencils have the least clay, and are the most satisfying for smudgy sketching. HB is traditionally the middle grade.
Within thirty years of Conté’s invention there were pencil factories all over Europe.11 England’s first pencil factory opened in Cumbria in around 1792, although the management must have been furious at having to buy all their graphite in London, as the mine owners insisted that everything had to go through their London warehouse and then be sold at auction on the first Monday of every month.
The next challenge to world pencil dominance was also from a Frenchman: and it started unexpectedly in 1847 beside an icy river in Siberia. Jean-Pierre Alibert was looking for gold that morning, although probably the twenty-seven-year-old merchant was looking for anything that might help pay for the mad expedition he had embarked on. I wonder what it was that—as his pan came up once again from the streambed with no buttery nuggets in its mesh— made him look again at the smoothed and rounded black pebbles that had washed in instead. Could it be that he knew this was a rare formation of carbon, and that it was valuable? Perhaps he recognized it from some half-forgotten geology class, but I like to think that on this particular morning the Siberian sunshine caught on the edge of the graphite and made it shine like precious metal.
Certainly the experience was startling enough to force him to divert his group by 430 mountainous kilometers as he followed the river back to the deposit. His determination was rewarded, and at a place called Botogol Peak, Alibert found the world’s richest seam of blacklead, just a graphite pebble’s throw from the Chinese border. English scientists reluctantly conceded that it was as good as the Borrowdale supply, which had almost run out. French scientists, naturally enough, testified that it was much better, and the Americans agreed.
Suddenly everyone wanted “Chinese” pencils. It was therefore a brilliant marketing move a few decades later when mass-produced pencils in America began to be painted bright yellow. They copied the color of Manchu imperial robes, and symbolized the romance of the Orient, while suggesting that the pencils came from that valuable Alibert mine, even though they probably did not. Most pencils made in the United States are still painted yellow today, even though Siberian graphite has not been used for years. Alibert began to mine a kind of gold that day, even though it was not quite in the form he had expected.
INK
Pencils are all very well, but our Corinthian artist would probably have rejected graphite. She was, we can assume, not out for profit but for permanence, and she was most likely looking for a nice stable ink instead of a fickle charcoal or an erasable pencil. Ink would be far more symbolic of the longevity of her love and, of course, would also be particularly useful for writing letters to her sailor on his foreign travels.
Nobody knows when ink was first discovered, but scholars tend to agree that it was already well established in both China and Egypt (as well as plenty of places in between) by about four thousand years ago. The Biblical Joseph—he of the multicolored coat—was viceroy of Egypt in around 1700 BC. He was able to manage all those famines and other agricultural crises only with the help of a huge city of scribes to record everything and send letters—written in the cursive or “hieratic” version of hieroglyphics— which would be posted by teams of runners. Each Egyptian clerk had two kinds of ink—red and black—which they used to carry around in pots set into portable desks. The black was made of soot, mixed with gum to make it stick to the papyrus.
Chinese ink—also known, confusingly, as Indian ink—is also made mainly of soot, and the best of it is made when a pine log, or oil, or lacquer resin, or even the lees of wine, have been burned. One vivid description from ancient China12 is of hundreds of small earthenware oil lamps enclosed in a bamboo screen to keep out the breeze. Every half an hour or so, workers would remove the soot from the lamp funnels, using feathers. When I first read about the feathers I thought the manufacturing process sounded delightfully flouncy, but actually it must have been a nasty smoky job, which would have left treacherous carbon deposits on the lungs of every employee.
When this ink meets dampened blotting paper it doesn’t leak into the kind of multicolored spider’s webs we see with modern fountain-pen inks13—in fact the ink must not leak at all, since Chinese paintings are stretched onto scrolls by wetting them. And yet, conceptually, for Chinese artists a thousand years ago, black ink did contain all the colors, just as in Zen philosophy a grain of rice contains the whole world. The Daoist classic text, the Dao De Jing (Tao Te Ching), warns that dividing the world into the five colors (black, white, yellow, red and blue) would “blind the eye” to true perception. The message is that we would all think so much more clearly if we didn’t divide the world at all.
The Daoists were reacting to a strict Confucian world, of course, where everything was separated into neat categories. The Confucians would define a cup by what it looked like, the Daoists by the nothing in the middle, because without that it wouldn’t be a cup. So in terms of colors, the greatest of artists should be able to make a peacock seem iridescent, or a peach seem pink, without using any colored pigments at all, and in that way they would get closer to understanding its true nature. By the time of the Tang dynasty this is exactly what the amateur artists were trying to do. Colors were for professional painters—who were rather sneered upon by the elite, as creating something necessary but vulgar. Black, on the other hand, was for the gentleman artists, who combined the skills of poetry and painting, and who wanted to portray the landscape of the mind, not of the eye. Unfortunately none of the Tang monochrome paintings has survived—but during the Southern Song dynasty in the thirteenth century this became quite a mainstream artistic theory, and there are plenty of examples from this period. One of the most precious paintings in the National Palace Museum collection in Taipei is a monochrome scroll painting by the thirteenth-century landscape painter Xia Gui.14 It is called Remote View of Streams and Hills, and I love it because like so many so-called “scholar’s paintings” it is much more than a landscape: it is a mental journey. You can’t try to pretend you are really looking at hills and streams from some kind of remote vantage point. Because as your eyes move along the eight-meter-long scroll the viewpoint keeps changing and sometimes you are above the landforms and sometimes below them, as if you are soaring on the wings of a crane or an apsara—a Chinese angel. It doesn’t matter what the colors are: angels (or probably cranes) do not divide the world into colors anyway.
This monochrome philosophy can be summed up in an anecdote about Su Dongpo, an infamous scholar-artist living in the eleventh century. He created marvellous paintings and poems, but he also left a mythology of endearing misadventures. Tales of Su Dongpo sometimes read like wise fables of a naughty innocent. Once, for example, Su was criticized for painting a picture of a leafy bamboo using red ink. Not realistic, his critics said gleefully. “Then what color should I have used?” he asked. “Black, of course,”
came the answer.
Another time Su Dongpo (who apparently ate three hundred lychees a day, and once announced that he liked living next to a cattle farm as it meant he would never get lost because he could always follow the cow pats home) was experimenting with making ink. According to legend, he was so enthusiastic in his endeavor (and in his wine-drinking) that he almost burned down his house. “Soot from poets’ burned homes” was not something he wanted added to the litany of ink recipe ingredients, although it has something of the whimsical about it, and I am sure he would have been wryly amused by the idea.
From early times both the Persians and the Chinese thought it was desirable to have ink that not only travelled seductively across the paper, but which also smelled wonderful. So they would add perfumes, to make writing the sensual experience that scholars deserved. Sometimes recipes for ink read like the random elements of a love poem: cloves, honey, locusts, the virgin pressing of olives, powdered pearl, scented musk, rhinoceros horn, jade, jasper, as well as, of course—most poignant and most common—that exquisite smoke of pine trees in autumn. Of all the luxury ingredients they probably needed the musk most: sometimes the binding glue was from rhino horn or yak skin, but sometimes it was from fish intestines, as it sometimes still is, and in its raw state it must have been horribly smelly.
The oak and the oak galls (1640)
Another kind of medieval ink was made in the spring, by a wasp. The female Cynips quercus folii is notable for her unusual nest-making—puncturing a home for her eggs in the soft young buds of the oak tree. The tree quite naturally protests at the invasion and forms little nutlike growths around the wasp holes, and it is these protective oak galls which (when collected before the wasp eggs hatch) form the basis of an intense black. It was used throughout Europe from at least medieval times, and the process was probably learned from the Arabs, who used it for ink, clothes dyeing and some mascara. It contains tannin—a highly astringent, acidic substance found in many plants, although rarely in such concentrated form as in nut galls—and the recipe can also be replicated with tea leaves. The Prado Museum in Madrid owns two small ink sketches by Goya which demonstrate the difference between iron and soot inks. And a Pity You Aren’t Interested in Something Else shows a woman holding a water jar, stopping to flirt with somebody just out of the frame. The Egg Vendor shows a courageous young woman striding across the country with her egg basket, stopping for nothing, not even bandits, certainly not flirtation. This one was made with Indian ink and it has a much finer definition—almost like charcoal, with a dryness to it. The first was sketched with iron gall ink: it is much softer, as if it had been soaked in the contents of the girl’s water jar.
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