The Map That Changed the World

by Simon Winchester

  He would perhaps have gained considerable insight had he found a copy of An Inquiry into the Original State and Formation of the Earth by John Whitehurst, which was popular enough to have two editions, in 1778 and 1786. Though the book put great emphasis in Derbyshire (still one of the counties most useful to teachers of geology, and so swarming each year with students, equipped with magnifying glass, compass, perhaps a now-environmentally-incorrect bottle of hydrochloric acid, and an Estwing hammer), it laid out a more general program that Smith himself would follow, almost to the letter:

  It is my intention to have deposited specimens of each stratum, with its productions, in the British Museum, arranged in the same order above each other as they are in the earth; being persuaded that such a plan would convey a more perfect idea of the subterraneous geography, and of the various bodies enclosed in the earth, than words or lines could possibly express.

  But we have little clear idea of his reaction to anything he discovered. Would Whitehurst have inspired him right away? Or would he have been depressed on reading it, suspecting that he had rivals? Would he have been dejected to read Christopher Packe’s 1743 description of the geology of Kent, his so-called Philosophico-chorographical Chart, since the author insisted that his was “a real scheme, taken on the spot with patience and diligence.” Or by The Course and Phenomena of Earthquakes, published in 1760 by the Reverend John Michell, who took Strachey’s rolled-up-papers view of the world and,

  bending them up together into a ridge in the middle, conceive[d] them to be reduced again to a level surface, by a plane so passing through them as to cut off all the part that has been raised; let the middle now be raised again a little, and this will be a representation of most, if not all large tracts of mountainous countries.

  Would he have been dejected by such thoughts and such writings? Intimidated? Apparently not in the slightest. Indeed, he seemed almost smug. “Although several authors had noticed the thickness of some strata in succession in various parts of the country, their resemblance to others was never noticed—none were collated, and for want of comparisons there could not be any reasonings on the subject [emphasis added].” By the time he had left London and was back at Rugborne readying himself to set out for the Bath post-chaise terminus, he was displaying a remarkable equanimity. No such observations as he had made, he wrote, had ever been placed on record. At least—not yet, and not in England.

  Yet as the party trotted off northward from Bath, he still steadfastly kept his own counsel. He was, he would later write, overjoyed to be going on the journey. It would go everywhere he wanted—they would pass northeastward through the English Midlands up to Leeds and York, along the east coast up to Newcastle-upon-Tyne (where there were no planned canals—none north of Leeds, in fact). Then, after a brief halt in an inn, they would cross back over the Pennines and head home via Lancashire and Shropshire and the borders with Wales. Perkins and Palmer sat inside the carriage, chatting endlessly about the possibilities for profit: They were interested only in using the tour to find out more about the mining and carrying of coal—Samborne Palmer was a landowner and suspected his estates contained abundant riches, if only they could be transported to market swiftly and cheaply.

  But Smith, though professionally interested in all matters flammable, had grander designs. He sat invariably out in the open, perched beside the driver and his blunderbuss-equipped guard* constantly scanning the horizon, continually asking to be allowed to get down and flail away at some roadside exposure “with the small hammer he seemed always to keep with him,” as his nephew was later to write, and to bring specimens of rocks, fossils, crystal, and minerals back into the coach with him.

  “The slow driving up the steep hills,” he noted in his diary,

  afforded me distinct views of the nature of the rocks. Rushy pastures on the slopes of the hills, the rivulets and kinds of trees all aided in defining the intermediate clays. And while occasionally walking to bridges, locks and other works on the lines of the canal, more particular observations could be made.

  Outwardly he was there for Perkins, Palmer, and the Somerset Canal Company. But “the most important [of my interests] I pursued unknown to them; though I was continually talking about rocks and other strata, they seemed not desirous of knowing the guiding principles.”

  More than likely the couple thought of him as a fusty old bore, and laughed at him a little from behind their Woodstock gloves. But it has to remembered too that people, especially those older than Smith and the small army of similarly curious and inventive younger people who were coming to the fore in the England of these times, were likely to be as much perplexed as wearily amused.

  Their world that had seemed so stable for so long was now changing all too rapidly, and men like Palmer and Perkins only half understood what was happening. They might have recognized in their strange companion what some of today’s middle-aged recognize in the young electronics visionaries—that Smith was a man who, though part of their world, still had a view that was somehow much larger than theirs, that he had firm sight of a future that he somehow knew was better, as well as being a future that was definably different and, most crucially, utterly unlike the world of the present. William Smith knew that he stood on the edge of something; and that knowledge, that certainty, set him somehow apart and made other, more ordinary men uneasy.

  They crossed the Cotswolds, put down at Tetbury, and again at the head of the river Thames, and took time (as Smith had already done with Edward Webb) to see the huge canal tunnel at Sapperton (because the initial plans for the coal canal called for a long tunnel to be built near Combe Hay). They looked at the Kingsnorth Tunnel on the Worcester & Birmingham Canal—Palmer remarking disdainfully (according to Smith’s diary) that the young surveyor spent an unduly long time inspecting the walls of the tunnels, gazing intently at the rocks through which they had been bored, hammering bits from the sides, and taking away fossils and samples until the coach groaned under their weight.

  They passed on through Derby and Ripley, dropped in to look at the great palace of the dukes of Devonshire at Chatsworth, went on to Matlock; and at Lord Fitzwilliam’s mine at Hisley Wood, Smith and Dr. Perkins were lowered deep into the pit in a basket, suspended as at High Littleton from a quintainlike crossbar worked by a steam engine. And then at Leeds, at the outer edge of the Yorkshire coalfield, from which point north there were no more canals, they decided to transmute themselves into tourists and visit the three cathedral towns of York, Durham, and Newcastle, and thereafter call it a day.

  Some like to say that it was high in the tower of York Minster that Smith first broke his silence and told his traveling companions about his bold ideas. There is little hard evidence for this, but it makes for a compelling tale—written most recently as fiction in a remarkable book, The Floating Egg, by a keenly original Yorkshire geologist named Roger Osborne.

  According to his account the three men climb the 290 steps from the nave to the top of the tower—Smith bounding ahead, the others panting damply and having to pause to catch their breath on the transept roof. When finally they reach the top, where there is a view for thirty miles in each direction, they find the young Smith standing transfixed as if in a dream, bright eyed with obvious excitement, caught in the headlights of a remarkable idea. They ask him what excites him.

  “You see those hills, Mr. Palmer?”

  “I do.”

  “You may not know it, but it is possible from their contours, the lack of trees, and their general appearance to say they are made of chalk.’

  “That is a remarkable skill. I congratulate you—”

  “No, no, that is not the point.” His impatience with me was perhaps necessary and I tolerated it. “It is the pattern that is everything.”

  “I see,” I said, though I confess I did not.

  “You remember the canal at Kingsnorth, and the locks to the north of Birmingham?” He was animated now, as if excited himself by the words he was saying.

  �
��I remember them well.”

  “The rock they passed through was a kind of red marl and sandstone mixed up.”

  “I remember you saying so at the time.”

  “In each case it lay as unconformable cover to the coal measures.”

  “What exactly does that mean?”

  “It lies over them, but there is an interruption between the beds, that is all. Just as at the colliery at High Littlejohn [sic], and all over Somerset.”

  “I see.”

  “And then we came on to the limestone of the Lias, in Derbyshire and here in Yorkshire, just as in the Cotteswold Hills.”

  I must have looked a little confused at this, as Mr. Smith saw the need to explain further. He grasped my hands and held them flat and horizontal between his.

  “The rock strata are formed like this, the oldest beneath and the youngest on top.”

  “Yes, I know that much.” I might have been annoyed at him, but his enthusiasm was a pleasant tonic.

  “Now, everywhere we have been, the rocks have tended to dip like this—” he twisted our hands slightly “—toward the south-east.”

  “I understand.”

  “So that when the top is levelled off, at the surface of the ground—” Smith slid our hands in their diagonal aspect so that the edges of them made a flat surface “—the oldest rocks are to the north-west and the youngest to the south-east.”

  We both looked at our hands for a moment or two; then became a little embarrassed and dropped them. Mr. Smith looked out across the country, and seemed in danger of reentering his private world.

  “And the chalk, Mr. Smith?”

  “Ah yes, the chalk, Mr. Palmer. The chalk, you see, is the youngest yet. If this pattern is true—if it repeated all over the kingdom—then to the south and east of the Lias limestone and the red sandstone and the coal, there must always be chalk. And there,” he pointed to the eastern horizon again, as if to keep the vision of the hills alive, “as on the downs of Wiltshire and Hampshire, is the chalk, Mr. Palmer.”

  “Then you are to be congratulated on a notable discovery, Mr. Smith.”

  The day of that visit to the thousand-year-old minster goes unrecorded, by Palmer, by Perkins, and by the historians of the great church. Smith himself makes the briefest mention—“from the top of York Minster I could see that the Wolds contained chalk in their contour”—a remark that allows what Roger Osborne suggests to sound more than plausible. It further allows his solid and reliably old-fashioned Mr. Samborne Palmer to write in his supposed diary that for this reason, that unremembered day on the tower of the greatest church in northern England, remains the birthday of the science of stratigraphy. We do not know the precise date; but we do know that the event took place, and that, with Smith at last revealing his theories to two members of the more general public, the science he had for months been on the brink of creating was now announced, and so now existed.

  The word stratigraphy itself was not to appear in print for another seventy years, and that in a description of Smith’s own work. The word stratigraphical, however, was to appear a good deal sooner—in 1817, in fact—and it did so as the title of a book by Smith, in which he expatiated on the ideas he first conceived in High Littleton, which possibly—just possibly—he first made public on that cool and windy late summer’s day, two hundred feet on top of the great cathedral in the city of York.

  And here in the narrative certain fact takes over once again from supposition. The diaries and the memoirs offer fragments from the journey. The trio made a few more northward miles, with Smith now fully confident of his thesis and eagerly and loudly proclaiming his observations and thoughts to all who would listen. His diary interweaves as diaries do the trivial with the profound. He notes how they dined on “pine-apples at the Black Swan,” but that when they left town next morning, how geologically similar were the Hambleton Hills to the Cotswolds, three hundred miles back to the southwest; how there were cliffs of the familiar red marl near Thirsk; how there was a yellow limestone lying unconformably above the coal at Ferryhill and Piercebridge; and yet how in Harrogate, newly opened as a fashionable spa, Dr. Perkins was persuaded to take “a nauseous draft of sulphur-water as we sat in the chaise.”

  By the end of September the party was back in Bath, and Smith, invigorated and brimming with ideas, settled himself down to the making of the canal. However, matters did not turn out exactly as he had hoped. The engineering work turned out to be very trying, his masters proved exacting, and though by the very nature of his work he was suffused with the geology of the region, he found he had no time to think, to assemble the broader picture. What he had hoped would be an intellectually stimulating time he found to be frustrating. He was obliged, he wrote, to suspend temporarily “my much wished-for opportunity…to make an accurate delineation of the stratification throughout England.”

  However, he was able to mitigate what he thought of as his stratigraphical impotence with the pleasures of burgeoning economic success. Within months of coming back from his tour, he left his rooms at Rugborne Farm and took a lease on the central house in a small and elegant Georgian crescent on the hills just outside and overlooking the city of Bath itself. He was now being paid well—a guinea a day plus traveling expenses—and he had few outgoings and no family to support. He was able to dress as befitted a gentleman of the time, and to engage in a modest round of social events—though so far as can be gathered from his diaries, he tended to restrict himself to the gentleman-scientists of the town, the divines and the antiquaries and the men of odd enthusiasms.

  He had no eye for art, no ear for music, he was not socially confident enough to venture to the salons and the tearooms, and he resisted all temptation to become a fop, a dandy, or a dilettante. He was an engineer, a surveyor, a man of minerals and, as he saw it, of great scientific ideas. He was content simply to work with the canal excavators, who called at his house each day in response to advertisements he had placed in the Bath Chronicle, and to travel with them to superintend the painstaking, inch-by-inch digging of the works; and he was then happy to come home and gaze from his windows at a prospect that clearly pleased:

  From this point the eye roved anxiously over the interesting expanse which extended before me to the Sugarloaf Mountain in Monmouthshire, and embraced all the vicinities of Bath and Bristol; then did a thousand thoughts occur to me respecting the geology of that and the adjacent districts continually under my eye.

  The city of Bath is of course very proud to have had William Smith as a resident, and in 1926 it unveiled a plaque to him. Local worthies explained why the city had so eminently suited him. “Of all the countries with which I am acquainted, no one is so interesting to the geologist as the vicinity of Bath, because in no other are so many strata exposed to view,” said one. And another:

  I need not elaborate the physical circumstances which favour the student of geology in Bath; besides the water supply, hot and cold, the steep cliffs and hillsides with their quarries of building stone, the neighbouring coal measures and the canals. Within easy riding distance are outcrops of the stratified rocks from the Silurian to the Upper Cretaceous, those to the east displaying a regular and obvious succession, those to the west disturbed by unconformities and faults.

  Stimulating and fashionable though the city might be, Smith evidently chafed—either at the daily commute by horseback to the digging sites, or because of a more general longing for the rural life to which he was so accustomed. With a year of leasing the house in Cottage Crescent* he had taken semipermanent rooms in the old Swan Inn at Dunkerton, which is right on the route of the canal (and also where the Roman road, the Fosse Way, crosses the canal’s route; and where the new cuttings revealed a Jurassic passage, the transition from the Lias in the west of the village, to the inferior oolite, and the limestones of which all Bath is made).

  And then, eighteen months or so later still, the restless Mr. Smith moved yet again. For sixteen hundred pounds—three hundred paid as cash, the rest borrow
ed on a mortgage that was to have the direst of consequences for him many years down the line—he bought his first-ever property, a small and exceptionally pretty estate known as the Tucking Mill.

  There has been some confusion as to exactly which house it was he bought. The two-story Tucking Mill Cottage, with its unusual Gothic sash windows, that stands on the narrow, leafy road between Midford and Monkton Combe—and that has a memorial tablet in its front wall saying that Smith once lived there—seems not to be it. Instead, shrouded by trees to the east of this house is a much plainer and more severe structure, the Tucking Mill House. A tiny brook separates the two properties and, as it happens, this same brook divides two parishes—the one to the west where the tableted cottage stands is the parish of South Stoke, while that with the unmarked, plainer house is the parish of Monkton Combe. And a search of the tax returns shows that it was property in the Monkton Combe parish, owned by a Mr. E. Candler, that Smith bought in March 1798. He must, therefore, have owned the house. A little local controversy still simmers, suggesting that the plaque be moved, in satisfaction of historical accuracy, if not necessarily in the interests of local real estate prices.

  Tucking Mill—currently wrongly identified (by a plaque, still visible at the bottom right hand of the house) as Smith’s home.

  In any event it could hardly be more appropriate than for Smith to live in a Tucking Mill. Tucking is the old word for “fulling,” which is the process whereby wool is scoured, beaten, and cleansed of the lanolin grease with which sheep make themselves warm and waterproof. The substance used to wash the raw wool is to be found, uniquely, in the very Jurassic strata that Smith was slicing through with his canal—a clay, found in the Middle Jurassic between the inferior and the great oolites, and known as fuller’s earth. It is a strange claylike rock, rich in a hydrous aluminum silicate mineral known as smectite, which happens to have the ability to absorb oil. To live in a house that is named after a process in which geology plays an essential part brings a fine symmetry to William Smith’s living condition, and one that almost certainly contributed to his eagerness to buy the house in the first place.