The Map That Changed the World

by Simon Winchester

  He was by now fast building up an impressive circle of friends and was winning commissions that would take him clear across the British Isles, satisfying his goading urge to travel, to keep moving. The Bath Agricultural Society was the key: Its membership reflected the extraordinary reputation of the region for comfort, beauty, wealth, and style, and it exposed Smith to a range of men of money, leisure, divinity, and science, as well as to men of the same kind of rudely practical bent as himself.

  Each group of men was peculiarly useful to him. The gentleman amateurs, the fossil collectors, and the natural philosophers who invited him to their vicarages and country cottages encouraged him in his studies and helped him with his ideas. The practical men, the coal borers and drainage engineers and well sinkers he met, taught him new techniques and allowed him to make the best use of his time in the field. But it was really the aristocrats, the members of the landed gentry, who at this stage in his life were to provide him with both the work and an entrée into ever-widening network of influence.

  There now came a sudden acceleration in William Smith’s ambitions and desires, and central to this change were the brief friendships he enjoyed with three famous men of the day: Thomas Coke of Holkham, the duke of Bedford, and Sir Joseph Banks. Considering Smith’s later belief, when he was imprisoned and in trouble, that it was the English aristocracy that had treated him badly, and that his humble beginnings had counted heavily against him in a society so class-obsessed as nineteenth-century England, it has to be remembered that the nobility assisted mightily in bringing his early ideas to fruition. His early sponsors were indeed members of the English upper class, writ large.

  The chain of introductions to these sponsors was brought about by way of Smith’s unusual expertise not with rocks or fossils, but with water.

  Canals, with which Smith now had a good deal of experience, are essentially enormous and elongated repositories of water. They are not rivers: The water in them does not have a natural source, does not flow from one end to the other, and is not continually refreshed from a spring. All is artifice, a complex and cumbersome arrangement of planning and engineering that allows a very large body of water to exist in a series of deep horizontal chambers along which vessels may glide, passing uphill and downhill by way of long cascades of locks, in order to move goods, or people, or to undertake commerce.

  It is central to the design of any canal that it retain its water as best it can, since water is costly and has to be brought into the canal from rivers or lakes or purpose-built reservoirs. Smith came to know very well—almost uncannily, his admirers said—just how to route a canal so that it lost as little water as possible. He saw to it that wherever practicable it passed over beds of impermeable rock—and in those places where it did not, that its bed and banks were lined and proofed so that the water standing inside stayed where it was.

  In accumulating what would later become his nationally known expertise in keeping water where it needed to be, and removing it from where it shouldn’t be—William Smith came into sudden demand by farmers, who saw in his skill a way for them to turn their profitless marshes into workable farmland. Up to this point he had been known for his skills as a surveyor and a cartographer; now he was changing, chameleonlike, with the addition of this new and very marketable skill, into the unglamorous but, to postenclosure England, essential figure of a drainage engineer.

  Recognition of his growing mastery was one reason why the chairman of the canal company, James Stephens, had in 1799 hired Smith to help him drain his own farmland. No matter that Stephens had fired Smith from the canal that very June: So bad was the rainfall that autumn, and so uselessly boggy did the Stephens family farm become, and so in need of employment was Smith himself, that a deal was struck—in which Smith was paid to drain, dredge, and dike the Stephens fields for the highly respectable rate of two or sometimes even three guineas a day. And Smith, clearly burying his pride, worked well: The Stephens farm was promptly drained, any number of cuts and culverts were made and pipes and bores laid, and the farmland was made ideally suited for agriculture for years to come.

  This was the time of the “improving farmer”—of the agriculturist who, now that the enclosure acts had brought some sanity to the fields of England, was intent on making as much as possible from the land he worked, by using newfangled fertilizers, by mixing soils, by judicious draining projects, by breeding new strains, and by sculpting the land and creating new environments. Thomas Crook, a typical improving farmer of the day, who lived in the Wiltshire village of Tytherington, saw what Smith had done to the Stephens farm nearby, and hired Smith to do much the same for him a year later.* And then, once the drainage work was successfully completed, Crook invited for an inspection tour the man who is quite probably still regarded as the greatest agriculturist of his or of any age—Thomas William Coke of Holkham, or as the Prince Regent later liked to have him known (since Coke took the title with great reluctance) the Earl of Leicester. For Smith the meeting presented an opportunity of inestimable value.

  Coke of Holkham, as he was generally known, was a man with initially no practical knowledge of farming—he simply owned farms, placed tenants in them, and lived off the rental income. But in 1788 one of his tenants refused to renew his lease, and Coke decided that, rather than let the land lie fallow, he would make an attempt to farm it himself. Since he knew so little he took the radical step of organizing a huge seminar, which he called a sheepshearing, and to which he invited all the local farmers and practical men and landowners so that they could inspect his land, crops, and livestock, and make recommendations. The event was enormously useful to him and, since he laid on huge lunches and dinners and had experts offer speeches and demonstrations, great fun for those who came.

  In due course his own farm flourished. He experimented with new soils and fertilizers, he replaced the normal Norfolk crop of rye with wheat; he decided to buy and crossbreed sheep, and to introduce into his fields large numbers of sturdy, fat, wool-covered animals that would replace the scrawny, doglike specimens with which Norfolk was then usually populated. He bred Suffolk pigs with Neapolitans, and within two years was producing massive porkers that delighted markets and trenchermen alike. The sheepshearings—known across the land (and through much of farming Europe) as Coke’s Clippings—became hugely popular: One of them, held in the early summer of 1818, attracted seven thousand people, with Coke offering hospitality to more than six hundred in Holkham Hall, no matter what their rank, station, or nationality.

  Thomas Coke’s reputation rests today largely on the outward appearance of his great farms, and on the now-widespread knowledge of his techniques of breeding and feeding. What is not so often recalled, about Coke, nor indeed about any of the other great improving farmers of the day, is that almost all these men, before they sowed a single seed or bred a single animal, had first to prepare their lands.

  Before the enclosure acts, English land was in a hopeless mess. Unfarmed, the newly enclosed fields were still merely boggy patchworks of mud and sedge, with barely any meadows suitable for workers to work them with plows and seed drills. Very few of the new estates were unencumbered by piles of rocks or clumps of trees. Fewer still, more important, were properly drained.

  The enclosure acts changed all that, by prompting the newly empowered owners to recognize the need for efficiency and careful husbandry, to come to grips with their individual agricultural shortcomings, and to begin shaping the tidy and mannered English countryside that we see today—fields laid out neatly, sedge trimmed back, bogs all drained. The fact that all is so impeccably and memorably attractive today stems in great part from the work of men like William Smith, who were called in by landowners like Coke to change out of all recognition the appearance of their vast acreages.

  William Smith was called in to Holkham specifically because the work there was difficult, and because he had evidently been so successful in performing drainage work on the canal, as well as for Stephens and for Crook. In Norfolk he
was asked to dry out the huge flat fields that stood beside the North Sea shore, to make productive the salt marshes that lay behind the dunes, to channel a network of wayward rivers, to dredge and drain and otherwise hydraulically improve the lands. His work remains intact today—hundreds of adequately dry and highly productive flatland acres that surround what is now recognized as one of England’s most enchanting stately homes.

  A year after Smith had accepted the commission, and at about the time he was coloring his geological discoveries on the Cary maps of England, Thomas Coke introduced him to one of those figures of whom Lloyd George was later to be so rudely disapproving—the vastly wealthy and hugely influential Francis Russell, the fifth duke of Bedford. “Deficient in wit and imagination” though he may have been regarded (by Emma Louise Radford, who wrote his entry in the Dictionary of National Biography), the duke was a great agriculturist,* and his enormous estates at Woburn—now a three-thousand-acre deer park for tourists, with nine species of especially adorable animals—were made into a model farm along Coke’s lines, and supported vast herds of cattle and flocks of sheep.

  The Duke’s four-day sheep-shearings were so popular as to make even those at Holkham look like village fetes: thousands came, and there were ploughing contests and cattle sales, wool auctions and dances, and banquets for many more hundreds than even the Earl of Leicester could afford. “To see a Prince of the Blood Royal and many great Lords sit down to the same table,” wrote Arthur Young,†one of those who went, “and partake of the conversation of the farmer and the breeder; to see all animated in the spirit of improvement, and listening with delight to the favoured topic of the plough, is a spectacle worthy of Britain, and in her blest isle alone to be beheld.”

  A suitably massive oil painting survives, by the noted animal artist George Garrard, of the great shearing held at Woburn in 1804. Partly a record, partly an allegory, it shows eighty-eight “agricultural personalities” grouped around the base of a massive limestone column capped by the “Ship of Commerce.” The duke is there, top-hatted and, suitable to both his gravitas and dignitas, the only figure on a horse. Around him are the great and the good of the English rural universe: smocked farmers and shepherds, impeccably dressed gentleman farmers, roughly dressed blacksmiths and farriers, men fat and thin, jolly and severe, ill-born and noble, of practical or professional appearance, all busy in conversation, or gazing in rapt attention at the tups being shorn in a pen before them, or at the elongate cattle standing patiently at center stage.

  Garrard’s painting seems to show that, despite this being June, the shearing was held on a wild and cloudy day. The buildings in the background are severe and practical, all stables, byres, and dairies, and none of the Inigo Jones–designed masterpieces in which his grace lived (as a lifelong bachelor) visible. To judge by the trees alone it is a very English painting: One of them is an age-gnarled oak—perhaps the very tree, which still stands at Woburn to this day, where a Cistercian abbot, one Hobbs, was hanged in the sixteenth century for making (according to the court records) “treasonable utterances” against the king. It was his supposed crime that led to his abbey being confiscated and handed to the determinedly Protestant Russell family, which has lived there ever since. Of such events, William Smith may have thought, has England’s aristocracy been made.

  For Smith was there, and he is included both in Garrard’s painting and in an aquatint engraving the artist made seven years later. He is only barely discernible, however—still regarded as only a peripheral member of the ducal elite. He is just visible on the picture’s upper left, amid a crowd of others of equal honor and distinction: a bluff-looking man of middle height, wearing a black broad-brimmed hat, looking away, barely recognizable. The artist helps by providing us with a key: his figure is shown as number 10, against which is written the simple and almost vaguely insulting rubric, damnation with the faintest of praise: “Mr. Smith,” says the note. “The drainer.”

  Matters of rank and propriety probably meant little enough to Smith at this stage in his career: He was as close to nobility and power as an Oxfordshire countryman could expect to be. And besides, the links he had forged in the brief time since his removal from the canal company—from James Stephens to Thomas Crook, from the Thomas Coke to the duke of Bedford—were proving both profitable and, as it happened, enormously useful. Moreover, further links in the chain were to be forged through his passing acquaintance with the duke: Not only did he meet and present his card—“Wm. Smith, Surveyor and Drainer”—to still more noblemen, like the duke of Manchester, the earl of Thanet, Lords Talbot and Somerville—but he also engaged his first apprentice, the first man who became a geologist as a direct result of working for Smith.

  This was the duke of Bedford’s land steward, John Farey—a figure who would champion his mentor’s work, play a vitally important role in his affairs, and lead him still further into a world of influence and connection that would enable him, finally, to produce and present the great map that would render him famous.

  The story of John Farey (and his own introduction of Smith to one further world-renowned figure who would become the map’s greatest and most influential patron) belongs properly a little later in the tale—except in one respect. For when the two men first met, at Woburn in October 1801, William Smith had something to show him.

  Benjamin Richardson’s stern warning—that if Smith didn’t begin committing his thoughts to paper, someone else would beat him to it—had apparently sunk in.

  He had indeed embarked on the publication of his ideas. He had accepted the good doctor’s advice not to publish merely a new map, or a list of strata like the one he had dictated at Pulteney Street, or even a cross-sectional portrait of the English underground—but a proper book.

  And so on June 1, barely two weeks after receiving Richardson’s letter, Smith surprised and delighted everyone by publishing a document—a four-page prospectus for the book he was now determined to write. It had a title that, back at the beginning of the century, might have sounded more tempting than it does today: Accurate Delineations and Descriptions of the Natural Order of the Various Strata That are Found in Different Parts of England and Wales; with Practical Observations Thereon.

  There was a closely formulated financial model: Two thousand copies of the final book would be printed, and they would be sold at two guineas each, with Smith taking a 50 percent cut of the expected profits of £3,200. The prospectus—which Smith showed to an impressed John Farey in 1801—was a suitably handsome creation: Printed in Covent Garden, it was ambitious enough to include a stratigraphically apposite epigraph from Alexander Pope: “All Nature is but Art Unknown to Thee./All Chance, Direction which thou canst not see.” The hope was that those who saw the elegant little document would be seized with a burning desire to own the eventual book.

  It seemed at first to have the required effect. Letters rained in, all enthusiastically asking to be put on the list. “I have distributed your Prospectus amongst my friends,” wrote one Richard Gregory from Coole, in Ireland, quite typically, “and have the pleasure to request you will add to the list of your subscribers the name of my father. Robert Gregory, of 56 Berners-Street, London, and the Hon. Richard Trench, MP, Spring Garden Terrace, London.”

  Smith had a publisher all lined up, supposedly one of the best. He was John Debrett, who had already made his name and might well have made a fortune as the most noted cataloguer of the peers of the realm. He was Piccadilly’s most celebrated Whiggish biographer, a man curiously obsessed with publishing books about Australia and by all accounts an amusing and unreconstructed snob.

  So everything thus far seemed set. Even the normally cautious Dr. Richardson appeared delighted, and he wrote an overjoyed letter to his young friend—a letter that reminds us today both of the antiquity of the moment and of the lingering hostility and suspicion felt toward France, so soon after the fall of Napoleon. Richardson advises Smith to:

  take Debrett’s opinion on the propriety of giving an edi
tion of the work in Latin for the benefit of all Europe, to be circulated under the patronage of our foreign envoys, etc. etc. This would give the system its due importance, and prevent any pirated French edition, which the world would be ready enough to catch at.

  But Debrett, who might well have made a fortune, was not to do so with this particular volume. His finances, spiraling out of control, turned out to be the cardinal problem both for the firm itself and, rather more ominously, for William Smith. For though the celebrated Debrett’s Peerage was soon to become a reference book of biblical standing among the aristocracy (and always regarded as a considerably more venerable text than its rather arriviste rival, Burke’s), John Debrett himself was not the man to make money from it, or indeed from any of his publishing ventures. He was described simply as “a kindly, good-natured man but without business aptitude,” and he lived well only because of moneys inherited by his wife. He went bankrupt twice; the entire project, along with many others in which he was involved, was soon mired in crisis.

  Smith himself set to work with a vengeance. “I have just come off a long and troublesome journey through Somerset, South and North Wales, Chester and Lincolnshire…a distance of about 800 miles,” he wrote Debrett from Woburn, six months after issuing the prospectus.