The Map That Changed the World

by Simon Winchester

  As it happened, though, the Somerset House meeting, which took place on April 21, 1803, turned out to be rather less propitious than Smith’s delighted diary entry might make it seem—because it laid Smith open to a temptation to which he should not have succumbed: It seduced him into taking an apartment in London.

  It was a woefully imprudent decision. Smith was not a well-off man. It had been nearly ten years since he had been in full-time employment, and although he was being paid handsomely enough for his work as a drainer or mineral surveyor, the work was typical of the freelance trade: days of feast followed by weeks of famine. And in between the episodes of paid work, he had to continue his journeying to make his endless geological surveys—journeying by stagecoach (for a not inconsiderable fee), lodging at coaching inns (for substantial sums), wolfing down pigeon pie and porter and the big breakfasts that his energies demanded. He asked the Society of Arts if they might help him out with an occasional supply of funds: They apparently turned him down, as did all too many others whom he approached. And now he was embarking on a program to spend even more.

  He had an office back in Bath to run; a partner (the long-forgotten Jeremiah Cruse) to pay; and an estate at Tucking Mill to keep, with its stable and garden and a manservant on constant hand. On the face of it Smith was heading into deep financial waters—and yet at precisely the time when he should have been trying to keep his expenses down, he was suddenly seduced, presumably by the magnificence of Sir Joseph’s own grace-and-favor* lodgings off the Strand, to take with effect from that same April day a permanent and costly lodging place just around the corner, at number 16, Charing Cross. He rented rooms from a Mr. Tapster—the building was called Tapster’s Baths. He shared it with his landlord and with one Francis Place, a mysterious man described in the DNB as a “tailor and radical reformer.”

  The accommodation, though expensive, was small: Smith spent most of his London days at the Craven Coffee House close by, which he used almost as an office. His initial plan was to engage an assistant who could stay in the Tapster’s Baths rooms during the day, and begin work on designing the final version of his map, as well as starting a program for drawing all his fossils. But for the time being he decided to leave his actual collection behind in Bath, at the offices on Trim Bridge.

  It turned out to be one of the very few prudent decisions he was to make during this frantic period in his life. It was just as well that he never brought his fossils to town—for just a few months after he had moved in, and as a harbinger of other disasters to come, his building and the one next to it caught fire and burned to the ground. Smith’s assistant, who would almost certainly not have been able to carry hundreds of pounds of boxes of precious samples out of a blazing house, managed to save most of his papers. They were removed “in a hurry and in disorder,” according to John Phillips, but they were at least safe. Smith was in any case not there: Once again he had been afflicted by his persistent wanderlust, and when his house burned down he was out of the city, on yet another mapmaking field excursion.

  The fire did not deter him from his grand plan to have an address in London: quite the reverse. He now took an even larger establishment—an entire five-storied mansion at number 15 Buckingham Street, in the Adelphi, an impeccably sited house standing beside the Thames, beautifully designed, conveniently located both for the Society of Arts and for Sir Joseph Banks’s office at the Royal Society. He paid a rent of eighty guineas a year—far too much for a man with such slender resources, with rent to pay in Trim Bridge, a mortgage to pay on Tucking Mill, and with a wildly varying income—and added to his bills a further pound a month for a housekeeper, the charmingly named Mrs. Kitten.

  A house in the Adelphi development was indeed a wonderful place for a man of means to live. The Adam brothers had designed them, and imported Scottish laborers, kept content by having bagpipes played to them, had built them. The houses, which went up on the site of the old riverside mansion of Durham House (immediately upriver from Somerset House) were spacious and elegant, and known by the clever honeysuckle motif on their stucco frontings. But the development was not a success, and the brothers only avoided bankruptcy by selling them off at bargain prices in a lottery. Not that Smith had the money to buy: For all his sojournin Buckingham Street, he was obliged to rent.

  Smith liked the place enormously—so much so that in late 1804, after the duke of Bedford had made an inspection tour of his fossils down in Bath, he had them all moved up to London—thousands of specimens, wrapped in paper or in small packets, and by now displaying no fewer than 720 different species. As with the scholar whose home is considered to be wherever his library stood, so it was with William Smith and his collection: This is where his fossils would lodge from now on; it was to be his official residence, a suitably grandiose symbol of the work in which he was now engaged. “I am happy to inform you that my fossils are now safely arrived in London,” he wrote to a friend in South Wales in June 1805, “and are now arranged in the same order as they lay in the earth.”

  Smith’s principal home in London’s Adelphi, at number 15 Buckingham Street.

  He liked the notion—erroneous, as it happens—that Peter the Great of Russia had stayed at number 15 when making his celebrated tour of England in 1698. And he would have thought it eminently suitable that the young Charles Dickens lodged there in 1833, by which time it had been converted into flats. But when he was there alone—except for Mrs. Kitten—he sported none of the trappings suitable either for a Romanoff emperor or a writer of great fame. Inside the house everything was modest to the point of monasticism. He was becoming fearful, evidently, of the possible financial consequences of yet more extravagance. In later, wiser times when he experimented with an autobiography he was to write:

  In London a tax-gatherer of one denomination or other is never long absent from your door. With their heavy hands my old rusty knocker too often made my high old house echo to the attics. I might have reduced taxes by stopping up windows and, indeed, by shutting up useless rooms. But it was only a house of call for me on my way through London, and a depot for my fossils; for I had no time to devote to the economy and comforts of housekeeping. I never half furnished it, never had a dining table; no carpets crossed my old oak floors, no rich curtains darkened my windows; and though my rent was high I had no expensive living, no dinner parties, no wine merchants to pay.

  He had indeed no time to devote to the comforts of housekeeping. His travel diary for the years between taking up residence in Buckingham Street in 1804 and in 1812 making his first real breakthrough in the publication of his map, reads like that of a Fury.

  His business as a drainer kept him traveling incessantly between Norfolk and Kent, between outposts in Wales and northern Yorkshire. The owners of the Hickling Marshes, for instance, had him stopping inundations from the sea between Yarmouth and Happisburgh. He was asked to go to Dolymelynllwyn, near Dolgelly in North Wales, to look at the slate quarries and inspect the soundness of a new embankment. He went to the top of Snowdon, the highest mountain south of the Scottish border; he examined the copper mines near Llanberis.

  We find his diary telling us he is variously in Yorkshire, Lancashire, Somerset, Gloucester, Devon, Rutland, Nottingham. Here he is opening a coal mine at Torbock, near Liverpool, here he is directing a trial boring at Spofforth, there he is off looking at the cliffs of Witton Fell in Yorkshire. He examined coal outcrops at Newent, at Nailsea, and in the Forest of Dean; he built a series of sand-dune-mimicking embankments, all shells and marram grass, to help protect the South Welsh coast from flooding at Laugharne. He worked on planning another big canal, the Ouse Navigation in Sussex; he was called in to help because the Kennet & Avon Canal, in his old stamping ground near Bath, had begun to leak. A landowner in Buckinghamshire tried to find coal on his land and called in Smith, who put down some bores and told him he was wasting his time.

  Scores of other would-be coal millionaires demanded his time, which he willingly gave for his customary two or t
hree daily guineas, if only to prove the pointlessness of their hopes. He was persuaded, despite offering the advice that owners were squandering their money, to conduct a survey in Herefordshire, another near Wincanton, and a third within sight of the towers of the Oxford colleges, at Bagley Wood—knowing on each occasion, as no other person in Britain could possibly know, that there was as much chance of discovering coal as there was of striking gold. It came as a pleasant diversion when he was asked to perform a task that would not end in disappointment—as when he planned a series of improvements to the harbor at Kidwelly, a little Welsh port well known to later readers of Dylan Thomas,* or when he completed work on the Minsmere Drainage Scheme in deepest Sussex.

  Occasionally there were more amusing or rewarding tasks, which brought him more than his simple per diem fee. In 1810 the Bath Corporation called him in because of an unparalleled calamity: The hot springs, which had provided the town with a raison d’être since before Roman times, suddenly failed, and no one knew why. (No one knew why there were hot springs in Bath anyway, considering the city’s location on top of thousands of feet of congenially stable sediments, with not a volcanic fissure in sight.)

  He rushed from London to the Bath Pump Room, examined the situation, and declared that the only way he could find out the reason for the failure was to dig a bore into the very spring itself. The city fathers were appalled: Never had an excavation been performed in these most hallowed buildings. But in the end, faced with the prospect of a well gone dry, they reluctantly agreed—and William Smith and a gang of navvies hired by the day burrowed down through the familiar limestones and clays of the Middle Jurassic until, after suffering in temperatures of 119 degrees Fahrenheit and melting all the candles they had used to light their way, they found the problem.

  It was all the fault of the large bone of a great ox—or, as the official city report of the time put it, “some large ruminant.” Somehow the bone had fallen into the spring, had become crystallized with pyrite and flint, and had rolled itself into the channel and blocked it. The waters promptly made another channel for themselves, as waters do, and flowed out into the Avon somewhere else.

  A few of the more suspicious members of the corporation said it was all really the fault of a new coal mine that was being dug at the time three miles away, at Batheaston; and there was a very angry movement to have this mine stopped up, to protect the integrity of the springs. But Smith went to Batheaston to have a look and decided that the two were not connected in any way. Bath’s hot springs had failed because of a pyritized ox bone, and nothing else. He removed it, the hot and healing (and vile-tasting) waters began to flow again with greater vigor than before, and Smith became, just as he liked, the hero of the hour. And for good measure, he plugged the hole in the coal mine as well.

  Much the same happened when he drained the infamous Prisley Bog, on the duke of Bedford’s estate at Woburn. This he managed with such speed and ingenuity—and, moreover, published a brief monograph in 1806 on how he had done it*—that the Society of Arts awarded him a medal. He was naturally delighted—except that it gave him good reason to remember, since this was the same Society that was offering a premium for making the great map, that the years were ticking on, and still nothing had been published.

  Sir Joseph Banks was also beginning to wonder why his golden boy had not delivered. It was now five years since the men had first met, and since the day John Farey had told Sir Joseph—with some prescience, seen in today’s light—what a stellar figure Smith was destined to be. Banks had already contributed the sizable but quite easily affordable fifty pounds. He had persuaded dozens of his friends and acquaintances to subscribe to the impending publication. He had seen Smith at least three further times—at the 1804 Woburn sheepshearing, at the Smithfield Cattle show six months later, and in London early in January 1805. There had been much talk of the map, “soon to be exhibited for the information of the curious” according to an optimistic publisher’s notice in the newspapers, in Banks’s very own London library.

  But since then there had been nothing, and influential men were beginning to grow impatient and exasperated. Smith had been expected both to prepare a great map, and to continue work on the treatise on strata that Debrett had been hoping to publish. But neither book nor map showed the slightest sign of being readied for an appearance, even in rough draft. Richard Crawshay, the Welsh landowner who had been an early supporter and who had promised money, wrote sharply about this to Smith in February 1806: “I am sorry to find that your promise of and my reliance on you for a publication of great importance is totally vanish’d. You will excuse my interfering any further in your affairs. I wish you well.” It was a considered and stunning insult. Smith wrote a spluttering explanation, but Crawshay never replied.

  Even the tolerant old Sir Joseph was worried. He wrote Farey to the effect that he “[did] not feel himself so interested in encouraging any new work” of Smith’s. Other potential subscribers were holding back, worried that Smith might never complete his work. They knew that he traveled widely, that he worked furiously, that he constantly promised visible progress: But nothing emerged—nothing from the Adelphi, nothing from Trim Bridge, nothing from Tucking Mill House.

  It was, for Smith, a terrible time. His book on draining had brought in no money. His most loyal supporter, John Farey, had been appointed, rather than Smith, to make an official survey of Derbyshire. It seemed suddenly as though there might be a conspiracy waged against him, a sudden drying-up of commissions, the beginnings of a muttering campaign. He had fallen out with the assistant at Buckingham Street, a man named Roope, whom Smith now described as “a book-learned, paragraph-writing coxcomb”—a remark that was about as rude as one could be in the London of the day without risking a duel.

  Then there had been an innovative suggestion from Sir John Sinclair, the president of the Board of Agriculture, that Smith might become associated with army engineers, might organize them into a mapmaking organization like the one that was eventually to be created, the Ordnance Survey: But Smith was not interested, or the board not interested in him, and a once-exciting-sounding project that would have been ideal for Smith eventually came to naught.

  But, most significantly hurtful of all, there came the formal foundation in 1807 of a new and vitally important London learned association, the Geological Society—and with it the wounding realization that despite all his evident contribution to the science, William Smith had pointedly not been invited to join. The impact of that decision was to rumble thunderously down the years—and it was to culminate, as we shall see, in the most delicious of ironies; but for the moment, in 1807, the news, when it was transmitted to Buckingham Street by friends, must have made it seem to Smith as if the whole basis of his professional existence was being lost.

  His personal life, too, suddenly seemed to be spiraling out of control. He was so short of funds that he began to consider selling his property to keep himself afloat. What little land he still had left from his family back in Oxfordshire had already gone. The Trim Bridge offices were now gone, rented to another tenant. All that remained that he could call his own was his mortgaged home at Tucking Mill. But try as he might, it wouldn’t sell; and the owner of the mortgage, Charles Conolly of Midford Castle, was making it abundantly clear to Smith that he would not release him from the mortgage debt or buy back the house himself.

  It was at about this time in Smith’s life that he made what appears to have been another woefully bad decision—and that was to get married. A sensible and ordered marriage might of course have been a good thing; but from all the available evidence—and there is very little; much seems to have been destroyed, and perhaps deliberately—it seems that his union was anything but sensible and ordered.

  We know little about his wife, other than her name, Mary Ann. No records have so far come to light about her origins—except for the assumption, calculated from her death record, that she had been born in 1791 or 1792—or of the date of the wedding, or when
(since it seems unlikely there was in fact any ceremonial) he became formally married. Everything that can be deduced stems from the fact that his diary for the year 1808 is missing, and that there are occasional references to “M.A.” in the journals for many of the years that follow.

  The first mention of what is probably her comes in a diary entry written in August 1809. Smith was in Norfolk, from where he wrote a note in faint pencil: “said per M.A. letter to come away Tuesday evening” and did indeed arrive in on that day—apparently telling his wife to expect him. On September 26 he records paying “Mrs. K. two months wages, £2, M.A. £2.” In April 1811 he notes that he “wrote a letter to M.A.” from Bath. In December 1815, more ominously, “At home all day with M.A., taken ill with pain in head.”

  In 1815, if her birth date is correct, Mary Ann Smith would have been twenty-four—and yet already perhaps seven years married. Smith seems to have started to live with her, almost certainly married, when she was only seventeen. And by such accounts as exist, it was a terrible marriage, with his wife neither educated nor stable enough (following the 1815 headaches, which began to worsen and transmute into more sinister ailments) to have been much of a support during these grim years.

  Indeed, Mary Ann seems to have been little more than a burden to Smith for most of his life. Her death, which happened some long time after that of her husband, came about in the very saddest of circumstances. During her life she fell victim to all manner of illnesses, physical and mental. Her case notes, kept in an asylum where she was later lodged, record her as having suffered from many things—not least the pathological need for sexual intercourse that is a common-enough side effect of some of the more florid mental illnesses, and which was known then, as it still is now, as nymphomania.