The Map That Changed the World

by Simon Winchester

  Meanwhile Smith continued to try to have something—anything—published. He got into his head the notion that he might write a short description of Norfolk, a county whose geology he knew well; and he took advantage of a parliamentary election campaign in Norwich to circulate among the crowds of voters, offering them cards advertising the forthcoming book, and talking up the impending publication of his greater works. But the Norfolk booklet or map never appeared either. Smith was losing his sense of self-esteem and self-worth, suddenly reckoning himself a presumptuous intruder into the learned world—remembering that he was merely a yeoman and an orphan.

  “I could previously write some sentences very well,” he was to reminisce, as an excuse, “but never with sufficient confidence, and I often found a difficulty in carrying on properly the continuity of a subject.”

  And so those nightmare years continued, from 1806 until 1812—six miserable years when nothing seemed to go right for him, when his friends were beginning to desert him, when his muse had apparently fled, his money was trickling away at an alarming rate, and the only thing he knew how to do was to travel, take samples, make notes, and cram into his grizzled head more and ever more information about the underside of England. It fascinated and drove him still; but there seemed no future in it, for him or for his supporters, allies, and backers.

  Old Dr. Richard Warner of Bath chose this time, most inappositely, to publish a guide to the city and its surroundings, making ample use of the geological information provided by his neighbor Smith, and to which he had referred generously when he wrote a Bath history ten years before. But on this occasion, in 1811, he stole freely from his onetime friend, drew a map that was an almost exact copy of one of Smith’s earliest experiments, and made no acknowledgement of him at all—another example of the plagiarizing and pilfering to which the poor stratigrapher was having to become accustomed.

  But then one old friend did eventually prove to be true. The Reverend Joseph Townsend, in whose house Smith had originally dictated his famous table of strata, published a book in 1812 with the curious title The Character of Moses Established—which set out to prove, scientifically, that the Mosaic view of the world’s creation, in which of course the Flood, the Deluge, figured prominently, was still the right one. No matter the prelate’s clouded scientific vision: The important feature of Moses is that it included, at length and in great detail, the essence of William Smith’s work. It showed him to have a unique vision of the underside of the earth. It gave him all the credit that had been due and, because Townsend was a well-known and well-respected man, it placed William Smith back in the minds of the nation’s chattering classes.

  And whether it was because of this book or merely coincident with its publication, one key figure in this story suddenly and enthusiastically—and unexpectedly—came back into the Smiths’ life.

  John Cary, the country’s foremost cartographer, announced that he would print and publish William Smith’s great map. The two men had met some twenty years before, when Smith was working on the survey of the coal canal in Somerset. Now, without warning, this distinguished mapmaker suddenly agreed to come on board—a move that everyone knew would now guarantee that this extraordinarily ambitious work would at last see the light of day. Why Cary agreed no one knows: It is convenient to assume, however, that he came across Townsend’s curious book, and was impressed by the evident importance of a man who he remembered well from their canal-making days. Yet the reason matters much less than the outcome: In the blink of an eye, Smith’s fortunes were changed, and, on this singular occasion, very much for the better.

  The first task was for Cary—working at his offices at 181 Strand—to make a wholly new topographic map of England and Wales. On this William Smith—who was working nearby on the floor of the main dining room at 15 Buckingham Street—would superimpose his geological information—information that he had now spent more than fifteen years, and hundreds of thousands of lonely miles accumulating. Smith decreed from the start that the scale should be five miles to the inch—meaning that the map itself, if fitted up in one sheet, would measure 105 inches by 74 inches, or 8 feet 9 inches high by 6 feet 2 inches across.

  Smith had no doubts at all: What he was making was going to be mightily impressive—it was going to be a grand, grand map, big, eyecatching, memorable, and entirely appropriate to the majesty of the topic that it would picture. It was, after all, the first-ever map of the geology of an entire country, and not just a country but the most important kingdom, as Britain saw itself, on the face of the civilized planet. There was no other such map of an entire country anywhere in existence. What was being created in London was to be the model that the rest of the nations would have to follow. This map was to be a world leader, in every conceivable way—and it was to look magnificent too, so that no one would ever have cause or occasion to doubt its excellence.

  Cary performed the outline drawing; one of Smith’s lawyer friends, Henry Jermyn of the ancient Cistercian abbey at Sibton, in Suffolk, was chosen to help perform the engraving, which included the writing of place-names, numbering in the thousands. It was evidently a pleasurable time. “I have a copy of Cary’s map spread out on the carpet,” wrote Smith, “he turned to his valuable collection of old authors—and thus did we proceed in marking the names…in those gleams of light thrown on the dark pages of our history we had many pleasant discussions.”

  The task was performed with infinite care, and yet at a rollicking pace. By February 1813, of the sixteen copper plates* on which the topographical map was being engraved, three had already been finished. A year later and the remaining thirteen were done, and Smith could now begin the equally painstaking task of colouring the individual strata, the key ingredient of a geological map. As he explained in his diary on the day he started, it was his wish “to render the map as interesting as possible to those who are desirous of knowing all they can of their country….”

  He now knew by heart, from all his years of travelling, the geology of a handsome proportion of England’s secondary rocks. His knowledge of the Jurassic, for example, provided him with a core of stratigraphical information that allowed him to colour in lines of strata from the south coast of Dorset to the east coast of Yorkshire—he could provide a swathe of information that more than justified his ambition to create a map of the whole country. His time in Norfolk had allowed him to add details of the Cretaceous, too. To the oolites and clays of the Jurassic he could now add his new and formidable knowledge of the Chalk—a rock which, together with the honey-hued limestones of the Cotswolds, is perhaps the country’s most distinctive outcrop, a potent symbol no less (in the White Cliffs of Dover) of the insular nature of the island kingdom.

  On April 18, 1814, Smith was interested indeed when he passed Cary’s shop in the Strand, and saw that in the bow windows of the store were four of his sheets completely finished, and fully coloured. Cary had chosen to surprise and delight the forty-five-year-old mapmaker—he had placed the finished sheets (which included sheet XI, the area around Bath)—in the window without telling anyone. Smith, who became as excited as a schoolboy, snatched up the sheets and immediately—his first reaction, and a noble one—took them over to Somerset House to show to Sir Joseph Banks. Sir Joseph had been the project’s first supporter. He had given Smith fifty pounds to begin the subscription. And yes, maybe he had harrumphed with exasperated impatience eight years before, when there seemed no end to the project in sight. But now all was coming to fruition, and, Smith reasoned, Banks should and would (especially as a near-neighbor) be the first to see the finished sheets. If he agreed, then he would be named on the completed full-scale map as the person to whom the entire project had been dedicated—the person to whom Smith owed most of all.

  Banks agreed readily—for the map, he declared, was a most handsome thing. He would tell his friends, urge them to offer their support even at this late stage. And so it came—six weeks later, in June, and William Smith was being summoned by no less a figure than L
ord Hardwicke to present the completed sheets to the leaders of the Board of Agriculture. They agreed wholeheartedly with Sir Joseph: the map was already magnificent, and once finished, excellent, in every way.

  Smith was told to make sure that he sent a prospectus for the map to every member—and he promptly wrote as polite a solicitation as could be imagined, indicating that

  William Smith will explain the Subject of the Strata at his house, 15 Buckingham Street, the Strand, on this and the following days between the hours of eleven and five, to such gentlemen as choose to subscribe towards the publication of this great national work. W. Smith’s Discoveries of Regularities in the Strata, with their accompanying organic remains, will be illustrated with Engravings of his large Collection of Fossils, which are placed in the same order as they lay in the Earth.

  Implicit in this letter was a powerful sales pitch. Everyone who could buy one of these maps, an example of (as purchasers were not allowed to forget) this great national work, should now sign up to do so. It mattered little how much people could afford: there was, as John Cary had decreed, a convenient spectrum of tariffs. All depended on whether a buyer preferred the keenly priced edition, with the sixteen unmounted paper sheets and a memoir all bound up in a box of stiff blue board for five pounds; whether he opted for the standard full-size canvasmounted map, ready for placing on a wall, and which would set him back seven pounds; or whether he decided to splash out and buy the deluxe version, the edition that was offered on canvas, mounted, varnished, set on spring rollers and issued with a fitted leather carrying case—for which the price was the not inconsiderable sum of twelve pounds. Cary and Smith were open to all kinds of financial models. And William Smith reckoned, with Cary’s implicit agreement, that he should make about twenty-five shillings on every copy sold.

  Ten months later and all was quite ready. On March 15, 1815, we have him writing in his journal that he had “finished corrections of five western sheets of the Map, which now completes the general corrections required….”

  It remained only for three crowning moments.

  The first came in mid-March 1815, when the prime minister himself, the great reactionary figure of Lord Liverpool, came to Buckingham Street to inspect the immense map; he pronounced himself well pleased, and congratulated Smith. That, considering Smith’s background, was no small feat indeed.

  The second came later that spring, in May, when Smith went to the Society of Arts and formally presented to its president, the duke of Norfolk, the completed map for inspection. Smith, stony broke as always, was at this time only too well aware that thirteen years beforehand the Society had offered a prize of fifty guineas* for the first mineralogical map of the nation. He was eager that the Society should now inspect his work, and decide whether to pay up: they did, two weeks later. Smith records the moment matter-of-factly in his diary entry for June 16—“Received from Dr. Taylor, Secretary to the Society of Arts, their premium of £52.10s.0d. for my Mineralogical Map of England.” Guineas, the money of the upper classes, clearly did nothing for him.

  And the third crowning moment came on August 1, 1815—the official date for the formal publication of the map, its distribution to those who had subscribed, its offering to bookshops around the land. The coloring was all done and dried; all copies were now numbered and signed, and in most cases had been colored, by the hand of William Smith.

  It was then, and it remains now, a truly magnificent thing—huge, beautiful, and filled with absorbing and elegantly managed detail. And, by comparison with modern maps of the geology of the country, in the very broadest sense, uncannily right. It is also, as well as being a scientific document without peer, tremendously attractive as a piece of art. It is highly colored in a way that mimics the colors of the rocks below, so that one can almost imagine that Smith was painting a portrait of the country, with all the foliage and topsoil stripped from it, such that only the rocks remain—green for the chalk, blue for the Lias, and a honey-colored, orange-hued bright streak of evening sunshine for the outcrop of the Middle Jurassic that he loved so much.

  The map is entitled with suitable grandiloquence, “A Delineation of The Strata of England and Wales with part of Scotland; exhibiting the Collieries and Mines; the Marshes and Fen Lands originally Overflowed by the Sea; and the Varieties of Soil according to the Variations in the Sub Strata; illustrated by the Most Descriptive Names.”

  And there is the dedication too, as promised, to the man who stood by him—impatiently betimes, but who had stood true until the end. “To the Right Honble Sir Joseph Banks, Bart., F.R.S., this Map is by permission most respectfully dedicated by his much obliged servant, W. Smith.” And there is the date, “Augst 1, 1815.” As John Phillips, his nephew and first biographer, was to write: “From that hour the fame of its author as a great original discoverer in English geology was secured.”

  Four hundred copies of the map were printed, numbered, and signed. About forty of them are known to remain in existence. Collectors today regard them as valuable beyond price. Huge sums are commanded for those very few copies that come onto the market. They are renowned within the rarefied world of the map dealer. There are several copies in London. One of the finest is the one that hangs behind the blue curtain beside the main staircase of the Geological Society of London, in Burlington House, Piccadilly.

  It is a concealment that abets a kind of shame. For considering what happened next, and considering how members of the Geological Society of the day dealt so cruelly with this man who had created so magnificent a testament to the science they were following, it is remarkable that the map is permitted in the building at all. It is in a way a haunting reminder, rarely seen now, of the way in which scientists, and especially British scientists of an era long past, behaved quite unforgivably toward one who was so self-evidently not one of their own.

  For although the map that was about to change the world had now at last been published, and although the great and the good of the land—the prime minister himself included—had seen it and marveled at it and had pronounced it a wonderful creation, the man who had made it was about to begin the most wretched of all the times of his life. And it was men who even now were professing themselves to be geologists who were almost wholly to blame.

  13

  An Ungentlemanly Act

  Macrocephalites macrocephalus

  The roots of the tragedy that were to befall William Smith go back some years before the moment during which he briefly savored his great cartographic triumph. It was a morning during the early spring of 1808, seven years before publication day, when a small delegation of worthy and distinguished Londoners arrived at the front door of William Smith’s riverside house on Buckingham Street. He had invited them there to make an official inspection tour, to see for themselves two things that were currently setting all scientific London on fire—and this at a time when geology, suddenly, was a new, exciting, and very fashionable science.

  They had been asked first to see the enormous collection of fossils that Smith had brought up from his former home in Bath and had cleverly arranged “in the order of their appearance in the strata,” as he put it, in cabinets in his otherwise empty dining room. And they had been invited also—or maybe this was their own idea; the records do not say—to make, at least ostensibly, a critical appraisal of the great new geological map on which Smith was then said to be engaged.

  If they had secondary reasons for examining the map, they did not let Smith know. It was for him in any case an important and an intimidating encounter—a formal examination of his half-made map by members of the newly instituted Geological Society of London, of which as yet William Smith had not been invited to become a member. It was crucial, at least from Smith’s point of view, that the meeting went well: Not only could the society’s members help him—they could also welcome him into their congenial midst, and accelerate his progress into the very center of Britain’s geological establishment.

  The visiting party was led by a young man
of undoubted distinction. His name was George Bellas Greenough, and the lacquered brougham that brought him and his companions to the Strand had come from the House of Commons, where he was, though only thirty, a sitting member for a comfortable Surrey constituency. He was a man of immense wealth, and was at the time building for himself a large Italianate mansion on the fashionable west side of Nash’s newly laid-out Regent’s Park.

  Everything about Greenough, from his dandyish clothes and comportment to his formal manner and conversation, marked him as a gentleman. He was in rank and reputation as different from William Smith as it was possible to be. Yet few knew the source of his family fortune, and the man who would be the first president of the new-formed Geological Society (and was for the time being chairman, a post long since abolished) was at pains to conceal his ungentlemanly origins: In fact his maternal grandfather had been in trade as a quack apothecary, and Greenough’s Liver Pills were a popular remedy for a range of maladies from chronic flatulence to simple low spirits. But they made him a fortune, all of which was in due course passed on to George, while he was a student at Eton, when the grandfather died. There had been only one condition attached to the will—that though George had been born a Bellas, his pill-maker-grandfather’s gift was accompanied by a request that the boy bear the Greenough name in perpetuity.

  George Bellas Greenough was an archetype of the small group of men that had come together, six months before, with the aim of creating a social and dining club to be called the Geological Society of London—“for the purpose,” as the original manifesto proclaimed, “of making geologists acquainted with each other, of stimulating their zeal, of inducing them to adopt one nomenclature, of facilitating the communication of new facts, and of contributing to the advancement of geological sciences.”