The Map That Changed the World

by Simon Winchester

  The society today is immense—it has nine thousand members—and is generally reckoned to be authoritative, academically rigorous, and contentedly catholic in its membership. Back when the society was formed at the Freemason’s Tavern, on November 13, 1807, it was anything but. Its thirteen founding members—“we are forming a little talking geological Dinner Club, of which I hope you will be a member,” went the invitation written by Sir Humphry Davy—were first and foremost cultured dilettantes (though admittedly visionary ones). Most of them were wealthy, all were possessors (though mostly for their value as modish drawing-room accessories) of cabinets of fossils and collections of pretty minerals, and in the fields of geology and mineralogy, all except one were rank—if leisured—amateurs.

  Four of them were doctors. Three were chemists (one of them was William Allen, cofounder of the firm of Allen & Hanbury, which still makes cough lozenges; another was Davy, the isolator of sodium and potassium and inventor of the miners’ safety lamp). Two were printers and booksellers (these were the brothers, Richard and William Phillips—the latter being the society’s actual founder). One was a minister in the Unitarian Church. (At least several of the other founders were Quakers—suggesting a degree of freedom from the intellectual strangle-hold of religious dogma, even in those early days.) And there was one wealthy and entirely independent man: George Bellas Greenough.

  The only one who was a practicing mineralogist—geology had generally been called mineralogy until the middle of the eighteenth century—was Jacques-Louis, comte de Bournon, a Frenchman who had fled to London during the Terror, had changed his name to James Lewis, and had established a profitable business organizing and classifying the mineral and fossil collections of London’s great and good (as well as laying out the diamond collection of the fabulously wealthy collector, Sir Abraham Hume).

  Of this group at least the Unitarian minister, a man named Arthur Aikin, knew William Smith and his work. Aikin was himself something of an amateur cartographer, and had a good knowledge of the topography of Shropshire and of its outcrops of minerals. There had been a halfhearted attempt by John Farey to bring the two men together, in the hope of speeding up the progress of the map—it came to nothing, however. But it was quite probably Aikin who proposed to his brother members that, having received the invitation from Smith, they go down to Buckingham Street and see exactly what he was doing—even though, quite pointedly, they had not invited him to join the society in the first place.

  It seems appalling and cruel, from this viewpoint, that Smith was not seized upon as an ideal member of the early society. But a roll call of men who were offered membership in those first few years indicates why: Greenough, Aikin, Babington, Pepys, and their colleague founders wanted men very much like themselves to join their “little talking dinner club”—elegantly distinguished men such as those who were speedily admitted, men like Lords Oriel, Seymour, and Seaforth; the bishop of Carlisle; Sir James Hall, Sir Abraham Hume, Sir Thomas Sutton, and (the soon-to-be) Sir Francis Beaufort; the Right Honorable George Knox; David Ricardo (later an MP); the Reverends Edward Burrow, Matthew Raine, George Sampson; and—the greatest humiliation of all for Smith—his old friend and benefactor from Bath, the Reverend Benjamin Richardson.

  But Smith himself simply would not do. In the eyes of the Greenoughs and Sir James Halls of the world, he was unpolished and ill educated. He did not know how to dress or to dine. His accent had the common and rounded vowels of Oxfordshire. His efforts, however laudable, had not rendered him sufficiently wealthy—he would probably find it difficult to manage the fees and certainly would not wish to spend the regular fifteen shillings charged for a society dinner. Neither, it was noted with asperity, had he married well enough* to counter the unfortunate circumstances of his rustic birth.

  The simple fact that he was dependent for his living on the practical applications of geology—on drainage and surveying and the holding back of the sea—meant that he was wholly unsuitable to mingle with men who liked to debate in contented languor over the competing virtues of Neptunism and Plutonism, or who looked at fossils for their beauty rather than for their usefulness in determining, as Smith did, which rocks were older than others.

  Nor, it was charged, was Smith an admirer of Abraham Werner, the Saxon geologist whose theory that all rocks had been precipitated from the sea—Neptunism—had convinced many of the founders of the London-based society. There was a good chance, Greenough and his colleagues believed, that Smith had never in fact heard of Werner—a further indication of the rough-hewn, artless ways of the man, which would sit ill with the manners of such learned figures as had already been asked to join. The fact that Wernerian theory was soon shown to be arrant nonsense cut little ice: His methods—the so-called continental methods—were those followed by a large number of those London geologists who thought of themselves as au courant: Rude provincials like Smith were condemned by the Wernerian elite, and generally regarded with contempt.

  And if all this were not enough—why, Smith was a friend and protégé of Sir Joseph Banks! And Banks had argued long and loud that the Geological Society should not be separate from the Royal Society itself, the grandfather of all London learned societies, and the one of which Banks was still the president. He tried to change the Geological Society’s constitution and, when he failed, resigned his membership and walked off in a huff. Certainly, Greenough and Hall were to say, no friend of Sir Joseph Banks should thus find it easy to become a member of their dinner club—particularly if he was socially unacceptable and not a true believer in the ways of Herr Werner of Freiberg.

  There was tension, then, when Greenough jangled the doorbell and Mrs. Kitten allowed the members of the delegation inside. Smith was ready, and brought the party smartly upstairs to see his work.

  It was all a terrible disappointment. The men spent only a short while looking, muttering among themselves, offering Smith merely curt pleasantries. They seemed not to be in the slightest bit impressed. In fact, they appeared almost bored.

  Smith was candor itself.

  “I scrupled not,” he wrote in his diary,

  to explain to these gentlemen (I think rather too freely) the order of the strata and the use of fossils so arranged as vouchers of the facts, not knowing but that the new body, the Geological Society, might be inclined to serve me. In all probability the maps were also opened and explained.

  I was rather surprised that Sir James Hall could find nothing in such an extensive collection which seemed to please him. A time was fixed for another visit—they came, but I was not to be seen.*

  That first visit had resulted in what was, all told, a humiliating encounter. John Phillips, later reading between the lines of Smith’s melancholy diary entry for the day, notes scathingly that the visitors offered him “only paltriness and condescension, such as they might have offered a grocer.” They walked out within the hour, leaving Smith with the firm impression that he could expect neither help nor sustenance from the society, nor would he ever be invited for membership. The meeting convinced Smith that rigid class distinction lurked deep within the very science of which he was a practitioner—“the theory of geology is in the possession of one class of men, the practice in another.”

  That was a polite way of explaining to himself and his friend that he had been most cruelly snubbed. A terrible wrong had been done to him; it would be nearly a quarter of a century before the Geological Society, by then purged of its dilettante beginnings, realized the error and acted, dramatically, to make amends.

  But there turned out to be far more darkness and menace about Hall and Greenough’s behavior on that spring day than their mere contemptuous dismissal of their host. Precisely coincident with the encounter with Smith, they embarked on the plan that was eventually to destine him to ruin. They decided—and it is not unthinkable to suppose that they did so in Greenough’s brougham as it clip-clopped back from the Adelphi down to Parliament that lunchtime—that they themselves should create a great new geol
ogical map. They would harness the efforts and expertise of the entire society and its growing corps of members. They would make a huge map that would become the official, definitive geological portrait of the nation, and would thereby deal a fatal blow to any further hopes of the ignorant rustic who had been so impertinent as to dare make one first.

  Moreover, in constructing their new map they could, if they played their cards shrewdly, have access to the one impeccable source of the information they needed: William Smith’s great map itself. They could find additional geological data elsewhere, of course; but the simplest and most direct way to discover the core material needed for a new map—though no one would ever say such a thing openly—would be to copy the very work that Smith was doing. They could turn themselves, unbeknown to Smith, into the very “scientific pilferers” that he had long suspected were working against him. They could become, in short, cartographic plagiarists.

  And in short order, this is what—under the leadership of George Bellas Greenough—they became. They saw to it—by means unspecified but certainly devious—that copies of Smith’s work fell into their hands, they pored over them, they traced the lines of the strata onto outline maps they had acquired for themselves, and then, year by year, they added information of their own, such that their end result would have the appearance and the utility of something entirely new.

  Politics, adversity, and misery, it is said, each make strange bedfellows. William Smith was to feel the sting of all three—and among his opponents were strange bedfellows indeed. None was stranger, perhaps, than John Farey, his old friend and pupil from Woburn, who was to become an unwitting conspirator in the devious process that unwound. His involvement began when Greenough—who was no mapmaker, and not really much of a geologist either—became stuck, unable to work out the best way to start work on the map, and turned to Farey for help.

  He did so because, right from the start, his plans for the actual making of his map began to go awry. The cause? Greenough’s basic notion that his map should be entirely empirical, and that its drawing should be based only on observations and not tied to any particular theory about which rocks were where, and why and when and how they had been laid down. Rumination, Greenough reasoned, had no place in a geological map: What should appear on the finished sheets of his chart should reflect facts that were quite unsullied by any theoretical presuppositions.

  There should be nothing on the map, for example, that hinted at any supposed importance of fossils—nothing that suggested, as William Smith was suggesting, that certain rocks could be identified by the fossils contained in them, and that intelligent deductions could be made about the relative ages of the rocks that were so identified. Nothing of this sort was to be allowed on the Greenough map: Following the teaching of those Europeans who clung to the idea that all rocks were precipitated from marine solution, only the results of observation were to be engraved onto the map. Maybe theories would result once the finished product was out there for all to see—but for the time being, observations only.

  It was a cartographic process that was doomed from the very start—for by denying any knowledge of which rock horizon might be coeval with any other, it swiftly became demonstrably impossible even to think of linking the representation on the map of any one outcrop with any other. And so Greenough, not too proud to concede that he had made a mistake, turned to the one man he knew personally, and who he suspected might help him—Smith’s old pupil John Farey.

  The request—which in normal circumstances Farey might have turned down out of loyalty—came at an appropriate moment. Farey was at the time working on his Derbyshire survey. William Smith, it will be recalled, had recently fallen out with him, for a collection of trifling reasons—he felt that he himself should have won the commission offered to his old pupil; he had reacted petulantly when it was Farey, not him, who was chosen to supply entries on geology for Rees’s new encyclopedia; he was furious when references to his own great work on canal surveying were left out of the same book by the editors. Farey knew only too well that Smith was angry with him—and it would be fascinating to learn that this knowledge contributed in any way to his decision to help Greenough. There is no written record: One can only wonder.

  But help Greenough John Farey most certainly did. He happily showed Greenough samples of his mentor’s early works, and explained how it was all being done. He urged Greenough to pay little attention to the European scholars and to Abraham Werner, who made their primitive maps of Europe simply by showing rocks in their arrangement of different types. He would be far better off if he followed the unfolding doctrines of William Smith, who matched the strata to their unique assemblages of fossils, and was able to draw maps showing rocks according to their different relative ages. And to illustrate the point to this languid and leisured amateur, Farey pulled out map after map after map—all the new, unpublished, and unprotected work of the man whom Greenough had publicly and cruelly dismissed.

  It was a ghastly error. Despite their recent falling-out, Smith had always trusted Farey. He had allowed him to copy his early maps, believing they would be used by him privately, never dreaming they would find their way into the planning of a rival publication. When he found out what had happened, he wrote bitterly in a letter to a friend describing what he saw, quite rightly, as yet another slight:

  Farey, it seems…they thought best to convert into a friend, and he either lent or gave them a one-sheet map of the stratification of the island—a copy, I think he told me, of the uncolored manuscript one that he had before given to me. And of course, his copy of Cary’s large map on which he had so many years before been drawing the lines of strata was also made use of…. And now, as a specimen of the liberality of the leaders of public bodies (for such bodies are generally led by two or three men), I may observe that…they deal with Mr. Farey, by making [him an] honorary member* and neglecting me—purposely, it would seem, the better to suit their sinister views.

  Armed with an abundance of advice—which, though it had come from Farey, had in essence all come from Smith—the Geological Society began its twelve years of hard grind to produce the rival sheets. Although a Committee on Maps was formally set up in 1809 to oversee the project, it was widely acknowledged within the society that it was really Greenough himself, with the help of his boundless personal fortune, who helped see the map to a successful conclusion.

  Because of this the rivalry that ensued became highly personal: The battle over the map was as much a fight between William Smith and George Bellas Greenough as it was a battle between Smith and the society, or between Smith and whatever was thought of as the geological establishment of the day. It was a contest too between the ways of a man who was not afraid to get his hands dirty and the ways of a perfumed flâneur.

  Smith was the epitome of the practical man, always grubbing around in the earth, draining fields, building watermills,* corresponding with engineers about pumping projects,†descending deep into coal mines. Greenough, on the other hand, was a young man of leisure whose works were largely confined to the library or the drawing room, and yet who was blazing a trail for what would soon be reckoned the most exciting and intellectually vital scientific discussion club in Europe. The great map battle can be seen in today’s light as a conflict between early geology’s doers and its thinkers, between the men of the hammer and the men of the quill—not, it has to be added, that George Bellas Greenough was ever known for his intellect; he was always thought to have a second-rate mind but first-rate connections.

  Greenough aside, this was above all a battle that need never have taken place, and it had ruinous consequences that the Geological Society was later to regret, mightily.

  Now that he had worked out how to make his map—more along Smith’s lines, and not those of the Europeans, Greenough would have said through gritted teeth—it remained simply for him to acquire the geological data for the engravers. These he acquired from three sources. He read everything he could lay his hands on; he accumulated
scores of notebooks full of information as a result of sending out hundreds of official leaflets called Geological Inquiries; and he went, with his colleagues, into the field.

  The first two means invariably brought him back to Smith—many of the small number of English-language books and pamphlets mentioned Smith and his techniques; and scores of the replies from men who responded to the Inquiries leaflets also mentioning his name. One woman, our redoubtable Etheldred Bennett of Wiltshire, wrote in response, and her letter is quite typical of what must have been so galling to the bumptious society chairman: “I never yet have been able to get any information here regarding the Crockerton Clay,” she wrote, “…but Sir Charles Blagden…informed me that Smith told him it was a hump in the bed of clay beneath the green sand.”

  The third method of collecting information was to go into the field—but Greenough’s excursions were very different from Smith’s field trips, which involved the mapmaker stopping coaches, jumping down into the mud, racing off to hit things with hammers and collect specimens and go down shafts and measure dips and strikes and perform all the classical tasks of a common geologist. Greenough, on the other hand, wrote in a letter to a “Mrs. S” from Richmond in Yorkshire, that he would strike out into the countryside, and

  as soon as we arrive at an inn half the inhabitants of the place are put in requisition—innkeepers, waiters, ostlers, postillions, wellsinkers, masons, gamekeepers, mole-catchers—and these are catechized one after another and, if their accounts vary, are confronted and cross-examined. Thus we soon become possessed of a vast deal of local information—which we string together as we can and then determine how much to take on trust and how much must be verified by our own personal investigation.

  It was not a method much appreciated by the more pedantic and less gentlemanly of his fellow scientists. When one early sheet—of Westmoreland—was published in advance of the main map, one critic, the geologist Thomas Webster, said that “Greenough’s map I found so very defective and inaccurate that I was obliged to begin de novo.” Another critic, named Underwood, who wrote to Webster as the project reached its conclusion, was even more vituperative: