The Map That Changed the World

by Simon Winchester

  None of these efforts seem to have done Smith much good. His financial situation did not improve. His standing with the Geological Society did not change. His acceptance into the salons of London’s intellectual demimonde remained on hold. John Farey had made generous mention of Smith’s working progress ten years before, in the pages of the Monthly Magazine and the Philosophical Magazine and in Abraham Rees’s Cyclopaedia—but none of these efforts seemed to have enhanced Smith’s standing, and it looked more than likely that this new blizzard of panegyrics was going to be similarly ineffectual.

  It was not until in the early summer of the following year that a wider public began to sit up and take notice. Only a very small number of appreciative people began to take Smith seriously—and not enough still to avert his impending disaster. But the mood, in the middle of 1818, most definitely began to change. And it did so purely because of William Fitton, because he did write his assessment—and a glowing assessment it was—of Smith’s work, and he saw to it that it was published in one of the country’s most respected journals of the day, the Edinburgh Review.

  His paper, which he entitled Notes on the History of English Geology, was only seven pages long. But short though it was, it was a concentrated tincture of approbation. It looked almost entirely at Smith’s contributions to the new science—it examined in a disinterested way, but in detail, everything of importance that had Smith’s name on it—the great map, the memoir that accompanied it, the first volume of the illustrated catalog of British fossils (the second volume of which was published the day after he was released from prison), the small geological cross-section between Snowdon and London drawn on the side of the large wall map, and the first proofs of the first of Smith’s seventeen large-scale county maps, which were to be published by John Cary over the coming six years, and which Fitton, cunningly and without Smith’s knowledge, had managed to get to see.

  The paper was an almost undiluted paean, a document that was destined (though probably not designed) to delight Smith in what was turning out to be the most troubled period of his life. Fitton had examined everything in the closest detail and written a considered criticism—noting errors, questioning judgments, criticizing lapses. But overall the tone was that of a man overjoyed by the serendipity of the experience, the enthusiastic pleasure of a man who has discovered a rare and special talent.

  William Smith, Fitton told his readers, was “a most ingenious man,” whose only fault was that he had been “singularly deficient in the art of introducing himself to public notice.” There could be no doubt but that William Smith was performing work that constituted a truly historical development in the evolution of an entirely new science. He did not go so far as to suggest that Smith’s map would change the world, but the implication in the paper was undeniably that, with the appearance of this immense and beautiful document, the world—of commerce, of industry, of agriculture, and of intellectual endeavor—would never be quite the same again.

  A year later, though, Smith was a destroyed man, fleeing London for good and forever (or so he supposed), disillusioned, bitter, the victim of those he claimed were cheats and scientific pilferers. So what if William Fitton had been so kind as to write with such generosity of spirit? His doing so had made no essential difference. His fine words had manifestly buttered no parsnips. The map, now three years before the public, still hadn’t sold as well as he had hoped. The quarry had gone bankrupt. The landlord had foreclosed on his mortgage and had called in a long-owed debt. The bailiffs had done their worst. He had been turfed out of the Buckingham Street house. His goods and chattels had been confiscated and sold. And now he was in Yorkshire, two hundred muddy miles away from London, and heartily glad—if, that is, he knew the meaning of gladness—to be there.

  Smith was never to own a home again, never to settle anywhere other than as a tenant. As John Phillips was to write about his uncle, with the timbre of a true Victorian melodramatist:

  [F]rom this time for seven years he became a wanderer in the North of England, rarely visiting London except when drawn thither by the professional engagements which still, even in his loneliest retirement, were pressed upon him, and yielded him an irregular, contracted and fluctuating income.

  It was seven years of nights at inns and coaching stations and weeks in cheap lodging houses, in towns and villages as far flung as Doncaster and Kirkby Lonsdale, Sheffield and Hesket Newmarket, Bennetthorpe and Durham Town. There was a curiously surreal, Gypsylike contentment to some of these years, which his nephew hinted at when he wrote, soon after they began their self-imposed exile:

  In the winter of 1819 Mr. Smith, having perhaps more than usual leisure, undertook to walk from Lincolnshire into Oxfordshire. According to an established custom on all such tours, he was employed in sketching parts of the road and noticing on maps the geological feature of the country.

  The object proposed was to pass along a particular line through the counties of Rutland, Northampton, Bedford and Oxford, but the ultimate destination was Swindon in Wiltshire.

  We crossed in a day’s easy walk the little county of Rutland …reached the obscure village of Gretton, on the edge of Rockingham Forest…whatever may now be the accommodations at this village, they were very wretched in 1819, December, but the odd stories of supernatural beings and incredible frights which were narrated by the villagers assembled at the little inn greatly amused Mr. Smith.

  The pursuit of geology, apparently for its own sake alone, was never far from Smith’s mind. “The road up Boziate Hill,” his nephew continued, now writing of the pair’s time in Northamptonshire,

  was mantled with fossiliferous stone, some of which obtained from the hilltop was believed to be Kelloway’s Rock, and was found to contain Ammonites sublaevis and other fossils. A fine specimen of this ammonite was here laid by a particular tree on the roads side, as it was large and inconvenient for the pocket, according to the custom often observed by Mr. Smith, whose memory for localities was so exact that he has often, after many years, gone direct to some hoard of nature to recover his fossils.

  Day after day there was the same goading restlessness about Smith—picking up, as he would for seven long years, a little work here, leaving his calling card at some great hall or grange or castle there, endlessly looking up old acquaintances in the search for work or contacts or rooms for the night, his journals always filled with references to local geology, with narratives of local lore, and lovingly noting his occasional encounters with famous men (as with Adam Sedgwick, the godfather of the Ordovician and coidentifier of the Devonian, whom he met in Kirkby Lonsdale; and the great Oxford geologist William Buckland, whom he met on this very walking trip, and whose eccentric decency came to figure prominently, along with Sedgwick’s in the next, and more gloriously culminating, chapter of Smith’s life).

  There was during this period an absence of any sustaining central core to his life—there was no home, no family, no single glorious project, except for completion (which never happened) of the series of county maps. He did a little work on these each time he went south to London, where he would see John Cary, take cheap rooms in Charing Cross, and knuckle down to coloring the new information he had gleaned, onto a series of charts and cross-sections that—when seen today—appear more beautiful than anything he did before.

  The cross-sections have found particular favor in the United States, where they can be seen in a popular poster published in Oklahoma. Certain of his county maps, in reproduction, can be bought today in London: But the half dozen or so that are for sale hint at another of the melancholy realities of Smith’s life—that though he had the time, and presumably the energy, and though he had the assistance of a young nephew of ever-increasing ability, he did little during this period of his life of any real merit, and rarely finished the greater projects that he had started in the years before. It was almost as though he wanted to shrug off the work he had already accomplished—to live off the reputation he had won from it, but not to return to it, in case
he suffered the same measure of disappointments from it that had dogged him all his life so far.

  He became fond, however, of two particular places during his long sojourn in the north. One, the seaside town of Scarborough, has today a charming, if rather vague, remembrance of his long association with it. He first went there in 1820, just a year after his exile began. He had been asked by the town corporation to see if he could advise on improving the water supply—a task he accomplished with ease. But what impressed him most about the town was its setting, its fresh sea air, its obvious charm—all of which might help to improve the health of his wife, now deteriorating fast. Phillips, who rarely wrote about Mary Ann Smith, includes a line that speaks volumes for this fraught period in his uncle’s life: He had come “to this romantic and delightful town in hope to soothe the mental aberration of his wife, which became very manifest in this year.”

  Ammonites sublaevis, from Smith’s own collection, found during his tour of Northamptonshire.

  “I went to Scarborough,” Smith was to write in his attempt at autobiography, “under distressing circumstances—unknown to anyone in the place but through the medical men.” But then he uncovered a happy chance about the population of the town—and noted in his journal that “everyone here is very fond of talking on Geology.” Within only a few weeks his temper improved; his apprehension of finding himself friendless and alone had abated. Within weeks he had won himself a circle of admiring and intelligent friends; he wrote that he found the people—provincial and unlettered Yorkshiremen though they might be, and by London standards innocent and artless folk—to be a constant delight. They had no side about them, he said; they accepted him for what he was, they made him welcome, they provided him with intellectual stimulus, and, most important, their evident pleasure at having so clever a man in their midst enabled him to renew a sense of self-esteem that had been soundly battered during his unhappy creative years in the capital.

  He completed his detailed geological map of Yorkshire while there—it was published in 1821. He also began offering lectures—a guinea for a series of nine,* a single lecture for three shillings—and with his nephew turned himself for a while into a highly profitable traveling road show. He pitched his tent, as it were, in York, Leeds, Hull, and Scarborough, time and again, offering the latest information and the most up-to-date arrangements of organic fossils, for the improvement of the minds of all.

  It was when he was off to give a course of lectures in Sheffield—for sixty much-needed pounds—that he was first troubled by the only illness he ever seems to have had, a curse of his peculiar trade. The notes for his possible autobiography record the moment:

  On sallying out from my winter quarters on a sunny day in March, and in hammering a long time for the fossils in blocks of the Cornbrash rock at the back of the Castle Hill I so caught the rheumatizm, which was the worst complaint I ever experienced, being six weeks confined to my bed in great pain and the loss of the use of both my legs, though all the time in perfect health and good spirits.

  He was determined to make his assignment in Sheffield. He had the stagecoach brought to the front door of his inn, and demanded that two men “tumble me in like a sack of potatoes.” He had to support himself on his arms during the fifty miles of the journey, but sang songs to keep himself cheerful. On arriving at the Sheffield junction he tried to get up, “fell like a child,” and had to be carried off in a sedan chair. He gave his lectures; they were well attended; he collected his money. But that evening he mused for the first and only time that he might perhaps now give up geology for good—rheumatic joints being the principal curse of a field explorer—and keep a school.

  It was an idea that vanished as fast as it arrived. Geology still managed to exert its powerful magnetism on the man. And by now Smith was finding Scarborough so congenial that he was coming back time and again, whether for a commission or not. He returned first for a two-year stay in 1824, lodging with a family called Williamson, who later wrote that “Smith and his eccentric wife established themselves in our house, where they dwelt for a considerable time.”

  Before long Smith also made a very considerable physical impact on the town. He helped, most notably, to set up the Scarborough City Museum—a curious rotunda of a building that was finished in 1829, and that still stands on the town’s seafront, though in much reduced condition. Smith’s idea was radical: He had called for the building to be designed—it was built in the Doric style, fifty feet high and nearly forty feet in diameter, with a spiral staircase and a graceful dome—so as to allow thousands of fossils to be arranged on shelves around the outer walls, all in their proper relative positions. The younger remains, in other words, were to be displayed on shelves at the top of the building, while the older fossils were deeper down, nearer the base of the building. The youngest members from the Cretaceous would be at the top, the oldest fossils from the Trias would be at the bottom, all of them arranged just like the strata lying deep in the earth outside, just as the strata were arranged elsewhere in North Yorkshire, in exactly the same order as the rocks in faraway Dorset, and no doubt just as the rocks were arrayed, Cretaceous up above, Trias down below, in all the distant corners of the world beyond.

  The rotunda-shaped Scarborough City Museum, designed by Smith for the specific purpose of allowing fossils to be seen in their proper chronological order.

  It was a beguilingly clever idea. The members of the Scarborough Philosophical Society—a number of such local institutions were being set up all around the country at the time, designed for the dissemination of knowledge about science—were all hugely enthusiastic. They quickly agreed to fund the venture, and within weeks they had backed Smith with a handsome subscription. Building started swiftly, and it was finished inside a year. There was a gala opening, with sixty for dinner, “the table being spread with every delicacy of the season, with a fine dessert and excellent wines.”

  The idea at first worked fabulously well, and for a while anyone who was interested in the paleontology of Yorkshire—which has some of the best fossil locales in the country, particularly rich in ammonites and dinosaurs—was compelled to make a pilgrimage to the curious little drum-shaped building by the sea, in which was housed “one of the most perfect fossil collections in England.” But in recent years the building has become a tawdry and half-forgotten little structure, the only relic of Smith being an indifferent reproduction portrait, and a diorama painted around the upper floors, probably by John Phillips. There is a memorial stone on an outside wall mentioning Smith as having helped conceive the idea. There are no fossils in the Scarborough Rotunda anymore; Smith’s shelves are filled merely with indifferent items of junky memorabilia.

  He went off surveying and draining in the Midlands once the museum was up and running, and spent six years away. He came back again to Scarborough in 1834—and though he only rented a small house called Newborough Cottage on Bar Street, he was happy enough to put down roots, so far as he could, and to stay in the town for what turned out to be the rest of his days. A letter he wrote to his niece, Ann, survives:

  I am now busy in partly furnishing a neat cottage situated in the midst of pleasure ground and walks laid out by Marshall, the tasteful designer and author of Rural Economy. We have two parlours and a kitchen, cellar and other conveniences—three good bedrooms with two staircases and attics. Shall have possession on Monday. Rent £15 a year. You may therefore direct to me in future at Newborough Cottage, Scarboro’. The place was occupied by the late Mrs. Eastwood, aunt to Mr. Hall, who kindly undertakes to convey this intelligence to you. I shall have plenty of room to spread out MS., maps and fossils, and in this snug retreat for doctors and philosophers I shall be happy to see you and the Professor whenever you choose to come.

  The letter was written in October 1835. Smith was by then a man of sixty-six—and, as the letter suggests, was slipping gracefully and—at long last, contentedly—into his old age. And contentedly is the key word here—for something significant by now ha
d happened to change his mood and temper. The train of events that brought him to a new state of untroubled contentment began at the one other Yorkshire site in which he spent time, and where he experienced the epiphany that was to redirect, and for so much the better, the course of his remaining life.

  The pretty village remains more or less unchanged since Smith was there during the six years from 1828 until 1834. It is no more than six miles inland from Scarborough, hidden deep in a fold of the hills, in the valley of the River Derwent. It is called Hackness, and it and the rolling hills around it have for years been the fiefdom of a family of lowland Scots called Johnstone—a family that would come to have an inestimable impact on the life of the old geologist who came, for a while, to stay among them.

  Hackness Hall, the Yorkshire seat of the Johnstone family, where Smith’s achievements and genius were finally recognized.

  Sir John Vanden Bempde Johnstone—there is Dutch blood liberally mixed in with the Scots—was described by his biographer as “a sincere friend to geology and natural history.” He had joined the Geological Society, was a keen collector of fossils, as well as being an MP—first for Weymouth in Dorset, and then for Scarborough (spanning, in his legislative responsibilities, both ends of England’s main Mesozoic outcrop). When, as a baronet—the Johnstone family of Hackness was not to become ennobled for a further eighty years*—Sir John succeeded to the Yorkshire estates, he decided to “convert to practical effect on his farms some of the geological and botanical truths which he knew to have been established in the museum and the laboratory.”