The Map That Changed the World

by Simon Winchester

  There were more lunches and dinners the following day, an artist was engaged to paint his portrait, and John Cary, who had published all the maps, atlases, and sections that were still on occasional sale in London, made Smith a present of a newly bought pair of silver-framed spectacles. And then Smith left London, heading first to Churchill, where he was born, and—despite never being much of a God-fearing man—going to church with all of his surviving family, where they engaged in “presenting our bald heads in supplication to their Maker.”

  A week later and he was back in the icy fastnesses of Yorkshire, reunited with his wife, who he reported to be in tolerable health though troubled by a head cold. The Father of English Geology was at last able to rest on his laurels and begin the final chapter of his life as a revered elder statesman, at long last accorded his due, and given the respect that his hitherto unsung achievements deserved.

  EPILOGUE

  Pavlovia pallasioides

  As everyone might wish, nothing but goodness seems to have attended the last years of William Smith’s life. He moved from Hackness to his cottage in Scarborough, he cultivated a small garden, he read and tried (in vain) to write the story of his own life, he nursed his now-fast-fading wife, he went for long walks on the cliffs, he raised geese and sent them off to his relations, he wrote letters aplenty—letters that show him to be a happy old countryman, lost in the revelry of a comfortable old age.

  A literary critic might have cruel amusement with his style. I have omitted from this account all of his innumerable attempts at writing poetry, the results of which were execrable at best. The paragraph that follows is not chosen for its merit as a piece of writing, but just to show the new-found contentment which had been so sorely missing from his life before. It was an autumn evening as he sat and wrote the following in his journal:

  When the sunbeam flickered on the gently waved gossamer suspended from the foliage, and filmy winged insects were waving up and down, innumerable, as if promiscuously enjoying the ethereal sports of a calm and sunny autumn morn, or that of one of summer’s retiring days, I, after breathing from the Bridge Walk Terrace the pure air wafted off the ocean’s smooth and boundless surface beneath its calm blue canopy—I so refreshed, and on my breakfast feasting—sat and enjoyed the same at my cottage window fronting that fine and full-grown hawthorn which casts a deep shade across the lawn and those bright distant lights which remind me of Claude’s fine forest glades where flickering gleams of light seem to steal in between the trees. Even so complete is my seclusion and calm retreat from the busy town and its numerous far distant visitors who annual come to bathe in the ocean and drink at the Scarboro’ Spa.

  Thus calmly to enjoy retirement with the never failing resources of a well-stored mind is the sweetest pleasure of a full-aged man.

  He kept his “well-stored mind” as active as he could. He tried to tinker a little with the geology he knew, but steadily he came to realize that behind the vanguard of the “young Turks” who were now running the science, and who had given him his long-due recognition, geology was now accelerating rapidly away from him, the discoveries and theories multiplying at exponential rates.

  He would travel, with near-religious punctiliousness, to the annual meetings of the newly formed British Association for the Advancement of Science—a body his nephew, John Phillips, had played a large part in establishing. But he would understand less and less of what was said; and when he came to suggest or to offer a paper, he found the organizers less than fully engaged by what he had to say. There were respectful pauses, hesitancies in their manner, suggestions about another day, another topic.

  His papers, wrote the historian Hugh Torrens, in the entry on Smith in the New DNB, “demonstrated all too clearly Smith’s great limitations in the new world of non-practical or theoretical geology, to which he was now expected to contribute.” Slowly, though Smith probably never came fully to know it, and cruel though it seems to say so, he was becoming out-of-date. It seems fitting to suggest that, living so close to their playground in Yorkshire’s Upper Jurassic, he was becoming a dinosaur himself in all but name.

  But the comforts continued to arrive. In the early summer of 1832 Smith traveled to Oxford and in a further ceremony received his Wollaston Medal, now fresh from the die makers and engravers. The society had not stinted: the Wollaston had been made by no less a medal maker than Benjamin Wyon, who held the august post of Chief Engraver of the Seals and was responsible for designing and manufacturing some of the finest medals in the land, as well as various great seals with which nation-states—most of them colonial governments—impressed the final versions of their laws.

  The medal was indeed made of gold; Smith’s name was engraved on one side, between a beribboned twine of laurel and palm. Roderick Murchison presented it to him at a ceremony in the Sheldonian Theatre, the graceful seventeenth-century building that still represents the spiritual core of the great university. He made just a short speech, reminding the assembled gathering that they were in the presence of “a great original discoverer in English geology” he suspended the medal, on its blue silk ribbon, around the old man’s neck, and then stepped back to watch with pleased contentment as the assembled worthies of all England’s sciences applauded a choice with which everyone seemed to agree. All Oxford, and all scientific Britain, were now giving William Smith their combined imprimatur.

  Oxford’s Sheldonian Theatre, where Smith was awarded the first Wollaston Medal.

  The government, too, chipped in. Within days it was announced that, in consequence of a petition from a panel of scientists, King William IV had agreed to grant Smith a pension, for the remainder of his life, of one hundred pounds a year. It was thought to be only right and fair that a man “whose personal labours for the good of all,” as it was put in countless petitions and other laudatory papers, had cost him his fortune—and, for a while, his freedom—should not be allowed to pass into old age a pauper. A hundred pounds was thought a sufficient sum to keep all wolves from doors; it was gratefully given, and the beneficence gratefully extended to cover the needs of his widow, when Smith himself died.*

  He still had one further honor to receive and that, which was offered (so his nephew reported) “quite unexpectedly” during another British Association meeting, was an honorary doctorate of letters. The association was meeting in Ireland; the provost and fellows of Trinity College, Dublin decided that Mr. Smith must be so elevated. The old man—by now sixty-seven, “his increasing deafness depriving him of a full share of enjoyments”—was according to John Phillips astonished, “and sufficiently alive to feelings more common in his youth” to be delighted with the title. The delight was general—though there was astonished dismay in some quarters, too, that the Father of English Geology had been honored not by one of England’s academic institutions, but by the premier college in Ireland.

  He dressed up in his new robes. He doffed his cap at the appropriate moment. He listened to the perorations in Latin. He mingled briefly with his fellow honorees—the three distinguished astronomers Sir Thomas Brisbane,* Professor Gerard Moll, and Francis Baily, and Louis Agassiz, the Swiss-American naturalist and fossil fish expert who had come up with the radical notion of die Eiszeit, the Ice Age. Whether, with his Oxfordshire accent, his deafness, his rheumatics, and his general innocence of urban sophistication, Smith felt comfortable in such august company, we can but wonder—John Phillips left a less than candid record of the occasion. In any case he was soon to be plucked away from the festivities, perhaps tactfully.

  The dean of Trinity showed him around Dublin and took him up to the north of Ireland—which was then, unlike today, politically a part of the same country. The director of the Geological Survey of Ireland took him in hand and showed him around farms in the geologically fascinating parts of County Antrim. But though the tertiary basalts of the Giant’s Causeway may well have enthralled him, his former reputation seems to have died hard in Ireland; before long, according to local accounts, the newly
created Dr. Smith was busily answering questions from the farmers about the efficiency of their drains.

  To add to the final honor there was one final task. In 1834 the Palace of Westminster, where the British Houses of Parliament met, had been all but destroyed by fire. Sir Charles Barry had been commissioned, along with August Pugin, to conceive a fitting replacement—and duly did, with his son Edward Barry, creating what went on to become what is possibly the most familiar and iconic of all London’s great buildings, crowned as it is with the clock tower that holds the famous bell, Big Ben. In 1838 a four-man committee was established—Barry, Henry de la Beche, an architect named Charles Smith, and, with his brand-new honorific, Doctor William Smith. The committee was charged with the express purpose of selecting the stone that was to be used in the construction of the giant new edifice.

  The four men set out (by rail!—such were these modern times) from Newcastle upon Tyne after that year’s British Association meeting. They spent most of August and early September traveling by pony-and-trap, inspecting quarries, drawing up comparative tables of which stone was best for its workability, its appearance, its cost. The official report—to the commissioner of Her* Majesty’s Woods, Forests, Land Revenues, Works and Buildings—was published in March the following year—five days before William Smith’s seventieth birthday. It listed more than a hundred quarries; it compared the criteria of each; and it formally recommended that the new palace be built of a rock from whitish-colored Upper Permian formation, a sandy Magnesian limestone from a quarry at Mansfield Woodhouse, in Derbyshire.

  The ornate stonework of the House of Commons—originally a Permian limestone selected by a committee of which Smith was a member. It corroded badly; Charles Dickens inveighed against the choice.

  It turned out to be a less than happy choice. The Mansfield quarry proved to have too little workable stone for the job, and another quarry at Bolsover had to be hastily substituted. Much the same happened there, with the stone running out within a matter of weeks. A third try, at a nearby quarry in the village of Anston, seemed to work, however. Before long a train of barges was setting out regularly along the Chesterfield Canal, to connect with the fast cargo sloops that sailed along the Trent and the Humber and thence down past the Wash and the Norfolk coast to the Thames Estuary and London. The quarry seemed bottomless. It provided, in the end, most of the stone for what were to be the visible upper parts of the palace for decades to come.

  Except that the Anston stone—which is technically a part of the Cadeby formation of the Zechstein epoch of the Upper Permian—proved a dismal selection. The committee had clearly not imagined the havoc that would be wrought on smooth sheets of a corrodable, white-colored limestone by the action of the winds and rain of industrialized London. A foul cocktail of acids, smoke, sulfur, heavy metals, and all manner of gases quite unknown in the pleasant towns of North Yorkshire scoured the new buildings. The stone changed color, flaked away, peeled off, broke. All of a sudden the grandest public building in the land had the look of a dour tenement in the middle of a slum.

  Within a decade of their completion, Barry’s buildings were being roundly attacked for their appearance, for their ruined look, for their discoloration and decay. Charles Dickens led the fray: If the buildings of the day were going to be as ornate as Barry and Pugin seemed to want, he said, then let them be built of proper, durable stone. That chosen for the Houses of Parliament, Dickens fulminated in a newspaper article, “is the worst ever used in the metropolis.”

  And there were dark rumors about the stone selection committee—its members were accused, obliquely, of having merely junketed around the countryside, during a pleasant summer, at the taxpayers’ expense, and not applying themselves properly to what was a profoundly serious business. It was Sir Henry de la Beche who took the brunt of public criticism. He had to testify before two select committees that were established specifically to make sure no public buildings ever suffered so embarrassing a fate again. No one seems to have blamed William Smith for anything: His involvement, said his admirers and detractors alike, was more of a sinecure for an honored ancient. Few had expected he would perform any kind of actual task on the committee, useful or otherwise.

  In the years since Barry and Pugin built their masterpiece, the Palace of Westminster has suffered heroically from the capital’s pollution, and further committees have recommended all manner of replacement stones in the hope that some might cheat the acid rainfall. These days the Commons building has been wholly rebuilt, using another limestone entirely—the warm, honey-colored semioolitic limestone from the Middle Jurassic of Lincolnshire, known as Clipsham stone.

  Smith would have found the ironies delectable: first that he managed to escape the opprobrium of the initial choice of a rock from the gloomy and fossil-free Permian; and second, that in the end it was his most favored horizon—the Jurassic oolitic formation for which he and his great map are best known—that was used to face his country’s best-known public building. Once again, the allure of the lively and warm shallow seas of Middle England’s Middle Jurassic proved inescapable and irresistible.

  William Smith set out for Birmingham for the next British Association meeting the following August. He had spent the previous week in Oxfordshire, wandering through a number of great gardens—which John Phillips points out were spread across basement rocks of both between the Jurassic and the Cretaceous. By this point Phillips seems to have become more than a little carried away by romantic notions about his elderly uncle’s enduring interests—and has him placed here in summertime Oxfordshire, yet again pondering the great questions about Mesozoic stratification. One has to doubt it. More than likely this stooped, deaf, rheumatic old man was taking time just to smell the roses, and to keep out the possibility of a late summer chill.

  This he did not manage. His coach stopped in Northampton, and as he was in no great hurry, he decided to put up for a few days with an old friend named George Baker. He caught a cold, suspected nothing, and went to bed. But the cold settled on his lungs, and it worsened. Doctors were called. John Phillips, already in Birmingham for the meeting, was summoned, and arrived in Northampton on the morning of Tuesday, August 27. There was little he could do. Uncomplaining or unknowing, William Smith died shortly after ten o’clock on the following night.

  He was buried nearby, in Saint Peter’s Church. There are a number of memorials—the most poignant, with the longest and most erudite eulogy, stands in Saint Peter’s. It is a marble column, and it is topped, quite appropriately, with a copy of a bust by Matthew Noble. It was an appropriate choice indeed, since the sculptor was a man Smith had met and befriended in Hackness, the Yorkshire village where, eight years before, his life had changed so much for the better, and public recognition of his astonishing talents got properly under way.

  Smith’s own grave outside the church is topped by a massive block of sandstone, now so corroded that if there was any inscription, it is quite illegible. The original of Noble’s bust of Smith stands in the museum in Oxford, near others of Buckland, Huxley, and Charles Darwin; there is another copy in the Geological Society, close to one of his nemesis, George Greenough. There is a tall monument standing beside the country bus shelter on the green in the little village of Churchill, where he was born; and a cul-de-sac of modern houses nearby has been named William Smith Close. There is a signpost pointing to Rugborne Farm, which Smith himself thought of as the birthplace of the science he created. There is a plaque on Joseph Townsend’s house in Bath, where the table of the strata was dictated. There is another on the house at Tucking Mill—though as it happens, and typically for the memory of this often-forgotten, often-overlooked man, it is on the wrong house, and nobody has made any serious moves to try to shift it. And in the Geological Society there is a portrait. Beneath it, within the frame, there is a cut-out circle containing a lock of his hair, gray and curled, and apparently snipped off as he lay in the George Baker’s upstairs bedroom on the evening he died.

  Overlo
oking this vaguely macabre memorial is a long marble staircase, and high up on the wall beside it, a pair of pale blue curtains. Behind these curtains, if anyone can be found to pull the tasseled cord to part them, is the greatest of all memorials—the very map that William Smith created, all by himself, in a labor of love that lasted for fifteen years, or, in truth, for all his life.

  Normally the map remains hidden from view, to keep it shielded from the light. The blue velvet curtains remain pulled firmly shut. The hundreds who pass by each day seldom glance up at it—and even if they do, few of them ever ask to see it, and fewer still ever stop to wonder who created it, and why, and exactly how.

  From F. M. Gradstein and J. Ogg, “A Phanerozoic Time Scale,” Episodes 19, nos. 1 & 2 (1996).

  Glossary of Geological and Other Unfamiliar Terms Found in This Book

  Ammonite: A mollusk, with a shell coiled in on itself, containing folded internal compartment walls, living between the Devonian and Upper Cretaceous.

  Annelid: A classic type of worm, having a long tubular body composed of a large number of rings.

  Annularia: Needle-shaped leaves of the horsetail plant Calamites that are arranged in rosette-like whorls. (The leaf whorls are named separately from the stems, which are actually called Calamites and are a common fossil.

  Anthracite: A hard, jet black, metallic-looking flammable rock that is the highest-ranking coal, the only version that can rightly be considered properly metamorphic.