The Lost World of James Smithson

by Heather Ewing

  He continued to fill his notebooks with observations on the topography, the stratigraphy of the rockbeds, the types of industries, architecture and more. He explored Hanau and Frankfurt, the basalt quarries in Stenheim and the spa town of Wilhelmsbade, studying the volcanic evidence of the region's terrain. "Green clay found by self near Frankfort," he scribbled. "I found it adhering to/coating one side of/a mass of lava lately extracted from the earth. It had probably formed in a fissure of the lava stratum."17

  In the spring of 1805 he headed south towards the Alps, hoping perhaps to distance himself from the convulsions of the war. At some point en route, however, a packet of papers he was supposed to receive was lost or misdirected. The loss agitated him greatly. It was important enough that Smithson began to retrace his steps, losing a week or more of travel time. And then, on a bridge over the Rhine between Strasbourg and the fortress town of Kehl, Smithson was spotted by an undercover French policeman on the lookout for runaway English détenus, disgraced émigrés, or potential foreign agents.18 Smithson—a lone traveler who showed a confident familiarity with his surroundings—had the potential to be any of the three. The policeman, named Mengaud, began to trail Smithson, initiating a wild-goose chase all through the region, a two-man odyssey of furtive layovers in hotels, casinos, and bars at all hours of the day and night. The encounter proved a serious drama for Smithson, but it was nothing compared to the ordeal that awaited him, when in 1807 he decided finally to attempt the North Sea passage home to England.

  Mengaud's avid scrutiny of Smithson affords us an amazing firsthand description of him at age forty. Smithson, in the eyes of a stranger, appeared fairly well built, around five foot eight inches in height, with brown hair and eyebrows, and distinctive little sideburns.19 He was without doubt a man of fashion. He wore blue trousers and a round hat, and Mengaud was especially interested to note that his grey redingote (a double-breasted outercoat or riding coat) was American in style.

  But he seemed a chameleon-like figure, able to slip amongst different national identities, befriending many and assuming their poses. At one point Mengaud "shivered with horror" to discover Smithson chatting with an émigré in the doorway of the "Auberge du Soleil d'Or" in Strasbourg; at another he saw him masterfully carrying on in German; and at yet another point he watched Smithson at a communal table in a hotel successfully pass as an émigré himself. But Mengaud heard an accent, and at night in the casino he watched Smithson reading only the English newspapers. Over dinner at the table d'hôte, as the assembled raucously recapped the news of the taking of Jamaica, Smithson, Mengaud smugly told his superiors, "took the side of the English too passionately not to be one himself." He decided finally that Smithson had "all the turnings of an Englishman."20

  Convinced his target was a spy, Mengaud slipped into Smithson's empty hotel room one night, rifled through his belongings and pocketed the passport he found nestled in the linens. The passport, which sits today in Smithson's police report in the Archives Nationales in Paris, was a single piece of paper covered with scrawled signatures, dates, and various seals. As Mengaud perused it, his suspicions grew. The passport had clearly been deliberately falsified. It appeared to have been authorized by the French ambassador in London on February 22, 1804, and by the Grand Judge in Paris on April 22, 1805. But there was no longer a French ambassador in England in 1804, and the man who signed as the Grand Judge was not the head of the police service in 1805. Both dates had actually been 1803, and Smithson or an accomplice had tampered with the passport, changing the years. Mengaud began to envisage an elaborate storyline for this Englishman who went by the name of Smithson—a story featuring a portmanteau of secret papers collected in France and ferried across the Rhine in a small boat at some unpopulated spot, and coded handshakes and messages passed between Smithson and the postilion of an empty carriage—with whom Mengaud had twice spotted Smithson talking. Mengaud filed a full report of his surveillance of Smithson, including his fantastical theories, and sent it off with the passport to the highest ranking person he could think of: the mercurial Talleyrand, Minister of Foreign Affairs.

  Talleyrand turned over Mengaud's reports to the head of police in the region, giving him full power to investigate the "comings and goings" of this Mr. Smithson. Consequently, Smithson must at some point have been dragged in for questioning. His distress over a lost packet of letters, coupled with Mengaud's overactive imagination, had alarmed an entire region. The letters were most likely of a personal or financial nature, though they might possibly have contained scientific notations and observations. Count Rumford, who had a trunk of papers containing "the result of whole years of intense study and of innumerable experiments" stolen outside St. Paul's as he was re-entering London after a stint on the Continent, wrote to Lady Palmerston: "I feel myself poor for the first time in my life … It does not appear to me to be possible for anything to ever make me smile again, or to remove the sad gloom which overspreads the whole universe."21 Smithson's lost material was important enough to him that he was willing to lose a week or more doubling back on his route to Switzerland. Mengaud's misinterpretation of this potential loss is predictable, since he was not of this distinct species of man, the savant. His reaction was akin to the incomprehension that greeted Smithson when he landed in Oban with the treasures that he had found on Staffa, which the innkeeper viewed as only "rocks and dirt."

  Smithson, later, when he really was suffering as a prisoner of war, lamented most the potential loss of his research and work. Facing his own mortality, he worried above all for the two papers he had not yet finished, "as I should be sorry that they were all lost by my death after all the pains & time they have cost me."22 Smithson believed that labor for the increase and diffusion of knowledge constituted man's highest calling. Its endangerment was the source of some of his deepest despair. For a non-scientist like Mengaud, on the other hand, there could only be one explanation for such concern over some lost papers: the man with the little brown sideburns, who spoke excellent German and had the airs of an émigré, was probably in reality an Englishman, and an English spy at that.

  In the end the letters were never recovered, and no evidence of espionage was found. Smithson was released. His police shadow Mengaud revealed himself to be a bumbling, hapless investigator. He executed his sneaking maneuvers so leadenly that eventually the Strasbourg police hauled him in and demanded an explanation of his activities in the area. Smithson, too, had quickly realized he was being followed, and in Strasbourg, when Mengaud was eavesdropping through the window of the hotel bar, Smithson had given him a cheery wave. When it was all finally over, Smithson congratulated himself on having survived unscathed an encounter with the dreaded French government. The episode became primarily a farcical anecdote. "You have not an idea perhaps what a terrific object is an agent d'Angleterre, whose presence in a country draws down upon it the destructive wrath of the almighty one," Smithson told Lord Holland. "In a trip I took last summer to Switzerland, taken for such, I moved like a comet spreading dismay, and foreboding, it was thought, as I appeared the fall of governments and of states."23

  Smithson ultimately carried on to the snow-covered summits of Switzerland unmolested, trying to maintain the belief that he could continue as the Grand Tourist he once had been. Through Basel, Neuchâtel, and Zurich he focused once more on augmenting his mineral cabinet. But even in Switzerland he did not find things much easier. "In Switzerland," he wrote home, "an english face had the effect of that of Medusa, and froze the blood of all who beheld it."24

  In late July he was at Karlsruhe. The muddled Mengaud thought he had heard Smithson say he was headed ultimately for Vienna. If Smithson did intend to carry on from Switzerland to Vienna, that plan was thwarted, once again, by the depredations of the French. Napoleon, on the coast menacing England during the summer of 1805, abruptly abandoned his plans for invasion. Recasting his forces as La Grande Armée, he turned them south and sent them 200,000 strong across the Rhine in late September. On course to c
onverge at the Danube, masses of troops marched swiftly all through the area in which Smithson was traveling, filling the roads with their rumbling caissons and seizing what food and supplies they could from the terrified locals. Napoleon had cannily predicted the Allied governments' next offensive, and the campaign he devised was unprecedented in its scale. In a rapid and stealthy attack he surrounded the Austrian General Mack at Ulm, forcing his surrender. The occupation of Vienna soon followed, as well as a series of brilliant maneuvers that culminated in the demolition of the third coalition at Austerlitz on December 2, 1805, the very anniversary of Napoleon's coronation.

  Smithson was safely back in Kassel by November 1805. He remained convinced, as he told Lord Holland, that he would soon be coming home.25 It was a hope he had cherished already for two years. He was weary of the war and eager to be in contact with friends. "Mankind has been in a state of agony from one pole to the other surely full long enough," he declared. But as long as the only route home was the dreaded North Sea passage, Smithson was willing to sit and wait. He simply was not physically strong enough to face the journey. He never wanted to repeat "the wild and endlessly-circuitous road of Embden; equally terrible in the part which is land and the part which is sea."26 With this route, as one passenger explained, a "most fortunate passage of forty-eight hours fine weather and no hard gales" qualified as quick and uneventful; but even that often meant being "most terribly sick for the first nine or ten hours."27 The seasickness occasioned by the rough waters seemed nearly insurmountable to the acutely sensitive Smithson, and there remained the threat of capture by the privateers skulking in the waters around England.

  As the war ravaged Europe, fewer and fewer options remained to Smithson, and there was correspondingly an increasing dearth of communication. Smithson was isolated both from friends and family back in London and from the community of scientists that formed his family in Europe. The English newspapers he read in the inns and casinos where he passed his time gave him notice of those friends whose rank was such that they were objects of general attention. In this way probably he learned of the death of Lord Lansdowne and the ascension of his friend Wycombe to his father's title. But as far as personal letters went, Smithson, like most, was far less fortunate. Fanny Burney, alone in France with her French husband, lived in such a news blackout that she didn't even learn of the English victory at Trafalgar until 1812, seven years after the event.28 When Smithson had no word from Lord Holland, he assumed that "my letters or yours, partaking in the spirit of the times, have deviated from their right road or been intercepted." He diligently wrote twice more over the next six months, near copies of the information contained in the first. Back in London Sir Lionel Copley likewise heard nothing from "Mr. Macie Smithson" on the Continent; the Royal Institution nevertheless generously permitted Copley to renew the lecture ticket Smithson had loaned him.29 Several letters Smithson had written to William Thomson went unanswered, and he no longer even knew whether his other Italian friends were still alive. "The troubled state of Europe for so many years," he lamented, "has prevented my keeping up that correspondence with my mineralogical friends in Italy, which I should have wished."30

  The upheaval his friends were experiencing in Italy was more even than Smithson could have imagined. The French had invaded Rome in 1798 and had, according to one disillusioned English painter, carted off everything but the Sistine Chapel.31 The elderly Father Petrini had undergone a complete conversion to the republican cause, and his passionate embrace of Jacobinism had cost him not only his position at the Collegio Nazareno but also his entire association with the Church. Once defrocked, he slunk quietly off to Lucca, the site of his childhood. His mineral collection had perforce been left behind, and Petrini lamented its future. "Hadrian's Muséum at Tivoli lasted forty years after the emperor's death," he told Fabbroni; "the collection at Nazareno won't survive forty days after mine."32 In Siena in the spring of 1799 the French had installed the physician Paolo Mascagni in a position of authority, set forth as an example of Napoleon's prizing of science and scientists. The appointment, however, was short-lived. In late June a violent counterrevolutionary brigade from Arezzo invaded the city. The marauding Aretini turned their attention first to the Jewish ghetto, but they soon focused on the Jacobins and members of the new French administration. The hatchet-wielding mob found Mascagni at his home, which was sacked as they carried him off. At the Piazza del Campo, where the murdered Jews were being burned in a sacrificial pyre on the site of the French tree of Liberty, Mascagni narrowly escaped being caught in the hysteria. He was locked instead in a stifling, filthy prison, where he remained for months.33 For William Thomson the arrival of the French in Naples had been likewise catastrophic, though he at least had been able to continue with his scientific work. He had hurriedly debarked with the entire English circle around Sir William Hamilton to Sicily. Secure in the shadow of Etna, and for a while enjoying the company of England's savior Nelson—then in thrall to Hamilton's wife Emma—he had carried on augmenting his volcanic collections.34

  In this time, as Smithson called it, "of unexampled calamity," Kassel remained something of a refuge. A tiny coterie of English society was still putting on masquerades and concerts, centered mostly on the house of Mrs. Heathcote, mother of Ralph Heath cote, the young secretary to Brook Taylor, Britain's Minister Plenipotentiary to the Landgrave of Hesse-Kassel.35 The city was also an island of quiet that allowed Smithson to carry on with his experimental work. In March 1806 he wrote to Sir Joseph Banks to announce a discovery: "a new, and perhaps it may be thought an interesting, species to the ores of lead. I have found minium native in the earth." Minium, or "red lead," was a lead oxide highly sought after for use as a pigment in paints, dyes, and glazes. It had been manufactured since at least Roman times, as its occurrence in nature was extremely rare. Smithson, while perusing the offerings at a dealer, thought he spied something that looked like this "factitious" or manufactured minium. It was "vivid red with a cast of yellow," in a "pulverulent state," and attached to a specimen of zinc carbonate—the very mineral Smithson had identified in 1802, later named smithsonite.36

  Excited at his find, Smithson subjected his little specimen to a thorough battery of tests to confirm its identity. He took a few grains, placed them on a hollowed-out charcoal block and submitted them to the blowpipe, chronicling the transformations under the blowpipe's varied flames. The sample melted, contracting into a small roiling ball as the oxygen escaped, leaving only lead. "On the charcoal," Smithson confirmed, "it reduces to lead." He then approached the sample with chemical reagents, mixing up some aqua regia, in an effort to offer his readers further proof that the metal he had uncovered was lead and not one of the noble metals, such as gold or silver or platinum.

  Smithson's publication provides another example of his masterful use of the blowpipe, but it also offers a window into his inventive experimental approach. With a very limited sample—Smithson apologized at the start for not being able to conduct as many experiments as he would have liked—he was able to plan a careful sequence of tests to confirm what had probably been a strong hunch from the moment he spied this curious scarlet matter on the specimen from the lead mines of Breylau in Westphalia at the dealer's shop.

  Smithson was still in Kassel in the late summer of 1806, although he curiously made a point of informing one friend that he was "not resident there." It may have been that he was simply on the verge of departure. At the end of July 1806, having seen yet another summer come and go, he told his friends that he planned to travel soon to the spa town of Pyrmont. His health problems must have been acting up, and he probably intended to follow a course of the waters there.37

  Napoleon, however, was determined to make the German states virtual colonies of France, and Smithson was inadvertently headed directly into the heart of the conflict. It would be more than three years before he finally reached the shores of England. With the dissolution of the Holy Roman Empire in the summer of 1806, and the abdication of Emperor Fr
ancis II, Napoleon reorganized sixteen of the German states into the Confederation of the Rhine. William IX, whose father had been the son-in-law of George II, owed too much to England to allow Hesse-Kassel to follow suit. Like Prussia it remained neutral. Central and northern Germany enjoyed what Goethe called "a doubtful safety."

  On October 1, 1806, Frederick William III of Prussia reluctantly declared war on France in response to their violation of the Treaty of Schonbrunn. The war, once declared, was short-lived; in one spectacular week Napoleon defeated Prussia, whose army had not so long ago, under Frederick the Great, been the most famed in Europe. The crushing battles at Jena and Auerstädt laid an enormous swathe of land under French control. Virtually all the coast of Germany along the North Sea and the Baltic, including the stronghold of English trade on the Continent, Hamburg, fell to the French. Napoleon arrived in Berlin for a triumphal procession under the Brandenburg Gate and down the Unter den Linden on October 27, 1806. A month later he announced the Continental Blockade, preventing any vessel originating in Great Britain or her colonies to enter a port of the Empire. His decree signaled a blistering escalation of tactics. France was ready to deal the crippling blow to England, and it seemed she had land and power enough to enforce it.

  The defeats in Prussia left Hesse badly exposed. The Hessian court rapidly demobilized their troops and tried to obscure the fact that they had been quietly supporting Austria and Prussia, going so far as to post signs along the roads proclaiming "Electorat de Hesse: Pays Neutre."38 Failing to gain a late admission to the Confederation of the Rhine, they sought to interest Napoleon in whatever they could offer him. As Smithson had joked with Holland:

  It is reported that a large body of French troops are coming here avowedly to eat, having like locusts devoured every thing in Hesse Darmstadt. A person is hastened to Paris to remercier. in the french sense of it, his Imp. Majesty for his partiality to this country. It is hoped that he has been furnished by the Elector with a sufficiency of weighty arguments to have effect, for the people here have at present scarcely enough to eat for themselves.39