The Lost World of James Smithson

by Heather Ewing

  Even before the fire of 1865, however, the context that gave rise to the ideals behind Smithson's bequest—the ferment of knowledge that comprised what is often now called the English Enlightenment—had virtually vanished. Smithson's belief in scientific exchange and opportunity had been forged in the coffeehouse societies of Revolutionary Europe; his models were likely bodies like the Royal Institution, dedicated places of research that sought also to make scientific education accessible to all. The Smithsonian as it emerged in the 1840s and 1850s took shape as a product of Victorian America. Its organization and interests reflected the needs and goals of a different culture and a very different scientific climate. In this transplanted environment, the Smithsonian's founder became simply a name, his motivations a mystery.

  In 1861, the Smithsonian learned of the death of Madame de la Batut, the mother of Smithson's nephew, in France. They also discovered that the money left in England to generate her income had appreciated greatly in the intervening years. The £5,015 lodged twenty-three years earlier in England realized $54,165.38 for the institution.46

  The passing of Madame de la Batut was not the last that the Smithsonian heard of this curious tangent from the Smithson story, however. Throughout the late nineteenth century her children clamored for recompense, in letters that decried the defrauding of their mother—and, by extension, themselves. "Great nations honor themselves by their gratitude to their benefactors," Emma Kerby de la Batut wrote, "and on this score the United States owe us a reparation."47

  The first aggrieved letter from this next generation arrived at the institution in the mid-1870s. In it Georges Henri de la Batut stated that he had sent a letter a few years earlier but had heard no reply, and he wondered if the Smithsonian had thought it was a hoax. "No, Sir," he announced, "I am the half brother of Henry James Hungerford and it is from some rubbish left by him that I find myself the possessor of this portrait [of James Smithson]. I have thought that it would be much better in the care of the Institution than in the hands of a disinherited person and I have decided to send it to you." Along with this miniature de la Batut also eventually sent a copy of Smithson's will written in his hand, a portrait of Henry Louis Dickenson, and one of the nephew. For the Smithsonian, which had lost nearly everything connected to Smithson in the fire of 1865, the news of these objects was extremely welcome. They promptly dispatched an agent to pay a visit to the de la Batuts in Brittany.

  The Smithsonian representative found only two people in the little town who spoke any English, a Navy lieutenant in charge of the Morbihan River oyster beds and an English jeweler married to a Frenchwoman. A wary Georges de la Batut, a local justice of the peace, received the men. Then in his early forties, about five feet eleven inches, with brown hair and blue-grey eyes, de la Batut had a "heavy English figure, and in features [was] not unlike the Prince of Wales." He was suspicious of his visitors, and the Smithsonian official soon determined that the family was deeply embittered at the loss of the Smithson fortune. They still believed that they were entitled to some money from the estate.48

  De la Batut nevertheless, as he had promised, went and "hunt[ed] through his mother's effects and his own papers" for memorabilia related to Smithson and his brother Dickenson. He mailed the Smithsonian a number of treasures—those items already mentioned, along with some scraps of letters indicating Smithson's social circles in Paris, an engraved portrait of the Duke of Northumberland, the passport papers of the nephew, the diary of Smithson's brother. A few months later, though, he was writing again to the Smithsonian. He complained that he had not been thanked, and he was genuinely irked to learn that the lieutenant in the village who had served as translator had been sent a set of books and engravings from the Smithsonian. The Smithsonian promptly mailed off a barrage of gifts to France—including twenty-five volumes of Smithsonian publications, eleven volumes of the Pacific Railroad Survey, ten volumes of the Geological Survey of the Western Territories, four volumes of the Fisheries Commission, a mineral map of New South Wales, three dozen stereoscopic views of national parks in the United States, and a photographic portrait of Joseph Henry. The damage, however, had already been done. De la Batut's next letter closed with this ominous warning: "When the Institution thinks of disinterring the remains of Smithson let it remember that I will be in the way. If he has given away his fortune, his remains still belong to his family."49

  Decades later, these words came back to haunt the Smithsonian. In the first years of the new century, the Smithsonian learned that the city of Genoa was planning to move the bodies interred in the cemetery where James Smithson was buried. The city was steadily reclaiming the cypress-covered heights of San Benigno, quarrying the great chalk cliffs overlooking the harbor—"slowly but surely eating its way towards us from the sea," in the words of one member of the cemetery committee. While most of the Smithsonian regents greeted this news with indifference, content to let Smithson's resting place remain in Italy, one member of the board saw in the dilemma a momentous opportunity.50 For Alexander Graham Bell, the famous inventor of the telephone, James Smithson was somebody worth remembering. In Bell's eyes Smithson's legacy had profoundly altered the direction and development of an entire country. His gift had marshaled the energies of the young government of the United States and provided a focal point for the collective organization of scientific research. It had provided an organ for the dissemination of knowledge and a repository for the immense and irreplaceable national collections of natural history specimens. Smithson's faith in the American government as the instrument to implement his bequest elicited Bell's deepest respect and gratitude.

  Bell identified strongly with Smithson's philanthropy. Despite the fact that he was only fifty-six, Bell was in appearance already the avuncular white-bearded man of legend. His invention of the telephone, when he was still in his twenties, had transformed society and the way that man contemplated communication; the liberal patent that had been granted such a fundamental discovery had ensured him an ample fortune. Bell had since devoted much of his wealth to fostering scientific research in America. He had established the Volta Laboratory Association in Washington to support research on deafness. He had underwritten the magazine Science, headed the National Geographic Society, and had actively supported the manned flight or "aerodrome" experiments of the man now heading the Smithsonian, Samuel Pierpont Langley. The Smithsonian's founder, in Bell's opinion, deserved a proper measure of homage. James Smithson's remains should be brought to America, he said, and "interred with due honors in the grounds of the Institution which he founded."51 Bell's proposal, however, found no support. He felt so strongly about the matter that when he saw the rest of the board uninterested in taking action, he even offered to pay the expenses of relocating Smithson's remains out of his own pocket. But the regents remained unconvinced, and time was running short. At the end of November 1903, the Smithsonian was informed that Genoa had expropriated the cemetery land. Their intentions regarding the disposition of Smithson's remains had to be communicated to Italy before the first of the year.

  It was Bell's dynamic son-in-law, who became the first full-time editor of the National Geographic, Gilbert Grosvenor, who turned the tide. Grosvenor published a lengthy editorial in the New York Herald, entitled "Should Smithson's Bones be Brought to America?," in which he put the case to the nation. "James Smithson, the founder of the Smithsonian Institution, is about to be turned out of his grave, in Genoa, Italy, to make room for a quarry," he announced. "We should place him where he may rest in peace—not for another seventy-five or one hundred years, but for as long as the great nation lives for which he showed such complete confidence and respect." The piece was reprinted across the country, from the Virginian-Pilot in Norfolk to the Salt Lake Tribune in Utah, and America responded. Soon enough, an about-face amongst the regents had Bell and his wife on a steamer to Europe.52

  The Bells arrived in Genoa on a dark and dreary Christmas Day. Bell had caught a cold on the train from Paris, which was "aggravated by
a chilly ride on Christmas Day without wraps." Confined to his hotel, he doodled in his notebooks, musing about the lime-dissolving liquid in which a hen lays an egg and its potential as a rheumatism remedy, while his wife explored the steep cobbled streets of the city.53 From his room Bell tried to coordinate plans for the removal of Smithson's remains. There were permissions to secure, health officers to contact, and shipping arrangements to make. But beyond these bureaucratic stumbling blocks there lay an even more formidable obstacle. An employee of the city had excitedly produced a paper some twenty-five years old, in which a man in France ostentatiously stated his claim over the bones of James Smithson. The bureaucrat had been able to recall the exact location of the letter in his files because, he said, in all his years of work he had never seen anything like it. The Smithsonian, it appeared, was not going to be able simply to cart Smithson away.54

  Back at Bell's hotel, the U.S. consul fretted nervously about the state of affairs. He was aghast that the legal claim to the site was not absolutely free and clear. It was only after lengthy consultation with the mayor of Genoa and the British consul that the exhumation was arranged, but Bell still decided to take only the remains. He left behind the monument—which was decisively carved with the inscription "This monument is erected, and the ground on which it stands purchased in perpetuity, by Henry Hungerford, esq., the deceased's nephew." The Smithsonian subsequently retrieved the sarcophagus later in 1904.55

  William Henry Bishop, the American consul at Genoa, photographed holding up Smithson's skull by Mrs. Bell, 1903.

  High on the heights of San Benigno, in the midst of a snowstorm made that much more intolerable by the cold whip of the wind, the exhumation proceeded. Snow collected on hat brims and the collars of woolen coats as the men peered into the chasm of the tomb. Mrs. Bell toiled in the background taking photographs. Smithson's skeleton, once exposed, lay coated in a fine layer of red dust, the remains of the thin wooden coffin in which he had been buried. "The effect recalled to me, on a large scale," the U.S. consul said later, "that of a desiccated leaf." He held up Smithson's skull in contemplation for Mrs. Bell's camera. Together they created a series a pictures they impishly called the "Alas, poor Yorick" set.56

  For the next few nights, guarded by the gardener, Smithson's remains, now sealed in a strong zinc coffin, rested in the cemetery's mortuary chapel, a little Doric temple surrounded by cypress trees. Bell, from his hotel, worried about what lay ahead. "It is to be hoped," he confided to his diary, "that these few bones—almost all that really remains of what was once the wealthy gentleman and scientific student—will escape the fate that has befallen all his other possessions which have preceded him to America!"57 On the morning of January 2, 1904, they held a brief ceremony at the chapel; the coffin was draped with an American flag, Mrs. Bell placed a wreath of leaves from the gravesite, and the others contributed flowers. Smithson's remains were then transferred to the steamer Princess Irene in the harbor below.

  Bell's son-in-law had not been idle while Bell had been in Italy. Gilbert Grosvenor had gone over the heads of the Smithsonian regents and gained the backing of President Theodore Roosevelt for an elaborate reception. Smithson's arrival in Washington was marked in grand style. The president ordered the Navy to send a boat to escort the Princess Irene into harbor, and Grosvenor arranged for a troop of U.S. Cavalry to accompany the casket from the Navy Yard to the Smithsonian. On the morning of January 24, 1904, as the Marine band played "Nearer My God to Thee," Smithson's coffin, draped in the American and British flags, was winched over the side of the ship to begin the stately trip to the Smithsonian. Men on the sidewalks doffed their hats as the solemn cortege passed down Pennsylvania Avenue; the mounted soldiers were followed by the carriages carrying the dignitaries in their best dark suits and silk top hats, and by the large-wheeled caisson with the flag-draped coffin. They drew up to the porte-cochere of the old red sandstone Smithsonian building, and Smithson was carried upstairs and placed in state in the regents' room—the very room where long ago his personal effects had been displayed.58

  Soon after the arrival of Smithson's remains, the Smithsonian solicited designs for a memorial to the institution's founder. They called on prominent artists and architects around the country, including Augustus St. Gaudens; Gutzon Borglum, the sculptor who went on to create Mount Rushmore; and Henry Bacon, later the architect of the Lincoln Memorial. Washington in these years lay in the grips of the City Beautiful movement, its landscape undergoing a transformation from a clutter of Victorian red brick into a city of magnificent axial vistas and gleaming marble monuments. The proposals for Smithson's tomb, following these general artistic trends, were a parade of images of neoclassical splendor. One presented a bust of Smithson on a pedestal under a classical pergola. Another resembled the Mausoleum of Halicarnassus, one of the seven wonders of the ancient world. Borglum proposed a monumental "heroic" statue of Smithson, sitting like Rodin's The Thinker, contemplating a mineral specimen in his hand.59

  Henry Bacon's design for a mausoleum for Smithson, 1904.

  Had the money been appropriated, and one of these designs built, Smithson's monument on the Mall might today have rivaled the Lincoln Memorial in size. In the end, bowing to financial constraints, the Smithsonian opted to dedicate a room at the entrance to the Castle as a crypt for Smithson's remains. The original marble sarcophagus, when it arrived finally from Genoa, was reunited with Smithson's coffin and installed in the room. It is still today Smithson's Crypt. For one brief glimmer of a moment, however, at the opening of the twentieth century—with a state reception at the shores of the nation's capital and the drafting of a mausoleum on the Mall by several of America's leading architects—James Smithson was elevated to the status of an American founding father.

  EPILOGUE

  1832

  We hope that the name "smithsonite" will not meet with any opposition as it recalls the name of a scientist to whom we owe several important accomplishments in a time when the science of chemistry had made but few advances.

  —çs Beudant, Traite Elementaire de

  Mineralogie, 1832

  IN 1832, THREE years after Smithson's death, the French mineralogist François Beudant coined the name "smithsonite" to describe the calamine that Smithson had identified as zinc carbonate. The attribution was published in the second edition of Beudant's multi-volume Traité Elémentaire de Minéralogie. This work, the labor of a lifetime of cataloging and describing, joined a long procession of such encyclopedias, reference works that sought to place the productions of the earth in a systematically ordered framework. Smithson's age had seen the birth of mineralogy as a science, a massive flowering of system-building after centuries of silence. Mineralogical classification had changed little since the Renaissance before the burst of activity that began in the mid-eighteenth century. The advances made in Smithson's lifetime, in many fields, but in chemistry and mineralogy especially, marked the beginning of what is generally recognized as the modern quantification of science. And Smithson's labors throughout his life fell in the midst of these developments.

  But Beudant addressed the memory of Smithson as if he had flourished a generation earlier, and not as if he were someone who had been dead only three years and actively publishing in the 1820s. Already in 1832 Smithson formed a part of a group rapidly receding into history, whose work and advances were quickly becoming obsolete. No longer could an amateur or self-taught man make a sizeable contribution to the world's store of knowledge. The year itself, stamped by the passage of the Great Reform Act in Parliament, has come to symbolize the sweeping away of old systems, and the obliteration of antiquated, corrupt modes of operation. As in government, the Church, and the world of education, science, too, underwent tremendous change and reform. Around this time William Whewell is credited with coining the term "scientist" to replace that archaic moniker "natural philosopher." And in 1832 the British Association for the Advancement of Science was enjoying the anniversary of its first year of existence. Est
ablished to give a common platform for the rapidly proliferating branches of scientific inquiry, it represented the beginning of a professional identity for the scientific community.1

  When he allied Smithson's name with this alluring and useful mineral, Beudant could justifiably have believed that he was providing the best and greatest memorial the world would ever have of one James Smithson. In his lifetime Smithson had published no great scientific to me, no account of his travels or his associations with famous people, no philosophical tract elucidating his beliefs or aspirations. His meticulous, minutely scaled analyses, while eliciting the praise and admiration of his contemporaries, resulted in no clever invention to change the way science was conducted. The limitations of the era—the lack of precise measurements, the difficulties in calculating temperature or time or weight—were all soon overcome in subsequent generations. Smithson's earnest and well-intentioned publications on how to build a balance or enhance the workings of a blowpipe hold appeal today mostly for their quaintness and for the evocation of the exigencies of laboratory work two hundred years ago. For all Smithson's desire to ensure his name should outlive that of the Percys and the Northumberlands, it was in fact François Beudant who first committed the name of Smithson to the pages of history.