The White Road

by Edmund de Waal

  No short cuts, I said to my first apprentice, some twenty years later.

  Chapter thirty-three

  A Quaker! A Quaker! A Quirl!

  i

  The business of this house is both deeply abstracted and deeply practical. This is the Quaker way.

  The Quakers at this moment are in ascendancy. Since the Act of Toleration of 1689, they are allowed to worship freely without the fear of imprisonment. But as they refuse to swear all oaths including the Oath of Allegiance, they cannot become Members of Parliament, cannot ascend the hierarchy of the state, become justices of the peace, serve on juries. And they cannot attend grammar schools or go to either of the English universities. As the days of the week and the months of the year are tied to pagan names, the Quakers have recalibrated the calendar so that Sunday is now the First Day and January has become the First Month.

  They hold themselves apart with their sombre dress, those wide hats and close bonnets, self-contained. Sixty years ago, it was the stocks. Thirty years ago, you might be arraigned. Now you get the odd shied stone from that knot of boys that forms and re-forms like a murmuration of starlings in autumn; A Quaker! A Quaker! A Quirl!, they yell, and the stones come over. You are not to respond or curse, but running is allowed.

  This pushes the Quakers’ entrepreneurial energy into alternative spaces and ideas. In all those shared silences at Meeting – long and measuring and unfolding – you look at those around and there is a kind of assessment in these hours as you wait for God to call on your fellow Friends to speak.

  The houses in Plough Court off Lombard Street were perfect for this careful knitting together of home and work and community. They have enough space for a workshop and apprentices. As in every part of London, there is a special timbre to belief in these few streets. Down in the east, in Spitalfields, there are the Huguenots, but here is Dissent with its collection of printers and doctors, and now chemists, merchants and coffee importers.

  London is huge and chaotic, but this bit of territory is easy to map.

  The Friends’ Meeting House is in White Hart Court in Gracechurch Street, four minutes away from the pharmacy if you are in hurry to get to Meeting. A watercolour shows a sea of bonnets, women on the left-hand side and men on the right-hand side, a few colourful visitors in the balconies. Though it is flooded by light, it is a study in umber.

  In the shop, Silvanus and his assistants are dealing with agues, melancholy, bee stings, astonishment, dropsy, the pox, green sickness and gout, a woman who needs to know whether she is with child or not. The art of the apothecary is complex. It necessitates looking at the person standing in front of you and assessing their needs.

  Silvanus, wrote Benjamin Franklin, another visitor to Plough Court, was ‘remarkable for the notice he took of countenances’, manifested through his talent for cutting ‘strong likenesses’ in ivory. Silvanus’s little ivory plaque of William Penn, all curlicued wig, shows a real man, substantial, confident, with his chins looking into the distance, pausing before speaking.

  For William Cookworthy this art of taking notice, being shrewd, is another part of not mistaking one thing for another.

  ii

  And this fits with the obsessive record keeping that is part of Quaker life.

  As the Quakers have opted out of the trappings of the state and conduct their own ceremonies, they keep lengthy records of marriage, permissions, wills, inheritances, the poor, grievances and concerns. There are ledgers and fair-copy letter books that minute the tremors of unease around the behaviour of a particular Friend, the caution of anything that might rebound on the image of the Friends. There is always the threat of exclusion, the sanction of removal from the Friends, and this necessitates more noting.

  This ordering of life is easily understood. You know where you are.

  All this accounting and counting and recounting on this earth helps to strengthen the rectitude needed for the final accounting to God.

  I’m not sure how long I would last before the stern questioning of the Elders.

  My methods in gathering material, noting it, and keeping clean records, my archival habits, are shot.

  A couple of months ago, unable to sleep in the middle of the night, I bought William’s Patent for Porcelain from an online bookseller as I wanted to have it in my hands. I thought it might emit some tremor of all the aspirations of the old man. It was as ridiculously expensive as my four pages of Tschirnhaus bought during my research last year. When it arrives from the bookseller, it is perfect.

  And now I can’t find it.

  My papers and files are in disarray with notes on China buried somewhere by Meissen, with Tschirnhaus on top of this, and now the complete works of Defoe and the letters of Leibniz.

  Do I have to stay awake until I’m in some fugue state to find it?

  And God help me, I think, as I look at my desk. I’ve got rid of the Jesuits and landed myself with the Quakers.

  Chapter thirty-four

  a greater rain

  i

  William Cookworthy is twenty-one in 1726 and after six years in London he is set on his way to Plymouth.

  In the established Quaker way, Silvanus is setting William up with a modest loan as Bevan and Cookworthy, Chemists, in Notte Street: ‘That part of the Town where Merchants do most congregate, a street that runs down towards the Quays, Customs House, Exchange and other offices connected with the Port.’

  It could not be a better start for this young man.

  The house is in a garden, useful for herbs, on one side of which stand the chemical laboratory with its benches, shelves and still, and a dispensary. It is seven windows wide, four storeys high, dressed in Portland Stone with a steep flight of steps to a beautiful pedimented door with an eagle about to take flight.

  I am following William. We’re on first-name terms.

  I’ve had Jingdezhen and Versailles and Dresden. I’ve had my fun and I’m off into the West. Plymouth is a busy port, set within the folds of grey-green wooded hills, the rivers running deeply out to the Channel, the grey-green town hugging the crescent of land. Dr John Huxham, William’s new neighbour, writes of the place:

  The town of Plymouth is situated at the Bottom of a very large Bay, lying quite open to the southerly Winds; on the East and West it is sheltered by very high Cliffs, at the Bottom it is terminated by Marble-Rocks, yet so as that an Arm of the Sea runs up a great Way into the Country on each Side of it … From the Bottom of the Bay the Country rises continually till you come to the Dartmoor Mountains at about ten Miles distant from the Town. – I have therefore described the Situation of the Town, that, amongst other Things, some Reason perhaps may be assigned why there falls such a Quantity of Rain here yearly.

  This is not so much a landscape as a weather system.

  It is a place prone to ‘sudden and sometimes severe changes of the weather’, writes Dr Mudge of Plymouth. The sky is lead, pewter, tin, sometimes mackerel, while the ground is ‘very dirty in wet weather, from the currents which pass along the middle of the streets’. In the British Library I spend a happy morning with Dr Huxham, who has used his barometer three times every day to record Observations on the air and Epidemic diseases from the year [1727] to [1737] inclusive, so that I know just how damp William gets in the morning, as he walks out at noon and as he takes his dinner and falls into bed in this new place.

  His days are to be marked, charted either as ‘Some Quantity of Rain’, ‘A considerable Quantity’, ‘A greater Rain’ or ‘Continual and heavy Rain’.

  ii

  The town and the dock are congested, febrile with sailors and whores, pressgangs and navy fixers, chandlers for sailcloth and spars, rope-makers and block-makers. There is a constant stream of carts for the merchants in the woollen trade handling the coarse wool from West Country flocks and serge cloth for export, and boats coming in from Cornwall with tin and copper. There are the morning sales of pilchards caught with seine nets, and then three times a week there is a market of produce, b
utter, chickens and corn. Plymouth has rare and wonderful auctions on the quayside of prize goods, seized from whoever we are currently fighting – Havana snuffs, notes William – and there are hogsheads of sugar, rum, rice, tobacco, and every colonial produce landed here.

  Wherever there are ships and cargos there are disputes, so this town has its attorneys. Then there are the doctors Mudge and Huxham, surgeons, bankers, auctioneers, the officers of the Royal Dockyard, and the clergymen they keep to preach respect and temperance to their sailors, and sundry ministers for the growing numbers of Dissenters, for Plymouth, like all ports, is a dangerous quivering balance of respectability and mayhem.

  William is to be a retailer and a wholesaler to doctors and apothecaries throughout Devon, Somerset and Cornwall and to the immediate population in Plymouth. He rides out on his grey mare to Plympton, Plymstock, the South Hams, Buckland, Tamerton Foliot, Bere Alston, villages whose names read like the lists of esoterica for his apothecary’s cupboard.

  William Cookworthy Esq. is already a little stolid in his Quaker broadcloth, a white cravat at his neck, his wide-brimmed black hat and the steady pace of his horse.

  William has called her Prudence.

  Chapter thirty-five

  covering the ground

  i

  At first, William’s journeys are to drum up custom, connect with the scattering of customers who need ointments and potions and tinctures. And to see his family; his mother and sisters still live in Kingsbridge, some twenty miles away. But then he is invited to visit Meeting in the villages in the deep countryside with sometimes only a few Friends in a room, and he starts to preach.

  In the deep lanes there is trefoil and comfrey, the simples which he can take back to his new laboratory. Slowly he starts to use these journeyings more systematically.

  Riding covers the ground and you can see over the hedges, see the lie of the land. And you are at the height of a branch of crab apples, Malus sylvestris, or damsons, Prunus domestica. But the roads in this part of the country are notorious. Some of them are barely roads, more loose assemblages of ruts and potholes, flung together. Celia Fiennes, a generation earlier, nearly broke her horse’s neck and her own, riding to Fowey from Looe, and Thomas Tonkin lost sight of an eye from a bramble overhanging a narrow sunken lane on his Cornish travels to research the history of the county. If the mist comes down on Dartmoor, who knows what will happen to you. There are unfenced mine workings all over the country, sheer drops that take you, your pack and your horse. Beware rising water and incoming tides and quicksands, and beware the Cornish.

  But when you are walking you find a different reading of the landscape. And he walks.

  The stone of the cottages changes, for instance, as you climb higher towards Dartmoor. Here between Boscombe and Edgefield the road turns from a brown and cloacal mud to a paler slip. You are on the edge of a tilt in the rock. Walking allows the welter of anxieties to settle, of course, allows for a rehearsal of ideas. It also brings pleasure.

  On a bridge in spring you feel the calligraphic shock of a kingfisher over the water below. A sudden shower and a stream like a vein of silver emerges on the hillside. You pause and lean on your stick to talk to the parish road-mender and idly turn the fragments of gravel with your toe, and turn them again. Here in autumn the stream washes over the track and carries silvery gravel from the hills to your right.

  You have deep pockets. The skeleton of a weasel, some hazelnuts, and now a handful of this gravel. It looks as if it contains iron. Though how much iron is something that you can only discern in Notte Street tonight when you get home.

  When you are walking you see movement that becomes men. And then you see mines. Sometimes you pass a couple of figures and a pickaxe, a scraping into a hillside, some baskets, a stream for washing ore, a tethered horse; freeminers working a tin-stream. They have rights to divert streams and cut fuel, bounding rights to ‘search for and work freely for tin’ over areas of common land.

  ii

  Other workings speak of money. They need ladders, and pulleys, waterwheels, sheds for the mine captain, stacks of expensive timber, handpumps. The great mounds of overburden – loose earth and rubble and stone – tell you of shafts sinking eighty feet, fathoms down to reach copper, tin, silver and lead. There is mercury here, in a barrel, and another of arsenic for testing.

  As he grew up in a Devon village, William knows what rural poor looks like with the sad smudge of smoke from a chimney, an exhausted line of cabbages, a clutch of children in a door. But this huddle of shacks near the pithead is different. Here children as young of six are sorting the ore in the mud. This is not clean, or tidy: it is improvident, wasteful, dissolute.

  William is appalled. He wonders if the endemic colic is caused by the horrific drinking of cider amongst the labourers. Is it caused by lead poisoning? He notes that the plates of the cider mill are covered in lead.

  This ‘crusty, rocky slip of a country’ is jagged with pitched battles between men from different mines, cockfights, gambling, casual piracy, wrestling matches that end in disfigurement, riotous revellings, drunkenness. It is attended by illness, racking coughs, lungs aspirant for air, repeated breaks to limbs, head injuries from falling rock, bloodshot eyes, lassitude and torpor, a hand that shakes and shakes. What connection is there between this weather, this landscape, this poverty?

  The young apothecary has left Lombard Street far behind. This is his new threshold.

  How do you weigh up dangers? The mines are full of ‘Poisonous Damps’, strange vapours where a man can sit down to rest and be found the next day, ‘his elbows resting on his knees, in a kind of sleepy nodding attitude … cold and stiff’, ‘where a father and son were walking through the Adiot, when the son stepped into an old short drift and instantly fell down dead. The father, on observing this, followed the son to give him succour, and shared the same fate.’ Mines are the underworld.

  This is an alchemist’s land and a mineralogist’s dream, but it is shaken up and deranged. Material science means a trialling and essaying of the ground, an assessment of what this rock means, where riches lie. In Saxony, this has been done for 150 years, in the Goldhaus of Augustus, where they have charts and tabulated specimens of ores and gems from across the land.

  But William walks across a landscape where knowledge is so local that the vernacular barely crosses from one valley to another. Lodes obey no logic; this lode is heaved to the right, or to the left, up or down, by a cross lode, a contra, a gossan, a slide, a flookan, or the like, ‘pursuant to the idiom of our Miners’.

  This is not a passive bit of country, some Wiltshire estate with elms halfway towards the river, some cows for placid scale. It is an active, angry land, caught up and congested.

  To understand it you have to understand the accent of this crooked place.

  Chapter thirty-six

  shillings, pebbles, or buttons

  It is money and ownership.

  William soon understands that who owns the land is critical. All land can hold a mineral claim, an offer for the rights for a share of the profits. Cornwall has its own legal system for the ownership of mineral rights, its own courts – the stannaries – to decide on penalties for infringements. There are complex disputes over the inheritance of mineral rights. It is possible to own almost nothing of almost nothing and still live in hope of riches.

  There is so much money to be made here, so much money to be lost, that everything needs to be done at speed, the shaft lashed together, barely propped. Your claim can lapse. You can wager your work against the future, buy credit for food and beer for your rights. You can buy a month of possibility on a few fields.

  This is a landscape of speculation.

  It isn’t just the rich who become richer. It is 1735 and to William, upright and prudent, used to his profit-and-loss ledger, everyone in Plymouth and in Cornwall seems to be speculating. There are the Friends who are buying shares in prize cargos on the value of a hold full of snuff and tobacco. Everyo
ne has heard of the mine where £100 was invested and in the first week £4,000 of copper ore was raised, £2,800 in the second week. Everyone knows the prices. These first years that William is in Plymouth, it is £7, fifteen shillings and tenpence a ton for copper. It matters because you are paid in complicated ways. You listen to the fluctuations in price as keenly as a trader in the bazaar knows the way that gold is heading.

  You see what speculation brings – estates and livings and titles. Thomas Pitt, over at Boconnoc, near Lostwithiel, is the grandson of ‘Diamond’ Pitt who made a fortune in East India acquiring the largest and most beautiful gem ever seen, and selling it on at vast profit to the dauphin in Paris.

  The Tinners, with only their coats on their backs, illiterate, can still ‘assign the properties of a parcel of Copper or Tin Ore, with the utmost accuracy, by the help of twenty shillings, pebbles, or buttons’. Buttons or diamonds.

  Chapter thirty-seven

  Letters Edifying and Curious

  i

  The year 1736 ‘begins with a Melancholy aspect, for the gloomy South wind blows, and perpetual Rains fall’, records the indefatigable Dr Huxham of Plymouth, noting his barometer, but William Cookworthy is very well.

  He is doing so well that he can afford a wife.

  Sarah Berry is Quaker, naturally, the youngest of a large and respectable Somersetshire family and the young couple have to declare their intentions to the Plymouth and Taunton Meeting so that they can be examined and ‘certificates of clearness’ produced. They are married early in the year ‘with good order’. They begin their married life in sober comfort. William and Sarah, known to everyone as Sally, are blessed with five daughters, Lydia, Sarah, Mary, and then the twins, Elizabeth and Susannah, so that this becomes a noisy Quaker household.