The White Road

by Edmund de Waal

  i

  The white earth of the Cherokees, unaker, shown briefly to William Cookworthy twenty years before by a mysterious man from America who proclaimed he had made porcelain, has reappeared. This earth is a white promise. It has been talked of for years. A patent to use this earth, ‘extreamly white, tenacious, and glittering with mica’, was granted to the proprietor of the Bow Porcelain works but it came to nothing. It glitters and it thwarts.

  This time the earth has turned up in Bristol. A young Quaker merchant, Richard Champion, has received it from his brother-in-law in America. It is August 1765 and Champion has passed on to another china manufactory a ‘box of Porcelain Earth’, from the ‘internal part of the Cherokee Nations, 400 miles from hence, on mountains scarcely accessible’. But he has kept a little back.

  Champion is twenty-one and recently married, part of a Bristol clan with family interests both in ships and in the shipyards. He is a man in a hurry to prove himself, keenly involved in the politics of the colonies, as the family trades with the West Indies and America. Richard is both politic – he has six ships – and moral, a member simultaneously of the Society of Merchants dedicated to self-interest, and the Bristol Society for the Relief and Discharge of Persons Confined for Small Debts dedicated to their victims. His self-confidence borders on the alarming. He writes Public Letters using the name of Valerius Publicola, protesting against injustices on behalf of ‘gentlemen of fortune and reputation … uninfluenced and independent’.

  White earth piques the interest of Richard Champion, so much so that when he sees William trialling porcelain, he decides to become involved.

  Champion sees a Public Friend with an idea, an amiable family man, a preacher, a man of good works, a little removed from modern business, well regarded, but a touch provincial. William, he senses, is a man with a limited sense of how to get things going, a man who starts up Works and gives up Works. He senses opportunity.

  William, in turn, is glad of the energy emanating from Champion, this young and positive Friend. Their new business is to be based in Plymouth, closer to the raw materials. Premises will be taken. ‘Experience must determine the best form and way of using this kiln,’ writes William cheerfully, ‘’tis the only desideratum wanting to the bringing of the Manufacture of Porcelain, equal to any in the world, to perfection in England.’

  That, and access to the materials themselves, of course. These lie on the land belonging to Thomas Pitt.

  Access is delicate. This isn’t a straightforward request for copper or tin prospecting – sign here, bang on the table Cornwall stuff. William is anxious that this shimmering possibility of Chinese porcelains made from minerals under Cornish hills might seem ‘mere fancy and Chimera’. What will happen if Thomas Pitt, this rich young man, takes no noticed of it, shrugs and turns away?

  ii

  Pitt is thirty, politically savvy and well travelled, having spent years on the Grand Tour. He has come back a connoisseur with views on architecture which he is keen to try out in his Cornish estates and at Camelford House in London. William asks his friend Dr Mudge to intercede as he is more businesslike, less like an old Quaker. We all know, William writes, of those who have engaged in ‘an Imprudent Undertaking’.

  I realise that the last thirty years of my life can lay claim to this exact description of making porcelain.

  Terms for the raising of the clay are agreed and William starts to write to Thomas Pitt in the winter of 1766. Three dozen long letters survive in the municipal archive of the Cornish Record Office, a single-storey prefab building on the edge of Truro, grounded in car parks. This is the front line of research. The folder is waiting. I’m given white gloves and left alone.

  Shards from Cookworthy’s porcelain experiments, c.1766

  Each one is folded three times, addressed to Thos Pitt, Piccadilly, London, a red seal-mark heavy on the outer fold, carefully scripted.

  And I’m immediately floored.

  I’d expected words but three little fragments of porcelain fall out of the first letter, wrapped and then folded into scraps of paper, annotated with the exacting notation of a chemist, broken by the snapper of saucers. ‘The inclosed Samples are not sent as proofs that I am a good Potter, but that the Materials which enter the Composition are at least the Equal in quality to those of China.’

  They are as sharp as when they were snapped.

  He sends a fragment of Common China Ware, and Part of a Jar of Nankin Ware, and then two shards made from the ‘Materials that rise in thy Lands’. It’s a start. The ‘Inside of the piece where the glaze was applied Vastly too thick’, writes William. This is no surprise as ‘no person is at present concerned with me but my Brother’. They have built an Essaying kiln, which does not contain above fourteen small pieces, and are going to trial it. They are going to use Newcastle coal as it is ‘Vastly cheaper than Wood’, and undersell everyone else with their glorious, perfect, economic china.

  Five weeks later he writes in good spirits that in three weeks he will be able to send a Cup or a Jar. His brother Philip and he have built a larger kiln – a Trifle of a kiln one foot square – and from this firing they have two vessels, marred by falling Spar which has stuck to the glaze but it gives ‘an Idea of perfect Porcellain’.

  For William, porcelain becomes an Idea as it comes into being, marred, sharp where broken, but an Idea.

  Chapter forty-six

  Ayoree Mountain

  i

  In Stoke-on-Trent, Josiah Wedgwood is in his pomp. His creamware has taken England by storm. After years of methodical testing he has discovered ‘a Good wt. [white] Glaze’ that works with his beautifully constituted earthenware. His new ware is finely made, can stand the shock of boiling water, and is contemporary in its clean colour. It is ‘Ivory’, he writes. He has delivered the first set to Queen Charlotte, who has graciously allowed it to be named Queen’s Ware. ‘How much of this general use, & estimation, is owing to the mode of its introduction - & how much to its real utility & beauty?’ he asks in a letter, reflecting happily on ‘how universally it is liked’.

  He hurdles problems and anxieties. This week – a week of fair March weather in Plymouth – he writes: ‘Don’t you think we shall have some Chinese Missionaries come here soon to learn the art of making Creamcolour?’

  He is like Augustus the Strong goading the Japanese to come up the Elbe and load up with Meissen.

  China Earth from America has piqued the interest of Wedgwood who seems, I am finding, to be both omniscient and omnipresent.

  Wedgwood writes to his business partner Thomas Bentley that:

  I find that others have been dabbling with it before us, for a Brother of the Crockery branch call’d upon me on Saturday last and amongst other Clays he had been trying experiments upon, shew’d me a lump of the very same earth which surprised me a good deal and I should almost have thought myself robbed of it if it had not been much larger than my pattern. He told me it came from South Carolina.

  Decisive, he puts a plan together to send a man to the scarcely accessible mountains to get him some tons of this clay, to possibly buy the mountains themselves. This white earth is perplexing, but Wedgwood is not a man to be held back. He has the self-confidence to consult and take advice.

  He looks at maps, at Hyoree, Ayoree, Eeyrie, somewhere. Taking out a patent is a form of madness as it will clag him in lawyers and parliamentary shuffling and show his hand to other potters when getting the stuff dug out of the mountains is the imperative. This is an annoyingly slow and expensive imperative as he finds that the earth must be carried nearly three hundred miles overland ‘which will make it come very heavy’.

  It is now May and he has to arrange the new showrooms in Pall Mall and ‘Vase madness’ means whirling requests and decisions. What do you do if you need something in a hurry? You find the right man. He is recommended Thomas Griffiths, a man who ‘is seasoned to the S. C. Climate by a severe fever he underwent at Chs. Town & has had many connections with the Indians�
��. He is down on his luck and ready to travel. Terms are agreed.

  Everyone, I realise, comes to Wedgwood first.

  A French nobleman, Louis-Léon-Félicité, duc de Brancas and comte de Lauraguais, has been in Birmingham chivvying Erasmus Darwin. He ‘offere’d the secret of making the finest old China as cheap as your Pots’, Darwin reports to Wedgwood.

  He says the materials are in England. That the secret has cost him 16,000£. That he will sell it for (2,000). He is Man of Science, dislikes his own Country, was six months in the Bastille for speaking against the Government, loves the English … he is not an Imposter. I suspect his scientific Passion is stronger than perfect Sanity.

  The news gets to William Cookworthy a little later. An old friend has told him that the comte has spent a fortnight sniffing around Scottish granite, a substance not far removed from moorstone, and has been pushing hard for a patent for porcelain.

  When I read Wedgwood’s letters, I think of him and all the great princes and their chamberlains and decrees on the decisive ordering of porcelain. I go and see the French nobleman’s beautiful plate in the Victoria and Albert Museum. It shows an insouciant butterfly, barely able to make it across the pearly French porcelain sky. And I see the Cookworthy brothers, the chemist and the sailor, opening up their Trifle of a kiln in the garden at Notte Street and gingerly passing their slightly damaged Idea backwards and forwards.

  ii

  It is June and we’re in Plymouth.

  William’s new porcelain venture needs investment and a patent. Everything will be ready in a month. ‘Thou will be pleased to take the Town Attorney’s Opinion about this matter.’ William and Champion take their time and get the lawyers in. It is a classic start-up.

  The house and pit for washing the clay has been honestly executed. The bricks from Bristol have arrived for the kiln, the mason has cut and polished the stone for the mill to grind, a ton of pipe clay to make the roughly thrown saggars is on its way. William has taken ‘a part of the Cockside Storehouses Sufficient for the Carrying on of Our Experiments, tis the most Convenient Spot for the purpose about our Town’. It is six guineas per annum.

  It is now July. On the 16th, the seasoned Thomas Griffiths pays seven guineas for passage and one pound ten shillings for a cabin, and boards the ship America to sail across the Atlantic to find and then buy white earth from the almost inaccessible mountains of the Cherokee nation. And bring it back. He arrives in Chas’ Town Bay on 21 August – a miserable, hot and sickly time – to start his journey into the nation of the Cherokees.

  Map of Cherokee country, 1765

  This stretch of country is beyond any law. It is six years since the end of the Cherokee War and there are hunters and unpaid militiamen and displaced settlers in the backcountry. The ragged new settlements, an inn of sorts, a blacksmith, hovels appear, sketchily, amongst the black oaks, hickory and ash. You look after your horse well, keep travelling and you keep your wits with you.

  Griffiths buys three quarts of spirits, a Tomahawk for twelve shillings and sixpence, and sets out. He falls into conversation on the road with another trader, a rare sight as you can travel for thirty miles without seeing anyone. Two days before a set of thieves, ‘the Virginia Crackers and Rebells’, had robbed and murdered five people, just here. Carry your pistol in your hand, now, he tells Griffiths, there are ‘two fellows ahead that he did not like well’. His companion advises don’t stay in that house, stay outside; ‘the people were all sick and lay about the rooms like dogs, and only one bed amongst ’em’. If you wake up, your horse will be gone. Griffiths buys ‘corn for my horse and potato bread and a fowl for myself, which I boiled under a pine tree, near the house, where I slept part of that night’.

  It is now September. Griffiths journeys towards the white earth: progress slows in Plymouth.

  William has wildly underestimated the difference between making a test with his brother in the backyard and real production. He describes it and it is like seeing the Industrial Revolution in very slow motion.

  In Plymouth, the arch of the kiln has come down:

  in the Course of the experiment, which prevented the Fire from reaching the top of it … We were also unfortunate in the bottom of our Safeguards cracking by which means the powder of Spar which keeps the vessel from sticking fell down into the Bottom of the vessel under it … We shall set about Repairing our kiln tomorrow … I have no Question but we shall do very well in this way too whence we come to make an object of it.

  The test pieces were cold and rather grey. They looked slightly, unpleasantly, viscous, like the bloom on the barrels of mackerel. It is porcelain, no doubt about it, but who would want this Cornish version? It rings alright, a relief after the dull timbre of the last pieces, but I pause here and register that they are making shards, day after day after day.

  On 17 September, Griffiths joins up with an Indian woman belonging to the chief of the Cherokees. He arrives at Fort Prince George, the first settlement in the nation, about forty miles from the Indian Line.

  His luck is in. He has arrived just as ‘most of the Chiefs of the Cherokee Nation’ have gathered to choose delegates for a peace conference with the ‘Norward enemies’.

  Griffiths writes:

  after I had Ate, drank, smok’d and began to be familiar with these strange Copper Coloured gentry, I thought a fair opportunity to Request leave to Travill through their Nation in search of anything that curiosity might lead me to; and in particular to speculate on their Ayoree white earth. And accordingly the Commanding Officer … desired to be very particular on the subject. This they granted, after a long hesitation, and severall debates, among thoughtfulness some more seem’d to consent with some Reluctance: saying that they had been Troubled with some young Men long before, who made great holes in their Land, took away their fine white Clay, and gave ’em only Promises for it.

  Suddenly you are there, listening.

  You hear that you are not the first. So who has been before? And when? Promises have been made, and promises broken. And then you hear anger and then anxiety. They do not care to disappoint as you have come in good faith, openly, but ‘they do not know what use that Mountain might be to them, or to their Children’.

  The moment lightens, passes. Their white clay will make fine white punchbowls and they hope they will drink out of them and they all shake hands and settle the matter, and Griffiths leaves, crossing the Chattooga River and it is a terrible journey, very rotten and dangerous roads, and he is ‘a littler in Fear of every Leaf that rattled’. And he is ambushed by a storm, eighteen hours of sleet until there is ‘scarce life in either me or my poar horse’ and he reaches an Indian hut, ‘when I advanced near the fire, it overcame me and I fell down’. The squaw wraps him in a bearskin and blanket, and feeds him and his horse.

  November. On the 3rd, he gets to the Ayoree Mountain:

  Here we laboured hard for 3 days in clearing the Rubbish out of the old pit, which could not be less than twelve or fifteen ton; but on the fourth day, when my pitt was well clean’d out, and the Clay appear’d fine, to my great surprise, the Chief men of Ayoree came and took me prisoner, telling me I was a Trespasser on their land, and that they had receiv’d private instructions from Fort George not to suffer their pitt to be opened on any account.

  You are stopped again and this is very difficult, as there is now a price to be paid of 500 cwt of leather for every ton, a huge price.

  Griffiths writes again, ‘this proves of very ill consequence to me, as it made the Indians set a high value on their white Earth’, and there are four hours of strong talk before they shake hands.

  In Four days from this I had a ton of fine clay Ready for the packhorses, when very impertinently the weather changed and such heavy rains fell in the night, that a perfect Torrent came from the upper mountains with such rapidity, that not only fill’d my pitt, but melted, stained and spoil’d near all I save and even beat thr’o our wigwam and put out our fire, so that we were nearly perish’d with wet
and cold.

  The rain also washes the stratum of red clay into the pit and stains and spoils a ‘vast deal of white clay’.

  This is a severe winter. Apart from the rains, it is bitter and the Tennessee River freezes over and the pot is ‘ready to freeze on a slow fire’. There are now regular and troublesome visits from the Indians, but Griffiths gives them rum and music and they part well, if carefully; ‘they hoped I should want but a few horse loads of white clay and pray’d I would not forget the promise I made ’em, but perform it as soon as possible’.

  He will come back with porcelain made from their earth.

  It is 20 December 1767. In pelting rain, high in the mountains of the Cherokee Nation, an Englishman is making safe five tons of white earth, packing it into casks, battening, preparing a train of pack animals.

  On the same day in Plymouth, William writes to Pitt. ‘You said we were in sight of land. I am vastly mistaken if we are not now Entering our port.’

  Here too, it is a day of Greater Rain.

  ii

  The packhorses are loaded with white earth and on 23 December Griffiths takes his leave of this cold and mountainous country with the frosty weather breaking, and ‘the mountain paths being very narrow and slippery we killed and spoiled some of the best horses and at last my own slipt down and rolled several times over me; but I saved my Self by laying hold of a young Tree, and the poar Beast Tumbled into a creek and was Spoiled’.

  ‘I had’, Griffiths writes, ‘Severall hundred Miles to Travill, besides the loss of a fine Young Cherokee horse.’

  Griffiths loads five wagons with five tons of clay to take down through the backcountry to Charleston, where he pays for porters and rum for the wagoners and for coopers and two casks and buys sundry sea stores and ‘On the first of March I agreed for freight and passage with Capt. Morgan Griffiths of the Rioloto, bound for London’, £73 and ten shillings with £70 for the freight of the clay. And Thomas Griffiths bids farewell to Charleston and sets sail.