The Map That Changed the World (27 page)

P
olitics, adversity, and misery, it is said, each make strange bedfellows. William Smith was to feel the sting of all three—and among his opponents were strange bedfellows indeed. None was stranger, perhaps, than John Farey, his old friend and pupil from Woburn, who was to become an unwitting conspirator in the devious process that unwound. His involvement began when Greenough—who was no mapmaker, and not really much of a geologist either—became stuck, unable to work out the best way to start work on the map, and turned to Farey for help.

He did so because, right from the start, his plans for the actual making of his map began to go awry. The cause? Greenough’s basic notion that his map should be entirely empirical, and that its drawing should be based only on observations and not tied to any particular theory about which rocks were where, and why and when and how they had been laid down. Rumination, Greenough reasoned, had no place in a geological map: What should appear on the finished sheets of his chart should reflect facts that were quite unsullied by any theoretical presuppositions.

There should be nothing on the map, for example, that hinted at any supposed importance of fossils—nothing that suggested, as William Smith was suggesting, that certain rocks could be identified by the fossils contained in them, and that intelligent deductions could be made about the relative ages of the rocks that were so identified. Nothing of this sort was to be allowed on the Greenough map: Following the teaching of those Europeans who clung to the idea that all rocks were precipitated from marine solution, only the results of observation were to be engraved onto the map. Maybe theories would result once the finished product was out there for all to see—but for the time being, observations only.

It was a cartographic process that was doomed from the very start—for by denying any knowledge of which rock horizon might be coeval with any other, it swiftly became demonstrably impossible even to think of linking the representation on the map of any one outcrop with any other. And so Greenough, not too proud to concede that he had made a mistake, turned to the one man he knew personally, and who he suspected might help him—Smith’s old pupil John Farey.

The request—which in normal circumstances Farey might have turned down out of loyalty—came at an appropriate moment. Farey was at the time working on his Derbyshire survey. William Smith, it will be recalled, had recently fallen out with him, for a collection of trifling reasons—he felt that he himself should have won the commission offered to his old pupil; he had reacted petulantly when it was Farey, not him, who was chosen to supply entries on geology for Rees’s new encyclopedia; he was furious when references to his own great work on canal surveying were left out of the same book by the editors. Farey knew only too well that Smith was angry with him—and it would be fascinating to learn that this knowledge contributed in any way to his decision to help Greenough. There is no written record: One can only wonder.

But help Greenough John Farey most certainly did. He hap
pily showed Greenough samples of his mentor’s early works, and explained how it was all being done. He urged Greenough to pay little attention to the European scholars and to Abraham Werner, who made their primitive maps of Europe simply by showing rocks in their arrangement of different
types
. He would be far better off if he followed the unfolding doctrines of William Smith, who matched the strata to their unique assemblages of fossils, and was able to draw maps showing rocks according to their different relative
ages
. And to illustrate the point to this languid and leisured amateur, Farey pulled out map after map after map—all the new, unpublished, and unprotected work of the man whom Greenough had publicly and cruelly dismissed.

It was a ghastly error. Despite their recent falling-out, Smith had always trusted Farey. He had allowed him to copy his early maps, believing they would be used by him privately, never dreaming they would find their way into the planning of a rival publication. When he found out what had happened, he wrote bitterly in a letter to a friend describing what he saw, quite rightly, as yet another slight:

Armed with an abundance of advice—which, though it had come from Farey, had in essence all come from Smith—the Geological Society began its twelve years of hard grind to produce the rival sheets. Although a Committee on Maps was formally set up in 1809 to oversee the project, it was widely acknowledged within the society that it was really Greenough himself, with the help of his boundless personal fortune, who helped see the map to a successful conclusion.

Because of this the rivalry that ensued became highly personal: The battle over the map was as much a fight between William Smith and George Bellas Greenough as it was a battle between Smith and the society, or between Smith and whatever was thought of as the geological establishment of the day. It was a contest too between the ways of a man who was not afraid to get his hands dirty and the ways of a perfumed
flâneur
.

Smith was the epitome of the practical man, always grubbing around in the earth, draining fields, building watermills,
*
corresponding with engineers about pumping projects,
†
descending deep into coal mines. Greenough, on the other hand, was a young man of leisure whose works were largely confined to the library or the drawing room, and yet who was blazing a trail for what would soon be reckoned the most exciting and intellectu
ally vital scientific discussion club in Europe. The great map battle can be seen in today’s light as a conflict between early geology’s doers and its thinkers, between the men of the hammer and the men of the quill—not, it has to be added, that George Bellas Greenough was ever known for his intellect; he was always thought to have a second-rate mind but first-rate connections.

Greenough aside, this was above all a battle that need never have taken place, and it had ruinous consequences that the Geological Society was later to regret, mightily.

Now that he had worked out how to make his map—
more along Smith’s lines, and not those of the Europeans
, Greenough would have said through gritted teeth—it remained simply for him to acquire the geological data for the engravers. These he acquired from three sources. He read everything he could lay his hands on; he accumulated scores of notebooks full of information as a result of sending out hundreds of official leaflets called
Geological Inquiries
; and he went, with his colleagues, into the field.

The first two means invariably brought him back to Smith—many of the small number of English-language books and pamphlets mentioned Smith and his techniques; and scores of the replies from men who responded to the
Inquiries
leaflets also mentioning his name. One woman, our redoubtable Etheldred Bennett of Wiltshire, wrote in response, and her letter is quite typical of what must have been so galling to the bumptious society chairman: “I never yet have been able to get any information here regarding the Crockerton Clay,” she wrote, “…but Sir Charles Blagden…informed me that Smith told him it was a hump in the bed of clay beneath the green sand.”

The third method of collecting information was to go into the field—but Greenough’s excursions were very different from Smith’s field trips, which involved the mapmaker stopping coaches, jumping down into the mud, racing off to hit things with hammers and collect specimens and go down shafts and
measure dips and strikes and perform all the classical tasks of a common geologist. Greenough, on the other hand, wrote in a letter to a “Mrs. S” from Richmond in Yorkshire, that he would strike out into the countryside, and

It was not a method much appreciated by the more pedantic and less gentlemanly of his fellow scientists. When one early sheet—of Westmoreland—was published in advance of the main map, one critic, the geologist Thomas Webster, said that “Greenough’s map I found so very defective and inaccurate that I was obliged to begin
de novo
.” Another critic, named Underwood, who wrote to Webster as the project reached its conclusion, was even more vituperative:

Failing that, however, there was of course, as crib sheet, William Smith’s map itself—for the first edition of the great work
came out in August 1815, by which time Greenough had still not finished his own work. There is plenty of evidence that he saw and studied the map, circumstantial evidence that he copied from it. Among Greenough’s papers held in the Geological Society archives today there are no fewer than four copies of Smith’s completed map; on one of them there are annotations in Greenough’s distinctive handwriting—“this sheet of no further use to the Geological Map,” he had written—leading critics to make the obvious inference that he took all the information that he could from Smith’s map and pasted it onto his own. Without, it has to be said, any acknowledgment at all.

Now that he had the information, it remained only to make the finished map. In February 1813—by then he was probably aware that Smith really was going to finish his task—Greenough paid to have a base map engraved. This work was finished in the summer of 1815, with the entire map—at almost exactly the same scale as Smith’s—on six copper sheets. By October 1817 the mountains and hills had been engraved; by January 1819, the title.

Finally, beginning in the spring of 1819, and using the intelligence gained from all those ostlers, paviors, and mole catchers—and all the data that had been, in the view of Smith and his allies, borrowed, purloined, copied, pilfered, plagiarized, and just plain stolen, or taken with no by-your-leave from William Smith—George Bellas Greenough began adding, with delicacy and elegance, the geological information. The lines of strata were drawn on, the colors were chosen, the shading was executed, a key was constructed, its position was decided. The underside of England and Wales, now officially determined and demarcated by the thirteen-year-old Geological Society of London, was about to be published.

It duly came out, published by Longman’s and distributed by a bookseller named Smith on the Strand (who was of course no relation to William Smith). Greenough, aware that Smith’s wall map, which was not selling well, was priced at seven pounds,
decided to undercut him: He would still make money, he reasoned, if he sold his new map for six guineas, and to members of the society, whether they were ordinary, honorary, or foreign, it should be just five guineas. Undercutting Smith had an immediate and devastating effect—and it coincided almost exactly with his committal to debtors’ prison. The precise nature of cause and effect can be argued about. The coincidence of events, though, was just too cruel.

In any case the reception of Greenough’s map was generally lukewarm, and it sold very poorly. In the first year after its appearance Longman recorded selling only seventy-six copies. The critical reaction to it in fact rather vindicated Smith’s genius. Purchasers said, scathingly, that there was nothing very new about Greenough’s work—there was, despite all the waiting and the expectation, not very much more in this map that had been produced by a society and backed by private wealth, than in the predecessor that had been published five years earlier by one impoverished man, working on his own. It might well be a useful helpmeet for people traveling to England, wrote one French geologist, A. J. M. Brochant de Villiers. But with characteristically curt Parisian dismissiveness he added, and then underlined for emphasis: “
Mais il n’y a rien là pour la Science
.” There was nothing there for science.

But whatever the details, this apparently official map was now out before the public, competitively priced, selling for substantially less money than the map on which William Smith had worked for so long, and on which he had long since founded his hopes for security and recognition. Smith had for years been in the deepest financial trouble; for months the public anticipation of the appearance of Greenough’s map had so limited his own sales as to effectively ruin him.

He suffered both as a consequence of the new map’s pricing and because of the confusion caused by the new map’s appearance. It confused, for instance, the professor of mineralogy at Cambridge, Edward Clarke—a man whose own mind was
already a wonderful confusion of interests, filled with information about passions that included zinc, the making of blowtorches, ancient Greek marbles,
*
old coins, the chemistry of barytes, and the history of the Cossacks. He had long been on the subscription list for Smith’s map, but was then told by the Geological Society that another chart was in the works. He wrote to John Cary, Smith’s publisher: