The Map That Changed the World (23 page)

Within the oolitic horizons there are countless variations—of color (gray to buff, orange to ochre to pale scarlet) and fineness of texture, size of oolith, and width of banding and bedding plane. I chanced during my journey upon a roadside quarry near the village of Northleach, and the ebullient owner happily showed me around, pointing out with delighted pride the different colors and thicknesses of his rocks, and the uses he could make of the various types.

He used to be a farmer, but he had given it up back in the 1990s when he decided there was more money and amusement to be had from working the land below than trying to make ends meet from the land above. He had become a canny businessman: Build the Future, was his slogan. Use Natural Stone. He had handsome brochures, tempting customers with warnings—such as the charming thought that lichens would grow on untreated stones, that fragments of shell might protrude from walls and mantles, and that the presence of something called quarry sap might make the more delicate pieces crack in times of severe frost, and advising they be protected with hessian or burlap sacking.

He sold oolite by the ton for houses and walls; he also had a small gang of resident masons who slaved away in dusty warehouses making lintels and fireplaces, finials and corbels, carving gravestones and coats of arms. An admirer of English stone, currently living in Saudi Arabia, had recently ordered a globe, three feet in diameter: It would take the quarry owner’s chief mason
three days to finish it, so long as his excavator could delve deep enough among the freestone blocks to find a chunk big enough and free enough of faults to allow for the extraction of a one-ton sphere.

What his quarry did not sell, though, was the one lithological expression of the Middle Jurassic that is too rare to market anymore, and that is what the quarrymen used to call “the pendle”—the so-called oolite “slate” of the Oxfordshire village of Stonesfield (not more than a couple of miles from Churchill, where William Smith was born). The rock is not a slate at all, but simply a very thin-bedded version of the usual limestone, and which has for centuries been used to finish the roofs of Cotswold houses. A truly classic manor house, that one might find between Oxford and Bath, should have its walls made of Jurassic freestone or faced with oolite ashlar, and its roof made of overlapping shingles of Stonesfield slate.
*

The quarry sap mentioned in the Northleach brochure plays a vital part in the making of Stonesfield slate—which, not being a proper slate, cannot be manually split along its bedding planes. Quarrymen would only remove the pendle—they had to mine for this rock, using shafts and burrowing along narrow horizontal tunnels—between October and Christmas, and then leave the rocks set in clamps until the onset of the first sharp frost. The moment that this frost came—invariably in the middle of some January night, and the church bells would have to be rung to summon everyone—the miners would dash out to their waiting clamps of pendle and see if the iced-up quarry sap had done its work, shattering the limestone into tile-thin slabs.

If it had, then the men spent the summer cutting and shaping the slates—120,000 of them in one Victorian summer at the Kineton Thorns pit alone. But if it had not, then the uncracked slabs of pendle would have to be buried in the cold earth to preserve their sap—for if this quarry water was allowed to leach out it could never return, the rock could never be split, the slates would go unmade, and the men would go unpaid. It was a harsh and unforgiving business. Few are the industries that require frost to keep them in business: The villages of Stonesfield and Collyweston, unique in the land, came to rely for centuries on the regular onset of bitter cold, just as a Punjabi farmer would rely, year after year, on the coming of the monsoon.

The quarrymen would have another source of income, though. Fossils were to be found in huge abundance in the Stonesfield slate—and not just mollusks and belemnites, the standard fare of the collector and the academic. Here there were pterodactyls, dinosaurs, crocodiles, fish, cirripedes, annelids, starfish, and plants. Each time a quarryman or a slater might find a spectacular occupant he would pry it carefully from its limestone resting place and prop it tantalizingly in his cottage window. Geologists from Oxford University, on the hunt for specimens for teaching or research, would know to pass by Stonesfield each weekend, and scores of guineas would change hands for some of the choicer finds.

After a pleasing week of wandering along the southern and eastern Midland outcrops of the oolites (and which were invariably garishly covered with the bright yellow flowers of
Brassica napus
, oilseed rape, which flourishes noticeably well on the limestones, with their six inches of highly alkaline topsoil), it
was time to cross the Humber, and then watch the Middle Jurassic very nearly vanish. For some while, once I had arrived at Lincoln (where I bought for thirty pounds [about forty-five dollars] a nice varnished specimen of the Liassic ammonite
Asteroceras
) I had been aware of the looming presence to the east of the uplands of the Cretaceous chalk—which William Smith had recognized from forty miles away, that day in 1794 when he climbed up the tower of York Minster. Now the chalk pressed closer and closer, until, just outside the Yorkshire village of Market Weighton it lay not—as it should—on an Upper Jurassic horizon, like Portland Stone or Purbeck Beds, but on the Liassic rocks of the Lower Jurassic. At Market Weighton there were no Middle Jurassic outcrops at all: Northward up to the village of Thixendale the chalk lay directly either on the Lias or, for a very few miles, directly on top of the Permian.

A classic Lias ammonite,
Asteroceras
.

An entire geological epoch was missing—and for no more complicated reason than that during Middle Jurassic times there was a lozenge-shaped axis of uplifted high ground to the north of Market Weighton, where no waters could lap and inundate, and where no rocks, limestones, shales, cyclothems, or marl-stones could ever possibly accumulate. For half an hour I drove north through a series of villages that had never known the Middle Jurassic, knew nothing of oolites, had few fields of oilseed rape and that seem to have been held economic hostage to their geology after being surrounded on the one side by chalk and on the other by clay. The village houses were uniformly ugly and built of brick; the fields were divided, if at all, only by straggling and ill-kempt bushes. I felt strangely prejudiced against the place; and Smith’s diaries showed he hurried through the countryside here too, eager to get back to a part of English geology for which he felt a keen affection but which here had found no place to settle.

North of Acklam, Leavening, and Burythorpe it returns once more, however—though this time in very different form. Just as
with the looming presence of Yorkshire’s chalk wolds to the east, so now another clump of hills began to rear darkly in front. These were the North Yorkshire Moors, heather-covered and wild, incised by deep valleys, and topped by vast flat acreages of unspoiled parkland.
*

But the rocks here are not oolitic limestones—because the seas here were neither shallow nor Hockney blue. This was the delta of an immense river that coursed down from the North Sea Dome much as the Rhine courses out from Germany near Rotterdam. The rocks are thick—the river must have been Yangtze vast and sent billions of tons of sediment into the sea each of the five million years of its existence—but they are not limestones: They are sandstones and thick shales and, near Cleveland, ironstones. There are few marine fossils here, but a huge number of specimens of trees and fossil plants—horsetails, gingkos, cycads—and even on the Yorkshire coast, very thin bands of coal. This is the Middle Jurassic still: But as one can tell from the purple billows of heather and the cold and lonely roads snaking past secret radar stations and to the cliffs of the North Sea, it is made up of rocks very different from those at the other end of the country.

William Smith saw all of this countryside in the first two decades of the nineteenth century—he saw and traveled across and mapped all this and a great deal more besides. When I followed my own route two hundred years later I did so by dint of using a series of government-issued geological maps—most of them at a scale of ten miles to the inch, some at one mile to the inch, depending on where I was, where I wanted to be, and how much detail I needed to know. And in using those maps I would realize, each day that I pulled them from the glove compart
ment, spread them out before me, and marveled at their accuracy and real beauty, that William Smith had, in essence, created them. He had been the first; it was his labors and his ideas that stood behind the artful confections that now guided me, and that guide a million others today.

There is something of a fine irony in the fact that my journey finished where it did, in this remote and enchanting part of North Yorkshire. For in the 1820s William Smith lived and worked here too, mapping and surveying an outcrop of the Middle Jurassic sandstones about five miles inland from the coast, at a village called Hackness. It was at Hackness that the fortunes that had eluded him for so many long and wretched years finally caught up with him, his life began to turn around, and he could begin afresh.

Now, however, with the Jurassic of the Dorset coast hundreds of miles behind, and with the Jurassic of Yorkshire before me slipping off the cliffs into the cold North Sea, is the moment to pick up the narrative again. To do so it is necessary to wind back the clock and return to 1802—to the year when William Smith, still young and energetic and with his later ill fortunes both unanticipated and a very long way off, embarked on what would become the most creative period of his life.

Clydoniceras discus

I
t was a work of genius, and at the same time a lonely and potentially soul-destroying project. It was the work of one man, with one idea, bent on the all-encompassing mission of making a geological map of England and Wales. It was unimaginably difficult, physically as well as intellectually. It required tens of thousands of miles of solitary travel, the close study of more than fifty thousand square miles of territory that extended from the tip of Devon to the borders of Scotland, from the Welsh Marches to the coast of Kent.

The task required patience, stoicism, the hide of an elephant, the strength of a thousand, and the stamina of an ox. It required a certain kind of vision, an uncanny ability to imagine a world possessed of an additional fourth dimension, a dimension that lurked beneath the purely visible surface phenomena of the length, breadth, and height of the countryside, and, because it had never been seen, was ignored by all customary cartography. To
see
such a hidden dimension, to imagine and extrapolate it from the little evidence that could be found, required almost a
magician’s mind—as geologists who are good at this sort of thing know only too well today.

And yet this was as yet a wholly unknown area of imaginative deduction—there were no teachers, no guidebooks. Just one man, doing it all by himself, imagining the unimaginable. Small wonder that the map of these new underground dimensions took fourteen long years to complete, years more than it was supposed to. It proved to be the financial ruin—at least in the short term—of the man who had the vision to see it made. But when it was done it all proved to be so very good, so revolutionary, so filled with potential for profit and fame that it was stolen, copied, pirated, and the man who had made it overlooked, ignored, and forgotten for years.

When the project was begun, at the very start of the nineteenth century, it was just like so many other vast and ambitious schemes of the time, instilled at first with sunny optimism and good humor. There was an absolute certainty that it would be done, and done very well. And it would indeed be done and done well—but, as it turned out, at what a cost!

William Smith, who would come to be known all across the country as the strangely driven and ever-wandering maker of this map, had ended the eighteenth century with a reputation for scholarship and
brio
. By the time the nineteenth century was properly under way, he was fast becoming something rather different: an all-too-familiar, hale, and friendly figure in the post-houses and inns along the English stagecoach routes. He was a very talkative man, with all the enthusiasm of the slightly dotty. He chattered so much about the passion for landscape and rocks that drove him that he soon picked up a nickname—“Strata” Smith—from the barmaids and fellow passengers and those who dined beside him.

And though to some he might have been a bit of a bore, he was by most accounts well liked—a bluff and hearty, muscular-looking man, full of energy, restless, talkative, jumpy, untidy—
and invariably to be spotted scurrying hither and yon, always scurrying, and carrying great bundles of papers, maps, and charts under his arm.

Maps, indeed, were an abiding passion. Like many uncontrollable passions, they proved a burden too. Money was a constant trial. When Smith was out working he had at least forty maps on the go at once, all of the largest scale and greatest accuracy he could find. And he found his need to have them dismayingly expensive. Because of the time-consuming way maps were engraved in the early nineteenth century, they were much more costly in relative terms than they are today—and Smith’s purchases added significantly to what he was coming to realize was the very high cost of his own hugely ambitious cartographic enterprise.

More trivially he was to write that the simple business of carrying maps as he bought them, rolled up in tubes, made the practical side of his work very difficult. He was always spotting interesting pieces of rock beside the roadway—always jumping down from the driving seat of the chaise and clambering back up to sit beside the coachman (he had this childlike wish to sit up there in the wind, no matter the weather, the better to see the landscape). But the rolls of maps made this near-impossible: To make matters simpler he carefully cut the larger maps into small squares, bound them into a green morocco carrying case, and then was able to write in his diary much later, and quite smugly, that even after travelling thousands of miles with them the maps were “in pretty good preservation, though disfigured in some parts by speculative attempts at the delineation of strata ranging through parts I had not then seen.”

He must have cut an eccentric figure. People were said to have been frequently rather frightened by him—he was enormously strong looking, and wore a rather stern expression, such that strangers would ask him if he had ever been a boxer or a soldier. In his journal he quotes a man remarking to him that he was
“so damned good built” that it was likely he must have been a great walker in his time—which, given Smith’s passion for strolling, clambering, marching, pacing and trolling across countless meadows in search of outcrops, was perhaps only the half of it.

He kept himself dressed ready for the moor, in brown tweeds and with a remarkable broad-brimmed hat (to keep off the sun). This, he wrote later, often prompted Dissenters—those religious nonconformists and free-thinkers who were flourishing in the fast-changing, fast-industrializing world of the time
*
—to stare at him, thinking he might be one of them (which, given that he was practicing a science dealing in large part with the evidence for and against Divine Creation, he was most certainly bound to be). The Quakers in particular liked to assume that “from a resemblance in habiliment” he was a member of their church, and they would wave as he passed.

Smith’s motive for making a proper geological map of England was more complex than it seems. On one level he was driven by simple intellectual passion. He had discovered in Somerset that the rocks were spread out in historical order, and that their fossils allowed their underground arrangements to be delineated and predicted—and the corollary of these findings was quite obvious to him: He should make a map. He should make it if for no other reason than that his discoveries now meant
that he could
. But there were other reasons too, and these he spelled out from time to time in his writings: He had a deep, obsessively felt need to be given wider recognition for what he was sure were profoundly important discoveries.

By the time he ran into the difficulties with John Debrett, and was forced to abandon the book he had expected Debrett to publish, he was puzzled to find that this recognition was proving to be more elusive than he expected. That the general public was less interested in him and his ideas than he thought they should be, bothered him deeply. He wanted to be immortalized: He would become so by creating a truly impressive piece of work, one that would last as a memorial for generations.

And there was a financial incentive, too. Landowners, among whom his reputation was spreading like bindweed, were set to wondering whether there might be mineral deposits on their estates: Smith, who men like the duke of Bedford were saying had an uncanny way of predicting what kinds of rocks might lie where, might hold the key to the gentry’s further amassment of wealth. Lord Egremont wrote to Smith to inquire if coal was likely to be found on his land at Spofforth; Thomas Johnes, a landowner and Member of Parliament in mid-Wales, offered a reward of five hundred pounds if he could show where he might find lime on his lands; and others deluged him with letters asking if he suspected there might be lead, or tin, flints, clay, marl, or sand.

And then there was the newly formed Society of Arts, which took the long-term, national view. In 1802, at the time when Smith’s efforts were getting into high gear, William Shipley’s “Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures & Commerce,” which, as its name suggests, had been founded to support all manner of worthy schemes, offered a fifty-guinea bounty for anyone who might make “a mineralogical map of either England, Scotland or Wales.” The society’s leadership knew now that such a thing could be done: It was up to someone—someone with time, energy, knowledge, and, though it was never openly stated, sufficient funds—to take up the challenge and satisfy a demand that was now clearly swelling up from the country’s body politic. England wanted a geological map. Rivalry
was in the air. The country’s cartographers were in the traces. A race was under way.

The society’s challenge prompted Smith to lever himself out of his base in the countryside—where, he reasoned, he would win relatively few commercial commissions—and set himself up in an office in town. Accordingly, on April 3, 1802, he placed an advertisement in the
Bath Chronicle
, announcing his partnership with Jeremiah Cruse, one of the men who had subscribed to his proposed Debrett book, and the subsequent formal opening of the firm of Smith & Cruse, Land Surveyors:

He brought his (by now enormous) collection of fossils up from Tucking Mill House and arranged them in their stratigraphical order, at first in boxes on the floor, then on a set of specially constructed sloping shelves. The duke of Bedford came to see them, and so did the duke’s land steward, John Farey. And although Messrs. Smith & Cruse was not to be an entirely successful firm—Smith resigned from the partnership early in 1804—its existence consolidated his friendship with Farey, who was to become one of the most conscientious supporters, both of Smith himself and of the map he was set upon making.

In John Farey he could not have had a sturdier ally—although the relationship got off to a rocky start. Farey’s initial career as the duke’s land steward had been hatched mainly because he had been born on the Woburn estate, where his father had a tenant farm. But the young man’s interests were in fact wider and more
catholic by far than those of a typical ducal employee: He soon left Woburn (sacked by an incoming duke) and became an expert musician (and a chorister of note), a mathematician whose work (on the curious properties of vulgar fractions) is still known today, and a contributor to encyclopedias on such topics as astronomy, engineering, the history of pacifism, the design of steam engines, the decimalization of currencies, and the population theories of Thomas Malthus.

He was also hugely interested in and stimulated by Smith, and traveled with him frequently as a devoted acolyte and apprentice in those early years of the century, learning theories and techniques that he was eventually to put to good use on his own account. Rather too good, Smith was eventually to complain bitterly—in an incident that illustrates the growing problems, some real, others merely the consequence of his perception, that were beginning to cloud Smith’s life.

The falling-out between Smith and Farey began when the editors of Abraham Rees’s
New Cyclopaedia
turned to the highly literate Farey, and not Smith, when they wanted articles to illustrate words and concepts of geology such as
clay strata
,
coal
,
colliery
, and
extraneous fossils.
The choice greatly injured Smith’s self-esteem, even though Farey was at pains to make generous mention in each article of his mentor’s name, his achievements, and his theories.

But when Smith found out that the entry on
canal
had been cut back by the editors so as to exclude the entire account of his contribution to the building of the Somerset Coal Canal, he was cut to the quick. And then again, when, shortly afterward, Farey wrote to say that he had been asked by the national Board of Agriculture to prepare a survey of the county of Derbyshire, and was writing to ask whether, to save time, he might see Smith’s own drawings of the strata so that he could trace them onto his own map, Smith became incandescent with rage.

No, he fumed, Farey most certainly could not see the map! If he wanted to survey Derbyshire, then he could do it himself, no
matter how long it might take. And in any case, his letter continued, he, Smith, should have been the one asked by the board—not this “scientific pilferer,” as John Farey, now a turncoat, had in his eyes become.

It was a brief-enough tiff—the men were the best of friends once again soon after, with Farey ending up as the most loyal of Smith’s many supporters. But at the same time the argument shows once again the degree to which Smith felt he was being overlooked and shunned by those in society who were reckoned to be more gentlemanly than himself. The Board of Agriculture, for example, was composed of grand landowning men; their president, Sir John Sinclair, though ostensibly a friend of Smith’s, was an indefatigable Scottish aristocrat, a man of vast wealth, who had raised his own regiment (the Rothesay and Caithness Fencibles), had become a world-class expert on sheep, and was interested enough in numbers to introduce the word
statistics
into the English language.