The Map That Changed the World (31 page)

Ammonites sublaevis
, from Smith’s own collection, found during his tour of Northamptonshire.

“I went to Scarborough,” Smith was to write in his attempt at autobiography, “under distressing circumstances—unknown to anyone in the place but through the medical men.” But then he uncovered a happy chance about the population of the town—and noted in his journal that “everyone here is very fond of talking on Geology.” Within only a few weeks his temper improved; his apprehension of finding himself friendless and alone had abated. Within weeks he had won himself a circle of admiring and intelligent friends; he wrote that he found the people—provincial and unlettered Yorkshiremen though they might be, and by London standards innocent and artless folk—to be a constant delight. They had
no side
about them, he said; they accepted him for what he was, they made him welcome, they provided him with intellectual stimulus, and, most important, their evident pleasure at having so clever a man in their midst enabled him to renew a sense of self-esteem that had been soundly battered during his unhappy creative years in the capital.

He completed his detailed geological map of Yorkshire while there—it was published in 1821. He also began offering lectures—a guinea for a series of nine,
*
a single lecture for three
shillings—and with his nephew turned himself for a while into a highly profitable traveling road show. He pitched his tent, as it were, in York, Leeds, Hull, and Scarborough, time and again, offering the latest information and the most up-to-date arrangements of organic fossils, for the improvement of the minds of all.

It was when he was off to give a course of lectures in Sheffield—for sixty much-needed pounds—that he was first troubled by the only illness he ever seems to have had, a curse of his peculiar trade. The notes for his possible autobiography record the moment:

He was determined to make his assignment in Sheffield. He had the stagecoach brought to the front door of his inn, and demanded that two men “tumble me in like a sack of potatoes.” He had to support himself on his arms during the fifty miles of the journey, but sang songs to keep himself cheerful. On arriving at the Sheffield junction he tried to get up, “fell like a child,” and had to be carried off in a sedan chair. He gave his lectures; they were well attended; he collected his money. But that evening he mused for the first and only time that he might perhaps now give up geology for good—rheumatic joints being the principal curse of a field explorer—and keep a school.

It was an idea that vanished as fast as it arrived. Geology still managed to exert its powerful magnetism on the man. And by now Smith was finding Scarborough so congenial that he was coming back time and again, whether for a commission or not.
He returned first for a two-year stay in 1824, lodging with a family called Williamson, who later wrote that “Smith and his eccentric wife established themselves in our house, where they dwelt for a considerable time.”

B
efore long Smith also made a very considerable physical impact on the town. He helped, most notably, to set up the Scarborough City Museum—a curious rotunda of a building that was finished in 1829, and that still stands on the town’s seafront, though in much reduced condition. Smith’s idea was radical: He had called for the building to be designed—it was built in the Doric style, fifty feet high and nearly forty feet in diameter, with a spiral staircase and a graceful dome—so as to allow thousands of fossils to be arranged on shelves around the outer walls, all in their proper relative positions. The younger remains, in other words, were to be displayed on shelves at the top of the building, while the older fossils were deeper down,
nearer the base of the building. The youngest members from the Cretaceous would be at the top, the oldest fossils from the Trias would be at the bottom, all of them arranged just like the strata lying deep in the earth outside, just as the strata were arranged elsewhere in North Yorkshire, in exactly the same order as the rocks in faraway Dorset, and no doubt just as the rocks were arrayed, Cretaceous up above, Trias down below, in all the distant corners of the world beyond.

The rotunda-shaped Scarborough City Museum, designed by Smith for the specific purpose of allowing fossils to be seen in their proper chronological order.

It was a beguilingly clever idea. The members of the Scarborough Philosophical Society—a number of such local institutions were being set up all around the country at the time, designed for the dissemination of knowledge about science—were all hugely enthusiastic. They quickly agreed to fund the venture, and within weeks they had backed Smith with a handsome subscription. Building started swiftly, and it was finished inside a year. There was a gala opening, with sixty for dinner, “the table being spread with every delicacy of the season, with a fine dessert and excellent wines.”

The idea at first worked fabulously well, and for a while anyone who was interested in the paleontology of Yorkshire—which has some of the best fossil locales in the country, particularly rich in ammonites and dinosaurs—was compelled to make a pilgrimage to the curious little drum-shaped building by the sea, in which was housed “one of the most perfect fossil collections in England.” But in recent years the building has become a tawdry and half-forgotten little structure, the only relic of Smith being an indifferent reproduction portrait, and a diorama painted around the upper floors, probably by John Phillips. There is a memorial stone on an outside wall mentioning Smith as having helped conceive the idea. There are no fossils in the Scarborough Rotunda anymore; Smith’s shelves are filled merely with indifferent items of junky memorabilia.

He went off surveying and draining in the Midlands once the museum was up and running, and spent six years away. He came back again to Scarborough in 1834—and though he only rented
a small house called Newborough Cottage on Bar Street, he was happy enough to put down roots, so far as he could, and to stay in the town for what turned out to be the rest of his days. A letter he wrote to his niece, Ann, survives:

The letter was written in October 1835. Smith was by then a man of sixty-six—and, as the letter suggests, was slipping gracefully and—at long last, contentedly—into his old age. And
contentedly
is the key word here—for something significant by now had happened to change his mood and temper. The train of events that brought him to a new state of untroubled contentment began at the one other Yorkshire site in which he spent time, and where he experienced the epiphany that was to redirect, and for so much the better, the course of his remaining life.

The pretty village remains more or less unchanged since Smith was there during the six years from 1828 until 1834. It is no more than six miles inland from Scarborough, hidden deep in a fold of the hills, in the valley of the River Derwent. It is called Hackness, and it and the rolling hills around it have for years been the fiefdom of a family of lowland Scots called Johnstone—
a family that would come to have an inestimable impact on the life of the old geologist who came, for a while, to stay among them.

Hackness Hall, the Yorkshire seat of the Johnstone family, where Smith’s achievements and genius were finally recognized.

Sir John Vanden Bempde Johnstone—there is Dutch blood liberally mixed in with the Scots—was described by his biographer as “a sincere friend to geology and natural history.” He had joined the Geological Society, was a keen collector of fossils, as well as being an MP—first for Weymouth in Dorset, and then for Scarborough (spanning, in his legislative responsibilities, both ends of England’s main Mesozoic outcrop). When, as a baronet—the Johnstone family of Hackness was not to become ennobled for a further eighty years
*
—Sir John succeeded to the
Yorkshire estates, he decided to “convert to practical effect on his farms some of the geological and botanical truths which he knew to have been established in the museum and the laboratory.”

He knew of William Smith from meeting him at the Philosophical Society meetings in Scarborough (he had contributed,
gratis
, the stone for building the rotunda), and in 1828 hired him as his land steward. He gave him the use of a vicarage close to where Hackness Grange now stands (as a hotel); and for the six following years Smith lived as pleasant a life as can be imagined, meditating, writing, living (as Phillips noted, with some asperity) like “a happy farmer,” and performing only one task of geological significance—making a beautiful large-scale and fully hand-colored map of the Hackness Estate, which hangs today in pride of place in the Hall—the big house—having survived a fire that raged through most of the rest of the house early in the last century.

All passing geologists of note now suddenly took great care to stop at Hackness, both to see Smith and to congratulate his patron—this “sincere friend to geology”—for taking care of the kindly old man who bumbled amiably around his estates. One of those who visited was the Derbyshire-born chemist and lens maker William Vernon, who came by in 1826. It was precisely at this time that the first suggestions were made that William Smith’s contribution to geology should somehow be formally recognized.

Whether Vernon first put the idea in Johnstone’s mind, or whether (as the romantic view maintains) the enlightened nobleman actually suggested it to Vernon remains unclear. But what is known indicates the subsequent chain of events. William Vernon dashed off a letter to Roderick Murchison, the Scottish soldier who had established himself as one of the great architects of geology, the founder of the Silurian period and, with Sedgwick, cofounder of the Devonian. In this letter Vernon said, as forcefully as courtesy allowed:

The mills of the Geological Society grind exceeding slow. There was still some opposition among the old guard—the “anti-Smith alliance” of Greenough and his friends, who had seen to it that as late as 1822 Smith was still denied even membership of the organization. But this was now changing, and rapidly. A new breed of scientists was directing the society’s affairs these days—scientists who accorded as much honor to the practical men, the men who went out into the field in the damp and chill and happily dirtied their hands in the finding of facts, as to the theorists and thinkers in what was, after all, a fundamentally practical field of study.