Twice during 1814 the bailiffs had been to the Buckingham Street doors, hammering for settlement, demanding back taxes and unpaid rent, threatening prison. Twice during that year Sir Joseph Banks, now convinced that the map he had helped sponsor truly was going to be published, had bailed Smith out with a check and a word in the ear of the vexed collectors. Now, come 1815, with the map almost done, with Combe Down collapsed, with John Phillips in residence, with Conolly of Midford Castle pressing for funds, the situation was far worse than even Sir Joseph could imagine. Smith knew there was only one course of action left open to him, and with this Banks himself concurred: He must sell his fossils, and if not privately, then to His Majesty’s Government.
The negotiations for the sale, which Smith initiated the summer of 1815, turned out to be painful, humiliating, and protracted in the extreme. They began when Smith asked for help from a Welsh farmer, James Brogden, for whom he had done some drainage work near Kidwelly. Brogden was now a member of Parliament and the chairman of the Commons Ways and Means Committee; Smith told him the situation and asked if the government might be able to help.
A steady stream of officials then began to call at the Adelphi house to see what was on offer. The fact that the prime minister had visited the house that same Easter, and that Sir Joseph Banks was telling everyone in earshot of Smith’s eminence, must have helped, for the visitors were a distinguished group: Nicholas Vansittart, the chancellor of the Exchequer, came by, as did a wealthy landowner named Sir John Stanley, and one of the secretaries of the Treasury, Charles Arbuthnot. (Smith went back soon after to see Vansittart at his office in Downing Street—his diary shows that he gazed longingly at the huge belemnites in the flagstones lying outside the waiting-room window.)
A few days later William Huskisson,* who had the grand title “Surveyor-General of Woods and Forests,” made his inspection; as did another MP friend of Smith’s (who had employed him on restoring a mill in Kent) with the improbable name of Mr. Barne Barne. The conclusion of all these visitors was that Smith should write a formal memorial†to the very Gilbertian-sounding lords commissioners of the Treasury, pleading his case.
This he did in mid-July—hastily cutting and pasting nine already printed paragraphs from the brochure that was to accompany his map, and adding simply an exhortation that the government “purchase my Collection for the British Museum‡ which would add very much in point of utility to the Collection now deposited there and would moreover I trust afford me means of giving to the Public a Mass of information which would be found highly interesting and beneficial to almost every Class of Society.”
There was at first no reply. He waited and waited. By late September, Smith’s creditors were becoming less and less patient. He wrote again, imploring the Treasury to help by advancing him five or seven hundred pounds (a not unreasonable sum, he thought, since in 1810 Parliament had voted to pay thirteen thousand pounds to a well-connected aristocrat, Charles Greville, for his collection of allegedly rare and valuable minerals). Still nothing happened; except that in October yet another group of officials and experts (including a chemist called Charles Hatchett who had discovered a metallic element and named it columbium) descended on Buckingham Street, where they found Smith and his fourteen-year-old nephew vigorously cleaning the specimens and readying them for valuation.
Then at last, in mid-October, the government agreed in principle to buy the specimens, and while waiting for a formal valuation, offered Smith an “imprest”—an advance—of the niggardly sum of a hundred pounds. Smith bit his tongue, remained respectful, and became firm friends (through the good offices once again of Sir Joseph Banks, whose beneficence during Smith’s long and tragic story cannot be gainsaid) with an even more influential Treasury official named William Lowndes—who had by chance become a fellow of the Geological Society two years before. His friendship turned out to be the key: Over the coming months, as a torrent of letters and memoranda swirled around inside the Treasury—to and from and about a tireless William Smith, working even on Christmas Day, cleaning and cataloging the collection to make the precious fossils more acceptable to the government—Lowndes’s influence, and its limits, became clear: Smith, it was finally decided, was to receive the sum of five hundred pounds, payable in four installments.
It was a bitter pill, and Smith was deeply disappointed. He had worked so very hard to persuade the government that his fossils were worth more—three times as much as they had offered, at the very least. He expected also to be paid for a 118-page catalog he and young John Phillips were creating as a handbook to the collection. But the Treasury was not interested in offering more money, and Smith had to spend yet more funds to have this slim volume published privately.
So he and John Phillips then packed up the fossils and, probably with very great sadness, stacked them ready for collection. It took several more months for curators to ready a room—but they never did collect the fossils. Eventually in June 1816, a year after opening the first correspondence with Brogden, it was Smith himself, making three round-trip journeys from the Strand to Bloomsbury, who finally carried the specimens—the 2,657 fossils, of a total of 693 different species—to their new home.
His plight briefly attracted the attention of the House of Commons. The member for Oxford, a Mr. Lockhart, mourned the “extreme parsimony” with which the government appeared to treat men of science, particularly “a gentleman who by his own discoveries had laid the foundations of geological science, who had for 30 years been cultivating that study, and had proved its application to many purposes of public utility.”
But in the same fulminating speech, Lockhart reminds us all of the limited view that was held by even the most enthusiastic supporters of William Smith and his findings. “The truth of Mosaic history,” he said, “is incontestably proved by Mr. Smith’s geological observations…[which provided] proof of the Account of the Creation and Deluge in the Sacred Book.”
In fact they did no such thing; though no doubt neither Smith nor his supporters would cavil over a point that, in any event, certainly reflected the prevailing mood of the day. The Bible’s teachings were even then still being accepted literally—regarded as Gospel truth—by the huge majority of both the public and their legislators: The more rational views of the learned few had still not found widespread acceptance. The more important lesson to be learned from Lockhart’s speech is in any case altogether another one: William Smith had, for what it was worth, an ally in the House, and his desperate situation was at least being talked about in the most important forum in the land.
In the short term such publicity did Smith and his fossils precious little good. And magnificent though the collection is still universally acknowledged to be, Smith’s fossils have been seen all too little in the almost two centuries since. At first the museum authorities let them languish in a damp storeroom, with few visitors. They balked at the extra expense of putting the specimens in the specially built glass cases they had promised, but instead had Smith come round and arrange them on his old sets of sloping shelves, which he had been asked to carry in from Buckingham Street—a service for which, adroitly, he charged an extra hundred pounds. Then everything was moved, more prominently, to the South Sea Room, then back to another room so neglected that when Smith visited late in life he found them hidden behind piles of junk.
(Matters took a distinct turn for the better much later, in 1880, when the museum itself was moved to its present site in South Kensington. By that time Smith’s reputation had soared, and his collection was placed prominently in a gallery of its own, with dozens of his own hand-colored illustrations in the huge glass display cases. Smith’s marble bust dominated the exhibition, and for eighty years his heroic status was commemorated in style. But then again his reputation began to dim, his name became less readily remembered, the details of his curious life unknown. The fossils went back into storage in the late 1970s and remain there now, in a series of drawers, consulted by specialists but otherwise, like Smith hims
elf, banished to a situation of respectable but little-deserved obscurity.)
The funds that were brought in by the sale and his subsequent work on the catalog proved only the shortest-lived of palliatives. Funds went out as swiftly as they came in. After one payment of one hundred pounds, Smith promptly sent twenty-five pounds to his brother back in Wiltshire, and then made out a check for a further fifty-five pounds to settle a legal action against him, most probably for debt. And yet none of what was done—no sale, no payment, no loan, no visit to the pawnbroker—could do more than briefly divert the inevitable, could do more than delay the day of reckoning.
By the end of 1816 William Smith had no fossil collection—and yet still, more or less, he had no money either. The situation had been alleviated only temporarily: A deep crisis, which was to deepen progressively over the next three years, was soon utterly to engulf him.
Out of these sad times, however, came two books that added mightily to the impressive list of publications that William Smith was to leave for posterity. Both relate to the specific use of fossils: The first, a four-part work published in 1816 under the title Strata Identified by Organized Fossils, contains nineteen beautiful hand-colored engravings of fossils. William Lowndes, proving himself the firmest of friends, contributed fifty pounds toward its publication. The second, confusingly called The Stratigraphical System of Organized Fossils, and published a year later, is essentially a catalog of the “3,000 specimens…in the British Museum,” as the title page put it, with all the hyperbole to which publishers are prey.
Neither did any good. Neither book was to help keep at bay the small army of bailiffs, beadles, process servers, apparitors, tip-staffs, and summoners who were now circling, vulturelike, around William Smith’s embattled person. He had suffered much over the preceding years. The clouds had long been building. Now came the deluge.
15
The Wrath of Leviathan
Peltoceras athleta
The storm was slow to break, but fierce and unremitting when it came. The creditors had been closing in on him for years. The dunning men were always hammering at the door, for bills unsettled, for mortgages overdue, for taxes owed but never paid. Now, by the beginning of 1818, thirty months after the publication of the great map, and at a time when William Smith should by rights have been showered with dignities and rewards, came the first grim mention of the ultimate penalty, debtors’ prison. James Brogden, the kindly MP who had tried to help Smith sell his fossil collection, was the first to make public his own anxiety, in an urgent letter written in the middle of January.
“Poor Smith’s distress and importunity force me again to intrude this unpleasant subject on your notice,” he wrote to the Treasury officials. “The annexed paper contains a statement of what he thinks are his claims…if you can settle his claim today and make a small advance on it, you will save him from arrest and enable him to resume his useful employment in the country.”
The Treasury got the message. An internal memo sped from one official to another: “Smith the Map Maker (I mean the Strata & Fossil Man) hopes to receive from the bounty of the Treasury some aid; I heard last night in the House of Commons that if he doesn’t get that aid he will be arrested tomorrow.”*
The urgency of the appeal got through: A check for thirty pounds was sent round to Buckingham Street the following morning. The bailiff on standby went away. The turnkey was stood down. William Smith was not compelled to appear before the bench, on that cold January day at least.
He continued to work and to travel, notwithstanding the financial fuss. When next the Treasury wrote, on February 12, he was away in Monmouthshire. The letter, from an official named George Harrison, had some moderately good news, though only in a tiding-over sense: Providing that Smith delivered to the museum the very last part of his collection, a cache of specimens he had been hoarding for such a rainy day as this, a further payment of a hundred pounds would be granted. He had been handed thirty pounds in January; and so when he arrived at the Treasury on March 28, he collected only the balance that was due—seventy pounds. This was the last payment to be made from His Majesty’s Government. There was no more in the kitty. So far as the current and pressing problem of debt was concerned, William Smith’s luck was now fast running out.
He had had the chance to cut and run, twice, no less. Anyone other than Smith might well have taken one or other of the chances—both of them exceptional, well suited to his talent. That he in the end refused both offers opened him up, yet again, to still more perfidy and ill treatment.
In the first instance he was invited to apply for a job in Russia, via no less an agency than the great Count Alexei Orlov, one of the heroes of the Russian campaign against Napoleon, and an adviser to the emperor, Alexander I. Count Orlov had come to England on a diplomatic mission and to take the waters at Bath; while there he instructed an aide, a certain Dr. Hamel, to make an official request for a British mineralogist to come to the southern part of the Russian Empire—most probably the Ukraine—to supervise the immense coal industry there.
One of Smith’s old friends from Bath, the Reverend Richard Warner,* told Hamel about Smith, and for some weeks in 1815 the two men wrote to each other, with the Russian clearly offering Smith a career of wealth and honor. However, Smith, at the time arranging his fossils for the British Museum, mentioned the possibility of going to Russia to his contacts there—prompting them to respond that, provided that he turned the foreign offer down, he could be assured of an offer of a permanent and lucrative career with the museum.
Not unnaturally he immediately told Dr. Hamel and, via him, the visiting Russian count, that he regretted he could not take the job. The museum, far from reacting with pleasure and a consequent generosity of spirit, remained stiff and silent. No further offer was ever forthcoming. Thus was the disappointment that plagued Smith’s life reinforced yet again.
A year later still he was offered another job, this time in the United States. He was asked, according to a note in his diary (though by whom we do not know) “to survey, level, estimate and report on the practicability of overcoming the falls on navigable rivers in North Carolina.” But this offer he declined as well, without explanation. Knowing what history allows us to know today, and what would shortly befall him, it beggars belief that this troubled, unappreciated man did not slip out quietly on a westbound ship, heading for an infinitely better life in the New World. As it is, and whether by commission or default his writings do not indicate, he opted to stay put in England and stare down the gathering crisis.
The law in relation to debt in London in the early years of the nineteenth century was clear enough—though by today’s lights, somewhat peculiar. Very basically put, a creditor who failed to get satisfaction from his debtor could apply to a court official—a bailiff, a man equipped with extraordinary summary powers—to have the debtor committed to one of the great London debtors’ prisons—the Fleet, the Marshalsea, or the King’s Bench. The former was on the east side of what is now Farringdon Street, near Saint Paul’s Cathedral; the two latter were across the Thames in the prison-ghetto of Southwark.*
The peculiar aspect of the law as seen today is that there seems to be no logic or sense in imprisoning a man for debt—for then he is most certainly not going to be able to earn money to pay the debt off. But the custom of English common law had been savagely firm for centuries: A debtor taken in execution—which was the rather overly dramatic legal phrase then used for debt arrest—was to be kept in salva et stricta custodia until the debt was paid.
The explanation for such a necessity is simple enough, and stems from the basic principle of the system, which held that by arresting a debtor, his body had been seized in lieu of his estates. Until he had so arranged these estates that his creditor could be paid and satisfied, then his body would be entrusted to the safekeeping of a prison warden—hence in salva et stricta custodia—as guarantee. There was no concept of guilt or innocence in a debt prison: Rather, imprisonment for debt was seen
as evidence of failure—the failure of a debtor to pay what was owed, the failure of a creditor to obtain what he was owed.
Legal scholars argue that the subsidiary intention of the ancient laws on indebtedness was simply to preserve a system of credit. Imprisonment was threatened as a deterrent, a means of ensuring that the credit necessary for commerce—the signing of bills to raise cash for custom, for example—continued to flow easily. Men of means would sign bills, it was argued, if they knew that those for whom they signed them would be imprisoned if the bill went unpaid.
But the system was willfully misused, by both creditors and their debtors—and it took a long while for more civilized laws to take effect. Only in 1759 did Parliament rule that a trader who was entirely without assets might declare himself bankrupt and go free; and in that case he was allowed ten pounds’ worth of personal goods—bedding, clothes, tools—to ensure that he still had both dignity and the means of livelihood left. If he declared bankruptcy fraudulently, however, he would be sentenced to hang.
At the time William Smith became mired in indebtedness, any more general reform of the debtor-prison system was still several years away. And when John Berisford, a noted advocate of the reformist agitations in the seventeenth century, wrote of “this great and terrible Leviathan, who thus disturbs our peace and cracks the sinews of the body politic,” he could have been writing just as easily about the mountain of debt that ensnared the nation, as of the lamentable state of some the prisons in which the debtors were placed.