The Map That Changed the World (7 page)

The corollary to such thinking was that the earth must in turn be far, far older than James Ussher had supposed. That, for the time being, had to remain unsaid. But that it could be
thought
, and that there was evidence to prove it, was for the young Oxfordshire man, a liberating realization—a realization that helped in no uncertain manner to foster the new science that he was soon, and at first almost unwittingly, to help establish.

Harpoceras falciferum

A
fully equipped English duke, grumbled Lloyd George to what he knew would be a sympathetic working-class Edwardian audience on Tyneside, cost as much as two dreadnoughts, was every bit as great a terror, and lasted a great deal longer.

Which was not, it has to be said, an exact description of the third duke of Bridgewater. Francis Egerton, who was born in 1736, succeeded to the title when he was only twelve, gave much of his money and his collections to the government, and allowed the dukedom to die with him in 1803. He was a startling exception to Lloyd George’s general argument, in other words: This particular dukedom of Bridgewater cost precious little and lasted almost no time at all.

Yet in one sense the prime minister was right, for Bridgewater was very much a terror—in many ways, seen from today’s perspective, a quite appalling man. As a child he had been thought so stupid that his father, who was called Scroop, seriously considered making a codicil to his will to ensure that the boy, the second son, could never succeed to the title. The sudden and
premature death of Scroop’s oldest son, however, scuppered the plan—and the child, Francis, who would become a duke variously regarded as ignorant, awkward, and unruly, duly joined his fellow aristocrats in the House of Lords in 1748.

He was at first widely disliked. As a young man he was irredeemably philistine, with little regard for art or society. He dressed intolerably badly. He loathed flowers and all kinds of ornamentation. He smoked like industrial Manchester, consumed pounds of snuff, never wrote letters, and had arguments with everyone. Though in time he became a great collector of painting and sculpture—more for their value than for their beauty, critics sneered—he wasted little time on what he regarded as the fripperies of life. He was a curmudgeonly bachelor and a misogynist who so despised women that he would not even allow one to serve him at table. He had only two apparent interests—the racing and riding of horses and, most significantly for this story, the building of canals.
*

It was a fascination that became an obsession, for both the duke and his country. “Canal mania,” the national mood was called—and it was all begun by this strangely unpleasant man. In 1759 the duke of Bridgewater had completed a forty-two-mile stretch of artificial waterway, complete with locks, allowing him to ship coal from his own mines at Worsley, in Lancashire, directly into the heart of Manchester and then onward to the river Mersey. Since most of the price of coal was the cost of transporting it across country, the use of a canal slashed prices by as much as 50 percent. Smelling the prospect of limitless profits, every investor with spare change promptly jumped onto what seemed an unstoppable bandwagon.

Every bank, every entrepreneur, every developer, every engi
neer in England suddenly seemed to believe that the canal was the highway of the future. The owners of the turnpike roads howled their dismay. Farmers, angry that their land would be torn up, raised all manner of objections. But, one by one, Parliament passed canal acts and navigation acts at a staggering rate. Small armies of navvies—workers on the inland navigations—descended on the hills and valleys to carve and cement these revolutionary new trade routes into place.

Grand plans were conceived for connecting the whole country, Carlisle to Cornwall, Dover to Dumfries, with a network of waterways. The great existing trade rivers of England, the Thames, the Severn, the Mersey, and the Trent, were all to be linked. Maybe, one overambitious inventor suggested, the English Midlands could have their own canal that followed the contour lines and so did not need the costly and cumbersome mechanism of locks. (Since this canal would have been hundreds of miles long, requiring a horse to drag its barge the equivalent of a transatlantic crossing merely to go down to London, the plan was quietly dropped.)

Almost overnight, extraordinary economic miracles were realized. A brewer in Burton who previously could reckon to be able to sell his ales within a radius of only five or ten miles, found he could now load his barrels onto a horse-drawn canal boat and two days later have them delivered in London. No longer did Josiah Wedgwood have to hear how his fragile porcelains had been smashed to smithereens during their transit on the potholed public roads; now they could pass along the waterways, in the steady tranquillity of the floating world, and be safely in the shops of Liverpool and Oxford and Edinburgh in a matter of days. Exporters based in Birmingham no longer needed to route all their wares through agents in London: They could send their goods to the United States directly, by canal boat from the factory straight to the clipper ships waiting at the docks. And for the ordinary public, too, canals became immediate sources of
betterment: No longer did coal double in price in the aftermath of heavy rains—now it was always cheap, and except in times of thick, canal-choking ice, bad weather scarcely ever affected its price, or the speed of its delivery, again.

The duke was quite right to foresee that indeed in those early, heady days the greatest canal cargo of all was to be coal. One horse, plodding quietly along ahead of a fully laden coal barge, could haul eighty times more than if it were leading a wagon down a muddy road—could take four hundred times as much as a single pack-horse. All of a sudden anyone with a coal mine, anywhere in England, now wanted a canal—so that his anthracite and his steam coal could be carried quickly and cheaply to the furnaces of the Industrial Revolution.

I
t has long been said that the people of England could never be poor, since they lived on an island made of coal and surrounded by fish. There had been an English coal-mining industry of sorts—via shafts and adits and opencut workings only—since the thirteenth century (though the Romans had known of coal and had probably burned it). From 1325 there is a record suggesting that a British mine exported a boatload of the strange black material to Pontoise, in northern France.

At first the black and flammable stones were used mainly for iron smelting and lime burning. It was only in Tudor times, when the climate turned chillier and demand for wood for house building soared, that people began to use coal to heat their homes. After that there was no stopping it. Wherever in the country coal was exposed on the surface—near Gateshead, close to Mansfield, outside Sheffield, in South Wales, near the Scottish town of Lanark—men clawed hungrily for it. It was convenient if the coal remained close to the surface: It was easy to work, and cheap. But it became so important a source of energy and heat that, by the fifteenth century, if a coal seam happened to plunge
deep into the ground, then, discounting all risks in the name of profit, they promptly dug after it.

Coal miners were very limited at first. Mines flooded, they collapsed, noxious gases poisoned workers or burst into flame. But then came technologies that allowed miners to dig deeper, to pursue seams for longer, and as a result through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the industry advanced at a prodigious rate. Chain pumps were brought in from Germany, and mines became drier. Thomas Newcomen invented the atmospheric engine, allowing pits to go deeper, and allowing drowned mines to be pumped out and worked again.

At around the time of Smith’s birth, as we have seen, James Watt came along with his condensing steam engine, and mines could be dug to reach seams four and five hundred feet deep; and then again a decade later, once Watt’s double-acting steam engine had been perfected and its rocking beams had been adapted to move huge iron wheels, so everything changed. Air could be pumped down to the miners, water could be pumped from where it gathered, elevators could be created that would speed workers down to the coalface and that would haul them and their coal back up to the surface again.

I
n 1800 all Britain’s coal mines, in which men were now working as deep as a thousand feet below the surface, were producing a million tons of a variety of types of coal each year. Landowners realized that they possibly had beneath their lawns and meadows and forests huge seams of coal that could make them rich beyond their dreams. Everyone was suddenly on the lookout for dark rocks, for traces of blackness, for hints that somewhere below might be a lode of that rich, soft, sweet-smelling substance that was for England what emeralds and silver and diamonds were elsewhere. Pits were dug and quarries were clawed—but often recklessly, incautiously—at every spot
where the earth seemed to offer up its dark temptation. More often than not the darkness was a chimera, a black shale, a slate, a mudstone, which had no more chance of burning than granite. Failures dogged the diggings of all too many countrymen: Some sort of guide, some sort of a
map
was needed, a way for men to forecast with some accuracy what might lie underneath them.

Men had been mining coal in northern Somerset since the thirteenth century—there is a cryptic reference in Roman writings to a house in Bath having been heated by such stone, locally mined. The Carboniferous Coal Measures that outcrop along the flanks of Pennine Hills in northern England, and in South Wales and southern Scotland, outcrop around the Bristol Channel too. The same hot dark swamps that eventually fossilize to produce coal existed south of Bath three hundred million years ago, just as they existed near Durham, Leeds, Mansfield, Lanark, and the Rhondda Valley and—since coal measures have been laid down all over Europe—just as they existed also in Silesia and Westphalia, in France and Belgium and across vast tracts of Russia.

The conditions in which they were formed were, miraculously for Europe’s economic development, much the same everywhere. There were fetid and swampy jungles, all mud, dead ferns, and sagging branches of clubmosses and horsetail. The steamy, clammy air was thick with clouds of insects, including dragonflies as big as thrushes. Scorpions and millipedes scurried and squirmed among the grasses and primitive leathery trees. Amphibians—from large thickheaded crocodile-like beasts to more gentle salamanders—splashed and lumbered through the steaming pools.

But then, in a space of just a few hundred thousand years, and maybe less, the seas swished their way back, the trees and plants and animals were overrun by salt water and drowned and died, thin sands were laid down on top of all the dead vegetation, and then yet more limestone and shale and mudstone and marl
formed and pressed down on the organic mat below, until all was hot and heavy enough for the heating and compression to begin—heating and compression that would turn all this thick, brown, decaying, gas-rich pulp into the hard, black rock we know today as bituminous coal.

In some places, where the world of the era three hundred million years ago was geologically stable—in Poland, say, in Westphalia, in northern England—the coal and sandstones that alternated with one another were thick and fat and relatively undistorted by any later tectonic events. But in Somerset and the rest of southwestern England and Wales, matters were very different. The layers of coal in the hills to the south of Bath have all been folded, closely, complicatedly, and very differently from the coal layers that are found in the fields of Poland or Nottinghamshire. The Somerset coals have been squashed into small, tightly wound folds and are fractured by countless faults and fissures—making them difficult to find, tricky to mine, and costly to pry from under the earth.

The crushing and twisting of the Somerset Coal Measures is evidence of part of one of the most dramatic events of more recent geological history. The rocks in this part of the world were all caught for millions of years in the gigantic vise of a cataclysmic mountain-building movement, one that occurred when the European and African tectonic plates of three hundred million years ago moved sharply and catastrophically against each other.

The grinding and squeezing and gnashing and crashing—basically, the closing of a huge sea called the Rheic Ocean that had divided Europe and North America on the one hand from Africa and South America on the other—went on for scores of millions of years, leading to the development of an entirely new supercontinent of the Permian period, called Pangea. The events, the vast rippling and crushing of the earth that so affected southwestern England, was once called the Hercynian orogeny. Now, like much in modern geology, it has a new name, the Variscan orogeny—and it has left a legacy of subterranean contortions and
distortions that have greatly affected the appearance of all pre-Permian rocks of the region. It has not made too much of a difference to the scenery above—few phenomena above the surface in Somerset would prompt anyone to imagine millions of years of crushing and grinding. But what those years did to the underside of Somerset is truly awesome.

There are coal seams down there, but they have almost all fallen victim to the contortions of mountain building. The fact that the beds of coal have been crushed and distorted out of all recognition has had a profound effect on the local economy. It has not stopped miners from trying to pry the coal from beneath the ground—historically, very little dissuades them from that. But it has affected mightily the way in which the miners have over the centuries tried to do the prying. And it has made the actual process of mining very difficult indeed. Coal that is difficult to obtain is priced accordingly—it is very expensive. And it was this simple fact—that Somerset coal was so very costly to extract—that led to the decision to build a canal. If it were costly to mine but cheap to transport, Somerset coal might be competitive still: A canal was essential to keep the coalfield in action at all.