The Map That Changed the World Read Online Free

of the kind of firm beliefs with which his community was invested. Whatever interest Smith the man might later develop in fossils, geology, and the makings ofhumankind, at the time he was born there was no question: The entire process of Creation had taken God the familiar six days, and he had begun it 5,772 years before.

    James Ussher’s dating of Creation is part of the rubric of a Bible from William Smith’s lifetime.
    At the start of that late October week, in the year that a modern Christian calendar would style 4004 B.C ., the Deity organized the basic concepts of light and dark, sun and moon, wet and dry. He then made every ocean, inlet, river, sandbar, meadow, desert, mountain, icecap, and fjord: The structure of the world, its topography, and the geology that forms the core of this story were complete. By the morning of the twenty-sixth, the Thursday, God had seen to it that life had been begun, and by that evening every first microbe, newt, spider, serpent, eagle, cat, horse, and monkey had been duly set in place, to creep, crawl, swim, fly, leap, spring, and deploy its opposable thumb to climb.
    By the following day the botanical phyla were all in place: Every rain forest, grassland, savanna, peony, orchid, rose, palm, apple, pine, and daisy had been left on earth, contentedly to bloom. All of Milton’s “rocks, caves, lakes, fens, bogs, dens” were now fully accumulated: An earthly paradise was set, ready to be lost.
    And by the Saturday, most important of all, emerged those creatures who would lose it. The first two examples of ur -human, in the bipedal and upright (but otherwise subtly different from each other) forms of Adam and Eve, had been created in the Garden of Eden. They were at this stage blissfully unaware, of course, and therefore untroubled by the Fall (which would come later, via the agency of the already created serpent and apple).
    Recorded history could now formally begin. Human beings were in place, made in the image of their Maker, and they could do with their world more or less as they and their Maker between them pleased. Thus was it all done. Come midnight on the Saturday, with all this frantic labor done, the weary Divinity slept, having declared that all he had created was good, and fullyready to begin the adventuring he had ordained for it for the next six thousand years and more. *
    Yet, when William Smith was born, the unquestioning acceptance of a notion such as this was beginning to change. There were vague stirrings of enlightenment from among the nation’s chattering classes. Some cynical views—in law, criminally heretical ones—that wafted up from the fashionable salons and drawing rooms of London challenged the very likelihood of Divine Creation. Among them was a new notion, still curious and outrageous to most in the eighteenth century, that Earth might in fact be a very good deal older than the human race that inhabited it, such that humankind and its planet might not in fact have been of near-simultaneous origin.
    There was no evidence whatsoever for such views—those who doubted Creation were indulging in little more than inspired hunches. In later years the hunches became more certain, and indeed it would be William Smith’s discoveries that would go some long way toward confirming them. But at the time he was born they were very much the idle speculations of a tiny group of sophisticates in London. And the capital was a very long way from northwestern Oxfordshire, both in distance and in temper. The muddy and rutted roads that passed across the ridges of the Chiltern Hills, between Oxford and London, did much to keep at bay any such wild and disagreeable ideas as these.
    Where Smith was born, among that small muddle of warm-colored stone cottages, with thatched roofs and climbing roses, the village green and the inn and the duck pond and the oldsteepled parish church, beliefs about such weighty matters as humankind’s beginnings were unburdened by the