i
The year 1736 ‘begins with a Melancholy aspect, for the gloomy South wind blows, and perpetual Rains fall’, records the indefatigable Dr Huxham of Plymouth, noting his barometer, but William Cookworthy is very well.
He is doing so well that he can afford a wife.
Sarah Berry is Quaker, naturally, the youngest of a large and respectable Somersetshire family and the young couple have to declare their intentions to the Plymouth and Taunton Meeting so that they can be examined and ‘certificates of clearness’ produced. They are married early in the year ‘with good order’. They begin their married life in sober comfort. William and Sarah, known to everyone as Sally, are blessed with five daughters, Lydia, Sarah, Mary, and then the twins, Elizabeth and Susannah, so that this becomes a noisy Quaker household.
William has visitors. He walks. He reads. Being in Plymouth, rather than, say, London or Bristol, does not alter the velocity of his reading. Weary metropolitans always underestimate provincial life, the ways in which information, periodicals, knowledge are sensed and seized, consumed. This is a port, of course. You can see news coming round the headland, hear it in the shocking amount of noise as cargos are brought ashore. There may not be so many lectures and public experiments as in the courts off Lombard Street, but early evenings become long nights of reading and conversation here as a Greater Rain drums in the street.
There are many conduits for books and papers. France is closer than London, and books, like rum, sidle in and are shared convivially. His neighbours are erudite. Sometimes, I think, it seems like every doctor and apothecary and cleric in the West Country in the eighteenth century was writing a book about the place they are in.
William is drawn to pragmatic men, to the application of ideas back into the world. It is less problem-solving. It is more looking hard at the world and problem-creating, stubbing your toe against the intractability of what you don’t know and can’t find, and then kicking it with intent.
William Cookworthy c. 1740
Knowledge is in English sometimes, but it often arrives in Latin and French. German is tricky. And this means that you spend your time tracking ideas through mentions and notes and shrugs of dismissal in several languages. There are journals that offer abridged versions of lectures, synopses that worry you through their elisions. What is being missed out? You order An Abridgement of the Philosophical Discoveries and Observations of the Royal Academy of Sciences in Paris every year and devour its contents. This year there are some Observations on the Bezoar, a paper on the Flux and Reflux of the Sea made at Dunkirk, an examination of the silk of spiders, something tendentious on the eclipse.
Certain names keep coming up, returning, retreating.
It is like at a noisy dinner when you become more and more attuned to the shape of a name, until you hear it reverberating. Du Halde is insistent. This is where you have to put aside your Quaker broadcloth. Much of the news from the most occluded parts of the East comes in dispatches from the Jesuits. Father Du Halde is the editor of their Lettres édifiantes et curieuses, flimsy annual reports that act as bulletins from the Unknown World. They come out irregularly, like all the best periodicals – It’s here! It hasn’t folded! – and into the hands of novelists and philosophers and scientists, and William in Notte Street.
And in 1735, Du Halde collects seventeen of these letters into four splendid volumes, vast and lavish, with beautiful unfolding maps and illustrations of silkworm factories and palanquins full of Chinese ladies. The title page shows a boat, laden, perhaps, with porcelain, in the harbour of a Chinese port, surrounded by Chinese figures, with Confucius the Celebrated Chinese Philosopher illustrated on the facing page. The books are published in English the next year, and then are printed again and again.
ii
And there is another name that keeps turning up – a Swedish metallurgist, Emanuelis Swedenborgii. He may well write in Swedish, but William reads him in Latin. Swedenborg is the superintendent of the mines to the kings of Sweden and the writer of a substantial book in three volumes that examines the composition of the mineral world. He is particularly good on copper, and copper is a perennial interest as it provokes conversation on your doorstep, on the quayside, whenever you ride westwards into Cornwall.
Swedenborg is a natural philosopher, fixated on the transformation of shapeless energy into regular structure, grand rhymes that echo from the planets to grains of sand. But it is also clear that he is a deeply practical man, not only the inspector of mines but intrigued by new ways of discovering mineral seams through the divining rod, the virgula divinatoria.
Diagram of divining rods, from Mineralogia Cornubiensis, 1778
William has taken it up with enthusiasm. He has learnt how to use it first-hand from the captain-commandant of the garrison in Plymouth, a truly respectable man and, ‘by many experiments on pieces of Metal hid in the earth, and by actual discovery of a Copper mine near Okehampton’, has become convinced of its efficacy. There are different pulls, William writes in a pamphlet, the strongest being gold, then copper, iron, silver, tin, lead, bone and finally coals, springs and limestone. But be careful he says, ‘in metallic countries, vast quantities of attracting stones scattered through the earth … and, even about town, bits of iron, pins &c. may easily be the means of deceiving the unwary’.
He is straightforward about divining. This is not mystical, but a practical approach to exploring the world. And he writes that ‘either the Hazel or the Willow actually answer with all persons, if they are in health and use it moderately and at a proper season’.
Evidently the sight of this Quaker chemist, serious and meticulous, with his forked stick criss-crossing an empty field, has produced ridicule. He writes in the pamphlet, ‘I would advise in case of debates, not to be too warm and lay wagers on the success, but unruffled, leave the unbelievers to their infidelity.’ When lodging at Carloggas with his friend Richard Yelland, he ‘went about the country with a dowsing rod looking for materials’.
William has become an Adventurer.