On 30 May 1745, William writes a letter to his friend and client Dr Richard Hingston of Penryn, a Quaker surgeon, ‘Dear Richard, My Eastern and South-Ham journeys hath kept me of late so much abroad that I hath not had opportunities to write to you.’ He apologises for the damage to the pillboxes which are normally well wrapped. His latest order has just been sent by sea to Falmouth. Has Richard been following the sales of prize cargos in Plymouth and the Friends who have been involved?
And, he goes on, evidently picking up an old conversation:
I had lately with me the person who discovered the CHINA EARTH. He had with him several samples of the china-ware, which I think were equal to the Asiatic. It was found on the back of Virginia where he was in quest of mines and having read Du Halde, he discovered both the petunse and kaolin, but it is this latter earth which he says is essential to the success of the manufacture. He has gone for a cargo of it, having bought from the Indians the whole country where it rises. They can import it for £13 per ton and by that means afford their china as cheap as common stone ware, but they intend to go only about 30% under the company. The man is a Quaker by profession, but seems as thorough a deist as I ever met with. He knows a great deal about mineral affairs, but not funditus.
This traveller has brought with him examples of new porcelain, talked of where the real materials for its manufacture lie. He has sketched a possibility. William listens.
The weather changes here within the quarter-hour. This mostly means you come home drenched, whatever you were expecting at breakfast. But today, staying with Friend Nancarrow, a superintendent of mines, you set off with a whippy little wind in your ears. It is a June morning and early, but you are glad of the thickest broadcloth you have and within your quarter-hour you are baked in your good black preacher’s coat.
You are passing Nancarrow’s works, so you stop to draw breath, and unwrap your stock from your neck. You take a drink of water from the brook that cuts down the hillside and you watch the labourers who are mending the furnace that drives the engine to pump water from the mines. It has split and they are caulking it with a local white clay from the moors, they tell you, spreading it into the cracks like a paste. As the furnace heats up, this white clay bakes on to the metal to fill the fissures. It is the use it’s commonly put to, ‘mending the tin furnaces and the fire places of the fire engines; for which ’tis very proper’.
Lives can change within the quarter-hour too. You take some of this white earth between your thumb and forefinger and it crumbles only slightly. Spit on it and rub again and it is a paste that spreads across the pads of your fingers and dries whisper-thin. Might it be? You know it. You take a knuckle of it home.
And the other material: the petunse?
You have been talking again. This time to some bell-founders in Fowey. You are asking them about the different materials that they use, and notice that the heat of the molten metal had fused some of the stones used to line the mould. What fuses in this way? You take a handful back. This same rock, you realise, white with greenish spots, has been used to strengthen the gun emplacements at the Plymouth garrison.
What does William see? He sees one material changing into another. He sees workers, Creation, the great rhythm of change. And because William is truly interested in people at work, he asks questions and then he listens to replies.
He comes back to Notte Street with geology on his boots, up the road from the docks.