The System of the World

Cornwall

WILL COMSTOCK, the Earl of Lostwithiel, has been worrying that they’ll become trapped in one of the sudden mists that wander about the moors like ghosts through a haunted house, and lose their way. And indeed such mists wash up round them on two occasions. He insists, then, that they stop right where they are, and bide their time until the air clears. Daniel frets that Minerva shall lose patience, and sail without him. But around midday the mists blow off on a stiff north wind that presses and pursues them down-valley toward the sea, now visible far off, pea-green, and pied with cloud-shadows and sun-shafts.

The land is chopped by stone walls into parcels so irregular it’s almost as if this country had to be pieced together from shreds of other worlds. In the high open country that tumbles down from the moors, the walls are lacy and irregular. Later, as the company of travelers traverse down into the valley, they pass through forests of stunted oaks, no taller than Daniel’s head, that cling to the slopes like wool to a sheep’s back and refuse to give up their leaves even at this time of year. There the walls run straight and solid, drenched with moss and saturated with life.

From such a wood, the company emerges into a smoky bottom-land, where shaggy anthracite-colored cattle engage in desultory shoving-matches. They fall in along the course of a rushing river that has vaulted down off the moor. Not far below them, it slows, flattens, and broadens to an estuary. There is the longboat waiting to take Daniel out to Minerva, which is anchored somewhere hereabouts, making ready for the run to Oporto and thence, eventually, to Boston.

But the travelers from London have not followed the Earl of Lostwithiel and Thomas Newcomen all this way to look at cows or boats. As they come out from under the dripping eaves of the last little oak-coppice, Daniel Waterhouse, Norman Orney, and Peter Hoxton begin to note certain oddments and novelties round the foot of the valley. Above the high tide mark, the ground runs gently up-hill for no more than a bow-shot before leaping up to make a rocky bluff that looms over the estuary. It’s obvious enough, even to visitors who are not aficionadoes of the Technologickal Arts, that men have been digging coal out of the roots of that bluff for many generations. The flat ground along the shore is strewn with dunnage and gouged with marks where they have trundled and dragged the coal down to meet the boats. To that point, it is typical of a certain type of small mine that might prosper until the miners delved to the waterline, and then be abandoned.

There is a flattish out-cropping not far above the foot of the bluff. On it stands a thing that might have been cobbled together from pieces of drawbridges and siege engines. Two free-standing stone walls are held apart by an unroofed void perhaps four yards in breadth. That void has been congested with a dark web of timbers that reminds Daniel of a gallows. This supports some arrangement of platforms, stairs, ladders, and Machinery that is quite difficult to sort out, even as they draw closer to it. From its complexities emerges a sucking and hissing and booming, like the beating of a giant’s heart, one might think, in the last moments before it dies. This does not die, however, but keeps going in a steady cadence. With each beat comes a sudden rushing noise, which their ears can follow as it meanders down a crooked wooden aqueduct and finally leaps out and spatters on the tidal flat below, where it has carved a little water-course-a man-made streambed-down into the surf.

“Ground-water, pumped from the depths of the mine, by Mr. Newcomen’s Engine,” announces Lostwithiel. This is unnecessary, since the three visitors have come all the way out from London expressly to see it. And yet it’s important for Lostwithiel to come out and say it, as when the pastor at a wedding intones, I now pronounce you man and wife.

Orney and Saturn are keen to clamber down into the bowels of the Engine and know the particulars. Daniel goes with them as far as a plank platform from which he can get a good prospect of the valley. There he stops for a look round. It is the closest thing to solitude he’ll have until he reaches Massachusetts. He can now see Minerva anchored beyond the bar, some miles down where the estuary joins the sea. The crew of the longboat have already marked him through their prospective-glasses and are rowing directly for him, building speed to ground their keel in the soft sand where the Engine spits out the mine-water.

Slowly shaking its fist above Daniel’s head is an arm made of giant, knot-ridden timbers joined by iron hasps that must have been sledge-hammered out in a forge somewhere nearby. Depending from its end is a gargantuan chain, its links about the size of a grown man’s femur, joined together by hand-forged cotter pins as big as bears’ claws. In Newcomen’s mind, Daniel knows, these links are meant to be of uniform size. In practice each is a little different, the differences averaging out as the chain disappears over the horizon of the curving arch-head that terminates the great arm. From it depends the piston, which fills a vertical cylinder the size of a mine-shaft. Packed round the piston’s edge to form a seal is a matted O of old rope yarn, called junk, clamped down by a junk ring, secured with rustic nuts. Plenty of steam leaks out around it, but most stays where it belongs. The opposite end of the arm is linked to a pump rod consisting of several tree-trunks squared off and bound together with iron bands, plunging into the earth and pulling on giant sucking and splurging equipment too deep down for Daniel to see. Compared to all of this, the brains of the thing are tiny, and easy to miss: a man, on a platform a storey or two below where Daniel is standing, surrounded by pushrods, bell-cranks, and levers and supplying information to the machine when needed, which is not very frequently. At the moment, he is supplying information to Orney and Saturn, who have joined him down there.

This platform is dripping wet, and yet it’s warm, for the used steam exhaled by the Engine drifts round it and condenses on the planks. Daniel lets the Engine breathe down his neck while he surveys the other works of the Proprietors of the Engine for Raising Water by Fire. He means to dash off a note to Eliza, letting her know just what has been done here with the capital that she and the other investors have entrusted to Lostwithiel and Newcomen. Mr. Orney will then take the letter back to London and see that she receives it. Orney will have a lot more to say, of course. Being a man of commerce, he’ll mark things to which Daniel would be blind, and he’ll know, without having to think about it, just which details Eliza shall and shan’t find interesting. For Orney himself has put a bit of money in this thing now, and if he likes what he sees here, he’ll go back to London and talk it up among his brethren.

So there’s no need for Daniel to make some foolish pretense of seeing this venture through the shrewd eyes of a businessman. He tries, rather, to see it as what he is: a Natural Philosopher. As such it is the experimental aspects of it-its failures-that draw his notice. The level ground below the Engine is pocked, all around, with wreckage of Newcomen’s boilers. The natural and correct form for such a thing is a sphere. Knowing as much, Newcomen has been learning how to fabricate large spherical shells out of iron. And just as a schoolboy’s waste-book is littered, page after page, with smeared and scratched-out failures, so the deep soil of the river-bottom is strewn with ineradicable records of every idea that Newcomen has ever had on the subject, and striking visual proof of why and how certain of those ideas were bad. He can’t possibly beat out a single billet of iron into a vast seamless bubble and so he has to piece the things together of many smaller curved plates, lapped and riveted.

Fifty years ago Hooke had caught sparks struck off of a steel, and put them under the microscope, and shown Daniel what they really were: pocked spheres of shiny metal, like iron planets. Daniel had supposed they were solid, until he saw some that had been blown open by internal pressure. For the sparks weren’t globules, but hollow bubbles, of molten steel that flailed, then froze, when they burst, leaving wild out-flung extremities that looked a little bit like clawing hands and a little bit like ancient tree-roots cast up on a beach. Some of Mr. Newcomen’s failed boilers look like those exploded sparks. Others have failed in ways not so obvious, and lie half-embedded in the earth, like meteors fallen out of the sky.

Some miners come up out of the ground talking in a language he’s never heard before: half a dozen Cornish men in black, sodden clothes. Daniel can see just from their stumbling gait that their feet are half frozen, and from the way they carry themselves that they’ve been working hard for a long time. They fetch hampers and gather round the one boiler in the vale that actually works: the one below Daniel, which is driving the Engine. This rests in a massive collar of masonry with holes in the bottom to admit air and coal. The miners pull off their boots and their dripping socks and stretch their feet out in the fire-glow and take great loaf-sized pasties out of the hamper and begin to tear out mouthfuls. Their faces are all black from coal, much blacker than Dappa’s. Their eyes are white as stars. A pair of eyes leaps up and marks Daniel on the platform, and then all the others follow suit. There’s a moment, then, when Daniel’s looking down at them and they are all looking up trying to decide what to make of this strange visitor. How must he seem to them? He’s in a long woolen coat and his head is swaddled in a knit sailor’s cap. He’s growing a beard. He looms above them wreathed in whorls of exhausted steam. He wonders if these Cornish men have the faintest idea that they are sitting around an explosive device. He concludes that they are probably as intelligent as anyone else, and know it perfectly well, but have made peace with the idea, and have decided that they can accommodate it in their day-to-day lives in exchange for what passes, around here, for prosperity. It’s no different from what a sailor does when he takes ship knowing that he might drown. Daniel supposes that the wizards of the Technologickal Arts will be proffering many more such choices to people in years to come.

This journey began with a wizard walking into his door. Now it ends with a new kind of wizard standing on an Engine. Gazing down on this boiler from above, the wizard has the sense of being an angel or demon regarding Earth from Polaris. For, chastened by his failures, Mr. Newcomen has become most regular in his practices, and in this, his master-work, the seams and rivet-lines joining one curved plate to the next radiate from top center just like meridians of Longitude spreading from the North Pole. Below is a raging fire, and within is steam at a pressure that would blow Daniel to Kingdom Come (just like Drake) if a rivet were to give way. But that does not come to pass. The steam is piped off to raise water, and the wasted heat of the fire affords a measure of comfort to the miners, and for the time being it all works as it is supposed to. At some point the whole System will fail, because of the flaws that have been wrought into it in spite of the best efforts of Caroline and Daniel. Perhaps new sorts of Wizards will be required then. But-and perhaps this is only because of his age, and that there’s a longboat waiting to take him away-he has to admit that having some kind of a System, even a flawed and doomed one, is better than to live forever in the poisonous storm-tide of quicksilver that gave birth to all of this.

He has done his job.

“I’m going home now,” he says.

HERE ENDS The BAROQUE CYCLE

This I have now published; not for the public good (which I do not think my poor abilities can promote), but to gratify my brother the Stationer. The benefits of that trade do chiefly consist in the printing of copies; and the vanity of this age is more taken with matters of curiosity, than those of solid benefit. Such a pamphlet as this, may be salable, when a more substantial and useful discourse is neglected.

–John Wilkins