Free The Map That Changed the World by Simon Winchester

it was the book that introduced the young man to the skill that would become central to him for the rest of his adult life—the basic principles of surveying. And it was as he was carrying this book, walking down thesingle sloping village street of Churchill, that he eventually met the man who would change his life.
    His name was Edward Webb, and he was a professional surveyor. His craft was all of a sudden big business in England. Roads were being built, country estates being measured and laid out to gardens, canals were being dug, rivers improved—and common lands enclosed. It was the business of enclosure that had brought Webb to Churchill.
    A group of the West Oxfordshire local squires and the wealthier farmers, just like their opposite numbers in countless other towns and villages up and down the country, had decided to have the local fields apportioned privately, and farmed efficiently. A surveyor was needed, and Webb was brought over from Stow-on-the-Wold, ten miles away. The young Smith introduced himself—in his own rather fanciful attempt at an autobiography penned many years later he wrote that he met Webb entirely by chance and asked him some penetrating questions about modern surveying practices. By the day’s end, according to the diary Smith was now in the habit of keeping, today held in the library of the University Museum in Oxford, he had been hired to work as the assistant. This was the autumn of 1787. He was eighteen, and, informally educated though he may have been, he had a profession and a job.
    It took him only a few months to master the basic skills. By the following spring he had learned how to use the pantograph and the theodolite, the dividers and the great steel chain. By the early summer of 1788 he was entrusted with doing his own work—the first opportunity arriving when one of Webb’s older assistants, who, it was whispered, drank , miscalculated the area of some allotments he had surveyed and made their owners order fences of the wrong size. William Smith did the measuring and the mensuration all over again, got everything right, and was promptly set up by Webb to survey other tracts of land on his own.
    He and Webb then began to travel together—indeed, Webb and his family so liked the young man they had him move away from Churchill and his niggardly uncle and into their substantial house at Stow. From there he traveled, to a farm in Cricklade, to make a survey of the Sapperton Canal tunnel, to the Braydon Forest, to the Kineton coalfield in Warwickshire. He also traveled to the New Forest, where he sank a borehole, looking for coal for the charcoal-burning industry, which was then locally booming.
    And by chance he also made brief but memorable contact with the one other celebrated former inhabitant of Churchill—the former governor-general of India, Warren Hastings.
    For his entire career Hastings, who had been born in Churchill, had yearned to return to his father’s old estate at Daylesford, in Worcestershire, which his father had been compelled to sell because of what were delicately but opaquely described as “embarrassments arising out of the civil war” (between the seventeenth century’s Royalist and Parliamentary armies, the Roundheads and the Cavaliers). With the eighty thousand pounds that he brought back from his thirty-four years in India in 1785, Hastings eventually managed to buy the great house—though at the very time he completed the purchase he was embroiled in the notorious impeachment trial (for alleged cruelty and corruption in Calcutta) that was to last for seven years, ruining him and (though he was acquitted on all charges) forcing his retirement from public life.
    As soon as he bought the old family house and its 650 acres (for eleven thousand pounds), he decided that he needed the grounds landscaped. And in the spring of 1788 he called in the by-now-well-known surveyor Edward Webb from Stow, and his young partner-apprentice, his Churchill-born former