The Syme Papers Read Free Page B

(entered December 1881), I discovered Syme.
    The name of SAMUEL HIGHGATE SYME was a puzzle, of course, for a number of reasons. The first being that his was the only unfamiliar book along the shelf; the remainder belonged to more or less eminent geologists of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Even the title annexed to the name rang oddly beside the others: the New Platonist, a brisk appellation beside its windy fellows, and one that smacked little of their earthy company.
    And yet it was a strangeness still slighter that made the greatest impression upon me at the time. Most of the books entered the library between the years of 1884 and 1886, when the botanicalinterests of Alfred’s clerical father drew him briefly into questions of mineralogy. Alfred had just entered boyhood at the time. And he recalled much later, in the diaries he kept on the last and fatal Greenland expedition, how he and his father used to hunt for quartz and shale on the long northern summer days in the nearby Grunewald, following dark veins of rock off the forest paths and charting their progress through the overlay of vegetation.
    Alfred’s father, however, came to suspect the geognosists of tampering with biblical fact to reach their conclusions. Though in typical German fashion he kept their blasphemies in good order on his library shelf, he admitted no geological entry after 1886 – except for Syme’s New Platonist, which found its way to the library nearly a decade later (November 1895), when young Alfred had just turned fifteen. As Alfred’s wife Else faithfully recorded in an account of her husband (‘a world-altering explorer, and good-natured, humorous man’): ‘young Alfred did not like going to the local Gymnasium, as the resources of his own home offered greater scope for a curious mind’.
    Perhaps, I considered, the New Platonist was a birthday gift from a relenting father.
    I spent the next week trawling through Richard Owen’s Key to the Geology of the Globe, looking for a clue. But Syme’s name caught in my thoughts, a teasing puzzle, what the Germans have so delightfully nicknamed an ear-worm, pestering its way to the front of my consciousness. If only because I wondered who the hell he was. What was the New Platonist, who were the New Platonists? And when at last Owen had exhausted my patience, I turned, almost as an afterthought, to the man who will make my name, as I his.
    *
    Some of the facts discovered themselves quickly enough. Samuel Highgate Syme was the son, born in Baltimore in 1794, of one Edward Syme, an Englishman, himself the younger son of Theophilus, a manufacturer of jimbles (the sturdy anti-corrosive bolts used in the wooden hulls of ships) and prominent MP, predictably, you have guessed it, in the neighbourhood of Highgate,then a village outside London. Edward, Sam’s father, attended Harrow and Oxford, graduating Master of Arts ‘as Hells and Clubs proclaim’, in 1788; deeply in debt and quite unprepared for the assumption of anything like what his father would call a profession.
    Unfortunately for Edward, 1788 was the year in which Bonnie Prince Charlie sank under full sail in a five-knot breeze at a royal display off the Isle of Wight. A parliamentary inquiry was launched, the manufacturers accused, corruption discovered, and public disgrace followed for Theophilus, who soon had no funds to set his son on his feet, nor influence to launch him on a career. (This much could be traced in records of the parliamentary minutes.) Shortly after, Edward joined the Agropolis, a society of young Oxford men determined to establish an idyllic community of Nature on the banks of the Potomac River in Virginia. Their plan, much ridiculed in the daily press, was to farm. ‘A mere two hours a day in the field’, their leader, young Benedict Smythe, declared, ‘would provide for their Earthly necessities!’
    The society was funded by the purse of Smythe, or rather, Smythe’s father, Lord Burkehead, who