The Island of Lost Maps Read online

  Bland’s lawyers would later argue that it was the failure of his computer leasing firm in Maryland that led to these financial troubles and eventually to his crime spree. But that might not have been the only factor. “I’ll put another scenario in front of you,” said Jonathan Ramsay. “He came over here [to the Bahamas] about four or five times—and he liked to gamble. He’d say to me, ‘I’m over here on a gambling junket.’ He would come in to see me and then he would go off to the casino.”

  Given Bland’s apparent propensity for risk, an infatuation with gambling would hardly seem out of character. But whether to pay off casino debts or for some other reason entirely, he clearly found himself in desperate need of fast cash—and knew a way to get it. “He found an easy avenue to make some quick money, and he really overdid it,” said Lieutenant Detective Clay Williams of the University of North Carolina Department of Public Safety, one of several law enforcement agencies that was by now getting involved in the case. “He got in way over his head. It became addictive. I don’t think he had any conception of the federal charges that could come down on him.”

  Come down they did—but slowly, very slowly. While news of the crime was breaking all over the country, the FBI’s attempts to get a search warrant for Bland’s store had gotten bogged down in red tape. “A search warrant has to be originated in the same jurisdiction that it’s going to be executed,” explained Special Agent Henry F. Hanburger of the FBI office in Columbia, Maryland. “And timing was terrible with the Christmas holidays and the absence of people at work both on the prosecutor’s side and our side We just couldn’t get the needed prosecutor to say, ‘Damn right, let’s get a search warrant.’ That cost us a little bit.”

  In fact, the delay would end up costing investigators a great deal—and prosecutors even more. It was not until a day or two after Bland had cleaned out his store that FBI agents tracked him down in Florida. And it was not until two weeks later, January 2, 1996, that the map thief turned himself in to local police. At long last Bland was in custody. Now it was his maps that were nowhere to be found.

  CHAPTER 10

  The Joy of Discovery

  THE ADMIRAL SITS DOWN TO WRITE A LETTER. From outside his cabin come sounds so familiar he does not even hear them: the creak of wood, the slap and flutter of sails, the hoarse lurch of the sea. He is on a ship called the Niña, heading east. As he leans over the page, his blue eyes narrow with excitement, and he indulges himself in a satisfied smile. The letter is dated “February 15 of the year 1493,” and is addressed to a Spanish official. It contains thousands of words, only two of which really matter:

  I discovered…

  The admiral does not know exactly what he discovered; he will go to his grave not knowing.1 (For now, he vaguely describes it as a great many islands inhabited by people without number.) Nor does he understand how completely his discovery will change the world, or how fast. Within months copies of this same letter will be circulating throughout Southern Europe, published in a dozen editions and in three languages. Within months the admiral will be a celebrity, cheered by throngs of well-wishers and feted by kings, queens, courtiers, and clergymen. Within months other explorers will be laying down plans to retrace the admiral’s route. They, too, will make discoveries, but none of those will compare with his. The admiral has crossed an uncharted sea, visited an unmapped world: even though people may have spoken and written about these lands, all was conjecture, nobody actually having seen them. To seek and to find—this has been his dream almost since childhood. (“He was charmed by the afterglow of legends that flashed from the unknown,” the biographer Gianni Granzotto would later observe.2 “He began to fantasize about them, and they became the constant subject of his thoughts and dreams; he thus learned to travel the invisible roads that lay between wisdom and exaltation.”) To seek and to find—and now, he writes, it has come to pass: the conquest of what appears impossible. The admiral has overcome all obstacles—the danger, the hardships, the terrifying uncertainty, the fact that learned and powerful men said it could not be done. To seek and to find—it is his triumph alone, he knows that, but he also knows that it means nothing unless it is shared, transformed from event to story and then to legend. That is why he is returning with specimens: gold, amber, cotton, herbs and chilies, caged parrots and other exotic birds, even human beings: I bring Indians. That is why he is writing this letter. That is why the still-wet ink glistens with these words: The whole of Christendom should rejoice and make merry…

  AN ALLEGORICAL COMMEMORATION OF COLUMBUS’S DISCOVERIES IN THE NEW WORLD, FROM A 16 2 1 BOOK.

  I TRY TO MAKE IT A RULE, DURING SOCIAL CALLS, TO REFRAIN from unsolicited comments about the attire of my hosts. Then again, not every host comes to the door dressed in South Seas islands.

  “Your shirt,” I blurted out, “is a map.”

  This unusual form of greeting did not seem to faze the white-haired man who stood on the other side of the welcome mat, studying me with a Cheshire-cat grin.

  “Oh sure,” he replied cheerily. “I’ve got map shirts, map ties, map just about everything. Come on in.”

  And so began my visit to the extraordinary home of an even more extraordinary person. For the next few hours my host would lead me on a wide-ranging and high-spirited review of the history of mapmaking, an astounding chunk of which happened to be hanging on the walls of his large house. Maps in the bedrooms. Maps in the lounge. Maps in the dining room. Maps in the living room. Maps in the hallways. (“There are a few rooms that don’t have maps,” he observed, his boyish eyes twinkling from behind a pair of big square glasses. “Fewer all the time.”) Maps on shelves and in cabinets and in cases. Maps spread out on tables. But not just any maps—these were some of the rarest and most significant maps ever printed, a collection of such scope and import that no less an expert than Graham Arader had described it as “unbelievable.” And Arader’s opinion of my host? “Oh, he’s a giant! A giant collector!”

  My visit here was yet another detour off Interstate Bland. Collectors in general had played only a small part in the map thief’s saga; my host, to the best of my knowledge, had played none at all. Yet I had come to believe my research would be incomplete until I understood the nature of collecting. I knew, of course, that the collecting impulse was, in a general way, what created the market for Bland’s stolen maps. I also thought this urge might help to explain why the map thief had built up his illicit hoard in the first place—and why he had then stashed it away from police. But I had a vague notion that it had an even deeper, if less immediate, significance to the story. I did not know then that my search for answers would turn into a journey of self-revelation. I simply had a hunch that an investigation was in order—and what better place to start than this bloated temple of cartographic wonders?

  The house, I should note, was extremely well-secured—yet because its contents are literally irreplaceable I have decided to publish neither its location nor the name of its owner. Let’s just call our “giant collector” Mr. Atlas, not only because he seemed to hold the whole universe aloft on his walls but because the house itself struck me as a kind of atlas—multiple views of the world making up a single worldview, an open book of one man’s obsession.

  And make no mistake: Mr. Atlas is obsessed. If you couldn’t figure that out from his shirt (which, he complained, was not an accurate reproduction of any specific map but a “cobbled together” representation of “Cook’s voyages of the South Pacific—though I’ve got lots of others”), you might have guessed it from the portraits hanging in the front hall. No, those bearded gents were not his ancestors. The pair in that double portrait, each of them holding a globe, were the legendary Dutch cartographer Gerard Mercator and Jodocus Hondius, the Amsterdam engraver and map seller whose atlases made Mercator’s work famous. And hanging beside them, that fellow with the tiny little head perched atop the great big pleated ruff was none other than the great Abraham Ortelius, a name and face so familiar in the Atlas family that, recounted
our giant collector, when “we visited a map dealer about a year ago, and my grandson saw a copy of the Ortelius portrait there, he just couldn’t understand how it could be Ortelius because Grandpa already had Ortelius in his house.”

  In short, it was safe to conclude that Mr. Atlas suffered from a severe case of the malady described on a poster in his basement stairway:

  WARNING

  OLD MAP POX

  Highly contagious!3

  There is no known cure!

  Infection is characterized by dizziness and sweaty palms

  when reading old map catalogues.

  This is often accompanied by apnea and lust.

  Additional pathognomonic signs are:

  loss of free wall space and a self-induced poverty.

  If infected, do not see your doctor, but

  seek aid from an antiquarian map dealer who,

  while unable to effect a cure,

  can provide symptomatic relief.

  But I would be loath to create the impression of Mr. Atlas as some sort of zoned-out eccentric. Articulate, dignified, and keenly intelligent, he was a man whose passion for maps was surpassed only by his knowledge of them. Retired from the business world, he now worked at an academic institution, where he researched and occasionally wrote about matters of cartographic history. He and his wife also helped to support various library acquisitions, as well as sponsoring a lecture series and occasional museum exhibitions. And, of course, his home was nothing less than a museum in its own right, painstakingly assembled over the course of some thirty-five years. As he led me on a tour of what he often referred to as “the treasures,” I felt privileged not only to be in the presence of such marvelous artifacts—a few of which could literally be found only within those walls—but to get to know the man who had assembled them.

  With a calm half smile fixed steadily on his full-lipped mouth, Mr. Atlas had the air of a slightly distracted sage—one happy to impart his wisdom upon a willing, if sometimes embarrassingly naive, pupil. “How many people can I share this with?” he said, gesturing to the walls. “Most people don’t care.” And so, in the slow cadence and indulging tones of a particularly patient grade school teacher, he began to speak about his maps and his life.

  “Ever since I can remember I’ve collected something, whether it was seashells, minerals, postcards, stamps, coins—all at a child’s level mostly,” he explained. “I don’t know whether you’re just born with an interest in collecting or what. I guess either you’re a person who accumulates things or one who gets rid of things. For example, if I have a file drawer, I’m not going to weed it out until it won’t close anymore.”

  He discovered old maps while working as an investment counselor in the early 1960s. A business associate’s office had recently been redone by an interior decorator who thought maps “created the right image.” Two of the artifacts had thus appeared on the man’s wall. “I think one was France and the other was Central Europe,” Mr. Atlas said. “I don’t even remember them exactly. But I said, ‘Wow, those really are neat, Bob. Where’d you get those?’ Well, he just mumbled something; he couldn’t have cared less about maps. But for me, something clicked. I’d always been interested in art history and geography, and I thought, Gee, here’s a product that brings both those interests together. And clearly it must be affordable also, or it wouldn’t be on this guy’s wall. So that got me started. I called the decorator and found out where the maps came from, and that led me to one of the most important dealers in the country. It was like a whole new thing opened up.

  “When I started with maps,” he added, “it was a miscellaneous assortment that had only a personal connection. I’d buy a map of a place because I’d taken a trip there or because I had relatives who lived there, something of that sort. And then after a few years I realized that really wasn’t the right way to go about it. That’s not a collection: it’s an assembly of items. And the way I draw the distinction is that selecting a piece for a collection has nothing to do with the individual merits of the item. It’s whether there’s a potential of relating it to other items. That’s what builds a collection: the sum is of greater interest than each of the individual pieces.”

  And then Mr. Atlas said something that has often occupied my thoughts since. His goal as a collector, he explained, was to tell a “comprehensive story.” I confess that this idea escaped—and irritated—me at first. My general impression was that collectors were people with too much time on their hands and too much money in their checking accounts—passive consumers. Collecting had never struck me as a particularly creative act, much less a narrative form. And as a moderately hardworking writer, I was a tad miffed by my host’s implication that owning a lot of cool stuff qualified him as some sort of auteur as well.

  If Mr. Atlas sensed my skepticism, he did not say so. Nor did he waste time with arguments in support of his thesis. Instead, he set about proving it—with maps. One such demonstration began with a 1718 map of the Mississippi River by the French cartographer Nicolas de Fer. On the inset was a smaller map, showing the entire Gulf Coast region. This rendering of the coast, he explained, was far more accurate than those that had come before it, a big step forward in the cartography of the area. He then showed me other maps bearing that same general image of the coastline, including Guillaume Delisle’s Carte de la Louisiane of 1718, “which was widely copied by many other cartographers and was the mother map of that region for half a century.”

  Finally, with barely restrained excitement, Mr. Atlas led me to another part of the house. “Now, look at this,” he said, carefully taking out one last document. “This is where all of that comes from.”

  On the table in front of me was a work produced not by a printing press but by hand—what historians call a manuscript map. Some of the edges had been slightly burned, but I could easily make out the outline of the Gulf Coast—the same outline I had seen on the other maps. Yes, said Mr. Atlas, I was indeed looking at a one-of-a-kind work, the original map drafted by the actual person who had surveyed the region nearly three hundred years ago.

  There was something even more haunting about this document than the others I had looked at that day. Looking down at those uneven lines of ink, it was almost as if I could see the hand that drew them moving carefully across the page. Then I began to imagine all the other hands that might have held this fragile document during its long life: the hardened palms of sailors and explorers, the sinewy fingers of cartographers, the pampered mitts of royals, the loving clutches of collectors. Suddenly, I felt a powerful connection to the past—not so much that I was reliving history but that I was part of it, a continent taking shape right before my eyes.

  “This map was done by Mr. Soupart, whom we know nothing about,” Mr. Atlas said. Not even the first name of the cartographer has survived. Only his map—and only in this house. “It’s so rare that you can know the exact source [of a cartographic tradition]. So this was really neat to come across. The other thing is, do you notice that it’s burned? Well, we can’t prove it but we do know that the ship which in all likelihood was involved in the surveying expedition burned in Pensacola Harbor in 1719. And it wouldn’t surprise me a bit if this was one of the things that was rescued.”

  What a story, I thought. What an absolutely, undeniably marvelous yarn.

  Not only did I feel a new admiration for my host but as the afternoon progressed I began to feel something else as well, something I would never have imagined when I walked in the door: I started to think that Mr. Atlas and I had a lot in common. It was not that I suddenly understood his obsession. But the more maps he showed me—relating each one’s history, demonstrating its interconnectedness to others—the less his hobby seemed like some arcane and alien pursuit. Was not building a collection, I began to wonder, a little like writing a book? Did not his quest and mine have the same end, the acquisition of knowledge? Did not we each seek to organize this information—one of us on the page, the other on his walls—in such a way that we might,
as he had put it, “know the exact source” of a thing? Wasn’t a desire to know the source, in fact, precisely what had brought me here?

  By the end of the day, I was ready to proclaim Mr. Atlas not only a storyteller but a chronicler of epic events, the Tolstoy of maps. He had devoted his efforts to documenting two sweeping historical narratives. The first one was the exploration of the American West. This period fascinated him in great part, he explained, because the people who did the exploring were often the same ones who made the maps. And since most of those maps were accompanied by diaries, “you can relive the entire trip.”

  To illustrate his point, he took out a work by Charles Preuss, cartographer for my old pal the Pathfinder. “Here you see all this commentary comes from the Frémont journal,” he said, pointing to text within the map. “And some of it is very interesting—like here! ‘First view of buffalo, June the thirtieth.’ And the campsites are all marked, so you can see how much space they covered on any given day.”

  His other great passion was the Age of Discovery, a period from which his collection contained a mind-boggling blur of masterpieces. I saw a 1513 work by Martin Waldseemüller, one of the first atlas maps to depict the New World. (It was Waldseemüller who—under the mistaken impression that Amerigo Vespucci had discovered the New World—named the southern part of that landmass America in a 1507 map. He later discovered his error and deleted the name in further editions, but by then the name had stuck.) I saw a rare work from 1534, drafted by Diego Ribero and printed by Giovanni Battista Ramusio, containing the first clearly identified depiction of the Strait of Magellan. I saw the first printed map devoted to the Western Hemisphere, a work by the German humanist Sebastian Münster. I saw maps by Ortelius, Mercator, the French innovator Oronce Finé, the Dutchmen Gerard and Cornelius De Jode, the Briton John Speed. The list went on and on. Pick a great map from the sixteenth, seventeenth, or eighteenth century, and it was probably in that house.