The Island of Lost Maps Page 24

  CHAPTER 12

  Eldorado

  THEN CAME THE HOUR WHEN I DISSOLVED INTO the map. Eighty miles an hour in a nice new rental car, and there I was, drinking my Dr Pepper and tapping my foot to something random on the radio, when all of a sudden—wooosh!—I’m hurtling backward through time and forward through space all at once. Part of me was still on Interstate 85, south of the Virginia-North Carolina state line, but part of me was on another road, a ghost road, the one that lay along this route before the concrete and cars, the horses, the white people. It was called the Great Indian Trading Path, one of the oldest travel routes in America, a byway that once snaked for more than five hundred miles from Virginia to Georgia.1 I had seen it on an old map of Carolina—engraved by James Moxon and published by John Ogilby in 1672—one of the same maps, in fact, that was in Special Agent Gray Hill’s collection. The trading path was only a thin gray line on that document, so sketchy that I had to squint to make it out, but now it seemed to be reaching out to me like a runway to an airplane, so real and so close that I could almost taste its hot dusty air. So this is what happens, I thought. This is what comes of so many hours spentpeering over the edges of old maps. Sooner or later you fall in.

  DETAIL FROM JOHN OGILBY-JAMES MOXON’S CAROLINA MAP OF 1672.

  Or maybe it’s just what comes of being tired and hungry and anxious about a meeting that may or may not take place an hour down the road. But whatever was causing this madness, I did not fight it. Give yourself over to the map, I told myself. March down that trading path. Scale those peaks—the ones labeled APALATHEAN MOUNTAINS. Frolic with those naked Indians pictured in that sparkling stream. What did I have to lose? This whole jaunt down I-85 was a giant crapshoot anyway. Might as well hitch a ride with the past, if only to see where it took me. And at that moment it was taking me to an Indian village illustrated on that map with thatched huts.2 These days, that same spot is known as Hillsborough, North Carolina, and if I could have stuck to the precise route of the trading path, it would have led me to within a block of Gilbert Bland’s jail cell.

  One of the first Europeans to visit the place Bland now calls home was John Lederer, a German-born adventurer whose geographical observations were later incorporated into the Ogilby-Moxon map. In June 1670, Lederer arrived at what was then a Native American settlement along the Eno River. He found the people of these parts to be “covetous and thievish, industrious to earn a peny [sic]”—which also struck me as a pretty fair description of the town’s most recent resident.3 But the sad was, I didn’t really understand the map thief a whole hell of a lot better than Lederer understood those Indians. Even after all these months, I still knew only the what of his story, not the why. So that’s what I had come to find out. I had this idea that, away from the influence of his lawyers, Bland might be willing to talk with me, especially if I showed up unannounced at his appointed house of correction. Anyway, it was worth a try.

  He was there to face state charges stemming from his heist at the University of North Carolina in nearby Chapel Hill. In addition, he still had to contend with state charges in Delaware, as well as the federal indictment in Virginia. At the time—July 1996—none of these cases had been resolved, so Bland, unable to make his $75,000 bond, was biding his time at the Orange County Jail in downtown Hillsborough. I went straight there, edgy to make contact with him, but was promptly told that there were no visiting hours on that day To see the prisoner I would have to return the following morning. In the meantime, a couple of bored-looking jailers agreed to let him know that I was in town.

  “Historic Hillsborough,” as the travel brochures call this village of five thousand, is packed with late-eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century buildings, making it something of a living museum, half Williamsburg, half Mayberry R.F.D. Wandering around town, the crape myrtle in full bloom, I had a renewed sense of being enveloped into the past. On one side street was a still-functioning inn, built in 1759 and rumored to have been frequented by such notables as the British general Charles Cornwallis, who led his troops over the trading path during the waning months of the American Revolution. I drifted inside and a few moments later found myself settling into a room just a block down from Bland’s jail cell.

  That night it happened again. Lying there in the dark, the window air conditioner murmuring aum like some Hindu mystic, I stumbled into yet another locale from the Island of Lost Maps. This time I wasn’t scampering down a footworn Piedmont trail but rushing headlong into the South American jungle, toward a place labeled “Manoa & el Dorado.” Blame this weird waking dream on Sir Walter Raleigh, who had been at the back of my mind all day, his memory being nearly unavoidable in a state where even the capital city (to which I had driven for dinner a couple of hours back) bears his name. But if Carolinians remember Sir Walter for organizing the first English settlements in North America, the ill-fated Roanoke colonies of the 1580s, I was more interested in a different venture, his 1595 search for a legendary land of gold. He did not find it, of course—but that did not hinder him from writing a fanciful account of his trek, in which he claimed to have come within a short distance of “the great and Golden Citie of Manoa (which the Spanyards [sic] call El Dorado).” He was also the first explorer known to have put Manoa on a real map—and, thanks to Raleigh’s fame and standing, his views commanded the respect of other cartographers.4 Jodocus Hondius, apparently using Raleigh’s 1596 map as a model, included Manoa in his 1598 map of South America. In 1599 the Dutch publisher Theodore de Bry issued a Latin translation of Raleigh’s book and included a map showing the city of gold with the caption “Manoa or Dorado, regarded as the greatest city in the entire world.” The mythical metropolis continued to appear on many seventeenth-century maps—including Gerard a Schagen’s Totius Americae Descriptio, into which I was at that moment fading—and would remain on some works until as late as 1808.

  In addition to inventing imaginary places and people (including a tribe of headless men described in his El Dorado narrative), Raleigh had a habit of reinventing himself. He was, as the writer Robert Silverberg put it, “a man of many characters”—one of several traits he had in common with Bland.5 Each man was in his forties when he embarked on his quest for sudden riches. Each appeared to be on the verge of a financial collapse. (“There are many possible readings of his El Dorado quest,” wrote Charles Nicholl in The Creature in the Map: A Journey to El Dorado, “but let us not forget the simple ones: for instance, that [Raleigh] was, or was going, broke.”)6 Like Bland, Raleigh had a penchant for shady scams (having dabbled in both extortion and piracy). Like Bland, he had been to prison before and would go there again.

  Yes, but I knew that I, too, shared something with old Sir Walter. For all his bluster, Raleigh seems to have sincerely believed his expedition ended just shy of a place where “the graves have not beene opened for gold, the mines not broken with sledges, nor [the] Images puld down out of [the] temples.”7 The hope of reaching that promised land never left him. Haunted by an unfinished quest of my own, I could relate to that. I could put myself inside his head, dream his dreams, imagine how it feels to emerge from the dark jungle into a lush valley, “the deare crossing in every path, the birds towardes the evening singing on every tree with a thousand several tunes, cranes & herons of white, crimson, and carnation pearching on the rivers side, the ayre fresh with gentle easterlie wind, and every stone … eyther golde or silver by his complexion.”8 And as that map rushed in at me, filled the corners of the room like darkness itself, I could almost see the glow of a “great and golden Citie” somewhere off in the misty hills. So there I was, chasing El Dorado all the way into the deepest part of sleep, and then it was morning, and there I was, off to visit Gilbert Bland.

  THEODORE DE BRY’S SIXTEENTH-CENTURY MAP OF GUIANA SHOWS “MANOA OR DORADO … THE GREATEST CITY IN THE ENTIRE WORLD” (SEE INSET), TO SAY NOTHING OF A HEADLESS MAN AND AN AMAZON.

  The bored-looking jailers got straight to the point. He would not see me. This was not a surprise,
and somehow not even much of a disappointment. If anything, my immediate reaction was a mild sense of liberation. I could finally relax: the quest was finished. Or so I now imagined. Later, I would begin to wonder if those bored-looking jailers had even bothered to pass along my message. Later, I would start to believe that, even if they did, only Bland’s legal circumstances held him back. Later, I would begin to hope that he’d agree to speak with me once his court cases were resolved. But all that anxiety was for the future; for the moment, everything seemed simple. I had but one thing left to do in town. A tourist brochure reported that archaeologists digging along the Eno River near downtown Hillsborough had discovered Native American settlements going back to the Stone Age. This, I realized, was that village I had seen on the Ogilby-Moxon map—the original destination point of my pilgrimage into the past. If I accomplished nothing else on this sorry expedition, at least I would complete that journey. I would give myself over to the map one more time.

  The dig site, it turned out, was only a few hundred yards from Bland’s jail cell, sitting in a fallow field at a bend in the Eno River, right down from a row of suburban-style homes. I walked out toward it, passing a rusty International Harvester tractor (itself so antique it could almost pass for the unearthed artifact of some forgotten culture), then pushing through a preternaturally large spiderweb, which hovered across my path like a phantom. The whole place, in fact, had a ghostly aura, an air of being more absent than present. The archaeologists had apparently gone home for the summer, covering their work with neat mounds of dirt that reminded me of fresh graves—the only outward signs of a Native American presence that dates back more than ten thousand years. So what happened to this place? Why its sudden demise in the early 1700s? The list of answers, I would later learn, included many of the usual suspects, such as warfare with other Indians and the devastating spread of European diseases (which, according to one early eighteenth-century chronicler, reduced some Piedmont-country populations by more than 80 percent in fifty years).9 But, standing there on that empty plain, I was already beginning to understand the role of another factor, less obvious but perhaps no less important: a clash of cartographies. When the adventurer John Lederer had rambled down the Great Indian Trading Path in 1670, for instance, he was not just sight-seeing. Working under the auspices of Virginia’s governor, Lederer was at the vanguard of a systematic effort to appropriate land—an effort in which maps often played as big a role as guns. As the scholar Mark Monmonier wrote in Drawing the Line: Tales of Maps and Cartocontroversy:

  Indigenous Americans communicated information about space and places through folktales, gestures, dances, and ephemeral drawings, but theirs was not the cartography of commerce, navigation, and warfare.10 Land ownership in the profane European sense of buying, selling, inheriting, recording, and taxing was an alien concept. American Indians, who considered land sacred and not “ownable,” never developed a formal cartography focused on boundaries and surveys. This lack of maps—really a lack of what the European invaders recognized as maps—was one of many technological disadvantages that made the conquest of the New World not only quick and easy but also morally right in the minds of the colonists and their priests.

  Even the map that had brought me here was made with pilferage in mind. Ogilby and Moxon’s work was used as an advertisement to attract English settlers to the new province, whose colonization had begun only a few years earlier when King Charles II granted Carolina to eight wealthy lords proprietors. It was no accident that the new owners’ names appeared all over the map (Ashley River, Cape Carteret, Clarendon County, Albemarle River, et cetera), obliterating the Native American identity of those places in the same way that Russian Communists would later try to purge the memory of their imperial predecessors by renaming perhaps half of the seven hundred thousand towns and cities in what became the Soviet Union.11 With the power to manipulate the land from afar—to hype it up, slice it up, divvy it up—the Ogilby-Moxon map gave colonizers a tool of theft every bit as sharp-edged and efficient as Gilbert Bland’s razor blade. Indeed, it now occurred to me that not only did this one small document encapsulate the whole long saga of New World exploitation, but that when Bland laid his hands on it, he was reenacting that story in a very poignant way. His victims had almost the same relationship to their maps as the people of this site had to their land. For librarian and Indian alike, these were “sacred and not ownable” resources—a lovely ideal, which, like most lovely ideals, proved easy to exploit. I came here to find out why Bland did what he did. Well, maybe it was as simple as this: because he could. Until that moment I had viewed him as something of a cultural freak, a man whose actions were outside the normal course of human events. But now, as I stared across that haunted little patch of earth, he seemed very much a part of the landscape.

  I HAD PACKED MY BAGS, DROPPED OFF MY KEYS. I HAD finished my breakfast, hopped into the car, and, just for the hell of it, cruised past the jail one last time. There was a plane to catch the next morning, hundreds of miles away. It was time to crank the AC and hit the road. But wait. Did I just see what I thought I saw? There, on Route 109 of my official North Carolina State Transportation Map, south of Healing Springs, north of Mount Gilead, east of Misenheimer, west of Spies, smack-dab in the middle of the Uwharrie National Forest, was a spot called Eldorado. Eldorado, the place that is always farther on. The land that exists only in a person’s mind. The destination to which, as Charles Nicholl observed, “there is only the journey, the approach toward something that you cannot reach, something … that you dare not reach.”12 Or … well, maybe I dared, after all. True, it was at least a hundred miles in the wrong direction. And true, I couldn’t come up with one rational reason to undertake yet another wild-goose chase. But like some born-again who gets rich by heeding advice from random Bible passages, I was beginning to believe in the power of cartomancy. Maps had been talking to me even more than usual. Let this one be your Ouija board, I told myself. Close your eyes and ask whether to go or stay. Open them again. What do you see? A place not far from Eldorado: the town of Whynot.

  And so I was off, like so many dreamers, desperadoes, and idiots before me: Raleigh, whose search for the golden city cost him his son and then his own head; Gonzalo Pizarro, whose men were reduced to eating horses, dogs, and saddle leather before abandoning their journey; Philipp von Hutten, whose expedition became what one chronicler called a “theater of miseries,” the final act of which was the leader’s decapitation with a blunt machete; Gonzalo Jiménez de Quesada, whose misadventure left 250 Spaniards and nearly 1,500 Indian porters dead and “achieved nothing,” according to the survivors; and, finally, the infamous Lope de Aguirre, the crazed leader of a wilderness mutiny who declared himself “Wrath of God, Prince of Freedom, King of Tierra Firme,” before his own followers killed and quartered him, then put his corpse on display in sections.13 “The reports are false,” Aguirre wrote about El Dorado, not long before his death.14 “There is nothing … but despair.” Not exactly a good omen for my little road trip—but if anything can be said for certain about the golden city, it’s that the place brings out the optimist in a person. And so I turned up that country-and-western station and hit the pavement, just like Edgar Allan Poe’s “gallant knight,” who

  … journeyed long,

  Singing a song,

  In search of Eldorado

  I followed the Great Indian Trading Path, aka I-85, west to Burlington, then cut down Route 62, past Julian and Climax, to Route 220 south.15 Everything was going just fine—but then a kamikaze rainstorm swooped out of the bright sky, making it difficult to keep track of the car in front of me and slowing my pace to a crawl. By the time I stopped for a dried-out chicken sandwich at the Hardee’s in Randleman, I was beginning to lose steam.

  But he grew old—

  This knight so bold—

  And o’er his heart a shadow

  Fell as he found

  No spot of ground

  That looked like Eldorado.

&
nbsp; I pushed on, past Asheboro, to Route 134 south, then followed that two-laner to Troy, a bleak town of textile and log mills. When I finally got on Route 109 and entered the Uwharrie National Forest, the afternoon and my patience were both seriously on the wane.

  And, as his strength

  Failed him at length,

  He met a pilgrim shadow—

  “Shadow,” said he,

  “Where can it be—

  This land of Eldorado?”

  “Over the Mountains

  Of the Moon,

  Down in the Valley of the Shadow,

  Ride, boldly ride,”

  The shade replied—

  “If you seek for Eldorado!”

  Oh, I was riding boldly, all right—thanks to another caffeine infusion from the kindly Dr Pepper. Somehow, though, I had managed to bypass the Mountains of the Moon and the Valley of the Shadow, winding up instead at a general store in the tiny burg of Uwharrie. Where can it be—this land of Eldorado? Well, shit, son. It’s just up the road.

  The first thing I learned about the place was this: even when you find it, it’s not really there. The Macedonia Methodist Church, the Adams Egg Farm, a few forlorn houses and ramshackle trailers—welcome to Eldorado (pronounced El-duh-RAY-doh by the locals), where the streets are not paved with gold and some are not paved at all. The most impressive edifice by far was the Eldorado Outpost, a new convenience store with deer and fish trophies on the walls, groceries and “Quality Gun Care Products” on the shelves, and Seen Better Days pizza under the heat lamps. I asked one of the girls at the cash register about the history of the town.