The Island of Lost Maps Read online

  “Um, it’s not really a town,” she said with a giggle, before searching behind the counter for a photocopied “minihistory” by the county historical society. It informed me that Eldorado had been the site of a gold discovery in 1885. Whatever small riches were made here obviously did not last. Eldorado, I realized, was nothing but the last remnants of somebody’s doomed schemes and blind greed. And, suddenly, I got a funny feeling that I’d been there before.

  GILBERT BLAND OUTSIDE THE COURTHOUSE IN HILLSBOROUGH, NORTH CAROLINA, ON JULY 1, 1996.

  CHAPTER 13

  Mr. Bland, I Presume

  EVEN AFTER ALL THE SETBACKS, I KNEW OF one last spot where I was sure to come across Bland. As his case shuffled toward completion in three jurisdictions, the map thief’s calendar had begun to fill with events he could hardly refuse to attend. And so, on a bright, brisk day in December 1996, I found myself at a federal courtroom in Charlottesville, Virginia, where he was due to appear at a sentencing hearing. I would finally lay eyes on the man.

  I had been awaiting this event with a kind of anticipation that bordered on frenzy. At times, I felt nearly as anxious as the explorer Henry Morton Stanley, who, on September 19, 1871, scribbled these words from somewhere deep in central Africa:

  I have taken a solemn, enduring oath, an oath to be kept while the least hope of life remains in me, not to be tempted to break the resolution I have formed, never to give up the search, until I find Livingstone.…1 And something tells me, I do not know what it is—perhaps it is the ever-living hopefulness of my own nature, perhaps it is the natural presumption born out of an abundant and glowing vitality, or the outcome of an overweening confidence in one’s self—anyhow and everyhow, something tells me … I shall find him, and—write it larger—FIND HIM! FIND HIM! Even the words are inspiring. I feel more happy. Have I uttered a prayer? I shall sleep calmly to-night.

  Stanley’s agitation was understandable. Having marched more than five hundred miles through vast swamps and dense jungles in search of the lost geographer-missionary David Livingstone, enduring 128-degree temperatures, torrential rains, unfriendly locals, mutinous underlings, bloodsucking tsetse flies, malaria-carrying mosquitoes, and beetles as large as mice, he was, at the time of his writing, half-loopy from “fevers without number.”2 So what was my excuse? It was clear by now that my search had led me into dangerous emotional territory. And so, having invested many months in trying to figure out what made the map thief tick, I now began also to look at my own motivations. If I was going to keep pursuing this frustrating quest, I thought I owed it to myself—and perhaps to Bland as well—to figure out exactly what I was doing.

  I realized that in spirit, at least, my search resembled a kind that popped up fairly often in the annals of discovery. As far back as Homer’s time, when Telemachus set out after his long-lost father, Odysseus, much of our world has been mapped by explorers who were not actually seeking new lands but hunting for elusive human beings. In the Middle Ages, for instance, generations of European voyagers headed to Asia and later Africa in search of Prester John, an ever-elusive Christian king whose vast and wealthy dominions were said to have “no theft nor sycophancy nor greed nor divisions.”3 We may now snicker at maps such as The Kingdom of Prester John, published by Ortelius in 1573, depicting a huge African empire. Nonetheless, the hunt for this mythical potentate unquestionably helped to end medieval Europe’s isolation and spark the Age of Discovery.

  Nor were other eras immune from what Eric Leed, author of Shores of Discovery: How Expeditionaries Have Constructed the World, described as “the Lost-Boy Complex.”4 In 1805 the Scottish explorer Mungo Park vanished along the Niger River. He was never found, but those who attempted to track him down dispelled many geographical myths about the West African interior. Likewise, after British rear admiral Sir John Franklin disappeared during his 1845 attempt to find the elusive Northwest Passage, more than twenty expeditions were sent out in search of the mariner and his men (all of whom, it turned out, had perished).5 “The Franklin affair was the greatest disaster in the history of Polar exploration,” wrote Peter Whitfield, “yet in drawing dozens of search-parties to the region in the 1850s, it was responsible for completing the map of the Arctic.”6

  My own quest had many motivations, of course, not the least of them being money and professional pride. Like Stanley, who was sent to Africa as a reporter for the New York Herald, I was first and foremost a journalist on assignment. There was also an intellectual challenge. The more Bland had avoided me, the more I had learned to rely on my own resourcefulness and research skills to patch together the details of his life. But something else kept me going, an almost instinctual drive, seemingly linked to the allure of the unknown. It was beginning to remind me an awful lot of this Lost-Boy Complex. And as I read through the accounts of explorers, trying to make sense of the phenomenon, a curious pattern began to emerge. In a striking number of cases, the searcher—consciously or not—began to take on traits of the missing person, finishing his quest, meeting his same fate, or otherwise merging with his being. Stanley, for instance, had suffered a lifelong crisis of identity. An illegitimate child who was abandoned by his mother and never knew his father, he changed his name from John Rowlands to Henry Stanley, after a man whom he idolized as a father figure. His hunt for Livingstone was likewise a search for self, as if he were driven not only to locate the great adventurer but also to become him in some way. Stanley himself hinted at this very notion in his journal. In the older and more famous man’s presence, he wrote, “I … begin to think myself somebody, though I never suspected it before.”7

  Livingstone was, in many ways, worthy of emulation. As a physician he dedicated himself to using modern medicine to alleviate the suffering of the African people; as a Christian missionary he battled the slave trade; as an explorer he made sweeping contributions to geographical knowledge of the continent. I could see why Stanley would be drawn to him. But just what was I trying to find in a man like Gilbert Bland?

  FACES HAVE OFTEN BEEN COMPARED TO MAPS. Ptolemy himself described mapmaking in terms of painting a portrait: in both disciplines, he wrote, one must be concerned not only with the whole head (the entire world) but with individual features (particular places). Likewise, the Dutch master Jan Vermeer—a contemporary of Golden Age cartographers such as Joan Blaeu, Jan Jansson, and Frederick de Wit—repeatedly counterposed the human face with the face of the Earth.8 In works like The Art of Painting, The Soldier and a Laughing Girl, Young Woman in Blue, Young Woman with a Water Jug, and The Geographer, Vermeer placed the face of his subject in front of a map—as if to show that the former charted the inner world just as the latter depicted the world at large. And this same metaphor was employed by any number of writers, including William Shakespeare in Henry VI, Part II:

  In thy face I see

  The map of honor, truth, and loyalty

  So what sort of map, I wondered, as I sat anxiously in that courtroom, would I see on the face of the defendant?9 By now several photos of Bland were etched into my memory: the waiflike face from his first mug shot in 1968, cheeks angelic but eyes empty; the noticeably hardened face from a post-Vietnam mug shot in 1971; the dazed face from another arrest in 1972, hair shoulder-length and shaggy, mustache full and walrusy, à la David Crosby; and, finally, the face of a middle-aged criminal, mustache graying, hairline receding, eyes peering past the camera defiantly, one brow arched at a foreboding angle. But while those photos charted the changes that had taken place in Bland’s outward appearance, they told me little about his soul: poker faces, every last one of them. If nothing else, I hoped that this long-awaited chance to observe him in person would allow me to decipher his features, as Stanley had done with Livingstone:

  I found myself gazing at him Every hair of his head and beard, every wrinkle of his face, the wanness of his features, and the slightly wearied look he wore, were all imparting intelligence to me—the knowledge I craved for so much ever since I heard the words [from my publisher], �
�Take what you want, but find Livingstone.”10

  As the appointed hour approached, the courtroom filled with lawyers and clerks. There were no well-wishers or family members seated in the gallery—just a few reporters quietly readying their notebooks. And then, there he was, shuffling to his seat in blue prison scrubs. In a similar moment of encounter, H. M. Stanley had professed a desire to “vent [his] joy in some mad freak, such as … turning a somersault.”11 But, despite months of anticipation, I now felt nothing but a vague sadness, whether at Bland’s meager appearance or my own grandiose expectations, I could not be sure. Although I had hardly imagined a robust individual, I was taken aback by how sunken he looked. Five feet nine inches tall, with reddish brown hair that was beginning to go gray, he seemed hunched and frail, as if his body belonged to an old man. Yet he also had the look of someone far younger than his forty-seven years: without the mustache I had seen in so many of his photos, he seemed almost childlike. His skin was pulpy and lusterless, as though never exposed to sunlight. And his expression? Empty. Blank. Bland. It was simply not a face, I now realized, that gave itself away. The only thing vibrant about it was his piercing hazel eyes. A couple of times he leaned back and sneaked glances at me as I stared at him. I’m not sure he even knew who I was, but his look was not friendly. I could imagine how Jennifer Bryan must have felt when he darted his “surreptitious” eyes at her on that fateful day in the Peabody Library. It was the gaze of a man who intensely disliked to be observed.

  Prison had not been good to the map thief. Earlier in his incarceration, while staying at the Albemarle-Charlottesville Regional Jail, he’d written the U.S. district judge to complain about having to live in crowded conditions with a number of violent criminals. He attempted to pass the days by reading, he said, but had trouble concentrating in a place where the television constantly blared, “with RAP music videos, cartoons, and wrestling…

  “I have tried, with the help of anti-depressant medication … to maintain and cope,” he wrote, but “the stress is unbearable.”12 Noting that two other inmates had hanged themselves since his arrival several months earlier, he said he was worried about “retain[ing] my sanity.”

  Knowing that Bland had written similar letters from prison in the past, I could not help but feel a certain skepticism about his claims of mental illness. But when the hearing got under way in court that morning, his attorney argued that the map thief’s troubled emotions were indeed at the heart of this case. In urging a light sentence for his client, the Roanoke-based lawyer Paul R. Thomson, Jr., said Bland’s “pattern of problems” was “largely triggered by depression, a very common problem with post traumatic stress syndrome and something that we saw a whole lot of during the Vietnam era.”13 Thomson also cited Bland’s financial troubles as motivation for the crimes. “He did it in large measure because his business that he owned in Maryland … was failing,” he said, adding that Bland “could not feed his family.” Thomson assured the court that his client would remain in an outpatient treatment program once he returned home to Florida. “He recognizes that this was a singularly poor judgment This has been an emotionally traumatic incident for him, for his family.”

  Any hopes I had entertained of Bland himself offering insight into the crimes proved sadly optimistic. Speaking in a meek voice that occasionally snagged with emotion, he gave what amounted to a stock repentant felon speech: “The first thing I’d like to say, Your Honor, is that I’m truly sorry for what I’ve done.14 I’m ashamed of myself. I’d also like to say, Your Honor, that in the year just gone by, I’ve had a lot of time to think about why this has happened and also … about my responsibility to my family, to my wife and children when I get back home. I have a lot to make up to them. I’m forty-seven years old now and I realize that I can’t make mistakes like this anymore…. It will never happen again.”

  Then he quietly slouched back to the defense table and seemed to melt into his chair, the soul of inconspicuousness.

  UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT JUDGE JAMES H. Michael, Jr., a tall, white-haired man with hawkish eyes, a resonant voice, and the stately air of an old-fashioned Southern gentleman, wanted Bland to know how much the thefts had offended him. “In the court’s view, the loss is irreplaceable and unmeasurable,” he told the map thief at that hearing.15 Nonetheless, a plea bargain had been signed, and the judge said he made it a rule to honor plea bargains. Accordingly, he sentenced the defendant to eight months in prison—time already served—and ordered him to pay seventy thousand dollars in restitution to the University of Virginia and Duke University. (Bland would later contest that amount, noting that the damages he had caused were easily remediable, since many of the maps could simply be glued back into their atlases—in response to which Judge Michael would accuse him of “a persistent misunderstanding of the gravity of the offense.”)16

  Ten days after his sentencing in Virginia, Gilbert Bland was in court once again. Like their federal counterparts, North Carolina prosecutors had agreed to a plea bargain that would have let the map thief off with time served. This time, however, the judge had other ideas. Noting that Bland had stolen twenty-six maps and documents worth an estimated twenty thousand dollars from UNC-Chapel Hill, Superior Court Judge Robert Hobgood rejected the deal, insisting that “the penalty is not severe enough for what this man has done.”17 It was a gutsy stand, so much appreciated by librarians that it earned Hobgood an award from the Smithsonian Institution’s 1998 National Conference on Cultural Property Protection. But the practical impact of the decision proved minimal: even with the judge throwing the book at him, Bland would end up serving only five additional months in prison. After receiving a two-year suspended sentence in Delaware, where he was ordered to pay nine thousand dollars in restitution for the maps he took from the university, Bland was ready for release, having spent a total of less than seventeen months behind bars.

  As the news of Bland’s imminent freedom spread via the Internet, librarians from around the globe seethed at what they viewed as a laughably light sentence. “In my opinion, he should have got twenty years hard labor Those who talk their way into our confidence and then betray our trust are lower than the dirt,” snarled P. D. Hingley, librarian for the Royal Astronomical Society in London.

  “Since civility prevents us from chopping off his hand, any such thief should be stuck away for a year for each dollar’s worth of stuff he stole and for each dollar it cost to apprehend, prosecute, and incarcerate him,” added Sidney E. Berger, head of special collections at the University of California, Riverside.

  Yet, despite such get-tough rhetoric, the librarians knew that their own peers were partly to blame for the situation. Of the nineteen institutions allegedly hit by Bland, only four had pressed charges. The others had simply let the matter drop. Why the unwillingness to act? “I’ve asked that same question many times, and I haven’t gotten much of an answer,” said Cynthia Requardt of Johns Hopkins, where Bland was apprehended but never charged. “I think it fell through the cracks. The legal counsel didn’t think that there would be much gained by it, everyone else was waiting for the legal counsel to take the first step It dragged on so long, and then Virginia prosecuted, and then Delaware and North Carolina, and so the feeling became, Well, it’s been taken care of.”

  True, Bland’s federal plea bargain would have made additional state cases against him difficult to pursue—but by no means impossible. “Other libraries would have been able to prosecute if they had really pushed,” insisted the FBI’s Gray Hill.

  Moreover, the U.S. plea bargain did not shield Bland in Canada, where he had allegedly walked off with a total of almost forty maps from the University of British Columbia in Vancouver and the British Columbia Archives in Victoria. Nonetheless, no charges from north of the border ever materialized. “I talked to the Royal Canadian Mounted Police about what our chances would be,” said Brenda Peterson of the University of British Columbia. “And they said that in order to bring any sort of charges against him, we’d get into
international law, and that would be very complicated. They didn’t hold out much hope that the amount of effort and money that would be required to actually charge him in Canada would be worth it. Let’s just put it this way: they did not urge me to pursue it.”

  And so, on May 23, 1997, less than a year and a half after entering jail, Bland strolled out into the spring air, a free man. In a curious twist of fate, his last days behind bars had been spent at Fort Dix, New Jersey—a federal prison established in 1993 on the site of a former military training facility that Bland knew all too well. It was into Fort Dix he had walked for induction into the Army in 1968, and it was out of Fort Dix he had come upon leaving the service in 1971, anxious to put the past behind him. Now he had reason to hope for another new start. The police and FBI were no longer after him. His victims had moved on to other concerns. And, as the weeks wore on, most of the media forgot about him, too. I was the last one on his trail.

  HELLO.”

  “Hi, Mr. Bland.”

  “Yes, who is speaking?”

  “This is Miles Harvey calling.”

  I had waited more than eight months after his release to telephone him. His lawyers had told me he was not pleased with the publication of my magazine article and had given me no reason to believe he was any happier about the possibility of a book. Still, I hoped that, with the passage of time, I might find him in a reflective mood. I was mistaken.