The Island of Lost Maps Read online

  “First of all,” he said curtly, “do you mind if I record this conversation?”

  “No. Do you mind if I go ahead and record it, too?”

  “Be my guest.”

  “All right, thanks.”

  I was surprised at how shaky my voice sounded—and how calm his seemed. It was also deeper than I remembered it, and his slight New Jersey accent seemed to give it a toughness. There was a hint of menace in it, too. Even from the first few words I sensed that it was a voice that could persuade, a voice that could intimidate and injure—a voice, in short, entirely unlike the broken and barely audible one I had heard in court.

  He demanded to know how I had found his phone number. I told him the source—a document on the public record—then fumbled for words. “I just wanted to introduce myself to you.”

  “Let me tell you something, first. I do not wish for you to communicate with me in any way and in any manner,” he said flatly, as if reading from a prepared statement. “There are laws in the state of Florida that protect people. I do not wish for you to communicate with me any further. If you do, I will try to bring criminal charges against you, and I will certainly bring civil charges against you. Do you understand that? Is that clear?”

  “I understand what you just said, yeah.”

  “Okay.”

  Although his legal threats were unfounded if not insincere, it was obvious the conversation was not going well. I knew this would be my last chance.

  “Now, what I’d like to request is that we at least meet in person,” I said. “I think you should meet me, even if you don’t want to talk to me. I—I’m a good guy. I’m interested in getting to know whatever part of this story you want me to get to know. I just want to give you every opportunity; I just want to be fair here. It’s part of my job. I have absolutely nothing against you. I have absolutely no interest in pestering you or invading your privacy. I’m just trying to do a good job as a reporter. Can you understand that?”

  “Uh, you’ve been warned, and I suggest that you check Florida statutes regarding stalking before you try to communicate with me again. As I said before, I’m warning you and I have a tape recording of this conversation. If you continue to harass me or attempt to communicate with me in any way, I will file charges with the police and I will charge you in a civil action. Do you understand that?”

  “Yep, I understand what you said.”

  “Is that clear to you?”

  “It’s absolutely clear. I’m still hoping to talk you out of it …”

  “I have nothing more to say to you.”

  Then came a silence. A familiar silence. A final silence.

  SEVENTY YEARS AGO, WHEN HER HUSBAND WAS CONVICTED of embezzlement and shipped off to federal prison in Leavenworth, Kansas, my grandmother faced an agonizing decision: how to break the news to her young daughter. Family lore has it that my grandfather was guiltless, save for refusing to snitch on a friend who worked above him at the bank (and who later shot himself to death at a church in our hometown of Downers Grove, Illinois). But my grandmother knew that, even if her husband was innocent, his departure would devastate their youngest child, then about six years old. A levelheaded and resourceful woman who taught many generations of elementary school students, my grandmother was usually the type of person who knew precisely what to do in a crisis. This time, however, she felt overwhelmed, paralyzed by a combination of grief, loss, and the prospect of sudden poverty at the height of the Great Depression. For her teenage stepson, from whom news of the trial could not be kept, the situation was bad enough: he would have to abandon his college plans and look for work in the government-run Civilian Conservation Corps. But how could she possibly hope to explain the tragedy to her daughter, a sensitive little girl who idolized her father?

  Desperate for help, my grandmother turned to an associate at her school and another friend with some supposed expertise in child psychology. Their advice was simple, rational, and, it turned out, tragically wrongheaded. Don’t tell the girl anything, they said. There is no need to mention the word prison; a young child could not cope with the shame. Let her believe that her father has just gone away on a trip. Tell her he’ll be home any day.

  And so for years my mother went to sleep every night wondering whether the next morning would bring her father back from his journey into the shadows. She does not remember how long he was gone. She does not remember asking anyone where he went. She does not remember trying to picture him in a faraway place. He had simply disappeared, faded into some misty terra incognita, a place all the more terrifying because it was entirely undefined and undiscussed, as distant and incomprehensible as death itself.

  He finally did return one day—but, in many ways, she waits for him still. I grew up with a mother who lived in constant fear that her loved ones would simply vanish. If her husband tarried too long on a trout stream, as he was prone to do, or if her teenage sons remained too long at a party, as was their wont, this normally vibrant and easygoing woman would dissolve into a panic. On nights when I came home far past my promised hour of return—there were too many of these, I regret to say—I would often find her sitting by the phone, sobbing, her terror so manifest it seemed to shrivel her six-foot frame. Yet if my grandfather’s disappearance left her with a crippling fear of the unknown, it also left her with a very different, very healthy kind of dread: a fear of not knowing. My mother’s fierce curiosity—a lifelong quest for answers, to both the world’s problems and her own—has been, I think, her salvation, a sweet revenge on the forces of uncertainty that haunted her childhood.

  I inherited, in equal and all-too-generous portions, her inquisitiveness and her skittishness. And, in retrospect, I realize how much these two contradictory traits colored my investigation of the map thief—one of them driving my search, the other filling me with trepidation about what I might find. Earlier in this book I wrote that Bland seemed such a stranger as to be “beyond my boundaries.” I now understand that his remoteness, both psychological and physical, was the main part of my interest in him. I cannot say whether in seeking him out I was somehow looking for the grandfather I never met, a man who, like the map thief, had fallen from social grace in middle life. All I know is that, with each passing month, it seemed that I was searching less for an actual person named Gilbert Bland than for some dark and unexplored part of my own existence. And then one day, to my fascination and horror, I caught a glimpse of it. Him. Me. The thief. My years of attempting to get inside Bland’s head had been a failure, I realized. I had not penetrated his thoughts, only imitated his actions—sneaking around the edges of his life just as he had crept around libraries, slicing away little pages of his past, then secreting them home. Although Bland’s threat to sue me for stalking was all bluster, I could not really blame him for feeling misused. His sense of violation, in fact, must have been very much like that of his own victims.

  And while I agreed with those victims that the judicial system had let Bland off easy, I also understood that punishment is not always measured in jail time alone. From my own family’s experience, I was tempted to believe Bland’s lawyer when he stood in federal court and told Judge Michael: “I think the biggest punishment that he will face is having to go back and face his teenaged son and explain to him how he made this decision.”18

  Moreover, I knew there was yet another punishment awaiting Bland—one that I myself would be bound to administer.

  I had hoped my search for the map thief would end with a discovery, some thunderbolt of truth that threw light upon all his actions. That never happened. Yet I came to understand that, at its most fundamental level, a discovery has less to do with revelation than with declaration. Just as the word explore comes from the Latin for “to cry out,” discovery is the act of making known. Christopher Columbus was not the first to arrive in America: his genius was in introducing the New World to the old one. “To discover is to draw the veil,” observed the Columbus scholar Mauricio Obregón.19 “It is not to run into something
and keep it to oneself. It is to push back the frontier of infinity and to pass the news on to posterity.”

  But every discovery is also an act of appropriation. After all my years of research, the only thing I could say about Gilbert Bland with absolute certainty was that he cherished his anonymity. I had seen him nourish it through a succession of aliases, deploy it ingeniously in one rare books room after another, guard it like a pit bull against all outside forces. Even the courts had not taken it away from him. But I would. This book would. It was not that I meant him any harm: if anything, my feelings of compassion toward him had only grown over the years. But I had come to realize that, no matter what my intentions, the telling of his story would doom Bland to what was, for him, a most terrible fate: to be known.

  I was confident that the penalty fit the crime. If nothing else, calling attention to Bland seemed likely to deter him (and other would-be library crooks, I hoped) from future pilferage. Nonetheless, over time I grew increasingly ambivalent about my pursuit of the map thief. I never considered abandoning the project entirely, but I did feel a growing moral fatigue, a creeping doubt about why I continued to rifle through Bland’s life for ever more obscure details—especially after it was clear that, without his cooperation, those details would never add up to a complete picture of the man.

  One last truth about the act of discovery: it’s easy to get lost in the wilderness. Henry Morton Stanley went into the African jungle driven by curiosity, a reporter in search of a scoop. He came out years later, a cynical adventurer for hire, who, as a mercenary of Belgium’s brutal King Leopold II, established the Congo Free State, a vast colony of forced labor, torture, and terror where literally millions of people perished.20 Perhaps it was also curiosity—“a genuine interest in and affinity for” old maps, in the words of one defense attorney—that first lured Gilbert Bland into the peculiar terrain of the rare books room.21 But curiosity, the desire to experience and understand a thing, has an unfortunate way of devolving into a need to possess it, to conquer it, to make it submit to one’s will. And when that happens the explorer becomes the exploiter. I had tried to prevent that particular tragedy from befalling my own adventure. But one day, while transcribing the tape of the phone conversation with the map thief, I heard my voice strain at the words “I’m a good guy.” It struck me that I had been trying not to convince Bland but to reassure myself. And I knew that I, too, was beginning to lose my way.

  We rarely reach our destinations, at least not the ones we set out to find. More often, we arrive one day at a place unfamiliar and unexpected, where all roads suddenly seem to converge and something—the ineffable smell of fate or the stench of defeat or (likeliest of all) sheer exhaustion—tells us the journey is over. In my case it was the knowledge that I had wandered too far. We do not take trips so much as they take us, and this one had started to transform me into someone I did not want to become. It was time to head home.

  FOR WRITERS A PLOT IS A SERIES OF EVENTS; FOR cartographers a plot is a map. By either definition, this plot is now at an end. That does not mean it is complete: no plot ever really is. But there comes a point at which you must let the ink dry and step away from the drafting table, hang your work on the wall and see what’s there.

  Any attempt, whether in writing or mapping, to fit our three-dimensional world onto the flat page leads to distortions. Some elements receive too much space, others too little; still others become warped almost beyond recognition. As I examine my plot I see not only that it suffers from problems of projection but that much of its geography is speculative. Mountains undoubtedly have been sketched where molehills exist, and vice versa. Such guesswork is inescapable when one must depend almost entirely on other people’s observations, often nothing more than a shoreward gaze from the crow’s nest of a ship. And then, of course, there is the subjectivity of the plot maker himself. Although I have tried to be exacting, all cartographers occasionally succumb to myth and prejudice, thereby transforming entire landforms into Rorschach inkblots that reveal more about the draftsman than the terrain.

  “Nature conceives of innumerable things, of which those known to us are fewer than those not known,” wrote the fifteenth-century mapmaker Fra Mauro, “and this is so because nature exceeds understanding.”22 To which I would add: especially human nature. As I study my plot, I see a land whose coastline is rendered with some degree of accuracy but whose interior, despite my best efforts, is still stamped Lands Unknown. I had hoped to do so much more. I had hoped to put things in exact relation and scale, to get at a single reality. Instead, I see only rumination and whimsy, arabesques of uncertainty. There have been times when, as I leaned over my work, I could make almost no sense of it. But as I step away now, the scattered details begin to merge into strangely familiar forms. And suddenly it no longer seems random at all, this ending. My plot, I realize, looks just like one of those wayward pages from the Island of Lost Maps.

  DETAIL FROM A CELESTIAL CHART PUBLISHED IN 1515 BY THE ARTIST ALBRECHT DüRER.

  EPILOGUE

  Lifting Off

  THE WORLD WAS BEHIND ME, AND BEFORE ME was nothing but emptiness. What a fine spot it was, this rise overlooking the Pacific, to celebrate the end of my adventure. A crisp spring wind rustled through the low scrub on the hillside; it smelled, as sea air always does, of old tales and new dreams. On the horizon the dull ocean faded haltingly into a leaden sky. For a moment, peering past the outermost limit of the continent, unburdened of all those years of research and obsession at last, I felt almost weightless. Then a voice brought me back. Solemn and scratchy, it crackled from a pair of loudspeakers set up to my rear:

  T-MINUS TWO MINUTES…

  Mapmaking is an endless quest for perspective. From the earliest times human beings have gazed up with awe and envy as the birds spired overhead. What did those soaring creatures see? Where were they going, so far over the horizon? What could be found there, and what lay beyond? How big was the world? Who else lived in it? How was it shaped? Wings not being our evolutionary good fortune, the human mind evolved an ability to dream its way into the skies and peer down, then created a language of symbols to describe what it saw. The first maps came no later than the Stone Age, and the earliest extant map of the world was made about 600 B.C. The Babylonians who crafted that little clay tablet figured the Earth to be flat, but the Greeks realized it was a sphere and came up with a way to project it onto a two-dimensional plane. The Chinese, too, learned how to reduce space to a systematic grid, and threw in another innovation: the magnetic needle. Other cultures, meanwhile, came up with more navigational tools, using the sun and stars to define the Earth. The tools got better. So did the maps. Better maps begat bigger dreams. New continents came into view. Sailing vessels circled the globe. Balloons levitated above it, then airplanes, then rocket ships. Orbiting on one of those ships in 1962, the astronaut John Glenn observed: “I can see the whole state of Florida just laid out like a map.”1 For the first time our perspective had outstripped that of the birds. Even so, we kept yearning for a better view.

  I was about to witness the latest chapter in that quest. Gathered around me, hugging themselves against the ocean breeze, were a handful of reporters, space industry executives, and officials from Vandenberg Air Force Base. It was April 1999, and we all had come to this isolated edge of the base, some 170 miles north of Los Angeles, for a pivotal moment in the history of “remote sensing”—the geeky buzzword for examining the Earth from on high. To the south of us, past the Santa Ynez River, loomed a row of hills, behind which, just out of view, stood a ninety-three-foot-tall Athena II rocket, ready to roar into space. Its payload was the most sophisticated Earth-observation satellite ever built for the commercial market. Operated by Space Imaging, a cutting-edge Colorado firm, the Ikonos I would be able to produce photographs of objects as small as one meter—images equivalent in detail to maps drawn by the U.S. Geological Survey. From an orbit some 420 miles above the Earth, its camera could distinguish cars, homes, roads, bridges,
individual trees, and even hot tubs. Previously the domain of only government spy satellites, these highresolution images could then be merged with those of another onboard sensor, whose multispectral scans would reveal information not seen with the naked eye, such as the health of crops and the spread of plankton at sea, as well as earthquake fault lines and potential mineral deposits. Transmitted to Earth in digital form—meaning they could be easily stored in computers, then processed and converted into maps—these images would be available almost immediately to anyone willing to pay thirty to three hundred dollars per square mile photographed. Among the early customers was the National Imagery and Mapping Agency, the federal organization responsible for military maps and surveillance photos. But cartographers and spies were far from the only people interested in the Ikonos I. At the edge of the millennium, everyone from farmer to miner, urban planner to relief worker, was demanding a bird’s-eye view of the world.

  Personally, I had a different sort of perspective in mind. In this place where the land and sea and sky converged, where the past and present of cartography met its future, I wanted to take one last look back at a story that had consumed me for four years. Although the case had largely disappeared from public view, it remained very much alive for the people affected by it, many of whom had continued to pursue it behind the scenes. Of course, Bland had never been far from my thoughts, either. I had even had something of a last run-in with him. And so, as one countdown crackled in my ears, another one ticked off in my head, as I thought back on a parade of events that had transpired since the map thief’s release from prison.

  T-MINUS ONE MINUTE…

  In February 1998 I had found myself in Florida, where organizers of the Miami International Map Fair were holding a panel discussion on security issues, focusing on the Bland case. Just three years earlier the map thief had passed himself off as a legitimate dealer at the event, trafficking his illicit stock to a number of unknowing map sellers and collectors. This fact was deeply embarrassing for all involved—but, to his credit, Joseph H. Fitzgerald, the fair’s affable founder and chairman, chose not to hide from it. Unfortunately, although most of the dealers I met at the fair seemed well-meaning, little was said or done that day to convince me that the same thing could not happen at an event like this again.