The Island of Lost Maps Read online

  “And the opal probably marks the place where the treasure is hidden,” Joe added. “Boy, I’d like to find that spot myself!”

  “But it’s in Texichapi—the land of nowhere,” Frank reminded him.

  You don’t have to read the rest of The Clue in the Embers to know what happens next. In about the time it takes chubby Chet to exclaim, “Wowee! What a treasure!”18 the brothers will locate the land of nowhere and uncover the long-buried Aztec palace there. This outcome is certain not only because the Hardy Boys are predestined to leave no mystery unsolved but also because the book is part of a larger literary tradition. So many adventure stories are set in motion by someone finding a map, in fact, that these narratives have assumed the status of myth, in which the buried treasure lies not only in the earth but deep in our collective unconscious. When I went back to read some of them, I was surprised to find how often these stories—like the real-life drama I was covering—were tales of temptation, exploring the perpetual contention between our good and evil selves, between our rational minds and the creatures that prowl the unexplored regions of our souls.

  In the case of the Hardy Boys, of course, evil never stands a chance. Being the very embodiment of upstanding American youth, Joe and Frank refuse to exploit Texichapi’s priceless antiquities for their own gain. (Frank: “These treasures are certainly government property! No one must be allowed to steal them.19 We must notify the Guatemalan government at once.” Joe: “We don’t expect a reward.20 We’ve had a grand time visiting your beautiful country.”) In other such stories, however, the moral landscape becomes far more complex. At the heart of these narratives are two opposing icons, one symbolizing desire, the other knowledge. If the buried treasure is the forbidden fruit of these stories, the map is the serpent, prodding us to dream of a place beyond the borders of our innocence, pointing us to it, hissing, X marks the spot. Perhaps this explains why our culture uses cartographic and geographic language to express notions of sin and virtue. We speak of a moral compass. We describe good people as following the straight and narrow. We say sinners lost their way, lost their bearings. And in our fables of maps and money, characters are constantly torn between sticking to the path of righteousness and wandering into the wilderness of the soul, populated by all those wild animals.

  The most celebrated of these stories, of course, is Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island. This 1883 classic is often regarded as a harmless children’s tale, but as the Stevenson biographer Frank McLynn pointed out, “There is a disturbing darkness about Treasure Island absurdly glossed over by those who continued to treat it as a mere ‘boy’s book.’…21 One of the most disturbing aspects of Treasure Island is its lack of a moral center.”

  The plot is well known. Treasure Island opens with the death of an old mariner, who leaves behind a sea chest. Jim Hawkins, a fatherless boy and the book’s narrator, finds a mysterious packet of papers in the trunk and takes it to Squire Trelawney and Dr. Livesey for inspection:

  The doctor opened the seals with great care, and there fell out the map of an island, with latitude, longitude, soundings, names of hills, and bays and inlets, and every particular that would be needed to bring a ship to safe anchorage upon its shores There were several additions of a later date; but, above all, three crosses of red ink—two on the north part of the island, one in the southwest, and, beside this last, in the same red ink, and in a small, neat hand, very different from the captain’s tottery characters, these words:—“Bulk of treasure here.”22

  Jim and the men decide to hire a ship and search for the island. Before their vessel departs, however, the one-legged pirate Long John Silver and his associates secretly join the crew and plot to get the buried gold for themselves. This sets up a bloody battle when the ship arrives at Treasure Island. Jim and his friends are eventually able to overcome the buccaneers and find the treasure—but theirs is not a clear-cut triumph of good over evil.

  Silver, for one, is a strangely paradoxical villain—especially given the simplistic moral framework of most children’s literature. Both a “monstrous imposter” and a man of his word, a reckless killer and a careful compromiser (who, at one point, saves Jim from being murdered by the other mutineers), he is alternately a “prodigious villain” and a “bland, polite, obsequious seaman.”23 24 The critic Ian Bell aptly described him as a “figure whose personality swings like a pendulum, whose character metamorphoses almost in an instant.”25

  But Treasure Island‘s hero is also oddly ambiguous. Despite the gee-whiz tone of his narrative, Jim is no Hardy Boy. In his worldview, love of money is not the root of all evil—far from it. Greed is good, and without consequences. Jim does not worry about where the buried treasure came from, who suffered by its accumulation, or whether he has the right to take possession of it. In fact, he revels in his avarice, providing a sensual description of the loot, one that might as easily have come from Long John Silver:

  It was a strange collection, like Billy Bones’s hoard for the diversity of coinage, but so much larger and so much more varied that I think I never had more pleasure than in sorting them.26 English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Georges, and Louises, doubloons and double guineas and moidores and sequins, the pictures of all the kings of Europe for the last hundred years, strange oriental pieces stamped with what looked like wisps of string or bits of spider’s web, round pieces and square pieces, and pieces bored through the middle, as if to wear them around your neck—nearly every variety of money in the world must, I think, have found a place in that collection; and for number, I am sure they were like autumn leaves, so that my back ached with stooping and my fingers ached with sorting them out.

  A villain capable of good, a hero who “never had more pleasure” than in fondling stolen money: in writing Treasure Island, his first novel, Robert Louis Stevenson was already fascinated by the notion of the divided self, a theme he would explore far more thoroughly in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. It’s a subject that has long captured the imagination of writers, not the least of them being James Fenimore Cooper, creator of such masterpieces of early American literature as The Pioneers, The Last of the Mohicans, The Pathfinder, and The Deerslayer.

  Cooper’s 1849 novel, The Sea Lions, is an allegory about two men on identical ships traveling the same route. If not quite Jekyll and Hyde, these sailors are nonetheless doppelgängers—alter egos embodying two very different kinds of human desire. As in Treasure Island, this tale begins with the death of an old sailor, who leaves behind a sea chest containing “two old, dirty, and ragged charts.”27 These are no ordinary maps, however. The first shows the secret site of a seal-hunting paradise in the Antarctic Circle; the other, the location of a West Indies island where pirates have buried a “very considerable amount of treasure.”28 Two schooners—both of them named The Sea Lion—set sail in search of this double jackpot. The first ship is commanded by Roswell Gardiner, an honest, brave, and resourceful Long Islander who, while diligent about making a profit, is primarily on a spiritual journey, having lost his belief in the divinity of Christ. The second ship is led by Captain Jason Daggett, a Martha’s Vineyard sailor, also courageous and cunning—but whom “no dangers, no toil, no thoughts of future, could divert from a purpose that was colored by gold.”29

  In the Antarctic Circle the ships harvest a fortune in sealskins, but because of misfortunes brought on mostly by Daggett’s greed, both become trapped in icy waters. During a horrible winter Daggett perishes, confessing to his symbolic twin: “I’m afraid that I’ve loved money most too well.” His alter ego done away with, Gardiner promptly learns humility, realizes that Christianity admits no “half-way belief,” accepts Jesus as his savior—and survives.30 He recovers the buried treasure on his way home, but it proves to be worth only “a little more than two thousand dollars,” much less than expected.31 And, unlike Jim Hawkins in Treasure Island, Gardiner understands that the money does not really belong to him. “Seeing the impossibility of restoring the gold to those from whom it had been forced in
the first place,” he decides on another course of action:

  The doubloons were distributed among the families of those who had lost their lives at Sealer’s Land.32 The shares did not amount to much, it is true, but they did good, and cheered the hearts of two or three widows and dependent sisters.

  A decidedly less happy, and less virtuous, fate befalls the split-personality protagonist of The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, a famous adventure tale by B. Traven—himself no stranger to imaginary creatures. The author’s own life, in fact, was a study in the slippery nature of identity. B. Traven was a pseudonym—but for whom? That question, the travel writer Paul Theroux once observed, is “the greatest literary mystery of [the twentieth] century.”33 Over the years, people have identified Traven as Jack London, a group of writers in Honduras, even the illegitimate son of Kaiser Wilhelm II. The most likely bet seems to be that he was the fugitive German anarchist Ret Marut (a name that itself was merely an alias for a man named Otto Feige, according to some researchers). Yet those obsessed with Traven’s “real” identity overlook an important point—one that may offer insight into the life of Gilbert Bland. As the Traven biographer Karl S. Guthke observed: “Here was someone who had apparently realized the fantasy of millions He had enacted the adventure of vanishing into thin air and being reborn, phoenixlike, as someone else—literally a self-made man.”34

  Not surprisingly, the idea of dual identity filters into The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, the 1927 novel that was later made into a film with Humphrey Bogart and Walter Huston. The treasure here is a lost gold mine, located somewhere in the Mexican state of Sonora and rumored to have been a primary source of the Aztec empire’s wealth. All traces of the legendary mine disappear for hundreds of years, until the late nineteenth century, when college students on vacation in Arizona come across some old maps in the library of a priest:

  One of the maps indicated a mine which was named La Mina Agua Verde.35 When [the students] asked the father about this, he told them the story of this mine. He admitted that the mine was one of the richest known, but said that it was surely cursed, whether by the ancient owners, the Indians, or by the Almighty he would not venture to say. But cursed it was. Whoever went near this mine was sure to be overtaken by misfortune.

  The discovery of the map triggers a number of efforts to find the mine—all of them ending in dissension and bloodshed. Yet this fact only seems to strengthen the legend’s allure and entice more men to look for La Mina Agua Verde. One of them is Dobbs, an American drifter in Mexico who is particularly fascinated by one part of the myth: a thing he describes as

  that eternal curse on gold which changes the soul of a man in a second.36 The moment he had said this he knew he had said something that never had been in his mind before. Never before had he had the idea that there was a curse connected with gold. Now he had the feeling that not he himself, but something inside him, the existence of which until now he had no knowledge of, had spoken for him, using his voice. For a while he was rather uneasy, feeling that inside his mind there was a second person whom he had seen or heard for the first time.

  Dobbs and two other men head off in search of the mine. They find it—but that “second person” takes stronger possession of Dobbs with each ounce of gold dust they pull from the hills. He becomes paranoid and unquenchably covetous, swindling one partner out of his share of the treasure and shooting the other, leaving him for dead. But before Dobbs can enjoy his wealth, he is attacked by bandits, who cut off his head with a machete. They steal his burros—and, thinking the sacks of gold dust are filled with mere sand, they empty the contents to scatter in the desert winds. The curse of La Mina Agua Verde lives on.

  Curses are for legends. We rarely speak of them in nonfiction narratives. Still, I can’t help feeling that there was a certain inevitability about Gilbert Bland’s story from the very start, as if what would follow was both unavoidable and doomed. The superstitious might call this fate. Bland’s lawyers described it as mental illness. Bland himself once hinted it had a lot to do with simple desperation. Whatever the case, it must have already been with him when he came upon those first old maps. As I try to picture that pivotal moment, I see him opening some long-sealed cardboard box to discover strange-looking manuscripts stacked inside. He takes them out into the light, blows the dust away, flattens them on a table, runs his fingers over the coarse paper, admires the craftsmanship of the printing and hand coloring. And, even at this early point, he is beginning to hear the voice inside his head, a whisper from the phantom who would become James Perry. Maybe these maps don’t lead to treasure, this voice tells him, maybe they are treasure. And maybe you should find out where more of it is buried.

  Then again, it may not have begun that way at all. It’s quite possible that Gilbert Bland lied to the FBI about how he became interested in antique maps. The real story could be entirely different—and perhaps, as with the details of B. Traven’s life, or John Mandeville’s, the truth will never be known. That’s the trouble with people who make up imaginary creatures.

  I SUPPOSE ALL OF US HAVE STRANGE VOICES IN OUR heads, quirks of cognition that defy simple explanation. When I was a boy, my parents were convinced I had a sixth sense. My father was a schoolteacher with a lot of vacation time and a mean case of wanderlust, so our family would spend much of the summer exploring the U.S. interstate highway system, a great barn of a travel trailer in tow. It was during these long trips that my supposed gift was discovered. Soon, testing it became a kind of game.

  I would be fast asleep in the backseat, drooling on my big brother’s shoulder, when my father would turn to shake me awake. “Quick,” he would say as I blinked my eyes open. “Which direction are we going?”

  “Uh … north?”

  He would look at my mother with a proud and conspiratorial smirk. “Amazing,” he would say, shaking his head. “You’re right once again.”

  It was true. As long as I can remember, I’ve had an excellent sense of direction. But, though I will never fully understand it, I suspect my boyhood adventures as the Human Compass had a lot more to do with cartography than with clairvoyance. More than likely I simply made educated guesses about the direction we were headed, based on earlier perusals of the coffee-stained, mildew-fragranced highway maps that were as much a permanent fixture of our Chevy Bel Air station wagon as the steering wheel. I could read maps before I could read books—and that skill, combined with a knack for measuring the sun’s angles, probably accounted for the better part of my so-called gift. If I was a prodigy at anything, it was cartographic comprehension.

  I was good with maps, plain and simple. But what obsessed me about them was never their scientific utility. I did not look on them as mere tools but as mysterious and almost sentient beings.37 Maps spoke to me. They still do.

  Having said that, I want to stress that I am not normally in the habit of listening to mute objects. Nor am I overlooking the obvious fact that a map is a visual medium. Nonetheless, when I need to think through some daunting problem, personal or professional, I often find myself flipping open an atlas and meditating on some random page. And after a few moments of blank contemplation, I no longer seem to be looking at the map so much as listening to it.

  A map does not converse in sentences. Its language is a half-heard murmur, fractured, fitful, nondiscursive, nonlinear. “It is almost as if one had to read from a page where all the words had been assembled in random order: obviously there could be no fixed starting point or sequence of perception,” wrote Arthur H. Robinson and Barbara Bartz Petchenik in The Nature of Maps.38 A map has no vocabulary, no lexicon of precise meanings. It communicates in lines, hues, tones, coded symbols, and empty spaces, much like music. Nor does a map have its own voice. It is many-tongued, a chorus reciting centuries of accumulated knowledge in echoed chants. A map provides no answers. It only suggests where to look: discover this, reexamine that, put one thing in relation to another, orient yourself, begin here… Sometimes a map speaks in terms of physical ge
ography, but just as often it muses on the jagged terrain of the heart, the distant vistas of memory, or the fantastic landscapes of dreams.

  I use a map to get from one place to another in my mind in the same way that someone else might use it to get from Omaha to Oskaloosa. It’s a peculiar kind of travel, I admit, but I suspect many others embark on similar journeys. Robert Louis Stevenson, for one, believed maps had the power of “infinite, eloquent suggestion.”39 Before he wrote Treasure Island, he sketched a map of its imaginary shorelines. Soon, he was practically taking dictation from the thing:

  As I pored upon my map of Treasure Island, the future characters of the book began to appear there visibly among imaginary woods; and their brown faces and bright weapons peeped out upon me from unexpected quarters, as they passed to and fro, fighting and hunting treasure, on these few square inches of a flat projection. The next thing I knew, I had some paper before me and was writing out a list of chapters.

  So important was this map in the genesis of Treasure Island, in fact, that Stevenson was reluctant to take too much credit for writing the book. “The map,” he wrote, “was the chief part of my plot.” He offered this advice to other writers:

  It is my contention—my superstition, if you like—that he who is faithful to his map, and consults it, and draws from it his inspiration, daily and hourly, gains positive support The tale has a root there: it grows in that soil; it has a spine of its own behind the words…. As he studies [the map], relations will appear that he had not thought upon.

  Like Stevenson, I often find myself ruminating on maps before I sit down to write. Often, little more comes of this exercise than a sense of relaxation and focus, a general freeing up of the imagination. But once—just as I was beginning work on this book—a seven-hundred-year-old map suddenly seemed to be speaking about Gilbert Bland. Mappa mundi: that’s the mellifluous expression for a medieval work of cartography—and, despite appearances, it does not mean “map of the world.” It more accurately translates as “napkin of the world,” a reference to the fact that mappae mundi were often painted on cloth. During the Middle Ages, in fact, there was no word for “map,” either in the everyday languages of Europe or in Latin—evidence of how different the medieval conception of geography was from our own. The mappae mundi were intended more to diagram history and anthropology, myth and scripture, dreams and nightmares, than to provide geometrically precise representations of the physical world. Not surprisingly, they can look bizarre to modern eyes.