The Island of Lost Maps

by Miles Harvey

  By this time, the man had noticed her as well. He kept glancing over his shoulder, flashing her “surreptitious” looks. Bryan is an unassuming young woman whose face does not easily give away her thoughts. But behind a pair of glasses, her large blue eyes ache with intelligence and intensity. The man seemed to grow increasingly flustered under her steady stare. “It was weird,” she said, “because he must have thought something was up, but he didn’t think enough to run, to get out.”

  Instead, he stood up, pulled out a card catalog drawer, and laid it alongside the books, purposely obstructing Bryan’s view. This was a fatal mistake. She could doubt herself no longer. With that one false move, the man had given himself away.

  WHEN MR. PEABODY AND MR. NOBODY CROSSED PATHS a few minutes later, there was no time for formal introductions. The encounter took place just outside the front door of the library, where George Peabody, or at least a bronze statue of him, sits leisurely in an armchair, permanently pondering the city he helped to create. At the time of their meeting, Mr. Peabody, wearing a vested business suit and a self-satisfied look, his legs comfortably crossed, had no special plans. Unfortunately, Mr. Nobody was in a rush. At that precise moment, in fact, he was fleeing security guards.

  After Jennifer Bryan had told library officials of her concerns about the man, they quietly contacted security officials. Peabody librarian Carolyn Smith then asked the man to move from the Grand Stack Room to a front area, where she hoped to keep an eye on him without arousing his suspicions. The ploy was apparently successful. Even after being moved, the man requested a 1670 atlas of Africa by the cartographer John Ogilby, although perhaps this was simply an attempt to maintain an air of innocence. At any rate, he did not immediately flee—a bad decision. Within a few moments Donald Pfouts, director of security at the Peabody Institute, had entered the room, joined by two other officers. This time the mystery man decided not to stick around. He grabbed his notebook and walked out the front door, followed by Pfouts and the other security officials.

  On the library’s steps Pfouts said, “Excuse me, sir …”

  The man picked up his pace. The officers walked faster to catch up—and the man hastened his gait to keep ahead of them. In a scene that might have come from some odd amalgamation of The Nutty Professor and The Fugitive, the bookish desperado now led his pursuers on a slow-speed chase through downtown Baltimore. Quickening his strides on Mount Vernon Place, Mr. Nobody passed Mr. Peabody and headed toward another famous city landmark, the 178-foot-tall monument to George Washington. “Great Washington … stands high aloft on his towering main-mast in Baltimore,” wrote Herman Melville in Moby-Dick, “and like one of Hercules’ pillars, his column marks that point of human grandeur beyond which few mortals will go.”

  The mortal now in question did venture beyond the column, but grandeur was far from his fate. With security officials now closing in at a jog, an ignominious capture seemed more likely with each moment. He pushed on, circling yet another statue as he headed west across the broad boulevard of Washington Place. Above him a bronze marquis de Lafayette looked down from his horse with a haughty stare. The general’s steed, a study in power and movement with muscles taut, mouth chomping at the bit, neck twisting against the reins, tail flying, seemed to be making mockery of the sluggish chase below. Searching for an escape route on the far side of the boulevard, the man spotted a nineteenth-century mansion that now serves as a wing of the Walters Art Gallery. Approaching the building, he ditched his notebook into a row of shrubbery. Then he climbed a stairway onto the Ionic portico.

  “That door doesn’t go anywhere,” Pfouts warned him. The man now realized he was trapped.

  Pfouts spoke again: “I would really like to invite you back to the library, because I think there are some issues here that we have to deal with.”

  When the officers pulled the red spiral notebook from the bushes, they discovered that Jennifer Bryan’s suspicions had been well-founded. Folded into its pages were four two-hundred-year-old maps.

  SEA MONSTERS FROM A 1550 EDITION OF SEBASTIAN MüNSTER’S COSMOGRAPHIA.

  CHAPTER 2

  Imaginary Creatures

  SOME OF THEM APPEAR TO HAVE THE TORSO of a unicorn, the paws of a weasel, the tail of an anchovy. Some look like Borneo-sized snapping turtles. Some resemble parrot-shark hybrids: the hellish spawn of Big Bird’s one-night stand with Jaws. Some look like an amphibious Lucifer, an Evil One with webbed armpits. Some are huge and menacing aqua-dogs, ready to go fetch Madagascar. Some have fur, some have feathers, some have huge human-looking eyes scattered amid their scales. Some are snacking on entire ships. Some have naked ladies surfing on their backs. At least one is bridled like a horse and jockeyed by the king of Portugal. Another has a large sailing vessel beached on its tail, a group of sailors celebrating mass near its gills, and an altar, complete with candles and a crucifix, straddling its dorsal fin. My favorites come fully loaded: spouts, fangs, beaks, spikes, armor, opposable thumbs, the works.

  HUMAN MONSTROSITIES

  ACCOMPANYING THE WORLD MAP IN HARTMANN SCHEDEL’S 1493 NUREMBERG CHRONICLE.

  Sea monsters are everywhere on old maps—loitering off Narragansett Bay and splashing around the Arctic Circle, slithering through the South Pacific and causing nothing but trouble near Tierra del Fuego. But they aren’t the only unusual forms of life. Hartmann Schedel’s 1493 world map, for example, is accompanied by prints depicting a variety of human monstrosities, from one man whose feet point backward to another with ears as big and floppy as Hefty trash bags. In the accompanying text, Schedel explained that in India some men have dog’s heads, talk by barking, eat birds, and wear animal skins, while others have just one eye in the middle of their foreheads and eat only animals. Libya has a breed of people who are male on the right side of their bodies and female on the left. The western part of Ethiopia has people with just one massive foot who can run as fast as wild animals. A land called Eripia has beautiful people with the necks and bills of cranes.

  Johannes Ruysch’s 1507 map, one of the first to record the discoveries of the New World, shows a pair of islands off the coast of Newfoundland said to be inhabited by evil spirits. In a legend next to these isles, Ruysch—who is believed to have gone on one of the early journeys to North America—offered what appears to be an eyewitness account: “Demons assaulted ships near these islands, which were avoided, but not without peril.”1 He is not the only explorer to have gone out into the great unknown and come back telling great untruths. Christopher Columbus reported that the New World contained “one-eyed men, and others, with the snouts of dogs, who ate men,” although he conceded he had not seen them himself.2 He did, however, claim to have spotted three mermaids on his historic 1492 journey but reported that they “were not as pretty as they are depicted, for somehow in the face they look like men.”3 Likewise, Henry Hudson insisted that, while exploring the Arctic in 1608, his crew saw a mermaid whose “back and breasts were like a woman’s, her body as big as ours, her skin very white.”4 Sir Walter Raleigh returned from South America in 1596, repeating tales that the jungles were inhabited not only by the Ewaipanomas, a tribe of headless men whose facial features were located in their chests, but by Amazons, a race of warrior women first described in Greek myth. Antonio Pigafetta, a member of Ferdinand Magellan’s historic sixteenth-century journey around the world, later wrote that on a beach in what is now Argentina, members of the mission saw a half-naked giant so tall that human beings stood only to its waist. The colossal beast, called a patagón (big-foot), is pictured on a number of seventeenth-century maps, including works made by the great Dutch cartographers Jodocus Hondius and Willem Janszoon Blaeu.

  Of course, Patagonia never had Patagons and Amazonia never had Amazons. The explorers were liars. “It is easy enough to move from reporting [on a journey] to embellishing, adding details—perhaps to hold an audience’s attention,” wrote Steven Frimmer in Neverland, a book about nonexistent places and fictive creatures that have persisted as fact in
the human imagination.5 “The next step must have been inventing The curious thing is that the stories had to be only moderately convincing, as long as they were fascinating. Distant places held a fascination all their own and human nature did the rest. It made the audiences want to believe in the unconvincing parts.”

  Maybe those early adventurers half-believed their own lies. As Bartolomé de Las Casas, the sixteenth-century missionary who documented the early period of Spanish New World discovery, once observed: “It is a wonder to see how, when a man greatly desires something and strongly attaches himself to it in his imagination, he has the impression at every moment that whatever he hears and sees argues in favor of that thing.”6 Or maybe the explorers made up tales of sea serpents and demons and giants to scare off the competition. Or maybe they found that no one was interested in factual reports, that the public wanted monsters—just as today’s public demands tabloid stories of UFO sightings and celebrity love affairs over hard news. Or maybe they created imaginary antagonists so that they could re-create themselves—and return as stronger, smarter, more heroic men. Or maybe they lied simply for the thrill of getting away with it.

  Some of them might not even have bothered to leave home. Over the past few years, for example, some experts have begun to question whether Marco Polo ever actually traveled to the Far East. In her book Did Marco Polo Go to China? Frances Wood noted that no Chinese records of Polo can be found, despite his claims to have served as an official emissary for Kublai Khan. She also found it curious that, despite his travels, Polo didn’t seem to learn much about Chinese geography and that he failed to mention even the most obvious aspects of Chinese culture, such as tea, bound feet, chopsticks, and the Great Wall. Wood, the head of the Chinese Department at the British Library, concluded that Polo probably based his book on the travel tales of other Italian merchants and on Persian accounts of China. It is “unlikely, even allowing for exaggeration,” she wrote, that Polo himself ever made it much farther than Constantinople.7

  He would not have been alone in fabricating his adventures. One of the most important books of the late Middle Ages was The Travels of Sir John Mandeville, supposedly written by an English knight who journeyed to China and many other parts of the known world between 1322 and 1356. Like Polo’s book, the Travels was hugely influential.8 Christopher Columbus read it in preparation for his 1492 journey. The English explorer Martin Frobisher took a copy of it with him on his 1576 attempt to find the Northwest Passage. The cartographer Abraham Cresques used it as a source for his monumental Catalan Atlas of 1375. And Martin Behaim’s globe of 1492, considered the oldest surviving European-made terrestrial sphere, includes text that quotes Mandeville extensively and respectfully. Details from the Travels were being incorporated into maps well into the sixteenth century.

  But although the Travels was treated as fact for hundreds of years, many of the things John Mandeville reported seeing and doing now seem preposterous. He described walking through the Vale of Devils, for example, a place literally populated by Satan’s minions, from which only “good Christian men … firm in faith” emerge alive.9 And he boasted not only of seeing the Well of Youth but of testing its miraculous waters: “I, John Mandeville, saw this well, and drank of it three times, and so did all my companions.10 Ever since that time I have felt the better and healthier.”

  Mandeville also claimed to have witnessed an amazing array of life-forms, including geese with two heads, thirty-foot-tall giants, people “who live just on the smell of a kind of apple; and if they lost that smell, they would die forthwith,” ants “as big as dogs” that guard “great hills of gold” from human intruders, and “a kind of fruit as big as gourds,” with a surprise inside: “an animal of flesh and blood and bone, like a little lamb without wool.11 And the people of that land eat the animal, and the fruit too. It is a great marvel.”

  But by far the most marvelous of Mandeville’s inventions was his own life. On close analysis, his entire journey seems to have been fabricated, pasted together from other writers’ travel narratives. “He was an unredeemable fraud: not only were his rare moments of accuracy stolen, but even his lies were plagiarized from others,” wrote the literary scholar Stephen Greenblatt.12 Another critic conjectured that the longest journey Mandeville ever took was to the nearest library.

  Even the name John Mandeville seems to have been a fabrication, leaving open—and probably unanswerable—the question of who wrote the Travels, and why. “The abundant identifying marks vanish on approach like mirages, and the extraordinarily ingenious efforts to name the author have failed,” observed Greenblatt.13 “The actual identity, the training, the motives, even the nationality of the person who wrote Mandeville’s Travels have become, under scholarly scrutiny, quite unclear Mandeville is radically empty.”

  ALTHOUGH THE STAFF AT THE PEABODY LIBRARY didn’t know it at the time, the man they caught with the maps in his notebook also had a compulsion for creating imaginary creatures. The latest—the one whose face appeared on a fake University of Florida student ID card he had presented at the front desk—was named James Perry. But, according to police and court transcripts, there had been many others: James J. Edwards and James Morgan and Jason Pike and Jack Arnett and Richard M. Olinger and John David Rosche and Steven M. Spradling and James Bland.

  He was no stranger to libraries. In the 1970s, when he was in his twenties, he had visited them often. But this, apparently, was long before he was interested in maps. According to one source who knew him at the time, he would use the libraries to track down the names of people who had died in childhood. Then he would create new identities, using the birth dates of the deceased.

  He would invent these creatures, and then he would figure out ways to get people to send them free money. It worked for a while but then stopped working so well. In September 1973 the San Diego police arrested a man named Jason Michael Pike for grand theft. The charge, as the man would later admit in court, stemmed from the fact that “I applied for a credit card, and I used it to get money under false pretenses.”14 At a bail hearing, however, the man conceded that Jason Michael Pike was just an alias. His true name, he told authorities, was Jack Arnett. But it later turned out that Jack Arnett was no more Jack Arnett than Jason Michael Pike was Jason Michael Pike. An alias on top of an alias—this led to an absurd moment in which the San Diego Municipal Court was transformed into a scene out of Alice in Wonderland:

  The Clerk: Jack Arnett, aka Jason Pike

  The Court: Is Gilbert Bland your true name?15

  The Defendant: Yes, sir.

  The Court: You are also known as Jason Michael Pike?

  The Defendant: Yes, sir.

  The Court: Did Mr. Langford [the court-appointed de

  fense lawyer] advise you of your constitutional

  rights, Mr. Arnett?

  The Defendant: Yes, sir.

  The Court: Mr. Bland, are you also known as Jack Arnett?

  The Defendant: Yes, sir.

  The Court: But your true name is Gilbert Bland?

  The Defendant: Yes, sir.

  The Court: What is your middle name?

  The Defendant: Anthony.

  The Court: Anthony?

  The Defendant: Yes, sir.

  But even Gilbert Anthony Bland was a persona of sorts. The defendant was born Gilbert Lee Joseph Bland, Jr., a name he had ditched many years before walking into that courtroom.16 He pleaded guilty that day, receiving a sentence of five years’ probation, but his urge to create new selves did not stop. Gilbert Anthony Bland soon transmogrified into John David Rosche and Richard M. Olinger and Steven M. Spradling. And like horror-movie monsters stitched together out of other people’s corpses, these creatures got their inventor into trouble—this time, serious legal trouble. On December 30, 1975, Bland was arrested in Tampa, Florida, for using those identities to defraud the U.S. government in a scheme to collect unemployment compensation for ex-servicemen. He pleaded guilty in U.S. district court, where he was given a three-year sentence
and shipped off to the federal corrections institution in El Reno, Oklahoma. He did not like it there, and when he got out he apparently vowed to begin anew.

  He cut ties with his old family, started a new one, got a college degree, found work in the computer business, and began to lead a middle-class existence in suburban Maryland. With this new life came a new identity, and an old one at the same time. Gilbert Anthony Bland was now back to his birth name (minus the “Lee”): Gilbert Joseph Bland, Jr. I think he intended this to be his final creation. I think he wanted to leave the phantasms behind. But somewhere in his head they must have been calling to him, enticing him with easy money, adventure, escape.

  Then one day in the early 1990s, they began to catch up with him. According to the FBI, it happened almost by accident. “His story is that he bought a bunch of items that someone had left unclaimed at one of these U-Store-It places,” said Special Agent Gray Hill, the Bureau’s point man on the case. “Included were a bunch of maps. And someone told him, ‘Hey, there might be some value there.’ ”

  LONG AFTER THE FBI AGENT TOLD ME THAT ANECDOTE about Gilbert Bland finding the maps, I was left with a vague feeling of déjà vu. Then one day I realized I had, in fact, heard the same story before—many times. On the desk in front of me, for example, is an open copy of The Clue in the Embers, the thirty-fifth installment of the Hardy Boys mystery series, a favorite of generation after generation of American children. In the chapter at hand, Joe and Frank Hardy, along with their “chubby pal” Chet Morton, have just discovered a missing medallion. The chums immediately realize that their new find, when matched with its companion, creates a map:

  “It must show the area near the treasure that Luis Valez is looking for,” Frank remarked.17