The Island of Lost Maps

by Miles Harvey

  WORLD MAP FROM THE 1482 ULM EDITION OF PTOLEMY’S GEOGRAPHIA.

  He also abandoned the Homeric conception that the known world (Europe, Asia, and Africa) was surrounded by an uninhabitable ocean. This left open the theoretical possibility of further discoveries. “More than any one of the ancients,” concluded the map historian Lloyd A. Brown, “Claudius Ptolemy succeeded in establishing the elements and form of scientific cartography.”6

  But Geographia might not have been remembered that way if not for the efforts of some passionate collectors more than a thousand years later. It might not have been remembered at all. Like many great works of antiquity, Geographia simply disappeared from the European consciousness after the fall of Rome. Its concepts, meanwhile, were kept alive by Arab geographers, who translated Ptolemy’s cartographic masterpiece around the ninth century and incorporated its concepts into their own maps. Then, in the thirteenth century, a Byzantine scholar and monk named Maximus Planudes found a long-forgotten copy of the work. According to Planudes’ account of the discovery, the manuscript was not accompanied by maps. (Indeed, modern scholars doubt whether Ptolemy ever included maps with the work.) Nonetheless, Planudes set about drafting a series of maps designed to portray the world as Ptolemy would have drawn it himself. This was possible because Ptolemy had made the effort to include the geographical coordinates of eight thousand places throughout the world, so that someone in another place—even another century—could create maps on the basis of the text alone. I like to imagine Planudes in his little chamber, plotting coordinate after painstaking coordinate, then at last stepping back from his work, the whole world suddenly appearing before his eyes.

  … $325,000.

  $350,000.

  $375,000.

  $400,000…

  Planudes was an omnivorous collector of ancient manuscripts, who could often be found scouring the bazaars of Constantinople for the works of great classical writers. In addition to translating many works from Latin into Greek, he put together a number of anthologies of lasting importance, including a compilation of Greek prose and poetry, a volume of Aesop’s fables, and the marvelously titled Very Useful Collection Gathered from Various Books. In his determined pursuit of classical texts, Planudes was a spiritual and intellectual forerunner of the great scholar-collectors of the fourteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth centuries, who, through “grinding persistence … in the recovery, collation, criticism, and publication of texts,” transformed “the study of the ancient world into a cultural force,” wrote the historian John Hale in The Civilization of Europe in the Renaissance.7 Not the least of these men was the Italian poet Petrarch, famous for his collection of—and obsession with—ancient texts. “Please, if you love me,” Petrarch wrote to a friend sometime around the year 1346, “find people who are educated and trustworthy and set them to scour Tuscany, to turn out the book-cases of the monks and all the other scholars, and see if anything comes to light which will serve to quench—or, shall I say, increase—my thirst.”8

  … $425,000.

  $450,000.

  $475,000.

  $500,000…

  Petrarch confessed that his urge to obtain books was an “insatiable desire which I so far have been quite unable to control.”9 Such compulsions would soon be the norm, as the Renaissance gave rise to an unprecedented culture of collecting. No longer did people seek out art and artifacts solely for their devotional purposes but for their intellectual, historical, scientific, aesthetic, nostalgic, or commercial significance. This collecting ethos—as exemplified by the “cabinets of curiosities” placed prominently in homes of the wealthy—began with an interest in ancient books, gems, coins, vases, and sculpture, then grew to encompass contemporary paintings, clocks, and scientific instruments, and, finally, expanded into what Hale described as “rare, valuable, or merely strange objects from the natural world,” from shells and fossils to stuffed toucans and mummified Egyptian cats.10

  … $525,000.

  $550,000.

  $575,000.

  $600,000…

  Geographia was at the center of this collecting craze. Around 1400 a copy of the text was brought from Constantinople to Florence, where, translated from Greek into Latin, it “caused an immediate and enormous stir,” wrote Thomas Goldstein in Dawn of Modern Science.11 Hand-copied, hand-illustrated versions quickly began to circulate in Western Europe, usually with maps based on those of Planudes. As Lisa Jardine observed in Worldly Goods: A New History of the Renaissance:

  Apart from the extravagant Bibles, the ancient scientist and cartographer Ptolemy’s Geography, complete with coloured and illuminated maps of the known world, took pride of place in a surprisingly large number of great men’s libraries.12 The Geography, too, was an extremely expensive purchase, since some copies contained as many as sixty individual maps, each of which had to be accurately drawn and locations precisely marked before the delicate business of colouring and decorating could even be begun.

  The first printed edition of Geographia appeared (without maps) in 1475, just two decades after the publication of Gutenberg’s Bible, and the same year that presses were being set up for the first time in places like Holland and England. Numerous illustrated editions soon followed, making Geographia one of history’s earliest bestsellers. The popular 1482 Ulm edition—the one on sale today at Sotheby’s—was the first to be printed outside of Italy and helped spur the widespread dissemination of the book, with profound consequences. Wrote the historian Daniel J. Boorstin:

  The revival of Ptolemy … would mean the awakening, or the reawakening, of the empirical spirit.13 Now men would use their experience to measure the whole earth, to mark off the known from the unknown, and to designate newfound places for return. The rediscovery of Ptolemy was a signal event in the revival of learning that marked the Renaissance, a prologue to the modern world.

  Spain’s King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella ordered their copy of Geographia from a Valencian bookseller. The monarchs’ interest stemmed from their discussions with an ambitious Italian sailor who claimed he could reach the spice-rich Indies by heading west instead of east. Christopher Columbus had, in part, based these ideas on what would later prove to be two of Ptolemy’s most famous mistakes: (1) a gross underestimate of the Earth’s circumference, and (2) a gross overestimate of the eastward reach of Asia. In 1492, after much procrastination and debate, the Spanish sovereigns commissioned Columbus to sail with three caravels “toward the regions of India.” He never reached his destination.

  … $625,000.

  $650,000.

  $675,000.

  $700,000…

  The Renaissance cult of acquisition had a dark side as well. Compulsive collecting could sometimes degenerate into theft—and some of the great writers and scholars of the age apparently succumbed to this urge. Giovanni Boccaccio, author of the Decameron and a friend of Petrarch, is thought to have pillaged a monastic library in his quest to obtain a previously undiscovered piece of classical literature. Poggio Bracciolini, one of the most famous bibliophiles of his time, justified his apparent theft from another monastic library by asserting that the books “were not housed according to their worth, but were lying in a most foul and obscure dungeon … a place into which condemned criminals would hardly have been thrust.”14 Needless to say, those in charge of such collections had a different view—as expressed by an inscription at the library of the San Pedro monastery in Barcelona:

  For him that steals, or borrows and returns not, a book from its owner, let it change into a serpent in his hand and rend him.15 Let him be struck with palsy, and all his members blasted. Let him languish in pain crying aloud for mercy, and let there be no surcease to his agony till he sing in dissolution. Let bookworms gnaw at his entrails in token of the Worm that dieth not. And when at last he goes to his final punishment, let the flames of Hell consume him for ever.

  … $725,000.

  $750,000.

  $775,000.

  $800,000…

  The mon
th before the Sotheby’s sale, another version of Geographia was to have gone on the auction block at Christie’s in London. This was an even rarer edition, published in Bologna in 1477 and considered the first-ever printed atlas. Only a few copies survive, meaning the auction would have been an extraordinary event—if it had happened. But it did not happen. It was canceled at the last minute, when Christie’s conceded the volume had been stolen nearly a year earlier from France’s National Library.16 That disappearance itself had a bizarre twist: for about three months library officials had simply failed to notice that one of the most important volumes in history was gone. Yet after the theft was discovered in November 1997, it had been widely publicized. It is hard to imagine that Christie’s officials did not know about it. Nonetheless, they had apparently accepted at face value the false ownership papers of a Frenchman who brought them the book. According to press reports, the sale had not been canceled until French authorities intervened.

  Reading about this debacle a few weeks before the New York auction, I had naturally wondered about the provenance of the Sotheby’s Geographia. I checked the auction catalog. The most recent owner it listed was a man named Georg Joachim Scherer. He had possessed the book in 1713.

  I asked Selby Kiffer of Sotheby’s whether his firm would provide me with information about the current owner. No luck. “The confidentiality of both our purchasers and our consignors is something we take seriously,” he insisted.

  Kiffer, however, was reassuring: “Knowing the consignor of this book as I do, and knowing the history of his family’s collecting, there’s certainly no doubt in my mind that it’s a privately owned copy.”

  In other words, I would have to take his word for it. I had absolutely no reason to doubt him. But I would have had no reason to doubt Christie’s, either.

  … $825,000

  $850,000.

  $875,000.

  $900,000…

  The auctioneer was speaking slowly now, leaving dramatic pauses to underscore the immensity of the bids. His voice was calibrated and quiet; it was the only sound in the room. The competition had come down to two phone bidders, and all eyes were on their respective representatives, seated on each side of the podium.

  … $925,000.

  $950,000.

  $975,000.

  $1,000,000.

  $1,050,000.

  $1,100,000.

  $1,150,000.

  The auctioneer waited, but no new offer came. At last he slammed down his hammer. Sold. There was a pause, and then those in the gallery began to applaud, slowly at first and then with real enthusiasm. They had just witnessed history. Once mandatory fees were added, the sale would come to $1,267,500—a world record for an atlas printed on paper. (In 1990, a scarce copy of the 1482 Ptolemy—printed on an animal-skin parchment known as vellum—was sold for $1,925,000.)

  If Arader was impressed, he didn’t show it. I asked him if he was surprised by the sale. “Not a bit,” he shot back cheerily. “I knew it was going to go for a million. It was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for somebody.”

  Others, however, were clearly in a state of shock. One dealer was slouching out of the gallery when his eyes caught Arader’s.

  “Twilight Zone,” he mumbled, in a dazed, singsongy voice.

  And then he left, shaking his head.

  BY THE END OF THE AFTERNOON, THE BILL FOR Graham Arader’s shopping spree at Sotheby’s had come to nearly $800,000; roughly half of that was spent to increase his own inventory and half to purchase works on behalf of clients.17 One of his last purchases of the day was Christopher Saxton’s 1579 book, An Atlas of England and Wales. It struck me as a perfect symbol of how far Arader had come. More than twenty-five years earlier a “wildly excited” teenager had got his start in collecting by purchasing a map of Dorset from the same edition of Saxton. He had paid $250 for it. Now that same map would sell for $5,500. Back then the entire atlas would have been worth $47,000. Today at Sotheby’s, Arader paid $150,000 for it—and, in fairly short order, was asking $450,000.

  Looking back on Arader’s career, Hugh Kennedy once compared his former boss to Microsoft founder Bill Gates. Each man, he observed, had transformed his respective industry through his own vision and force of will. I thought the comparison was apt in another way, too. Like Arader, Gates had become a lightning rod for resentment. Some was well-justified and well-reasoned—but much was an unfocused rage, expressed in everything from the “Punch Bill Gates” Web page or “I Hate Bill Gates.com” to a real-life 1998 attack on the computer mogul by a group of cream-pie-wielding Belgian anarchists.

  It occurred to me that beneath this anger was a lot of envy. We dislike successful entrepreneurs like Arader and Gates, in part, because somewhere in our dark hearts we want to be like them. We wish we had their foresight and confidence, maybe even their ruthlessness, their ability to spot an opportunity and grab it. It angers us that we came on the scene too late, that the doors are now closed, that the money has been made, the power taken, the fame handed out. In many ways these men are heirs to the explorers who first came to this country, brash mercenaries like de Soto and Coronado. We may revile them for their crassness, their avarice, their destructiveness, but who doesn’t yearn to have been in their shoes as they strode deep into blank spots on the map?

  Our resentment can take warped forms. According to the FBI, computer financial crimes and infrastructure attacks more than quadrupled between 1996 and 1998, as frustrated Bill Gates wanna-bes poured their energies into the electronic underworld of hacking.18 And Graham Arader wanna-bes? In the words of the map impresario himself: “Someone who comes along who’s not well-educated, whose father beat them growing up, who’s twisted, but has the same passion for maps I had without any of my advantages, is going to steal them.”

  DETAILS FROM A 1511 WORLD MAP BY BERNARDO SYLVANUS.

  CHAPTER 4

  An Approaching Storm

  ZEPHYRUS, FROM THE WEST; BOREAS, FROM the north; Notus, from the south; Eurus, from the east—in Greek mythology, these four deities shared the empire of the winds. Sons of Eos and Astraeus—the dawn and the starry sky—they provided the ancient world with a sense of order. True, Boreas could be nasty and vindictive, chilling the Earth with icy blasts from the north. But on the whole he and his brothers were a hugely positive force, helping to organize human labor, fertilize crops, and orient the routes of navigation. Such powerful icons were these wind gods, in fact, that they reappeared in the Middle Ages and Renaissance, this time on the edges of European maps.

  On some maps they took the form of stern old fellows with shaggy beards; on others, flaxen-haired cherubs with playfully pursed lips; on still others, robust men with feathers blooming from their necks, symbolizing their role as God’s “wings.” Eventually, the original four wind blowers were joined by more of their kind, some shifting positions, others changing names, until there were as many as thirty-two faces surrounding some maps. They were not there merely for decoration, however. Their purpose was all-important: to serve as direction markers. “The Spanish sailors on Columbus’ crew thought of direction not as degrees of compass bearings but as los vientos, the winds,” wrote Daniel J. Boorstin in The Discoverers.1 “Portuguese sailors continued to call their compass card a rosa dos ventos, a wind rose. When the religious brotherhood of pilots commissioned the Madonna for their chapel in Cordova, it was no accident that she was Nuestra Señora del Buen Aire, ‘Our Lady of the Fair Wind.’ ”

  Not all winds were fair, however. Consider the Harpies. They, too, were classical wind deities, but you won’t find them on old maps. That’s because the sailors and adventurers wouldn’t have wanted to think about these tempest-goddesses, much less look at them. The Harpies had the faces of old women, the ears of bears, and the bodies of birds, with long, hooked claws. Their stench was said to be so vile that it would sicken all living creatures. Even their names—Okypete (Rapid), Celaeno (Blackness), and Aello (Storm)—inspired fear. Combining the primitive concepts of wind spirits a
nd predatory ghosts with the actual characteristics of carrion birds, the Harpies brought nothing but disaster and misfortune.

  Fair winds or foul? The answer to this question has determined the fate of many a journey—even, perhaps, Gilbert Bland’s own odd version of an epic adventure. And up until that day in downtown Baltimore, we can only conclude that the gods had been extremely kind to our mysterious hero. Zephyrus and his brothers had ushered him safely to and fro across the continent, with stops in Seattle and Charlottesville and Chicago and Vancouver and several other apparent ports of plunder. He had been lucky. Any of a million little things could have failed him—a fumbled razor blade, an inopportune rustling of paper, an unseen security camera—but, miraculously, everything had gone off without a hitch. Or maybe he considered it a matter not of miracles but of his own skill. Maybe, as he emerged undetected from the tenth, eleventh, twelfth, thirteenth, fourteenth, or fifteenth library, he began to feel invincible—or, even more intoxicating to him, invisible. Yes, that seems right: he was suffering from hubris, that prideful arrogance which spelled doom for so many a hero of Greek tragedy, causing him to ignore warnings that might have averted disaster.

  Now it was too late for warnings. The winds had changed, and three foreboding figures suddenly stood before Gilbert Bland on the steps of the Walters Art Gallery. To you and me those three would have looked like slightly exhausted security guards. But Bland could be excused if, in his panic and confusion, they suddenly seemed like creatures surreal and terrifying, with whetted talons ready to tear him asunder. When the Baltimore city police arrived at the Peabody Library a short while later, they found a suspect who was sheepish and scared and apparently ready to cooperate. He admitted his name was not James Perry, as indicated on the University of Florida ID card he had presented to library officials earlier in the day. (Like the name, the card would prove to be a complete fake.) His real identity, he confessed, was Gilbert Joseph Bland, Jr., and he showed police and security officials a Florida driver’s license bearing that name. According to library staff members, the man offered no other excuse for taking the maps than that he “just wanted them.”2