The Island of Lost Maps

by Miles Harvey

  How to Take a Map

  PART ONE

  IT TAKES THOUSANDS OF YEARS. A SINGLE map, observed Denis Wood in The Power of Maps, is not a self-contained document but a compilation of what “others have seen or found out or discovered, others often living but more often dead, the things they learned piled up in layer on top of layer so that to study even the simplest-looking image is to peer back through ages of cultural acquisition.”1

  Geographic discoveries are part of it, of course, but before you can explore the land you have to explore the heavens. “Progress in the science of cartography has never moved ahead of developments in astronomy” wrote the map historian Lloyd A. Brown, “and our world map of today has been made possible largely because of the high degree of accuracy achieved by astronomical observers.”2 Coming to grips with this notion takes millennia all by itself, and then you still need the right tools. The sundial in ancient Babylonia and Egypt, the magnetic needle in ancient China, the astrolabe in ancient Greece, the cross-staff in the fourteenth century, the backstaff, telescope, and theodolite in the sixteenth century, the quadrant in the seventeenth century, the octant, sextant, and chronometer in the eighteenth century—these instruments make measuring the size and shape of the world possible. Nonetheless, they can only provide bits and pieces of information at any one time. In drafting your map, you will also need to depend on eyewitness reports of sailors, soldiers, merchants, adventurers, braggarts, and scam artists. You will have to consult the work of other cartographers and, when all else fails, rely on educated guesses and the occasional time-honored assumption (read: myth).

  AN EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY

  PRINTING PRESS.

  It’s an incredibly difficult job. Let’s say you’re working in the seventeenth or eighteenth century, an age in which mapmakers were sometimes referred to as “world describers.”3 In geometry, describe means to draw or trace the outline of something; in poetry, it means to get at the essence of something, to bring it to life in a way that’s both startling and beautiful. You’ve got to do both kinds of description—and do it in a medium that’s partially visual, partially mathematical, partially textual, a complicated miscellany of scale, orientation, projection, grids, signs, symbols, lines, colors, words. It’s often been said that mapmakers combine science and art, but there’s far more to it than that. Joan Blaeu, a legendary Dutch cartographer of the seventeenth century, wrote that “maps enable us to contemplate at home and right before our eyes things that are far away.” Making the distant immediate, the unseen visible—that’s far beyond science or art. That’s alchemy.

  It may take you months, even years, to draft a single map. It’s not just the continents, oceans, mountains, lakes, rivers, and political borders you have to worry about. There’s also the cartouche (a decorative box containing printed information, such as the title and the cartographer’s name) and an array of other adornments—distance scales, compass roses, wind-heads, ships, sea monsters, important personages, characters from the Scriptures, quaint natives, menacing cannibal natives, sexy topless natives, planets, wonders of the ancient world, flora, fauna, rainbows, whirlpools, sphinxes, sirens, cherubs, heraldic emblems, strapwork, rollwork, and/or clusters of fruit.

  And once you’re finally finished describing the world, you have to transfer it to a copper plate for printing. This, too, takes time. You select a piece of copper that’s not too soft, not too hard, and you planish it with a hammer to smooth it out and to ensure that it is firm and free from holes or flaws. Then you have to polish the smoothest side to a mirror-smooth finish, first with a piece of grinding stone and water, next with a pumice stone, then with a hone and water, then with hardened charcoal, and finally with a steel burnisher. Perfection is a must: any minor scratch might show up as a line on your map, possibly causing the accidental subdivision of one small nation into two smaller nations.

  Next, you transfer the design of your map to the plate. This is a difficult process that involves heating the plate, spreading a layer of wax over it with a feather, then laboriously tracing the map, in reverse, onto the wax coating. Once that’s done, you’re ready to cut the design into the plate. You might do this by etching—using a needle to scratch the outlines of the map through the wax coating, then pouring acid into the needle marks to burn your design into the plate. More likely, however, you would engrave the plate—cut the design into it by hand—using a variety of tools: the burin (also known as the graver), the tint tool, the scauper, the threading tool, and the roulette. This is precision work, and it usually requires a number of people and a great deal of time, not the least because at several intervals in the process it is proofed and then corrected, by meticulously smoothing over the mistakes with a burnisher and then reengraving.

  Next comes the ink. You spread it over the plate, then carefully wipe off the excess until the only remaining ink sits in the engraved grooves. You heat the plate until it is warm, lay it out on the printing press, and place a sheet of thick dampened paper over it. When the press is tightened, the moist paper draws the ink from the incised lines of the plate—and, at last, you are looking at a printed map.

  But you might not be done. You might also need to color your engraved map—and there is no machine to help you with this. You must do it by hand, brushing watercolors onto the freshly printed map—meticulous detail work that, if done wrong, ruins all the labor that came before it, and, if done right, gives birth to bright-hued oceans and vibrant nations. On a particularly sumptuous map, you might also need to add gold-leaf highlights.

  All that, and you’ve made only one map. What if you’re making a whole atlas? The scholar C. Koeman once tried to estimate how long it took for the great Dutch mapmaker Joan Blaeu to print his famous Atlas Major of 1663.4 Assuming a relatively small press run of three hundred copies for each of the first three editions of the atlas (Latin, French, and Dutch), Koeman concluded that the composition (or typesetting), with eight full-time employees, would take 1,000 working days; the letterpress printing (of the text parts of the book), involving nine printing presses, would take 330 working days; the copperplate printing (of maps and other graphic elements), involving six printing presses, would take 900 working days; and the binding, involving three employees, would take 300 working days. “The planning involved in printing the three editions … within a span of three or four years,” Koeman concluded, “exceeds the range of our imagination.”5

  Making a map, in short, is a painstaking process, requiring extraordinary skill on the part of everyone involved, but there is a huge demand for your work. Members of a later generation will smugly call their era the Information Age, but it will be nothing compared with this one. The printing press is changing many aspects of life, none more so than the way people envision the Earth. This breakthrough invention not only allows for maps to be produced in accurate and standardized ways but makes possible the widespread dissemination of geographic images. For the first time the whole world is able to see the world as a whole.

  PART TWO

  IT TAKES NO TIME AT ALL. AND YOU NEED only one tool. An out-of-the-way spot is preferable but not necessary: with enough skill and daring, you can do this right in the middle of a busy rare books room. If making maps requires real magic, taking them involves only sleight of hand. Just listen to how Gilbert Bland did it. “When no one was looking he would proceed to take out a single-edged razor blade, like you would use to scrape stuff off glass,” explained Lieutenant Detective Clay Williams of the University of North Carolina Department of Public Safety, who talked to Bland about the heists. “He could put the razor under his fingers so that you never really saw it. You just saw him take his hand and go down from the top of the page to the bottom. It would appear to be nothing unusual—maybe like he was just scanning text. But he would actually be cutting out the page. The whole operation would take just a matter of seconds.”

  Slide the page into your coat and you’re through the door, hundreds of years of history gone in less time than it took th
e ink on the map to dry.

  THE HARD PART ISN’T THE ACTUAL STEALING, IT’S THE getting in and getting out. Even at the least secure of libraries, you must present your identification, sign a register, perhaps even pass by a security guard and answer a few questions about your reasons for being there. This is usually when you feel the most trepidation and anxiety, like a smuggler at a border crossing. In fact, you are crossing a kind of border. As a map aficionado, you know about borders. You understand that they are not just lines on a piece of paper but powerful psychological metaphors. “The crossing of the border symbolizes transgressing against moral commands or trespasing into forbidden territory,” observed Avner Falk, a clinical psychologist interested in the relationship between maps and the mind.6

  And make no mistake: a rare books room is forbidden territory. Scholars believe that libraries evolved from ancient “temple collections” that housed a religion’s most important texts. “The theological collection was kept in a sacred place, and presided over by a priest,” wrote Michael H. Harris in History of Libraries in the Western World.7 “Only the most important of the temple officials might have access to this library.” In Judeo-Christian tradition, the temple collection was exemplified by the Holy of Holies, the innermost sanctum of the Jewish tabernacle and home to the Ark of the Covenant, which contained the original stone tablets of the Ten Commandments. The Ark was considered so sacred that God would smite dead those who touched it.8

  You have come to desecrate the modern equivalent of this temple, a largely off-limits chamber where our culture stores its rarest and most valued documents. But while penetrating this forbidden place no doubt fills you with apprehension, it might also give you a huge thrill. “Some people seem to seek the exhilaration of border crossing, and when conventional borders no longer seem exciting, more imposing ones are sought To even possess the ability to cross a dangerous border may be a necessary potency for some individuals,” wrote the psychiatrist G. Raymond Babineau.9

  From 1967 to 1970 Babineau was the chief of psychiatric services at the U.S. Army Hospital in Berlin. There he had the opportunity to observe many “compulsive border crossers”—restless souls who repeatedly made dangerous journeys over the Iron Curtain in order “to be rid of one psychological state and catapulted into a newer and better one.” Maybe you’re driven by similar impulses. Maybe, like those Babineau interviewed (and, as court records indicate, like Gilbert Bland), you suffer from depression. Perhaps strolling through the doors of the library allows you to leave your feelings of low self-esteem and ineffectuality behind for a few moments and enter a world in which you are skilled and powerful. You may also, like Babineau’s border crossers (and like Bland), come from a broken home. If so, your visit to the library might be what Babineau called a “search for identity.” History shows that people often take on new personae when they cross borders, from the Old Testament, in which Jacob became Israel after crossing the Jabbok River, to Ellis Island, where countless immigrants likewise were given new names. It may be that by entering the library you, too, are trying to be reborn, just as Gilbert Bland became James Perry when he walked through the door.

  In addition to the border crossers that Babineau studied firsthand, he also examined the case of a young man named Lee Harvey Oswald. You may have more in common with him than you think. True, stealing a few maps is a long way from killing a president. But look at The Warren Commission Report. See if you don’t recognize something of yourself in it:

  Perhaps the most outstanding conclusion of such a study is that Oswald was profoundly alienated from the world in which he lived. His life was characterized by isolation, frustration, and failure. He had very few, if any, close relationships with other people and he appeared to have great difficulty in finding a meaningful place in the world.… [His wife] Marina Oswald thought that he would not be happy anywhere, “Only on the moon, perhaps.”

  Maybe you steal maps because you’re searching for a home.

  Or perhaps you simply crave the dark joy of appropriation. Because that’s another thing about borders: they are mighty tools of theft. “Countless governments have used map boundaries to subdue, displace, or annihilate native peoples,” noted the geographic scholar Mark Monmonier in Drawing the Line: Tales of Maps and Cartocontroversy.10 Talk about magic: with one teetery line, what was ours suddenly becomes yours. You understand how easy this is. That’s why you are adding a new border to a map at this very moment. But you are not holding a pen. Your border is limned with cold steel.

  THE PEABODY LIBRARY’S GRAND STACK ROOM, FROM AN 1879 ENGRAVING.

  CHAPTER 6

  The Invisible Crime Spree

  THE GHOST OF LLOYD A. BROWN WAS NOT pleased. He floated invisible amid the mote-speckled air of the Grand Stack Room, nervously chewing his pipe or rubbing his bald pate, his bushy eyebrows arched with tension. In life, Brown had been head librarian at the Peabody. While there he introduced the first modern ventilation system to the building, overhauled the outdated card catalog, launched a campaign to degrime hundreds of books, and, as part of that effort, took it upon himself to personally inspect the contents of every shelf on all six tiers.1 But his biggest accomplishment, during a tenure that ran from 1942 until 1956, was his efforts not as a librarian but as an author. His groundbreaking book, The Story of Maps, published in 1949, set the standard for all cartographic histories to come—and is still in print more than fifty years later. With no formal training in cartography, Brown had not been an obvious candidate to write such a volume, but he’d had a couple of advantages going for him. The first was an obsession with old maps. “If you get bitten by a flea, I guess you have to live with it,” he once joked.2 The second was his own library’s extraordinary collection. In researching The Story of Maps, Brown had needed to consult more than five hundred books. He delighted in recounting that all but ten of them were found on the shelves of the Peabody.3

  Since his death in 1966, Lloyd A. Brown had led a happy spectral existence amid his beloved books. Or at least that’s the way I imagine him. What a wonderful thing reading must have been, when unencumbered by the earthly pressures of time! One could linger on every word. No volume was too long, no passage too dense, no subject too unfamiliar, no metaphor too obscure, no foreign script too unintelligible. One need not despair, as in life, about the books one would never have the opportunity to open or reopen. Lloyd Brown had gone to heaven, and it was called the Grand Stack Room.

  And so things might have remained, if not for the intruder—the hated one who crept into the library one day, seated himself at one of Brown’s favorite old tables, and, as the ghost hovered helplessly above, began to slice up books. Worse: map books—the ones Brown had cradled so often, so tenderly, for so many years, the ones that had succored his intellect and imagination, the ones that had given him a sense of purpose, the ones that had ensured his name would live on long after he passed into the realm of the spirits. It was as if that razor blade was not just cutting paper but severing Brown’s ties to the realm of the living. He raved, howled, shook incorporeal fists, shed invisible tears. None of it helped. I imagine that even after the man was apprehended, Lloyd A. Brown’s ghost continued to wander disconsolately, muttering curses heard by no one—a spirit no longer at rest. The intruder had caused him to understand that while he would haunt this piece of air forever, all he had worked so hard to create could disappear, page by page, book by book, shelf by shelf, wall by wall, until the Peabody was nothing but a landmark on some old city plan, the last faded trace of his life. Of what use is eternity without the past?

  AMONG THE LIVING AT THE PEABODY, THE MOOD WAS not much brighter. In the days after Cynthia Requardt’s Internet posting about Gilbert Bland, all news was bad news. Requardt had sent the message as “an attempt to warn people to watch out for Bland in the future,” she later recalled. In so doing, however, she had unintentionally opened Hopkins officials to criticism—a torrent, as it would turn out. One writer after another filed messages to the ExLibris n
ews group, lambasting the university for allowing Bland to go free. Such criticism pained Requardt. She would later concede that she was simply “not prepared” for the “candid assessments” of her peers. Yet as much as the attacks stung, she was even more devastated by the reports arriving from other libraries. James Perry had been to the University of Virginia. James Perry had been to Duke University. James Perry had been to the University of North Carolina and to Brown. At all of those stops, books handled by the mystery man now appeared to be missing maps and prints.

  Perry’s visit to the Regenstein Library at the University of Chicago on October 31, 1995—Halloween—came five weeks before Bland was detained in Baltimore. Walking calmly into the library, he sat down in the special collections room and opened one of the Western world’s most extraordinary texts: a 1584 edition of Theatrum Orbis Terrarum, “Theater of the World,” compiled and edited by Abraham Ortelius, the father of modern geography. Ortelius, a Flemish cartographer, lived during an unprecedented period of discovery. Columbus had landed in the Americas, Magellan’s expedition had circumnavigated the globe, Copernicus had made his case for a sun-centered universe. Yet cartography was behind the times. Maps came in a slapdash variety of sizes and styles, many of them based on the ideas of Ptolemy and other ancient geographers, who, of course, had known nothing about the existence of North or South America. Ortelius set out to change that, painstakingly collecting the finest maps of places throughout the known world, then bringing them together in a uniform size and format. Originally published in 1570, Theatrum Orbis Terrarum was the first modern atlas. Ortelius put the whole world at the fingertips of the traveler in a standardized fashion—a milestone in the history of human imagination.