The Island of Lost Maps

by Miles Harvey

  “We have traditional cartography and digital cartography going on down here,” Benson explained, showing me into the mapmaking department, a long, open basement room with low ceilings. But even if she hadn’t mentioned it, I could have seen that American Map was in a state of technological transition. One part of the room was filled with drafting tables, strewn with art supplies and staffed by slightly harried-looking designers. They were using a mapmaking process that was cutting edge not too long ago but that now struck even a casual observer like me as slow and inefficient—involving, among many other maddening details, the manual application of literally tens of thousands of street names to a page. American Map’s colossal camera, that fading marvel of the mechanical age, was the central component in this kind of cartography, producing the negatives used to print everything from giant wall maps of the world to wallet-sized street maps of midtown Manhattan.

  Another part of the room had a much more orderly appearance. Here, the tabletops were tidy and the faces serene. Instead of grappling with X-Acto knives, scribing tools, pens, paper, and unwieldy sheets of Mylar, the cartographers were drafting maps within the clean confines of their computer screens. “The advantage obviously is that digital maps are much easier to revise,” Benson told me. “They’re very time-consuming to create, unlike what people might expect. But then the benefits come in when you want to change the look of a map, eliminate features, alter it. Each feature is coded, so that, at will, you can just remove layers of information. You can take out a certain size of type, for instance, or you can change all the yellow roads to green. Previously, if you made a whole map and then decided the type you used was much too bold, there was nothing else to do but to scrap the whole thing and add on another fifteen thousand names by hand. Now, all you do is push a button.”

  It’s not always quite that easy, of course. In another part of the room, Benson introduced me to a frustrated cartographer who was “looking at the fallout” from a computer-generated atlas that encompassed Bergen and Passaic Counties in New Jersey and Rockland County in New York. “We just got the index, and it has a lot of mistakes,” Benson said. “There are twelve thousand street entries just for Bergen—and twenty-three hundred discrepancies Somehow the computer manages to create more problems on top of the ones we already have. We can’t figure out why.”

  Because of such technical problems and other practical concerns, Benson predicted it would be years before the giant camera would snap its last shot. In the meantime, even workers who make maps the old-fashioned way were undergoing extensive computer training as the firm rushed to embrace the digital age.

  Yet despite all the changes at American Map, what struck me most about the place was a sense not of disruption but of continuity. As Benson led me around the facility, I often felt like I was looking into the past, present, and future of mapmaking all at the same time. The decor, for example, mixed satellite photos of the Earth with reproductions of maps from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. And, glancing around the cartography department, I was amused to observe a state-of-the-art computer on one desk and a stack of books about the history of cartography on another. The texts were there, it turned out, because the firm was trying to cash in on the old maps craze. “We are turning one of our world maps into an antique-look map,” Benson explained. “It’s going to be an up-to-date world map, but it’s going to look like an antique map, designed for those people who might not want some stark modern map in their office but may want something more traditional.”

  I wondered whether this computer-designed artifact would include sea monsters.

  “Absolutely!”

  Though she professed no expertise in the subject, Benson had an obvious appreciation for old maps. On the wall of her office hung a huge reproduction showing a bird’s-eye view of Manhattan from the nineteenth century, and behind her desk stood a framed engraving of Johann Baptist Homann, a famous German mapmaker of the 1700s. “A friend of mine who is an antiques dealer thought I might like to have [Homann], because he was a German cartographer and I am a German cartographer,” she explained with a shrug. “I had never heard of him.”

  The two mapmakers certainly looked nothing alike. The man on the engraving had a tight-lipped expression every bit as pompous as his lace cravat and cuffs, and wore a full-bottom wig so absurdly overblown that it looked like a sheep had crash-landed on his skull. Benson, by contrast, had short brown hair, sensible glasses, and simple elegance to go with her direct, low-key manner. Yet the more I listened to her talk, the more she seemed to have in common with Homann and other mapmakers from the past. Benson began her work life in Germany as an architectural draftsman and later studied to become a civil engineer. Those plans were cut short, however, when she married an American and moved to the United States. She then worked in the fine arts—“graphics, painting, lithography, photography, and the like”—before coming to American Map two decades ago. She freely conceded she was not a “classically trained cartographer” but made no apologies for it: “Map publishing, which is what we do here, is really an interdisciplinary field that combines cartography, printing, art, photography.”

  The man in the picture, it turned out, had not been classically trained, either.1 Although late in life Homann was given the title Geographer to the Holy Roman Emperor, he began his career as an ordinary engraver. Like Benson, he succeeded because he knew how to merge science and commerce and art, how to bring the physical world to the printed page in a way that was both useful and beautiful. The technology of publishing is now vastly different than it was in Homann’s time, but the instincts and imagination required to make maps have not changed—nor, as Benson pointed out, has the fundamental objective: “information, how to get it right and get it in a timely way.… In cartography, that’s the big word: new data.”

  New data was what had driven Ptolemy and Ortelius and Homann, just as it was what now drove Benson and her contemporaries. But if the quest to procure new data had remained constant, so had the need to protect it. Before I contacted American Map, Rand McNally had refused my request for a tour of its plant; a publicist hinted that the firm was worried about the loss of trade secrets. Benson was obviously less guarded, but she made it clear that security was also an issue for her company. American Map, she explained, uses a trick called trap streets to discourage competitors from infringing on its copyright. This practice, common to the industry, involves hiding a fictional roadway somewhere on each map. “We place the trap streets in areas that would be relatively harmless and would not mislead someone using the map—just a cul-de-sac at the end of some development,” Benson said. “I let my researchers be creative in deciding on the names: they might name the street after their wife or dog or whatever. This allows us to do a quick spot check of our competitors’ maps to see if they have stepped on our toes. It happens all the time…. Sometimes it’s an innocent blunder, but more often, it’s not so innocent.”

  And so, sitting in Benson’s office and imagining maps with out-of-the-way streets such as Fido Lane or Fritzie the Good Puppy Boulevard, I realized that yet another big factor had remained constant throughout the history of cartography: larceny.

  CALL ME OBSESSED, BUT THE MORE I LOOKED INTO MAP theft, the more I found it lurking behind the scenes during key moments of our collective past. And I’m not talking about small moments, either—unless you consider Columbus’s voyage to America small or Magellan’s circumnavigation of the globe small or the invasion of Normandy small. I started to think the historians had overlooked something important in their eternal search for those “hidden hands” that guide the course of human events. I kept coming upon hidden hands myself, all of them holding hot maps. It was not that I presumed to have hit on the answer to all life’s mysteries, a Unified Theory of the Missing Map. It was just that I began to see Gilbert Bland as heir to an ancient though hardly noble tradition, one that has shaped our world more than we know.

  Maps are big-time booty. Mapmaking has been going on since at lea
st the Stone Age: a picture map painted on a wall of the famous Catal Huyuk settlement in south-central Turkey dates back to about 6200 B.C., nearly three thousand years before the first system of written language appeared. And recent studies have shown that even very young children have an uncanny ability to understand maps, fueling speculation that we are born with the skill. All cultures are thought to make maps in one form or another, and for good reason.2 Throughout history they have enabled their possessors to win military battles, gain access to precious economic resources, and claim new territories as their own.

  As manna, maps predate even money. Cartographic crime also goes back thousands of years. “In the Roman Empire … maps of the world were exclusively for government use, and it was a crime for a private person to possess one,” wrote the historian Daniel J. Boorstin.3 Augustus, emperor at the time of Jesus’ birth, was so worried his maps of his empire might fall into the wrong hands that he had them locked in the innermost vaults of the palace.4 Rome’s traditional rivals from Carthage were no less concerned about theft. According to legend, one Carthaginian sea captain sank his ship rather than let his sea charts fall into Roman hands. His crew drowned, but he was given a hero’s welcome upon his return home.

  In the Age of Discovery map theft literally changed the world. Sooner or later some European adventurer would have stumbled upon America, but it might not have been Christopher Columbus and it might not have happened in 1492 if not for some sticky fingers. Before beginning work for the Spanish crown, Columbus spent the better part of nine years in Portugal, where his brother Bartholomeo had established himself as a noted cartographer. In 1485, having failed to sell Portugal’s King John II on his proposed Enterprise of the Indies, Columbus decided to solicit help for the plan in Spain.5 He left in secret, “fearing the king would send after him and hold him,” according to the sixteenth-century chronicler Bartolomé de Las Casas.6 The reason for his furtive exit is unclear—but some historians have wondered whether Columbus absconded with a copy of the Florentine cosmographer Paolo del Pozzo Toscanelli’s world map (no longer extant), which showed a possible westerly sea route to the Indies. If so, the mariner would have had good reason to worry about being stopped. Portugal was then the world’s dominant seafaring nation, a status it guarded with an iron fist. Nautical writings and charts were considered state secrets, and to copy or divulge their contents was a capital crime. Yet despite these restrictions, an even bigger cartographic caper would soon follow. This time the perpetrator was Bartholomeo Columbus, who had remained behind in Lisbon to help compile a large world map that incorporated the latest top-secret information gleaned by Portuguese explorers. As Lisa Jardine explained in Worldly Goods: A New History of the Renaissance:

  Bartholomeo prepared to join [a cash-strapped Christopher Columbus] in Spain to help his project.7 Before he left Lisbon, however, he copied a number of Portuguese maps from the secret archive, including the large world map (which he transferred on to eleven sheets of paper, because paper was lighter, and easier to conceal, than parchment). The Columbus brothers sold Bartholomeo’s valuable stolen maps in Italy for substantial sums, thereby dispersing vital information hitherto held only by the Portuguese.

  In Seville, their financial circumstances alleviated by their map sales, the two brothers reassembled the world map, and modified it to incorporate material not yet entered at the time of Bartholomeo’s departure. Crucially, this additional information suggested that, once the Cape of Good Hope had been rounded, a significant mass of land remained still to be navigated around before ships could gain access to the Indian Ocean. Although factually incorrect, the Columbus brothers’ map, thus modified, apparently offered strong concrete support for the argument that a westwards route to the Indies was a viable alternative option. On the strength of comparison of the Columbuses’ map (with its exaggerated coastline of Africa) with their own Ptolemaic maps (on which calculation errors significantly reduced the Atlantic Ocean) the Spanish monarchs Ferdinand and Isabella finally agreed to finance the venture in 1492.

  All this from a purloined map. No wonder Lisbon kept a tight lid on its secrets—so tight, in fact, that almost none of the empire’s charts made before the sixteenth century have survived, meaning that much of what we know about Portuguese cartography comes from the relatively few maps that left the country illegally. The most famous of those is the so-called Cantino planisphere, a one-of-a-kind world map with a colorful and iniquitous history. Considered the earliest surviving map of Lisbon’s discoveries east and west (and one of the first maps ever to show the Americas), the Cantino planisphere was named not after the unknown Portuguese cartographer who drafted it but after the Italian secret agent who smuggled it out in 1502.8 Alberto Cantino had gone to Lisbon masquerading as a dealer in purebred horses. His real mission, however, was to gather intelligence for the duke of Ferrara. Gather it he did, bribing a mapmaker for an up-to-the-moment copy of the padrão real, the standard cartographic prototype unto which new discoveries were constantly being added.

  Prominent on this lavishly illustrated chart is a fragmentary outline of the Brazilian coast, marked by Portuguese flags and decorated with resplendent red macaws. Just two years earlier the adventurer Pedro Álvares Cabral had sighted this new land, which he “believed to be a continent,” according to an inscription on the map. That was big news. Christopher Columbus went to his death in 1506 insisting that the land he had reached was Asia, but other European navigators were beginning to realize that the face of the Earth was drastically different from the three-continent version pictured on their Ptolemaic maps. This was one of the most sudden and dramatic jolts in the history of human thought, and it triggered a fierce competition for cutting-edge cartographic data, which, given the realities of the time, often meant contraband cartographic data.

  Among those exploiting this emerging black market was Ferdinand Magellan, who departed his native Portugal for Spain in 1517, taking with him classified information that a navigable strait might exist at the extreme southern end of South America. At a meeting in Spain with Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, Magellan “brought with him a well-painted globe showing the entire world,” wrote Las Casas, “and thereon traced the course he proposed to take, save that the Strait was purposely left blank so that nobody could anticipate him.”9

  Scholars disagree about the origin of this globe. Some have argued that it was either a copy or an updated version of a famous 1492 work by Martin Behaim, today considered to be the oldest surviving European terrestrial sphere. Behaim was an enigmatic mathematician, merchant, and adventurer who had once been a government mapmaker in Portugal but had since sold his services to the city fathers of Nuremberg. “In making the globe for the Germans,” explained Lisa Jardine, “Behaim had been involved in a substantial piece of commercial and industrial espionage Behaim incorporated the cartographical information he had access to in Lisbon—the most highly classified and inaccessible cartographical information currently available.”10

  Other historians, however, have conjectured that what Las Casas loosely described as a “globe” was, in fact, a world map—most likely one made by the Portuguese cartographer Jorge Reinel, who had gotten into trouble in Lisbon and had since fled to Spain.11 This argument is bolstered by a report, made in 1519 by Lisbon’s ambassador to Seville, which informed the Portuguese king that Reinel had made a map specifically to help Magellan prepare for his voyage. Reinel’s father, the prominent mapmaker Pedro Reinel, had gone to Seville to bring his wayward son home. But according to the ambassador, the elder Reinel was also seen adding details to the Spanish map.

  In any case, it is clear that Magellan benefited from cartographic secrets stolen from the Portuguese. A firsthand account of his journey suggests that without access to such intelligence, he might never have located the famous strait that now bears his name. On October 21, 1520—more than a year after setting sail—he reached a cape where the South American coastline appeared to turn west. Was this, at last, the long-sought openi
ng to the Pacific? Antonio Pigafetta, an Italian who sailed with the expedition and later wrote about it, was not convinced. Like others on the journey, he had expected the strait to be an open passageway that you could see through, like the Strait of Gibraltar. This cape, “closed on all sides,” did not inspire much hope. But Magellan was certain they were in the right place—apparently for good reason. As Pigafetta explained, “He knew where to sail to find a well-hidden strait, which he saw on a map in the treasury of the king of Portugal.”12

  Historians are still unsure which map Magellan had seen, or whether it actually could have provided him much useful information. And no map could have guided the ships through the unexplored strait that lay ahead, a maze of narrow passages and small islands, blasted by strange winds. Magellan’s skills as a navigator should not be underestimated. Still, without the illicit information he procured from Lisbon, the first circumnavigation of the Earth might have been neither attempted nor completed.

  But the Portuguese were not alone in their worries about map theft. Spain was quickly establishing a trade monopoly in the New World that rivaled the Portuguese hold on Africa and Asia. And as Daniel Boorstin noted in The Discoverers, the new empire had security problems of its own: