The Island of Lost Maps

by Miles Harvey

  Smith had a big advantage over his imitators: he had actually been to Virginia. But what differentiated the creators from the copiers often had nothing to do with firsthand familiarity with the terrain. Zebulon Montgomery Pike, for instance, made extensive explorations of the American West, whereas Alexander von Humboldt never set foot there. But Pike’s 1810 work, A Map of the Internal Provinces of New Spain, presented as being based on “sketches of … Captain Zebulon M. Pike,” was in fact plagiarized directly from a map that Humboldt had left at the State Department during a visit to Washington in 1804.

  In an 1813 letter of apology to Humboldt, Thomas Jefferson regretted that Pike “made ungenerous use” of the map, insisting it had been done “on a principle of enlarging knolege [sic] and not for filthy shillings and pence.”58 But in fact a hunger for “enlarging knowledge” was precisely what separated the two mapmakers. Pike, a career soldier in the U.S. Army, was good at following orders but lacked a necessary zeal for getting at the crux of things. During his 1806–7 expedition, he set out with much hoopla to climb a “Grand Peak” he had spotted in the distance.59 But after experiencing a bit of cold and hunger, he abandoned the project, miles short of the summit of what is now known as Pikes Peak. Humboldt, by contrast, was bent on penetrating the unknown. When faced with a daunting climb of his own—Ecuador’s Mount Chimborazo—he braved rough weather to reach “the highest altitude ever attained by any human being in history until that time,” according to his biographer Douglas Botting.60 He was not only a great explorer—covering more than six thousand miles of South America during one five-year period—but also a brilliant physiologist, zoologist, botanist, anthropologist, archaeologist, and meteorologist. Today he is perhaps best remembered as a founding figure in modern geography, a subject that fired his imagination even as a boy. “The study of maps and the perusal of travel books,” he once wrote, “aroused a secret fascination that was at times almost irresistible, and seemed to bring me into close relationship with distant places and things.”61

  It was this same inquisitiveness that enabled Humboldt to produce a map of the West that the expert Carl I. Wheat described as “a truly magnificent cartographic achievement.”62 Humboldt could map a place he had never seen—using, in his own words, “a great variety of data” instead of “vague supposi-tions”—because he was blessed with the sort of intense curiosity that most of us experience so infrequently it often seems to come as a surprise.63 I’m not talking about the kind of curiosity that invites but about the kind that demands, not about the kind that says I wonder but the kind that says I must know. The kind that makes you immerse yourself in a subject, ponder it over and over until you are able to make sense of it for others and, in so doing, give your own life new meaning in some small way. Under such a spell, humans can accomplish the extraordinary. One need not be a genius like Alexander von Humboldt to make unseen worlds appear.

  THE MAN WHO BROUGHT GILBERT BLAND TO JUSTICE was neither a high-profile FBI agent nor a flashy detective on a big-city police force. He was a campus cop, not too far up on the law enforcement food chain from the lowly private security guard. Nonetheless, Thomas W. Durrer had a keen mind and, more important, a roiling sense of curiosity. As an investigator for the University of Virginia Police Department, Durrer had little in common with the shoot-’em-up stars of tabloid TV cop shows; his work involved mostly mundane matters such as dormitory break-ins or stolen backpacks. But he took pleasure in the detail work that others might find boring, tracking down all the scattered little pieces of evidence, then putting seemingly unrelated facts together until they told a complete story. And, every now and then, something big would happen in Charlottesville and Durrer would luck into the kind of case where, as he put it, “you just have to kind of use your imagination and see how far you can go with it.”

  In early December 1995 he landed just such an assignment. Officials at the Alderman Library reported that at least seven rare maps were missing, including eighteenth-century works by the cartographers Herman Moll and Andrew Ellicott. Librarians had discovered the loss after hearing from Johns Hopkins officials, who had noticed references to the Alderman in the map thief’s notebook. A check of the records confirmed that someone using the name James Perry had indeed paid visits to the Alderman on December 5 and 6, right before Gilbert Bland’s ill-fated stop in Baltimore.

  The case seemed tangled and slightly bizarre—everything Durrer could have wanted. “I knew this was probably going to be broader than some of the other cases I had worked,” he said. “I knew it was going to be in-depth. And that type of investigation is, for me, fun to work. It’s what I love to do.”

  Solid in stature, with a touch of both Southern gentleman formality and good-ol’-boy waggishness, the fifty-two-year-old Durrer has the air of a shrewd small-town sheriff. And in this investigation, at least, his hunches seem to have been dead-on from the start. Because the thief had apparently visited the library on two consecutive days, Durrer correctly concluded that he had spent the night in town. “I just started checking local motels and found out where Bland had stayed,” he said. “It was a Howard Johnson’s in Charlottesville, and he paid for his room by charge card. I tracked his address through his charge card and found out where he lived. I then confirmed his address and obtained a picture of him through the Florida Department of Motor Vehicles. People up here at the library made positive IDs on his picture.”

  Durrer quickly began to share his findings with other universities. “I don’t think any of us knew how broad this would get before it was over,” he said. “At the time, I thought maybe I had a collector who stole a few maps. Once I got into digging into him, I saw a pattern of him moving from one university to the next. It was obvious what he was doing.”

  Durrer said that some institutions, such as the University of Florida, were completely unaware that they had been robbed until he alerted them to the possibility. Such discoveries spurred him on. “As this case broadened out, it just made me go after it a little quicker, a little harder. As I found out one thing, two or three more things would show up.”

  His perseverance paid off. With the list of alleged victims growing nationwide, the FBI entered the investigation, armed with hard evidence linking Gilbert Bland to a crime scene. You could argue that collecting this evidence had been a matter of simple, solid police work, that any investigator from the dozens of places Bland had visited could have done the same thing. Yet the fact remains that only one man took the initiative. Thanks to Thomas Durrer’s curiosity, the map thief would eventually wind up in jail.

  A FEW MONTHS AFTER MY VISIT WITH VERA BENSON AT the American Map Corporation, I called her with a tale to tell. I had just been looking at two early-eighteenth-century maps showing most of what is now the United States. The first one, by the cartographer Guillaume Delisle, was based on firsthand information gathered by French explorers.64 The second one was—with the exception of a priest, a pelican, a picture of Niagara Falls, a family of Indians, a couple of buffalo, and a pair of naked buttocks—a direct rip-off of the Delisle work. The man who made it was J. B. Homann, that foppish old cartographer whose portrait was perched behind Benson’s desk.

  When I informed her that she was harboring a known map thief, Benson began to chuckle. “Well, these things have happened throughout history”—she sighed—“but I’m terribly disappointed that my German countryman would have done such a thing.”

  As we both laughed, I remembered something Benson had told me during my trip to Queens. She had explained that these days a certain amount of cartographic appropriation is considered not only acceptable but necessary. Her company, like its competitors, copies maps all the time—the so-called base maps from the U.S. Geological Survey, which “everyone uses as sort of a framework or skeleton to build their own maps.” With the basic shape of the world no longer a matter of debate, the challenge for cartographers now comes from accurately and stylishly modifying these base maps by eliminating “stuff we don’t need, such as elevati
on lines or other features that are not appropriate for a street map,” then adding the latest data from satellite photos and a variety of other sources.

  “We are still refining the mapping that exists,” Benson had concluded, “but nobody has to make a map by going out and surveying the land anymore.”

  Recalling those words, I laughed even harder—this time at the absurdity of my own situation. You see, the quest I had launched all those months ago at the coffeehouse—then a matter of simple curiosity—had become an increasingly complicated and frustrating endeavor. I now found myself in the midst of a peculiar cartographic project, one for which there were no base maps. My task was even more of a stretch than Alexander von Humboldt’s attempt to chart a place he never saw. I was trying to map the life of a man—an anonymous and elusive man, a man I did not know, and a man who had demonstrated no desire to meet me. And even all that might not have been so bad if I had somehow been able to find a way inside his head, to put myself in his shoes. But Bland and I were very different people. Other than a few shared superficialities—both of us white males, both right-handers, both map lovers—our common frames of reference were few. We came from contrasting family backgrounds (Bland: broken home, me: two stable parents), were of different generations (Bland: turbulent 1960s, me: dull 1970s), had opposite dispositions (Bland: extreme introvert, me: strong extrovert), and battled dissimilar demons (Bland: risk taker, me: cautious to a fault). The more I knew of him, the more he seemed a stranger. Stranger—a word linked to notions of geography, its etymological root being “beyond the usual bounds or boundaries.” That was Bland: beyond my boundaries. Searching for him had transformed me into a land surveyor of a land unknown and perhaps unknowable, never quite sure what I was doing or where I was going. In my most ludicrous moments I felt a creepy bond with another land surveyor—K., the protagonist of Franz Kafka’s The Castle—a man haunted by the feeling that he was losing himself or wandering into a strange country, farther than he had ever wandered before, a country so strange that not even the air had anything in common with his native air, where one might die of strangeness, and yet whose enchantment was such that one could only go on and lose oneself further…

  CHAPTER 8

  Pathfinding

  SILENCE IS A WILDERNESS. I TRUDGED THROUGH it many times as I tried to map Gilbert Bland’s world. It was there after every letter I sent him, there when I wrote his lawyers and when I wrote his wife, there when I followed all those letters with phone calls. It loomed in front of me at every turn, vast and unyielding, making distances difficult to measure, directions hard to gauge, landscape tough to decipher. It was daunting, this wilderness, yet strangely seductive. The more I encountered it, the more I was determined to overcome it. Not that I particularly begrudged Gilbert Bland his silence. In an age when almost everyone is willing to go public about almost everything, I could not help but feel admiration for something so foreign as to seem exotic. Sometimes, as it spread out on every horizon like the sands of the Empty Quarter, obscuring all that lay below, I found it almost breathtaking. Eventually, though, I had to face the fact that it was not some sort of mirage, that it would not go away, and that if I did not conquer it, it would conquer me.

  A GRAPHIC FROM WILLEM JANSZOON BLAEU’S THE LIGHT OF NAVIGATION ILLUSTRATING HOW TO FIND YOUR LATITUDE WITH A TOOL CALLED A CROSS-STAFF.

  Curious to tell, it was the map thief himself who inadvertently showed me how I might do it. I had come to believe that when Gilbert Bland cut into all those books, he unloosed not just pieces of paper but stories, hundreds of stories centuries old, about the discoverers and scientists and surveyors and kings and queens and cartographers whose lives were pressed into those maps as firmly and indelibly as the ink, stories that were slowly intertwining in my imagination with the map thief’s own tale. And so it was that I began to commune with the dead in search of a guide, someone whose past would light my journey through the shadowy wasteland of the present. Ultimately, I chose a man famous for navigating ground that was, as he once described it, “singularly unfavorable to travel.”1 He was called the Pathfinder.

  John Charles Frémont probably did more to popularize the American West than any other explorer of the nineteenth century. Friend and fellow adventurer of Kit Carson, son-in-law of the powerful Senator Thomas Hart Benton, and, later in life, first presidential candidate of the fledgling Republican Party, Frémont earned his legendary nickname by leading several Army Corps of Topographical Engineers expeditions to survey and map little-known parts of the West. He covered more ground than any other government explorer, including Meriwether Lewis and William Clark, and his published accounts of the journeys made him a national celebrity.

  Historians love to point out that the Pathfinder did not, in fact, find many paths. The Pulitzer Prize winner Bernard DeVoto, for example, insisted that Frémont “did little of importance beyond determining the latitude and longitude of many sites which mountain men [already] knew.”2 (Not to mention the Native Americans.) True enough—but this view ignores an important point. The Pathfinder understood that to truly conquer a wilderness you must not only survive in it yourself but make sense of it for others. His maps—usually drafted with or by the gifted cartographer Charles Preuss, who accompanied him on a number of missions—helped fuel one of the greatest migrations in American history. Most notable among them was the Preuss-Frémont map published with the 1845 Report of the Exploring Expedition to the Rocky Mountains. Presenting for the first time a coherent picture of the continent from Kansas City to the Pacific Coast, it took on vital importance for those who followed Frémont to the region—the builders of railroads, the settlers of land, the seekers of gold. “The map … radically and permanently altered western cartography,” wrote Carl I. Wheat in his Mapping the Transmississippi West.3 “There would appear a few throwbacks, of course, but with thousands of copies of Frémont’s authoritative report and map in print, no cartographer could find reasonable excuse for not fairly representing the main features of the West.”

  Frémont’s philosophy of mapmaking was simple. He once offered the following instruction on “fixing on a small sheet the results of laborious travel over waste regions, and giving to them an enduring place on the world’s surface:

  First, the foundations must be laid in observations made in the field; then the reduction of these observations to latitude and longitude; afterward the projection of the map, and the laying down upon it of positions fixed by the observations; then the tracing from the sketchbooks of the lines of the rivers, the forms of the lakes, the contours of the hills.4

  I wondered if this straightforward formula for charting unfamiliar land would also work for charting an unfamiliar life. By this time I knew exactly what Frémont had meant by “laborious travel over waste regions.” I had accumulated stacks of newspaper and magazine articles about the case, interviewed scores of people who had come in contact with Bland, retraced the path of much of his crime spree, and brought together hundreds of pages of public documents relating to his personal, financial, and criminal history. At long last my fieldwork was almost complete. It was time to begin “laying down … positions fixed by the observations.”

  Here, too, I took inspiration from the Pathfinder. Frémont and Preuss were not afraid to leave huge white areas on their maps. They understood that no single map can say everything about a place, so they cautiously chose to incorporate only that information which came from their own observations. Still, they made some mistakes. On one map they combined the Great Salt Lake and Utah Lake as a single body of water. On another they conveyed the false impression that the interior basin of present-day Nevada was encircled by mountain ranges. They knew that after all the measurements are complete, you still have to make some judgment calls. The Pathfinder inspired me to trust my own instincts in identifying the landmarks of Bland’s life—and to let the blank spots stand.

  So I set about the task of drafting my map, beginning with two coordinates close in time but half a world a
part.

  Latitude: 40.40 N. Longitude: 74.06 W. June 17, 1968

  At 10:55 P.M., police in Bayonne, New Jersey, arrested a skinny, redheaded kid from nearby Ridgefield Park for possession of a stolen motor vehicle.5 He was eighteen years old but looked two or three years younger. In his now-faded mug shot, he sports a white T-shirt, a tight-lipped scowl, and a conservative mop top, half Beatles, half My Three Sons. His eyes are filled less with fear or anger than with numbness, as if he is looking through the camera instead of at it, as if he is trying to daydream himself right out of the police station.

  He was in serious trouble. In 1968, conviction on the charge of possession of a stolen motor vehicle in New Jersey carried a maximum sentence of a five-thousand-dollar fine and ten years in prison—not a happy prospect for a kid who had just graduated from high school. Then again, the young Gilbert Bland was apparently no stranger to tough times. He had been born in 1949 in Indianapolis, where his father, Gilbert Lee Joseph Bland (listed on the boy’s birth certificate as a baker), and his mother, a nineteen-year-old New Jersey native named Julia Patricia Bland, lived in a tiny, one-story house in the shadow of an International Harvester foundry.6 Today that house sits in a bleak working-class neighborhood, around the corner from Ron & Deb’s Tobacco Outlet and the Paradise Cove, a self-described “gentleman’s club.” Whatever happiness his parents found in that place did not last long. The couple separated when Bland was only three years old, according to Bland’s lawyers in a later case. Some two years later, in 1954, Bland’s father sued his mother for divorce. After Julia Bland failed to show up in court on three separate occasions, a Marion Superior Court judge ruled that “the allegations of the complaint alleging statutory grounds for a divorce are true.”7 Surviving court records do not make the specific nature of those allegations clear. But whatever the case, Julia Bland, who was granted custody of the boy, took him back to her home state of New Jersey and at some point remarried.