The Island of Lost Maps

by Miles Harvey

“I heard that the war did affect him,” she said. “I heard a hearsay story about one of the things that happened to him. I don’t know how true this is, but supposedly while in Vietnam he saw one of his higher-up officers doing something to some female, raping her or something like that. My father supposedly beat the hell out of him and was put in solitary confinement. Rumor has it that it really messed him up.”

  I found no confirmation of this story during the course of my expedition. But in Hackensack, New Jersey, I found a jail docket from Bland’s July 6, 1971, arrest on charges of being AWOL. It indicated that he claimed to be suffering from a “nervous disorder,” for which he was receiving medical care from the Army.38 The docket also listed him as a “drug addict.” In those same files, however, I found another docket from an arrest some six months earlier, in which Bland “denie[d] illnesses” and “denie[d] drugs.”39

  Whatever the case, I discovered plenty of evidence about the chaotic state of Bland’s life after the war. In the New Jersey State Archives I found a letter he sent to then-Governor William T. Cahill on September 29, 1972, a few months before Heather Bland was born. Writing from the Sussex County Jail in Newton, New Jersey—where he had been booked the previous day for marijuana possession—Bland begged the governor to show mercy upon his pregnant, nineteen-year-old wife. Although she was with him at the Playboy Club during his arrest, he explained, she had nothing to do with the drugs that were found in his car. Nonetheless, she too had been tossed in jail, he claimed. Insisting that he was “going crazy” because of a situation that “I would expect to happen in Nazi Germany or Communist Russia,” Bland implored the governor to halt the “persecut[ion]” of his wife.40

  It was hard not to feel sorry for the person who wrote this letter, hard not to see him as a deeply troubled and terribly naive young man—perhaps even as a victim. And it was equally difficult to imagine how such an unsophisticated individual would someday be able to talk his way into a blue-blood subculture dominated by Ivy League types. Or at least those were my first impressions. But, as I was quickly learning, first impressions—mine and other people’s—about the map thief were often misleading. In police and court files in California and Florida, I found evidence of a Bland very different from the author of that forlorn missive. This was Gilbert Bland, inventor of imaginary creatures, exploiter of the system, professional con man—a persona that may have already been present in that jail cell in New Jersey. Files from the Sussex County case show that Bland, aka James J. Edwards, never showed up in court to face his drug charge, and that a warrant for his arrest (apparently still open to this day) was issued on June 22, 1973.41 (Those same court files, as well as local police records, indicate that, despite Bland’s implication to the contrary, no charges were ever filed against his wife.) The next time this alter ego surfaced was in California, where, in September 1973, Bland, aka Jason Michael Pike, aka Jack Arnett, was arrested on grand theft charges stemming from a credit card fraud scheme. And, unlike the Bland of a year earlier—a man so seemingly ignorant of the judicial process that Governor Cahill had to advise him to “give consideration to retaining legal counsel”—this one was a shrewd manipulator of the courts.42 Facing a maximum penalty of ten years in prison and a five-thousand-dollar fine, he agreed to a plea bargain and was given five years’ probation. That, however, did not seem to slow his career as a scam artist. On December 30, 1975, federal agents nabbed him in Florida on charges stemming from his use of false identities to rip off unemployment benefits. This time, his long string of luck in the courtroom had finally run out. Even with another plea-bargain deal, he got a three-year sentence.

  In files from that case, I found a letter he wrote shortly after arriving at the federal prison in El Reno, Oklahoma. In that note Bland begged the judge who had sentenced him for help, explaining that other prisoners had unjustly accused him of” ‘snitching’ as they call it, a crime in here punishable by death.”43 He elaborated:

  Everyone in here is associated in “clicks” or gangs. Since I am an outsider to these “clicks” I live a fearful existence. I pray before I go to sleep at night that I’ll wake up the next morning. It’s common knowledge among the inmates here that for [$]30 worth of comissary [sic] items, a person could be arranged to be killed. Weapons are not hard to come by in here. I know I am obtaining a paranoia complex because I fear it’s only a matter of time before something happens to me.… I don’t know how long I can bear this pressure. I don’t know who to talk to. My counsellor said if I’m going to be in a fight to choose my own place and time and make a lot of noise so the guards can come and break it up before I’m hurt bad. I don’t know if I can fight. I’m not a violent person and I thought I was being sent to a place with non-violent people, but that’s not the case here.… I don’t think this pressure is the punishment you had in mind for me. It’s very hard to live in fear all the time…

  Were these the words of a shell-shocked veteran who once again found himself trapped in a windowless box, dreading sounds in the darkness? Or were they simply the latest fictions of a calculating flimflam man? I could never be sure. Nor could I judge whether Gilbert Bland believed his own words when he wrote that same judge eleven months later to vow, “I have no intention of ever committing an illegal act again.”44

  THE PATHFINDER SURVIVED THE SIERRAS, BUT JUST barely. When he and his men became bogged down in snow as deep as they were tall, their Indian guides deserted, and one starving member of the expedition, suffering from hallucinations, wandered off into the wilderness, never to be seen again. The cartographer, Charles Preuss, lost from the main party for three days, was forced to eat ants to survive. Yet when the dazed adventurers finally stumbled down into the Sacramento Valley, at least one thing was clear in their minds. As John Noble Wilford wrote in his book The Mapmakers: “Frémont’s march south to California eliminated the Buenaventura from the map.”45

  My own expedition was not so successful. I found a few promising streams and many dry riverbeds but discovered no unmistakable channel linking Bland’s experience in Vietnam with his cartographic crime spree. Yet neither could I conclusively discount it as a myth. By now I had learned that sometimes you don’t conquer the wilderness even when you have a guide. I would add many new coordinates to my map in the months to come, but this particular one would always resist my geography. In the end I was left to ponder one last story about the Rio Buenaventura. For centuries mapmakers theorized that the Great River of the West and all the other major rivers on the continent had their headwaters in the same place, a so-called height of land. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, this concept assumed a brief life as cartographic fact when Zebulon Montgomery Pike claimed “no hesitation in asserting” that, on a journey to present-day Colorado, he had come within a short distance of this “grand reservoir of snows and fountains.”46 He should have known better. The true source of a thing is never so easy to find.

  THIS MAP, WHICH ACCOMPANIED A 1614 EDITION OF WALTER RALEIGH’S HISTORY OF THE WORLD, LOCATES THE EARTHLY PARADISE IN MESOPOTAMIA.

  CHAPTER 9

  The Waters of Paradise

  FLORIDA HAS ALWAYS BEEN A LAND OF new beginnings. Even the guy who put the place on the map came in search of metamorphosis. As a Spanish functionary in the West Indies, Juan Ponce de León had heard local legends about an island with “a spring of running water of such marvellous virtue, that the water therof being drunk, perhaps with some diet, makes old men young again,” in the words of one sixteenth-century chronicler.1 Funny thing: European myths foretold a similar fountain, usually set in some far-off enchanted garden—sometimes Eden itself. You may remember, for example, that Sir John Mandeville, the enigmatic fourteenth-century figure we examined earlier, claimed to have visited a “noble and beautiful well, whose water has a sweet taste and smell, as if of different kinds of spices.”2 Never one for understatement, Mandeville claimed that “he who drinks of it seems always young. They say this water comes from the Earthly Paradise, it is so full of goodness.
” Could it be mere coincidence that two legends half a world apart were so similar? Apparently Ponce de León didn’t think so. Feeling past his prime at age fifty-three, he set sail from Puerto Rico in 1513, reportedly to search for gold and a cure for el enflaquecimiento del sexo, the debility of sex.3 He never located the Fountain of Youth, but he did stumble upon an even greater marvel: North America.

  And, in a curious way, Ponce de León’s quest has never ended. To this day Florida remains a mecca for those trying to make a new start. Possessing one of the country’s lowest proportions of locally born citizens and highest rates of population growth, the state teems with wealthy Yankee retirees, ambitious Caribbean immigrants, and a hodgepodge of others who come in search of a new lease on life.4 The sense of rootlessness is as thick and ripe as the midsummer air.

  Gilbert Bland, too, began his life all over again in Florida—not once but twice. The first time came upon his release from the federal penitentiary in late December 1977. After being discharged from a Florida halfway house in March 1978, Bland settled down in the Fort Lauderdale area, where, in May of that year, he went to court to divorce his first wife, Carol Ann Talt Bland. It would turn out that he was breaking not just with one person but with his whole past. According to Heather Bland, a daughter by that first marriage, her father rarely contacted her or her sister, Melissa, as they were growing up. “He’s got two children that he totally abandoned and couldn’t care less about,” she told me.

  Nonetheless, Bland appeared to turn his life around, at least for a few years. He married again, and he and his new wife, Karen Bland, had two more children. After receiving an associate’s degree from Broward Community College in Fort Lauderdale and studying for three quarters at Florida Atlantic University, he moved to Maryland, where he worked for Allied Signal Corporation for five years during the 1980s. He may have also developed an interest in antiques during this period. Statements Bland later made to other dealers, as well as to police, indicate that his fascination with maps grew out of a more general interest in antiques, apparently including old stocks and bonds, as well as rare books. This notion was later confirmed by one of his attorneys, who wrote: “His interest in maps developed through his prior interest in and collection of older books, some of which contained maps in them.”5

  In 1992 he and his wife opened their own computer training and leasing firm, Pacific Data Systems, in the town of Columbia. The firm, according to Maryland state records, was owned by Karen Bland—because, I would imagine, her husband’s fraud convictions did not make for a particularly good credit rating.6 The couple apparently worked out of their home, since the company’s mailing address was a postal box at Parcel Plus, a mail services outlet in Columbia. I could not find out much about the specific nature of Pacific Data’s operations, but court documents from a later case offered a few fascinating details. One of Bland’s “major customers,” according to the documents, was an organization he would soon be dealing with in a vastly different capacity: the Federal Bureau of Investigation.7 The documents, drafted by Bland’s attorneys, asserted that he “made a number of sales” to the FBI office in Maryland, where he “trained agents in the use of such equipment, and … assisted in a technical capacity with computers used during and for surveillance operations.”

  The FBI, prompted by a request I filed under the Freedom of Information Act, confirmed that a Pacific Data Systems of Columbia, Maryland, did indeed perform unspecified work for the Bureau in 1993. But even with a government contract, the firm was apparently far from a rousing success. Paul R. Thomson, Jr., one of the map thief’s attorneys, would later assert in court that a changing market in the early 1990s made the concept of computer leasing “no longer … economically feasible.”8 As Bland’s business dried up, he and his wife decided to move to Florida to be with her mother, who “had been recently widowed,” according to Thomson.

  Bland departed from Maryland sometime in late 1993 or early 1994, leaving behind his usual share of unfinished business. At the Parcel Plus in Columbia, for example, an employee told me that Bland had pulled up stakes without paying his bill—and without leaving a forwarding address. It was yet another clean break from the past.

  In February 1994, the Blands opened Antique Maps & Collectibles, Ltd., in the Gardens, a sleepy little office and retail complex located in the Fort Lauderdale exurb of Tamarac, whose open-air courtyard echoes not with the bustle of shoppers but with the listless gurgle of fountains that line the empty walkways. Perhaps, as he stared out at those fountains, Gilbert Bland thought that he had succeeded where Juan Ponce de León had failed, that he had discovered a way to wash away the past and reinvigorate a sense of potency. Perhaps, beginning a new career in a new town just months shy of his forty-fifth birthday, he felt almost young again.

  Or perhaps he just wanted to be left alone. “Basically, the man stayed to himself,” said Jan English, a bartender at the Beverly Hills Cafe, an eatery at the Gardens. Added one employee of a business that faced Bland’s shop: “The place was basically always empty. We were sitting here one day thinking, I wonder how he makes money? And then we were wondering, Who would be interested in those old maps?”

  The choice of location for the store must have seemed peculiar indeed to casual observers. Lost amid South Florida’s vast formless expanse of strip malls and subdivisions—the kind of landscape where “everyplace looks like noplace in particular,” in the words of James Howard Kunstler, author of the anti-sprawl tome The Geography of Nowhere—the Gardens was about the last spot you might expect to find an antique maps shop.9 Then again, this was one antique maps shop that had no desire to be found.

  THE MAP DEALERS DID NOT TRUST ME; THAT MUCH WAS obvious from the start. When I called them they would often beg out of the conversation, some politely explaining that they were simply too busy to talk in the foreseeable future, others bluntly telling me to mind my own business. When I visited them at the 1998 Miami International Map Fair, once again following in Bland’s footsteps, their eyes would sometimes dart to the floor as I approached, or their conversations would come to a sudden halt, rising again in whispers after I walked past. In some cases it took me years to gain their confidence, and even then they would usually speak to me only on the condition of anonymity.

  At first I attributed their guardedness to simple embarrassment. Many of them had done a considerable amount of business with the now-notorious map thief, a fact that they hoped their colleagues would forget and their customers never learn. But as time wore on I began to see a more subtle factor at work. The world of antique maps is a very small and genteel one. Although their shops are located all over the globe, the dealers regularly attend the same gatherings (including the Miami map fair), read the same journals (such as the glossy Mercator’s World or the scholarly Imago mundi), and keep in touch on the same Internet forums (most notably the Map History Discussion List), where they join librarians, scholars, and collectors in exchanging esoterica, debating map controversies, and trading cartographic jokes. (What did the mapmaker send his sweetheart on Valentine’s Day? A dozen compass roses.) I was a complete stranger to this punctilious subculture. Even so, I had the feeling that in normal times I might have been made to feel welcome. These, however, were not normal times. Three years earlier, another outsider, someone the dealers had known no better than they knew me, had come into their midst asking for their trust. They had made the mistake of giving it to him. “It’s a very close community,” explained F. J. Manasek, a well-known Vermont dealer and industry observer who wrote Collecting Old Maps. “We’re all friends, even though we compete in business. There’s a lot of honor, which is probably why Bland could gain such easy entrée.”

  “The map trade is basically a handshake business,” added George Ritzlin, another longtime dealer, based in Illinois. “People trust each other. Substantial amounts of valuable material travel thousands of miles based on a telephone call, without any other supporting documentation. And this is why Bland was able to be so successfu
l. He was incredibly brazen by putting himself up to be a dealer. People just assumed that anyone acting as a dealer had obtained material honestly. Thieves don’t normally work that way. Normally they are very surreptitious.”

  Having been burned once, the dealers now had little intention of exposing themselves to another outsider, especially one determined to open old wounds. I had not counted on them viewing me this way. Somehow I had convinced myself they would look upon me as an ally. It took a very long time to realize that when they glanced at me with those disdainful eyes, the man they saw looking back was Gilbert Bland.

  ONE OF THE FEW DEALERS WHO WOULD DISCUSS THE matter openly was Barry Lawrence Ruderman, himself a relative newcomer to the trade. A bankruptcy lawyer by profession, the thirty-eight-year-old Ruderman discovered antique maps in his late twenties, when, during a ski trip to Taos, New Mexico, he “got bored” one day and wandered into a map shop. It was, said Ruderman, “love at first sight,” and his passion soon developed into what he and other map junkies sometimes call cartomania.

  “Cartomania is a sickness,” he once told me. “It’s obsessive. Once you’re in up to your ankles, you want to be in up to your knees; once you’re in up to your knees, you want to be in up to your waist. I like to think that it’s sort of a beautiful sickness, because all human beings need things that stimulate them intellectually and drive them to passion. But the secondary aspect is that many of us spend insane amounts of time dedicating ourselves to map collecting. It’s a twisted pursuit. But where’s the problem in that?”

  In 1992 Ruderman turned his “sickness” into a sideline vocation, opening Old Historic Maps & Prints, a La Jolla, California, venture that sold rare maps via mail and the Internet. Two years later he received a catalog from another fledgling map retailer, this one based in Tamarac, Florida. “It was semiprofessional looking, nothing real fancy,” Ruderman remembered. Although the catalog contained “a bizarre mix” of materials, including a lot of worthless junk, Ruderman was intrigued by some of the offerings, especially maps of the American West. He would become one of Gilbert Bland’s earliest clients.