The Island of Lost Maps

by Miles Harvey

  The one that really seized my imagination, however, was a smaller work by a lesser-known cartographer, Francesco Rosselli. Printed in Florence around 1508, this particular copy of the map had disappeared shortly thereafter. It remained hidden away for hundreds of years—and might never have surfaced, if not for a fortunate turn of fate. “Apparently this copy was discovered during the rebinding of an early book,” Mr. Atlas said. “In past centuries, it was not uncommon for other prints, unrelated to the book at all, to be used as filler in the covers: the exterior of the cover would be an animal skin, and then to give it body there would often be paper inside that. And so when the book is being rebound, the conservators know enough to be careful because often there are prints and other things found that way. And that’s how this one came to light.”

  Originally in the hands of a British dealer, the piece was purchased in the 1980s by a San Francisco map seller who, in turn, sold it to a collector in South America. Mr. Atlas became interested in the map when the South American, who “had to come up with lots of money due to a divorce settlement,” decided to put it up for auction at Sotheby’s.

  He knew little about the piece at first. “I had to research it,” he explained. “In fact, to me that’s really the most interesting part: the work you do prior to making your decision whether to add a piece to the collection or not. And whichever way the decision goes, you’ve learned a lot. Really, that’s what it’s about, because it’s only a piece of paper, after all. But the key thing is what that piece of paper represents. So if you don’t know the historical and cultural elements that produced a map, I think you’re missing most of the fun.”

  It turned out that those “historical and cultural elements” were plenty significant. Rosselli’s map was the first one to use a projection system that incorporated 360 degrees of longitude and 180 degrees of latitude—making it, “in a very real sense, the first map of the whole world,” according to the historian Peter Whitfield.4 (That “whole world,” however, was a quirky one, containing a separate South American continent—labeled “Land of the Holy Cross or New World”—but no North America, only an elongated Asia.) It was also the first map to use the name Antarcticus (Latin for “opposite of the north”) to describe what was then still a hypothetical southern continent. And it was the first map to incorporate discoveries made by Christopher Columbus during his fourth voyage of 1502–1504.

  An important artifact, yes, but more: an extremely rare one. It turned out that only two other copies were known to exist—one at the British National Maritime Museum in Greenwich and the other at the Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale in Florence. Mr. Atlas determined that, if possible, the third one would be his: “It took a lot more digging than usual to find out what this one was. And I said, ‘Well, yeah! That’s definitely a great one to have. Absolutely!’ ”

  Luck, as it turned out, was on his side. Instead of putting the work up for sale in an auction devoted solely to maps and prints—where it would likely have garnered a great deal of interest—Sotheby’s offered it with an assortment of other antiques from the South American collector’s holdings, including such unrelated items as furniture. “And it was not pictured in the Sotheby’s catalog, either, so, again, attention was not drawn to it,” explained Mr. Atlas.

  How sweet it must have been to realize this gem was hidden from the view of other potential bidders! Yet how nerve-racking to think they might catch on! I knew enough about the lore of collecting to understand that the most coveted acquisitions are the “finds.” There’s the story of Henry Stevens, for instance, a prominent bookseller in the nineteenth century who, while visiting the home of an acquaintance, “chanced to notice a small copper globe, a child’s plaything, rolling about the floor.”5 Stevens, who later recounted that his host had “picked it up in some town in France for a song,” realized that it was no mere knickknack but a world globe from the early 1500s—a priceless, one-of-a-kind artifact now housed at the New York Public Library. By comparison, of course, the reappearance of the Rosselli map was not quite so dramatic. Still, said Mr. Atlas: “I knew there would never be another chance to get it. And there, it’s a question of how badly did you want it?”

  Just badly enough. Though he refused to say how much he paid for the map, he did note—with discernible glee—that he “got it for a lot less” than the seller had shelled out in the first place. Still, it was clear that the map’s monetary value was of relatively little importance to him. “The only time money matters,” he insisted, “is at the decision point about whether you’re going to buy something.”

  But if the commercial aspects of collecting weren’t what kept him going, then why did he pursue a map like the Rosselli with such fervor? Its historical import? Sure. Its beauty? Of course. Its rarity? Doubtless. The stature it would bring him? Possibly. Yet something else seemed to matter more than all that—something that he never quite expressed but that I nonetheless began to recognize while I watched him pore over that map, his eyes dancing from one place to another as though in search of a previously unnoticed detail. Perhaps it was simple. Perhaps the impulse to collect maps and the impulse to make them arose from the same desire. Perhaps what drove aficionados like Mr. Atlas was precisely what had driven explorers like Columbus: the sheer joy of discovery.

  The searching, the dreaming, the navigating of strange seas, the overcoming of obstacles—all leading up to that instant when the unknown is known, the unreachable reached, the unobtainable obtained. In an essay on collecting, the philosopher-critic Walter Benjamin—himself an incurable bibliophile—described that shining moment as “the final thrill, the thrill of acquisition.”6 Columbus had put it another way: the conquest of what appears impossible.

  An impossible conquest—I couldn’t think of a better description of how Mr. Atlas had come to possess that long-lost document. But I also knew that not all journeys of discovery end so happily. If I needed proof, it was right there in front of me, on that map commemorating the last, lonely journey of history’s most famous explorer.

  THE ADMIRAL SITS DOWN TO WRITE ANOTHER LETTER. TEN years have passed and much has changed. He has fallen from favor with the crown, become an object of scorn among his peers. He has arthritis. He has malaria. His eyes bleed, leaving him blind for long periods. At the moment, he finds himself marooned in Jamaica, hundreds of miles from any hope of rescue, his men on the verge of revolt. He writes: I have not a hair upon me that is not grey, and my body is infirm.7 He writes: I am … ruined. He could have avoided all this, if only he would have retired after his great discovery. (“Almost anyone, it might be thought, would rest content with so much fame, so much wealth, so many discoveries, so dramatic a social rise.8 But not Columbus,” his biographer Felipe Fernández-Armesto would observe. “His sights were always fixed on unmade discoveries, unfinished initiatives, imperfect gains, and frustrated crusades.”) The elation of that first triumph was so very sweet but so very short-lived, and he has tried to get it back ever since. Three times he has sailed across the sea, and three times his journeys have ended in frustration. (Once, he was taken back to Europe in chains, due to his misgovernance of the new colonies.) He has made many new discoveries, of course, but they do not satisfy him. He wants more: more land, more status, more fame, more wealth. He writes: Gold is most excellent. He writes: Gold constitutes treasure, and he who possesses it may do what he will in the world. To seek and to find and to keep on seeking—it’s as if his dream has turned into an unquenchable obsession.

  EASING INTO THE SOFA OF WERNER MUENSTERBERGER’S midtown Manhattan apartment, I found myself surrounded by unsettlingly beautiful pieces of ancient African art: brooding figures that lurked in the corners like dim and disquieting memories, phallic totems, wild-eyed masks that stared at me so intently I almost blushed. They seemed to be carved out of solid id, those objects, which was only fitting because I had come here to discuss the shadowy nether regions of the human mind. Muensterberger, a charming, erudite, and meticulously attired octogenarian, was
a leading expert on the psychology of collecting. With his bulky glasses, brushed-back white hair, and wiry eyebrows, he looked every bit like the psychoanalyst and retired professor of psychiatry that he was—and with his Teutonic accent, the result of a childhood spent in both Germany and the Netherlands, he somehow sounded the part as well. I had already become fairly familiar with Muensterberger’s ideas on collecting through reading his work and interviewing him over the telephone. What I had not known was that his interest in the subject was obviously far more than clinical. Yet the fact that he was himself a confirmed aficionado only made me more anxious to talk to him. If Mr. Atlas had taught me about the beauty of collecting, I hoped that Dr. Muensterberger could give me some insight into the darker side of the obsession, a subject he had explored at length in his book Collecting: An Unruly Passion.

  Fittingly, we began on the subject of African art. Muensterberger had just visited the home of a fellow collector of such objects—a man whose life story, he said, offered crucial insights into the mind of the collector. “It happened last night, so it’s very fresh in my memory,” he explained. “I walked into this house where he keeps his collection, a rather large suburban affair, and hanging on the walls were all these antlers. I said, ‘Oh, you collect antlers, as well [as art]?’ And he said, ‘Well, I was a big hunter.’ Then he took me to his basement, where he had an enormous collection of mounted and stuffed gazelles, antelopes, and lions, all of which he had shot himself in East Africa.”

  Muensterberger explained that the man had never been particularly interested in primitive art until one fateful visit to the western side of the African continent, when, “in a market, he suddenly saw pieces like these.” Overcome by the strange beauty of the objects, the man eventually decided to put away his guns and abandon the bloody existence of the safari for the refined world of the auction house. His life had been turned upside down—or so it seemed. But on closer inspection, explained Muensterberger, it hadn’t changed much at all: he had simply “switched from the collecting of animal skulls to collecting objects of African sculpture.

  “I was sorry that I didn’t know him when I was doing my book,” he said, “because here is a very essential element of collecting—the hunting. When you talk to collectors, very often aggression, concealed as it may be, plays a role in the obtaining of the object.”

  Muensterberger believed that, like the hunt for big game, the hunt for rare objects involves what he described in his book as a “search—successful or not—that ever promises hope, suspense, excitement, and even danger.”9 So it came as no surprise to him that his acquaintance demonstrated the same pattern of behavior in the art galleries as he had exhibited in the bush: having set off on an expedition, the man could not rest until he had bagged his prey.

  “As a hunter, when he had two or three wonderful animals, he could take off and come back to America. The same is true now that he collects African objects,” he said. “He told me he went to Europe to see some dealers in Paris and London and Brussels. Then he showed me an object he had bought. And, you see, when he had found that, he could take it under his arm and come back from the hunt.”

  Muensterberger felt that such behavior could be traced back to an ancient urge. In our past lives as hunters and gatherers, we humans practiced animism, the belief that when people or animals die, their remaining life force, or soul, is transferred onto ordinary objects. This philosophy, which eased the awful finality of death, has long since been replaced by those that purport to be more rational. Nonetheless, our animistic impulses remain—and, according to Muensterberger, are at the root of our compulsion to collect. As he put it in the book, “There is reason to believe that the true source of the habit is the emotional state leading to a more or less perpetual attempt to surround oneself with magically potent objects The compelling concern [is] to go in search, to discover, to add to one’s store, or holding, or harem.”10

  I asked him why the sense of discovery seemed to play such an important role for the collector. “Think of the word: discover—to take the cover off and see what’s there,” he told me. “It goes very deep for the collector: I want to find out. And what you really want to find is, Where do I come from? What is the source? That is discovery—finding something no one knew before, and you didn’t know before.”

  That jibed with what I had learned from Mr. Atlas (whose pursuit of the long-hidden Rosselli map had begun—quite literally—with someone “taking off the cover”). But Muensterberger believed that such discoveries are not without a downside. While they can bring the collector much happiness, he noted, the elation is usually short-lived, giving way to renewed feelings of frustration. And so the hunt goes on. “The quest is never-ending,” he wrote in his book.11 “It is, as one can see time and again, bound to repeat itself, while the ultimate pleasure always remains a mirage.”

  Most collectors seem to accept, even embrace, this contradiction—aware that for the aficionado, as for the adventurer, the journey is better than the destination. Mr. Atlas, for instance, seemed to have his habit well under control, buying only a few new maps each year at this point in his life. (“In fact,” he had told me, “one of the reasons that I’ve gotten involved in exhibits and the lecture series and other aspects of maps is that … I didn’t want my interest to be dependent on the next acquisition.”)

  But for a few aficionados what begins as harmless hobby can devolve into what Muensterberger described as “an all-consuming passion, not unlike the dedication of a compulsive gambler to the gaming table—to the point where it can affect a person’s life and become the paramount concern … overshadowing all else: work, family, social obligations and responsibilities.12 We know of numerous cases in which moral standards, legal considerations, and societal taboos have been disregarded in the passion to collect.”

  History has seen more than a few out-of-control collectors, such as the notorious Don Vincente, a bookseller and former monk whose malignant bibliomania led him to commit no fewer than eight murders in nineteenth-century Barcelona.13 But while it is tempting to dismiss such zealots as a mentally disturbed minority, Muensterberger warned that even a generally well-adjusted and honest person can be tempted to transgress laws or moral codes—in part because overcoming the obstacles that lie between the collector and the desired object is exactly what makes the experience so rewarding. “Look, I spoke of the discovery,” he said. “Découvrir in French, entdecken in German—I could use any number of languages, and it has more or less the same meaning: to take off the cover. So, as a collector, what you do is look for something that you’re not supposed to see or possess. And so, intrinsically, whatever you discover or obtain by discovery is taboo in one way or another.

  “There is always the chance of having trespassed,” he added, glancing slowly around the room at his beloved possessions. “Even with these African objects it’s true.”

  He had been collecting such pieces for no less than seven decades: “I discovered African art the first time consciously when I was eight years old in the house of a distant relative. I was so taken by it that, when I was thirteen, I went to the flea market in Amsterdam and saw a piece. The man said, ‘It comes from the Dutch colonies—Indonesia.’ I said, ‘No, it comes from Africa.’ He said, ‘No, stupid boy.’ But it clearly was a very nice African horse and rider. That was the first piece I ever bought.”

  In the years since then, he had tried to avoid buying items that are stolen from—or are sacred to—the people whose ancestors made them, instead purchasing only objects that either are meaningless to them or have been abandoned.

  “But some of the objects have been discovered only recently, buried underground. Now, to whom do they belong? In Italy, anything in the ground belongs automatically to the state. In Africa, they have laws—but there are tribal laws and national laws and provincial laws,” he said with a sigh.

  “It’s all very muddy,” he added. And then, for a second, the old man’s gaze seemed to lose itself on one of the sculpture
s. I have no idea where his thoughts had taken him at that moment. My own had drifted, as they did so often in those days, back to Gilbert Bland.

  OF THE MANY WONDERFUL YARNS SURROUNDING THE LIFE of Christopher Columbus, my favorite is the story of the Unknown Pilot. The tale is said to have taken place around 1480, when Columbus lived on Porto Santo, one of the Madeira Islands off the North African coast. It begins when a crippled vessel, floating at the mercy of the waves, lands on the island. All of the ship’s sailors have perished, except for the helmsman, who is on death’s doorstep himself. Seeking to nurse the mariner back to health, Columbus takes him to his house. There, the ailing man reveals an astonishing secret: another world exists on the far side of the Ocean Sea (as the Atlantic was then known). The man has been to these distant shores himself, after his ship blew off course during a storm. With the pilot’s help Columbus crafts a map showing the route to these new lands. Then the man dies, leaving our hero alone with the secret that will change the course of history.

  The story of the Unknown Pilot is a myth.14 We can be fairly sure of this not only because it lacks supporting evidence but because it sounds so much like a myth. Substitute the Unknown Pilot for the Lady of the Lake and the secret map for Excalibur, and suddenly we’re talking about not Christopher Columbus and the New World but King Arthur and the Holy Grail. In The Hero with a Thousand Faces, his classic study of legends, Joseph Campbell wrote that a key starting point for the hero’s journey is “a protective figure (often a little old crone or old man) who provides the adventurer with amulets against the dragon forces he is about to pass What such a figure represents is the benign, protecting power of destiny.15 The fantasy is a reassurance—a promise that the peace of Paradise, which was known first within the mother womb, is not to be lost.”