The Island of Lost Maps

by Miles Harvey

  The lord of this curious domain was seated across the way. Gray Hill was a lanky, middle-aged man who towered over his island the way Gulliver overshadowed Lilliput in Jonathan Swift’s Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World. I knew that Hill had not come to these shores by choice. Like Gulliver and the heroes of a thousand other island tales, he was a castaway, brought here by the improbable tides of fate. Hill was an FBI agent, not a map collector—but, in the famous words of a shipwrecked traveler from The Tempest, “misery acquaints a man with strange bed-fellows.”17 It was now July 1996, and he had already been stranded for some six months. He did not know it yet, but he was destined to remain for years, as if the Island of Lost Maps was enchanted and Hill was being held under the spell of a sorcerer. And, in a certain sense, that was exactly what was happening.

  IN HIS BOOK ABOUT COLLECTING, WERNER MUENSTERBERGER wrote that the dealer of antiquities is sometimes endowed with almost magical powers. Many aficionados, he observed, view the materials they collect not as inanimate objects but as fetishes with “a soul or a life-force of their own.”18 As a result, wrote Muensterberger, “the relationship between collector and dealer is different from any customary buyer-seller contact … largely due to the intrinsic power that accrues to the dispenser of magic provisions.19 This predicament is one of the most potent assets of the successful dealer, whose role is often closely akin to that of physician, priest, or shaman.”

  For those who had done business with Gilbert Bland, the mysterious dealer from South Florida must have indeed seemed like something of a shaman at times, able to conjure up maps as fast as he could snap his fingers. Abracadabra, yield us an Ortelius! Open sesame, here comes a Jefferys! One of those who got a firsthand demonstration of Bland’s black art was a prominent Florida collector who visited the map thief’s booth at the Miami International Map Fair in 1995. He came away—happy but perplexed—with two copies of a hard-to-find Florida map from 1845. “He had three of them,” the collector said of Bland’s inventory. “Those were the first three I’d seen [for sale] in six years.”

  To possess what others covet—what a heady feeling that must have been for the map thief, especially after his frustrations in the computer business. Systems integration, RAM upgrades, peripherals—people may need these things, but they do not hunger after them, do not stay awake at night aching for their feel, their look, their smell. Even before his computer firm went belly-up, Bland must have known that he was trafficking in mundane essentials—the same ones everybody else was trying to hawk during the 1990s. But to be the bearer of rare maps—well, that changed everything. Suddenly Bland was golden. Suddenly he was in demand. Suddenly he was a genie with the power to grant—or deny—people’s fondest wishes.

  I don’t know how Bland felt about his newfound power, whether it thrilled him or scared him or gave him a good laugh. What I’m quite sure about, however, is that he knew how to wield it. Even after he was arrested, his magic did not fail him. In a strange way, it became even more potent. Bland had been in legal trouble before, and he was skillful at working the courts. He knew that the judicial system was a lot like the antiques business: if you had something that the other side desperately wanted, you were likely to get a very favorable deal. And so, before surrendering to police, Voodoo-man Bland pulled off his most remarkable piece of prestidigitation: he made hundreds of old maps disappear, as if into thin air. Somewhere he was holding New Jersey, Virginia, and Maryland, as well as Italy, Sweden, and Norway. He had the fortifications of Montreal. He had the Missouri Territory. He had the Empire of China, the Empire of Japan, and India beyond the Ganges. He had the Eastern Hemisphere, the Western Hemisphere, and the North Pole. He even had the trade winds locked up somewhere.

  I LIVE IN FEAR OF GETTING THESE THINGS WET.” As he carefully unfolded one fragile map after another, Special Agent Hill cast a suspicious glance at the can of soda in my hand. Spreading out on the table before us was a haphazard collection of cartographic gems. There were maps by Ortelius, Ogilby, and the Pathfinder. There were Hondius and Mercator. There were Jacques Le Moyne de Morgues, who visited Florida in 1564 and produced the first detailed map of the region; Guillaume Delisle and Jacques Nicolas Bellin, two leading French cartographers of the early eighteenth century; Thomas Jefferys, the official geographer of Britain’s King George III and creator of one of the first important atlases of North America; and many others, including the great explorer James Cook. Glancing from one old map to another, I was once again struck by their strange beauty, a kinetic clash between austere grids and voluptuous contours, empirical reality and romantic fantasy, as if the cartographers could never decide whether to make rigorous scientific diagrams or erotic doodlings of Mother Earth. It was disconcerting to see them heaped up like that, centuries of mesmerizing and historically crucial documents scattered unceremoniously across the tabletop like a bunch of wallpaper samples. And, had the thief not been caught, that would have been their fate—decorating walls. Now it was Hill’s job to undo Gilbert Bland’s crime spree page by page, returning each of these orphaned masterworks to its proper home.

  Hill pulled out a map from the 1607 edition of the famous Hondius-Mercator atlas. “This is another one that I don’t have any idea where it came from,” he said glumly. Then he turned to me, his frown slowly transforming into a conspiratorial grin.

  “Hey,” he said, holding out the map with a wink, “you got your checkbook with you?”

  Hill kept surprising me. Prolonged childhood exposure to the TV series The F.B.I. had led me to sort of expect that all G-men would be like the stone-faced Efrem Zimbalist, Jr., who played his role as though possession of a personality could land you on the Ten Most Wanted List. But the amiable Hill, wearing a comfortable blue blazer as he reclined beneath a portrait of grim old J. Edgar Hoover (who looked like he had laced up his girdle a little too tight for the photo shoot), seemed to be a different sort of agent entirely. I had no doubt he could be a tough guy when the situation demanded, but at the moment Hill’s most menacing quality was his booming tommy gun of a laugh.

  Then again, everything seemed a little topsy-turvy on the Island of Lost Maps. Normally, Special Agent Hill’s job was to track down lawbreakers, but now his role had been reversed: he hunted victims. This offbeat assignment had fallen into his lap shortly after Bland’s arrest, when the map thief was extradited to Virginia. Federal prosecutors in Charlottesville—Hill’s base of operations—indicted Bland on charges of stealing objects of significant cultural heritage and transporting stolen goods across state lines. If convicted on those charges, the map thief would have faced up to twenty years in prison without the possibility of parole and a fine of half a million dollars. Moreover, state courts in North Carolina and Delaware would soon file additional counts against Bland—and other states were threatening to follow. In short, the map thief was in what some old cartographer might have called an orbis terrarum of trouble. On the other hand, he had what one of Hill’s associates later described as “a very effective bargaining chip.”

  Not only was Bland the only one who knew where the maps were hidden but he was also the only one who knew where they all came from. As a result, explained Hill, the feds faced a tough dilemma: “Do we take our pound of flesh, or do we say to the defendant, ‘Okay, fine, we’ll take eight ounces of flesh in return for information about what you had access to and what you have stolen’? We decided it was worth getting eight ounces of flesh, and maybe even a little bit less, if we could get all the maps returned.”

  Bland finally agreed to a plea bargain in which he would receive a reduced sentence and limited immunity from further prosecution. In return, he promised, among other things, to cooperate fully with FBI agents in their attempts to get the maps back to their rightful owners. So in February 1996, while jailed without bond, the map thief directed FBI agents to a storage locker in Palm Beach Gardens, Florida, that he had rented under an assumed name. When they looked behind its bright orange doors, they discovered an extraor
dinary booty: some 150 maps in all, a few of them more than four centuries old. Taken together with the 100 or so other maps that authorities would gather from Bland’s clients across the country, the thief’s total collection of some 250 maps had a market value estimated at as much as half a million dollars.20

  Federal authorities promptly held a self-congratulatory press conference to announce the maps had been “recovered, unharmed.”21 But recovering them was one thing; returning them proved to be something else entirely. My visit came a full five months after the FBI had obtained the maps. Yet despite an exhaustive search, Hill had been able to positively identify the owners of only about seventy—less than one third of the total.

  His efforts had been slowed by three big obstacles, the first having to do with the documents themselves. As a rule, maps are unmarked; many lack even a page number. Some institutions do, in fact, put stamps or other types of identification on their maps, but to many librarians this practice is repugnant, the equivalent of stenciling PROPERTY OF THE LOUVRE across the Mona Lisa. Nor do libraries always keep inventories of the maps that are bound in books—so even if they discover one missing, they can rarely be sure when it disappeared. As a result, FBI technicians were being forced to match each stolen map, jigsaw-puzzle style, with each damaged book, using ultraviolet-light technology to make sure the edges lined up precisely and the paper stock was exactly the same on both sides of the cut. It was a labor-intensive and time-consuming process—and, for all that, it did not always produce the desired results. “Just because someone is missing a map does not necessarily mean that the map I have matches that book,” explained Hill. “I have duplicates—four or five of the same map. Some of the matches look good to the naked eye. But under the ultraviolet light, it’s a different story.”

  A second problem was the attitude of certain librarians. Although the vast majority of institutions cooperated willingly with his investigation, Hill was surprised to find resistance from some quarters. A couple of libraries, for instance, had rebuffed his initial inquiries, asserting their records were private and Hill would need a subpoena to see them. “We explained to them, ‘It’s not our maps that are missing,’ ” Hill said, “ ‘And any information you have concerning the theft would be directly beneficial to you as well as to us.’ ”

  Even so, at least one institution had chosen to remain in denial about the thefts, even when the evidence was incontrovertible. “I talked to one librarian who said, ‘There’s no way he could have stolen anything out of here.’ Well, I said, ‘I just know one thing. I know that Mr. Bland told me that he came to your library and stole maps.’ But they won’t accept it. They will not believe that they have had anything stolen.”

  Or maybe they believed it all too well. As Robert Karrow, curator of maps at the Newberry Library in Chicago, once told me: “A lot of library thefts have gone unreported in the past. You know—you’re embarrassed, and maybe you say to yourself, ‘What will the donors think?’ And you’re reluctant to talk about the whole issue because you don’t want to give the crazies ideas.”

  Hill fretted that a similar rationale might now be keeping other victims from coming forward. But he knew that there was absolutely nothing he could do about it, except throw up his hands and say, “If you sit there and tell me that your security is so great that Bland can’t possibly have stolen anything from you, well then, I have nothing to return to you.”

  The agent’s other big frustration was Bland himself. Under the terms of his plea bargain, the map thief was required to provide full information about what libraries he had visited, what maps he had taken, and what had become of those items. To a great extent, he had done just that—but Hill knew that Bland was not being completely truthful. The thief was insisting, for example, that many items in the FBI’s collection were rightfully his, having been legally obtained from other dealers. He could not provide documentation of the alleged purchases, however, and when Hill set a little trap for him—showing him a couple of items that FBI technicians already knew to be the property of a certain library—the map thief fell right into it. “Those are mine!” he reportedly declared.

  “I have never seen anything proving that he had any legitimate purchases,” sneered Hill. “Why buy something if you can steal it? It gives you a much higher margin of profit.”

  True, but if all those unaccounted-for maps weren’t Bland’s, whose were they? For now, Gray Hill had no answers. “Some universities,” he said, glancing at the pile with a look of resignation, “may not even know they are missing these items.”

  ROBINSON CRUSOE ON THE ISLAND OF DESPAIR, Napoleon on Elba, Odysseus on Ogygia, Scarface Capone on Alcatraz, the souls of the dead on Dante’s Purgatory—in literature, myth, and history alike, islands have frequently been places of waiting. And thus it was on the Island of Lost Maps. Time moved so slowly there that Special Agent Hill might have been forgiven if he, like Crusoe, sometimes felt that “all possibility of deliverance … seemed to be entirely taken from me.”22

  It was not the maps that wore on his nerves. He found the history of cartography “an interesting field,” about which he had become something of an accidental expert—able, for instance, to quickly spot the difference between almost identical maps. Nonetheless, Hill’s job had become such a bureaucratic nightmare that it was starting to look like he would still be marooned on these shores long after Gilbert Bland got out of prison. “I’m getting to know my stock very well, going through it time and time again,” he said with a sigh, placing another centuries-old piece of paper atop the heap.

  In recent weeks the island had seen a number of visitors. Like adventurers in search of lost treasure, librarians from all over the country had come bearing slashed-up books. “Some people leave very happy,” Hill reported, “and a few leave very upset.”

  At least one library got more maps from Hill than staff members had even known they were missing. But relatively few of the visitors were so lucky. Another institution was looking for “probably thirty or forty maps,” all of which, in theory at least, corresponded with those in the FBI’s collection. “Well, they came down and brought their books, and we started trying to match up maps,” he said. “We matched up nothing. The books are missing these items—but they just didn’t match up with the ones I have.”

  Despite such setbacks, Hill was not giving up. “It becomes an obsession,” he told me, “to try to get rid of as many of these things as possible.” His next step was to compile a volume containing photographs and precise descriptions of all the lost maps. Copies of this “big black book,” as some librarians would later refer to it, were to be circulated all over the country. “Before, the way we were going about it was, ‘You tell me what you’re missing and we’ll see if we can match it up,’ ” Hill explained. “Now we’re going to go back out and say, ‘Hey, we have these items; you look and tell us whether you’re missing any of them.’ ”

  Hill’s persistence would eventually lead to a number of successes. Six months after my visit to Richmond, the British Columbia Archives in Victoria discovered that a certain James Perry had visited in October 1995, departing with twenty maps. Bland had not mentioned this episode to Hill. A similar stop at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver had also apparently slipped the thief’s mind. With the help of Gray Hill’s big black book, these two institutions would get back many of their maps. And, as the months wore on, Hill would find homes for dozens of other misbegotten documents. Even so, many mysteries would continue to hang over the Island of Lost Maps.

  THERE’S A FAMOUS PASSAGE FROM ROBINSON CRUSOE in which the shipwrecked narrator discovers a single, inexplicable footprint in the sand. Having been alone for many years, he is instantly overcome by “wild ideas” and “strange unaccountable whimsies.”23 At one point he concludes that cannibals have invaded his island, only to decide that, no, he himself left the print. Other times he “fancy’d it must be the devil … for how should any other thing in human shape come into this place?” Such “cog
itations, apprehensions, and reflections” haunt him for “many hours, days, nay, I may say weeks and months.”

  It is no exaggeration to say that, like Crusoe, I had begun to experience “innumerable fluttering thoughts, like a man perfectly confused and out of my self.” Increasingly, I felt as though I were chasing a ghost—traces of his presence all over, but he himself nowhere to be found. And in the months to come that ghost would begin to feel more and more like my own shadow, until it could sometimes seem as if Gilbert Bland was on my trail and not the other way around. But now, as I watched Gray Hill ponder one map after another, meditating on the mystery of each one’s origin, I realized that at least I was not alone: the agent and I were following the same footprints. This was a strangely comforting thought, yet I knew that it was nothing he and I could discuss. Not only did the rules of our respective professions prevent us from comparing notes but Hill obviously had little time for small talk. He had more pressing cases to contend with, including the recent and widely publicized murders of two female hikers in Shenandoah National Park. And, to tell the truth, I was in a bit of a rush myself. At long last I hoped that those footprints might lead me face-to-face with the one who had left them.