The Map Thief

by Michael Blanding

  William Darby

  American

  1775–1854

  * Some dates are approximate.

  [A]s Geography without History seemeth a carkasse without motion; so History without Geography, wandreth as a Vagrant without a certaine habitation.

  —CAPTAIN JOHN SMITH, 1624

  INTRODUCTION

  THE FIRST TIME I heard Forbes Smiley’s voice was at six o’clock on a summer Friday as I was drinking a martini at a Boston bar. It was a warm night after a long week, and I was almost down to the olive when I got the call. “This is Forbes Smiley, from the Vineyard,” he intoned, speaking in that rich, nasally voice I had heard so many people imitate in the months I’d spent researching a magazine article about his case. Though he’d been caught stealing millions in rare maps nearly ten years earlier, at the height of his career as a rare-map dealer, he’d never spoken to a journalist until now. With some persistence—and help from an old friend of his named Scott Slater—I’d finally gotten him to contact me.

  “I understand that Scott met with you and you had a conversation and that he thought it would be a good idea that I speak with you,” he continued. Maybe it was just the buzz from the martini, but I found myself having difficulty following his circuitous language. “Frankly I wish these kinds of things would go away and one might move forward. What I understand is that people are interested in the human story. When someone crashes and burns as I did, you learn certain things, and that may be interesting to some people.”

  After a bit more back and forth, he agreed to an interview, and we settled on some ground rules, chief among them that I would not report on his wife and son any more than necessary in order to tell his own story. A week later I was on a ferry to the island of Martha’s Vineyard, off the south coast of Massachusetts, to meet him. We talked for four hours at an outdoor picnic table, where I found him to be candid, thoughtful, and even funny. By the end of the interview, I was convinced that an article wasn’t enough space to tell his story. After a second interview a few months later, I broached the subject of a book.

  He initially threw cold water on the idea. “I’ll be straight up right now; I think it would be difficult to write without me saying a lot more than I am willing to say,” he said, adding tantalizingly, “I could tell you stories that would make your hair curl.” After a few months, however, he agreed through Slater to participate. I secured a book contract and began talking to friends, map dealers, librarians, and law enforcement officers. Only after I was well into the reporting did the stalling begin. We made another date to meet on the Vineyard, which he canceled. We set a time to meet in Boston, which he canceled.

  Finally, the night before another scheduled meeting in a Boston suburb, I received an e-mail from him. After speaking to his “closest confidant & adviser,” he said, he decided not to participate any further. “After talking it through, he is of the strong opinion that I am unable to [distance] myself from the emotional pain of these events to [ensure] that I remain within appropriate bounds. He considers the harm I might do to others, to my wife and family, friends, dealers & old clients—in something as involved as a book—too great a risk.” I wrote back immediately, expressing my disappointment but also telling him it was too late now to scuttle the project. Though I would like to have his participation, I’d be writing the book regardless. Despite several more attempts to contact him, I never heard from Smiley again.

  Over the next year, I persisted in filling in the gaps of the narrative that had been left open after our conversations. After talking with a wider circle of people, investigating a paper trail of court documents, and spending hours sifting through library archives and volumes of old maps, I began to piece together an answer to my biggest question: Why did a respected map dealer at the height of his profession betray those closest to him—and deface the artifacts he spent his life preserving? The more I researched his story, however, the more questions I uncovered—to the point where I began to suspect that his reasons for cutting off our correspondence had less to do with the advice of his advisor or the impact on his family, and more to do with his own fears of exposing secrets he had never revealed.

  —

  IN HIS ONE-PARAGRAPH short story, “On Exactitude in Science,” surrealist writer Jorge Luis Borges imagined an empire so advanced in the science of mapmaking that it was able to produce a map on a one-to-one scale—that is, as large as the empire itself. Such a feat, of course, is as impossible as it is undesirable. The very point of a map is to re-create an area in miniature, allowing us to envision, navigate, and control our world.

  The paradox of mapmaking, however, is that as soon as you begin shrinking a geography down to usable size, you necessarily are forced to misrepresent it. By making choices about what to include and what to leave out, you change the map from a document faithfully documenting an area to one furthering a particular point of view. Writing contains the same paradox. As soon as we start picking and choosing relevant details to “propel the story forward” (literally or figuratively), we change the story to fit the narrative.

  When I was growing up, I always found that the best books were those with maps in them. Like many children, I pored over the “There and Back Again” map in J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit, which both allows the reader to follow along with the journey and also plays an essential role in the plot. Personally, though, I was always more captivated by the sprawling map of Middle-earth in Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, thrilling to the long leagues of jagged mountains and dark-shaded forests bleeding off the margins of the page. That open-ended geography consciously raised the specter of other stories in adjacent territories occurring at the same time as the events described in the trilogy. That appeal to imagination made the world of the novels both less knowable and more real.

  I can still see the two-tone version of the map that folded out of a red leather–bound edition of The Lord of the Rings that sat on my father’s highest shelf. In those days, I suppose, reading fantasy novels was for me a way to grow closer to my father, who like many men of his generation seemed to me a distant territory. He had piles and piles of them stacked by his bed, stuffed into overflowing bookcases in the den, and filling shelf after shelf in the basement. Most of them contained maps, and I can still see the borders of their imagined earths in my mind—Cimmeria and Amber, Shannara and Xanth, Prydain and Pern. And I can still smell their musty pages as I opened them to the maps—always first to the maps—and began navigating their geographies before reading their stories.

  The other love my father and I shared was for traveling. He worked as a sales rep for a computer company and continued to make sales calls across New England as president of his own company. We hit the road for family vacations as well, and I can clearly see him in his cockpit, with everything he needed close by—the radio, a bag of salted peanuts, and that sheaf of folding state maps simultaneously offering freedom and control. I loved sitting next to him in the passenger seat, folding and unfolding the maps as the trip itself unfolded. It gave me a feeling of control over the landscape—and maybe some control over our relationship as well, navigating a simpler topography than our familial bond.

  As I got older, I continued to love maps. In junior high school, I spent hours creating my own fantasy worlds on hexagonal graph paper, piling continents full of cities, mountains, forests, of my own invention. In high school, I plotted my own road trips with friends, and after college, I traveled farther afield, backpacking across France and India, always with map in hand. In those days before Google Earth and GPS, I felt like I could find my way anywhere as long as I had a map, offering me ownership of places where I didn’t even speak the language.

  Eventually, I began collecting maps as well, focusing on subway maps of places I’ve lived or traveled over the years—Washington, Paris, London, Barcelona, Moscow. They line the walls of my apartment as I
write this, each a skeleton of a city reduced to its essential form. I like reading the names of the stops on their colored lines: L’Enfant Plaza, Charing Cross, Passeig de Gràcia, conjuring up worlds in my imagination as efficiently as the fantasy maps of my youth.

  I know I’m not alone in feeling that cartographic allure—since I started working on this book, countless people have shared with me their own enthusiasm for maps. Some love them for the beauty they express, others for the sense of order they represent. Some thrill to their promise of adventure, armchair or otherwise, and others cherish their familiar depiction of a territory close to home. For everyone I’ve spoken with, however, there is something intensely personal about this cartographic connection. Despite the way they express a shared geography, maps are tools of the imagination first, mediating a relationship between an individual and a place.

  —

  GIVEN THE LOVE I’ve always had for maps, it was natural that I’d become intrigued by the story of E. Forbes Smiley III—that deliciously old-money name opening the door to the rarified world of map collecting and map collectors. I read about him in The New Yorker in October 2005 with fascination—first, for the maps themselves, these historical documents that were at once beautiful and flawed, and second, for this strange character at the center of the crime, so mysterious in his decision to despoil the world he loved.

  The New Yorker article, however, was written before the case went to court, and without Smiley’s voice to offer his explanation. When I heard Boston Public Library was opening a new map center in which Smiley had played a bit of a role, it seemed opportune to revisit the story. Initially, the timing seemed good, since Smiley had decided he finally wanted to tell his story. His son, E. Forbes Smiley IV, was getting old enough to use Google, and he wanted at least one chance to offer his version of what had occurred.

  As I spoke with Smiley, I found a mass of contradictions—someone who was at once so capable and at the same time so deeply flawed. The irony of the story, as I came to understand it, is that this man who was stealing maps had so clearly lost his own way. Perhaps what made maps so appealing to him was the same thing that made them appealing to me—that sense of control they give over our surroundings, no matter how much control we have over our own lives. Researching his story, I became just as intrigued with the stories of those who made the maps he stole, each with their own passions and rivalries. As I spoke with Smiley and those around him, I found myself writing the map of a man, a profession, and an obsession. And like any good map, his story ultimately bleeds off into the margins between the known and the unknowable.

  Chapter 1

  THE EXPLORER AND THE THIEF

  FIGURE 1 JOHN SMITH. “NEW ENGLAND,” FROM ADVERTISEMENTS FOR THE UNEXPERIENCED PLANTERS OF NEW ENGLAND. LONDON, 1631.

  June 8, 2005

  E. FORBES SMILEY III couldn’t stop coughing. No matter how much he tried to suppress it, the tickle in the back of his throat kept breaking out into a hacking cough, drawing glances from the patrons sitting around him. The glass fishbowl of a reading room at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University was quiet except for the low hum of the air-conditioning and the clicking of fingers on keyboards, making Smiley painfully aware of the noise he was making. At one point, he pulled a handkerchief out of his pocket to muffle the sound. As he did, an X-Acto knife blade wrapped inside fell softly onto the carpeted floor. He folded the cloth and put it back in his pocket, oblivious to what had just happened.

  Smiley was in the Beinecke this morning to study some rare atlases in preparation for the London Map Fair, an annual gathering of hundreds of map collectors who came to the British capital to buy, sell, and trade antiquarian maps. As one of the top dealers in the field, Smiley hoped to use the event to climb out of the financial hole into which he’d recently sunk. Over the years, he’d become expert at recognizing different versions of the same map from subtle typographical variations, an ability that could translate into thousands of dollars when deployed at the right moment. By refamiliarizing himself with some select maps, he hoped to be ready for any opportunity in London.

  So far, the trip hadn’t gone well. The previous night, he’d woken up miserable in a cheap hotel. It wasn’t the kind of place he’d usually stay. He favored luxury hotels, where he could see the look of surprise and interest flit across the faces of people when he let it be known he was a map dealer. He looked the part, too, with graying hair swept back over his ears and a long, oval face ending in a narrow, patrician chin. A pair of silver wire-framed glasses perched on his nose, and he invariably wore tweed or navy blue blazers. That, along with his Yankee-sounding name, usually caused people to assume he was from “old money,” an impression Smiley did nothing to correct.

  When people thought of Forbes Smiley—as he was universally known by friends, dealers, librarians, and clients—a few words inevitably sprang to mind: gregarious; jolly; larger-than-life. He spoke with the resonance of an Italian tenor mangled by a nasally Waspish affectation. His voice, like Daisy Buchanan’s, was “full of money.” When he made phone calls, he made sure to announce that he was calling “from the Vineyard.” His upper-crust affectations, however, were tempered by a charming self-deprecation. He’d ingratiated himself with many a librarian by inquiring after her spouse or children, and reciprocated with entertaining stories of travels around the world or the progress of the new home he was building on the Vineyard.

  Most of all, people thought of his laugh. For years, friends had reveled in Smiley’s laugh, which rolled up out of his belly and wracked his body in a cackle that only increased in volume the longer it went on. It was the kind of laugh that in college had earned him free tickets from theater producers, who sat him in the front row to egg on the audience. And it generally caused people to excuse the pretension that crept into his voice when he was expounding on any of his obsessions—architecture, New England history, the blues, and, of course, maps. Whether they liked him or not, his colleagues and rivals in the map business had all been seduced by his knowledge, which in certain areas exceeded that of anyone else in the world.

  On the morning of June 8, 2005, however, none of the librarians at the Beinecke’s public services desk recognized him. Had they known him, they would have been shocked at the transformation he’d undergone. In addition to the cough that had developed overnight, he was suffering from a splitting headache left over from a night of drinking. Smiley had been drinking a lot these days—it was the only thing that took his thoughts away from the problems that multiplied in his mind whenever he was sober. As gifted as he was at remembering details about maps, he was abysmal at managing the details of the business through which he earned his livelihood. No matter how entertaining his stories, the truth was that he was overextended and hemorrhaging money.

  The stress had taken a physical toll, leading to a constant pain in his back for the past two years. This morning, it was particularly awful. Each time a cough wracked his body, fresh bullets of pain rocketed up his spine. Smiley made two phone calls that morning: one to his wife and one to a client; neither ended well. His spirits were already sinking as he headed across town to Yale’s campus. If anyone had stopped to wonder, they might have thought he looked strange in a tweedy olive blazer on this warm summer day. Then again, Yale was full of eccentric professors who might be found doing just that. Probably no one gave him a second glance as he crossed the Beinecke’s broad plaza to enter the building.

  —

  THE BEINECKE LIBRARY’S modern architecture is an anomaly among Yale’s predominantly Gothic-style buildings. A heavy granite lattice creates a series of squares on its façade, each framing a thin, octagonal sheet of translucent white marble. On a sunny day, the sun bathes the interior mezzanine in a soft, church-like light. Inside, the library resembles nothing so much as a giant literary aquarium, with a rectangular tank of steel and glass stacked with five stories of weathered bindings—a literal tower
of knowledge. Completed in the 1960s, the Beinecke remains one of the largest libraries in the world devoted exclusively to rare books. Nearly two hundred thousand volumes fill its tower, with space for a half million more in its subterranean stacks.

  Smiley entered at the mezzanine and headed downstairs, where a much smaller aquarium tank houses the library’s reading room. On his way, he passed by one of the jewels of the Beinecke’s collection: a six-foot-long framed world map by Henricus Martellus dating from 1489. As Smiley—and few other visitors—knew, the one-of-a-kind map is the closest representation we have to Europeans’ worldview on the eve of Christopher Columbus’s first voyage. Smiley stopped at the public services desk to request the books and atlases he’d come to see, then headed into the reading room, where he sat at a window table looking out on a sunken courtyard of white marble sculptures. For a while he worked, leaning over books hundreds of years old, carefully taking notes in pencil.

  As studious as he looked, he was feeling a fresh sense of desperation by the time he left to get lunch around eleven. Sitting in a coffee shop around the corner, he turned his options over in his mind. He could take the train to New York today and fly to London a day early in hopes of putting together a deal before the map fair began. Or he could abandon the whole plan and head back to the Vineyard, saving the expense and hoping to find another way out of his financial mess.

  While he sat pondering his predicament without reaching a conclusion, the situation in the reading room had changed radically in his absence. Smiley may have missed the X-Acto knife blade that fell from his pocket, but a librarian named Naomi Saito had not. The Beinecke’s librarians make regular sweeps of the room to ensure that materials are handled properly—and to subtly alert patrons they are being watched. As Saito had entered to make her check, she immediately spied the blade on the floor. Few objects could be more disturbing to someone who works in a building full of rare books than a tool that can separate the pages of a book from its binding. Saito picked up the blade in a tissue and walked back out of the room.