In the summers, he stayed at a client’s cottage in Harpswell on the southern Maine coast, inviting Scott Slater and other Hampshire friends to join him. During one visit in 1988, he was flipping through a real estate circular and came across an ad for an old New England farmhouse. The property was located in Sebec, a fleabite of a town in almost the exact center of the Maine—an hour north of Bangor and eight hours’ drive from New York City. The asking price, Slater later recalled, was just $89,000.
When Smiley flew up to take a look along with his father and old friend Paul Statt, it quickly became clear to Statt why it was so cheap. The house was picturesquely situated on a small hill overlooking Sebec Lake—but it was a dump. The floor was full of holes, the bathroom was nonexistent, and there was only a frame where the kitchen should be. He flatly counseled his friend to save his money. To Smiley’s father, however, the house reminded him of his own house in Bedford, and with only three hundred people, Sebec reminded him of what Bedford used to be.
Smiley was excited with the potential of both the house and the town. Here at last was the vllage he’d always dreamed about. After years of studying maps, he knew how small settlements could grow over time. The trick, he told Statt excitedly, was to find place before it had become gentrified and suburbanized, and play a role in its development to keep those elements in check. He bought the house in cash, paying close to the asking price—even though he later always told friends that he paid $50,000. Slater and other old pals came up with a term for this phenomenon: “Forbes dollars,” a personal accounting system in which Smiley always spent less than he had and was always owed more than he was.
He used the same calculus in business. Whenever he saw a map he knew his clients should have, he snapped it up, worrying later how he’d pay for it. At auctions in London he’d walk out with maps, promising to have the money wired, figuring out how to come up with the cash once he got back to New York. He began falling further and further behind in his payments. In 1988, New York State issued warrants for two years of back taxes totaling more than $8,000. He began defaulting on payments to other dealers as well.
In one instance, Smiley walked into the Old Print Shop to see a six-part map of Virginia made in 1807 by James Madison, a first cousin of the president. Harry Newman had spent a fortune to restore it—and when Smiley saw it on the table, he pled with his younger colleague to let him buy it. He wrote a check for $12,000, immediately heading uptown to sell the map to a client. As with the incident with Bill Reese and the Clark atlas, the check bounced a few days later. It took Smiley years to cover what he owed, finally coming in with a check for $15,000 to cover the map plus interest. Newman forgave him and resumed doing business with him, but other dealers, like Reese, stopped, handicapping Smiley’s ability to sell.
No one criticized him more than Graham Arader, the reigning king of the map world, who lost no opportunity to disparage his rival. The two were similar in many ways—both projected an air of upscale refinement, down to the “III” at the end of their names; dealt in top-of-the-line material; and touted their superior knowledge as the key to their success. But in many other ways, they were polar opposites. While he could be gregarious in social situations, Smiley retained enough Yankee humility to deflect conversations away from himself. Arader, by contrast, shot from the hip in a stream-of-consciousness patter. He was his favorite topic of conversation.
In one area, he couldn’t compete with Smiley. Despite his accumulation of knowledge, he was not the natural scholar Smiley was. Arader never wrote articles in booksellers’ magazines about the history of cartography. He’d much rather spend his time on the phone, wheeling and dealing, with three conversations going on at once, than sitting in a library for hours on end taking notes on a sheet of paper. But that’s exactly the kind of thing that drove Smiley, as he traveled to library map collections throughout the northeast.
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AS HE EXAMINED THEIR MAPS, Smiley began to unravel a complicated web of mapmakers who emerged in London in the late 1600s and early 1700s. This was a time of rampant colonial expansion, in which the newly restored king Charles II pushed colonization as a way to fill England’s depleted coffers and hold off encroachment by the French. Like their French rivals, English mapmakers began using modern survey methods to claim the borders of their new territories.
In order to secure the outlays of capital to conduct massive surveys, mapmakers had to please the aristocratic shareholders of the companies that controlled the colonies themselves. One early figure, a Scotsman named John Ogilby, created the first large-scale map of Carolina in 1673, based on a manuscript map provided to him by the wealthy proprietors of the colony. According to their wishes, he attached the names of these investors to rivers, capes, and counties, which still bear them today.
In repayment of a debt, Charles II awarded a no-man’s-land between New York and Virginia to William Penn; the only trouble was, the area had already been settled by Swedes and Dutch fur traders. Penn commissioned a map by an Irish surveyor, Thomas Holme, who created “A Map of Ye Improved Part of Pennsylvania” in 1681, cementing the area’s ownership by the English lord.
Eventually, mapmakers in London coalesced into a group called the Thames School, a dynasty every bit as influential as the Dutch mapmakers of the previous century. “These, then, were the men who established England’s place in the art and business of practical cartography,” Smiley wrote in AB Bookman’s Weekly. “A role in which the English would dominate the world during most of the 18th century.” Smiley traced their lineages, as they passed knowledge from master to apprentice, creating maps that not only reflected the New World, but also helped shape it.
By the early eighteenth century, the action in North America had shifted inland. The eclipse of the Netherlands and Spain as colonial powers on the continent left only two countries in the running for control—England and France. While England had a firm grip on the coasts, the French flanked them down from Canada to the west. The stage was set for a brawl over the continent, with the Ohio River—the key passage from the Great Lakes to the Mississippi—as its flashpoint.
Long before the conflict erupted in force of arms, it was fought through maps. The first salvo was fired by Thames School protégé Herman Moll, in “A New and Exact Map of the Dominions of the King of Great Britain on Ye Continent of North America” in 1715 (Figure J) The map is better known as the “Beaver Map,” for its inset of beavers chewing through a forest with Niagara Falls in the background. Beaver hats were the rage in London at the time, and Moll was sending a not-so-subtle reminder of the valuable fur trade at stake in America. That was only the beginning of the propaganda contained in the map, which breathtakingly declares nearly all of North America as belonging to England. The land to the west of the St. Lawrence previously known as New France, Moll calls “Part of Canada,” granting France only the land north of the river.
Three years later, the French cartographic master Guillaume De L’Isle countered with his own map of North America, in 1718, which splashed “La Louisiane” in a giant font across the entire middle of the continent (Figure K). As outraged as the English were over the cartographical appropriation, they had to concede that the accuracy far outstripped anything England had produced at the time. While England might claim the Ohio, it was clear that France held it. Moll countered in 1720 with a new map of North America that rather brilliantly showed not the boundaries claimed by England, but the boundaries claimed by France, as a way to incite his countrymen to outrage.
For years, the British were forced to use De L’Isle’s as the basis for their claim against his countrymen. A 1733 map by Henry Popple used it for his topography, even as he showed the boundaries of Virginia and Carolina stretching west past the Mississippi. Even so, that wasn’t good enough for England’s powerful Lord Commissioners of Trade, who denounced Popple for conceding the strategically important Niagara Falls to their enemies. His career foundered, and he never
made another map.
After the French and Indian War broke out in 1754, the commissioners sent out a call for more accurate maps, and in 1755 John Mitchell delivered with a large-scale map that went beyond Popple’s boundaries to claim the Ohio and all of the Great Lakes for England. The same year, Lewis Evans produced “A General Map of the Middle British Colonies,” a smaller map that drew from new English sources, including personal expeditions he took to survey up the Ohio. Finally, the British had a map nearly as accurate as the French (Figure 7). In another essay for AB Bookman’s Weekly on early American mapmakers, Smiley calls it out for special mention, naming it the “greatest effort of American cartography in the 18th century” and an accurate map of the “final theater of war in the English and French struggle.”
Maps continued to play a role during the war as well. A crucial flex point in the French defenses was a fort at the confluence of the Ohio and Monongahela Rivers called Fort Duquesne. An officer held captive there smuggled out a map that showed the fort’s weaknesses. Using it, British general Edward Braddock boldly marched out to attack with fifteen hundred men—straight into a French ambush. The loss of half of Braddock’s troops sent shock waves through the British public, which hotly debated Braddock’s tactics, especially after his aide-de-camp published six maps of his battle plan defending his tactics.
That was only the beginning of three years of French victories and British incompetence, as the British lost fort after fort. Eventually the tide turned when British general John Forbes (no relation to Smiley) took back Fort Duquesne after convincing the French’s Iroquois allies to defect. In the treaty signed in 1763, the British once again won the battle of maps when John Mitchell’s map of North America was used over more accurate French maps to set the new boundary lines, effectively giving England uncontested control over all the territory east of the Mississippi.
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IN ADDITION TO being the definitive conflict for colonial control of North America, the war was also one of the most mapped in history. Surveyors accompanied the troops to battle in every theater, sketching battle plans and mapping forts, which were published after the fact in newspapers and as single-sheet maps to be snapped up by the British populace. After the war, many of these maps were gathered by British cartographer Thomas Jefferys into A General Topography of North America and the West Indies, the first great atlas of the American interior. The one hundred maps feature all the seminal maps of the continent, including the first accurate survey of Virginia by Peter Jefferson (the future president’s father), the first accurate survey of New York by John Montresor, and all six of the maps of Braddock’s disastrous attack on Fort Duquesne.
Though Jefferys died in 1771, his partners brought out another edition, calling it The American Atlas, in 1776. It included several more important maps of the colonies, among them a new map of Pennsylvania by Nicholas Scull and a map of North Carolina by John Collet. All these maps were instrumental to the British as they went to war against their own colonists in the American Revolution from 1775 to 1783. Unlike the previous conflict, which was fought on largely uncharted territory, now both sides in the conflict had accurate maps they could call upon to plan strategy.
A partner in Jefferys’s firm named William Faden mapped the conflict practically in real time, seeking out surveyors who accompanied British officers. He published thirty-three maps of Revolutionary battles and released them in his own atlas, the most complete record we have of troop movements during the war. Meanwhile, what Faden did on land, Joseph F.W. Des Barres did at sea with The Atlantic Neptune—the last of the great English sea atlases. The book was part of an ambitious project by the British Admiralty to scientifically survey its colonial holdings around the world. By the time the three-volume atlas was published in 1775, Des Barres had produced more than a hundred charts of the entire Eastern Seaboard.
The maps are lush and expansive, lavishing just as much detail on the woods and hills as they do on the bays and headlands. Even in Des Barres’s lifetime, they were recognized as a superior achievement, with one contemporary reviewer enthusing that it was “one of the most remarkable products of human industry which has been given to the world through the arts of printing and engraving.” That assessment has only grown over time. According to map historian Sy Schwartz, “Historical consensus has it that this atlas is the handsomest collection of hydrographic maps ever published.”
As the war intensified, Des Barres kept mapping, making charts of several Revolutionary sea battles, including the siege of Charleston Harbor (Figure L). By the time he was done, the territory no longer belonged to the country that employed him. Nonetheless, he pressed on, producing new surveys at his own expense until 1784. His accomplishment is to sea charts what Willem Blaeu’s atlas was to land atlases a century earlier, and a direct descendant of the promise made by John Seller in The English Pilot. Unlike Seller, however, Des Barres was wildly successful, creating charts superior to anything made in America for another fifty years. Des Barres himself lived almost that long, retiring to Canada as a wealthy landowner and political figure before he finally died at age 103.
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BY THE FALL OF 1988, Smiley’s fortunes, too, had improved, at least temporarily. Already, his knowledge of English and American mapmakers was among the most extensive in the trade. He put a point on that fact by issuing his very first catalog, The Early Cartography of North America: A Selection of Maps, Atlases, and Books, 1507–1807. Up until now, he had produced lists of maps for clients, but this was something different—a scholarly history of the founding of North America told between the lines of sixty-eight maps, along with prices showing the increasing value of historical maps at the time. One map dealer later referred to it as “one of the great rare Americana Catalogues of the last 25 years. . . . It stands head and shoulders above the rest for its combination of rare material and scholarship.”
In an editor’s note Smiley more modestly called it “our small contribution to the history of the discovery and settlement of America, and . . . an indication of our most sincere interest in the cartographic record.” The book started with the 1507 Ruysch map of the world Smiley had presented to Leventhal as the basis for his expanded collection ($40,000) and ended with the 1807 map of Virginia made by Reverend James Madison, which Smiley bought from Harry Newman ($17,500). In between, it devoted long blocks of text to explaining the significance of the maps in an academic but readable style.
One page had a sequence of maps derived from John Smith’s map of Virginia, the next a full-page description of an incredibly rare map of New France by explorer Samuel de Champlain in 1613. These were followed by several maps by Blaeu, Hondius, and Jansson; John Foster’s, map of New England ($30,000), Holme’s map of Pennsylvania, and a three-foot-high wall map by John Thornton, which Smiley said was found in only three libraries ($38,000). “We know of no other copies in private hands,” he proudly boasted, before describing seven different base maps that Thornton used to create it.
He included many of the maps in the spitting match between England and France over the Ohio, including two by De L’Isle and two by Moll, as well as John Mitchell’s map that was used to draw the new boundaries ($28,000). Toward the end of the catalog was a chart of Georgia by Matthew Clark—one of the last pages from the Clark atlas Smiley had bought from Reese several years before. On the following page were three of Andrew Ellicott’s maps of Washington, DC, including the pirated Boston edition, which hadn’t appeared on the market for a century.
Taken in total, it was an impressive record of what Smiley had accomplished in just three years of dealing maps—with a combined asking price of more than a half million dollars. If this “Catalog Number One” was Smiley’s official coming out as a dealer, then it was a sign of impressive things to come. As he stated in his introduction, he had the intention of producing more catalogs for the future—and seemed to have the inventory, the clients, and the knowledge to make more than
just a “small contribution” to the historical record. Just as he seemed poised for success, however, an event apparently occurred that put his chances for producing a “Catalog Number Two” in jeopardy.
Chapter 6
PLAYING HARDBALL
FIGURE 9 SEBEC VILLAGE, C. 1860.
1989–1995
FOR YEARS AFTER it happened, Smiley told the story the same way: One April morning in 1989, he rushed into his studio on Seventy-Ninth Street in a panic. No, he thought, this can’t be happening. Pushing past police officers, he searched up and down the stairs and on the sidewalk outside, hoping that the thieves had dropped a map or two. Anything, he thought. But above all he was hoping to find a rare 1713 edition of The English Pilot, The Fourth Book that he had just bought for Slaughter but had yet to deliver. Maybe they tore out some maps and dropped the atlas, he told himself as he searched, in vain hope that he could recoup at least part of his investment.
But it was gone, along with all the rest of his inventory. He had been cleaned out in the burglary of his studio, losing hundreds of thousands of dollars in inventory—all of it uninsured. There had been a string of gallery thefts in the neighborhood lately, but he never thought anyone would steal from him. He knew everyone in the business. Where would a thief be able to sell? According to Smiley, police saw the theft as a crime of opportunity. They told him the thieves had robbed several other art galleries in the building, breaking in through a skylight in the roof. In Smiley’s case, however, they may have been drawn by the sign on his door that read “Rare Maps, Atlases, and Globes.” The maps had probably left the country that night.
Smiley remained hopeful. The thieves would eventually have to sell—and when they did, someone would alert him. He began making calls to other dealers. Some were sympathetic, but by this time Smiley had damaged his reputation so badly that some just shrugged it off. Arkway’s Paul Cohen remembers Smiley calling, irate about a John Thornton chart he saw in Cohen’s catalog that he was convinced came from The English Pilot. But Cohen insisted it came from another volume. Alex Krieger, a Harvard architecture professor who assisted Norman Leventhal with his collection, remembers being questioned by the FBI at the time about the theft, and Ashley Baynton-Williams, a London map dealer who began working for Smiley soon afterward, distinctly remembers seeing pictures of the gallery’s bashed-in door.
The Map Thief Page 11
