The Island of Lost Maps

by Miles Harvey

  But I was just as fascinated by the possibility that Bland was in it for the money. For centuries thieves have reaped big rewards by catering to the peculiar needs of collectors. In our own culture extensive black markets exist for everything from art to animals and sports memorabilia—but history offers some even more outlandish examples. In the twelfth and again in the sixteenth century, for instance, the popularity of a medicinal elixir made from, of all things, the flesh of Egyptian mummies led to a booming business in grave robbing.16 “Alas, poor Egypt!” wrote Louis Reutter de Rosement.17 “After having known civilization at its zenith, after having sacrificed its all to respect its dead, it was now forced to see the eternal dwellings of its venerated kings despoiled, profaned, and violated and the bodies of its sons turned into drugs for foreigners.”

  With our own tedious era sadly devoid of contraband pharaoh goo, Bland’s alleged crime spree seemed about as interesting a subject as a writer—especially a writer with his own lifelong love of maps—could hope to find. I began to look into the caper and discovered that it was even more extensive than was originally reported. According to the FBI, Bland had stolen maps from at least seventeen libraries across the United States and two in Canada. He was, it turned out, the Al Capone of cartography, the greatest American map thief in history.

  I took the story to my editors at Outside, who found the case deliciously offbeat and assigned a lengthy feature on Mr. Bland. I thought I would finish it in six weeks. But when it finally appeared in the June 1997 issue, I had worked on it for more than a year—and my labors had only just begun. By the time I completed research on this book, the investigation had consumed four years of my life.

  Bland proved to be an extremely enigmatic and unwilling subject and, despite it all, a fascinating one. He was a chameleon. He changed careers and families without looking back; when a daughter from his first marriage asked him for help with buying a car, he refused, saying, “You’re a stranger.” He could seem to switch age before your eyes, appearing world-weary one minute and boyish the next. Medium height, medium weight, middle-aged, middle everything—he was a cipher, a blank slate; in cartographic terms, terra incognita. He was Bland: “1. Characterized by a moderate, undisturbing, or tranquil quality. 2. Lacking distinctive character.”

  Because he turned down all my requests to interview him—both for the article and, later, for this book—I was forced to build my profile the slow, hard way: visiting the places he worked and lived; walking through crime scenes; talking to family members, friends, business associates, and victims; methodically piecing together his past through criminal records, court documents, military files, computer databases, and other sources of public record. The more snooping I did, the more I began to see my quest for information as similar to that of the Houtman brothers, and my attempts to make sense of it like the task faced by Mercator. Filling in a life, it turned out, was like filling in a map, and my search for Gilbert Bland soon transformed from an investigation into an adventure. Along the way, I happened upon a curious subculture made up of map historians, map librarians, map dealers, and map collectors—all gripped by an obsession both surreal and sublime. Like the explorers of old, I found myself heading farther and farther into strange waters, never quite sure if I had found what I was looking for, but endlessly filled with bemusement and wonder.

  A BIRD’S-EYE VIEW OF BALTIMORE’S MT. VERNON NEIGHBORHOOD FROM 1850, AROUND THE TIME GEORGE PEABODY BEGAN MAKING PLANS FOR A LIBRARY THAT WOULD ONE DAY STAND JUST LEFT (OR EAST) OF THE WASHINGTON MONUMENT. ONE HUNDRED AND FORTY-FIVE YEARS AFTER THIS ENGRAVING APPEARED, GILBERT BLAND WAS APPREHENDED ON THE FIRST PORCH TO THE RIGHT OF THE MONUMENT.

  CHAPTER 1

  Mr. Peabody and

  Mr. Nobody

  THE GEORGE PEABODY’S LIBRARY IN BALTIMORE’s historic Mount Vernon neighborhood is, by any measure, a remarkable place. “There is no other library like this in America, or anywhere else excepting the parallel universe of Jorge Luis Borges’s fiction,” the poet and essayist Daniel Mark Epstein wrote.1 From its lofty reading room, surrounded by gilt-framed portraits of long-dead librarians, to its Grand Stack Room—measuring sixty-one feet from the white marble floor to the latticed skylight, appointed in ornate cast iron and gold leaf, and containing 250,000 of the world’s rarest and most important volumes—the Peabody has lived up to its original conception as “a cathedral of books.”2

  The man who built the library was also remarkable. Born poor in South Danvers, Massachusetts, in 1795, and receiving no more than a fourth-grade education, George Peabody built a small fortune in the dry-goods business in Baltimore, then moved to London, where he made millions in the financial markets. But Peabody was equally adept at giving money away. In England he built more than forty thousand rent-free units of housing for poor people. In the United States he endowed seven cultural institutes and libraries, including the museum of archaeology and ethnology at Harvard and the natural history museum at Yale. At the end of the Civil War, he also established the Peabody Education Fund with $2 million (about $20 million in today’s dollars) to provide schooling for the “destitute children of the Southern States.” All told, his gifts totaled more than $7 million—something like $70 million in today’s dollars.

  In 1869, the year of the famous financier’s death, the American Annual Cyclopaedia called Peabody “the most liberal philanthropist of ancient or modern time”—an overzealous description, maybe, but not by much.3 Mr. Peabody as people around the library still respectfully refer to him, is widely acknowledged as the founder of modern philanthropy. He was extraordinary not only in the size of his gifts but in his philosophy of giving. Unlike most big-money benefactors of his day, Peabody did not promote religious beliefs. He had a different sort of evangelism in mind. In an 1831 letter to his nephew, he wrote:

  Deprived as I was, of the opportunity of obtaining anything more than the most common education I am well qualified to estimate its value by the disadvantages I labour under in the society [in] which my business and situation in life frequently throws me, and willingly would I now give twenty times the expense of attending a good education could I possess it, but it is now too late for me to learn and I can only do to those that come under my care, as I could have wished circumstances had permitted others to have done by me.4

  Let others save souls; Peabody was interested in minds. And so it happened that in 1857, during his first visit to the United States in almost twenty years, he announced plans for a facility which, he said, “I hope may become useful towards the improvement of the moral and intellectual culture of the inhabitants of Baltimore.” The Peabody Institute was, wrote his biographer Franklin Parker, “perhaps grander in its original design than any previous benefaction in America.”5 Its audacious goal was to jump-start the city’s moribund cultural life on many fronts at once. The institute would have an art gallery and a lecture series and an academy of music. Perhaps most important, it would also have a library—but no ordinary one.

  Peabody had two major stipulations for his library. First, he insisted that it would be “for the free use of all persons who may desire to consult it.”6 But, although open to even the poorest and least educated Baltimorean, it would not be a lending library, cluttered with contemporary novels, how-to tracts, and other popular forms of literature. The volumes, he declared, would be only “the best works on every subject”—and they would never leave the building.7 They would remain in the stacks, always available “to satisfy the researches of Students who may be engaged in the pursuit of knowledge not ordinarily attainable in the private libraries of the Country.”8 What Peabody had in mind was a kind of modern-day athenaeum, a repository of wisdom and history that would survive the ages.

  “Mr. Peabody’s purpose,” explained Epstein, “was to gather books that had made history and first recorded the thoughts and passions of humankind, in the belief that a book is something more than a locus of data, paper, glue, and ink; a book has supersensible power, and a great collection dr
aws down a resonance endowing the reader of any book in it with special faculties of understanding.”

  Bringing such a library together was no small task. But library organizers had two huge advantages. The first was lots of money. Peabody eventually endowed the institute with $1.4 million, a huge sum for the time. The second was the Civil War. It delayed the library’s official opening for nearly a decade—a vexation for just about everyone but John Morris, the first librarian. “Taking advantage of the delay, Morris and the Library Committee devised a long-range plan to systematically acquire the world’s best books for the collection,” wrote Elizabeth Schaaf, archivist and curator for the Peabody Institute.9 “Their model was no less than the combined catalogues of the finest libraries in Europe and America. The Peabody was a carefully planned collection, the scope of which was contingent neither on funds nor immediate availability in the book market.”

  Morris and his successor, Nathaniel Holmes Morison, carefully compiled massive desiderata—or wish lists—of books for the library. Publishing these lists in bound form, they sent them out to booksellers, bibliophiles, and librarians all over America and Europe in what surely must have been one of the greatest literary scavenger hunts in history. Ten years after the Peabody Institute opened its doors in 1866—an event attended by a crowd of twenty thousand and covered by newspapers on both sides of the Atlantic—there were more than sixty thousand volumes on the shelves, filling the library’s original quarters to capacity and prompting the construction of the architect Edmund Lind’s palatial Grand Stack Room.

  The Peabody collection eventually totaled more than 250,000 volumes—including rare and vital works in U.S. and English history, Greek and Roman classical literature, romance languages, archaeology and art history, science, architecture, building and mechanical trades, genealogy, and, finally, geography and cartography. This amazing catalog has been well-used. H. L. Mencken sat in a reserved desk at the library when working on his monumental treatise, The American Language. The novelist John Dos Passos, whose books include The 42d Parallel and 1919, spent countless hours there, along with thousands of less famous researchers and writers. Among them was Epstein, a poet, playwright, and biographer whose books include The Boy in the Well, Sister Aimee: The Life of Aimee Semple McPherson, No Vacancies in Hell, and Nat King Cole. In a 1993 essay, Epstein described the “magical library” as providing “the necessary environment for private education, the encounter between a person and a book.” The Peabody is, he concluded, “a space where time stands still.”

  That is true in more ways than one. Because of shifting financial priorities at the Peabody Institute, few books have been added to the library’s collection since the early part of this century. Today the library—now run by Johns Hopkins University—is something of a gilded warehouse of old books, a treasure-house of knowledge that goes largely unused. Only a few patrons visit the Peabody Library each day. Most of them are scholars, as has always been the case. Others are tourists, who come to gaze at the library’s architecture, not its books. Many of the rest are eccentrics, following some odd fancy of intellect or simply killing time. But a few others, constituting a tiny but ominous minority, have darker reasons for being there.

  On December 7, 1995, one such man entered the library. It is safe to say that George Peabody had just such a person in mind when he stipulated that the facility “should be guarded and preserved from abuse.”10 It is also safe to say that the stranger was, in many ways, an opposite of the library’s founder. Peabody’s face—with its distinctive muttonchop whiskers, patrician nose, and wide-set eyes—is still familiar to many people more than a century after the philanthropist’s death. The man who walked into the library that day, however, had built a career on anonymity. Few people who crossed paths with him could later recall the details of his appearance; many could not remember him at all. But Mr. Peabody and Mr. Nobody were opposites in even more fundamental ways. Peabody had spent millions preserving rare volumes for the betterment of all people; the man in the Grand Stack Room had come to gut those volumes for his own illicit financial gain.

  The two of them, however, had one important thing in common: a passion to collect. Like the men who assembled this library more than a century earlier, the stranger had come to the Peabody with a wish list. It was a red notebook, roughly the size of a steno pad, its cover bearing the initials U.S.C. and a picture of a gamecock, the mascot for the University of South Carolina, where the man had apparently paid a recent visit.11 Inside, in neat, well-spaced cursive, was a list of centuries-old books, most of them atlases. Next to many of the titles someone had scribbled the names of various libraries where the books could be found. Several of the entries were followed by “Peabody Inst.” or simply “Peabody.”

  Now some of those same books were piled on a desk in the Grand Stack Room. Now the mystery man began to leaf through one of them. Now he stopped to examine a page. Now he took out a razor blade and carefully lowered his hand to the aged paper.

  ON OCTOBER 11, 1492, CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS, BELIEVING that he was nearing the shores of Japan, looked out across the ocean and saw a light “like a small candle that rose and lifted up.”12 Ever since, historians have debated about what Columbus saw—or whether he saw anything at all. Was it a campfire on a distant shore? Was it the glow of native animals called Bermuda fireworms, which give off blinking green lights to attract mates? “Or was the mysterious light,” wrote the Columbus biographer John Noble Wilford, “only an apparition in the eyes of the wishful mariner?”13 We will never know. What we do know is that four hours later, a lookout on the Pinta spotted white cliffs in the moonlight and shouted, “Tierra! Tierra!” Cartography would never be the same.

  Like other discoveries, the discovery of a crime often depends on a combination of trained eyes, educated guesses, and good luck. Jennifer Bryan had all those things going for her as she sat in the Grand Stack Room that December day in 1995. But her visit to the Peabody would have been completely unremarkable—indeed, the whole saga documented in this book might never have been told—if not for another factor: “I was bored.”

  Bryan, who was then completing her Ph.D. in history at the University of Maryland, had come to the library to work on her dissertation. Her research that day involved scanning volume after volume of British legal documents from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. It was not a thrilling endeavor, even for a student with a sincere passion for her work, and Bryan soon found herself “just sort of staring into space.”

  From the skylight a gray winter glow washed down over the room. The air was cool and still and fragrant with the faint perfume of old volumes. The place was silent, save for the hush of the ventilation system, the occasional click of footsteps against the marble floor, and the squeal of the old-fashioned elevator. As Bryan sat absentmindedly, the elevator rose into the five upper floors of stacks, carrying a library staff member to collect books. When the elevator stopped, a light came on in one of the balconies, briefly illuminating shelves crammed with old volumes, then went off again. Then the elevator creaked back down to the main floor. This sound momentarily drew Bryan’s attention, and when the elevator door opened she watched as a librarian took an armful of old volumes to a man sitting across the way. He was the only other patron in the room.

  There was nothing unusual about his appearance—quite the contrary. A studious man in his mid-forties, wearing a blue blazer and khaki pants, he could have been mistaken for half the scholars who walk through the library’s doors. He was unimposing and slight-framed, with a biggish nose and smallish chin, reddish hair and mustache—not the kind of person who normally draws stares. Yet Bryan found her eyes lingering on him as he flipped through the books.

  “You know how it goes: this is distracting, so I’ll watch it to break up the monotony,” Bryan recalled about her fixation on the man. In truth, however, she was accustomed to observing other people at libraries. She had been trained to do so. In addition to her graduate work Bryan was employed as a manus
cripts curator at the Maryland Historical Society, located just a few blocks from the Peabody. Her desk there faced a huge window that looked down over the James W. Foster Reading Room, and part of her job was to keep an eye on the patrons. She knew that there was good reason for such vigilance. Over the past few years rare books rooms all over the country had been plagued by thefts of increasingly valuable antiquities. The Library of Congress, for example, had announced in 1993 that thieves and “slashers” had stolen thousands of items from perhaps five hundred books in its collections. That august institution was less than fifty miles down Interstate 95 from the Peabody: what happened there could happen here. Moreover, Bryan knew that the old saying about judging books by their covers also applied to crooks. Often those responsible for the thefts did not look like criminals; in a number of cases, in fact, they had been professors, even librarians. And although she had no obvious reason to distrust the man, she began to get an unsettling feeling about him. “Maybe I just have a suspicious nature,” she said.

  He quickly gave her good reason to worry. “I just happened to look up and over in that direction and thought I saw him tear a page out of a book,” she remembered. But it happened so fast, and the man did it with such seeming nonchalance, that at first she did not completely trust her eyes. “I thought, well, now what do I do? Do I say something, or did I just imagine that?”

  Bryan decided to wait—and watch. She did not like what she saw. “He was behaving very oddly,” she said. “I mean, he wasn’t behaving like a researcher He was just sitting there, riffling through the pages, so it was obvious that he was looking for illustrations.”