The Island of Lost Maps

by Miles Harvey

  The Spanish … kept their official charts in a lockbox secured with two locks and two keys, one held by the pilot-major (Amerigo Vespucci was the first), the other by the cosmographer-major.13 Fearing that their official maps would be deliberately corrupted or would not include the latest authentic information, in 1508 the government created a master chart, the Padrón Real, to be supervised by a commission of the ablest pilots. But all these precautions were not enough. The Venetian-born Sebastian Cabot … while serving as pilot-major to Emperor Charles V, tried to sell “The Secret of the Strait” both to Venice and to England.

  Perhaps no one person was more hated by the Spanish than the man they called “master thief of the unknown world.”14 In his fabled round-the-world voyage of 1577–1580, Francis Drake not only helped shatter Spain’s hold on the Americas but came back to England with some forty tons of gold and silver bullion from Spanish ships and outposts. And yet those were not his only spoils. On March 20, 1579, while storming a small enemy vessel off Costa Rica, his men captured two large navigator’s maps of the Pacific and a collection of charts detailing Spain’s China route. Nuño da Silva, a Portuguese pilot Drake was then holding captive, later testified that the English buccaneer “prized these greatly and rejoiced over them.”15 Drake had good reason to be pleased. Many historians believe that he had not left England with firm plans to circle the world. But now, with Spanish ships searching for him up and down the Pacific coast of South America, he was in no position to head back through the Strait of Magellan. The charts of the Pacific were “exactly what he required,” wrote Alexander McKee in The Queen’s Corsair: Drake’s Journey of Circumnavigation, 1577–1580.16 Added the historian John Hampden, “Drake’s smooth passage from the American coast to the East Indies was not due solely to his genius for navigation; he had [the] captured Spanish charts.”17

  Other swashbucklers quested after similar booty, as Lloyd A. Brown observed in The Story of Maps:

  In the sixteenth century genuine Spanish charts of any part of the Americas were real maritime prizes, rated as highly by the French and English as the gold bullion which might be in the ships’ strong rooms.18 One such priceless haul was made by the English adventurer and freebooter Woodes Rogers. While cruising on behalf of some merchants of Bristol along the coast of Peru and Chile he captured some charts which were so “hot” that they were immediately engraved in London and published by John Senex.

  In another celebrated case, a group of English pirates led by Bartholomew Sharp captured the Spanish ship Rosario off the Ecuadoran coast in 1681. On board they found what one buccaneer described as “a great Book full of Sea-Charts and Maps, containing a very accurate and exact description of all the Ports, Soundings, Creeks, Rivers, Capes, and Coasts belonging to the South Sea, and all the Navigations usually performed by the Spaniards in that Ocean.”19 A Spanish mariner tried to cast this chart book—or derrotero—into the sea, but one of the pirates stopped him. “The Spaniards cried when I gott [sic] the book,” Sharp later wrote.20

  Sharp did not know it at the time, but that derrotero may have saved him from the gallows upon his return home in 1682. Because England and Spain were then at peace, the buccaneer and two members of his crew were charged, at the behest of the Spanish ambassador, with piracy and murder. Before the trial, however, a copy of the stolen chart book was given to England’s King Charles II, who took a personal interest in the case. Sharp and the others were soon acquitted—a verdict that may well have been due to “royal influence,” according to Derek Howse and Norman J. W Thrower, authors of A Buccaneer’s Atlas, a book about the incident.21

  Charles II, by the way, seems to have had a real passion for the cloak-and-dagger side of cartography. In 1683 England’s ambassador to France wrote the king to offer “the plans of some fortified places which I believe are very exact.22 If Your Majesty … approve of them, I do not question but to have draughts of all the other fortification of France in a little time.” England and France were then allies. No matter: a reply soon came back informing the ambassador that Charles had received the plans and “carried them to his closet: where … he perused them … appeared extremely well pleased and … desire[d] you would goe on & procure as many as you could.”

  Another leader who appreciated a good secondhand map was George Washington. A former surveyor, the general was well aware of the military necessity of knowing one’s terrain. In 1777 he lost more than twelve hundred men at the Battle of the Brandywine, partly because he had no accurate map of the area.23 “Spies directed by Washington were explicitly alerted to acquire maps whenever possible,” wrote the map historian J. B. Harley, who added that “men were … prepared to risk their lives (and lost them) in acquiring suitable maps.”2425

  The crown had its own spies. Benedict Arnold’s scheme to join the British was only discovered when his illicit maps—the plans for West Point—were found hidden in the boot of an accomplice. Other map-toting turncoats had better luck. In 1776 the British captured Fort Washington in New York City, thanks at least in part to the treachery of an American officer named William Demont, who later confessed that he had “brought in with me [to the British] the plans of Fort Washington, by which plans that fortress was taken by His Majesty’s troops.”26

  Stolen maps were again at a premium in the Civil War—especially for the Confederacy, which generally lacked not only trained cartographers but mapmaking basics, such as surveying equipment, printing presses, paper, and ink. At times the situation was so bad that one Southern general declared his field officers “knew no more about the [local] topography of the country than they did about Central Africa.”27 Southern spies coveted cartographic intelligence—and often had to look no further than Northern newspapers, whose accounts were regularly accompanied by battlefield maps. “I know that the principal northern papers reach the enemy regularly & promptly,” fumed General William Tecumseh Sherman, who added that the problem had “brought our country to the brink of ruin.”28

  Some Confederate operatives, however, had more prurient methods of obtaining maps. Rose O’Neal Greenhow was a beautiful and well-connected widow whose admirers included a number of powerful Northern politicians and military officers. From her richly appointed house in Washington, D.C., Greenhow ran a remarkably successful espionage operation—at one point charming a U.S. senator out of key military secrets that helped the South win the Battle of Bull Run. The person who finally exposed her as a spy was Allan Pinkerton, the famous private detective. On August 21, 1861, Pinkerton—perched on the shoulder of two assistants—watched through Greenhow’s parlor window as the sultry secret agent entertained a young Union officer. As Pinkerton looked on, the soldier handed her a military map and described its contents in detail. Then, according to the detective’s account of the event, Greenhow led the officer into another room—from which they returned “arm and arm” an hour later. “There was no doubt, if Pinkerton’s report was to be believed, that the handsome widow had performed a sexual tryst with the officer in return for his delivery of the vital map,” observed the writer Jay Robert Nash.29

  During World War I both sides were so concerned about secrecy that their maps of the front showed only the enemy’s trenches, a practice that prompted troops to capture maps from the other side in order to get around their own fortifications. World War II military planners were also obsessed with safeguarding the maps of their defenses—sometimes in vain. In 1943 Nazi officials in the French town of Caen hired a man named René Duchez to redecorate their headquarters. While there Duchez noticed that, folded on the top of a desk, was a large map labeled “Special Blueprint—Top Secret.” A normal housepainter would have minded his own business, but Duchez happened to have a sideline career with the French resistance. While the German commandant was distracted by other matters, Duchez hid the map within the office, retrieving it when he returned to work a few days later. The stolen map was a remarkable find, detailing the Germans’ secret “Atlantic Wall” defense system, an elaborate network of
underwater obstacles, tank traps, minefields, barbed wire, and gun installations—information that proved essential to the Allied invasion of Normandy. As General Omar Bradley later explained: “Securing the blueprint of the German Atlantic Wall was an incredible feat—so valuable that the landing operation succeeded with a minimum loss of men and material.”30

  Not every map heist of World War II worked out so well, however. In 1944 twenty-five German POWs pulled off the largest and most spectacular escape from an American compound during the war, digging a 178-foot tunnel out of the Navy’s Papago Park Prisoner of War Camp in Arizona.31 All of the men were eventually captured, but some remained at large for more than a month. Among the last to be brought in were three German soldiers who had based their own audacious but ill-fated escape plans on a stolen highway map of Arizona, which showed the Gila River leading to the Colorado River, which in turn led to Mexico. Devising a scheme to flee by water, they constructed a collapsible kayak under the noses of their captors, tested it in a makeshift pool within the prison compound, then snuck it out through the tunnel. Their plan was perfect—except for the map. The Gila, shown as a healthy blue waterway, turned out to be little more than a dry rut.

  BECAUSE MAPS HAVE SO OFTEN PROVED INACCURATE, out-of-date, or just plain unavailable, military leaders have long searched for ways to get the lay of the land without them. Manned observation balloons were used for intelligence gathering as early as 1794 and played a vital role in both the Civil War and the Spanish-American War. In World War I, camera-equipped airplanes were providing information not available on old-fashioned maps, such as up-to-date images of troop movements and bomb damage. Aerial espionage continued to advance and flourish through World War II and the Cold War. But by 1960, when Soviet forces shot down the U-2, an American ultrahigh-altitude aircraft specifically designed for spying, both superpowers were already hard at work on the next frontier of overhead observation. The space race was on, and soon the sky would be full of eyes.

  Far from making maps obsolete, however, new satellite technologies have led to one of the most productive periods in the history of cartography, comparable only to the golden age of mapmaking in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. NASA’s Landsat satellites—which, rather than taking photographs of the Earth, measure wavelengths of reflected energy—have “stood traditional cartography on its ear,” according to Stephen S. Hall, author of Mapping the Next Millennium.32 “By seeing in electromagnetic increments beyond the normal range of human vision, Landsat revealed whole new worlds hidden within the folds of a familiar world we thought we knew so well.” Among the many benefits of Landsat imagery has been the discovery of previously unknown lakes, a new isle (named Landsat Island) off Canada’s Atlantic coast, and an uncharted reef in the Indian Ocean.

  While such imagery greatly enhances maps, it won’t replace them anytime soon—a point I grasped one day as I toured the Santa Barbara, California, headquarters of Map Link, Inc., the largest independent wholesale distributor of maps and atlases in North America. My host that day was the firm’s publishing manager, Will Tefft, a man who regularly travels to distant corners of the Earth in search of cartographic treasure. As he led me around the facility, a cavernous former lemon-packing plant, Tefft explained that he and his associates chase a lofty goal: to stock every modern-day map by every map publisher on the planet. When a desired map cannot be obtained or does not exist, Map Link will often publish one itself. Among the firm’s customers have been the Kuwaiti embassy in Washington, which purchased maps of its own country during the 1990 Iraqi invasion, and the U.S. military, which also placed large orders for maps of the region during the Gulf War.

  Tefft, far more than most people, understands the importance of satellite photos in modern cartography—yet he insisted that no photograph alone can take the place of a map. “Perhaps people have been overwhelmed by movies, TV news, and all the other electronic media,” he said. “There’s a camera everywhere; it’s just incredible. But a camera can’t reveal the place names—anything that humans ascribe a word to, from Mount McKinley to the Los Angeles International Airport—and a camera can’t help travelers, in terms of what they are looking at now and what they are aiming for over the horizon.”

  I remembered his words a short while later, when, during the height of the air war over Yugoslavia in 1999, NATO forces accidentally bombed the Chinese embassy in Belgrade, killing three people and touching off a messy diplomatic crisis. In preparing to deploy “smart bombs” for the attack, NATO commanders had made use of the most advanced satellite imagery available. What they did not have was something that could show them the correct locations of both the embassy and the intended target, the Yugoslav Federal Directorate of Supply and Procurement. The resulting tragedy was graphic proof that even in an age when satellites allow us to observe each other and our world in mind-boggling ways, there’s sometimes still no substitute for a good map.33

  Not surprisingly, a black market for up-to-date maps still exists. In 1995, for example, a Michigan man named Bill Stewart was convicted of trying to sell classified U.S. government computer tapes containing three-dimensional maps of the Mideast.34 Nonetheless, in an era when you can switch on your laptop and find an adequate map of almost any place on Earth, and when, for a fee, you can buy satellite images of your own home or even spy from space on the backyard of a hated neighbor, contemporary maps have lost much of their contraband currency. These days a new kind of map thief has emerged—one who steals not to claim the future, like Columbus or Magellan, but to recapture a lost and longed-for past.

  WHO COULD BE MORE TRUSTWORTHY AROUND OLD books than a couple of priests?35 When fathers Michael Huback and Stephen Chapo—members of the Eastern Rite of Greek Orthodox Catholicism, a Slavonic sect—began making frequent visits to Yale’s Sterling Memorial Library in November 1970, they apparently received little scrutiny from staff members. The clergymen remained regulars in the stacks until March 1972, when a Chicago book dealer offered to sell Yale one of three extant copies of a 1670 atlas by the Dutch cartographer Hendrick Doncker. Library officials were shocked to discover that the sale item was, in fact, the copy they had thought to be sitting safely on their shelves. The stolen atlas was soon linked to Huback and Chapo, and when librarians did an inventory of their atlas collection they discovered that nearly two hundred other books were missing. But Yale, apparently, had not been the only victim. When FBI agents searched a New York City monastery where Huback and Chapo were living, they recovered books belonging to a number of other schools, including the University of Chicago, Dartmouth, Harvard, Notre Dame, Manhattan College, the University of Washington, and Indiana University. The motivation of the priestly pair, soon defrocked, seems to have been decidedly secular. As St. Jerome once quipped: “Avoid, as you would the plague, a clergyman who is also a man of business.”36

  The recent annals of cartographic crime are full of such colorful tales. The offenders come from varied backgrounds and circumstances, but almost all of them have one thing in common. Like Gilbert Bland, they have all wrestled with bizarre alter egos, as if what those stolen maps showed them were secret routes to the furthest places in their hearts. Among the more notable figures in this unusual rogues’ gallery are these:

  Andrew P. Antippas, a Tulane University English professor who “was regarded with that special undergraduate awe reserved for only a chosen few professors,” according to a 1979 report in the New Orleans States-Item.3738 A charismatic lecturer who sometimes fought back tears while reading the poetry of Keats aloud in class, Antippas was apparently held in such high esteem that the student board of the campus newspaper, Hullabaloo, voted not to report on his November 1978 guilty plea to charges resulting from the theft of five antique maps—then valued at twenty thousand dollars—from Yale University’s Sterling Memorial Library. He also admitted to stealing maps from the Newberry Library in Chicago. A map collector and part-time dealer, he apparently succumbed to his demons. “I was there, I was tempted.39 Who can ex
plain something like this?” he said at the time. In January 1979, upon being sentenced to a year in prison, he declared that “I indeed ruined my life and career.”40 But in retrospect he appears to have been overstating the case. Today Antippas owns Barrister’s Gallery, an upscale New Orleans establishment specializing in Southern folk art.

  Charles Lynn Glaser, one of the most notorious Jekyll-and-Hyde figures in cartographic crime. Glaser was a noted authority on antiquities whose 1970 book, Engraved America, was once described by the trade publication AB Bookman’s Weekly as “the standard reference for early American iconography.”41 But he was also a compulsive map thief with a criminal career that spanned three decades. Even before his legal troubles began, Glaser exhibited a curious fascination with fraud. In his 1968 book, Counterfeiting in America: The History of an American Way to Wealth, he took lengths to praise the “few great counterfeiters … men of unusual skill or cunning” who “ennobled the crime by demonstrating vision and industry.”42 It’s not clear why Glaser himself turned to crime. He did sell the maps he stole—but when I tracked down his ex-wife, Nosta Boll Glaser, she said, “I don’t think he did it for the money.” Instead, she offered this theory: during the 1970s her former spouse, suffering from “delusions of grandeur,” became deeply frustrated that his own map and print business floundered while a fellow Philadelphian, the loud and brash Graham Arader, thrived. “Arader was a younger guy who came on the scene like gangbusters. And I think my ex-husband couldn’t quite deal with his success and his presence,” she explained. “Lynn considered himself—and this is his expression and not mine—morally superior to Arader. And since he was morally superior he couldn’t quite understand why Arader was having all this success I think he justified the thefts by telling himself he was morally superior but he wasn’t being appreciated.”