by Miles Harvey
If, as has often been said, myths teach us fundamental truths about ourselves, then the Unknown Pilot legend demonstrates the powerful spell maps cast on the human imagination. Throughout the centuries people have viewed maps not just as useful navigational tools but as enchanted objects—what Campbell called “amulets” and Muensterberger described as “power-imbued fetish[es].”16 Columbus himself, for instance, seemed to think maps were endowed with a force that transcended mere matters of geography. They stoked his imagination, inspired the flights of fancy that made his great discovery possible. The sixteenth-century chronicler Bartolomé de Las Casas wrote that when Columbus gained access to a map from the Florentine scientist Paolo del Pozzo Toscanelli it “set [his] mind ablaze.”17 Likewise, Ferdinand Columbus reported that after another acquisition of sea charts, his father’s passion was “still more inflamed.”18 A cartographer and dealer himself, Columbus drew maps, dreamed maps, meditated upon maps, listened to maps, acquired them at every opportunity (sometimes under very questionable circumstances). Even in 1492, after sailing into the unknown, far past the point where maps would be of any practical use to him, he continued to pore over them, fingering their edges the way a child might rub the satin lining of a blanket, as if their mere presence could ward off danger and make land appear on the horizon. I have no hesitation about labeling Christopher Columbus a cartomaniac.
In the centuries that followed his discovery, maps became ever more scientific and less whimsical. Even so, people continued to be drawn to them for reasons that had nothing to do with utility. In 1570, for example, John Dee, the Elizabethan mathematician and mystic, wrote this about why people collect maps:
Some, to beautify their Halls, Parlors, Chambers, Galeries, Studies, or Libraries with, some other for their own journeys directing into far lands, or to understand other men’s travels, liketh, loveth, getteth, and useth, Maps, Charts and Geographical Globes…
But what is behind the liketh and the loveth, let alone the getteth and the useth?19 What is the specific allure of maps, especially old maps? Why are some people drawn to maps instead of, say, books, porcelain, beer cans, dolls, or any of a million other objects they might collect?
When I put such questions to Muensterberger, he said the map lovers he has met tend to come from broken homes or families that have moved around a good deal. They throw themselves into their hobby, at least in part, as a way to connect with a parent or to ground themselves in a more permanent sense of place. “Looking for maps, especially antique maps,” he told me, “is really looking for the past—Where do I come from? Who were my ancestors?—and, symbolically, finding security.”
Harriette Kaley, a Manhattan clinical psychologist and psychoanalyst who has also studied the phenomenon of collecting, offered a similar view. “Analysts refer to a person’s early childhood as his or her prehistory,” said Kaley, herself a minor map enthusiast. “And in fact, people remember that period of their lives as a kind of fantasy, because an adult is unable to recapture the way his or her thought process worked as a child. For each of us, our early life seems like the distant past, and in that sense it’s like an ancient land—far-off, foreign, and unknown. It occurred to me that it’s not unlike the way fairy tales begin: ‘Once upon a time in a faraway place.’ And I think there must be something in map collecting that taps into that. In some sense, old maps reach back into a part of life that you can’t quite grasp, and give you a sense of where you’ve come from. They give you a feeling of being rooted.”
Does any of this help explain the actions of our Antihero with a Thousand Faces, Gilbert Bland? His critics would probably say no. Most of those who came in contact with him told me that, in retrospect, they believed his interest in maps was never sincere; his only real passion was for a good scam. This view was somewhat bolstered by Bland himself, who reportedly told the FBI he had happened upon maps by accident. Nonetheless, I tend to agree with Joseph Campbell: “As Freud has shown, blunders are not the merest chance.20 They are the result of suppressed desires and conflicts. They are ripples on the surface of life, produced by unsuspected springs. And these may be very deep—as deep as the soul itself. The blunder may amount to the opening of a destiny.”
Of all the criminal enterprises a would-be felon might select, I can’t believe Bland chose map theft entirely on its merits as a racket. I won’t presume to guess what “suppressed desires and conflicts” might have drawn Bland to maps, other than to note that his somewhat rootless childhood seems to fit a general pattern for cartographic connoisseurs as outlined by Muensterberger. And while he was not, strictly speaking, a collector, he did seem to exhibit the behavior of an obsessive aficionado. When I look through the entries of his notebook, for instance, I see someone who operates with the single-minded determination of a hunter. Each new map is like an elusive quarry, meticulously stalked down, first on the Internet and then in the library itself. The hunt is full of danger (Can’t these people leave? I can’t do it now. OK now), but it is this very risk, perhaps, that makes the eventual conquest so exhilarating (These 2 are done now. Thank God!). And by the end the thrill seems to have become addictive—so addictive that it’s almost as if one’s whole life hinges on the next conquest (The Bowen Atlas—of all the bad luck—What is going on here. Am I not going to get these Bowens? What [will] become of me?). Which brings us back to the tale of the Unknown Pilot. It turns out that there’s a second version of the legend, one that offers a different lesson about the allure of maps. In this one the sailor does not die of natural causes. In this one Christopher Columbus bullies the man into supplying him with the map—then kills him to keep the secret all to himself. In this one the great discoverer becomes a common criminal.
I ONCE DABBLED IN A SORT OF MAP COLLECTING MYSELF. When I was twenty-five years old I covered the bedroom walls of my Chicago apartment with street maps of every place I had ever called home, a less than cosmopolitan list that, in addition to the Windy City, included the Illinois burgs of Downers Grove, Carbondale, Champaign-Urbana, and Springfield, as well as Washington, D.C., and Manchester, New Hampshire. I can’t say for certain what prompted me to do this. Perhaps I was simply looking back at my childhood through those maps, aware that, with my father in failing health, the full weight of adult life’s realities and responsibilities would soon be upon me. They were still on the walls when he died, but fate soon put an end to the collection. An arsonist set fire to the building, leaving the apartment in ruins. (I was lucky—in more ways than one—to be spending the night elsewhere.) I learned a lot from that blaze. It taught me that I could do without my possessions just fine, but I could not do without my friends and family. It also reminded me to look forward instead of dwelling on the past. I never retrieved those maps from the wreckage but left them hanging there, clouded with soot, like so many faded memories.
Nor was I seriously tempted, in all the time I spent working on this book, to purchase an antique map. Having reproductions of them in books was enough for me; unlike Mr. Atlas, I did not need direct contact. The truth is, I have never done much collecting at all. A few baseball cards as a kid, some 1950s-era slide projectors as an adult—but even these were halfhearted pursuits, inspired more by boredom than by any overriding passion. I always told myself that I was free from the compulsion.
I was wrong. That fact hit me like a bus during the afternoon I spent sitting on Werner Muensterberger’s sofa in Manhattan. The elderly psychoanalyst was holding forth on the relationship between collecting and hunting when it suddenly occurred to me that, without really noticing it, I had devoted years of my life to building a collection, and a very extensive one at that. It was sitting on the shelves of my office back in Chicago, neatly displayed in a growing series of three-hole binders. Gilbert Bland’s birth, marriage, and divorce records. Gilbert Bland’s military documents. Gilbert Bland’s criminal records. Transcripts from his trials. Gilbert Bland’s prison correspondence. Documents related to his business and real estate dealings. Forms from his wife’s
bankruptcy case. A copy of the notebook Gilbert Bland left at the Peabody Library. Photographs of the maps he stole. Hundreds of pages of testimony from those who came in contact with him. I had never spent so much time, effort, or money acquiring any group of objects in my life.
All journalists keep records—but these scraps of paper had become much more than that. I realized that they were my amulets, my fetishes. Every time some new bit of Blandabilia arrived in the mail or turned up in an archive, I would rush to examine it with a feeling of giddy anticipation, sure that it would fill in some key corner of the map I was trying to create. Often it did just that—but invariably it would also raise new questions, so that as one blank space was filled another would open up, my map becoming simultaneously larger and smaller, Bland both more and less real. Excitement would then give way to disappointment—but just as quickly I would think of some new document or witness that, if tracked down, might provide just the right piece for the puzzle. And so the process would begin again, and I would set out in search of yet another discovery.
But in “taking off the cover,” I sometimes saw more than I wanted to see. Prying into other people’s lives is a necessary, if unpleasant, part of a reporter’s job. In this case, however, it seemed even more disagreeable than usual. Not that I felt particularly sorry for Bland. His own actions had transformed him into a public figure, and, whether he liked it or not, public figures merit public scrutiny. Yet, because of a long-ago tragedy in my own family, I knew that the map thief would not be the only one to suffer. During the Great Depression my grandfather was sent to prison for bank embezzlement—a traumatizing event that left lasting scars on my mother’s psyche and indirectly shaped my own personality. This incident, still a touchy subject in my family, assumed an increasingly central place in my thoughts as the investigation progressed.
Perhaps because of this, I felt particularly uncomfortable delving into matters that affected Bland’s wife and children. When, for instance, one of Bland’s daughters by his first marriage agreed to speak with me after much hesitation, the conversation turned out to be an awkward one for both of us. Heather Bland knew very little about her father, and the few memories she did recount were mostly unpleasant. I ended up learning more about her pain than I did about his life—and, though I was grateful to her, I was also relieved when our conversation concluded. I learned a similar lesson once in Florida. I was talking to people who lived on Bland’s street, trying to add one more precious little piece to my collection, when a neighbor stopped me and pointed to a group of children playing with skateboards at the end of the block. “One of those kids is his,” the man said sternly. “Is it really so important for you to be here right now?” I thought about it for a second, shook my head no, then got into my car and drove off.
Yet as unpleasant as such incidents could be, they were not the creepiest aspect of my pursuit. I simply cannot explain how surreal it was to spend years tracking down a man I’d never met, how disconcerting it felt to know someone so well and yet not know him at all. At first, Bland had seemed to me an exotic and intriguing figure—but, as is often the case with familiarity, the more I learned about him, the less interesting he became. He was, I ultimately determined, a fairly unexceptional person who had happened to commit a fascinating crime. At some point I realized he was not even someone I would normally want to know. But even that did not stop me from seeking him out. I had to face the fact that my search had become a compulsion—not so different from the one that lured Bland into those rare books rooms, perhaps, or the one that Rudyard Kipling described in his 1898 poem “The Explorer”:
“Something hidden.21 Go and find it. Go and look
behind the Ranges—
“Something lost behind the Ranges. Lost and waiting for you. Go!”
Then one day I came to an even more disturbing realization—that my identity and the map thief’s were somehow starting to converge, that he had taken up permanent residence on the edges of my consciousness, a cipher on which I was projecting musings and misgivings and fears that had nothing to do with the case. And at that moment I understood that I was no longer searching only for the map thief. My quest had gone beyond Bland: I was now hunting down some enigmatic citizen of my own psyche, a persona I did not know and did not particularly look forward to meeting. There seemed to be no going back, however. Remembering what Aldous Huxley had written about what lurks in “the antipodes of the mind,” I sensed that I was on a collision course with one of those “strange psychological creatures leading an autonomous existence according to the law of their own being.” It was one discovery, I feared, that would bring no joy at all.
DETAIL FROM HERMAN MOLL’S 1719 MAP OF NORTH AMERICA, DEPICTING CALIFORNIA AS AN ISLAND.
CHAPTER 11
The Island of Lost Maps
THE HISTORY OF CARTOGRAPHY IS FULL OF peculiar islands. One of the items Gilbert Bland stole from the University of Virginia, for example, is the cartographer Herman Moll’s eighteenth-century map of North America. It shows a continent that looks a lot like the one we now inhabit, except for one striking detail. Running parallel to the West Coast all the way from what is now Canada to Mexico is a sprawling independent landmass—a famous and widely repeated cartographic miscalculation known as the Island of California. Other charts contain isles even more bizarre. A twelfth-century map by the Arab geographer al-Idrīsī shows El Wakwak, an island said to be filled with trees whose fruits, shaped like the heads of women, continually cry out the meaningless chant “Wak-Wak.”1 The famous Hereford mappa mundi, drawn around 1300, has an isle on which “sirens abound,” according to the accompanying text, while another world map of the period contains an island inhabited by “men who murdered their fathers.”23 The Catalan Atlas, made around 1375, shows one isle that “produces all crops and all fruits without any need to sow or plant” and a second where “there are trees that yield birds as other trees yield fruits.”45 Martin Behaim’s history-making globe of 1492 shows the Islands of the Satyrs, whose residents “have tails like animals,” as well as a pair of Indian Ocean landmarks named Masculina and Feminea.6 “One of these islands [is] inhabited by men only the other by women only, who [meet] once a year,” reads the legend.7 Even the great Ortelius published a map in 1570 that depicts several completely mythical islands in the North Atlantic, including Drogeo, purported to be inhabited by cannibals; Icaria, whose king was said to be a direct descendant of Daedalus; and Saint Brendan, where the legendary Irishman is said to have brought a dead giant back to life.8
From the earliest of times islands have had a special place in the human imagination. So close to our own world yet so out of reach, they have been the landscapes where no life-form was unimaginable, no occurrence impossible. Homer spattered The Odyssey’s oceans with isles such as Aeaea, where the sorceress Circe transformed men into pigs; Cyclopes Island, where one-eyed giants dined on human flesh; and Lotus-land, where visitors, having consumed the local flora, forgot their friends and lost all desire to return to their native lands. Other classical writers described islands on which those favored by the gods lived untouched by sorrow: Hesiod and Pindar called these the Isles of the Blessed, while Plato provided the first written account of Atlantis, the splendrous island that disappeared into the ocean. Celtic myth was full of enchanted outcroppings—islands of laughter, islands “full of men agrieving and lamenting,” islands of women, islands shared by the living and the dead, islands where time stood still, and islands that could be seen only by the elect, rising out of the sea for one adventurer and vanishing back into the depths for another.9 Arthurian legend told of Avalon, a paradisal island inhabited by nine sorceresses, where the great king was taken after being mortally wounded. The Arabian Nights described one island that was home to “a bird of monstrous size called the roc, which fed its young on elephants,” and another that was inhabited by the Old Man of the Sea, a huge beast that enslaved visitors.10 The Tantric books of medieval and modern India told of an Island of Jewels, where a god
dess lived in a grove of wish-fulfilling trees.11 Thomas More put Utopia fifteen miles from the coast of the New World. Shakespeare set The Tempest on an island “full of noises, sounds and sweet airs,” ruled by a noble magician.12 Native American island legends included the tale of Maushope, a giant on Martha’s Vineyard, who pulled whales from the sea with his bare hands and ate them raw.13 J. M. Barrie set Peter Pan on the Never Land, an isle inhabited by lost children, “where all the four seasons may pass while you are filling a jug at the well.”14 The film director Merian C. Cooper dreamed up an island “way west of Sumatra,” then populated it with huge lizards and a petulant primate named King Kong.15 And while such enchanted islands no longer can be found on maps, they continue to dot the dark seas of our collective unconscious. It was no coincidence, for instance, that, when Michael Crichton needed a setting for his modern-day dinosaur epic Jurassic Park, he chose a volcanic seamount whose “forested slopes were wreathed in fog, giving the island a mysterious appearance.”16
Now let me tell you about another wondrous isle, one I saw with my own eyes. Like some evanescent island of legend, this one was elusive. Had you been with me when I first beheld it, you might not have noticed an island at all—just a mound of plastic bags, file folders, a zip-up art portfolio, and a U-Haul moving box, sitting in the middle of a vast conference table at the FBI office in Richmond, Virginia. In my eyes, however, it was a strange, sad world unto itself, full of marvels. All its inhabitants were exiles: Indians, Eskimos, cossacks, conquistadors, emperors, presidents, chieftains, queens, kings, soldiers, sailors, monsters, mermaids, serpents, seals, whales, lions, beavers, elephants, polar bears, fire-breathing horses, gods, and angels. As I approached its shores, they all seemed to be speaking to me at once, telling a million different stories in a thousand different tongues—tales of oceans crossed and shorelines glimpsed, of new worlds explored and old orthodoxies exploded, of empires gained and lost, of wars waged and genocides committed and peoples enslaved, of forests felled and cities built and borders drawn and railways laid and prairies cleared. They were chanting the whole history of the last five hundred years, the inhabitants of that tiny island, but they were also reciting another tale, one about how history can be untold with a few silent strokes of a razor blade. I had been seeking this place almost since my journey began. Now here it was, before me at last: the Island of Lost Maps.