To get there, Smiley climbed a marble stairway from the main reading room and threaded his way through a warren of rooms with random, almost bizarre exhibits—including a room full of dioramas depicting three-dimensional versions of classical paintings and another re-creating the office of a former Boston Symphony Orchestra conductor. He checked his coat and briefcase—but left on his blazer—and greeted the librarians warmly, asking about their families and telling them about the trips he took to Europe and the stores he was building in Maine. Often, he dropped references to the collection he’d helped build for “Mr. Leventhal.” Few people ever requested the maps in the department, much less dealers of Smiley’s stature, so they were eager to help. Once inside, Smiley filled out call slip after call slip. He was so well-known by staff, he barely included his name and address, writing only “SMILEY MA” in all capital letters.
The BPL’s rare-books reading room wasn’t large, but it did have one drawback for efficient monitoring—a series of several pillars that blocked some tables from the view of the curator’s desk. And it was attractive to Smiley for another reason. Unlike the Sterling, which carried mostly single-sheet maps, many of the BPL’s maps were contained in books, which were often poorly cataloged, with little indication of the specific maps they contained. Twice in 2003—once on January 14 and once on May 12—he checked out a copy of the Speculum Orbis Terrarum by Cornelius de Jode, whose father, Gerard, had fruitlessly battled rival Abraham Ortelius to produce the first atlas. Cornelius had carried on his father’s legacy with a new edition of his atlas in 1593 but was ultimately no more successful at breaking Ortelius’s monopoly, making the book extremely rare.
On one of those two days, Smiley opened the book’s stiff, bone-colored parchment cover, which had been bowed and warped by centuries of moisture. He flipped to the book’s highlight, a double-hemisphere world map, showing the Northern and Southern Hemispheres in conjoined circles as viewed from both poles (Figure E). Most double-hemisphere maps depict the Eastern and Western Hemispheres, making the map as unusual as it was beautiful. Perhaps de Jode was responding to the interest in searching for a Northwest Passage to hasten travel to Asia. His map shows a clear open sea route above North America, only a couple of inches from Holland to China, tantalizingly short compared to the vast distances shown on a Mercator projection.
Smiley took in the map’s coastlines and calligraphy, waiting for his moment. Perhaps he sat at a table behind one of the pillars; or perhaps he stood at the card catalog with his back to the monitor; or maybe he just waited for a time when the desk was left unattended. Whatever the case, he found a moment to separate the map from its binding. The next map in the atlas, one of the earliest views of North America, was nearly as spectacular. It showed a rugged continent with tall, shaded mountains, again with a clear blue passage at its top. Smiley took that one too.
In the winter and spring of 2003, Smiley made at least a half-dozen trips to the BPL to view the maps in its books. While the Dutch were producing their gorgeous seventeenth-century world atlases, the French and English were still in the infancy of their exploration of North America. The main form of propaganda they used to stake their claims were travel narratives that detailed the adventures of explorers and the natural resources of the land. John Smith excelled at the genre with his books about Virginia and New England, but he was not the only explorer writing travelogues.
The most successful explorer of his time was Samuel de Champlain, a Frenchman who first ventured into American waters in 1603. He returned for twenty voyages in all, the “single most important factor” in the establishment of a French foothold in North America, according to map dealer and historian Philip Burden. Like many explorers, Champlain set out initially to find a Northwest Passage—but stumbled across the densely forested wilderness of lakes and rivers along the St. Lawrence instead. He founded Quebec and Montreal and set about exploiting the land for lumber and furs.
Champlain was also the first person to use scientific survey methods to map the New World. His first map appears in his 1613 book Les Voyages du Sieur de Champlain, which details the riches he found. His “Carte de Nouvelle France” is considered the mother map of Canada, preparing the region for colonization. Like John Smith, he used artistic license in forecasting the future, depicting Quebec as a castle flying the French flag, even though no more than two hundred people lived there in his lifetime.
Champlain also included another, smaller map of New France in the book, showing the most recent expeditions by English explorers. Both maps exist now in only a handful of copies, making them extremely valuable. At the time Smiley looked at Boston’s copy of Les Voyages on January 20, 2003, neither had come up for auction in more than three decades. When one finally did appear at Sotheby’s five years later in 2008, it sold for $250,000. A year later, a copy sold at a Bloomsbury auction for a staggering $750,000.
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A WEEK AFTER examining the Champlain book, on January 28, 2003, Smiley requested a ten-volume set of writings by Theodor de Bry, a Flemish cartographer who worked in Antwerp, London, and Frankfurt in the late sixteenth century. De Bry’s work catalogs nothing less than all the voyages of discovery around the world. While in London, he acquired a manuscript map drawn by a French protestant named Jacques Le Moyne, who was one of the only survivors of a Spanish massacre of an early French settlement in Florida. De Bry reproduced the map in his work, depicting a flattened peninsula in the shape of a saucepan, beneath the edge of a vast inland lake that was supposed to cover the area around the modern-day Carolinas. The image became the dominant depiction of Florida for a century after Jodocus Hondius used the map in his editions of Mercator’s atlas (and much later, a favorite for collectors at the Miami International Map Fair).
Another seminal map de Bry included was a map of Virginia by English settler John White, governor of the ill-fated Roanoke colony. The colony was founded by Sir Walter Raleigh before the settlement of Jamestown; during White’s time there, he produced an accurate map of the area, bringing it back to London in 1587 just as de Bry was looking for material. No sooner did he arrive, however, than the Spanish Armada blockaded the English coast. England’s eventual defeat of the Spanish fleet helped ensure English dominance of the oceans for centuries. But for White it was little consolation. By the time he returned to his colony in 1590, all traces of it had disappeared, an enduring mystery to this day. Only the map, now included in de Bry’s book, survived.
De Bry worked in London during a feverish time for English exploration. Interest in the New World had been sparked by the writings of Richard Hakluyt, a geographer whose two books, Divers Voyages Touching the Discoverie of America and the Islands Adjacent (1582) and The Principall Navigations: Voiages and Discoveries of the English Nation (1589), recounted the travels of early explorers such as John Cabot. Hakluyt’s books, in turn, inspired and supported a generation of Elizabethan sea dogs including Sir Francis Drake and Sir Walter Raleigh to set sail in search of adventure and fame.
Hakluyt’s papers were inherited by Samuel Purchas, a minister from a seaside vicarage with an insatiable appetite for collecting stories of captains and explorers. In 1625, he combined them with his own research into a book entitled Hakluytus Posthumus, or Purchas His Pilgrimes. Smiley requested the BPL’s copy of the work three times: on July 27, 2003; January 14, 2004; and September 14, 2004. Inside, Purchas included a number of important maps, including a reprint of John Smith’s map of Virginia; a map of New Scotland by Sir William Alexander, an English lord granted the rights to colonize the region north of New England; and a map of North America by Henry Briggs (Figure N).
Briggs’s map was the first to accurately illustrate the discoveries of explorer Henry Hudson, including Hudson’s Bay. But it is better known for its role in propagating one of the most notorious myths in cartography: the island of California. For a century after its discovery in the early 1500s, the West Coast of North America appeared on maps by
Mercator, Ortelius, and others much as it does now. Almost out of nowhere, Henry Briggs’s map shows a dramatically different image—a triangular wedge broken off from the edge of the continent, in almost the same size and shape as the modern-day state. To modern eyes, it’s as if the Big One has finally arrived—breaking the land along the San Andreas Fault to be cast adrift in the Pacific.
The error most likely has its origins in a Spanish expedition in the 1590s in which a friar boldly combined the Gulf of California with a purported inland sea to the north. Soon after, a Dutch ship supposedly captured the map, bringing it to Amsterdam. It’s unclear how Briggs, a prominent English astronomer, acquired it, but he apparently used it to create his own manuscript map in 1622, which became the basis for the map in Purchas’s book.
After that, the misrepresentation spread like a virus. Prominent English cartographer John Speed picked up the change in 1626, and from there it crossed the channel to all the Dutch giants, including Hondius, Jansson, and Blaeu. English and French mapmakers followed suit; John Seller reproduced the mistake in at least a half dozen of his sea charts. The difficulty of exploring the area perpetuated the myth. Spanish galleons bypassed the fog-shrouded cliffs on their way from the Philippines to South America, uninterested in risking their cargoes in pointless cartographic surveys.
Finally, in 1698, the inaccuracy was corrected when Jesuit friar Eusebio Kino traveled overland from California to Mexico, charting the terrain. But mapmakers persisted in creating an islanded California for another half century. Finally, Spanish king Ferdinand VI had to outlaw the practice with a royal decree in 1747 that stated simply, “California is not an island.”
Of course, the persistence of the mistake has made maps showing the island of California a favorite among state residents. Depending on whether you are a California sympathizer or a California detractor, it can be seen as either a cheeky celebration of the state’s proud otherness, or a punishment for its profligate ways. The sheer number of maps that feature the error—more than 150 different maps with thousands of individual copies—ensure plenty of examples to satisfy even casual Californian map lovers. But for the serious collector, the original Briggs map is most coveted, commanding prices of up to $25,000—a fact Smiley well knew when he ripped the BPL’s copy out of Purchas’s book.
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SMILEY SOLD HIS MAPS to his network of dealers, including Newman, Arkway, and London map dealer Philip Burden. Burden literally wrote the book on North American exploration, The Mapping of North America, in the mid-1990s, and he had consulted with Smiley during his research. Burden started buying from him after Smiley bounced a check for something he purchased. “Let me make it up to you,” Smiley told him. “Let me sell you a few things.” In February 2003, Smiley sold Burden a copy of the Le Moyne map of Florida from the de Bry book. The following year, he sold Arkway a copy of the White map of Virginia from the same volume, along with a copy of the John Smith map of Virginia from Purchas His Pilgrimes. Smiley sold other maps directly to collectors, including a sea chart of Chesepeake Bay by English mapmaker Sir Robert Dudley, which he sold to New York bond trader Bob Gordon for $19,000 (Figure 13).
Dudley is one of the most colorful characters in all of cartography. Born in 1574, he was the son of Robert Dudley, the Earl of Leicester, and Douglas, Lady Sheffield. His father was the favorite courtier of Queen Elizabeth and the subject of endless “did they or didn’t they” rumors from Elizabethan times to the present. Perhaps out of fear of the queen’s jealousy, he hid his relationship with Douglas, revealing it only when she gave birth to their child. Elizabeth forgave his dalliance, but he knew naming Robert his heir would be too much.
Instead, Dudley was sent to live with his cousin. He grew up with all the trappings of a young English lord but, as an illegitimate child, had none of the prestige. Dudley sought to prove himself, studying at Oxford and excelling in geography and nautical science. The sea was to young men in sixteenth-century England what space was for boys and girls in twentieth-century America—the new frontier, full of possibility and the promise of adventure. In 1594, Dudley set out to win glory for himself, planning a joint expedition with Walter Raleigh in search of El Dorado, the mythical city of gold.
When Raleigh couldn’t get his ships together in time, Dudley went alone, earning a lifelong enemy in the process. On the voyage, Dudley explored the mouth of the Orinoco River and claimed Trinidad for the queen. Two years later, when England attacked Spain, he commanded a ship in the successful sacking of Cádiz, for which he received a knighthood.
His promising career came to an abrupt halt, however, after Elizabeth died in 1603. Taking advantage of the opportunity, Dudley sued to have his father’s titles reinstated by proving his father and mother had been legally married when he was born. The trial went badly, however, when his mother and other witnesses gave conflicting testimony. Dudley’s rivals, including Raleigh, pressed their advantage, accusing Dudley of bribery. The new king, James I, meanwhile, came out publicly favoring Dudley’s cousin, Sir Philip Sidney, for his father’s titles. It was no surprise to anyone when the verdict came out against Dudley.
Dejected and outraged, Dudley left England on July 2, 1605, ostensibly for a three-month trip to the continent. Soon after he’d gone, however, news broke that he had left his wife and four daughters to run away with a nineteen-year-old handmaiden to the queen who had been disguised as a pageboy. Once in France, they scandalized English society by declaring themselves Catholics to avoid extradition. Finally, the celebrity couple arrived at their real destination: Florence.
The city had declined since its days as the center of the humanist revolution. But the Medici grand duke Ferdinando I still presided over a city famed for art and culture and had bigger plans to consolidate his control over the Tuscan coast. Dudley went to work in his service, applying his knowledge of shipbuilding and navigation to build a new navy to defeat the pirates of the Barbary Coast, and developing the coastal city of Livorno (Leghorn) into a modern port.
But he never gave up his fight to see his titles restored. As his fame grew, so did the calls back home to restore his earldom. Finally, in 1644, James’s son Charles I wrote a proclamation declaring that the truth of Dudley’s birth had been hidden from his father, and restoring Dudley’s titles. The gesture was enough for Dudley, who never returned to claim them, dying in his adopted city of Florence in 1649.
Before his death, however, he bestowed one last honor on his native country: a sea atlas called the Dell’Arcano del Mare. Dudley’s ambitions exceeded his experiences; he had taken only one voyage of exploration himself. The book, whose title means “Secrets of the sea,” was nothing short of a comprehensive atlas of every known coastline on the planet, a feat not even the Dutch had attempted. At the time, the English hadn’t even produced a sea atlas of England.
As Dudley collected charts from explorers and navigators, he applied another revolutionary twist: He rendered each of them on a Mercator projection—something that wasn’t consistently applied by cartographers for another fifty years. Though the English didn’t realize it for years, the book is a valuable missing link between the early maps in books by the likes of Hakluyt, Purchas, and Smith, and the later sea charts of Seller, Thornton, and other cartographers of the Thames School.
Despite some inaccuracies in Dudley’s maps due to faulty source material, the atlas is a stunning work of art. Dudley gave his manuscripts to a young Florentine engraver who spent twelve years and used five thousand pounds of copper to reproduce them. He copied them in a delicate, spidery hand, transcribing the Italian words with a fine calligraphy adorned with loops and pirouettes. The overall effect is breathtaking, making Dudley’s charts highly desired collector’s items today.
Smiley checked out the BPL’s copy, a two-foot-high tome with a brown leather cover, on January 14, 2003, May 12, 2003, and again on July 19, 2004. On one of those dates, he flipped through the feather-light pages until he
came to the maps of the Americas. In addition to several general charts of the East Coast, Dudley had produced several smaller-scale charts: one chart of New England and the New Netherlands based largely on Dutch maps of Blaeu; one of Chesapeake Bay; and one of southern Virginia, both drawn from the maps of John White and John Smith. Smiley slipped a razor down the length of the binding, the blade curving slightly along the grain of the paper as it sliced through all three sheets at once.
Chapter 10
CAUGHT!
FIGURE 14 JOHN MELISH. “MAP OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA.” PHILADELPHIA, 1816.
2004–2005
EVENTUALLY FOR SMILEY the stealing just became habitual. “I know this stuff really, really well,” he told me. “I know it without having to think about it which maps would be easy to sell. I didn’t go looking for these things, but I saw the opportunities, and I couldn’t walk away from it.” Strangely, he never felt much anxiety about walking out with maps in his pockets. If anyone asked, it was perfectly reasonable for him to be carrying old maps. How could anyone know that he didn’t walk in with them?
When he wasn’t in the libraries, he rarely thought about what he was doing. Somehow, he could compartmentalize and rationalize the thefts. “The libraries weren’t using these things, and I’m building collections where they are going to be used,” he told me. People were going to look at them every day on their walls; they were going to compare maps and make new connections about the world. Besides, hadn’t he been invaluable in helping libraries build their collections?
That conviction became stronger in 2003, when Norman Leventhal announced that he was donating money to create a new center at the BPL to house the library’s map collection—and was looking for a new home for his own collection too, with the library as the presumed beneficiary. A celebration that November drew six hundred of the city’s businessmen and socialites, who ate at private dinner parties around Back Bay and Beacon Hill and then walked to the library for a reception of drinks, dessert, and dancing. Leventhal insisted Smiley be invited to the most important dinner, held at the library for a select group of map scholars and donors. Smiley sat at a table in the back, looking miserable. “He did not exhibit the old kind of arrogance,” remembered Alex Krieger.
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