Maphead: Charting the Wide, Weird World of Geography Wonks (15 page)

It was a Herculean task, the Indian survey. This kind of triangulation is difficult enough if you’re mapping, say, Devonshire. It’s almost inconceivable on a subcontinent of dense jungles and the world’s
highest mountains,
^*
where torrential rains might halt mapping for months at a time and you have to constantly replace the surveyors killed by malaria. Where there were no easily visible landmarks to sight to or from, rickety bamboo scaffolds would be built, and many of the flagmen stationed atop them
fell to their deaths
.
James Rennell
, the “father of Indian geography,” was almost killed on the Bhutanese border in 1776 when his small party of sepoys was attacked by hundreds of Sannyassa fakirs, who had been terrorizing local villages. Armed only with a cutlass, Rennell fought off two lines of the bandits and crawled back to the British camp, bleeding copiously from at least five sword wounds, one more than a foot long. The nearest doctor was three hundred miles away, but Rennell somehow clung to life, though he was never the same after surviving the attack. Even more remarkable is the story of
Nain Singh
, the Bhotian schoolteacher who spent the better part of ten years exploring the Himalayan “roof of the world” for the British. Tibet was closed to Westerners under penalty of death, but Singh was able to smuggle himself across the border and complete the five-hundred-mile trek to Lhasa, where he met the Dalai Lama himself. Singh’s Buddhist prayer wheel concealed a hidden compartment for notes and a compass; his rosary had been doctored so he could use the beads to count his paces. At every place he stopped, he would secretly use his sextant to determine latitude and boil a pot of water to measure altitude. Though he received only twenty rupees a month for his pains, his measurements formed the basis for the only maps of Tibet available for the next fifty years. In 1877, the Royal Geographical Society awarded him its prestigious Victoria Medal “for having added a greater amount to our positive knowledge of the map of Asia than any individual of our time.”
^†

Today, collectors might be the only people who can look at a map and still see the heroism, the sacrifice—sometimes the lifeblood—that went into the drawing of its contours. There’s no better place than the Royal Geographical Society to consider the human face of mapmaking. As I stand in the society’s main hall, John Singer Sargent’s portrait of Lord Curzon, Asian explorer and viceroy of India, considers me coolly from its post above the great marble fireplace. Behind me is an intricate scale model of the
Discovery,
one of the last three-masted wooden ships ever built in Britain, which in 1901 took Scott and Shackleton to Antarctica, a continent from which, in the end, neither would return alive. To my right is an odd oil painting of Richard Francis Burton, spotlit in the dark, huddled under a blanket on a dirt floor. The setting might be a Mecca alley or a prison cell, but either way, as Burton stares warily out at the viewer, he gives the impression that he’d rather be somewhere else entirely.

There’s a funny disconnect between the rugged adventurers painted in oils here and the meek little men walking through the halls and poking through their maps. But then I reconsider: is the divide really all that wide? All the sweaty tropical valor of the Indian surveys was performed in the service of trigonometry, of all things—it’s hard to get nerdier than that. Eratosthenes, the mapmaker who was the first man to accurately measure the size of the Earth, was a
librarian
. The great mariners of the Age of Exploration, for all their naval derring-do, never would have left home if they hadn’t been map geeks as well: Columbus etched maps in his brother’s Lisbon print shop (“
God had endowed
me with ingenuity and manual skill in designing spheres, and inscribing upon them in the proper places cities, rivers, and mountains, isles, and ports,” he once wrote the king of Spain), and
Vespucci was a map collector
from his youth. We think of trail-blazing as a tough, brawny pursuit, but there’s something solitary and nerdish at the heart of it. What is exploration if not the urge to go somewhere where there’s no one else around—where no one, in fact, has
ever
been?

On the wall next to Lord Curzon, Mindy points out a photograph of the
current
president of the Royal Geographical Society. “Is that a joke?” she asks incredulously. It’s none other than Monty Python’s
Michael
Palin
—who, I explain to Mindy, has become a respected globetrotter and travel documentarian in recent years. He’s so influential that the travel industry speaks of a “Palin effect,” a sudden influx of tourists pouring into any destination he features on his TV programs. I guess that seals the deal regarding the nerd/explorer overlap: if a geek icon like Monty Python can take over the Royal Geographical Society, then exploration isn’t just for jocks and probably never was. But Mindy can’t stop laughing at the idea of “K-K-K-Ken” from
A Fish Called Wanda
having been placed in charge of British geography. I guess I can see her point; it would be like an Englishman coming to the United States only to find that William Shatner runs NASA now.

The now-valuable maps of the Age of Discovery made the world a much bigger place, but the world of map collecting itself is small. “It is a tiny subculture,” says the New York dealer Henry Taliaferro. “I’m an expert in rare maps, but saying you’re the greatest expert in rare maps is like saying you’re the best ballet dancer in Galveston, Texas.” It’s an insular, incestuous world where everyone knows everyone else. Dealers sell maps to collectors but might buy them back later when a collector moves on or decides to refine his or her collection, and then sell them again to someone else. (Many of the best maps on display here today are on consignment from private collectors looking to sell.) Dealers sell to museums and libraries as well—Nikolaus Struck, a map dealer here from Berlin, tells me he makes most of his living selling to museum curators. This is why the year’s big map fairs—London, Miami, Paris—are such important events in the trade: they’re symposia as well as marketplaces, chances for colleagues to meet up and swap stories. “In the evening we go out together, eat and drink,” says Massimo De Martini.

But that cozy world is changing. “The one thing that’s transformed everything is the Internet,” says Taliaferro’s partner, Paul Cohen. “Before, the dealers had special knowledge.” In fact, many dealers could make a living as trusted tastemakers, shepherding a small but elite clientele through the confusing world of copperplates and cartouches. Today the balance of power has swung to the collector: I can
go online and comparison-shop the catalogs of dozens of antiquarians. There are now price guides and standardized condition guides. It’s hard to see this wider spread of information as a problem, but for the dealers, accustomed to their position as gatekeepers of all map lore, it’s been a bitter pill to swallow. “Collectors used to be loyal,” sighs Cohen.

That exclusivity made the rare-map world one of cliquish secrecy, and old habits die hard, as I learn every time I tell someone in the trade that I’m working on a book about maps. Stories become as vague as the South American coastline on a Sebastian Münster map; lips tighten into a single etched line of latitude. Dealers working with wealthy collectors don’t want rival sellers finding out about their golden-egg-laying clients and vice versa. Collectors don’t want their personal list of Holy Grails to be widely known, for fear they’ll be quoted higher prices when one comes up for sale. They don’t even want you to know what they already own, and maybe I wouldn’t either, if I had pieces of vellum that each cost more than my first house hanging in my den. Especially if they weren’t all insured. “It’s almost like the confidential relationship between a psychiatrist and a patient,” Cohen explains in all seriousness. “I’m limited in what I can say, like someone who’s been indicted of a crime.”

This reticence surprises me at first; in my experience, the main conversational problem with hobbyists is getting them to
shut up
about their odd pastime. But map knowledge has always been guarded with great secrecy.
In 1504, King Manuel I
of Portugal declared that anyone leaving his kingdom with a single Portuguese map would receive the death penalty. He did so for the same reason that map dealers keep mum about their clients today: to protect a trade monopoly. The geopolitical equivalent of the space race at that time was a “spice race” for Asian cinnamon, pepper, and nutmeg, and Vasco da Gama had just given Portugal a crucial edge by charting a sea route to India. Keeping Spain in the dark about his discoveries was a crucial matter of national security. Likewise, until the dawn of glasnost in 1988, the KGB was charged with making sure that essentially every detail of every publicly available map of the Soviet Union was wrong. “
Almost everything was changed
,” said chief mapmaker Viktor Yashchenko. “On the tourist map of Moscow, only the contours of the capital are
accurate.” Visitors to the city would invariably rely upon the CIA’s Moscow map, the only one that actually got the streets right.

You might assume that falsified maps are a Cold War relic that could never survive in the age of satellite photography, but you’d be wrong. For most of the decade my family lived in Seoul, we lived less than a mile from Yongsan Garrison, the largest U.S. military installation on the Korean Peninsula. Yongsan is a bustling miniature city, home to more than seven thousand troops stationed in Seoul. My family wasn’t military, but lots of my friends’ parents were, and my mom worked at the high school there, so I spent more time on that post than many GIs did. Today, when I look at maps of Yongsan on Google Earth, little has changed—I can see the barracks, the bowling alley, the chapel where I played in my sixth-grade piano recital, the tennis court where my Boy Scout troop sold Christmas trees. But if I bring up the same coordinates on Naver, by far the most popular South Korean search engine, my childhood has been erased. The contours of the military garrison have been carefully filled with imagery of forested mountainside, no doubt for government-imposed security reasons. There’s now a trackless 620-acre wilderness sitting incongruously in the middle of one of the world’s most densely populated cities,
^*
a lie as whoppingly transparent as any Soviet-era skewing of railroad lines.

But competitive advantage isn’t the only reason why antique map dealers are wary of outsiders these days. There’s been a flurry of recent media interest in their quiet little community, but nobody’s covering the standard map-world controversies: whether it’s good form for collectors to add new outline color to uncolored maps, for example, or whether the “Dieppe maps” of 1547 provide evidence that the Portuguese were the first to land in Australia. Instead, the articles have been written by crime beat reporters, because of a recent rash of high-profile map thefts that have rocked the trade to its foundations. Maps have gone missing in libraries from Madrid to Mumbai, but by far the most notorious case is that of
E. Forbes Smiley III
.

Smiley was one of the world’s most knowledgeable map dealers, but if his name makes him sound instead like a sitcom millionaire, that’s not a coincidence. By all accounts, this scion of a middle-class New Hampshire family carefully cultivated an über-preppy image—“right down to the deck shoes with no socks,” said one dealer—in order to project reliability and taste to his high-roller clients. He had helped build some of the most magnificent collections of colonial American maps ever assembled and sat on the steering committee of the New York Public Library’s Mercator Society. On the morning of June 8, 2005, Smiley was sitting with four valuable map books in the reading room of Yale’s Beinecke Library for rare books and manuscripts when a library employee found an X-Acto knife near him on the floor. A small blade in a university library is a red flag; a best-selling book had recently told the story of Gilbert Bland, the Florida map dealer who’d used a hobby knife to slash valuable maps and prints out of old books in libraries coast to coast. After learning that Smiley had been looking at rare maps and that some maps he’d recently handled at Yale’s Sterling Library had been reported missing, the librarians began videotaping Smiley and had him followed by campus police when he left the building. When detectives stopped him, they discovered that his metal briefcase was full of old maps and that an inside pocket of his tweed blazer contained a John Smith map of New England that, it turned out, had gone missing from the very book he’d been reading.
^*
He was charged with first-degree larceny and led away in handcuffs.

“The Forbes Smiley case did a lot of damage, because he was one of us,” says Paul Cohen. His own gallery had recently bought a large number of high-quality maps from Smiley and faced huge losses if they too turned out to be stolen property. Other libraries began to report missing maps from books that Smiley had handled over a period of years. The Boston Public Library was missing thirty-four; the New York Public Library, his old stomping ground, was missing thirty-two. The total value of the heisted maps was close to $3 million. In the end, the FBI could link Smiley to only eighteen thefts; as part
of his plea bargain, he copped to eighty others and helped authorities recover the maps from dealers like Cohen & Taliaferro, which found itself out $880,000. Smiley explained to prosecutors that he had stolen because of mounting debts and had chosen institutions that he blamed for some past slight. Outraged map librarians testified that Smiley was “a thief who had assaulted history” and argued for an eight-year sentence, but in light of Smiley’s cooperation, the judge sentenced him to only three and a half years in a minimum-security Massachusetts prison. That seemed plenty harsh to her. “When he leaves prison,” she pointed out, “he will have no assets, no career in the field he loves. He will be a pariah, he will lose years of liberty, and years with his young son.” Indeed, in his courtroom appearances, the once oversized and ebullient Smiley appeared to be a broken man, haggard and hesitant.