The Map Thief (9 page)

When Philip died in 1506, he passed down that inheritance to his son Charles, who also acquired a chunk of Germany and Austria from his grandfather, the Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian I. By the time he took the throne as Charles V of Spain, he ruled over nearly all of Western Europe (with the exception of England, France, Portugal, and northern Italy). At the heart of his growing empire were the Netherlands, where he’d spent his childhood and where he continued to focus his patronage as king.

The Portuguese began calling at Antwerp, the closet port to the copper and silver mines of Germany, in order to load up on cash to trade for spices and slaves in Africa and India. As they did, they unloaded cargoes of silk, gold, and gems. Soon Antwerp became a major commercial center, finishing cloth from the woolen mills of England and working leather from Germany. The Jewish quarter filled with gem cutters, and bankers from Germany created the first modern banks. Eventually, Antwerp’s merchants started sending their own ships to the Indies, earning ten times what their investors paid to fund the expeditions. Within a generation, it became the richest city in the world, displaying its new confidence with the tallest cathedral in Europe, a four-hundred-foot tiered tower that soared over the city.

The city also had something the Spanish and Portguese didn’t: a printing industry that would soon revolutionize the art of mapmaking. Not only did Antwerp have a ready supply of copper for engraving, but it also had a tradition of cultural diversity and religious tolerance, with finely illustrated books and prints in high demand. Engravers organized themselves into guilds, which set rules for working hours and sold licenses, passed down from father to son or transferred through marriage. While that closed entry to newcomers, it also ensured a high quality of
craftsmanship. Members increasingly specialized, including some who focused exclusively on maps. Eventually, due to political changes, the Portuguese began bypassing Antwerp for ports in Germany, and Dutch sea captains began competing with the Portuguese for the Indies trade, clamoring for accurate charts that would give them an advantage. Showing the right depth for a channel or a hidden passage between islands could shave days off a trip, translating directly into profit. If the Dutch were going to truly compete, they’d need maps of their own.

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INTO THIS WORLD
was born the greatest mapmaker of the age—and arguably any age. Gerard Klemer was born outside Antwerp in 1512, the son of a cobbler who died young. But his uncle rescued him and educated him in mathematics and cosmology at one of Europe’s most prestigious universities. In the style of humanist scholars, he took a new Latin name, upgrading Klemer, which meant “peddler,” to the Latin word for “merchant.”
Gerard Mercator was born.

Apprenticed to one of the Netherlands’ preeminent mathematicians, Mercator showed a gift for map engraving, opening his own business in 1536 to make globes, sundials, and maps under patent from Charles V. His first world map, produced two years later, was an impressive effort, done in a “double coridform” projection with two heart-shaped hemispheres joined at the north pole. The map was both beautiful and influential, the first to name North and South America. But Mercator was dissatisfied with the distortion of the projection. For the rest of his life, he came back to the problem of how to most accurately portray the globe on a flat surface.

Even as his career was on the rise, however, it was derailed by the Counter-Reformation, launched by his patron, Charles V, to stamp out Protestant heresy. Despite the terrible reputation of the Inquisition in Spain, it was even more brutal in the Low Countries. Suspected Lutheran sympathizers were hauled away in the dead of night, imprisoned, tortured, and often burned alive at the stake. Mercator’s association with the humanists made him a target, leading to his imprisonment in 1544. For months, he watched as friends were beheaded or buried alive, escaping a similar fate himself only due to a last-minute intercession from connections in high places. Once released, he fled Antwerp for Duisburg,
a university town across the border in Germany, where he lived out the rest of his days as a professor in self-imposed exile.

Even so, he continued a rich correspondence with other mapmakers, and his workshop produced some of the most definitive maps of Europe. By the late 1560s, he fixated on a new project—a different kind of world map that could actually be used to navigate long distances. It’s not clear where Mercator got the idea for his eponymous projection, but the need for it had been clear for decades. Rhumb lines on portolans were fine for sailing short distances but quickly became distorted in the long trip across the Atlantic, requiring constant correction to maintain a straight line. Mercator solved the problem with a simple trick: straightening the lines of longitude and then stretching the distance between the lines of latitude as they got farther away from the equator. First produced in 1569, the Mercator projection meant that for the first time, sailors could plot a course on a small-scale map and be assured of a constant bearing (
Figure D
). Of course, the technique distorted the shapes of the landforms, since the scale of distances lengthened the farther one traveled from the equator. But these maps were meant to be used, and the overall distortion seemed a small price to pay.

Mercator’s great invention heralded the beginning of the Dutch golden age—but he wasn’t the only innovator at the time. As he worked in exile in Duisburg, the Antwerp map trade continued to flourish. One of the greatest workshops was that of
Abraham Ortel—better known as Ortelius—a great friend and confidant of the famous mapmaker despite being fifteen years his junior. Ortelius got his start in one of the most influential guilds as a map colorist, serving the new demand of prosperous bourgeois families for maps to hang in their homes as proud symbols of the economic might of their empire. In order to supplement his income, Ortelius began selling maps on the side. Bringing Dutch maps to sell at book fairs in France, Italy, and Germany, he returned with maps from foreign cartographers to sell in the Netherlands—making him one of the world’s first map dealers.

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EVENTUALLY, ORTELIUS’S EFFORTS
caught the attention of a prosperous Antwerp merchant who’d acquired an edge over his rivals through a large collection of sea charts of foreign ports. The only problem was,
with so many maps to roll and unroll, it became difficult to find what he wanted. Hearing of Ortelius’s business, he asked him to create a single volume containing as much of the world as he could. Ortelius worked hard on the task, reducing dozens of maps to a common scale. When he saw how pleased the merchant was with the results, he reasoned others might find such a book useful as well.

Though other publishers had published corrected versions of Ptolemy or supplemented editions of his maps with their own, Ortelius was one of the first to conceive of creating a Ptolemy without the Ptolemy. For the next ten years, he combed the continent for the most up-to-date maps, submitting them to the inquisitors for careful scrutiny and approval. He wasn’t the only one with the idea for a standardized book of maps. Another Antwerp map dealer, named
Gerard de Jode, had set himself the same goal. Originally, the two seem to have been collaborators, with de Jode publishing Ortelius’s first world map. But at some point the relationship soured, and Ortelius began to use his powerful connections in the guilds to block de Jode’s license from the all-important headquarters of the Inquisition.

De Jode watched helplessly as Ortelius published his volume in 1570, calling it
Theatrum Orbis Terrarum,
Latin for “Theater of the world.” The world’s first true atlas, it was an immediate success, selling out two editions in just a few months. Sources from around Europe began contacting Ortelius to offer him their latest maps, which he then included in future editions. By Ortelius’s death in 1598, he’d
published at least thirty.

De Jode, meanwhile, wasn’t able to come out with his book,
Speculum Orbis Terrarum
(Mirror of the World), until 1578. Unlike the maps in Ortelius’s atlas, all of de Jode’s maps were engraved by the same pair of brothers, giving the atlas a uniform beauty. By this time, however, Ortelius had cornered the market, and de Jode’s volume languished, with only one printing during his lifetime. After he died, his son
Cornelius continued his father’s work with one more edition in 1593, but he, too, struggled (
Figure E
). It took five hundred years for the de Jodes to get their due. Since Ortelius flooded the market, his maps are now relatively common today at map auctions and fairs such as the one in Miami. De Jode’s maps, however, are extremely scarce, with only a
dozen or so copies of the first edition of his atlas in existence. As a result, they command much higher prices than those of his onetime rival.

By the end of the century, Mercator had produced his own book of maps. Clearly his masterpiece, it consisted of three volumes with more than one hundred maps, most reproduced on a Mercator projection. He called the book simply
Atlas,
with the subtitle in Latin: “Cosmographical meditations upon the creation of the universe, and the universe as created.” For a few years after
Mercator’s death in 1594, his son Rumold brought out new editions. Eventually, an Amsterdam-based engraver and printer named Jodocus Hondius bought the plates and began producing new editions of Mercator’s
Atlas
—with his name attached to the name of the great cartographer—at the rate of nearly one a year. When he died, the business passed to his son Hendrik Hondius and then to Hendrik’s brother-in-law Jan Jansson, who together established an unbroken line of
Atlas
editions through the middle of the next century. They soon supplanted Ortelius entirely, establishing the term “atlas” as the standard name for a bound collection of uniform maps.

With each generation, the maps produced for Mercator’s atlas became more elaborate. Maps increasingly became valued as works of art as much as navigational tools. Dutch master Jan Vermeer used recognizable maps of the period to decorate the walls in a half dozen of his paintings. By this time, the Dutch were in open revolt against Spain, and were actively attacking the overseas holdings of Portugal, which remained under the Spanish crown. The demand for maps for both mercantile and military uses increased.

The Mercator-Hondius-Jansson dynasty led the way, eventually beginning its own war against the
rival family of Willem Blaeu, a pupil of the astronomer Tycho Brahe who established his own map business in Amsterdam in 1600. For years, the two firms competed to publish the most up-to-date maps, often accusing the other of plagiarism. Because copper plates could be easily reworked, secondhand publishers often sold old plates to buyers, who then changed names and released them as their own. After all, it was impossible to copyright the earth. The temptation to steal another’s work often proved irresistible.

Eventually, Blaeu came out on top. After the northern Netherlands rebelled against Spain and acquired its own rights to trade in the East Indies in 1609, the States-General of the provinces favored Blaeu with its commissions. In 1631, he produced his own atlas, name checking both Ortelius and Mercator in his
Appendix Theatri Ortelli et Atlantis
Mercator.
Eventually, Blaeu and his sons Joan and Cornelius established a workshop along one of Amsterdam’s canals with fifteen printing presses and a footprint of more than ten thousand square feet. By 1634, the Dutch East India Company, the giant corporation overseeing trade with the Asian colonies, appointed Blaeu its official mapmaker and forbade its merchants from carrying sea charts made by anyone else. In 1648, he created his own twenty-sheet map of the world, drawing from Dutch, Italian, English, Spanish, and French sources to surpass any other map in both beauty and accuracy. Blaeu followed it up in 1664 with his
Atlas Maior,
the crowning achievement of Dutch mapmaking and universally recognized as the most gorgeous atlas ever created (
Figure F
).

Just as the Dutch mapmakers reached the pinnacle of success, however, they also stood on the brink of decline. Global politics were again changing, and both Spain and the Netherlands began to lose power and influence as England and France began to rise. Along with the dominance of these countries came the dominance of their cartographers, who began to use new techniques that eventually supplanted the Dutch monopolies. It is these mapmakers that E. Forbes Smiley III focused on as he began his own rise in the map business.

WHO KNOWS THE MOST WINS

FIGURE 6
MOUNT AND PAGE. “A NEW SURVEY OF THE HARBOUR OF BOSTON IN NEW ENGLAND.” LONDON, 1708. (FACSIMILE REPRODUCTION BY GEORGE GRIERSON, 1749.)

1985–1987

RONALD VERE “
R.V.” TOOLEY—OR MICK,
as he was known to close friends—was born in London in 1898, “an enchanted world of hansom cabs and gas lamplighters who came with long poles at dusk,” as he later recalled. The peace of his childhood was shattered with the outbreak of World War I, during which two-thirds of his regiment was killed in a single battle. Returning to England after the war, he found security in the relative quiet of a secondhand bookstore called Francis Edwards.
There, over the next few decades, he became responsible, perhaps more than any other person, for launching the modern map trade.

At the time Tooley began selling books, map collecting was a rare hobby; salesmen at the store used maps that didn’t sell to wrap packages. But Tooley gravitated toward the objects, which he found the perfect combination of history and art. In an early map catalog, he wrote, “
To hold an ancient atlas of rich and gorgeous coloring, to turn the leaves, to see the quaint fantastic figures adorning their borders, ships riding the seven seas, and towns picked out in red and gold, gleaming as if the sun shone on them, is to have in one’s hands the epitome of an age, art and knowledge combined in happy proportions.”

In 1930, he left briefly to open Atlas Books, dealing exclusively in maps, atlases, and globes—but unfortunately the market was slow in the making. At the time, Tooley sold a copy of John Speed’s famous atlas
The Theatre of the Empire of Great Britaine
for £3; today it would go for more than $100,000.

Tooley soon found himself back at Francis Edwards, where for the next fifty years he held court in a dusty upstairs room, gradually building some of the greatest map collections in history. Every Saturday, he did research in the map room of the British Museum, where he was often the only occupant. But he was just as comfortable in the pub, where he spent most afternoons telling wild stories of his buying trips to the continent. At the annual Antiquarian Booksellers’ Association dinner, he was a tireless dancer and a shameless flirt.

Tooley never held maps as sacred. On the job, he wore a linen jacket with pockets crammed with damp paintbrushes, which he’d use on the spot to hand color maps upon request. More controversial was his practice of breaking up atlases and selling maps individually to collectors. As atlases increased in price, only wealthy collectors could afford them. The “breakers,” he argued, opened up map collecting to the masses. Of course, the practice was also more lucrative for dealers, who could split up atlases by region—maps of France to the French, Germany to the Germans, and so on—and earn more on each map than for the atlas as a whole.

However eyebrow-raising his practices, there was no disputing his influence. His 1949 book,
Maps and Map-Makers,
was responsible for turning many collectors on to the field. For years, he kept an index file for
every map that passed through the shop. Starting in the 1960s, he began publishing a series of books called
The Map Collector’s Circle,
each edition focusing on a different geographical region. Even in his eighties, he was still spry and charismatic, overseeing the
The Map Collector
magazine and holding forth at the pub.

That’s the man Forbes Smiley met in 1985, when he traveled to London with one of Rosejeanne Slifer’s letters of introduction in hand. As he began his search for maps to fill out Leventhal’s collection, he had no reference guide upon which to draw. For a city obsessed with its history, Boston was curiously uninterested in its cartographic past; in four hundred years, not one of Boston’s many civic institutions and colleges had ever even put on an exhibition of Boston maps. Smiley asked Tooley for advice on where to begin, and Tooley—who had a reputation for unstintingly sharing his knowledge—was only too happy to comply.

Over pints at the local pub, Tooley sprinkled his technical expertise with advice for a career as a successful dealer. “
A collection of maps,” he told Smiley, “is an attempt to put together a puzzle that’s lost many of its pieces. If you can find them, you can learn something about the world that no has ever seen before.” That might seem simple, he said, but it was amazing how many collectors lost sight of that in search of maps that were simply rare or expensive.

“To really succeed at this job,” he continued, “you need to understand two things: First, the person who knows the most wins.” At the end of the day, a small dealer who knew what pieces to look for could beat out bigger, better-connected dealers. “Second,” Tooley said, “if you take care of your clients, they will take care of you.” Clients weren’t a piggy bank; they were partners in building a legacy. “
No dealer is really successful unless he loves his subject,” Tooley wrote in one of his books. “And enthusiasm is contagious and spreads from buyer and seller. So many friendships are formed and trust is mutual.” Building that trust, he said, was the key to success.

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SMILEY TOOK THE LESSONS
to heart in his dealings with Leventhal. He began pouring himself into the study of maps of Boston and New England, spending hours at the New York Public Library and traveling farther afield to research the maps at the Boston Public Library and
university libraries at Yale and Brown. Every few weeks, he’d get on a plane and fly to London, Amsterdam, or Paris, scouring bookshops and map fairs and bidding in auctions to chase pieces of the puzzle.

Among his first finds for Leventhal was John Smith’s 1614 map of New England. The copy he located had been included in the English version of Gerard Mercator’s
Atlas,
published in 1635. The last state Smith made before he died, the map included the proper locations of Boston and the neighboring locales of Charlestown, Roxbury, and Newton, which all exist today, alongside many of the fictional town names proposed by Prince Charles. Leventhal was particularly pleased to see his hometown of Dorchester included for only the second time on any map, and bought the map from Smiley for $9,500.

Smiley also found another copy of Smith’s map from 1624, and discovered a copy of the map naming both Boston and Dorchester for the
first
time: a crude woodcut made by William Wood in 1634 for his book
New England's Prospect.
He tracked down a beautifully illustrated map of New England and New York made by William
Blaeu in 1635, featuring an oversize Lake Champlain taking up most of modern-day New Hampshire and Vermont. Blaeu makes up for the errors, however, with finely drawn pictures of foxes, beavers, and deer cavorting through the woodlands. Smiley also found a map of the same territory created by Blaeu’s rival Jan
Jansson in 1651 that marks a significant improvement. It includes not only a more accurate survey of the coastline, but also an improved interior, with Lake Champlain shrunk down to almost its proper size (though still on the wrong side of the Connecticut River) and a detailed course of the Hudson River, starting with the bustling city of New Amsterdam and continuing north through Dutch and Indian settlements up into Canada (
Figure G
).

One of the maps that drew heavily on Jansson’s map was by English mapmaker John
Speed, found in his book
A Prospect of the Most Famous Parts of the World,
from 1676. The name—“A Map of New England and New York”—speaks volumes. While the Netherlands had been busy establishing its trade empire in the mid-1600s, England had undergone a brutal civil war, which led to neglect of its overseas colonies. During the conflict, Charles I—the king who had founded so many fictitious towns in New England—was beheaded, and his heir sought refuge in Holland but was denied.

Finally restored to the throne in 1660, Charles II wasted little time turning his focus to the English colonies in the New World. Just a few years later, he declared war on Holland—payback, in part, for its refusal to house him during his exile—including the Dutch holdings overseas. He gave the task of taking their American holdings to his brother James, the Duke of York. Hopelessly outnumbered, the Dutch surrendered in 1664 without firing a shot. Speed’s map shows to the victors go not only the spoils, but also the geography. His map is almost a perfect copy of Jansson’s map, with one major difference: New Amsterdam and New Netherlands have both become New York (
Figure H
).

The maps Smiley found reflected other changes in the development of cartography as well. As richly illustrated as they were, the Dutch maps were only as accurate as their source maps, which were wildly inconsistent. As the Renaissance became the Enlightenment, however, a more scientific form of
mapmaking began in France, where Louis XIV established the first royal academy of science in 1666. One of his first decrees was to make a new topographical map of France, and scientists took up the challenge, dragging a chain from Paris to Amiens to determine the exact length of a degree of latitude, and using the moons of Jupiter to determine longitude. By the time the Académie finished its survey of the coast in 1684, it had determined that even the best current maps were more than thirty miles off the mark.

Using this as a beginning, Gian Domenico Cassini and family triangulated distances from a central meridian to complete the first modern topographical map, a feat that took more than one hundred years and three generations of Cassinis to complete. But the new scientific techniques were used right away. Cartographers including Nicolas Sanson, Guillaume De L’Isle, and J.B. Bourguignon D’Anville led the way in applying the Cassinis’ methods to create successively more accurate maps of both Europe and the New World. By the turn of the eighteenth century, the Dutch maps began to feel antiquated.

By then, the new scientific techniques had also crossed the English Channel to the country of Isaac Newton and Roger Bacon. Britain’s first great mapmaker, John Speed, used mostly Dutch source material for his maps. But after the Restoration and the ensuing war with the Netherlands, it became a matter of national pride for the English to have their own maps—especially across the Atlantic. How could it fend off
encroachments of the Dutch, French, and Native Americans on its territory if it didn’t know what that territory was? The same applied at sea. Until the late 1600s, English navigators relied primarily on Dutch sea charts by Lucas Janszoon Waghenaer, whose name became anglicized to the point that all pilot books became known as “
waggoners.” One cartographer named
John Seller, however, envisioned a thoroughly modern, thoroughly English sea atlas, and he fought to make it a reality—even if he personally received little credit for it during his lifetime.

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“
SO COMPLETELY DID
the Dutch mapmakers of the 17th century dominate the sale and distribution of cartographic material, that little attention has been given by the public to efforts made by their English speaking neighbors across the sea,” begins a 1986 article in the antiquarian trade magazine
AB Bookman’s Weekly.
It continues:

So beautifully produced are the Dutch atlases, with their lovely engravings, rich color and elegant binding, that we are reluctant to close their covers and open those of a contemporary English volume. But if we do, we are rewarded. We perceive the map trade in its swaddling clothes, intriguing experiments within a wide open market, the efforts of men and women who risked their livelihoods to advance the art and fill the needs of an every expanding empire. And when we turn their pages to the maps and charts of America, we are met by extraordinary records of an empire at work, and documents of England’s struggle to settle a continent 200 times her size, and far across a threatening sea.

With such lofty prose, E. Forbes Smiley III began his article “The Origins of the English Map Trade, 1670–1710,” his attempt to synthesize the combined knowledge that he’d acquired digging through the New York Public Library’s collections and bidding in auctions overseas. As he continued to study, Smiley felt that scholars had passed by English mapmaking at the turn of the eighteenth century—a period that he saw as seminal to the settlement of North America. Smiley focused in on a particular figure whom he saw as key to this development.