By MarÌa Eugenia Guerra

The Island of Lost Maps:
A True Story
of Cartographic Crime.
By Miles Harvey.
New York: Random House
Broadway Books.
2000. 395 pages.

It is not down in any map;
true places never are.
Herman Melville

Now and again an excellent book finds you, a book so unlike one you might choose based on its title or your area of interest. Such was the case with The Island of Lost Maps: A True Story of Cartographic Crime, a book so narrow in subject matter -- maps -- but a book vastly revealing of the author’s grasp of world history, cartography, and people who deal in the buying, selling, and theft of old maps.

The last time I felt this way about a book was when I read Hope Is the Thing With Feathers by Christopher Cokinos, a beautifully written natural history of six extinct species of birds and a bigger story yet about all of our lives on the Planet Earth.

When The Island of Lost Maps grabbed me at a San Antonio bookstore, it was the book’s parchment colored cover that evoked the childhood pasttime of drawing treasure maps with India ink and a quill pen and then burning the invented document’s edges to give the old paper sack an appearance of antiquity. The maps we drew included coordinates and sometimes the embellishment of a compass or a sailing ship, its sails puffed with the prevailing winds.

In this well written, beautifully spun account of the life of one of the most infamous of modern map thieves, Gilbert Joseph Bland, Jr., author Miles Harvey has awakened my interest in maps and world history with little glimmers of the lives of others who valued maps -- everyone from the Flemish map maker and mathematician Gerardus Mercator (the author of parallels of latitude and meridians of longitude) to Robert Louis Stevenson, the author of Treasure Island. Before beginning to write Treasure Island, Stevenson sketched a map of its imaginary shorelines. According to Harvey, the map practically dictated Stevenson’s story and created his characters and their actions.

As he undertook the writing of The Island of Lost Maps Harvey found inspiration in a medieval work of cartography, a mappae mundi which he said diagrammed "history and anthropology, myth and scripture, dreams and nightmares." It is here that Harvey begins the narrative of the story of Gilbert Joseph Bland, Jr., the razor-wielding fast-slashing thief of antiquities whom Harvey calls "the Al Capone of cartography."

Bland, an Army deserter who had been at map thieving a good part of his adult life, was popped at Baltimore’s George Peabody Museum by a staff member who, wary of Bland’s furtiveness, eagled-eyed his swift work with a razor as he cut an ancient map from a valuable old book.

Harvey’s accounts of other map thieves -- including Sir Francis Drake, who was called "the master thief of the unknown world" -- evince Harvey’s reverence for old maps. Drake plundered two large Spanish navigator’s maps and charts detailing Spain’s China route, and in garnering those maritime prizes he forever changed Spain’s hold on the New World and the Americas.

Harvey’s book is no small treasure of information. It is also well written and well organized. There is a dramatic momentum about his writing and a sense about his style that throughout the book confirms that he has immense value for maps. Harvey writes:

"A map has no vocabulary, no lexicon of precise meanings. It communicates in lines, hues, tones, coded symbols, and empty spaces, much like music. Nor does a map have its own voice. It is many-tongued, a chorus reciting centuries of accumulated knowledge in echoed chants. A map provides no answers. It only suggests where to look: discover this, reexamine that, put one thing in relation to another, orient yourself, begin here. . . . Sometimes a map speaks in terms of physical geography, but just as often it muses on the jagged terrain of the heart, the distant vistas of memory, or the fantastic landscapes of dreams."