The Map Thief (13 page)

Maps continued to play a role during the war as well. A crucial flex point in the French defenses was a fort at the spot where the Allegheny and Monongahela Rivers join to form the Ohio, called Fort Duquesne. An officer held captive there smuggled out a map that showed the fort’s weaknesses. Using it, British general Edward Braddock boldly marched out to attack with fifteen hundred men—straight into a French ambush. The loss of half of Braddock’s troops sent shock waves through the British public, which hotly debated Braddock’s tactics, especially after his aide-de-camp published six maps of his battle plan defending his tactics.

That was only the beginning of three years of French victories and British incompetence, as the British lost fort after fort. Eventually the tide turned when British general John Forbes (no relation to Smiley) took back Fort Duquesne after convincing the French’s Iroquois allies to defect. In the treaty signed in 1763, John Mitchell’s map of North America was used to set the new boundary lines, effectively giving England uncontested control over all the territory east of the Mississippi.

—

IN ADDITION TO
being the definitive conflict for colonial control of North America, the war was also one of the most mapped in history. Surveyors accompanied the troops to battle in every theater, sketching battle plans and mapping forts, which were published after the fact in newspapers and as single-sheet maps to be snapped up by the British populace. After the war, many of these maps were gathered by British cartographer
Thomas Jefferys into
A General Topography of North America and the West Indies,
the first great atlas of the American interior. The one hundred maps feature all the seminal maps of the continent, including the first accurate survey of Virginia by Peter Jefferson (the future president’s father), the first accurate survey of New York by John Montresor, and all six of the maps of Braddock’s disastrous attack on Fort Duquesne.

Though Jefferys died in 1771, his partners brought out another edition, calling it
The American Atlas,
in 1776. It included several more important maps of the colonies, among them a new map of Pennsylvania by Nicholas Scull and a map of North Carolina by John Collet. All these maps were instrumental to the British as they went to war against their own colonists in the American Revolution from 1775 to 1783. Unlike
the previous conflict, which was fought on largely uncharted territory, now both sides in the conflict had accurate maps they could call upon to plan strategy.

A partner in Jefferys’s firm named
William Faden mapped the conflict practically in real time, seeking out surveyors who accompanied British officers. He published thirty-three maps of Revolutionary battles and released them in his own atlas, the most complete record we have of troop movements during the war. Meanwhile, what Faden did on land,
Joseph F.W. Des Barres did at sea with
The Atlantic Neptune
—the last of the great English sea atlases. The book was part of an ambitious project by the British Admiralty to scientifically survey its colonial holdings around the world. By the time the three-volume atlas was published in 1775, Des Barres had produced more than a hundred charts of the entire Eastern Seaboard.

The maps are lush and expansive, lavishing just as much detail on the woods and hills as they do on the bays and headlands. Even in Des Barres’s lifetime, they were recognized as a superior achievement, with one contemporary reviewer enthusing that it was “
one of the most remarkable products of human industry which has been given to the world through the arts of printing and engraving.” That assessment has only grown over time. According to map historian Sy Schwartz, “Historical consensus has it that this atlas is the
handsomest collection of hydrographic maps ever published.”

As the war intensified, Des Barres kept mapping, making charts of several Revolutionary sea battles, including the siege of Charleston Harbor (
Figure L
). By the time he was done, the territory no longer belonged to the country that employed him. Nonetheless, he pressed on, producing new surveys at his own expense until 1784. His accomplishment is to sea charts what Willem Blaeu’s atlas was to land atlases a century earlier, and a direct descendant of the promise made by John Seller in
The English Pilot.
Unlike Seller, however, Des Barres was wildly successful, creating charts superior to anything made in America for another fifty years. Des Barres himself lived almost that long, retiring to Canada as a wealthy landowner and political figure before he finally died at age 103.

—

BY THE FALL OF 1988,
Smiley’s fortunes, too, had improved, at least temporarily. Already, his knowledge of English and American
mapmakers was among the most extensive in the trade. He put a point on that fact by issuing his very first catalog,
The Early Cartography of North America: A Selection of Maps, Atlases, and Books, 1507–1807.
Up until now, he had produced lists of maps for clients, but this was something different—a scholarly history of the founding of North America told between the lines of sixty-eight maps, along with prices showing the increasing value of historical maps at the time. One map dealer later referred to it as “
one of the great rare Americana Catalogues of the last 25 years. . . . It stands head and shoulders above the rest for its combination of rare material and scholarship.”

In an editor’s note Smiley more modestly called it “
our small contribution to the history of the discovery and settlement of America, and . . . an indication of our most sincere interest in the cartographic record.” The book started with the 1507 Ruysch map of the world Smiley had presented to Leventhal as the basis for his expanded collection ($40,000) and ended with the 1807 map of Virginia made by Reverend James Madison, which Smiley bought from Harry Newman ($17,500). In between, it devoted long blocks of text to explaining the significance of the maps in an academic but readable style.

One page had a sequence of maps derived from John Smith’s map of Virginia, the next a full-page description of an incredibly rare map of New France by explorer Samuel de Champlain in 1613. These were followed by several maps by Blaeu, Hondius, and Jansson; John Foster’s map of New England ($30,000), Holme’s map of Pennsylvania, and a three-foot-high wall map by John Thornton, which Smiley said was found in only three libraries ($38,000). “We know of no other copies in private hands,” he proudly boasted, before describing seven different base maps that Thornton used to create it.

He included many of the maps in the spitting match between England and France over the Ohio, including two by De L’Isle and two by Moll, as well as John Mitchell’s map that was used to draw the new boundaries ($28,000). Toward the end of the catalog was a chart of Georgia by Matthew Clark—one of the last pages from the Clark atlas Smiley had bought from Reese several years before. On the following page were three of Andrew Ellicott’s maps of Washington, DC, including the pirated Boston edition, which hadn’t appeared on the market for a century.

Taken in total, it was an impressive record of what Smiley had accomplished in just three years of dealing maps—with a combined asking price of more than a half million dollars. If this “Catalog Number One” was Smiley’s official coming out as a dealer, then it was a sign of impressive things to come. As he stated in his introduction, he had the intention of producing more catalogs for the future—and seemed to have the inventory, the clients, and the knowledge to make more than just a “small contribution” to the historical record. Just as he seemed poised for success, however, an event apparently occurred that put his chances for producing a “Catalog Number Two” in jeopardy.

PLAYING HARDBALL

FIGURE 9
SEBEC VILLAGE, C. 1860.

1989–1995

FOR YEARS AFTER
it happened, Smiley told the story the same way:
One April morning in 1989, he rushed into his studio on Seventy-Ninth Street in a panic.
No,
he thought,
this can’t be happening.
Pushing past police officers, he searched up and down the stairs and on the sidewalk outside, hoping that the thieves had dropped a map or two.
Anything,
he thought. But above all he was hoping to find a
rare 1713 edition of
The English Pilot, The Fourth Book
that he had just bought for Slaughter but had yet to deliver.
Maybe they tore out some maps and dropped the atlas,
he told himself
as he searched, in vain hope that he could recoup at least part of his investment.

But it was gone, along with all the rest of his inventory. He had been cleaned out in the burglary of his studio, losing hundreds of thousands of dollars in inventory—all of it uninsured. There had been a string of gallery thefts in the neighborhood lately, but he never thought anyone would steal from him. He knew everyone in the business. Where would a thief be able to sell? According to Smiley, police saw the theft as a crime of opportunity. They told him the thieves had robbed several other art galleries in the building, breaking in through a skylight in the roof. In Smiley’s case, however, they may have been drawn by the sign on his door that read “Rare Maps, Atlases, and Globes.” The maps had probably left the country that night.

Smiley remained hopeful. The thieves would eventually have to sell—and when they did, someone would alert him. He began making calls to other dealers. Some were sympathetic, but by this time Smiley had damaged his reputation so badly that some just shrugged it off. Arkway’s
Paul Cohen remembers Smiley calling, irate about a John Thornton chart he saw in Cohen’s catalog that he was convinced came from
The English Pilot.
But Cohen insisted it came from another volume.
Alex Krieger, a Harvard architecture professor who assisted Norman Leventhal with his collection, remembers being questioned by the FBI at the time about the theft, and
Ashley Baynton-Williams, a London map dealer who began working for Smiley soon afterward, distinctly remembers seeing pictures of the gallery’s bashed-in door.

Other dealers, such as Reese and Arader, doubted the theft had even happened. There is scant evidence in the record to prove that it did. No newspaper stories refer to it, and neither the New York Police Department, nor the FBI, nor Interpol could produce records of any investigation. Smiley himself
referred to the incident in court papers several times between 1989 and 1991, putting the loss anywhere between $220,000 and $330,000 depending upon the date. “
Though I may be an ‘expert’ in cartography, I am, admittedly, no businessman,” he wrote in one case, “thus no insurance.”

The other galleries in the building have long since closed, but I did track down the super, who still works in an office in the basement of the building. He remembered Smiley as a good tenant who paid his rent on
time, but as for any burglary in the building at that time, he shook his head. “
I can’t say it never happened, but there is a one percent chance out of a thousand that it did,” he says. Asked if it’s possible he was never alerted, he adds, “Usually someone farts in this building, and I hear about it. It’s inconceivable to me that I wouldn’t hear about something like that.”

Whatever the truth of the situation,
friends said Smiley grew despondent after the incident. As the weeks went by without a single map surfacing, he hinted darkly that one of his rival dealers might have been behind it. The map world was too small for nothing to turn up.
I get it,
he fumed.
You do this alone.

“I didn’t trust the marketplace after that,” he later told me. “I went on to be a loner, and I think it was unnecessary and imprudent.” He rubbed his hands together. “It was straight-up foolish to struggle so hard because I insisted on doing everything myself.” Smiley stopped advertising and putting out catalogs, relying solely on his network of personal collectors to continue buying and selling maps. Some of his
friends and family urged him to cut his losses and get out of the business, but Smiley stayed in. There was no way he was going to allow himself to be beaten.

Rebuilding his collection wasn’t as easy as it had been to build it in the first place, however. By now, many of his European contacts had retired or died. To help him, he hired
Baynton-Williams, a third-generation map dealer whose father was one of the leading dealers in London, and who called on his connections to help find Smiley material. He was impressed with Smiley’s ability to buy and sell but quickly grew frustrated covering for him over his promises to pay. Some of Smiley’s best clients were sympathetic toward his plight and told him they’d wait to be reimbursed for items they’d bought but were stolen before he could deliver them.

One person who showed no sympathy was Graham Arader, who had
sold Smiley several maps, including a rare 1759 map of Pennsylvania by Nicholas Scull, in May 1989.
Smiley signed a note promising to pay him nearly $50,000 for the map by late June. When he failed to do that, Arader sued. The next month, the two settled, agreeing to a new payment plan, but Smiley kept defaulting on payments for nearly a year. It wasn’t until the following spring that Arader got his money, along with interest and $5,000 in attorney fees.

In order to make ends meet, Smiley
took out a mortgage on the house in Maine for $40,000 and called upon friends for loans. But his debts mounted.
Creditors began suing him for unpaid bills, and he defaulted on credit cards, including more than $20,000 owed to American Express for travel expenses. The
IRS hit him with liens for nearly $5,000 in unpaid taxes, and ironically, he even
failed to pay the bill for $10,000 to a burglar alarm company in April 1990. In another case, he got into a
dispute with a Spanish map collector, José Porrúa, who accused Smiley of selling him maps in poor condition. Smiley blamed the gallery theft for his failure to reimburse Porrúa the money for the sales, again defaulting over and over on payments to make up the debt. Eventually, the court ordered him to pay Porrúa $35,000 in April 1991.

As difficult as all these financial problems were for Smiley, nothing hurt him as badly as a falling-out with his first and biggest client—Norman Leventhal.

—

FOR YEARS, SMILEY
and Leventhal had a symbiotic relationship. Leventhal worked exclusively with Smiley, who tirelessly tracked down all the pieces of the puzzle he could find to tell the story of the mapping of New England. Together they put together a collection that had never been assembled before—and probably never could be again, given the rarity of some of the maps in the collection. As Leventhal began showing his maps more publicly, however, their relationship became more complicated.

In 1988, Leventhal attended a presentation at the Boston Society of Architects in which Harvard architecture professor
Alex Krieger showed slide after slide of old maps of Boston to illustrate how the city had changed over time. After the presentation, Leventhal approached him. “What do you know about maps?” he asked. “Not much,” Krieger responded. But he did know about Boston. After visiting Leventhal’s collection at the Boston Harbor Hotel, Krieger struck up a friendship with the collector. He introduced him to other local historians and librarians and eventually agreed to become his curator.

When he met with Smiley to discuss the purchase of more maps, Krieger took an immediate dislike to him. He seemed obsequious and too eager to please—the way he called Norman “Mr. Leventhal” and
referred to him as “Professor Krieger.” “
I thought he was slimy,” he later told me. “Just the way he was courting Norman in an overdone way—kind of just sucking up, but unduly so,” Krieger later said. Until now,
Leventhal hadn’t been too concerned with how much he paid for the maps Smiley found, writing checks for the prices he quoted without question or negotiation.

But Krieger began to wonder whether the prices Smiley charged were fair. When Smiley brought them a new map, he started
calling around to other dealers to ask what they would charge for a similar map. Of course, in a trade with such few players, map prices are a subjective concept, varying dramatically depending on individual taste, condition, and color—to say nothing of the potential motives of Smiley’s competition, who continued to be jealous of the way Smiley had sewn up his clients and certainly hoped to sell to Leventhal directly.

According to Krieger, Smiley’s prices were close to those of other dealers at first, sometimes higher and sometimes lower. After a year or two, however, Krieger said he began to notice that Smiley’s prices were creeping up relative to the competition, frequently coming in highest. When they began to be even higher than Graham Arader’s, Krieger really began to become suspicious that he was overcharging them.

Finally, Smiley brought Leventhal a 1785 map of New England by the eighteenth-century mapmaking team of Norman and Coles, which was only the fourth map printed in the United States. Only two copies of the map were known to exist, Smiley told them, with the other at Yale. There would never be another opportunity to buy it, he continued, setting its price at $100,000. Even Leventhal hesitated at that figure, but convinced by Smiley’s sales pitch, he agreed to the sale. Afterward, Krieger called Chicago map dealer Ken Nebenzahl to ask how much he’d charge for the map. The Chicago dealer agreed that it was an important map but thought there were several other copies in existence. Based on a photograph, he said a fair price would be $25,000.

Krieger was stunned. He confronted Smiley, bluffing that he had another opportunity to acquire the same map for a quarter of the price. Smiley backtracked, explaining how difficult it was to accurately price maps in the market, but sticking by his initial enthusiasm for the map. He reduced the price to $60,000, which Leventhal paid, and offered several other maps free of charge as well. But Krieger had lost trust in
him. By now, other dealers were calling Krieger to offer material for Leventhal’s collection, and he began to buy maps from Arkway and others.

Shortly after the incident, Leventhal decided to have the entire collection appraised, and Nebenzahl flew into Boston, staying at the hotel for several nights and removing each map from its frame to price it. Many had appreciated in just a few years and were worth thousands more than he’d paid for them, but some of the more recent ones were worth less than Leventhal had paid, in Nebenzahl’s estimation. At the end of the appraisal, Nebenzahl brought out a portfolio of other maps Leventhal might be interested in buying, and soon Leventhal was buying from him too. When I spoke with him, Smiley
remembered his falling-out with Leventhal differently. In Smiley’s recollection, Krieger and Leventhal were upset not about the high price of a map, but over the cost of an eighteenth-century view of Boston that he’d discovered on wallpaper in a house in France. Due to the cost of cutting it from the plaster and export duties to get it out of the country, the wallpaper became much more expensive than a reproduction of the same view available in the United States. When Krieger and Leventhal discovered that, Smiley said, they balked at the price of the original. “My jaw dropped open,” Smiley told me. “We were in the business of collecting originals. If you want to collect facsimiles, go ahead, but it has nothing to do with me.”

Whatever the cause, both Krieger and Smiley agreed that the relationship with Leventhal cooled after that. Leventhal bought a few more maps from Smiley, but
gradually they parted ways. Smiley felt helpless to retain his client but rationalized the loss with the fact that the collection was practically finished anyway—at least, there was little more he could add to it. But he resented the way he’d been pushed aside and never given credit for the role he’d played in building the first great map collection of such a historically important part of the world.