The Map Thief (19 page)

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ONE SUCH MAP,
in fact, had gone missing along with its card the previous spring—and Kaye failed to realize it. It was the most valuable of all of the maps Smiley had stolen so far, a plan of Boston made by
John
Bonner in 1743, which Smiley listed on his site for $185,000. A sea captain in the Indies trade, Bonner first made the plan in 1722 at the age of seventy-seven, the only map he’d ever made. At the time, it was the first city plan ever engraved and printed in America, and it’s the only map of Boston that survives from the period when the capital of New England was growing in prosperity.

After Bonner’s death, map seller William Price acquired the plates and revised it eight times. Yale owned the fifth state, which featured some of the most significant changes, such as the addition of Faneuil Hall, where the Sons of Liberty met a few decades later to plan the Boston Tea Party. Only five copies of this state were known to exist—and only three copies of
any
state of Bonner’s plan were now in private hands. Even Norman Leventhal, the great Boston collector, owned it only in facsimile.

Smiley
brought the map to Harry Newman, who’d never held an original copy of Bonner’s map in all of his years as a map dealer. This one was in rough shape, folded into six sections and nearly falling apart. Knowing what it would go for in good condition, however, Newman bought the map and sent it out to his restorer, who painstakingly reconnected the pieces in time for it to appear in the Old Print Shop’s 2002 summer catalog, which was shipped—among other places—to the Sterling’s map room.

The following summer, one of the maps Smiley stole ended up in an even stranger place. Every two years, the prestigious
International Conference on the History of Cartography took place in a different part of the world. In 2003, the conference chose the Harvard Map Library in Cambridge and the Osher Library in Portland, Maine, to host the get-together. Hundreds of map scholars, dealers, and collectors were set to attend. To celebrate the honor, Osher arranged with the Portland-based Shipyard Brewing Company to produce a
special label of beer to be sold at the conference.

Attendees arrived to find a limited-run edition of Shipyard’s 2003 Summer Ale in large-format bottles, described as a “
2-row British Pale Ale” with a “mellow malted wheat flavor” that was “great with seafood.” Wrapping around the label was the library’s newly acquired John Seller map of New England, with “ICHC 2003” replacing the title in the
cartouche. On either side were the Native Americans whose loincloths Smiley had painted green (
Figure M
).

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A HUNDRED MILES
farther north, the feud in Sebec was escalating. Charlene Moriarty’s
list of complaints about Smiley’s shops had been mostly dismissed by Sebec’s code enforcement officer, Bill Murphy. But he did “withhold final judgment” in the issue of parking. Smiley’s project had been “grandfathered” to allow parking space to take up 20 percent of the property, while the rest had to remain vegetated land. If Smiley went over that amount, he would be in violation of his permit. The
planning board, which included several of the Moriartys’ supporters, also filed a complaint with the selectmen, charging that Smiley’s parking took up 32 percent and demanding that Smiley submit new plans. “We have an
obligation to uphold the laws of the town and the state,” planning board member Walt Emmons said at the selectmen’s meeting that November.

Smiley countered with a formal appeal of the Moriartys’ marina permit, which earned an angry response from the Moriartys’ lawyer. “Consider this
a shot across Mr. Smiley’s bow,” he wrote. “If he continues to engage in meritless meddling into the Moriartys’ affairs, we will respond in a very aggressive manner, putting Mr. Smiley and Mr. Fariel at considerable legal risk.”
Glen Fariel resigned from the board of selectmen nine days later, citing “increased responsibilities and demands” at his work. Smiley refused to withdraw his appeal, which was
denied by the remaining two selectmen in short order.

On December 2, 2002, the selectmen finalized a new agreement with the Moriartys, stating that the original permit was “ambiguous” and granting the Moriartys permission to operate the marina so long as they obeyed all state and local environmental laws. The same day, the town’s code enforcement officer, Bill Murphy, opened a formal investigation into the alleged violations at Smiley’s shops.

Smiley was furious. He had spent hundreds of thousands of dollars to help his neighbors, and now instead of being thanked, he was being persecuted. Put on the defensive, he gave an interview to the local paper,
The Piscataquis Observer,
saying the town had simply been “
overwhelmed with all of our plans and details.” His lawyer, Greg Cunningham,
however, was more forceful, alleging the investigation into Smiley’s property was nothing but payback for his opposition to the Moriartys’ permit. The town’s response was “to have our property investigated and put under the microscope,” he said. “I think that’s a unique way of handling local land-use issues.”

Backing down wasn’t in Smiley’s nature. Concluding that fairness was impossible to find in Sebec, he
filed a new appeal—this time against the town as well as the Moriartys—in the county superior court a week before Christmas. The town had “exceeded its authority” in signing the deal with the Moriartys, he charged, engaging in actions that were “arbitrary, contrary to law, and not supported by evidence in the record.”

Of course, not everyone saw the situation that way. The town’s two selectmen,
Buzz Small and Susan Dow, publicly contended that they were simply trying to forge a compromise that would allow everyone the freedom to pursue their projects. With the help of one of Smiley’s friends, they each arranged to meet with him separately to plead with him to withdraw the lawsuit. Smiley refused, telling them, “I don’t like to lose.”

The town continued to pursue its investigation into the parking at Smiley’s shops, with the code officer declaring in February 2003 that he was in
violation of exceeding the permitted amount. Smiley’s lawyer insisted that the property lines Murphy used were incorrect and that by his calculations, Smiley had been
grandfathered parking on 41 percent of his property. At a meeting that April, the Portland attorney
stood over a desk in a jacket and tie while selectman Small reviewed the plans in a red-checkered flannel shirt. By his calculations, he said, Smiley was allowed 35 percent—but he might be willing to concede another 3 percent, to bring the total to 38. Smiley had until October to correct the problem, the selectmen said.

Still no word had come from the superior court on the Moriartys’ permit. The town was now
solidly split into two camps, one that ate at Smiley’s café in Sebec Village Shops and mailed their letters from his post office, and another that ate at the diner down the street and drove a dozen miles to the next town to send mail. In February 2003, some residents charged the
Big Bear Snowmobile Club, where Glen Fariel was president, with discrimination because it had two tiers of dues, one for long-term members and one for newer members. They formed their own
snowmobile club called the Sebec Freedom Riders, unsuccessfully petitioning the town for a share of Big Bear’s state funds for trail maintenance.

When the Moriartys finally built their boat dock and moorings in the summer of 2003, they put up a
sign prohibiting any boater from docking there in order to visit Sebec Village Shops. According to Smiley and his friends,
speedboats began buzzing Smiley’s house, drawing figure eights in the water with their outboards, while riders waved American flags and screamed obscenities. Finally, one summer night, Smiley and his family were woken up by the sound of a gunshot followed by breaking glass. Smiley panicked and threw on the outside lights to find that one of his barn windows had been shattered.

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SMILEY’S LEGAL BATTLES
in Sebec put new pressure on his finances. In order to pay his bills, he expanded his list of targets. By 2003, they included the Boston Public Library (BPL), which had exhibited the Norman Leventhal collection a few years earlier. Unlike the New York Public Library, the BPL didn’t have a dedicated map room, or even a map curator to look after its collection. Maps were included as part of the rare-books and manuscript department, housed in a nearly forgotten room on the library’s third floor.

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,
Champlain's book had only rarely come up for auction in past 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 thirteen-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).