The Map Thief (10 page)

John Seller was born around 1632 and apparently had a tumultuous youth, which led to prison time at age thirty for an alleged plot against
the Church of England. He began publishing and selling books and maps in an East London shop around 1667, bringing out a well-received navigational treatise. He was appointed hydrographer to the king and awarded a contract to sell compasses and spyglasses to the Royal Navy. But Seller had greater ambitions—nothing less than a complete atlas of all the major sea routes then plied by British ships.

In 1671, he announced his plan: four books, covering the North Seas; the Mediterranean and Western Africa; the Orient; and finally, the Americas. Called
The English Pilot,
it would eventually become, as Smiley wrote, “the earliest sea atlas published in England, and the only guide to foreign waters which England produced for nearly a century.” His early efforts fell short of his ambitions.
The
First Book
was little more than a compilation of Dutch charts, which Seller had only slightly reworked—sometimes Dutch titles still showed through superimposed English names. No less a wit than Samuel Pepys, the great diarist, derided Seller’s atlas as a “pretended new book.”

Pepys was probably being unfair. The Dutch plates were as geographically accurate as anything at the time, and Seller did little to hide the fact that he was reworking other sources. Starting with
The
Second Book
of
The
English Pilot
in 1672, however, Seller began leaning on new original British surveys of the coasts. In
The
Third Book
in 1675, the majority of the charts were original, including some of the first maps of Cape Town in South Africa. That same year, Seller produced a kind of compilation atlas of his best maps, called the
Atlas Maritimus,
which he custom built for individual buyers depending upon their needs, so no two copies were the same.

While the atlas succeeded, however, Seller himself did not. By this time, Smiley wrote in
AB Bookman’s Weekly,
he “had lost control of the project. About 1675 Seller experienced financial difficulties stemming from his overly ambitious projects, and was forced to seek the help of other booksellers.” Seller proposed a consortium, whereby all the partners would enter into a deal together to finish the project, splitting the risk and rewards.

Initially, the plan worked, enough for Seller to start on
The
Fourth Book
of
The English Pilot,
covering the Americas, in 1678. A year later, however, the consortium, too, failed. Seller’s plates, which he had worked so hard to assemble over a period of nearly a decade, were dispersed to the
various members, who took them to make their own sea atlases. “Seller lost most everything,” wrote Smiley. For the next two decades, his print shop limped along, but Seller was never able to regain control of his work, and he died poor in 1697.

Despite his individual failure,
The English Pilot
project wasn’t entirely dead. One of the members of the consortium, John Thornton, began buying back the original plates one by one from the other dealers and made a deal to publish them with another member, William Fisher, who had retained the naming rights. In 1689, Thornton and Fisher put out the first full edition of
The
English Pilot, The Fourth Book.
The preceding decade had changed the fortunes of Great Britain, which by now had begun a lucrative trade with its American colonies. That placed the book in high demand by merchant captains, and Thornton prospered where Seller had failed.

Over the next few years, Thornton began rereleasing editions of the other books of
The
English Pilot,
as well as his own
Novus Atlas Maritimus.
Upon his death in 1708, the plates passed to Fisher’s son-in-law, Richard Mount, and his apprentice, Thomas Page, who founded the successful firm Mount and Page. Over the next seventy-five years, successive generations of Mounts (William, John) and Pages (Thomas II, Thomas III, Thomas IV) continued to print the books, with at least thirty-four separate editions produced between 1689 and 1794.

Smiley began tracking down these editions, which he realized contained some of the most influential maps in the history of the world—enabling the rise of Great Britain into the sea power it became. As one historian said about
The Fourth Book
, for the “British trading in North America” it “
must have been a godsend. . . . To modern eyes the charts are crude and sparse of detail; but to the navigator of American waters in that period, it was his Bible. Whatever its shortcomings, there was really no substitute, no real competitor, for over sixty years.”

—

WHILE HIS SEA
atlases were enough to establish John Seller’s legacy, he made one more contribution that also particularly interested Smiley. Around 1675, just as his business was collapsing, Seller got his hands on a survey of Massachusetts Bay Colony done by William Reed. The colony’s original boundaries were vague, with its northern limit set at the
source of the Merrimack River, an east-west-flowing river that spilled into the sea forty miles north of Boston. While it was initially assumed that source would be more or less at the same latitude as the mouth of the river, later explorations found it took a dogleg north a hundred miles into New Hampshire (as Smiley knew well, since he had crossed the river every day from his hometown in Bedford to attend Derryfield School in Manchester).

Eager to increase its landholdings, the colony’s commissioners appointed Reed to perform a new survey; however, on the way to London, the ship carrying it was captured by a Dutch privateer and that copy was lost at sea. It wasn’t until King Philip’s War, an American Indian uprising in 1675 that decimated several New England towns, that King Charles II became concerned about his New England colonies and demanded an update of the situation. The result was a flurry of mapmaking based on Reed’s survey, including an exceptional version by
Seller that was the first map to include all six New England states (
Figure I
).

Seller’s map reflects a new anxiety about a dark and dangerous continent, with heavy woods and mountains filled with wild animals. Right in the center, a pack of American Indians is pictured doing battle with an outnumbered group of colonists above the town of Deerfield, which had been wiped out in an attack. In addition to its striking artwork, the map corrected long-held errors in Dutch mapping, putting the Connecticut River in its proper place, and drawing the Merrimack accurately up to its source in Lake Winnipesaukee, which was no longer conflated with Lake Champlain. Here, at last, was a map of the area relying on English sources, which was copied over and over for the next seventy-five years. When New England preacher Cotton Mather sat down to write his definitive history of New England, he used Seller’s map to produce his own map of the region.

As Smiley continued to research English mapmaking, he focused on Seller as the linchpin, following every lead to new editions of the
Atlas Maritimus
and
The English Pilot, The Fourth Book.
Sea atlases weren’t stored in climate-controlled libraries or tucked away in castle garrets for a century; they were meant to be used, taken aboard ships plying the North Atlantic and weathered by sea spray. Often, captains who needed only a handful of charts might break them up and sell the rest off cheaply. As a result, many of the charts were lost over the centuries, such that some of
them now existed in only a handful of editions, and some editions existed in only a handful of copies.

Smiley got a bead on one of these rare charts, called “A New Survey of the Harbour of Boston in New England,” which had been produced by
Mount and Page for their 1708 edition of
The English Pilot.
Prior to this map, Boston had been featured only in small, inset maps, not large-scale maps like this one, measuring more than a foot by nearly two feet in size. According to Smiley’s later recollections, he heard of a copy of Mount and Page’s
Atlas Maritimus
containing the map coming up for auction in London. He bid hard for it, and after he won it, he broke it up to sell the other charts inside to recoup the cost.

It wasn’t until Smiley brought it back to Boston and put it side by side with other maps in Leventhal’s collection, however, that he understood how important it was. The two stood together in Leventhal’s office as Smiley took a deep breath and set it down next to other maps of the city. Unlike earlier charts, this one included more than twenty of the city’s Harbor Islands, drawn in crude but true outlines. More important, it included 132 soundings at low tide throughout the harbor, with a dotted line labeled “Ship Channell,” which snaked its way through them to the city—coincidentally landing directly at the location of Leventhal’s Boston Harbor Hotel. Viewing it together, Smiley and Leventhal realized they were looking at the first-ever navigable chart of Boston Harbor (
Figure 6
).

Like a lost puzzle piece that reveals a picture that had only been hinted at before, the map formed a missing link between the earlier sea charts of Seller and Thornton and the next navigable chart, published several decades later. Client and dealer spent the afternoon rearranging maps from Leventhal’s collection on the table, determining which mapmakers had traced the lines of this map to create their own maps, and which had drawn from original surveys. It was one of the most pleasurable afternoons of Smiley’s life—and there were many more like it, as he and Leventhal together began to understand the mapping of the city in a way that even most historians didn’t.

Smiley started to attract other wealthy clients as well. One who contacted him early on was
Lawrence Slaughter, then head of computer database operations for the United Nations. Slaughter had grown up an army brat, living all over the country, but spent his formative years at
Georgetown Preparatory School in Bethesda, Maryland, before attending Georgetown University in Washington, DC. He met Smiley at B. Altman, where he bought maps based on places he’d traveled—Paris, Bermuda, the Holy Land. Smiley urged him to focus his attentions on a particular area in order to create a collection that might be important one day. Slaughter took the advice to heart, focusing on Washington and the Chesapeake Bay, eventually expanding to include the entire mid-Atlantic coast. Soon, Smiley was taking regular trips to Slaughter’s home in Larchmont, a suburb north of New York City, as well as Boston, with finds from his European trips.

Other clients followed, until Smiley was chasing multiple maps on his trips. “What a thrill for a young man to be handed that responsibility to fly around Europe looking for this stuff,” Smiley told me. “And then to bring it back and put it into a collection with a man who was deadly serious about collecting it. At that moment, you have an understanding no one else has.”

It was a happy time in Smiley’s life, both professionally and personally. On
October 12, 1985, Smiley’s friends gathered on the rooftop of the Gramercy Park Hotel for
Smiley’s wedding to his fiancée, Lisa. Drinks in hand, his friends from Hampshire and Derryfield—Paul Statt, Scott Slater, Scott Haas, and Fred Melamed—posed for a photo in mismatched suits with white boutonnieres. In other photos from the day, Smiley looks handsome in a dark suit and silver wire-framed glasses; his new wife wore her blond hair up and a white wedding dress with full lace sleeves. That night, they drove with Slater up to Maine to stay for a night on the Maine seacoast before flying out the next day for a honeymoon on the Canary Islands—the classic embarkation point for generations of explorers setting sail for the New World.

—

BY NOW, SMILEY
was a regular fixture at the New York Public Library, bringing clients there to show them examples of maps he was planning on finding for them. When map chief Alice Hudson put out a call for a “friends’ group” to help raise money for the division, he volunteered right away to become one of the five members of the group’s planning committee, turning over his Rolodex for the mailing list. The group called itself the
Mercator Society and gathered for its first meeting on
March 20, 1986, to celebrate Gerard Mercator’s 474th birthday. Each member was required to contribute a minimum of $250—with the money used to conserve the collection and acquire new maps—though many contributed more. In the first year, thirty members together donated more than $10,000.

Guests at the inaugural meeting also found a surprise waiting for them: a pamphlet entitled
English Mapping of America, 1675–1715.
In advance of the meeting,
Smiley had contacted nearly two dozen map experts, asking each to pick his or her favorite map from the period and write a short paragraph describing its importance. Smiley served as editor and anonymously donated $4,000 of his own money to print it in a slim gray volume marked as
The Mercator Society: Publication Number One
.

The book’s contributors were a who’s who of map collecting. Dr. Seymour Schwartz, an avid collector and amateur historian, chose John Seller’s map of New England, illustrated with a rare copy of the map from Yale University. University of Wisconsin professor David Woodward picked a 1677 woodcut of New England by John Foster, drawn from the same survey as Seller’s map, which had the distinction of being the first map printed in the New World. Tony Campbell, map historian at the British Library, chose Thornton’s chart of Long Island from the very first edition of
The English Pilot
in 1689, one of the first maps to accurately depict the contours of the island.

Alice Hudson chose a less accurate map by Thornton, “A New Map of East and West New Jarsey [
sic
],” made in 1700. As she notes in her description, the surveyor “
apparently moved mountains in order to conduct his ‘Exact Survey’”—transposing the high ground in northern New Jersey into the south. Still, it’s a delightful historical artifact, showing the line of partition between the two New Jerseys, which were originally separate colonies. Finally, toward the end of the volume is the “New Survey of Boston Harbor” from the 1708 edition of
The English Pilot,
chosen by “A New England Collector” and identified as the “
earliest navigable chart of Boston Harbor.” At the end of the book, Smiley closed with a brief paragraph explaining the Mercator Society’s role in preserving the map collection, writing that it “
considers the maintenance and enrichment of the library’s collection its primary concern.”