[CPProt.net] Map mystery: Who's nicking treasures? (Map thefts)

[MSN CPPnet (Ton Cremers)]

Map mystery: Who's nicking treasures?

      RANDY BOSWELL
      CanWest News Service

Wednesday, September 14, 2005


One of the rarest and most important early maps of Canada has been sliced
from a 427-year-old book at the British Library, apparently taken in a
worldwide map-stealing spree that has led to the arrest of a well-known U.S.
antiquarian.

The landmark 1578 depiction of Martin Frobisher's discoveries in northern
Canada was contained in a first-hand account of the explorer's Arctic
voyages written by one of his chief lieutenants, George Best.

The map is valued at about $100,000 but is historically priceless.

''It's a terrible loss to mankind and to the history of exploration,'' said
Louis Cardinal, chief of cartography at Canada's largest repository of
historical maps, the Ottawa-based Library and Archives Canada.

He said he is aware of only one other original of the vanished Frobisher map
and that Canada itself possesses ''a good facsimile, but only a facsimile.''

Two other antique maps - including one removed from a 1624 book promoting
the Scottish settlement of Nova Scotia - also have been reported missing
from the British Library.

The prime suspect is E. Forbes Smiley III, 49, a Massachusetts map dealer
and expert in early North American cartography who was arrested in June for
allegedly stealing maps from a Yale University rare books room.

After a librarian spotted a dropped X-Acto knife blade on the floor and
alerted security, police caught him with eight maps, worth $900,000, stuffed
inside his jacket pockets and briefcase.

At least four had been taken from centuries-old books held by Yale. The
origins of the other four are unknown.

The FBI then issued an alert to map libraries around the world, advising
curators to check their collections and determine whether the accused had
recently visited their institutions.

That's when the British Library first noticed the missing Frobisher map and
the two other apparent thefts. Peter Barber, head of the library's
cartography section, recently told the Hartford Courant that records show
Smiley visited the library twice in the past 18 months and examined at least
two of the books.

The wave of thefts has sent a shudder through Canada's curatorial community,
says Marcel Fortin, a University of Toronto librarian who is also president
of the Association of Canadian Map Libraries and Archives.

''It's a very difficult situation,'' he said. ''We realize the importance of
these icons - like the Frobisher map - but our focus is more and more on the
digital collection. A lot of times there is very little security. Many
libraries are short-staffed and have no money to install better security
systems.''

Cardinal said map experts across Canada are aware of the Smiley case.
Library and Archives staff have conducted a thorough inventory and checked
client records. They are satisfied that nothing is missing and that ''the
person has not visited us.''

But several libraries in Boston, Chicago and New York City have reported
losses of rare and valuable maps in recent months. Police are reportedly
investigating possible links to Smiley.

Smiley, who is to appear in a Connecticut court on Oct. 3, boasts on his
website that ''we buy worldwide very aggressively and sell very actively to
dealers and collectors.''

If the Frobisher map has already been sold, a significant relic of the
earliest English expeditions to Canada has been lost.

Sailing in search of a northwest passage to China in the days of Queen
Elizabeth I and William Shakespeare, Frobisher reached Baffin Island and
even attempted to establish a gold mine near present-day Iqaluit.

His voyages, like the sparkly but worthless rocks his men mined from the
Arctic earth, promised more than they delivered. But his journeys produced
two maps, believed drawn by James Beare, a modestly skilled cartographer who
had sailed to Canada with Frobisher and Best.

Printed in Best's A True Discourse of the Late Voyages of Martin Frobisher,
one showed how ''Frobusshers Straightes'' - an imagined passage through the
Arctic Ocean that wouldn't be truly discovered for centuries - connected
western Europe with eastern Asia.

Because of this map - the one stolen from the British Library - Beare is
credited in the Dictionary of Canadian Biography with creating ''the first
maps to show with reasonable accuracy the eastern approaches to the Canadian
Arctic.''

C The Gazette (Montreal) 2005