You hope Bill Miner would have approved of the theft of his pocket watch.
After all, the old train robber was A) a crook and B) didn’t surrender it willingly in the first place. The timepiece stolen from the Royal B.C. Museum last week was one the legendary outlaw left behind when he broke out of the New Westminster penitentiary in 1907.
Four years later, after Miner had been jailed in the U.S. for another crime, the overseer of his Georgia chain gang asked the B.C. Pen’s warden to return Miner’s personal possessions — the watch and $155 cash — as he was “old and destitute.”
No way, the warden replied. The rules say a prisoner’s property is held until his release; Miner, having escaped, hadn’t been properly released and therefore could not get his stuff back. So instead of going into Miner’s pocket, the watch eventually wound up in the museum.
History curator Lorne Hammond dug up that background following the recovery of the Miner watch and seven others spirited out of the Old Town exhibit last Friday.
As museum heists go, it wasn’t exactly Tom-Cruise-being-lowered-from-the-ceiling, more like a couple of opportunists snatching something to trade for meth or crack.
Certainly, it wasn’t as well-planned as a 1995 caper in which the adjoining B.C. Archives fell victim to a notorious map thief whose crimes were the subject of a bestselling book.
Miles Harvey’s Island Of Lost Maps tells the story of the appropriately named Gilbert Bland, a seemingly unremarkable man who for a couple of years escaped notice while slicing rare, ancient plates out of atlases and old books in a score of institutional libraries around North America.
Bland was a longtime con man who, after doing time in the 1970s, appeared to embrace the straight-and-narrow as a computer consultant — one who even did work for the FBI — before owning an antique-map shop in Florida.
No one suspected he was using the shop to sell stolen goods, not even the people who were buying them.
“He was stealing to order,” said Harvey, on the phone from Chicago on Friday.
Clients would call the shop in search of a particular map. “He would say: ‘I don’t have a copy with me, but I know where I can get one.’ ” Then Bland would go on a shopping trip, stealing the map in question and others found en route.
His saga included an Oct. 5, 1995, journey to Victoria’s provincial archives, where Bland, using an assumed name, signed out nine books including a 1601 edition of Theatrum Orbis Terrarum, the first known collection of world maps. By the time he left, he had surreptitiously sliced out 20 maps, including one of the earliest ones of the Pacific Rim and another pointing to a possible location of the Northwest Passage. He then hit the University of B.C. for 19 more.
It wasn’t until getting a bulletin from another of Bland’s victims that archives staff, poring over the collection, discovered the missing pages.
“I got physically ill,” provincial archivist Gary Mitchell recalled Friday. “For my colleagues and I, it was just awful. It felt like we had suffered a death in the family.” It felt like they had failed.
In truth, most of Bland’s targets had no idea they had been robbed until security staff caught him running off with maps from Baltimore’s Peabody library in late 1995. Tracing his tracks led to 19 victim libraries, though Harvey believes there were more.
Even though the FBI said his loot was worth $500,000, Bland was able to negotiate a light 18-month sentence, using the return of stashed maps as a bargaining chip. Canadian authorities declined to charge him with the thefts here.
Once Bland was caught, the B.C. Archives flew an employee, clutching the damaged books, to the FBI lab in Quantico, Va. The resulting forensic sleuthing brought a small miracle: 18 of the 20 maps, including the most precious ones, were returned.
What drove Bland is still debated. Certainly he stole for profit. Some said he had a gambling problem. A psychologist could have a field day with a, well, bland man’s habit of turning into someone else. “He had a history of adopting false identities, slipping into other people’s skin and committing crimes,” Harvey said.
Certainly Bland was smarter than the typical criminal, blended in, took care not to draw attention. “He didn’t steal the most expensive maps,” Harvey said.
“You have to acknowledge this individual was an absolute professional at what he did,” Mitchell said. Bland inspired security measures at the B.C. Archives that are evident today.
Happily, his story is a rarity. It’s worth noting that even with seven million items in its collection, the Royal B.C. Museum has only recorded one other theft, that of a replica coat used as a prop in an exhibit.
