I grew up in the Hawaiian islands, so the ocean has always been a sacred place to me. My summers included many hours spent in the waves, and ample time for reading. The book that captured my imagination above all others was Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island.
One of the central anchors of the story is Captain Flint’s treasure map. The irony is that, as you read the book (or watch the Disney movie), the details of the map are never revealed. It is just the notion of the map’s existence, and what it could lead to, that drives Long John Silver and others to the point of obsession.
I fancied myself one of the characters in the story, fascinated by the idea of a pirate’s life, with liberty, equality, and fraternity held high. At the beach, I followed imaginary clues and dug for loot in the sands. And I pored over the last page of my leather-bound copy, where a colorful rendition of the mysterious map was included on the inside of the back cover.
I had no idea at the time as a child what cartography was, but that map fascinated me to no end: the shapes of the landforms, the colors, the arrow pointing north. Not only was I set on a permanent heading toward a love of pirates and pirate lore, I also wanted to know how to better to decipher maps, and how to make them myself. I wondered, why did most maps only show the top of the ocean? What is beneath the surface, and how in the world do you make a map of that?
Those questions ended up launching my career of making real treasure maps of the ocean floor. I studied geology in college, then oceanography at Texas A&M. It was there that I would find another map to my future: the 1977 World Ocean Floor Panorama by Marie Tharp and Bruce Heezen, which adorns the walls of many great institutions of oceanography around the world. It was the first in history to hint at the full scope of what lies beneath the blue.