Map thief leads 'merry dance' with return promises

A man who used a Stanley knife to cut a rare 17th Century world map out of an atlas at a museum library has been jailed for three years.

Melvin West, 70, sliced the map from a 1684 atlas by Dutch cartographer Frederik de Wit while viewing it at the Caird Library, part of the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich, in February 2025.

The map has never been found, and a judge at Woolwich Crown Court said West had led the court, police and museum a "merry dance" over where it was.

The Metropolitan Police has appealed for anyone who knows where it is to come forward.

The double hemisphere world map, known as Nova Orbis Tabula, was one of 12 in the atlas, and is studied by scholars around the world.

The court heard West, from Chingford in east London, had viewed the atlas on 19 and 20 December 2024 and again on the day before the theft.

Staff called police after finding a knife on the floor of the viewing room where he had been looking at the atlas. They then discovered the map had been cut out.

West was arrested at his home in March 2025, but the map was not there. He pleaded guilty at Bromley Magistrates' Court in May to theft, criminal damage and possession of a bladed article.

Prosecution barrister Damian Warburton said the complete atlas had been worth about £50,000 and the map alone could fetch £6,000 on the black market.

The atlas is now valued at £20,000, but he told the court the "cultural loss far outweighs the financial loss".

Defence barrister Jessica Flain said West had partly paid a man to restore the map, but he would not hand it back until the full fee was settled. She asked for sentencing to be adjourned for seven days so a friend could pay the balance and West could take the map to Charing Cross Police Station.

Judge Charlotte Welsh refused, saying she did "not believe a word of it".

She said West had told the court in June that he could return the map within seven days, and in August that it was with a friend and he would retrieve it once he had recovered from heart surgery.

"Again, that appears to have been a lie," she said. "You were charged in February. You have had eight months to return the map."

The judge said she believed West had a buyer in mind and had stolen the map "to order".

The court heard he had 27 convictions for 107 offences in the UK and abroad, mostly for dishonesty and including 41 thefts. They included a burglary conviction in Hungary in 2011 and a theft conviction in France in 2013, and he had also been convicted under various identities.

Flain said West, a father of two, was "ashamed and embarrassed" and had been in debt and unable to meet basic living costs. She described the offence as "a short-term, pressured decision by an elderly man living in difficult circumstances".

Judge Welsh said the map was of "international cultural significance" and the damage had "permanently diminished what can be learned from it". The court was told the two digital copies of the atlas are incomplete.

West was jailed for three years for criminal damage, with concurrent sentences of 16 months for theft and six months for possessing a bladed article. The judge refused to suspend the sentence, saying immediate custody was needed "to deter other people from doing precisely what you have".

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