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It is one of history’s first representations of the land that would become Canada.

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The Geographic Map of New France, drawn up in 1612 by Samuel de Champlain, the founder of Quebec City, showed Europeans a new continent of endless forests flanking a mighty river leading to an inland freshwater sea.

Written on what is now Labrador, a small indigenous word: “Canadas.”

This was the map that made Ronald Grim’s heart skip a beat when he spotted it in the pages of a New York antique catalogue; he had been looking for it ever since someone had walked out the front door of the Boston Public Library with it hidden under their clothes.

“It looked like it was torn … it would have been done fairly quickly,” said Grim, curator at the library’s Norman B. Leventhal Map Center.

He had only just started work at the Boston Library in 2005 when the theft was uncovered.

In June that year, the discovery of a X-acto knife on the floor of a Yale University reading room had led university police to confront a suspicious patron in a heavy tweed coat that, detectives would soon discover, was filled with stolen maps.

The patron was E. Forbes Smiley, a well-known map collector. His subsequent arrest forced libraries across the United States to take an inventory of anything he had ever touched.