A 72-year-old man who stole a 350-year-old map from a London museum has been jailed for three years. Melvin West took the rare artefact from the National Maritime Museum's Caird Library in Greenwich, using a Stanley knife to cut it from an atlas dating back to 1684.
Theft at the Caird Library
Officers were called to the museum at around 3pm on 26 February last year following reports from staff that a small knife had been found on the floor under a desk. The desk had been used by a member of the public, later confirmed to be West, earlier that day.
Staff quickly found that a centuries-old atlas had been cut and one of the maps removed. The missing page was a celebrated example of a double hemisphere world map, called Nova Orbus Tabula, by seventeenth-century Dutch cartographer Frederick de Wit.
Investigation and arrest
The map has never been recovered and police are still searching for it. The map alone is worth £6,000 on the black market, but prosecutors said the complete atlas, once worth £50,000, has now been ruined.
Police discovered that West had visited the library three times before and signed up for a reader's card under the name Melville West. CCTV footage showed him using a small knife to cut the map out of the book before hiding it in his clothing.
Sentencing and consequences
Detectives from the Met's Art and Antiques Unit identified West, who had previous convictions across Europe for stealing pages from valuable antique books. He was arrested at his home in Chingford on 4 March 2025 but answered "no comment" to most questions during his police interview.
West was sentenced to three years' imprisonment at Woolwich Crown Court on Thursday, 22 October after pleading guilty at Bromley Magistrates' Court on Tuesday, 19 May to theft, criminal damage and possession of a bladed article. The judge also imposed a 10-year Criminal Behaviour Order preventing West from being alone in any reading room of a museum or library in England and Wales.
