There are many famous stories that my father told me when I was younger. Stories from his fathers time. Stories of adventurers and fortune seekers. People who would go off and explore the world and bring back all sorts of trinkets. They would then go around and tell their story, they would have one or several of their trinkets with them, they would sit at bars, and clubs and all sorts of places – high class and working class – and tell their stories. Regale anyone who would come along with probably embellished tales of heroism, mystery, romance and espionage.
As a child these stories took me to places I could never imagine. I could pretend to be one of these adventurers, seeking my fame and fortune along the rivers of undiscovered nations, stowaway on boats setting out for hostile territory, surviving merely by the skin of my teeth as my enemies pursued me and my friends through unknown terrain. For the longest time I wanted to be one of these adventurers. I would tell my friends, really anyone who would listen, about all the things I was going to discover, all the tribes I would befriend and all the things I would bring home. And then I would talk about all the stories I would tell. All the people I would tell them to and the places I would see in the telling.
My favourite of these people, these heroes of days I had never seen, was the Englishman Milo Sharp. He was the most well known, the one with the most stories attached to his name. My father often said that he was most likely not a real person, that all these stories were just other people trying to ride the fame of someone else. Milo Sharp, in other words, is something of a placeholder. A shapeless form to inhabit with your own story. I dreamed of being a Milo Sharp, of continuing that legacy. Perhaps even having something that I found, deep in the jungles of Africa, in a museum in England, with the Milo Sharp name attached to it. I dreamed of walking through the museum, unrecognised, knowing that this artefact and that artefact were there because of me. That people were caught up in the tale that I provided. That was what I wanted to be, above all else, as a child.
But then I grew up and I learned that the dreams of children are often shot down in tatters. The depth of the idea that Milo Sharp was not a real person hit me as a young teenager. If he wasnt real, then could the stories also be made up? I asked my father, before he left us, about this and he shrugged. He said that some of them were absolutely made up. Some of the escapades were physically impossible to attempt, much less complete. Some of the places were just not real. That the natives of some of these places werent the welcoming sort at all and there were many – true and verifiable – stories of people trying to be adventurers and never returning. Often, these stories went, that they were eaten by these natives.
As I neared the end of my secondary education, the idea that we knew everything on the map came into focus. The holes in the great continents were filling faster and faster. More and more people were able to travel quickly and cheaply around the world. In fact, there were several tours named for Milo Sharp that toured ancient rivers in Asia and Africa.
I visited museums as I studied archaeology – I couldnt escape the grand dream entirely – and there were almost no items with Sharps name on them. Most people in those fields now believe that the name was always a fake. There was no single person. Back in those days, so the story goes, an idea like that; romantic, almost unbelievable and exciting was an easier sell than the truth. But today, truth is more important than a good story.
So here I am, in my twenties, heading into my thirties. A graduate of discovery in a world where there was very little left to discover. A mapmaker where all the maps had already been made. A storyteller in a world were documentary ruled. I have my niche, sure. But I sit behind a desk. I write curricula. I help professors who all know the Sharp stories, but dismiss them, if theyre in a petty mood, as a hoax. A fraud. Like all the “intermediate steps” from primitive primates to modern human.
Unfortunately I understand all of this. Milo Sharp was not real. His escapades were fictionalised accounts from real people. Those people werent adventurers in the sense that the stories used to describe. They were often colonists, expanding their empire. They were missionaries, spreading their faith. The good they did was eclipsed by the evil. The way they treated the natives of the places they visited, the way in which those same natives were forced out of their homelands for more space for people like me. But you cant tell a good story when all of that is part of it, so all that was written out. The good parts, the exciting parts, were left and Milo Sharp and all the others were made up to be the all-good heroes.
Except.
There is still one story. The original Milo Sharp story. A story that has defied all attempts to discredit it. A story that has all the hallmarks of a fiction story, yet it cant be. We have the artefact. We know when and where it was found. The descendants of the people we took it from have stated over and over again that it was theirs, that it should be returned and all of that. We just dont have the explorer, or the adventurer, the colonist or the missionary who found it. Who brought it back from the heart of Africa.
We dont label it with Sharps name anymore. But it was the last one to have the name removed. Now, it says “unknown discoverer.” I have seen the artefact myself. It sits on the fifth floor of the British Museum. It doesnt belong to any one exhibit and has a plinth all to itself in the middle of a small room, towards the back of the museum.
Unlike the exhibits on the more popular, the more famous floors, this small jade carving sits behind think acrylic. There are no sensors within the display, only the omnipresent cameras that peered into every nook and cranny of the museum. While it wouldnt be hard to take the item, getting it out of the museum undetected would be. Ive often wondered if I should have reached under the plastic and touched it. Not take it, of course not, but just to touch it. It would be the closest thing I could think of to actually being Milo Sharp. To being my childhood hero. But I havent been to England for several years now. With a young family to care for, travelling further than the hospital my mother is a resident in marks a pipe dream.
I missed the news. It was, in fact, my mother who told me. I must have looked bewildered because my reaction coaxed a laugh out of her. The first one since she had been interred, as she put it, into full time care.
The British Museum had been attacked. How I missed it, I could not tell you. It was front page news across the world. Many priceless exhibits had been destroyed and officials across the world were looking into how many were still there.
Through my contacts in the field, I was able to be kept in the loop on what was missing, what had been found and all that. Something in my gut, something I didnt know I could feel, told me that the small jade carving, the centrepiece to a story from my childhood, would not be found. I knew, somehow, in some irrational way, that it had been taken. That it was the target of the attack above all the other more impressive things on display. Of course, the back of the museum, on the fifth floor was not a high priority area to examine and any requests for information I sent were either ignored or replied to with a form letter that said that since I was a literal nobody, that I was not entitled whatsoever to any information regarding any investigation into what happened.
It would be many months before the final tally came through and was made public, and as I had intuited, there was no accounting for the small jade statue. If the tally were accurate, it was now in the wind. Someone had taken it.
A mystery fit for Milo Sharp.
This is one of those things that you forget about normally. The museum, all the officials, everyone had two lists. The items lost, and the items recovered. Between the two, a complete and entire list of exhibits. Yet the small statue was not there.
The fact that I had sent multiple requests for information about it somehow made its way to the office of someone or other high up in some large investigative force and one day, while in the midst of my usual work, I was arrested. A person of interest in the incident. Not a suspect. The unsaid “yet” was hanging there, though.
I sat through fifteen different interrogations. Each of them asking slightly differently worded versions of the same questions. Since I was not involved in anyway, I couldnt give them the answers a guilty person would. For several weeks, I was watched. My history was scoured. They knew every inch of my life, every moment awake was theirs. I saw them as I left the supermarket. As I exited my office. They even went through my childs school. They were everywhere for six months and then they disappeared. I was free again.
Until, on a walk one winter night, a black van parked next to me and three large men got out. They wore all black and their faces were covered in ski masks. A part of my brain knew what this was, but couldnt warn the rest of it in time. One of them clubbed me and the world went sideways. Through fuzzy vision, I saw them load me into the van and we were away. The entire thing lasted less than a second.
“You saw the statue,” someone in the van said. The words meant little to me while my head throbbed. “No one else did. How did you see it?”
I couldnt speak. There was no signals being sent from my brain to my mouth. All I could do was groan and hold the back of my head where I had been hit.
“You hit him too hard,” someone else said.
I felt my head being lifted roughly and my eyes opened enough to stare into the face of a scarred, bearded man. “How did you see it?” he asked.
“Milo Sharp story,” I managed to squeak out. As I spoke, he dropped my head and I collapsed to the floor. As I blacked out, I could hear them all muttering amongst themselves.