More notes on the Beale Ciphers…

I’ve recently been trawling through lots of sources of information on the Beale Ciphers, and thought it might be nice to dump a whole load of thoughts in a single place, rather than sprawl these out over 4-5 posts. So here goes…

Clayton Hart

The suggestion that the Beale Ciphers might be three genuine ciphertexts but that the Beale Papers could simultaneously just be fantastical meanderings woven around those ciphertexts is not original to me (and I never claimed it was). However, what I didn’t realise until the last few days was that Clayton Hart also wondered that this might have been true, possibly as far back as 1903:

Clayton Hart actually met with James Ward and his son, who both, in 1903, confirmed the content of his pamphlet. In particular he states: “I have wondered if Ward might have written his manuscript based upon some figures he found, or made up; and yet, we have the word of Ward, his son, and friends to the contrary. Inquiry among some aged neighbors of Ward showed the high respect they had for him, and brought forth the statement that Ward would never practice deception.”

Interesting, hmmm?

C3 and high numbers

Another Beale page on the same angelfire.com site (though watch out for those pesky pop-unders there, *sigh*) demonstrates that the high numbers in B3 are concentrated very strongly in the second half of the ciphertext:

The image is credited to researcher Simon Ayrinhac, who has a picture from 2006 or earlier here:

Ayrinhac’s French discussion on the Beale Ciphers is also online, though as it doesn’t include the above diagram, there may well be further Beale analyses of his elsewhere online (which I haven’t yet found).

Declaration of Independence

One of Stephen M. Matyas Jr.’s major contributions to Beale Cipher research is his extensive collection of printed versions of the Declaration of Independence from 1776-1825, which is available both in printed form and online on his website, e.g. his checklist and addenda PDFs (both highly recommended).

This has led him to build up what I think is a really solid reasoning chain about the Declaration of Independence used in the (solved) Beale Cipher B2. For example, as far as the word “unalienable” goes, Matyas writes:

Many, in fact, most Declarations printed before 1823 contain the word “unalienable.” Thus, it may be surmised that Beale’s Declaration contained the word “unalienable,” not “inalienable,” and therefore that the two Declarations are different and taken from two different source works (probably books).

In Chapter 6 of his book “Beale Treasure Story: The Hoax Theory Deflated” (according to this page, but more about Matyas’ books another day), Matyas further writes about the word “meantime”:

Beale’s DOI contains the variant wording “institute a new government” at word location 154 and the more common wording “mean time” at word location 520. (The pamphlet’s DOI uses the word “meantime” (one word), and this should be changed to “mean time” (two words) so that ten words occur between numbered words 500 and 510 instead of the present nine words. The printer of Ward’s pamphlet may have unwittingly combined the two words.)

So, the first big takeaway from Matyas’ careful analysis of all the pre-1826 printed copies of the Declaration of Independence is that the DoI that was used to create B2 was, he asserts, not an obscure and wonky variatn, but instead a genuine mainstream copy of the DoI. Matyas says that of the 327 printed versions he was aware of, 26 were entirely consistent with the cipher: and he believes that the one used to encipher B2 was from a book (rather than, say, from a newspaper).

His second big point is that some of the errors that affected the DoI numbering in the pamphlet seem to have arisen because the author of the pamphlet included a version of the DoI that he had adapted / reconstructed to better fit the one used to turn B2’s decrypted plaintext into its ciphertext. As Matyas puts it, “The misnumbered DOI in Ward’s pamphlet is the result of the anonymous author’s best attempt to simulate Beale’s key. He did a pretty good job of it, although some might disagree.”

From all this, I think it is clear that anyone genuinely trying to decrypt B1 and B3 should very probably be working forward from one of Matyas’ 26 remaining compatible DoI texts rather than backwards from the DoI version given in the pamphlet. This is a tricky point with code-breaking ramifications I’ll return to in a follow-up post.

Matyas’s Reconstruction

With the above in mind, Matyas moves on to show the sequence of steps that he believes was taken to construct Beale Cipher B2, which I reduce to bullet-point format here:

1. “[I]t is supposed that [the encipherer] copied the words in the DOI to work sheets.”
2. “He then carefully counted off groups of ten words, placing a vertical mark at the end of each group of 10 words.”
3. “Finally, he constructed a key by extracting the initial letters from the words on his work sheets, and arranged them in a table with 10 letters per line and 101 lines.”
4. The encipherer “made three clerical errors”:
(a) “a word was accidentally omitted after word 241 and before word 246,”
(b) “a word was accidentally omitted after word 630 and before word 654, and”
(c) “a word was accidentally omitted after word 677 and before word 819.”
5. The encipherer “made one additional clerical error; he accidently skipped over 10 words in the work sheets immediately following word 480, thus omitting an entire line of 10 letters in the key.”

Matyas believes that because of these errors, when the anonymous author of the Beale Papers pamphlet came to reconstruct and number his own Declaration of Independence, he adapted the numbering and wording to better fit the plaintext he had worked out.