Putting to one side the bombshell news that the Zodiac Killer’s Z340 cipher has been cracked, the other big cipher-related event in December 2020 was that Clarkson / Hammond / May’s Grand Tour Special came to Madagascar. The idea was to see if they could (a) drive utterly mad cars around arguably the world’s worst roads without anyone actually lynching them, and (b) find pirate treasure by solving the cryptogram attributed to the French pirate Olivier “La Buse” Levasseur.
That they managed (a) while continuing to flog their format’s dead horse(-power) probably surprised no one at all: but how did they do with (b)?
Is it a treasure map?
I have already blogged here about La Buse far too many times to mention. The short version is that the chances that the pigpen cryptogram widely attributed to him actually had anything to do with him are basically zero. Rather, it seems massively more likely that the cipher was concocted at least fifty years after his death, and that the plaintext was in fact some kind of medical recipe. And if it turns out that the pigeon hearts were simply an 18th century substitution for hoopoe hearts, my Spockian eyebrow would barely flicker.
So, is it a pirate treasure map, me (hoopoe) hearties? Not a hopoe.
What about the end five lines, then?
OK, I know that some (gullible) people think the final five lines sometimes seen added to the cipher make it sound like a right proper treasure map:
un bon verre dans l’hostel de le veque dant(S)
le siege du diable r(Q)uarar(N)te siz(X) degrès
f(S)iz(X) minutes deuz(X) fois
pour celui qui le decouvrira
juillet mil sept cent (T)rente
(…in English…)
a good drink in the bishop’s hostel in
the devil’s seat forty six degrees
six minutes two times
for the person who will discover it
july 1730
But that’s because they sound just like the text describing a treasure map in Edgar Allan Poe’s (1843) “The Gold Bug”:
A good glass in the bishop’s hostel in the devil’s seat
— twenty-one degrees and thirteen minutes
— northeast and by north
— main branch seventh limb east side
— shoot from the left eye of the death’s-head
— a bee line from the tree through the shot fifty feet out.
And, more specifically, they sound more like the 1933 French translation of Poe’s story than Baudelaire’s 1856 French translation.
It therefore seems extraordinarily likely to me that the extra five lines were speculatively added to the cryptogram by a French person after 1933. Which was nice of them.
A Turkish Dog?
All the same, the Grand Tour research minions did do a fair bit of digging. They had James May mention a “Turkish dog” (“UN CHIEN TURQ” in the decrypted text), which has been flagged only in very recent years as a phrase used in the 18th century to describe the kind of hairless state that mangy dogs get into in hot countries. (In the above link, the researcher suggests the phrase should be read as “To make a Turkish dog eat well, throw some dry shit at it”, make of that what you will). Here’s a 1755 image from the BNF showing a real (but now extinct) hairless Turkish dog:
But ultimately, this was – like most of the world seen through the windscreen in the Grand Tour – just window-dressing for the car-themed light entertainment. Which, this time round, basically consisted of repeatedly covering James May (in his big-wheeled Caterham) in high-velocity Madagascan mud to make him swear.
Bless them, they’ve all come so far, yet have ended up where they began.
Réunion, Mauritius, Seychelles, Madagascar?
It was correct of them to say (a) that La Buse tried to get himself a pardon from the newly-installed French authorities on Ile de France (Mauritius); (b) that he was captured in Madagascar; and (c) that he was hanged in 1730 in Réunion. So I think it was fair to say that they did broadly present his overall timeline right.
However, La Buse had (it has been widely written) settled down on the Seychelles, nowhere near Madagascar. He was also captured near Fort Dauphin (the main French colony on the island at the time), which was completely the wrong end of the island from the end the bumbling comedic trio drove their modded cars to.
Though La Buse had boarded the Compagnie des Indes’ ship “La Méduse” (1728-1731), it was merely as a pilot to steer it into Port Dauphin. Unfortunately (for La Buse), he was recognised by the captain (it is widely reported, which was presumably Capitaine Hyacinthe D’Hermite as per Memoires des Hommes), captured, and brought to Réunion. And from there to the gallows.
Also: the grave on Réunion that is supposedly La Buse’s isn’t his at all, it’s just a piece of much later tourist trappery. And Madagascar’s “Libertalia”? This is probably more fun as a computer game than as an historical source, so please don’t get me started on that pile of… conjecture.
So, What Really Happened, Then?
Most of the stuff written about La Buse seems to me to vastly overplay his importance as a pirate. Rather, he seems to have been bigged up by the same kind of French ‘historians’ who turned the dead bookseller Nicolas Flamel into some kind of undying alchemist. Flamel would, of course, be turning in his grave were he not still alive. Supposedly.
As to what actually happened with the treasure, I’m marginally more convinced by the account in Charles Grey’s “Pirates of the Eastern Seas” (Chapter XVII): “The pirates divided the plunder at St. Mary’s, besides the cash sharing about 42 small diamonds per man or in less number according to their proportion” (p.325). Grey finishes with Captain David Greenhill’s July 1723 report “that the pirate ship Cassandra was come into Portobello, and that the people have a free pardon for themselves and their goods, and were selling their diamonds and India goods when he came away” (p.329).
The fabulous treasures and chintzes the pirates took had (without much doubt) already been spirited back to Cochin (modern-day Kochi in Kerala) to sell to”their Dutch friends” (p.325). So this is almost certainly where the Flaming Cross of Goa was melted down and laundered, with most of the cash then spaffed on the normal mad carousing pirates specialised in.
Why? Being a pirate was a shitty thing: you expected to die young, because that’s how it normally worked. It’s just that life on board ‘proper’ ships was pretty shitty too, so why not go for the 10% odds that piracy might just work for you?
In some ways, I can’t really blame people for wanting all or any of the tongue-hanging-out-your-mouth La Buse treasure stories to be true. But in my experience, most of the stories attached to unsolved cryptograms tend to be simply historical backfill, campfire stories grafted on to help flog an uncracked cipher to the next sucker mug enough to buy it. And, in my opinion, La Buse’s cryptogram fits that template to a T.
Of course, the other scenario is where people use a bit of unsolved cipher mystery snake oil to help repackage tired old products well past their sell-by date. But that would never happen on Amazon Prime, would it?
Thanks, Nick, I didn’t know The Grand Tour. The cars are worth a look!
Wonder why the LaBuse cipher AND the Gold Bug cipher both have similar directions charted? They reference a single location and show that the movement from that location relied on the angle of movement to a set of rivers and they branched at a point where there were turns made to find a location in a mountain pass.
Because they were keys to a location that proved who they were.
It was clearly someone that had an idea about the resting place of a great treasure that made the Levasseur Cipher. There was something odd about them showing that detail in both, as if a historical location, so I made the connection one night when breaking the ciphers of the Plougastel Dauolas stone slab that showed both carvings of Levasseur’s face, with matching symbols found on the parchment cipher that were seen on the stone.
It was apparent that the so-called LeVasseur Cipher was actually known to be authored by Thomas Jefferson. It spoke of a series of locations where he had buried his troves of his shares, and the shares brought for the King, but neglected to mention the Cross of Goa. These were all mapped out in France and were designed to lead to Mahe. There the path to the high cave was littered with more carvings describing the areas in and around Brest, where Levasseur had his Naval Training. The locations were obviously in France and not Mahe as a large face with a phallic nose was carved there in the cave. A testament to their humor as this was designed to bring anger and confusion to the wanton gold hunter, eager to be rewarded after traveling all the way to Mahe.
The cipher of the Levasseur Troves authored by Jefferson finished with a directional guide to another series of ciphers altogether and acted like a signature. The other parts of the cipher were to be used to hint at the other person involved as being a Doctor, whom Jefferson was speaking with. Dr. James Currie. This led me to examine the oddly capitalized words in their correspondences between eachother that gave away the whole story in detail. They were using the troves of Levasseur to fund the French Revolution. The whole missing part of their involvement with French Freemasons.
Of which there was a vault that held these treasures. But these ciphers holding the same location were real places, and were meant to show they were the original keepers of the secret behind the Mountain Pass in Stowe.