The Tamarin Bay Cipher Mystery…

Mauritius has long had a surfeit of treasure hunters, though also a shortage of actual treasures. In fact, in Alix d’Unienville’s (1954) “Les Mascareignes: Vielle France en mer indienne“, M. Aimé de Sornay asserts (p.236) that almost all Mauritian treasure hunters focus on what we might call The Big Two: La Buse’s treasure and Bernardin Nageon de l’Estang’s treasure.

Yet d’Unienville also flags a number of other, more ‘pittoresque‘ treasure stories that over the years had raised Mauritian treasure seekers’ blood pressures to sphygmomanometrically dangerous levels. So I thought it would be fun to post about one of these. 🙂

The Tamarin Bay Cipher Mystery

If you are a surfer, you may already know about Tamarin Bay: its waves feature in Larry Yates’ (1974) culty surf documentary “Forgotten Island of Santosha“.These days Tamarin Bay is home to a large (though uneconomic) salt pan (which you can see in the nice aerial picture below, courtesy of Legend Hill Resort), and a whole load of Airbnb holiday accommodation.

With that all in place, let’s hear Alix d’Unienville’s story (p.246):

“En 1949, par exemple, on trouva par hasard sur une propriété située au sud-ouest de l’île, près de la baie de Tamarin, une grosse pierre où se trouvaient gravés quelques caractères chinois. Intrigués par cette découverte et voulant en avoir le cœur net, car ici le moindre signe pourrait bien donner la clef d’un trésor, les propriétaires en demandèrent la traduction à quatre membres de la communauté chinoise connus pour leur probité.”

All of which almost translates itself into English:

In 1949, for example, on a property located in the southwest of the island, near Tamarin Bay, a large stone with some Chinese characters engraved on it was found purely by chance. Intrigued by this discovery and wanting to get to the bottom of it, because the tiniest clue might yield the key to a treasure, the owners asked four members of the Chinese community known for their probity to translate it.

What did they say? What did they say? Well, here’s the “petit quatrain” the four came up with (p.247):

“13.800.000 onces or-argent
Ici se trouve une courtisane
Je vous laisse, Monsieur, deviner
sans vous demander de l’argent“

Which was, of course, exactly what les propriétaires were hoping to hear, even if it was utterly vague. And when a metal detector flagged the presence of metal just below the surface, digging commenced immediately.

Only three feet down, a flat stone bearing two long hand-chiseled parallel lines was uncovered. This was the point where police were called in to protect the gold the diggers were surely about to find, along with transport to carry it away to safety.

Of course, what they actually found beneath this second stone was… nothing whatsoever: and extending the dig to twenty feet down revealed nothing else either. Oh, and then a famous metal dowser from the Seychelles turned up, and told them that the treasure was there but just to one side of where they had dug. Inevitably, even though they then dug out several more tons of earth, they found not so much as a gold pirate earring.

Finally, it turned out that the original metal detector had been fooled by the presence of iron ore in the soil. So it had all been a waste of time and effort.

Note: The Date Might Be Wrong

At this point, I should add that when I cross-referenced this against Philippe Chevreau de Montléhu’s (1974) paper “LE TRÉSOR DE BELMONT” (available from S.H.I.M.), the two seem connected but the dates didn’t quite match up.

The story Chevreau de Montléhu tells about Belmont (on the other side of the island) is that workers who were cutting back the mangroves at Belmont in 1927 noticed a rock with very similar long parallel markings:

When he saw the H mark he mentioned it to M. de Sornay who was his superior and who was also interested in treasure excavations. M. de Sornay then went to Belmont, and at the sight of this ‘H’ mark he exclaimed: « Tiens mais c’est le même plan que nous avons appliqué par erreur à la Rivière Noire, à Anne ».

i.e. “Look, it’s the same treasure map that we got wrong at Rivière Noire [i.e. Tamarin Bay], at Anne”. [Note: I don’t know how to translate “à Anne“]

The problem here is that while Chevreau de Montléhu dates the Belmont find to 1927 (and implicitly after the Tamarin Bay find), Alix d’Unienville dates the Tamarin Bay find to 1949.

All the same, both accounts are connected to M. Aimé de Sornay (actually Marie Joseph “Aimé” de Sornay 1906-1959, of whom there’s a statue in Curepipe, and who was the Rector of the Mauritius College of Agriculture at one point), so there does seem to be a bedrock of truth to the two, even if the dates are a bit wobbly.

However, in the ever-reliable Denis Piat’s list of Mauritian treasure digs (which I discussed here back in 2016), we find “Belmont, close to Poudre d’Or” listed as 1927 and “Tamarin” listed as 1950. So it seems that Chevreau de Montléhu’s story about what Aimé de Sornay supposedly said is… less than completely accurate, let’s say.

So… Why Is This A Cipher Mystery?

Every single detail in d’Unienville’s account (the treasure, the greed, the futility, even the metal dowser from the Seychelles) rings completely true to my ears: apart from one, which I think sticks out like a teetotaller on a pirate ship.

Errrm… does anyone reading this really think that the decryption from the ‘Chinese characters’ sounds as though the respected Chinese elders nailed it? Or do you think it sounds like just about every other misinterpreted cipher mystery that’s drifted past us down the river over the years?

Currently, my best guess is that the markings the owners had uncovered were actually more like the ones you see in scratchy pigpen ciphers, whose blocky outlines can vaguely resemble the blocky outlines of Chinese ideograms. And so I strongly suspect that this was very probably a genuine cipher mystery all along… though one that was not in any way Chinese.

However, I haven’t seen any other accounts of this story apart from Alix d’Unienville’s (presumably because it makes the treasure hunters look like greedy superficial idiots). And despite having looked for any image of the actual “grosse pierre” for some time, I haven’t yet been able to find one.

All the same, perhaps someone with a bigger/better library of Indian Ocean treasure-related books than me will know where an image of this appears.

I would also expect that there would be 1949 newspaper articles with more details (though probably not in Gallica, which only goes up to 1944). If I was in Mauritius now, I’d head off to the Mauritian National Archives whose collection of Mauritian newspapers goes back to 1777 (e.g. Le Mauricien, Le Cerneen, etc). But… here I am, most definitely not in Mauritius. 🙁

All future research leads gratefully received! 🙂