While flicking through Robert Charroux’s (1962) “Tresors du monde : enterres, emmures, engloutis” a few days ago, I noticed that his version of the Tamarin Bay ciphertext was slightly different to the one given by Alix d’Unienville that I previously discussed:
13 800 onces or-argent
Ici se trouve une courtisane
Je vous laisse monsieur deviner
sans vous demander de part
Though very similar, the number given by Charroux here is a thousand times smaller than the one d’Unienville gives; and his final word is “part” rather than “l’argent“. So perhaps these are two different people’s transcriptions?
On the off-chance, I also searched Gallica for various phrases in the quatrain, but found nothing: so it seems that this ciphertext hasn’t appeared anywhere else. Why is there no interest in this mystery?