Category Archives: Le Butin Papers

“Capital” issue 132, 5th June 2013 has an article on page 15 entitled “Jean Giraud et ses Précieuses Pierres”, which discusses the death of Jean Giraud (who founded Mauritian company United Basalt in July 1953) on May 14th 2013 at the age of 94:

The article continues:

Grand chasseur devant l’éternel, il est aussi chercheur de trésors à ses heures. Persuadé comme beaucoup de passionnés de la catégorie, il est persuade que des pirates ont enfoui des trésors dans les îles de sud-ouest de l’océan Indien. Il decide de s’intéresser à celui du fameux Oliver Le Vasseur, dir La Buse, qu’il croit enfoui quelque part à Saint-Antoine et à celui de Nageon de l’Estang, qui, just avant d’être pendu aux Seychelles, a jeté à la foule des curieux un prétendu plan de trésor. En compagnie de son frère Lucien, de Philippe de Rosnay et de Raymond Chevreau, il va ainsi se dépenser sans compter dans la recherche de ces précieux butins qu’il ne trouvera jamais.
Mais on dit des chercheurs de trésors qu’ils ne vivent que de l’espoir d’en trouver un et que c’est uniquement cette quête, souvent vaine, qui les fait vivre…

My free translation of the above – and native French speakers, please step forward to correct me, because I might easily have gone completely wrong here – is as follows:

Ever the eternal opportunity hunter in business, in his spare time he was also a treasure hunter. He was, as are so many others of that particular ilk, firmly convinced that pirate treasure lies buried in the southwestern islands of the Indian Ocean. For many years, his focus was on Nageon de l’Estang (whose booty he believed was buried somewhere in Saint-Antoine) and on the well-known pirate Olivier Levasseur (AKA “La Buse”) who, just before being hanged in the Seychelles, allegedly threw a treasure map into the crowd. Now reunited with his brother Lucien and fellow treasure hunters Philippe de Rosnay and Raymond Chevreau, Girard is free to spend forever searching lavishly for the precious spoils he will never find.
But it has been said that treasure hunters live only for the search and that it is by their quest, often in vain, that they live…

Of course, Cipher Mysteries readers will know that it was actually Olivier Levasseur who was hanged (and in Réunion rather than the Seychelles): but it was a surprise to me that Jean Giraud believed Bernardin Nageon de l’Estang buried his treasure in Saint-Antoine (in the North of Mauritius).

Regardless, if my translation is basically right and both Jean Giraud and his brother Lucien Giraud have now both passed away, it shows just how urgent it is to try to get to the bottom of this, before there’s nobody left to help tell the story.

Of course, the question some will doubtless be asking now is: who inherited the brothers’ collections of Nageoniana? From various fragments online, it seems that Jean Giraud left at least a son (Michel Giraud) and a grand-daughter (Marine – is she the famous Mauritian tennis player born 23rd April 1986 in Riviere Noire?): but that’s as much as I can reliably be sure about.

For what it’s worth, I found no obituary or note in Le Mauricien for either brother, nor any mention in ancestry.com: but perhaps other people’s searches for the same basic BDM data will prove both luckier and more productive than mine.

Researchers studying the Voynich Manuscript use what’s called an “interlinear transcription”: this interleaves different researchers’ interpretations of the (handwritten original) Voynich text, a line at a time. So, rather than having to constantly refer to, say, a contrast-enhanced image of the first line of the first page…

…you can instead refer to its interlinear transcription, which is much more convenient, and yet lets you see the differences of opinion that various researchers have about how to read that line:

<f1r .P1.1;H>       fachys.ykal.ar.ataiin.shol.shory.cth!res.y.kor.sholdy!-
<f1r .P1.1;C>       fachys.ykal.ar.ataiin.shol.shory.cthorys.y.kor.sholdy!-
<f1r .P1.1;F>       fya!ys.ykal.ar.ytaiin.shol.shory.*k*!res.y!kor.sholdy!-
<f1r .P1.1;N>       fachys.ykal.ar.ataiin.shol.shory.cth!res.y,kor.sholdy!-
<f1r .P1.1;U>       fya!ys.ykal.ar.ytaiin.shol.shory.***!r*s.y.kor.sholdo*-

Anyway, given that I now have copies of (what might well be) all the printed versions of the Nageon de l’Estang papers, it struck me a few days ago that I should get round to putting them together into an interlinear transcription.

And there being no good reason not to, that’s exactly what I did. 🙂

The Interlinear Transcription

I’ve posted a page holding my Nageon de l’Estang interlinear transcription on the Cipher Foundation website.

The first few interlinear blocks of lines in BN1 (“Bernardin Nageon de l’Estang paper #1″) look like this:

FC: [l'an III de la République]

RC: Je pars m’enrôler et défendre la patrie. Comme je serai sans doute tué, je fais
FC: Je pars m'envoler et défendre la Patry,  comme je serai tué c'est sûre, je fais

RC: mon testament  et donne à mon neveu Jean Marius        Nageon de l'Estang,
FC: mon testament. Je donne à           Jean Marin  Justin Nageon de l'Estang,
LM:                Je donne à           Jean-Marius-Justin Najeon de l'Etang.

Here, [FC] stands for “Paul Fleuriau-Chateau”, a now-deceased Mauritian researcher from Rivière Noire, who included a transcription in his 2001 book “Aventuriers en mer”. The first line stands alone because the date Fleuriau-Chateau gave for BN1 does not appear in the other transcriptions at all. (In case you’re wondering, it’s a French Republican Calendar date equivalent to 1795).

The second set of interleaved lines appears both in Robert Charroux’s (“RC”) and in Fleuriau-Chateau’s (“FC”) copies, but not in any of the others: while the third set of lines appears in Charroux and in Fleuriau-Chateau, as well as in Loys Masson’s (“LM”) 1935 article.

Immediately you can see the kind of differences in play between the versions: but which are attempted corrections, which are miscopying, and which are insertions? What is original and what is make-believe? That is the $64,000 question (possibly even literally).

According to Le Clézio, circa 1901 his grandfather knew of numerous different copies of these papers floating around in what he called “grimoires” in Mauritius (p.105). So… might there be more versions out there?

Reading between the lines (so to speak), I think the answer is almost certainly yes: in fact, I suspect there may even be ten or more as-yet-unseen variants out there in private hands. However, only by bringing them all into the light and comparing them in a really analytical, scientific, open way do we stand any real chance of making sense of them as a whole.

Incidentally, my current interlinear transcription isn’t quite complete: the two photographs I took of page 56 of Paul Fleuriau-Chateau’s “Aventuriers en mer” turned out to be out of focus. So if anyone has access to a copy and/or can email me through a scan of p.56, that would be really helpful, thanks!

Le Club International des Chercheurs de Trésor?

Interestingly, I think that Robert Charroux’s omissions are quite telling, and this is something that hasn’t really been talked about before.

For a start, he mentions (but only includes the first couple of lines of) two further cryptic documents that I call “BN4” and “BN5” (which Fleuriau-Chateau and Le Clézio both include). His reason for not including them is that “Le teneur exacte de ces documents est le propriété du Club International des Chercheurs de Trésor“, ho-ho. But don’t worry, dear reader, he then assures you that “vous savez tout ce qu’il est permis de savoir sur les secrets de Nagéon de l’Estang“. You’re not on the list, you can’t come in.

For what it’s worth, I suspect that this also explains why Charroux left out the interesting section in BN2 from “au nord” to “testament” that says how to find the cave: because only a ‘true’ treasure hunter (i.e. a member of his club) could be trusted with such powerful knowledge.

Your Mission, Should You Choose To Accept It…

What can be done to move this research strand forward? For me, the answer is obvious: dig up more versions of these letters to add to the interlinear transcription.

I’m convinced that there simply must be photographs, scans, hand-copies, mentions, quotations, letters, newspaper articles and books (for example, in other languages) that I don’t know about out there and not just cut-and-pasted from Charroux (as seems to be the Internet norm). What can we find?

I’m similarly convinced that there must be archival documents on the Klondyke Company, and even on Le Club International des Chercheurs de Trésor, both of which tried so jealously to hold back Nageon de l’Estang’s secrets for themselves. And these documents must surely include multiple versions of the Nageon de l’Estang papers, right?

Finally, I’m also convinced that there are individuals out there who have collected their own versions of the letters: for his book, Paul Fleuriau-Chateau relied on Lucien Giraud and Jean Giraud. Is Lucien Giraud still alive?

For me, the big reason for trying to make a documentary is to find these people and just ask the right questions…

As I mentioned a couple of days ago, my Kickstarter Mauritian pirate treasure documentary pitch is now live, and has already picked up its first few backers, all of them long-time Cipher Mysteries supporters (each in their own way) – thank you very much indeed for that, it’s undoubtedly true that the first few steps of a thousand mile journey are the hardest ones. 🙂

Anyway, given that the project plan is to structure the documentary into nine sections, what I’ll be doing here over the next four weeks is writing posts on those same sections – or rather, on what I currently know about them, as well as what I hope to find out about them in Mauritius. Though this won’t quite amount to a “Nageonopedia”, my hope is that it should be the most reliable (and realistic) collection of basic data on the Bernardin Nageéon de l’Estang historical mystery on the Internet or in print.

It may well turn out that better informed (or just plain cleverer) readers can answer one or two of the key research questions without my actually having to go to Mauritius to do so. Moreover, you clever people might also suggest even better research questions than the ones I set out to answer. I don’t mind, though, because these are all positive scenarios as far as I’m concerned, and the documentary would surely continue to develop and move forward in an ever-better direction as a result. 🙂

At the same time, I’m planning (over the next few days) to do some PR to propel the idea of the documentary into the wider cultural ether: so if anyone has any good suggestions for bloggers or journalists to contact about interviews, please let me know, I’m all ears! 🙂

It’s been a little while in preparation (difficult things almost always are), but the project I mentioned a little while ago has now gone live for crowdfunding on Kickstarter (so I now have 30 days to convince you and a thousand other people to back it).

The documentary I’m planning to make is called Gold Beyond Your Dreams: the idea is to go to Mauritius and see if I can finally unravel some (though hopefully most) of the secret history of Bernardin Nagéon de l’Estang and his alleged pirate treasure, and tell the story. But I’ve included a 3-minute video (with subtitles) as part of the pitch which explains it all nicely, along with a project plan showing exactly what I’m aiming for: hopefully it’s specific enough.

Even though I think there’ll be enough source material for 120+ minutes, I’m aiming for a 45-minute final edit to keep it all tight and interesting.

What do you think?

Here is as good a collection of pre-1800 maps of Mauritius as I have been able to put together. If you have others (or even better quality versions of the same), please leave a comment below and I will update the page accordingly, thanks!

1601 – Gelderland

The Dutch colonized Mauritius (quoth Wikipedia): landing in 1598, they initially named the Island after Prince Mauritz of Nassau (hence “Maurice” and “Mauritius”). However, when in 1615 governor Pieter Both was shipwrecked and killed on his way back “from India with four richly-laden ships in the bay”, Dutch sentiment shifted against the island, thinking it was “cursed”.

This is a map of a bay in the southwest of Mauritius, drawn from aboard the Dutch ship the Gelderland.

This is historically notable because it mentions dodos, which almost certainly gets ornithology historians a-twitching (in a nice way, I’m sure).

1659 – Johann Blaeu

This early (but modestly-sized and almost impossible to recognize) map was printed in Amsterdam in 1659 as part of Johann Blaeu’s “Nuevo Atlas o Teatro del Mundo”:

Mysteriously, the auction site where I found this scannotes that this was printed on the reverse side of a map of “Vaygach Island” (in Russia), when it is actually of Staten Island (next to Hollandia Nova). Oh well! *sigh*

16xx – Portolan

A very early (but undated) Portolan map of the island, courtesy of Harold and Maryse.

1702-1707 – John Thornton

This is “A chart of the Island of MAURITIUS” by John Thornton: and though it was reprinted a number of times during the 18th century, it was first drawn between 1702 and 1707.

This scan was from NYPL, who have very kindly posted up an even higher resolution TIFF image of it if you want to download that.

Note that North is to the right, so Mauritius’ modern-day Black River district sits across the top left edge of the map, though few (English-language) landmarks here have names recognizable to a modern cartographer. Barely any internal details of the island are filled in: all in all, it’s more of an outline than a map.

1726 – François Valentijn

Here’s an early Dutch map of Mauritius, which this seller calls “the earliest large map of the island”. The cartography seems a bit suspect to my eyes, but perhaps others will disagree:

17xx – Jean-Baptiste Bourguignon d’Anville

This undated map of Mauritius was allegedly drawn for Monsieur de Noyon, who was (it says here) the Governor of the island (though I’m not sure about this myself). I found it on Harold and Maryse’s site, in their nice collection of old maps of Mauritius.

1751 – Jean-Baptiste-Nicolas-Denis d’Apres de Mannevillette

This next map is “Plan de l’Isle de France, suivant les observations de M. D’Après de Mannevillette” by Nicolas-Louis de La Caille (1713-1762), which you can download from Buchfreund, while the matching bibliographic detail is on Gallica.

Once again, North is to the right: but some rivers, internal details and many modern names are now visible – la Riviere Noire, Flic en Flac, and so forth. Nice quality draughting, but still somewhat sketchy.

1753 – Van Keulen

Here’s a Dutch map of part of the coast dating to 1753:

1764 – J.N. Bellin (Part 1)

Bellin was the Hydrographer at the Depot de la Marine: I found this copy courtesy of Harold and Maryse’s site.

1764 – J.N. Bellin (Part 2)

Bellin adapted his map for the Duc de Choiseul, adding a few useful extra cartographic bits round the edges:

Once again, this was courtesy of Harold and Maryse’s nice site.

1781 – John Lodge

A handwritten note added at the top of the full map from which this was cropped (courtesy of the Norman B. Leventhal Map Center at the Boston Public Library) says: “Cut from The Political magazine, London 1781, vol. 2, p.545”. Note the best map ever drawn, for sure, but it is what it is:

1788 – Rigobert Bonne (First Map)

Rigobert Bonne (1727-1795) was a French engineer and cartographer who was the Hydrographer at the Depot de la Marine after J.N. Bellin. This map was a part of “Cartes générale et particulières des Isles de France, de Bourbon et de Rodrigue” (a good copy is here, courtesy of DePaul University), and appeared in a number of places, such as Abbé Guillaume-Thomas-François Raynal’s “Atlas de Toutes Les Parties Connues de Globe Terrestre”, and Bonne’s own “Atlas Encyclopédique” (2 volumes, 1787-88).

Even though this is recognizably Mauritius and Bonne has obviously tried to develop a topographical angle (by adding mountains), there’s not a lot of named detail: hence this seems to have been drawn independently of la Caille’s 1751 map and even possibly of Bellin’s 1764 map(s).

1791 – Rigobert Bonne (Second Map)

It’s hard to say whether this is genuinely a second Bonne map, or just a kind of merging (say) of the toponymic detail from La Caille’s 1751 map into Bonne’s first map of 1788. There’s a good quality scan downloadable courtesy of Wikipedia.

I’ve been working away behind the scenes on the crowdfunding documentary proposal I mentioned here a few days ago, and it’s now starting to take shape. Here’s a sneak peek of the (first draft) image I’ll be putting on Kickstarter:

However, I’m finding it hard to pin down a good title for the documentary, because I want it to cover so much ground:
* pirates and corsairs in the Indian Ocean, and of the truths and lies surrounding them: about desperation, sea-faring, trade, riches, and greed;
* the secret history of Bernardin Nageon de l’Estang (and indeed of the missing corsair I’ve blogged about several times);
* early 20th century treasure hunters in a country wracked by poverty and racial inequality;
* the dynamiting and despoiling of a country’s natural resources in the name of treasure;
* modern day Mauritian treasure hunters, maps, and technology;
* the various versions of the treasure documents, and what is (and isn’t) genuine;
* using ground penetrating radar (GPR) to look for lava tubes; and perhaps even uncovering the real history…

Anyway, here are some possible film titles, please leave comments below to let me know what you think what would be best:

(1) Hunting Pirate Treasure
(2) Dreams of Pirate Gold
(3) What Lies Beneath Mauritius?
(4) Does X Mark The Spot?
(5) Thirty Million Ingots
(6) Pirate Truths, Pirate Lies
(7) Gold! Diamonds! Pickaxes!
(8) The Gold Bug

All alternative suggestions gratefully received too! 🙂

Even though I now have a very clear idea of the documentary I’d like to make in Mauritius about the whole “Le Butin” pirate treasure mystery, there’s something about it all that still sits a little bit awkwardly.

I guess the key problem is that I’m just not a treasure hunter: I don’t have that secret inner dream of fabulous riches, or the kind of inner fire to keep on searching that could burn for decades. Reginald Cruise-Wilkins (who believed that Olivier “La Buse” Levasseur’s allegedly fabulous treasure was concealed inside a cryptogram beneath many layers of mythological symbolism, and hunted for its location in the Seychelles for nearly forty years) passed on one such flaming baton to his son John, who then spent almost as much of his life on essentially the same quest. More recently, an American called Robert Graf searched in the same set of places for at least a decade, and also without success: doubtless many more names could be added to this list.

(The story goes that in 1940, Cruise-Wilkins bought some documents from the captain of a Norwegian whaling ship: these included a copy of the cryptogram that had not long before been reproduced in Charles de la Roncière’s book “Le Flibustier Mystérieux”. However, he didn’t actually start searching for it until 1947. Commenter “Rookie Observer” noted here that this was (something like) Captain Gulvorg (?), and that the cryptogram had much earlier been owned by a Captain Rocco (?), but please leave a comment here if you can clarify these names at all, thanks!)

What I’m after is rather different: I want to see through the veils to what really happened, to strip away the hopeful lies and the mythopoeia that almost inevitably get slathered all over these historical mysteries.

It would be nice to think that history is no more than a gigantic logic puzzle where there is only one answer – after all, only one set of events did happen, and that can always be assigned an after-the-event probability of 100%. But that’s no more than an unhelpful tautology: history is actually about the complex processes which you try to follow to approach that ideal… even though this often fails to run to plan.

Treasure hunters take this to extremes: typically, they firmly grasp what they happen to think is a telling clue and wield it not so much as a talisman as a machete, swinging it from side to side to clear a path through the evidential jungle surrounding them. But, as with Cruise-Wilkins and his Labours of Hercules ‘key’, the truth of the matter is very much subtler and far less amenable to such reductionistic heuristics.

For me, history is more about doing the best job you can with the evidence you have, and constantly trying to do just a little bit better in each respect – slightly better evidence, slightly better reasoning, slightly clearer vision. And then, with a good bit of wind in your sails, to travel just a tiny bit further in the right kind of direction. It’s not hugely glamorous, sure, but there is still a sense of forward motion gained by accumulating genuine insights.

So the underlying tension is that while I couldn’t genuinely make a breathless treasure-hunting documentary, that’s probably what many people would expect, given the whole pirate-treasure-in-Mauritius subject matter. But… in practice, perhaps what that means is that I would have to make quite a different kind of film from that same starting point.

Give ’em what they want, just not in the way they expect, eh? 🙂

In my last post, I included a scan of the earliest known image of a cave entrance in Mauritius: but I wasn’t really satisfied by its quality. And so I decided to track down the original source (and why not?): it turned out to be one of a long series of drawings made by the French painter Louis Auguste de Sainson (1801-1887), who travelled on board the corvette l’Astrolabe on its journey around the world in 1826-129 as the voyage’s official painter.

The resulting images – which included splendid depictions of body art observed on numerous Pacific islands – are well worth a look, and were printed in two volumes as:

Voyage de la corvette l’Astrolabe : exécuté par ordre du Roi pendant les années 1826-1827-1828-1829, sous le commandement de M. J. Dumont d’Urville,… publié par ordonnance de Sa Majesté : Histoire du voyage / rédigé par M. Dumont-d’Urville.

The Muséum d’Histoire Naturelle de Toulouse has copies of both of these (shelfmark A 55(1) and A 55 (2) respectively): from its website, you can download PDFs of Volume 1 and Volume 2 for yourself, highly recommended!

Here are scans of the engravings of the drawings de Sainson specifically made on Mauritius, all taken from Volume 2:

Une Grotte au Quartier de la Grande Riviere

Vue des Pamplemousses

Vue de la Montagne de Pieter Bot

Vue Prise sur la Route de Port-Louis

Chute de la Grande Rivière

Geologically speaking, volcanic activity rocks the house: land appears almost ex nihilo from volcanoes, spewed out as lava at (geologically) great speed, and occasionally explosively so. A fair few places on Earth (such as Mauritius) can only properly be grasped in terms of multiple lava onslaughts: studying these layers is arguably closer to codicology than to geography, if you like.

There are also many different types of lava: if you are an avid Scrabble-ist, you probably can at least spell aa (rough, rubbly lava), though you perhaps would be forgiven for not having used the eight-letter word pahoehoe (smooth lava, that can sometimes end up looking like coiled ropes as it cools). [Vulcanologists have countless technical terms for lava and lava-related features, *sigh*.]

However, what is far less well known is that as (typically pahoehoe) lava moves and cools, it often leaves behindvoids inside the lava flow: these can be long and thin (e.g. “lava tubes”), or small and round (“lava blisters”), or many other shapes. Hence the rocky basaltic landscape left behind by lava is defined not just by the overall topology of the rock itself as it moves and cools, but also by the eerie topology of the spaces left inside it.

For speleologists, these volcanic voids are wonderful and sublime: exploring and mapping the sinewy curve of a completely new lava tube is arguably just about as good as their hobby / profession gets. Lava caves are inhabited by bats, swiftlets, and all manner of curiously adapted species (including a number of Mauritian black magic altars). Yet it turns out that other, very different groups of people are also hugely interested in lava tubes…

As Below, So Above

Wonderfully, lava tubes and lava blisters are far from being a solely terrestrial phenomenon. Around 2009, a ‘skylight’ (a hole to the sky opening up at the top of a lava void) was discovered on the Moon, offering the theoretical possibility of ready-made shelter from radiation for future lunar astronauts, should (say) any future US President have broadly the same kind of scientific vision as John F. Kennedy once had (not that this seems particularly likely at the moment, admittedly). (Image from this AtlasObscura page):

And the same astro-vulcanological principles would seem to hold true for Martian geology as well. Future Martian astronauts not blessed with Matt Damon-ic fortitude may well end up sheltering inside the Red Planet’s lava tubes, wandering in awe through all the weird terraforming technology left there by ancient alien civilizations (hohum). 🙂 [“You are what you do“, indeed.] Here’s a picture courtesy of the European Space Agency, where the large dips would seem to be rilles (collapsed lava voids) and the black feature in the middle a skylight down to an intact lava tube.

Incidentally, there’s a GPR (ground-penetrating radar) rover called RIMFAX going to Mars soon, specific to look for voids: given that we have lava tubes on Earth that run for miles and miles, who knows what this robot will find there?

Looking For Lava Tubes…

Back on Earth, recent research suggests that there are many more lava tubes here than previously thought. Even though many groups of researchers want to know more about them, the practical problem is that that we typically only find these voids accidentally – one lava blister in the west of Mauritius was only discovered when a bulldozer driver bumped into it, knocking open the end of the blister.

And so I was pleased to find a paper where a large group of scientists developed a GPR system specifically for finding lava tubes and lava blisters non-invasively (and without the need for careless bulldozer driving). “Mapping the structure and depth of lava tubes using ground penetrating radar” (2005) by Miyamoto et al appeared in Geophysical Research Letters (Vol. 32, L21316, doi:10.1029/2005GL024159).

Having said that, Gaffney and Gater’s (2003) “Revealing the Hidden Past: Geophysics for Archaeologists” (which I finished reading this morning) shows a nice example of a void being found with normal GPR at 250MHz (p.173, of a railway tunnel), and also points (p.178) to Lorenzo et. al.’s (2002) paper “Selected Radar Images of Man-Made Underground Galleries” (Archaeological Prospection, 9(1), pp.1-8) as an exemplary study of looking for (admittedly) man-made tunnels and basements down to a depth of 7 metres. They conclude that GPR with a 100MHz centre frequency might well be the lower limit to use if you want avoid missing underground details.

But Why Lava Tubes, Nick?

If you’re wondering why I’m suddenly interested in lava tubes, the answer is actually painfully simple.

The most interesting section of Loys Masson’s copy of Le Butin’s papers that I blogged about recently runs as follows (my translation):

At the place indicated by my will, climb the river, and then climb the cliff eastward: twenty-five or thirty steps along according to the documents you will find corsair indicator marks to establish a circle of which the river is a few feet from the center. To the north and then four feet south you will find exactly the entrance to a cave once formed by an arm of the river passing beneath the cliff and blocked up by privateers to put their treasure in and this is the vault described by my will…

Prompted by insightful comments from Byron Deveson, it doesn’t take a huge leap of the geological imagination to see that what the writer was describing here was less likely to be an underground “river passing beneath a cliff” than a lava cave, lava tube or lava blister. And so for my proposed crowdfunding documentary, my plan is now to hire a suitable GPR rig, get myself trained up and go a-hunting on camera for any of these splendid lava void structures.

But how do I know there are any lava tubes on Mauritius at all? Well, that would be down almost entirely to the work of one determined individual… Greg Middleton. I’ll come back to his work in my next post, but to whet your appetite, here’s the earliest known drawing of a cave on Mauritius by the painter de Sainson (in D’Urville, 1830):

The matter of Bernardin Nageon de l’Estang (“Le Butin”)’s papers and his (allegedly) buried treasure cache has exercised my mind greatly over the last few years, though not so much in the traditional “how can I get my eager hands upon his pirate loot?” way as a “what the heck is going on there?” way.

The problem is simple: even though thousands (if not tens of thousands) of Mauritians have gone a-hunting for his treasure based on the description given in his papers, nobody has yet dug up so much as a brass earring, let alone (archivally) any scrap of evidence that proves that Bernardin Nageon de l’Estang ever lived.

All of which has greatly encouraged those who like to conclude that such cipher mysteries are necessarily fakes or hoaxes. In this instance, however, the correct answer is that the case is “Not Proven”, neither for nor against. It would be nice if we could tell either way but (for now)… we simply can’t.

The Sea Fog Starts to Recede…

More recently, though, things have started to make a little more sense (well, to me, at least). It now seems highly probable that of the three “Le Butin” papers, Nageon de l’Estang himself only wrote the first two (BN1 and BN2, a Will and a letter): it appears that the three documents that the writer of the third paper (BN3) mentions having been given (by a dying sea captain, somewhat melodramatically) were in fact BN1 and BN2, along with a (now probably lost) third document.

If this is correct, it is really helpful, because it helps us know how the three papers are (and are not) connected to each other: to be precise, the (unnamed and as yet unknown) corsair who wrote the third paper seems to have known no more about the contents of the other papers than we do. So the fact that Bernardin Nageon de l’Estang’s name does not appear on the crew lists of the Apollon (as apparently referred to in BN3) would make sense: it is the “missing corsair” (the author of BN3) who was on the Apollon, not Nageon de l’Estang.

It also now seems quite clear that “Le Butin”‘s papers have absolutely nothing to do with the treasure tradition associated with Olivier Levasseur (AKA “La Buse”, ‘The Buzzard’). This, too, helps keep our eyes focused on what we need to be looking at, and not distracted by other stuff.

Moreover, the version of the papers owned by Loys Masson (and described in print by him in 1935) turned out to be substantially different to the version given by Robert Charroux in 1962. Furthermore, it would not surprise me if the version described by long-time Mauritian treasure hunter Philippe Cherveau de Montléhu were to prove to be different from both. And again, it would not surprise me if the version described in Paul Fleuriau-Chateau’s book (which I’m hoping to see at the British Library this week, at long last) will turn out to have subtle differences from the others.

So… the first thing that would be good to see would be a set of transcriptions of the various copies of the papers.

Cladistics, Perhaps?

For those who study medieval manuscripts, the term ‘cladistics’ is sometimes used to denote the study of different versions of the same document, with the idea of trying to discover their relationships with each other: which is the original, which is the copy, which is the copy of the copy, or indeed might we reasonably hypothesize the existence of a missing original from which different copies were made?

Perhaps one next big step forward will involve collecting together the various versions of the “Butin” papers and applying this kind of analysis to them as a group. Can we do this to reconstruct what the original documents looked like? Or perhaps we would be able to identify one particular set as being most likely to be the original?

From what (little) I’ve seen so far, my prediction would be that Loys Masson’s copy of the papers are closer to the original set than Charroux’s copy: but this is still a very long way from certain.

Finally, it might be extraordinarily revealing to see the various copies of the letters (people must have photos of them, right?), because their internal evidence implies that we should expect BN1/BN2 and BN3 not to have all been written by the same hand. So if we find a set written by at least two hands, it is far more likely to be the original set than a (single-handed) set (i.e. probably copied by a later owner). Something to think about, anyway.

So… the second thing that would be good to see would be a set of photos of the various copies of the papers.

An Underground Riverbed…?

As far as the treasure expeditions go, Klondyke Company-style treasure hunting groups seem to have excavated in countless places along Mauritius’s West coast, as well as in numerous places along the island’s South and East coasts, though apparently without success. Phillipe Cherveau de Montléhu‘s fruitless 20-year hunt would seem to be entirely typical in this respect.

But given that the letters say (quite unambiguously, it has to be said) that the treasure was sealed in an underground river (between a river and a cliff, and apparently not too far from Vacoas), the right tool for searching would be not a huge team of guys with pickaxes and hungry eyes, but ground penetrating radar. If GPR can’t find something resembling an underground river void, you’d best leave your spades and trowels in the shed.

So… the third thing that would be good to see would be GPR scans of any areas in Eastern Mauritius between a river and a cliff.

And So… A “Le Butin” Documentary?

Even though I’ve been pursuing this whole story for some years, I suspect there’s little else out there that will be publicly available. I keep plodding away behind the scenes, sure: but the Law of Dimishing Returns seems to have firmly set in.

So I now suspect that the best way to try to bring new stuff into the open would be to take a bold step sideways, by crowdfunding a “Le Butin” documentary.

As part of the film, I’d like:
* to go through various Mauritian archives (e.g. in Curepipe etc) for documents and old photos
* to look for archival traces of the Klondike Company and other treasure hunting groups
* to interview Phillipe Cherveau de Montléhu (if he’s still alive?) and any other “Le Butin” treasure hunters out there
* to interview Mauritian historians who have taken an interest in this over the years (some must have seen copies of the papers, surely?)
* (of course) to carry out a GPR scan (to look for any sign of an old underground river between a cliff and a river in the Black River District)

Does this sound sensible? Is there anything missing from the list that you think would be interesting to see in a documentary? Can anyone advise about the most appropriate GPR setup to use (e.g. what frequency would be best for searching for underground river beds in a basaltic area)?