Category Archives: Le Butin Papers

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)?

Once upon a time, Cipher Mysteries commenter Christopher Maggi posted a link (very kindly) to a page with some vintage photos of Mauritius, including the following image of a treasure hunt in the Baie de Corsaire (Klondike) in 1908:

However, the profusely-illustrated “Pirates & Privateers in Mauritius” (2014) by Denis Piat lists (p.71) a long sequence of excavations made on Mauritius in search of pirate treasure (though not including 1908):

* 1860 – east coast, near the “Grande Retraite dwelling house”
* 1902 and 1912 – Klondike [as per the Klondyke Company I blogged about here]
* 1925 – Walhalla
* 1926 – Grand Port area, Pointe Vacoas
* 1927 – Belmont, close to Poudre d’Or
* 1932 – Petit-Sable, Pointe Vacoas
* 1940 – Klondike
* 1950 – Tamarin
* 1960 – Pointe aux Roches [this “was explored by a diviner”]

Piat also shows part of a (somewhat fake-looking?) map courtesy of Patrick Ferrat, that he says “belonged to Philippe Chevreau de Montléhu, a Mauritian treasure hunter who searched and excavated the Barachois de Belmont for 20 years without success”. (p.59)

Sounds like an interesting character, but… Montlé-who, you may quite reasonably ask?

Philippe Chevreau de Montléhu

There seems to be almost nothing written about him. However, I did find an article in German by Sonia Shinde or Richard Dobson (it wasn’t clear to me who wrote it), from the online magazine Merian: it included a nice picture of Philippe Chevreau de Montléhu on a Mauritian beach:

Just to be kind, I translated the section of it (fairly freely, admittedly, but I don’t think it’s much the worse for the encounter) that related to him for you all. Enjoy!

It must be somewhere on the island. Somewhere along the Rivière Noire in the West, perhaps, or at least at Souillac in the south? Or maybe just behind the airport in the middle of the tomato and sugar cane fields? Philippe Chevreau de Montléhu is on the trail of the treasure of the pirate Bernardin Nageon de l’Estang.

The pirate buried three iron barrels filled with doubloons and ingots, as well as a copper casket overflowing with flawless diamonds from the Indian mines of Vizapoure and Golconda, the places where such legendary stones as the Koh-i-noor and the Hope Diamond were found. Half a dozen slaves helped him, their skeletons now guarding the treasure. The hoard will be worth nine million euros, if not more, and Chevreau feels he is extremely close. A sixth share will go to the five to seven financiers who helped him, and another share to the owners of the lands. “For me, then there is still more than enough. I will keep one to two million, the rest I will donate”, he promises.

Philippe Chevreau de Montléhu, an elderly man from a wealthy French-Mauritian family, seems to have spent his share of the booty before the treasure is found. Always elegantly dressed and with an air of serenity and composure, he has researched pirate treasure for over 20 years. Though his riches will probably die with him, according to the island gossip, he speaks of a good 6000 euros which he has already invested. He has – alas – found nothing yet: but success is surely only a matter of time. Ultimately, the directions to the treasure are precise: “Follow the course of the river, cross the gorge and take the road to the east until you see the signs of the corsairs.”

[Folge dem Lauf des Flusses, durchquere die Schlucht und nimm den Weg nach Osten, bis du die Zeichen der Korsaren siehst.]

The pirate Nageon himself wrote this down as a legacy for his nephew Justin: but unfortunately the nephew found nothing. When he finally stopped in the dark of night with his uncle’s testament in his hands, destiny hit him with the force of a axe-blow on the beach in Mauritius… his body was never found. But the story of the fabled treasure has haunted the island for more than 200 years.

No one knows how many treasure hunters there are in Mauritius today. A good handful is rumored to have devoted their life and career to the search for Lost Treasure, though many others armed with metal detectors wander at random through the basalt caves and on the beaches. And when their search has eaten up all their capital, they go to the beaches and tourist spots instead, and hunt there for lost watches, bracelets, rings and rupees. It’s not big money, sure, but it can be enough to keep their dream alive.

The other treasures – the proper ones – were left behind from busy times: the British and French fought bitterly in the 19th century to gain control of the Ile de France, nowadays called Mauritius. Privateers, legitimized by the letters of marque they carried, plundered and sunk everything flying the wrong flag. Robert Surcouf, the King of Corsairs, made life difficult for the English – making himself and his crew rich in the process.

This proverbial buck must finally have stopped somewhere. For what did not disappear on card tables, in taverns or onto the necklines of the harbor whores ended up hidden, buried in caves or buried in the sand, and marked with secret signs. For example, the outlines of boots or anchors were often found carved into the rock, as pirate symbols of money, as indeed were strangely shaped stones.

Chevreau has found just such a stone: it looks like a boot and now sits in his garden. For inexperienced visitors, this would seem to be no more than a freak of nature: but for him it is a clue, a fateful sign. The sugar barons, he says, flattened and bulldozed everything, even the signs left behind by the Corsairs. The river whose course he is trying to follow is no longer there, but you can still see the bright stripes of limestone which run through the dark rocks. Might this be a trail for treasure hunters to follow – or merely traces of the sedimented fertilizer the plantation owners used to treat their fields with?

Chevreau keeps his most precious treasures in a red tin with a rusted lid: stones and a few coins, which (I’m sorry to say) are too young to have come from the Golden Age of Pirates at the end of the 18th century.

Over recent years, one topic on which I’ve expended much virtual ink (as well as actual book-buying budget) is that of Bernardin Nageon de l’Estang’s (AKA “Le Butin”, ‘Mr Booty’) letters. But one of the many questions that bother me is: where are these letters? Who owns them?

I don’t yet know the answer: but I believe I can name someone who did once own an actual copy of them…

Loys Masson

Back in April 2016, I mentioned in a post here that I had found an online reference to a 1935 article in the long-running French literary magazine “Revue des Deux Mondes” that seemed related. However, the specific issue wasn’t available online, so I (once again, are you seeing the pattern yet?) had to spend money on a copy. In fact, it proved cheaper to buy the entire set of magazines for 1935 than a single issue (don’t ask me why).

The author of the article was a young Mauritian poet called Loys Masson: when he (later) arrived in France just as the war properly kicked off, the focus of his work suddenly transformed from a rather elegiac love of Nature into the rather more conflicted (and interesting) topics of war, Resistance and loss.

But you should remember that Mauritius at that time was still a British possession, despite being predominantly French-speaking: which meant that he suddenly found himself (technically) a Briton in occupied France, which required plenty of flexibility to avoid problems. There’s much more about Masson to be found in the book “Loys Masson – Entre Nord et Sud : Les terres d’écriture“, a collection of pieces on him edited by Norbert Louis, who himself contributed a fifty-page summary of Masson’s life and works to it.

But in 1935, it was Masson’s article “La France A L’Ile Maurice” that proved to be his breakthrough piece: the goodwill and interest it raised opened many doors for him, to the point that he could genuinely consider moving from Mauritius to the French literary scene.

His Revue des Deux Mondes piece celebrates the bicentenary of the founding of Port Louis, the capital of the island. More directly relevant to Cipher Mysteries, though, is the fact that in it Masson describes owning a copy of Bernardin Nageon de l’Estang’s letters.

I mentioned this to Norbert Louis, who – though he had seen the 1935 article – was very surprised to find out that the letters to which Masson referred do genuinely exist (he suspected that they were merely Masson’s literary invention), and wasn’t aware of any article or book that discussed these further. So there would seem to be no literature relating to these letters in studies of Masson’s life or works, alas.

What follows is my free translation of what Masson wrote (and which I have transcribed separately and posted on a new Cipher Foundation page):

Masson’s Article

We now make a short stop at the mouth of a stream, a river full of great boulders, where you will have to suffer a nebulous history of treasures. Have they ever existed, these fabulous caches allegedly buried somewhere near the coast? Nobody knows at all. Whether legendary or true, however, there was a time in my family home when numerous Oedipuses found themselves passionately absorbed by these problems. Treasure research was fashionable. Several of my relations threw themselves headlong into it, losing themselves completely. As a child, I recall plans full of cabalistic symbols that one would study by a night lamp, their arrows and crosses traced in a faded ink. As a teenager, I had the good fortune one Sunday to accompany some romantic relatives on one of their treasure-hunting expeditions. Indeed, I saw on large flat stones some of the signs from the documents: here an anchor, there a turtle, and further on were the vestiges of a cryptographic alphabet. Despite our extensive searches, we found nothing. Yet treasure was there, I’m sure. For a long time, I have been in possession of letters from a Sieur Najeon de l’Etang, a veteran corsair, written to one of his nephews in the Seychelles. What remain of these, alas!, are but poor copies. I permit myself to extract some short passages from them for you.

The first is dated 20 floréal an III. “With help from our influential friends, get yourself to the Indian Ocean and the île de France. 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…”

The second, “I give to Jean-Marius Justin Najeon de l’Etang, my nephew, namely… treasures recovered from the Indus: I was wrecked in a cove near Vaquois and walked up a river and deposited in a cave the riches from the Indus and marked the place with B. N. my initials… ”

And a third, starting with this almost biblical quote: “Beloved Brother… There are three treasures. The one buried on my dear île de France is considerable. According to the documents, you will see: three iron barrels and jars full of minted doubloons and thirty million ingots and a copper box filled with diamonds from the mines of Visapur and Golkonda…”

What happened to this Croesian cache? Who will tell us? Have we taken completely the wrong route? Only one certainty remains: neither Jean-Marius Najeon nor his descendants solved the riddle. Nor did anyone since. The precious jars and boxes of diamonds, might they have been abducted by an affiliate of the adventurous band? Or do they slumber still in that same dark cave, guarded by a ghostly sentry? The diamond sphinx prefers not to say…

The Differences

What is intriguing is that although extracts from two of the three letters given by Masson are very close (though still not 100% identical) to what we have been working with, the other extract – though overlapping – can only be described as significantly different.

I’ll make the differences there clear, sentence by sentence, by comparing them with the better-known versions of the letters that appeared in “Trésors du monde” by Robert Charroux, Édition J’ai lu (1962):

[Charroux 1962] Par nos amis influents, fais-toi envoyer dans la mer des Indes et rends-toi à l’île de France à l’endroit indiqué par mon testament.
[Masson 1935] Par nos amis influents fais-toi envoyer dans la mer des Indes et rends-toi à l’Ile de France.

[Charroux 1962] Remonte la falaise allant vers l’est ; à vingt-cinq ou trente pas est, conformement aux documents, tu trouveras les marques indicatives des corsaires pour établir un cercle dont la rivière est à quelques pieds du centre.
[Masson 1935] Au lieu indiqué par mon testament, remonte la rivière, remonte la falaise allant vers l’est : à 25 ou 30 pas Est conformément aux documents tu trouveras les marques indicatrices des corsaires pour établir un cercle dont la rivière est à quelques pieds de centre.

[Charroux 1962] Là est le trésor.
[Masson 1935] Au nord donc et à quatre pieds du sud tu trouveras exactement l’entrée d’une caverne jadis formée par un bras de la rivière passant sous la falaise et bouchée par les corsaires pour y mettre leur trésor et qui est le caveau désigné par mon testament.

My Thoughts

Back in 1935, treasure hunting was hugely in vogue – not just in Mauritius, but all over the world. Yet might it have been the case that people were relying on the versions of the letters Charroux later printed in his book, rather than the versions Loys Masson had? Or on yet other copies of those letters?

We don’t know: I know of no retrospective literature on this, and treasure hunters rarely reveal their secrets, even when they – finally, having blown all their personal money and any syndicate money they raised – give up the chase.

More recently, I pointed out that there seems to be strong internal evidence that the final “Beloved Brother…” letter was written by what I called a “missing corsair“, who had inherited the first two documents. If this is correct, it helps give some clarity to what has long been a muddy picture.

Might it be that Loys Masson saw two types of handwriting in his documents, and inferred that they must be copies of older documents, when they could easily have been originals? Unless we ever get to see these (and who owns them now I have no idea, and Norbert Louis had no idea either), we’ll never know.

But perhaps modern investigators will be able to use up-to-the-minute techniques to follow the slightly more detailed instructions in Masson’s versions of the treasure documents: to travel up the river from Vacoas, eastwards along a cliff to some pirate marks, northwards then four feet back, before finding the underground cavern hidden by pirates all those centuries before. Might the cache still be where he left it?

Which River Vacoas?

Here’s the south-west corner of Mauritius (“Isle de France”) from a 1791 map:

You can see clearly that there are only two inlets that are near Vacoas. The first (to the right of “Flic en Flac”) collects the Rivière du Tamarin, the Rivière des Vaguas, and an unnamed third smaller river; while the second has only the ominous-sounding Rivière Noire feeding into it.

It would seem logical that the writer of the first two documents believed that he had had been shipwrecked close to the mouth of the Rivière des Vaguas: yet the problem with that is that there are no cliffs whatsoever beside that river.

In fact, only the Rivière Noire runs past cliffs of any size (according to the topographical map I looked at):

Anyway, just so you know… if I was going to go on a treasure hunt here, I’d start by looking at all the early maps of the island I can find. Could it be that Bernardin Nageon de l’Estang confused two different inlets, and so was never able to recover his treasure?

I hear the distant sound of metal detectors being warmed up… who knows where this story may lead?

The third “le Butin” letter BN3 relates a rip-roaring story: of how a dying French sea-captain gave the letter-writer three documents describing the location of buried treasure, urging him – as a fellow Freemason – to use the money for patriotic ends. All of which undoubtedly sounds a bit “Aaarrrrgh, Jim Lad, take thee moy treasure maaaps afore I die” to our modern ears: but all the same, it is a story that has proven surprisingly difficult to prove or disprove since it first appeared roughly a century ago.

And in that time, there has been no obvious shortage of treasure hunters wanting to know more about the story, and reading it in pretty much whatever way they want: as evidenced by this news item that appeared in the Thursday 18 June 1925 Lancashire Evening Post:

“£30,000,000” MINE LOCATED
A Londoner with gold-detecting instruments is said to have located a gold mine in Mauritius which was discovered and worked by the crew of the French corsair Nageon more than a century ago. It is said to contain £30,000,000 worth of gold.

Anyway, I’ve recently been wondering – might this dying captain have been Captain Malroux of the Iphigénie?

Captain Malroux

The basic story appears in numerous sources, such as René Guillemin’s lively (but far from reliable) (1982) “Corsaires de la République et de l’Empire”.

Guillemin’s chapter concerning Ripaud de Montaudevert relates .215-219] a well-known incident of 1799 concerning a French corsair corvette (the Iphigénie, 18 cannons) commanded by Captain Malroux (“un armateur influent de Port-Louis”) with Ripaud as its second-in-command. Summarizing Guillemin’s account of events:
* 25 August 1799: Iphigénie departed towards the Gulf of Ormuz, where it arrived and waited… and waited…
* 07 October 1799: they spot the Pearl (three-master, 16 cannons) leaving the Persian Gulf. They fight: the British captain and a Lascar die, and the Pearl surrenders. Sacks of gold and silver (4 million francs’ worth), 5000 small copper ingots, and “diverses autres marchanises de mondre valeur” are transferred to the Iphigénie, but forty Arab horses were left on the Pearl (which Ripaud took command of).
* 10 October 1799: they encounter the corvette H.M.S. Trincomalee (40 cannons or smaller cannonades, but with a crew of 140 sharply reduced by illness down to just 70) and the schooner Comet.
* The sea battle ends in the middle of the night with the Trincomalee exploding and the Pearl sinking
* The Comet ran away, and the Iphigénie then picked up the survivors.

OK, it’s not quite off the coast of India: but it’s not far away at all and the timing is good. We also have several vivid eye-witness accounts, including letters by John Cramlington (on the Cipher Foundation website).

Citoyen Malroux

Interestingly, there’s a report here – Gazette nationale, ou le moniteur universel, No 190 (page 1, top of column 3) – that quotes a report in JOURNAL DE TOULOUSE, L’OBSERVATEUR REPUBLICAIN; ou L’ANTI—ROYALISTE (page 2) verbatim:

Octidi 18e Germinal (99) L’an VIII de la République – 1800-04-08

Extrait d’une lettre de Brest, qui contient des particularités relatives à l’Isle-de-France.

Le citoyen Malroux, commandant un corsaire de 20 çanons, après avoir pris un navire anglais qui, indépendamment d’une cargaison très – riche, avait à bord 10 à 12 millions en pagodes d’or, a été rencontré par une frégate anglaise de 40 canons. Après un combat très vif, il l’a enlevée à l’abordage. Le capitaine anglais, désespéré d’être pris par des forces aussi inférieures, a fait sauter sa frégate au moment où on amenait le pavillon : le corsaire, se trouvant accroche à cette frégate, a coulé bas. La prise, qui est arrivée a bon port, est parvenue à sauver quelques personnes des deux équipages; mais le capitaine Malroux a péri. C’est une belle action bien maleureusement terminée, etc.

However, this was followed up by a slightly sniffy article in a later issue that downplayed almost everything about the incident:

Sextidi 26e. Germinal, (N°. 103.) L’an VIII de la Republique:

Un habitant de l’Isle-de-France, arrivé au Havre ces jours derniers, a confirmé, quant au fond, la nouvelle de la capture d’un riche bâtiment anglais par un corsaire français ; mais il en rectifie ainsi les détails:

» Le corsaire du capitaine Malroux n’avait que 14 canons, de 4; le bâtiment ennemi n’était pas une frégate de 40 canons, mais une corvette de 26.
» Malheureusement, lorsque le capitaine anglais fit sauter sa corvette , les grapins étaient encore à bord, et le corsaire a coulé bas.
» On a connu ces détails par la prise qui est arrivée à l’Isle-de-France , deux jours avant le départ de cet habitant.
» Elle n’est évaluée que 100 à 150,000 piastres, l’or ayant été embarqué à bord du corsaire, au moment de la capture.

There’s a lot more to the history, but that’s all I can fit in a blog post for the moment. 🙁

La Perle, Le Butin and… La Buse?

All in all, I think Malroux is a surprisingly good fit, and nothing in all the accounts of his death contradicts the BN3 story: but oddly, it seems that I’m far from the first person to consider this.

If we take another look at the second La Buse cryptogram…

…it includes drawings of three large ships: “Le Victorieux” (32 cannons), “La Perle”, and a third (unnamed) ship in the middle of exploding.

Now, I can’t prove it, but – given that there already seems evidence that strongly suggests that the second La Buse cryptogram was faked no earlier than the start of the twentieth century – it seems highly likely to me that this was intended by the fakers to intimate a link between the (in reality probably entirely unconnected) La Buse cryptogram and the Le Butin letters.

Who would want to do such a thing? Someone with an interest in both cipher mysteries, for sure: and who had a better knowledge of Indian Ocean maritime history than most people, good enough to point a knowledgeable finger at Malroux.

I’m sorry to have to say it, but this seems likely to me to be the work of someone close to a well-known French treasure hunting group, either to gull them all or as part of the kind of treasure map theatre they seem to have engaged in to show off to each other.

Which is a shame, because I would have loved to have talked with the people behind it, because I’m sure they would have had some great stories to tell. But perhaps no-one will ever know now. Oh well!

In a post a couple of months back, I mentioned what I called “The Indus Problem” implicit in the first of the Bernardin Nageon de l’Estang letters: that even though the pre-1800 BN1 mentions “les trésors sauvés de l’Indus”, the phrase “Trésors de l’Indus” was from the well-known 1804/1805/1806 poem “La Navigation” by Joseph Esménard.

Hence if the phrase came from the poem, then the date of the letter must be wrong – and (by implication) the letter could well be fake. That would definitely be a problem with the basic evidence: and I didn’t really have a workable explanation for the phrase.

But today I came up with alternative scenario…

Captain Lewis and the “Industan”

Auguste Toussaint (1911-1987) was, without much doubt, Mauritius’s premier marine archivist and maritime historian.

While looking through his (1967) “La route des Iles: contribution à l’histoire maritime des Mascareignes” this morning, I noticed some intriguing entries:
* (p.306) 4th March 1796, the ‘navire’ “Industan” (Captain Louis) arrived from Philadelphia.
* (p.262) 22nd August 1796, the American ‘vaisseau’ “Industan” (Captain Lewis) arrived from Pondicherry.

Might Captain Lewis’ ship the “Industan” have hit the rocks near Vacoas, spilling its treasures for Bernardin Nageon de l’Estang to opportunistically get hold of? It certainly seemed a far more concrete explanation than assuming the phrase was pulled from a high-culture poem written nearly a decade in the future.

(There was also (p.311) mention of the Industrie, a ‘brick’ out of Newburyport commanded by Captain Stone, arriving on 2nd April 1804: but that would seem to have been a quite different ship.)

For the sake of completeness, there was (even though the dates don’t match BN1) a later ship called the “Indus”:
* (p.312) 10th September 1804, a 400-ton American brick called the Indus (Captain Myrick), armed in (and coming from) Boston
* (p.331) 22nd February 1805, a 400-ton American ‘vaisseau’ called the Indus (Captain Myrick) of Batavia, heading for Boston.

Toussaint also lists a similar-sounding ship called the “India”, which might well have been the (later) Indus on an earlier journey:
* (p.326) 25th April 1798, Captain Armhead, a 400-tone American ‘navire’ out of Batavia (no destination listed)

Tracing the “Industan”

(Note that this was not the British ship the Hindostan, parts of which are in Whitstable Museum, which I didn’t find time to visit when I was there this week.)

What I was looking for was an American boat called “Industan” (Captain Louis or Lewis) going from Philadelphia to Pondicherry and back, but which might possibly have hit the rocks off Mauritius (for whatever reason) in August or September 1796.

Splendidly, searching Philadelphia newspapers revealed the following advertisement from the Philadelphia Gazette that ran from March 1797 to May 1797:

So it would seem the Indostan (Captain Jacob Lewis) made it safely back to Philadelphia, and so this thread has come to an end.

But… What Happened Next?

Might the Indostan have then embarked upon a further – but far less successful – trip to Mauritius and India? I would expect that the ship would have left a little later in the 1797 season (say September), with a view to using the favourable trade wind pattern to make it across the Indian Ocean in the spring of 1798.

If this guess is right, I would expect the Indostan to have reached Mauritius in or around March 1798, which is – presumably – where it would have hit the rocks at Vacoas before reaching the island’s main port.

However: having now broadly reached the limits of my search tools, perhaps others would like to have a look and see if they can take this further.

Might there be newspaper reports of the Indostan’s subsequent departure and Indian Ocean demise out there, just waiting to be found? Might there be an obituary for Captain Jacob Lewis, or an account of his life? Who financed the ship in Philadelphia? Who insured the ship?

Plenty of interesting (and hopefully resolvable) questions. 🙂

I grabbed the opportunity to go to the National Archives in Kew for a short while this morning to have a look at some prize papers – papers in the archives relating to the capture of ships.

In almost all cases, these are made up of depositions and submissions to the Prize Court about who should be rewarded for the capture. In a few lucky cases, though, the bundles include log books and lists of crew members.

Because I’ve recently been thinking about whether the “Captain Hamon” in BN3 (the final document of the three commonly attributed to Bernardin Nageon de l’Estang) might actually be Jacques-Félix-Emmanuel Hamelin, I wanted to see La Vénus’ prize papers. Might they include a list of ensigns and sailors? It was worth a look.

HCA 32/1752 is divided into two parts: La Vénus’ prize papers are in Part 2. But unless you really enjoy grinding your way through interminable longhand legal wrangling, I would only recommend them over (say) Ant & Dec’s Saturday Night Takeaway. By which I actually mean: not at all.

The Timeline Problem

But the overall process of putting together the picture of Hamelin and La Vénus has revealed what could very well be a timeline problem with the “Hamon == Hamelin” hypothesis.

19th November 1809: Hamelin and his ship La Vénus were captured by HMS Boadicea
10th December 1810: Hamelin and the other Prisoners of War were sent on the Bombay Merchant to the Port of Morlaix (near Brest)
2nd February 1811: three frigates sail from Brest – Renommée (Commodore François Roquebert), Clorinde (Captain Jacques Saint-Cricq), and Néréide (Captain Jean-François Lemaresquier)
February 1811: Hamelin arrives back in Brest.
12th February 1811: Tamatave was captured by the brig HMS Eclipse
6th May 1811: the three French frigates arrive at Mauritius
19th May 1811: Roquebert’s squadron reaches (and recaptures) Tamatave
20th May 1811: Tamatave again falls to the British (though this time for good).

Ideally, we would expect this timeline to square with BN3:

I’ve been sick since the fall of Tamatave, despite the care of my friend the commander
[…]
When I am dead, Captain Hamon will give you the little that I possess that I saved during my adventurous life at sea.

From this, it would seem that BN3 was written either after the first fall of Tamatave (12th February 1811) or – perhaps more probably – its second and final fall (20th May 1811). Yet by then, Captain Hamelin had been captured for over a year and had been returned to France. Moreover, Hamelin, despite subsequently being made a Rear Admiral by Napoleon I and having his name engraved on the Arc de Triomphe, never again returned to the Indian Ocean.

I don’t know if this timeline definitively rules out the Hamon / Hamelin hypothesis: but it’s certainly not supportive of it just yet.

More as it happens.