Category Archives: Le Butin Papers

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.

When I looked again at the “Le Butin” documents a few days ago, I noted that I thought BN3 (the third letter, apparently dating to not long after the Fall of Tamatave in 1810) had been written not by Bernardin Nageon de l’Estang, but by someone else entirely – someone who had ended up with Nageon de l’Estang’s Will and other documents.

Whereas Bernardin Nageon de l’Estang seems (from his letters) to have thought and acted like a pirate, this unidentified other person seems by contrast to have thought and acted like a corsair (i.e. a French privateer). I know there’s a lot of practical overlap between the two categories, but the two men’s core motivations seem to have been quite different, along with their use of language.

If we abandon the idea that the third letter (“BN3”) is in any way connected to Bernardin Nageon de l’Estang, can we use the internal evidence to identify the missing corsair who appears to have written it? It would seem that:
* he was from a family in France whose ancestral house remained but whose proud splendour had long faded;
* he had a “beloved brother” called Etienne, who had at least two sons;
* he was alive after the Fall of Tamatave in 1810 (though weak, and fearing death);
* he had (almost certainly) been on a ship under a “Captain Hamon” (Jamon?) not long before;
* his “glorious feat of arms” had been rewarded by none other than Napoleon Bonaparte, the First Consul;
* he was on the Apollon’s ill-fated last sea mission in 1798;
* at “our last battle with a large British frigate on the shores of Hindustan”, the dying Franc-Mason captain had given him “his secrets and his papers”, leading to buried treasure; and
* there were three documents about the treasures (though it would seem that we only have seen two of them).

Incidentally, I’ll return to the “last battle with a large British frigate” at a later date (I now have a strong suspicion which battle that was): but right now I’m more concerned with the Apollon.

The Apollon Crew List

After a previous spectacular success when captained by Jean Francois Hodoul, the 12-cannon Apollon (now captained by Louis Le Vaillant) was captured in 1798 by HMS Leopard. According to the prize documents in the National Archives at Kew, it had either 132 or 137 men on board.

If our missing corsair was – as BN3 suggests – on the Apollon’s last sea mission, then we should be able to see his name on the crew list. Furthermore, I think it would seem more likely that he was a sailor, ensign, or pilot than a volunteer, cook, or carpenter: and we can very probably rule out anyone with a non-French surname or any of the “noirs liberés” on board.

Hence I have image-enhanced roughly half of the crew list, numbered them, and placed them on a new page on the Cipher Foundation website.

The first two names on the crew list are very straightforward: Louis Le Vaillant and Jean Francois Hodoul, the latter of whom left the ship at the Seychelles (according to a note in the margin):

However, there are plenty of other names on the crew list that I’m far less certain of, so this is very much a work in progress.

Could I therefore please ask those readers with experience of reading older French handwriting if they would contribute, by suggesting what the other crew members’ names are? I have made some obvious-looking readings to try to get the list going, but this is not something I can claim any great expertise in. Please leave your comments either on this page or on the Cipher Foundation page and I’ll integrate them into the list, crediting you on the page for your help if you like.

Incidentally, I’m simply not allowed – as normal with historical archives – to publish the raw images of the crew list from Réunion on the web. But feel free to email me (nickpelling attus nickpelling dottus commus, hopefully you can read Latin email addresses) if you are a researcher who would like to see more from a particular page etc.

Thanks!

When, as so often happens, a cipher mystery’s genuine history gets overlaid by multiple layers of wishful thinking, unpicking them all can prove extremely difficult. In many cases, those extra layers can end up offering at least as much of a barrier to research as the original artefact itself.

This is, essentially, where things stand with the historical mystery surrounding Bernardin Nageon de l’Estang. Originally referred to in the newspapers of the 1920s as the “Chevalier de Nageon” or Chevalier Nageon, he has now become better known as “Le Butin”, i.e. ‘The Booty’ (a cipher for raw greed if ever there was such a thing).

The three letters famously linked to him would seem in principle to place the man at the scene of all manner of Indian Ocean corsair / privateer / pirate / sea-action / derring-do circa 1790-1810: but in close to a century of searching, nobody has yet turned up a scrap of practical evidence that he ever existed.

What on earth is going on?

Dating BN1 – The Will

The first document is, without much doubt, a Will. It leaves possessions to “my nephew the reserve officer Jean Marius [Jean-Marie Justin] Nageon de l’Estang […] My writings are deliberately difficult to read as a precaution; I would tell Justin if I were to retrieve them first.”

According to sources on Ancestry.com, Jean-Marie Justin Nageon de l’Estang was born on the 8th August 1770 in Mauritius, and died on the 9th May 1798. So it would seem that we should be able to date this to before 1798: and if we could find out when this Jean-Marie Justin became a reserve officer, we might also be able to squeeze out an earliest date for this Will. But that’s about as far as we can go with it.

Dating BN2 – Letter to Justin

This letter begins “Dear Justin” (so was almost certainly to the same Jean-Marie Justin Nageon de l’Estang mentioned in BN1), and has a French Republican date at the top: “20 floréal an VIII”, i.e. 10th May 1800. However, given that Jean-Marie Justin Nageon de l’Estang died in 1798, this immediately seems problematic.

Emmanuel Mezino skirts this issue by asserting that the date must therefore have actually been “20 floréal an III” (i.e. 10th May 1795) and was mistranscribed. It is also possible that at the time of writing, the writer didn’t yet know that his nephew Justin was dead… it’s hard to be sure either way, given that nobody seems to have actually seen these documents in decades.

BN2 says that “a true friend will give you my will and my papers”, so we can also probably use this to date BN2 to after BN1.

Dating BN3 – Letter to Etienne

The third letter brings with it an abrupt change of tone: the writer is now concerned less about concealed booty than about what retrieving that booty can do for (French) patriotism in the hands of a (French) Freemason. The writer’s meagre possessions are also in the care of a Captain Hamon (Jamon?), which seems to run counter to BN1.

The writer of the third letter also notes that “I’ve been sick since the fall of Tamatave”: this marked the Invasion of île de France, where the French finally surrendered on 3rd December 1810. So this letter BN3 would seem to have been written in early 1811 or so.

The writer also mentions his “adventurous life before embarking on the Apollon” – the Apollo was built in 1796, sailed out of Boston, was then captured at Brest, was captained by Jean Francois Hodoul in 1797, but was then captured by HMS Leopard in 1798 (I’ve gone through the prize papers). The misadventure alluded to would therefore seem to be the capture of the Apollon in 1798. But there was no Bernardin Nageon de l’Estang in its final crew list.

All in all, BN3 doesn’t sound to me as though it came from the same person who wrote BN1 and BN2.

The Missing Pirate

Sifting through all this evidence, I find myself being led towards a new conclusion: that if Bernardin Nageon de l’Estang was indeed the author of BN1 and BN2, it now seems very probable to me that someone else entirely wrote BN3. That is, it seems more likely to me that BN1 and BN2 were the documents owned by the “captain […] on his deathbed”, and passed to the writer of BN3 (who wasn’t Bernardin but someone else entirely). Which is not at all to say that Nageon de l’Estang was the captain, but merely that the dying captain owned BN1 and BN2.

In which case, it would seem that we have perhaps identified a missing pirate: and so should be looking not for Bernardin Nageon de l’Estang, but for someone
* who was on the Apollo’s ill-fated last sea mission before being captured (there is a crew list still in existence);
* whose “glorious feat of arms” had been rewarded by the First Consul (Napoleon Bonaparte);
* who had a “beloved brother” called Etienne;
* and who was still alive at the Fall of Tamatave in 1810.
It’s not an insurmountable task, I think: and now that we can state it in such bald research terms, perhaps answering it will prove to be possible…

However, as far as BN1 and BN2 goes, there is one additional problem I really need to mention…

The Indus Problem

BN1 mentions “un demi-terrain rivière La Chaux au Grand-Port, île de France, et les trésors sauvés de l’Indus, savoir“. Reading this the other day, I wondered to myself where the by-now well-worn phrase “Trésors [sauvés] de l’Indus” originally came from, just in case it was a phrase ‘out of time’ in the same way that “stampeding” seems to be a phrase out of time in the Beale Papers.

According to Google Books, “Trésors de l’Indus” was from a couplet in the first part of the well-known 1804/1805/1806 poem “La Navigation” by Joseph Esménard:-

Et du golfe arabique échangeant les trésors
De l’Indus étonné reconnaissaient les bords

So: if the use of this phrase was inspired by La Navigation, it would mean that BN1 dates to after 1805 or so. Which would consequently make both BN1 and BN2 (which refers to BN1) fakes.

Ultimately, then, the evidence seems to lead us to suspect that BN1 and BN2 could well be post-1805 fakes, while BN3 may be a genuine letter by an as-yet-unidentified seaman, who had genuinely received BN1 and BN2 from a captain on his deathbed, who (in turn) had genuinely believed them to be real (even though they weren’t).

Thus is the twisted yarn of cipher mysteries oft arrayed.

PS: Revue des Deux Mondes

Incidentally, when I searched Google Books for the phrase “trésors sauvés de l’Indus”, it appeared in an article in one of the 1935 issues of the long-running French high-culture literary review journal “Revue des Deux Mondes” (Google lists it as being on “page 343”, though this seems to be of a collection of all 24 (?) issues published in 1935).

However, Gallica’s scans of Revue des Deux Mondes only currently go up to 1930: so I’d be extremely grateful if anyone can get access to what this says at some point, rather than the version of the letters given in a 1962 book by Robert Charroux (i.e. the ones on the Cipher Foundation page), just in case Charroux happened to have misquoted them, which is always possible with treasure hunters, sadly.

Three “treasure hunters” trying to dig close to rock markings in a Réunion cave since December 2015 have been arrested. There’s a short news story here with three nice pictures showing the cave in question:-

And here’s another news story (also in French, but with some talking heads from the local community in a two-minute video at the top of the page).

Inevitably, though, the coverage quickly gets confused: was it Nageon de l’Estang’s or La Buse’s treasure that these treasure hunters were after? (Hint: there’s currently no obvious evidence to support either scenario, but since when has a lack of evidence ever got in the way of greedy self-destructive idiots with shovels?)

And Emmanuel Mezino gets quoted along the way in this final news piece, which I began to translate but then thought better of it.

Why did I stop? Because it’s all so futile: everything to do with the cocked-up cryptograms, the wobbly markings and the diggers’ drooling dreams of gold, gold, gold, all of it. It’s as if everyone involved has a deluded version of the X-Files tag-line tattooed backwards on their forehead to see in the mirror every morning – not so much “I want to believe” as “I have to believe”.

There is no rationality to it all, just trails of zeroes preceded by a mythical non-zero digit and a dollar sign. Evidence, careful history, sound judgment – you’ll search these caves in vain for any of those three too. My best advice: steer your ship well clear of these rocks.

Google now has me thoroughly confused. I’ve been trying to track down Captain Russell, presumably arriving in Port Louis in Mauritius in 1926 with a load of technical sensing equipment on a boat from Liverpool, and staying in Vacoas on behalf of the “Klondyke Company”, and hiring lots of local hands to dig a huge-sounding crater: and am getting nowhere fast.

And then all of a sudden I find three independent Dutch newspaper sources from 1926, and a German-language South American newspaper source from 1929. But Google then seems to keep arbitrarily deciding whether or not to include these in searches: it’s all very confusing.

Anyway, I don’t *think* these four articles tell us anything new, but please feel free to have a look yourself:

* Goessche Courant, 16th April 1926, p.3
* De Harderwijker, 16th April 1926, p.2
* De Gazet van Poperinghe, 2nd May 1926, page 1
* Der Kompass, 4th March 1929, page 1

I also found a short article (in Gallica) from L’Echo d’Alger 25th April 1926 that said:

Le trésor de chevalier Nageon

UNE SOCIETE ANONYME ANGLAISE LE RECHERCHE… VAINEMENT !

Londres, 24 avril. – On poursuit activement des recherches méthodiques dand l’île Maurice afin de retrouver un trésor que le chevalier de Nageon, le célèbre corsaire français, y aurait caché en 1780 et 1800, et qui contient, parait-il, des diamants, des perles et des doublons d’Espagne, pour un total de trente millions de livres sterling.

Depuis une cinquantaine d’années en tente, de temps en temps, de découvrir ce fameux trésor ens basant sur certaines instructions fournies par les descendants du corsaire. Mais les investigations n’ont été reprises sérieusement, dit-on, que depuis que l’on a trouvé un plan topographique établi par le chevalier lui-même.

On a constitué depuis lors une société anonyme, et l’an dernier on fit venir de Liverpool à l’île Maurice le capitaine Russell, qui se fait fort de déceler la présence de masses métalliques sous le sol.

Or, le capitaine Russell a signalé ls présence d’une masse de métal ensevelie à une grande profondeur et l’on creuse fébrilement à l’endroit désigné par lui pour mettre au jour le merveilleux trésor. Le malheur veut que des inflitrations d’eau gênent kes travaux et que l’on soit constamment obligé d’interrompre ceux-ci pout recourir aux pompes.

Ces jours derniers l’émotion fut grande lorsque l’on annonĉa que l’heure de la découverte était proche. On fit, en hàte, venir des camions automobiles et des sacs tout neufs où devaient être empilés les beaux doublons d’Espagne. Des brigades de détectives armés accompoagnaient le convoi.

Mais, hélas ! ce ne fut qu’une fausse alerte.

All true. 🙁

Anyway, it’s as if there’s an entire layer of documents just below where I’m looking at (and out of sight). Who went digging for this treasure in 1880, and what had the (anonymous) Klondyke Company got that made Captain Russell so optimistic? Who were the (unnamed) shareholders in the Klondyke Company? Why were its shares traded in Rupees? When did they finally throw in the towel?

This touched so many people’s lives (though probably mostly for the worse, it has to be said), there must be echoes of it in countless places. Surely?

More generally, does anyone known what the tools are for tracking defunct companies from nearly a century ago? Is there a great big ledger somewhere in an archival basement in London I can stick my nose into and have a look?

When I look at all the different cipher mysteries, the main thing I want to achieve with them is a certain level of clarity. Solving them would be a huge bonus (given that most are from so long ago, the Muses of History have no obligation to furnish us with enough evidence to do that), but getting to the stage where I can talk clear-headedly about each one in turn would be a good starting point.

Yet the air around many unsolved ciphers is horribly clouded by the fog of acquired mythology. For example, it seems to me that treasure hunters since the year dot have gone out of their way to weave whatever optimistic stories they can from the single-strand threads of available evidence, often with the aim of convincing both themselves and other people to invest in their next treasure hunting wheeze, whether that may be digging for the gold and diamonds of La Buse (the pirate Olivier Levasseur), tracking down the hidden treasure caches of Le Butin (Bernardin Nageon de l’Estang), or whatever. And this constant upcycling of fragmentary evidence has left us with a tangled mesh of things that may or may not be true, and/or that may or may not be connected.

In the two cases of La Buse and Le Butin, though, I simply fail to see any specific way they are connected beyond treasure hunter X, Y, or Z asserting loudly that they are. They’re both improbable Indian Ocean pirate yarns that are close to impossible to verify individually, for sure: but inferring from this similarity that they must therefore somehow be connected could only really be a travesty of logical deduction.

Hence from now on, I’m going to try to separate La Buse posts from Le Butin posts: even though treasure hunters have long tried to argue that the two are somehow connected, I just don’t see it at all. Even Charles de la Roncière’s 1934 book doesn’t mention Nageon de l’Estang whatsoever, even though a pirate treasure hunting expedition from Liverpool to Vacoa had made international news in 1926, just a few years before.

Le Butin’s “Doubloons & Diamonds”

For the record, here’s a copy of the 1926 ‘Le Butin’ news story courtesy of Trove. I have, however, been entirely unsuccessful in my attempts to determine the actual identity of “Captain Russell” or the “Klondyke Company” formed to retrieve Bernardin Nageon de l’Estang’s various treasure caches, despite the long series of very specific details mentioned. Can any Cipher Mysteries do better? 🙂

Brisbane Telegraph, 5th June 1926, p.18

Doubloons & Diamonds

Hunt for 30 Millions

Venture in Mauritius

Privateers’ treasure, diamonds, and pearls and Spanish doubloons, valued at anything up to thirty millions sterling; such is the object of a systematic and scientific search which, unknown to the outside world, has been in progress in the island of Mauritius for 12 months (writes the Port Louis Correspondent of the “Daily News”).

The presence beneath the soil of some mysterious and undefined mass of metal has been “sensed” by means of an electrical instrument sent out specially by a Liverpool firm; but the nature of this find has yet to be discovered, although a crater has now been excavated to a depth of 54 feet.

Motor lorries were brought up, laden with bags in which to carry it away, and the approach to the excavations was guarded by armed police. But nothing happened.

Despite this and other disappointments, however, the greatest optimism is expressed by Captain Russell, who, as the representative of the Liverpool firm already mentioned, is directing the operations in person.

I understand that his optimism was reflected in a cable which he despatched to his firm.

The scene of the search is a spot known as Klondyke, on the west coast of Mauritius, in the Black River district, and the treasure, which has come to be spoken of as the Klondyke treasure, is believed to havo been secreted there between 1780 and 1800 by the Chevalier de Nageon, a noted privateer.

It has to be borne in mind that in the latter part of the 18th century Mauritius, or, as it was then called, the Ile de France, was a nest of the French privateers, mostly Bretons, who harried commerce in the Indian Ocean.

A number of attempts have been made, at intervals since 1880, to find the treasure, and excavations were made in accordance with instructions sent to a Mauritian from one of his relatives in Brittany.

Then the Chevalier de Nageon’s own plan was said to have been found, and a company was formed to begin regular diggings.

Some stonework and other clues tallying with the plan were brought to light from time to time, but nothing else happened, and the shares of the Klondyke Company — held by about a score of persons — became temporarily valueless.

But by the end of last December these shares were selling at 5000 rupees (about £375) each. This was because Captain Russell had come across new indications which gave rise to the highest hopes.

Captain Russell landed here almost exactly a year ago, as the sequel to correspondence between the Klondyke Company and the firm he represents, whose advertisement in an English review, of a metal-divining instrument, had led to their being consulted by the shareholders.

It is understood that the firm, having made certain inquiries of its own, was sufficiently impressed to enter into an agreement whereby it undertakes the excavation at its own cost, and, in the event of success, has the right to 50 per cent, of the treasure.

Captain Russell, whose headquarters are at Vacoa, brought with him all the necessary instruments, and digging was promptly started on a large, and costly scale.

There are tunnels lighted by electricity, and a special sewage system has been installed to drain away underground water.

The presence of water is one of the great difficulties, for when a crater 85 feet deep had been dug, infiltration from an irrigation reservoir nearly put an end to the whole process.

A high power pump was then brought into play, and the crater has now been dug out for a further 20 feet or so.

It is estimated that the Work has already involved an outlay of nearly £12,000. A large number of hands is employed.

There are plenty of sceptics, of course, for though there is no doubt that Mauritius was repeatedly used as a cache for the loot of privateers and pirates, it is hardly to be supposed that these sea rovers all failed to remove their booty later.

But Captain Russell remains cheerful. He believes that the Klondyke treasure will be discovered.

In any case he is positive regarding this one fact: that his instrument has registered, and continues to register, the presence of a mass of metal underground. and he will not desist until he has found out what the metal is.

Not only do the promoters of the Klondyke treasure-hunt share his cheerfulness, but the native diggers, as I hear, are feverishly excited concerning yet another treasure, supposed to have been hidden by the same Chevalier de Nageon at Pointe Vacoa, Grand Port.

Fabulous figures are mentioned in this latest story, but for the present it seems prudent to concentrate on Klondyke’s “thirty millions” alone.