Category Archives: Le Butin Papers

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.

As I mentioned not long ago, while spending an enjoyable afternoon last Saturday mooching round the London Library in an even-though-I’m-feeling-a-bit-lost-that’s-basically-OK kind of way, I found sufficient time to scan in the whole of Charles de la Roncière’s (1934) “Le Flibustier Mysterieux” and take home on a memory stick.

And now I’ve read it, I have to say it’s… really quite different from what I expected. The keel (if you like) of the book is de la Roncière’s quest to attribute the 17-line cryptogram to an Indian Ocean French pirate. He takes the approach of examining lots of pirate / treasure stories from broadly the right time and place, and seeing if he can use them to gain a glimpse of the mysterious man hiding behind the cryptogram’s curtain.

His book was clearly, I think, written for a popular audience: and even though he occasionally tries to affect academic detachment and skepticism of his sources, the raw evidence he’s moulding the whole thing from is simply too slight. Being brutally honest, I came to the book expecting a soupçon of the rigour and maritime erudition that he brought to his (literally) heavyweight six-volume “Histoire de la Marine Française” (from 1898 to 1932!): but found not so much as a single footnote. Perhaps he had footnoted himself out over those long decades.

On balance, though, perhaps that’s not so much of a issue for “Le Flibustier Mysterieux”, because it isn’t honestly that kind of a beast: rather, it’s both entertaining and an (on the whole) easy read.

All the same, I think it suffers from one big underlying problem, un éléphant dans la chambre: that History – and in particular historiography – has changed so much in 80 years that we would need the whole thing annotated and positioned within the context of what we now know in order to make proper sense of what he’s saying. Otherwise his book would be no more than a Parisian curio, a 115-page historical footnote (if you like).

Cipher Foundation Microproject #1

As I mentioned before, what I originally had in mind here was asking people to volunteer to transcribe two or three pages each from scans: but having now myself sat down and typed in sixty-five (small-ish) pages in one day, it became quickly clear that it would take far less time and effort to do it myself than to set up and coordinate a way of collaborating broadly to make that happen.

Hence what I want to aim for instead here is something a bit bigger, more thoughtful, and (I hope) more genuinely revealing; and something that overall better fits The Cipher Foundation’s charitable purpose (to “improve awareness of historical codes and ciphers”).

So rather than just transcribe it, what I’m now planning to do is commission an annotated translation of it. In short, The Cipher Foundation’s first historical cipher microproject will be: Translating “Le Flibustier Mysterieux”.

Inevitably, I haven’t worked out all the details yet (do you think Indiegogo would be the best crowdfunding platform? Or perhaps somewhere else entirely?) and it’ll take more than a few days to get the bank account, PayPal account, and the friendly-looking [Click Here To Donate] button all working etc. But it’s a plan, and – I hope you’ll agree – not an entirely bad plan either.

And if I do pretty much the opposite of everything Derek Abbott did with his attempt at crowdfunding, it should work out fine. :-p

Does that make sense to you?

I’ve previously blogged a number of times about Bernardin Nagéon de l’Estang: the short version is that I have yet to see a single piece of external evidence that he genuinely existed. A man with the right name did exist in the right place, but some 25 years too early for the dates: and so the reasonable – but as yet entirely unproven – presumption is that we should be looking for an unrecorded son of this man sharing his father’s name. The man certainly had several sons, not all of which are recorded… but that’s as far as we have been able to get.

The reason anybody cares about him is that he wrote (in French, translated here) that “…at our last battle with a large British frigate on the shores of Hindustan, the captain was wounded and on his deathbed confided to me his secrets and his papers to retrieve considerable treasure buried in the Indian Ocean; and, having first made sure that I was a Freemason, asked me to use it to arm privateers against the English.” Secrets and papers which treasure hunters have been speculating wildly about ever since.

In a post from April 2015 [which I managed to miss until very recently],
Emmanuel Mezino blogged about the evidence he had managed to dig up about Nagéon de l’Estang. From internal evidence, Manu reasons that the event where Nagéon de l’Estang claimed to have gained possession of “secrets” and “papers” from a dying French Freemason sea captain must surely have happened prior to 1789 [though personally I’m not so sure his logic holds]; and so Manu then winds the historical clock back to 1781-1783 when, in a series of five battles between Admiral Hughes’s squadron and Admiral le Bailli de Suffren’s squadron off the coast of Cuddalore, three French sea-captains died. Manu lists these as:

* The Chevalier Eleonore Perier de Salvert (whose life and Freemasonry connections are ably described here), commander of Le Flamand [50 guns];
* Captain Dupas de la Mancelière, Captain of the Ajax [64 guns];
* Capitain Dien, Commander of the fire-ship [probably 0 guns] launched under the orders of Capitain De Langle of Le Sévère [64 guns].

Manu thinks it probable that it was the Chevalier de Salvert whom Bernardin Nagéon de l’Estang was alluding to: and opening up H.C.M. Austen’s trusty “Sea Fights and Corsairs of the Indian Ocean” (which specifically covers this series of sea-battles in Chapter V), we find a report (p.188) of de Salvert’s death noted by William Hickey, who had met de Salvert several times on board his ship in January of that year:

“I was greatly concerned to to hear that in this action [the fifth and final sea battle] my worthy and respected friend the Chevalier de Salvert lost his life, being cut in two by a cannon-ball on the quarter-deck of the Flamand, while gallantly fighting his ship and encouraging her crew to use their utmost exertions to ensure success. I truly grieved at his death, notwithstanding he died fighting against my country, but that was no fault of his, and I firmly believe a better man never lived, such are the dire and lamentable consequences of war, the best men often being the most unfortunate.”

[Taken from “Memoirs of William Hickey”, published by Messrs. Hurst and Blackett, Ltd, but I’d be more interested in reading this in context in the original Vol III (or possibly Vol II?) than the abridged later version “The Prodigal Rake”.]

All the same, there must surely be many more accounts of this highly-respected Chevalier’s death in the archives yet to be found…

Manu goes on in a second post to recount how he found references to a certain Hélène Nagéon de Lestang, who married the creole poet Antoine Bertin at her stepfather’s property in Sainte-Domingue, and links this to the (nearby) 1770 birthplace of (the very real) Jean Marius Justin Nagéon de Lestang.

So that’s as far as Manu got with normal archival research, i.e. not really anywhere substantial. Close, but no cigar.

But then he pulls a gigantic rabbit from his hat, the testimony of Ali Loumi Ben Kace, as given in treasure hunter Patrice Hoffschir’s (2002) Bourbon l’̂île aux tresors:

“One day, in a sea port in Sicily, I drank too much: and woke up at sea on a pirate ship owned by Bernard Nagéon. I spent more than two years on this ship. […] In the Indian Ocean, we fought with two English corvettes, but we had to flee by night along the coast of Bourbon Island, with a broken main mast and sails, and with four holes torn in the hull. We were then stranded on a reef; and after throwing all the ballast overboard, the boat escaped the reef and we landed on the island. But the hull was holed on a rock and we were all forced to land there. Bernard Nagéon became almost crazy. Despite the waves, he ordered everyone to save what was possible. We managed to get a big chest and a barrel of gold ashore with the captain. […] I saw Bernard himself making marks in the lava rock: a heart and a “B9″ shape – everything is hidden there because both holes are now resealed. We left three weeks later on the galley of François Boivin of Saint-Malo, Bernard leaving everything concealed lest Boivin steals it all. […]. ”

Which, to my ears, sounds utterly peachy and completely made up. But… might it be true? There’s a little more on Hoffschir here, who goes treasure hunting with “une grande dose de spiritualité”. Hmmm…

A few weeks ago, I stumbled upon a Swiss book publishing website that was planning to re-release “Le Flibustier Mysterieux” in November this year. However, when I tried to find the website again a few days later, it had disappeared off the face of the Internet, which was a bit odd.

Then again, given that Charles de la Roncière wrote “Le Flibustier Mysterieux” in 1934 and died in 1941 (i.e. more than 70 years ago), his book would now seem to be out of copyright according to all the public domain copyright flowcharts I’ve looked at. So it would seem that there’s no obvious reason not to republish it in any format you like, if you want to.

Yet at the same time, there are no obvious digital copies of “Le Flibustier Mysterieux” available: while pirate treasure researchers jealously guard their 150-euro copies of it as if gold doubloons are stuffed inside their cover. (I’d have paid 100 euros myself to get a copy for my own cipher library, but I’ve always been too late to every copy to pick one up).

Surely someone can photograph or scan this somewhere and we can collectively divide up the pages into blocks and type it in, Project Gutenberg style? Think of it as a dry run for a Cipher Foundation microproject! 🙂

The first ‘La Buse’ cryptogram was first described (and indeed ably decrypted) by Charles de la Roncière in his 1934 book “Le Flibustier Mysterieux”. Though only 17 lines long, the decryption was – though correct without any real doubt – as mysterious as the pirate of the book’s title.

Annoyingly, de la Roncière didn’t give sources for any of his evidence, almost all of which seemed to be tied up with French treasure hunters; much of his secondary narrative (e.g. about Le Butin) has yet to have a single external document verifying it; and his whole narrative is wrapped up with a fair few unsubstantiated myths and legends which seem to have appeared in his book for the first time anywhere.

Why did this sober and exceptionally well-respected historian get himself tangled up with this mess? What was going on back then? Seventy years on, there’s still no good answer for any such questions: the only people who think this could be real are treasure hunters (who want all treasure to be real, basically) and skeptical code-breakers (such as myself, who suspect the cryptogram might be genuine, even if the proposed link with La Buse itself is almost certainly spurious).

And then you have the second ‘La Buse’ cryptogram, the first image of which was first put on the Internet (I believe) by Yannick Benaben about a decade ago, as part of a La Buse-themed fiction he was writing. Though this has its cadre of true believers (such Emmanuel Mezino, whose book about it lurches violently between the twin cipher poles of clear-headed accuracy and woefully empty speculation), my own conclusion is that it is, if anything, even more confused than the first cryptogram.

This second cryptogram has an extra five lines of encrypted text appended to (broadly) the same 17-line cryptogram, using (broadly) the same pigpen cipher key: but whereas the decrypted cleartext of the first 17 lines makes essentially no sense at all, the extra lines shine through clear as a bell.

My cryptographic conclusion was this these extra lines were surely an extra layer, added at a later date (and by a completely different owner), i.e. that these are “super-marginalia”, added in for reasons unknown… though I tentatively predicted that it was to try to link the underlying 17-line cryptogram more definitively with the piratically successful (but ultimately hanged) Olivier Levasseur.

All of which was no more than an appetiser.

Because this was where online commenter CptEvil came in.

The Gold Bug

CptEvil noted that if you compare the start of the last five lines of the second La Buse cryptogram…

un bon verre dans l’hostel de le veque dant(S)
le siege du diable r(Q)uarar(N)te siz(X) degrès
f(S)iz(X) minutes deuz(X) fois
pour celui qui le decouvrira
juillet mil sept cent (T)rente

(…in English…)

a good drink in the bishop’s hostel in
the devil’s seat forty six degrees
six minutes two times
for the person who will discover it
july 1730

…with the cryptogram used by Edgar Allan Poe in his famous short story “The Gold Bug”, you discover something rather extraordinary:-

A good glass in the bishop’s hostel in the devil’s seat
— twenty-one degrees and thirteen minutes
— northeast and by north
— main branch seventh limb east side
— shoot from the left eye of the death’s-head
— a bee line from the tree through the shot fifty feet out.

(Note that this was also suggested elsewhere on the web back in March 2015 by online commenter “indi”.)

Are these two cryptograms connected? Why, yes, they most surely are. But how? That’s far more difficult to answer than you might think, even though we probably only have three main scenarios to consider:-

(1) Did Poe Make Both Cryptograms?

Even though there are plenty of people who assert that Poe made the Beale Papers, I’ve yet to see any evidence beyond mere handwavery that this is so. And the same would seem to be true here… but yet the two cryptograms are connected.

(2) Was “The Gold Bug” The Second Cryptogram’s Source?

Interestingly, Baudelaire’s famous (1856) French translation of The Gold Bug (as CptEvil noted in a follow-up comment) uses “la chaise” to translate “seat”, whereas “le siege” only appears in a 1933 translation. Which would tend to suggest that if the second cryptogram was in some way a copy of Poe’s cryptogram (which, after all, was embedded in a pirate fantasy about discovering Captain Kidd’s treasure), it was probably made after 1933.

(PS: how did Alphonse Borghers translate this in 1845?)

CptEvil also points out that there is a distinct similarity between the treasure chest depicted in the second cryptogram…

…and a fantasy treasure chest famously depicted by Victorian illustrator Howard Pyle:

(This was also pointed out by online commenter “marc” later in March 2015.)

Note in particular the “XO” motif on the lid of the chest and the structural similarity of the square chest just to the left of the main chest: all of which would seem to be a giveaway, particularly as Howard Pyle seems to have made up almost everything he drew to do with pirates. (Indeed, most of Johnny Depp’s “Jack Sparrow” on-board piratical style seems to have been plucked directly from the Howard Pyle play-book, more than a century later).

And yet… just as we can’t (yet) rule out Poe having seen this second cryptogram, we can’t rule out Pyle having seen it either. And we also can’t (without a huge investment in time in tracking down the iconography of treasure chests) rules out the possibilities (a) that Pyle copied it from the second cryptogram, or (b) that Pyle and the second cryptogram’s author were both strongly influenced by the same image, perhaps found in an old pirate book.

Moreover, inserting a line from “The Gold Bug” would seem like quite a ridiculous thing to do if the overall intention was to make the cryptogram seem to date from 1730, given that Poe wrote his short story more than a century after Olivier Levasseur died. This fails the test of good sense, surely?

(3) Was The Second Cryptogram “The Gold Bug”‘s Source?

Between December 1839 and May 1840, Edgar Allan Poe wrote a series of articles in Alexander’s Weekly Messenger, in many of which he decrypted readers’ cryptograms. You can also trace aspects of these exchanges in Poe’s letters.

Rather more substantial is Poe’s A Few Words On Secret Writing from Graham’s Magazine in July 1841, though I should add that William Friedman didn’t think much of Poe’s non-systematic attempts at decryption (see p.41ff of this 1937 Signal Corps magazine).

From his correspondence, we know that by 1842 Poe had lost interest in decrypting the approximately one hundred reader’s cryptograms that even then still continued to crash on his beach, and in some of which “Foreign languages were employed”: and yet in 1843, his “The Gold Bug” played directly to that same audience on the same mysterious vein, with wild success. Poe also refers to a book in French on cryptography by Jean-Francois Niceron (though Niceron lived a century before La Buse): so it is entirely possible that Poe had contact with a French cryptographer of his era.

It seems entirely possible, then, that Poe might have been directly inspired by an encounter with the second cryptogram (or something exceedingly like it), to the point that he shaped his story around it. For are they not both pitched as pirate treasure narratives, with an exceedingly obscure key?

(Note that David Kahn, who likes The Gold Bug despite the fact that it is “full of absurdities and errors”, suggests in “The Codebreakers” that Poe may well have borrowed the basic Captain-Kidd-treasure-hunting plot from Robert M. Bird’s novel “Sheppard Lee”, a book Poe had previously reviewed – apparently, all you need to do is dream how to get to the treasure the same way three nights in a row, etc etc.)

But the single observation that most makes me suspect that Poe had seen the second “La Buse” cryptogram is simply that the plaintext revealed by his protagonist’s decryption makes no sense, even as a novelistic device. His cryptologic hero Legrand eventually makes sense of “Bishop’s Hostel” as “Bessop’s Castle”, which didn’t really make any sense to me when I first read the story many decades ago, and – frankly – still doesn’t ring even remotely true today.

So could it be that Poe actually constructed the story backwards from the phrase “A good glass in the bishop’s hostel in the devil’s seat”? If so, what does the phrase actually mean?

The most (in)famous Devil’s Seat of recent years is the “Fauteuil du Diable” (“Devil’s Armchair”) at Rennes-les-Bains, which somehow got entwined with the whole ludicrous “Priory of Sion” fantasy. But The Gold Bug would seem to have preceded that by many decades, so we can perhaps move swiftly past it. 🙂

It has been suggested that this in fact refers to the formerly-volcanic piton (mountain) on Réunion Island: though possible, this seems to be wading knee-deep in the inky waters of speculation. But beyond that, I’m kind of out of ideas.

All the same, the notion that “The Devil’s Seat” at “forty six degrees six minutes two times” (presumbly longitude measured east from Paris?) refers to a formerly-volcanic piton seems more probable to me than the notion that Poe plucked the phrase “A good glass in the bishop’s hostel in the devil’s seat” from the ether entirely a propos of nothing, even if he did dream it three nights in a row. But even so, I’d prefer to have even a soupcon of solid evidence either way, this is still all a bit too messy for my liking. 🙂

Though it’s probably no surprise to any of you cleverly inferential bunch, I’ve just got back from holiday – hence Cipher Mysteries’ pin-drop quiet for the last few days.

Anyway, one of the [inevitably many] cipher-mystery-related things I read/re-read while away was a rough-and-ready English translation of the Copiale Cipher, which appears to have been composed by a German ‘Oculist’ secret society in the 1740s.

Pages 100-101 say (I’ve reformatted it into a list, but kept the clunky translation intact):

The so called key *tri* has in its turn something very special, it seams to be thought of beginning from agitation, is commendable by means, and it perished to a great part, as follows:
* On the green cloth there is first of all an olive branch, this is the sign of piece and tranquility.
* Secondly, the drum is there, so that its acoustic noise bum bum bum gives the sign for a general revolt.
* Thirdly, the fama, which signals the alarm with the trumpet, calls the *bigx* together again to regain their natural freedom and therefore to build a corps.
* Fourthly, the three-headed monster means the rule and governance, which, by means of power and perfidy, deprive man of his natural freedom and enjoyment of the timely things and of what we, human beings, need.
* Fifth, the sublime heap means tyranny, with which scaver we are printed.
* Sixth, the three snakes, which are placed in a hieroglyphic and mystical way, stand for nature, justice and bravery.
* Seventh, the lance, pistols and flag are weapons of the *bigx*, to regain their lost freedom and to rejoice themselves in piece and calmness of all timely goods.

Although I’m intrigued by all of the above, the three snakes in particular struck a distant chord for me – might this somehow explain the snakes on the second La Buse cryptogram?

Left:

Right:

Bottom:

I know, I know – the bottom snake is actually a pair of snakes. But… I’m going to run with this for a bit regardless, see where it all leads. 🙂

One web page I found in this snakey vein mused about the seven snakes used as page dividers in the Rohonc Codex (along with various other interesting stuff). Also: Serpens was the constellation where the 1604 supernova famously occurred, but that doesn’t obviously seem connected to this present case. And here’s a more obviously symbolic drawing incorporating three snakes, though from where the image came I don’t know.

As far as people researching the Copiale Cipher go, the whole ‘Key Lodge’ section from p.100 to p.104 that this snake mention is embedded in seems to have no obvious external parallel. Specifically, Andreas Önnerfors writes:

My assessment is that the rituals, symbols and ideology of the “so-called Key lodge” (“die so genannte Schlüssel loge”) described on pages 100-104 are absolutely unique.

And so my question to you all is: has anyone seen any mention elsewhere of a decorative Freemason pattern involving three snakes? Or did the Oculists dream it up all by themselves?