Category Archives: Le Butin Papers

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?

The second “La Buse” cryptogram is a funny old thing: Emmanuel Mezino swears to its authenticity, but I’m really not as convinced as he is – given that a number of key elements (such as the cryptography, the dates, the drawing style, etc) seem jarringly incongruous to my eyes, there seems plenty of good reasons to infer that it is (at best) a later copy and/or an assemblage of earlier pieces, or (at worst) a modern fake.

Here’s Yannick Benaben’s image of it, the earliest that I’ve found on the web:-

And then there’s the cryptogram’s map to consider. Even though La Buse (Olivier Levasseur) ended his piratical career in the Indian Ocean, he seems to have begun it in the Caribbean, so it perhaps shouldn’t be at all surprising that this cryptogram should contain a very high-level map of the Florida / Caribbean area.

Many names on the map can be identified without difficulty:
* Florida – though because this area became ‘La Louisiane’ (named after Louis XIV of France, of which it was a colony) in 1682, it would seem that this map predates (or appears to predate) 1682.
* Virginie (= “Virginia”)
* Golfo Mexicano (= “Gulf of Mexico”)
* Tragillo (= “Trujillo”)
* Jamaica
* Cuba
* Tropicus Cancri (= “Tropic of Cancer”)
* Hispaniola – it looks to me as though the island of Hispaniola has been miscopied into two halves.
* S. Dominici (= “Santo Domingo”, Hispaniola’s capital city founded by Columbus’ brother Bartholemew in 1496, and also another name for Hispaniola).
* La Bermuda (= “Bermuda”, although on the map this is positioned way too close to the coast)

Curiously, the map has a snake design that wiggles – coincidentally or not, I can’t say – roughly up the path of the Mississippi. It’s far from historically obvious that the Mississippi River was only discovered (by Louis Jolliet and Jacques Marquette, says Wikipedia) in 1673: and hence it is tempting to suspect that this snake design was added simply to cover up a cartographic slip-up by a later forger or hoaxer (i.e. adding the 1673+ Mississippi River to a map supposed to be linked to La Buse, who died in 1730). But that’s just my speculation, please don’t read too much into it. 🙂

The other map labels, though, are slightly less straightforward.

* Boriquen – this is clearly Boriken, the original Taino Indian name for Puerto Rico (although Columbus called it “San Juan Bautista”, i.e. St John the Baptist Island, which is presumably why the capital is called San Juan, and why the island’s motto is “Joannes est nomen eius”).

* Guanima was the original (pre-1520) name of the Bay of Marantzas on the north coast of Cuba, while “Guanahani” was the Taino Indian name for the first island to which Columbus came (the controversy over which island that actually was continues to the present day). And so it seems likely to me that the island on this map marked as “Guanima” was intended to be “Guanahani”, but got mangled in the copying.

* Boca Ioneque – I have no idea what this is. It’s next to “Guanima” and looks as though it is attached to an island, but I’m not sure if that’s helpful or not. All suggestions welcome!

* “Acalaia” / “Alcaldia” (town hall?), apparently on the Yucatan peninsula – though I did manage to work out what this (miscopied and mangled) label was late last year from some 16th century maps, I now cannot find my careful notes on it at all, bah. 🙁

* R. Fuado – I have no idea what this is.

* C. de S. Marie – I have no idea what this is either.

* C. de S ???? – I can’t even read this, let alone guess what it is.

My Thoughts

This map is hugely odd. Not just the mix of languages (Spanish, French, Latin) or the miscopied labels (Guanima, Tragillo) or the suspicious snake tail (covering the Mississippi?) or the miscopied geography (Hispaniola), but the whole thing seems jarring to me. Manu may be convinced, but to my eyes this is all over the place.

But what do you think?

Over the last few days, I’ve been looking again at the cryptogram widely claimed to have been composed by the pirate Olivier “La Buse” Levasseur that I first properly described here back in 2013: and really, I have to say that I don’t believe a word of the supposed hidden-pirate-treasure back-story.

I’ll explain…

A Pigpen Cipher

The mysterious text is, without any real doubt, a cryptogram formed using the exact pigpen cipher layout suggested by Charles de la Roncière in 1934. But there is also, I think, strong evidence that the plaintext was already enigmatic and/or hard to read even before it was ever enciphered.

For example, one very early section of the cryptogram is in almost perfect French:

* Lines 3-4: prenez une cullière de miel

Here, “cullière” looks overwhelmingly as though it ought to instead be “cuillère” (spoon), i.e. “take a spoonful of honey”. What this suggests to me is that the person originally encrypting this text found it hard to tell the difference between ‘i’ and ‘l’ in the original (plaintext) handwriting he/she was working from. What’s more, this sounds – however disappointingly prosaic it may be to some people – a lot like a recipe of some sort. And furthermore, it is tempting to surmise from this that the encipherer was unable to read French, and was just reading and processing the letters exactly as they seemed to him/her.

All of which is rather odd: but perhaps the encipherer had inherited or acquired the plaintext and believed that it contained directions to a French pirate’s treasure (albeit one written in a language he/she couldn’t read), and so thought it more prudent to encipher it than leave it lying around en clair. This is just my speculation, of course: but all the same, there’s a whole heap of details here that doesn’t properly make sense just as it is, so there has to be some explanation for the confusing stuff that we can see.

There is evidence too that the cryptogram that we have was also copied from an earlier version of the same cryptogram, specifically because of the variability of the pigpen dots. For example:

* Line 8: povr en pecger une femme [dhrengt vous n ave]

Here, if you swap pigpen dots for the first ‘v’, ‘n’, and ‘g’ you get –

* Line 8: pour empecher une femme [dhrengt vous n ave] — i.e. “to prevent a woman…”

Even with what snatches of mangled French we can (mostly) read, it seems highly unlikely to me that this will turn out to contain anything so obnoxiously capitalist as clues to hidden treasure.

A French Love Spell?

In fact, to my eyes the most convincing scenario so far is that what we are looking at here is a French love spell involving honey.

Because spells were almost always copied rather than devised, I therefore think the most practical way to untangle this whole cipher mystery would therefore be to look at as many (preferably pre-1800) French spells as possible, and see if we can discern unusual patterns there that are reflected in the text here. And any mention of honey, too. 🙂

So I took a quick look on the web, and quickly found The Passion Spells of France (2nd Edition) (though note that your $6.99 only buys you 24 pages). This includes a French spell involving placing honey in the middle of a pentacle (the “Midnight Secrets” ritual, page 15), but sadly the spells only appear in English translation and there are no notes as to the original French sources for any of them. 🙁

Note that the book also includes a “Dove Love” ritual (p.8) involving the feather of a dove: which might possibly begin to explain the otherwise generally mystifying inclusion of the “une paire de pijon[s]” [t -> s] on the first line of the cryptogram. (Incidentally, pigeons less than a month old are known as ‘squabs’ and have historically been considered a great delicacy.)

I also found a book often mentioned called “La Poule Noir” (The Black Pullet) by “A.J.S.D.R.L.G.F.” (all bar one of whose initials lie on the middle row of a QWERTY keyboard, for all you trivia fans). This seems to be included in a 1900 book by Legran Alexandre called “Les Vrai Secrets de la Magie Noire” (downloadable here), but please say if anyone finds a proper download (note that there are a whole of sign-up-for-this-service-and-get-this-ebook-free scam download pages that contain it).

A few of the recipes / rituals listed there do include honey, such as one for making newborn babies intelligent, and also one involving the left leg of a tortoiseshell cat. The love ritual involves taking a lock of someone’s hair, burning it, and spreading the ashes on their bedframe mixed in with honey. (If it brings people together, who am I to raise an eyebrow? It’s no worse than online dating, 17th century style.)

I don’t know. There must be a huge literature on French love spells somewhere out there (dissertations and books), but I’m far from tuned into that whole channel just yet. If anyone finds a better starting point into it, please say! Perhaps we’ll then start to make some genuine progress with this, rather than wasting time and effort wishing for buried treasure. 😐

It’s no secret that there is little of substance about “La Buse” (the pirate captain Olivier Levasseur) on the web. Errrm… or anywhere else, to be brutally honest.

One of the few good places is photographer Yannick Benaben’s website, where he has posted up a set of pages called Sur les Traces du Trésor de La Buse Entre Histoire et Légendes Insulaires. This is a mixed bag of “La Buse”-related threads, some of them genuinely historical (which is good), but also a lot of fairly empty cryptogram-based speculation too (which is… not quite so good).

Regardless, I’m happy to recommend his set of “Sur les Traces…” pages as a genuinely useful resource covering the Indian Ocean phase of La Buse’s piratical life (as long you don’t inhale the cipher speculations part of it too deeply).

“Les Diamants de Goa”

However – and this is where it gets confusing – Yannick has also published an online story called Les Diamants de Goa. This has a (fictional) underwater archaeologist called “Francesca Verrazone” working at a (fictional) French underwater archaeological institute in Marseille, albeit one that sounds a great deal like (the very real) Marseille underwater archaeological institute DRASSM, which is indeed one of the first (real) places you’d go if you were looking for an underwater site in French (or formerly-French) territorial waters.

Yannick’s story has his (fictional) Verrazone arrange a (fictional) conference to air her (fictional) theory about the Nossa Senhora do Cabo, the (real) treasure-filled ship that La Buse captured. He then has a whole load of (fictional) marine archaeologists go and look for it: and so it all proceeds.

But though he seems to have enjoyed this writing (I suspect he had the film rights at least half in mind), the piece has ended up unfinished, stranded precariously on the water’s edge of his website. And people (particularly those who rely heavily on Google Translate, I expect) find links to his story high up in their La Buse search results and conclude it must be just as true as the “Sur Les Traces…” pages, when it’s in fact no more than a frippery.

As a result, you have to be very careful as to which “tree” of pages you’re looking at (i.e. the “Sur Les Traces…” set or the “Les Diamants de Goa” set), because while the former is largely factual (though laced with cipher speculation), the latter is simply made up – a bit of cipher-themed fun.

This difficulty becomes most apparent when Benaben’s (fictional) narrative deals with the captured treasure ship…

The ‘Nossa Senhora do Cabo e São Pedro de Alcântara’

There are plenty of things we can say for certain about this (very real) ship. The Nossa Senhora do Cabo e São Pedro de Alcântara (or ‘Nossa Senhora do Cabo’ for short):
* was built in Amsterdam in 1710 and called the ‘Zeelandia’ or ‘Gelderland’;
* was a two-deck 2nd rate ship of the line with 72 guns;
* was bought by Portugal in 1717 and renamed ‘Nossa Senhora do Cabo e São Pedro de Alcântara’;
* entered service in August 1717;
* having survived a terrible storm, was captured in port by Olivier Levasseur (“La Buse”) in 1721;
* subsequently disappeared without a trace (presumed sunk).

(Note that because people writing about La Buse tend to be French, the ship’s Portuguese name tends to get Frenchified into “La Vierge du Cap”.)

In Yannick’s story, however, he has his (fictional) marine archaeologist refer to the (real) “Grande Panorama de Lisboa” (a huge set of tiles depicting Lisbon around 1700):

He has Verrazone (fictionally) assert that a (real) ship (genuinely) drawn near the front of the tiles is the Nossa Senhora do Cabo:

As you have probably already worked out from the above, this cannot actually be the Nossa Senhora do Cabo: the tiles were drawn before 1703 (because that was when the artist died), while that ship was not built until 1710, and did not arrive in Lisbon until 1717. Also, while the ship depicted does have two decks, it only seems to have ~44 cannon (rather than 72): the real Nossa Senhora do Cabo was a substantially bigger beast.

(Perhaps someone else will be able to find out what this ship depicted actually was, because there wasn’t anything on the 3decks website that seemed to match: doubtless a plucky Portuguese historian has already trawled through many more fleet descriptions to do precisely this.)

The First Cryptogram

My current understanding is that the first “La Buse” / “Le Butin” cryptogram – the one that Charles de la Roncière wrote about in his 1934 book “Le Flibustier Mysterieux” (and how I’ve tried to get a copy of that book, but without success) – has not been sighted since 1934.

(And for what it’s worth, I still fail to see how this has anything to do with La Buse.)

However, following an exchange of comments on Klaus Schmeh’s recent page on La Buse, I received what seemed to be a low resolution version of a photo of the real first cryptogram (“crypto_musee_2004”). Looking at the EXIF data attached, it was (c) Yannick Benaben and dated 2004:07:18 13:10:30.

When I then trawled through the Wayback Machine, the only place that this appeared on Yannick’s site was at the bottom of the ‘Préambule’ section of his (fictional) “Les Diamants de Goa” web pages. It therefore seems – unless someone can prove otherwise – highly likely to me that Yannick mocked this up for the purposes of his “Les Diamants de Goa” story sometime before 1st Sep 2009.

The Second Cryptogram

Going forward a little in (Wayback Machine) time to 16th October 2011, we find that Yannick has replaced the (presumed mocked-up) image of the first cryptogram with an image of the second “La Buse” cryptogram, the one which Emmanuel Mezino wrote an entire book about (but which I don’t believe is genuine).

As far as I know, this would have been the first public sighting of this second cryptogram.

Now here’s the curious thing. If we look closely at the ship on the second cryptogram identified as “La Perle” (of which Manu very kindly sent me a close-up copy), we see something rather odd:

What is arguably far too coincidental is that the back of “La Perle” is almost exactly the same as the back of the ship drawn on the Grande Panorama:

My Conclusion

I didn’t believe that the second cryptogram was real before, and now I really don’t believe it all. To be precise, it seems extremely likely to me not only that Yannick Benaben mocked up the image of the first cryptogram, but also that he was the person who created the whole second cryptogram. He had the means, opportunity, and – crucially – the motive to do it.

…unless anyone knows better?

Emmanuel Mezino, having misinterpreted my critique (of his book) as in some way overcritical, has left some comments on Cipher Mysteries challenging me to disprove his La Buse theory. Constructing a disproof is often quite hard, but I think that in this case it’s possible if I focus solely on his speculative cryptology (rather than his speculative history, speculative cartography, speculative numerology, etc).

First, I’ll need to summarize Manu’s complicated-sounding reasoning. He argues…
* …that the 17-line copy of the cryptogram (as decrypted by Charles de la Roncière and popularized by Robert Charroux) is a fake, while the 22-line copy of the cryptogram (as revealed for the first time in Manu’s book) is real;
* …that the pigpen cipher key inferred by de la Roncière is only the basis of the cryptogram’s cipher system;
* …that there is an extra first level that involves swapping between dotted and undotted pigpen shapes;
* …that there is an extra second level that involves a Caesar-like +4 substitution shift (i.e. replacing a letter with a letter four steps on within the alphabet) for certain characters;
* …that there is an extra third level that involves treating the two halves of the pigpen alphabet key as if it is some kind of virtual chess board, and then using knight’s moves to make letter substitutions within the alphabet (but again, only for certain letters);
* …that even with this pigpen cipher basis plus these three additional confounding steps, he still can’t make sense of the first 17 lines of the ciphertext, but that the final five lines (of the recently revealed 22-line copy) can be read very clearly;
* …and hence that the only things he draws from the cryptogram are (a) the number 22 (which is important to him, because it is the same number as the number of mysterious stone markings he claims to have found scattered around the North-East part of Réunion, (b) the word “ECU” (which he claims links with the constellation known as the Ecu of Sobieski), and (c) a steganographic star map of the same constellation hidden in plain sight within the cryptogram, formed by linking up all the letter “A”s (in their pigpen form).

Additionally: whereas the original 17-line cryptogram has no connection to La Buse at all beyond mere hearsay, the new 22-line cryptogram has “LA BUSE” clearly added to it (written in the same pigpen cipher), along with a picture of a ship marked “La Vierge du Cap”, a picture of a man being hanged (presumably Olivier Levasseur himself), five additional lines of cipher including the date 1730 (i.e. the year of La Buse’s execution) written in words, and lots of other wonderfully detailed historical pirate-looking stuff all around it.

What is wrong with this reasoning?

For me, there’s a difficult paradox that underlies all of the above: that even though Manu concludes that the original 17-line cipher is uncrackable and unknowable (even with his claimed three stage extra confoundment of a pigpen cipher, he only claims to decrypt a single word “DIFFUS” from the whole of line 17), he simultaneously is content to accept that the new lines 18 to 22 are perfectly readable and reliable.

17: UUNDIFFURQECIEEFURTETLESL
= …DIFFUS…………….
18: UNBONVERREDANSLHOSTELDELEVEQUEDANT
= UN BON VERRE DANS L’HOSTEL DE L’EVEQUE DAN[S]

Were these two lines really made in the same way and at the same time?

For me, the answer is a flat no. If line 18 to 22 were written at the same time as lines 1 to 17, then the same subsequent process – whether of conscious confoundment (as Manu thinks) or of accumulated historical accident (as I suspect) – would have happened to both blocks of text. As such, we would not be in a situation where we can read line 18 but have not the faintest clue about its neighbouring line 17.

Really, from what I can currently see of these two ciphertexts (Manu’s book only includes his transcription of lines 18-22, but not a clear image of these new lines in the ciphertext), I cannot honestly accept that lines 17 and 18 were originally written down at the same time. That is, the final 5-line block looks to my eyes like it was added as an entirely separate (and possibly much later) constructional layer.

It’s therefore an open (and extremely interesting) question whether this second cryptogram is a genuinely old artefact (i.e. a copy of an earlier document that has been extended, though not with sufficient art to make that extension appear seamless) or a modern fake. From my perspective, I don’t think there’s yet quite enough information to make that call: but I hope someone takes it on as a challenge in the future. That, for me, is the central core of the book that I’d have written (but which Manu plainly didn’t, apparently for reasons of “respect”).

All in all, then, Manu’s notion that 22 (the number of lines of the second cryptogram) is somehow important now seems impossible to justify, whether or not you place any trust in numerological arguments (and I personally have never seen one that turned out to be true or useful). And so his subsequent claim that this necessarily links with the 22 stone incisions he found now seems almost certainly wrong.

Given the uncertainty in the confoundment of lines 1 to 17, I also have no confidence at all that all the instances of the letter “A” were letters “A” in the original ciphertext: I also have no confidence that the cryptogram as it has come to us (in either variant) has precisely the same layout as the one that was originally enciphered. As a result, I have no real confidence that Manu’s suggested A-based star map is a reliable guide to anything.

Finally, I also have no confidence that the word “ECU” apparently in the ciphertext was in the original. Manu’s claimed explanation of the 17-line ciphertext as some kind of triply-confounded pigpen (based on what? Has anyone ever made one even remotely like this? I don’t think so) is completely speculative and unhelpful, in that it doesn’t seem to explain a single word. I cannot see that the presence of “ECU” in a string of unreadable French can be a reliable starting point to build an argument about steganographic star maps.

Last year, I was contacted by a young French guy called Emmanuel Mezino: he was writing a book about the famous “La Buse” cryptogram and treasure, and asked if my publishing house Compelling Press might publish it. From my experience with “The Curse of the Voynich”, I told him that if he structured it in two distinct halves – the front half summarizing facts and historical research (giving sources), and the second half comprising his inferences and speculation – then yes, I would be very interested.

My rationale for this was simple: even if readers happen to disagree with every single aspect of the reasoning (which, let’s face it, is often the default position with cipher mysteries), the book would still stand a good chance of being hugely interesting, entertaining, and useful in its own right – the story of La Buse is fascinating and intriguing, and I have found few properly historical accounts that do justice to any phase of the pirate’s life.

However well-intentioned that was, it was perhaps too tightly-fitting an editorial straitjacket for a young writer to want to wear; and so Emmanuel ended up editing and publishing his book himself, giving it a romantic-looking cover:-

For its title, Mezino used the phrase allegedly called out by Olivier Levasseur (‘La Buse’) en route to the gallows, as he (so the story goes) threw a piece of paper containing his cryptogram to the crowd – “Mon Trésor à qui saura le prendre” (i.e. “My [fabulous] treasure [will go] to he who will take it”). Buying it will cost you rather less than the bejewelled gold cross of Goa: 18,00 euros (plus postage) for a physical copy, or (perhaps more likely if you happen to live outside France) 11,99 euros for the ebook.

Without much doubt, I think the best bit about the book is that it includes some close-up photographs of parts of a new cipher document – what could very possibly be a second copy of La Buse’s cryptogram. It’s not a perfect scoop (a low resolution colour version of this was included on page 8 of Liz Englert’s (2013) treasure-hunting omnishambles book “My Adventures of the Famous La Buse Treasure“), but the quality of the scans Mezino includes is on the whole extremely good.

Having said that, armchair treasure hunters will be perhaps less than fully impressed that Mezino somehow fails to include a close-up of the lines of cipher that only appear in this second version of the cryptogram, settling on giving merely his interpretation of what those extra letters say (which may or may not be correct).

Another less than satisfactory section was Mezino’s imaginative rendition of the “La Buse” legend, which for all its liveliness was plainly derived from a variety of unreliable sources (apparently including his interpretation of the drawings around the second cryptogram). Though this wasn’t as bad as Pauline B. Innis’ (1973) “Gold in the Blue Ridge” (a teeth-grindingly dreadful imaginative historical reconstruction of the Beale Papers story, which I wearily read recently), I’m not planning to return to either any time soon.

And it should be no surprise that, for all Mezino’s claims that he has (by collecting together an assortment of markings on rocks scattered across the northern half of Réunion; interpreting them as a star map written on land; reconciling that with sacred-geometry-style details overlaid on the cryptogram itself; and then back-linking everything to the astronomer Hevelius) logically deduced the only possible answer to the cryptogram… I’m more than just a bit skeptical. In fact, I don’t think there’s even a single detail in his reasoning that I’d ‘fess to agreeing with.

But as you’d expect, Mezino brooks no disagreement with his Grand Plan: and as writer and editor, that’s ultimately his right. You buy his book or you don’t, and you agree with him or you don’t. It’s all fine.

For me, though, his account is all a bit of a missed opportunity: pictures aside, he’s included all the stuff I’d have left out, and omitted all the stuff I’d have put in. There’s no critical appraisal of the second cryptogram as a source document (or even, dare I say it, as a possible modern forgery made to impress treasure hunters), nor any critical appraisal of La Buse’s own history and the quality of the sources.

Nor is there any kind of critical assessment of La Buse’s earlier life in the Caribbean, nor Le Butin’s trustworthiness as the (alleged) source for the first cryptogram, nor a critical assessment of Charles de la Roncière’s (1934) “Le Flibustier Mysterieux”, which first brought the cryptogram to the world’s attention.

Many Cipher Mysteries readers will doubtless link all this with my recent grouchy post about The Voynich Manuscript for Dummies, where I moaned about how people tend to fixate on the mythology of cipher mysteries, and seem to have no time for looking at the basic historical dimensions of the claimed evidence – transparency, reliability, agenda, bla bla bla. Well, yes: and it would be hard to deny that Emmanuel’s book has ended up somewhat hollow in this respect, which is a big shame.

But even so, I do appreciate that writing an evidence-centred cipher mystery book that manages to keep a properly analytical cutting edge but without destroying the underlying mystique is a really tough writing brief – perhaps almost impossible for a writer’s first book. Ultimately, though, perhaps Mezino’s book will – for all its many shortcomings – prove to be a useful first step in the right direction. Hopefully: and yet from where I’m standing, we’ve got a very long way to go on that road just yet…