A pirate is a thief on a ship, a privateer is a pirate licensed to steal from other countries’ ships, while a corsair is a French or Muslim privateer. (Oh, and a buccaneer was a hunter from Hispaniola who had turned pirate or privateer, but that’s another story.)

For the story behind the La Buse / Le Butin pirate cipher, it’s important to understand that while La Buse (Olivier Levasseur) was a pirate through and through, Le Butin (Bernardin Nageon de L’estang) seems to have been a nationalistic pirate who then turned official privateer before finally becoming a sailor in Napoleon’s Indian Ocean fleet (such as it was), where he died.

Specifically, Le Butin’s will (as described in Part 1) says “In my adventurous life before embarking on the Apollon, I was one of those pirates corsairs who did so much harm to our enemies Spain and England.

At first, this didn’t mean much to me: but while reading “Forgotten Eden” (1968) by Athol Thomas, fragments of the larger story began to emerge. It turns out that the 16-gun Apollon (built in 1796) had been one of the most famous corsair ships in the Indian Ocean, because during a six month period in 1797 she captured over 700 million francs’ worth of treasure. Her illustrious captain was Jean François Hodoul whose grave at the Bel Air cemetery in the Seychelles’ Mahé Island sports (according to Thomas, though I haven’t been able to verify this) a carving of the Apollon.

Jean Francois Hodoul

The Apollon then passed from Hodoul to one of the other “Kings of the Corsairs”, Louis La Vaillant: there’s a line drawing of her from 1798:-

apollon

However, the Apollon’s shimmering career was then abruptly terminated by Captain Thomas Surridge on H.M.S. Leopard on 24th October 1798 (according to the London Gazette): the prize papers taken from the Apollon are HCA 49/13-5 at The National Archives in Kew (though these are marked as “1799”, perhaps the date they were archived).

By far the best account of the Apollon’s end I’ve found so far is from the extremely well-researched and well-informed Henri Maurel:-

A son retour à Port Louis, L’Apollon, dont Hodoul aurait possédé la moitié des parts, fut vendu au corsaire Le vaillant, qui en assura le commandement. L’Apollon appareilla pour une campagne le 22 Août 1798, captura une riche prise portugaise, puis fut lui-même arraisonné par le HMS Leopard, le 10 Novembre 1798, à environ 500 miles au NE de Mombasa, près de l’équateur et Longitude 45° 30′. Son équipage fut emmené à Anjouan, aux îles Comores, mais purent, plus tard, retourner à Maurice. Il est improbable qu’ Hodoul ait été parmi eux, en dépit de l’affirmation de Toussaint, comme officier en second. [xxii]

Si l’on considère la date de naissance du premier enfant de Hodoul, Raymond, le 20/06/1799, et “en comptant sur les doigts”, on arrive à la conclusion que son enfant avait été conçu en septembre 1798. Hodoul n’était donc pas à Bord de L’Apollon lors du départ de ce navire de Port Louis. Cet argument est conforté par deux éléments irréfutables: Un exemplaire du rôle d’équipage de L’Apollon retrouvé au Archives Départementales de la Réunion [xxiii], indique que le navire avait relâché dans cette île, certainement pour “faire le plein” de volontaires. La mention marginale en face du nom de Hodoul indique “à Prendre aux Seychelles”. L’Apollon n’ira point le chercher, car dans ses mémoires, le matelot Tabardin [xxiv], écrit ” … nous partons et nous voilà voguant sur les flots. Nous passâmes à Bourbon pour y prendre des volontaires, et continuant notre voyage, la première terre que nous vîmes fut la baie de Lagoa, ensuite celle de St Augustin; Puis nous dirigeâmes notre route vers Mozambique pour y établir notre croisière.” Hodoul échappa donc à cette fâcheuse aventure.

[xxii] Auguste Toussaint: Dictionnaire de Biographies Mauricienne.
[xxiii] Liasse L408
[xxiv] Mémoires de Tabardin, manuscrit, Carnegie Hall Curepipe Ile Maurice

My typical free’n’easy translation of Maurel’s text runs like this:-

On her return to Port Louis, the Apollon (which Hodoul had owned half the shares of) was sold to the corsair Louis La Vaillant, who also became her captain. The Apollon embarked on a new campaign on August 22nd 1798, captured a rich Portuguese ship, but was herself then taken by H.M.S. Leopard on November 10th 1798 about 500 miles NE of Mombasa near the equator, at Longitude 45° 30′. Her crew was brought to Anjouan in the Comoros Islands, but may later have returned to Mauritius. Despite the assertion to the contrary of Toussaint, the second officer, it is unlikely that Hodoul was among them. [xxii]

This is because if we count backwards ‘on our fingers’ from Hodoul’s first child Raymond’s date of birth (20th June 1799), we arrive at the conclusion that he was conceived in September 1798. Hence Hodoul was not on board at the start of the Apollon’s journey in Port Louis. This argument is strengthened by two irrefutable facts: (1) a copy of the crew list of Apollon found in the Archives Départementales de la Réunion [xxiii], which indicates that the vessel put in on the island, almost certainly to “fill up” its complement of volunteer seamen; and (2) the marginal note in front of Hodoul’s name indicates that he was “Taken to the Seychelles”. Apollon didn’t go looking for him at all because, as the sailor Tabardin [xxiv] wrote in his memoirs, “… we departed and straightaway we were sailing on the waves. We went to Bourbon [i.e. Reunion] to take on volunteers; and, continuing our journey, the first land we saw was Delagoa Bay, then on to St. Augustine’s Bay [in Madagascar]. After that we proceeded on our way towards Mozambique to get our cruise properly underway.” Hodoul thus escaped this unfortunate adventure.

Personally, this leaves me with little doubt that it was indeed the famous corsair ship Apollon that Le Butin served on: but under which captain – Hodoul or La Vaillant? I’m reasonably sure that it will turn out to be Le Vaillant, which is probably why Le Butin’s corsair career came to an end there: but perhaps a definite answer will be found in the crew list on Réunion, or in the prize papers at The National Archives.

Next step is to find enough time & money to get down there to see for myself (Réunion would be nice, sure, but I’ll probably have to settle for the bus fare to Kew & back, oh well!)… 🙂

To summarize Part 1, an ex-pirate known as ‘Le Butin’ left a will, two letters, and an enciphered note describing where he had buried treasure on Île de France (the former French name for Mauritius). But even though this is widely referred to as the “La Buse Cryptogram”, I can’t see any obvious reason to connect the pirate Olivier Levasseur (‘La Buse’) with it. Anyway, our story continues…

The documents were retrieved from the Archives Nationales de la Réunion in 1923 for a lady from the Seychelles called Rose Savy(who was descended from Le Butin’s family): she to flew to Paris with it to try to solve its mysteries. In 1934, the eminent French librarian Charles de La Roncière at the Bibliothèque National de France wrote a book about the affair called “Le Flibustier mystérieux, histoire d’un trésor caché“.

LeFlibustierMysterieux

Spurred on by the promise of gold-gold-gold, numerous treasure hunters have poured decades of their lives into this whole, ummm, ‘hopeful enterprise’. Savy herself believed that the answer was somehow connected with some strange carvings that she found on her property, depicting “chiens, serpents, tortues, chevaux“, as well as “une urne, des coeurs, une figure de jeune femme, une tête d’homme et un oeil monstrueusement ouvert“. [Do I need to translate those for you? I don’t think so!]

Reginald Cruise-Wilkins (1913-1977) “had done code-breaking work with the British forces and he found references to Andromeda in Levasseur’s enigma”, says John Cruise-Wilkins, who even today continues searching for the treasure that so obsessed his father from 1949 onwards. Just so you know, John C-W himself “believes [Levasseur] buried the bounty according to a complex riddle inspired by the 12 labors of Hercules”, ten of which he believes he has solved.

Well… another famous Levasseur story goes that as he was crossing a bridge over what was known as “la ravine à Malheur”, he said “Avec ce que j’ai caché ici, je pourrais acheter l’île” – ‘with what I’ve hidden here, I could buy the whole island‘. So perhaps it’s no wonder that people desperately want to believe that there’s pirate gold in (or perhaps under) them thar island hills. [Though as I say, I’m fairly unconvinced that this cryptogram has anything to do with La Buse. But perhaps that’s just me.]

Another famous La Buse treasure hunter was called Bibique (real name Joseph Tipveau, he wrote a book called “Sur la piste des Frères de la Côte”), but who shot himself in 31st March 1995, I’m sorry to say.

But with my crypto hat back firmly on, I have to say that the cipher system ascertained by de La Roncière could barely be more straightforward: a pigpen cipher, with letters of the alphabet arranged in a very simple manner, and with some of the shapes also used to represent digits (AEIOU=12345, LMNR=6789). Arranged in traditional pigpen style, the key looks like this…

Alphabet_de_la_buse-white

…while the cryptogram itself looks like this (click on it to see a larger image)…

la-buse-le-butin-cryptogram-small

And yet despite all that clarity, the cipher mystery remains, because if you use the above key to decipher the above ciphertext, what you get is an extremely confusing cleartext, to the point that perhaps “clearasmudtext” would frankly be a better word for it. Here’s one version from the Internet with spaces added in for marginal extra clarity:-

aprè jmez une paire de pijon tiresket
2 doeurs sqeseaj tête cheral funekort
filttinshientecu prenez une cullière
de mielle ef ovtre fous en faites une ongat
mettez sur ke patai de la pertotitousn
vpulezolvs prenez 2 let cassé sur le che
min il faut qoe ut toit a noitie couue
povr en pecger une femme dhrengt vous n ave
eua vous serer la dobaucfea et pour ve
ngraai et por epingle oueiuileturlor
eiljn our la ire piter un chien tupqun
lenen de la mer de bien tecjeet sur ru
nvovl en quilnise iudf kuue femm rq
i veut se faire dun hmetsedete s/u dre
dans duui ooun dormir un homm r
esscfvmm / pl faut n rendre udlq
u un diffur qecieefurtetlesl

The best single page presentation of it I’ve found comes from this French site that tries to colour-code the letters. Certainly, there are indeed errors in the text: but I don’t personally think that throwing your hands up and guessing at the correct plaintext values (which is what most treasure hunters seem to do) is methodologically sound.

Far less cryptographically naive would be to try to classify many of the errors as probable pigpen enciphering errors (where, for example, the difference between A and B is simply a dot). The fact that the ‘Z’ shape apparently occurs both with and without a dot implies (to me, at least) that a number of dots may well have slipped in (or out) during the writing. Moreover, there is no suggestion as to which of the ciphertext letters might be enciphering numbers (the two instances of “2” given are actual ‘2’ digits, not carefully interpreted ‘e’ ciphers), and aren’t pirates always pacing out distances from curious rocks etc?

For example, “doeurs” is a mere dot away from “coeurs”; while mysterious non-words such as “filttinshientecu” might actually start “fils…” rather than “filt…”. Might it be that (Voynich researchers will perhaps groan at this point, but…) some of these were emended by a later owner?

Or might it be that the image we’re looking at is actually a tidy copy of an earlier, far scrappier cryptogram, and what we’re most plagued by here is copying errors? I would say that the presence of some composite letters in the text is a reasonably strong indication that this is a copy of a cryptogram, rather than the original cryptogram itself.

Hence I suspect that properly decrypting this will be an exercise rich in cryptology, French patois, and codicological logic. Good luck, and let me know how you get on! 🙂

But after all this time, is there any Le Butin booty left? I read an online claim that several of Le Butin’s treasures have already been found:-
* one allegedly found in 1916 on Pemba Island (part of the Zanzibar Archipelago), allegedly marked with his initial “BN” (Bernardin Nageon)
* one allegedly in Belmont on Mauritius in a cave near the river La Chaux
* one possibly found on Rodrigues (is this the one mentioned in the letter?)
* one allegedly found at a cemetery on Mauritius in 2004, though I found no mention of it in the archives of the weekly Mauritian Sunday newspaper 5-Plus Dimanche.

However, I haven’t yet found any independent verification of any of these claims, so each story might separately be true, false, embellished, misheard or merely mangled in the telling. Please leave a comment below if you happen to stumble upon actual evidence for any of these!