My best wishes to all Cipher Mysteries subscribers, commenters and visitors for a wonderful and genuinely revealing 2015. 🙂
I had intended to use this post as an opportunity to go through some of the funky historical cipher-related things I’ve been planning for the year ahead, but I’ve had a last minute change of heart. Instead, all I’m going to say for now is that my plan is for this year to be full of splendid surprises, and I hope that you enjoy them all! Cheers!
If you look at the reverse side of the Voynich Manuscript’s famous nine-rosette foldout sheet, you’ll find two curious (and as yet wholly unexplained) circular diagrams sitting beside one another:
Let’s look a little closer (f85r2 is on the left and f86v4 is on the right):
The characters look like this (N, E, S, W):-
For f85r2 (the ‘sun’ circle on the left), the interlinear description notes that:
The sex of the figures is indeterminate, as neither breasts nor beards are visible. The South figure is leaning on a staff, and looks like an old man or woman; the other three could be women or young men, possibly children.
The figures are partially hidden behind by the inner frame: the South figure is hidden from the knees down by the inner frame, and the other three are hidden from the waist down. All four figures wear a colored, buttonless shirt, with long and narrow sleeves, which in the South figure is seen to be a tunic or dress, ending just above the knee. Ring collars are visible in the North and West figures. All three figures have light hair, bushy over the ears and cropped just below them. The East figure wears a dark skullcap.
The right hands of West, North, and East are hidden by the inner frame. With the left hand, North seems to be pointing to the last word of the text above (which sits on a line by itself); East holds an unidentified dark object, consisting of two stacked bulbs of unequal size, topped by a short spike (it could be a root); and West seems to be holding a flower, shaped like a lily but dark colored. South holds a staff with the left hand, and a chain with three huge rings on his right.
Comments:
It has been conjectured that the four figures represent the Four Ages of Man. If the diagram is to be read clockwise, like the text, then West (who lies over the “start marker”, by the way) would be Infancy. However, East (with the skullcap) looks younger than the other three.
D’Imperio suggested that this diagram might tie in with Galenic medicine: while a Voynich mailing list contributor by the name of Eric suggested back in 2004 that the four characters on f85r2 were all male. (Here’s his page preserved on the Wayback Machine).
[North] Gazing towards his left hand, on which (or in?) is a small square object with a blue dot in the center – most probably a ring. The right hand bends out of view. Hands positioning ambiguous. Wears a small headband or crown – small dots inside could be jewels. Wearing a blue shirt with neck and wrist bands. Hair cut above the ears. Most probably male.
[East] Holding a round object in the right hand topped with a cylinder and a spike and two circles to either side – possibly an oil lamp (the spike being a flame). Left hand bends out of view. Hands positioning ambiguous. Has a band of blue across the forehead, though it isn’t a cap since his hair flows freely out the top. Wearing a blue shirt with neck and wrist bands. Hair cut around the ears. Most probably male.
[South] Holding and leaning on a cane in the right hand. Left hand holds a large circled chain of three loops. Hands seem front-to-back. High forehead, very short hair (above ears). Wearing a green full-length dress with blue sleeves and trim, with wrist bands and a plunged neckline. Mouth is painted blue. Could be a man or woman.
[West] Holding a lily shaped object in the right hand. Left hand bends out of view. Hands positioning seems correct. Wearing a blue shirt with neck and wrist bands. Hair cut below the ears. Most probably male.
Back in 2004, I conjectured that these four characters might instead represent four powerful European nations:
N = Holy Roman Emperor (ring)
E = Venice (glassware)
S = Rome/Sicily (a blind guess on my part, but feel free to play cherchez-le-pain) 🙂
W = France (fleur-de-lys)
More recently, Marco Ponzi suggested that these four characters might represent the four seasons with Winter (East) holding a metallic hand-warmer, an idea which then got elaborated into a page on Stevie Bax’s site. Needless to say, I’m not convinced by this, not even slightly.
But if you want a properly interesting medieval parallel, I’d perhaps suggest the Wheel of Fortune, the Rota Fortunae: “Fortune, good night, smile once more; turn thy wheel!”, indeed. Schwikipedia describes it thus:
“Characteristically, it has four shelves, or stages of life, with four human figures, usually labeled on the left regnabo (I shall reign), on the top regno (I reign) and is usually crowned, descending on the right regnavi (I have reigned) and the lowly figure on the bottom is marked sum sine regno (I am without a kingdom). Dante employed the Wheel in the Inferno and a “Wheel of Fortune” trump-card appeared in the Tarot deck (circa 1440, Italy).”
Needless to say, I don’t buy into this either: in fact, all these theories seem to be bouncing off the surface, and not really getting any kind of grip on this diagram.
At first sight, this seems quite different to the first diagram, apart from a load of odd filigree-style detailing… but closer examination reveals some features hidden in plain sight:-
The characters look like this (N, E, S, W):-
Eric concludes that these four moon-side characters are probably all female, and describes them thus:-
[North] Holding a round object in right hand (this might be false and should be an open hand, with the object actually the arching design – though by looking at the detail of the area, it seems most likely it is an object; however, it is not painted in the light yellow color the other objects are) and what looks like a small twiggy plant in a soil pouch in the left. Faces away from the viewer. Seems to have a hair band or possibly a blindfold. Hands positioning ambiguous. Wearing a flowing shirt with neck and wrist bands. Hair falls just below the ears. Could be a man or a woman.
[East] Holding a round object in the left hand and a seemingly flat, square object in the right (this might also be false – the square object is rounded in a fashion and could be the arching design; the object is colored yellow like the other objects though, so I have included it as an object). Hands seem back-to-front. Wearing a flowing shirt with neck and wrist bands. Hair falls just below the ears. Could be a man or a woman.
[South] Holding a round object in the left hand and a bowl in the right. Hands seem back-to-front. Wearing a flowing shirt with neck and wrist bands. Hair falls just below the ears. Breast outline visible.
[West] Holding twigs (straw, wheat?) in the left hand and an dumbell shaped object with a round addition on top (a vase possibly?) in the right. Hands seem back-to-front. Wearing a flowing shirt with neck and wrist bands. Hair falls just below the ears. Both breast outlines are visible.
As to what these all are, there are surprisingly few theories: Erni Lillie once wrote that this depicted Dante’s Mystic White Rose (full theory here).
For myself: having read a lot about magic circles over the years, I have a strong suspicion that the West figure is holding hyssop, mentioned in the Bible as a herb used for ceremonial cleansing. And the way that we are looking at the back of the North character’s head reminds me of a paricular medieval necromantic demon whose name eludes me but whose face was supposed never to be depicted. (I mentioned directional spirits here and here in relation to f57v before).
But beyond that, people have largely drawn a blank here too.
If we compare the two sets of four figures with the four figures on f57v’s circular diagram, some further unexpected similarities emerge:
It seems to me that the four characters on f86v4 (middle row) are in some way related to the four characters on f57v (bottom row). What that actually means I really don’t know… but it’s an interesting point, eh?
If you strip away the decorative ‘papellony’-style fish-scale detailing from f86v4, you end up with two circular diagrams side by side, one with a sun at the centre, the other with a moon at the centre. I honestly find it hard to believe that something so distinctive arrived here ex nihilo: this pair must surely have come from a prior document somewhere.
If that original pair of diagrams still exists and we can find it, then we stand a chance of reverse-engineering the text beside the Voynich Manuscript’s versions of these diagrams. This is a block we should be actively looking for!
People have long proposed that the Voynich Manuscript’s Quire 20 (‘Q20’) might be a collection of recipes of some sort. This also suggests that there may well have been an original plaintext block of recipes from which Q20 was derived (though whether as a cipher, shorthand, or curious language it matters not at this stage): but do we stand any chance of identifying the original document?
Actually, we do know quite a lot about Q20: and having thought about these many observations for several years, the inferences I remain most convinced by are:-
(1) that the tails on the paragraph stars are probably hiding ‘y’, short for ‘ytem’ or ‘ybidem’;
(2) that the tail-less paragraph stars on f103r were added in after the event – that is, that f103r was originally written unstarred, but that untailed stars were later added in so that this page blended in better with the others (but I don’t know why, or what this means);
(3) that Q20 was originally formed of two distinct gatherings, with f105r the first page of the first gathering (‘Q20a’) and f116v the last page of the last gathering (‘Q20b’), and as a result we cannot really trust the layout of the bifolios as they have been handed down to us;
(4) that the last paragraph of f116r probably contains some kind of attribution or conclusion – e.g. this book was copied by me on the 4th January 1453 in the town of Milan, from the manuscript lent to me by the painter Giovanni from Verona etc etc 🙂 ;
(5) that even though we currently have between 345 and 347 starred paragraphs and four missing pages (i.e. two missing folios, or rather one missing bifolio), I think – because I’m far from convinced that all the paragraph stars are definitely genuine ‘item’ markers – we have to be very wary about trusting that the number of starred paragraphs we see is an accurate representation of the number of itemized paragraphs in the original.
All the same, my overall suspicion is that if we were to look for candidates for the original source of this recipe block, we should perhaps look for a source compiled prior to 1450 containing between 300 and 400 itemised recipes. As usual, I’d prioritize European sources over others, and I’d prioritize candidates whose writer obviously believed them to be secret; but everyone sees this differently, so make of those particular preferences what you will.
All in all, I currently only have a single serious candidate for that original block, one that I stumbled upon only recently: and because it’s Christmas time, I thought I’d throw it out to you lovely people, see what you think. 🙂
It’s MS. 6741 of the National Library of Paris, containing a sizeable (359 numbered items of varying size, plus various rhymes) set of recipes compiled from various sources by Jean le Bègue / Jehan le Bègue [1368-1457], as admirably transcribed by Mary Philadelphia Merrifield (and translated by her two sons) in 1849 in her book Original Treatises, Dating from the XIIth to the XVIIIth Centuries, on the Arts of Painting.
If you’re interested, there’s some modern discussion on Merrifield’s work here: but both her and Jean le Bègue aren’t really discussed anywhere much these days, which I think is a shame because there’s lots of lovely stuff in there.
PS: this post may be the first time someone has proposed a possible link between MS 6741 and the Voynich Manuscript’s Q20, but please correct me if I’m wrong. 🙂
The book begins (p.47):
EXPERIMENTA DE COLORIBUS.
1. Nota quod auree littere scribuntur sic, cum ista aqua ; accipe sulphur vivum, et corticem interiorem mali granati, aluminis, saltis, et de pluvia auri, tantum quantum vis, et aquam gummi liquide, et modicum de croco, et misce, et scribe.
The book finishes (p.320):
DEO GRATIAS
Compositus est liber iste a magistro Johanne le Begue, Licentatio in Legibus, Greffario Generalium Magistrorum Monetae Regis Parisiis, anno Domini 1431, aetatis vero suae 63.
THANK GOD
This Book is composed by Master Jehan Le Begue, a Licentiate in the Law, Notary-General of the Masters of the King’s Mint, at Paris, Anno Domini 1431, when he was 63 years of age.
This page is just a round-up of all the Risdon-in-1948-related research bits that ought to go onto the blog, but that don’t (yet) merit a page of their own. Maybe the Next Big Thing will be in here, who can tell?
Wharf workers who worked at Risdon were employed full-time by the Electrolytic Zinc Company, though were paid different hourly rates if they were working on the wharves or not: a policy which brought it, in July 1948, into conflict with the Waterside Workers Federation, which instead wanted to allow casual waterside workers to be used on the Risdon wharves, and were threatening to get the Seamen’s Union to blacklist throughout the Commonwealth any ships that loaded or unloaded there. (The EZ Co had managed to get Risdon exempted from counting as a part of Hobart port for 28 years.)
This war of words continued for a long time, with the Waterside Workers Federation’s Mr. E. Roach also alleging that “dangerous practices in loading and unloading are carried on at the Electrolytic Zinc Co.’s Risdon wharf and that the company has threatened with dismissal any man who protests“, allegations that the company loudly insisted were “entirely untrue“. (I haven’t found any specific details about Roach’s claims anywhere, but perhaps a different researcher will have more luck than me in this regard.)
The Stevedoring Industry Commission under Judge Kirby had ruled in favour of EZ Co: and the matter eventually went quiet, with claims that the matter was being put to one side pending a state election also being declared false.
Byron Deveson turned up this article from the Advocate (Burnie) 30th June 1948 page 1
ZEEHAN SMELTERS TO CLOSE DOWN NEXT WEEK
Roasting at the Electrolytic Zinc Co’s smelters at Zeehan will be discontinued in a week’s time. The last rail load of concentrates will leave Rosebery tomorrow for the Zeehan plant, and it is expected that roasting of this ore, together with supplies on hand, will take about a week. The entire output of concentrates from Rosebery will in future be despatched to Risdon, where completion of extensions to the roasting and acid plants demand great quantities of concentrates. About 50 per cent of the production-500 tons weekly-has in the past been railed to Zeehan for reduction to calcines which have then gone to Risdon for the production of zinc. The recovery of sulphur, which is lost in the atmosphere at Zeehan, is a feature of the Risdon plant. The acid produced from the sulphur is used mainly in the manufacture of super-phosphate. The Zeehan roasting plant has been in operation for the past 12 years and employs approximately 30 men. For the time being they will be engaged in cleaning up calcine dumps and in the dismantling and removal of portion of the plant. On the completion of this work they can be readily absorbed at Rosebery.
Byron concludes that from the start of July 1948 until December 1948, 500 tons a week of zinc concentrate containing lead would have been sent to Risdon: which would have placed a lot of pressure on Risdon staff to get the flash roaster and acid plant commissioned as quickly as possible.
I also turned up an article from the 21st September 1948 Mercury reporting the Electrolytic Zinc Company’s Community Council AGM, where the general superintendent W. C. Snow said that “the new flash roaster and new acid plant were almost ready to go into operation. Much work had been done overseas in preparation for the ammonium sulphate plant, and he hoped that work would start at Risdon within a few months.” This should help to narrow down the range of dates when these expensive new facilities actually started being used at Risdon.
Trove has numerous copies of articles about migrants arriving in Tasmania during 1948: many of these were on assisted passage schemes from the UK and Commonwealth that were designed to give Australia’s economy an injection of vitality in the difficult post-war years, and who typically arrived on big ships such as the SS Ormonde. There were also many other ships, such as those that arrived with ex-service personnel (e.g. the SS Strathavan).
One group of migrants, however, sticks out: 40 unmarried men and 9 unmarried women who came across from Australia on the RMS Taroona, arriving on the 15th October 1948. The 16th October 1948 Mercury described them as “Displaced Persons” and noted that “[e]ighteen men would work at timber mills on the North-East Coast, 22 men at the Electrolytic Zinc Co. at Risdon, and the nine women at hospitals in Hobart.”
The 16th October 1948 Launceston Examiner ran a very much fuller story:
TIMBER mill-hands-to-be, these Europeans who arrived at Launceston on the Taroona yesterday worked at a variety of occupations before the war.
One was a judge’s associate in Latvia. Odds are that if you try to pick him, you’ll be wrong. He’s on the extreme right. Others in the group are, from left: A tailor, engine driver. carpenter, locksmith, cook and fitter and turner. Most of the 18 who arrived at Launceston to work in northern timber mills spent about four years in Germany as prisoners. The ex-judge’s associate worked in Germany as a fireman. His wife and nine year-old son are in a transit camp awaiting a ship for Australia. Those for the north were a mixed group, including one Latvian, two Czechs, three Estonians, and 12 Ukranians. Twenty-two more men and nine single women for hospital domestic work went to Hobart by train.
Of course, I strongly doubt that the Somerton Man will turn out to be one of these timber mill hands: but might he be one of the 22 other displaced persons who started work at the Electrolytic Zinc Company at Risdon in mid to late October 1948? It’s entirely possible, and I personally wouldn’t like to be betting against that possibility just yet.
Nicely, it turned out that Cipher Mysteries commenter Helen Ensikat has been looking at this same group completely in parallel: and she found out that the Electrolytic Zinc Company held reasonably detailed files on its migrant workers. If you want to see these for yourself, they are AA59/1/256 (held in Hobart): who knows what these will tell us?
All of which leads me swiftly on to the larger issue of displaced persons. If you search the NAA’s catalogue, you’ll find a huge amount of stuff on the policies, pamphlets and propaganda targeted at displaced persons. For example, the nurses who ended up in Tasmania seem to be covered by the file “A434, 1950/3/3363” (16 Sep 1948 to 1950): while other documents describe the history (e.g. the Skaugum motor vessel, the Protea, and the Orontes, all bringing around 4000 to 5000 migrants per month in mid 1949) and even things like the construction and running of hostels – after all, these migrants had to live somewhere.
There were many ships that seem primarily to have brought displaced persons to Australia: for example, the Protea arrived at Melbourne on 30th September 1948, so our 22 could well have been on that ship (NAA ref: “PROTEA 21/8/1948”, held at Adelaide). Similarly the Wooster Victory (whose splendidly Wodehousean name will doubtless make Diane O’Donovan nearly choke with laughter) arrived at Sydney from Genoa on 6th September 1948 (NAA ref: “WOOSTER VICTORY 6/8/1948”, also held at Adelaide; while its nominal rolls are online here, filled to the funnels with Eastern Europeans). There was also the General Sturgess (mentioned in a file on Communist displaced persons in Australia), and the Kanimbla (arrived 11th October 1948), and doubtless numerous others.
The point of all this is that these two groups of displaced persons and migrants are towering haystacks for our Somerton Man needle to be lost in. So: not really a great place for us to try starting any search from, without some significant secondary hypothesis to work with. 🙁
I’ve been exchanging more emails about Risdon with the ever-insightful Byron Deveson. At my suggestion, he bought a copy of a 10-page pamphlet entitled “A Brief Guide to the Risdon Plant of the Electrolytic Zinc Company of Australasia Ltd, March 1949” online from an Australian bookseller: this includes maps and layouts of the buildings around the zinc works at Risdon, and also descriptions of the history and the various industrial processes involved.
One particular paragraph on page 3 leapt out at me, because it contained an unexpected fact that may change how we look at the Somerton Man case:-
“The flash-roasting furnace in which the charge is roasted when suspended in air as a dust has been in operation at Risdon for only four months.”
The pamphlet was written in March 1949: so four months before (i.e. around November 1948), an entirely new flash-roasting furnace that took powder as its input was coming online at the plant. At the Electrolytic Zinc Company’s AGM at the end of November 1948, the chairman had noted that: “The cost of the flash roaster and the new acid plant at the Risdon works had so far been about £560,000. That would give some idea of the magnitude of these additions to the Risdon plant.”
Byron Deveson’s opinion (and I do hope he won’t mind being quoted on this): “The fluidised bed calciner could pump out lots of fumes while it was being commissioned. The air coming out of the roaster has to be scrubbed very thoroughly, and there would be lots of it and malfunctions during the commissioning phase are quite likely.”
Moreover, according to page 7 of the March 1949 pamphlet:
“A contact sulphuric acid plant began operating at Risdon in December 1948 …”
This leads Byron to the further conclusion that “it is quite likely that the roaster gases that were discharged from the cyclones were probably vented into the atmosphere for several months before the acid plant was completed. And the lead dust particles would have not been noticeable but the lead concentration could have been quite high.”
The Somerton Man is now looking to me likely to have been the victim of industrial lead poisoning incident at Risdon in the period after the flash roaster was initially put into commission (October / November 1948) but before the acid plant started operation (December 1948). If this is correct, the most productive place to be looking for answers should be in the Eletrolytic Zinc Company’s staff records archives (which still exists and is held in Hobart).
Essentially, if the Somerton Man had been working there in November 1948, he certainly wasn’t being paid during December 1948: that should be sufficient to narrow the search down to two or three people. Pretty good odds! 🙂
How are we ever going to resolve the mystery of the Voynich Manuscript?
Even sixty years ago, it was abundantly clear to William Friedman (widely believed to be the greatest ever codebreaker) that the Voynich’s cipher/language was of a different type to anything that had previously been encountered, and that normal cryptanalytical tools would be of little use in revealing its secrets. If Voynichese was ‘gettable’, Friedman and then Brigadier John Tiltman (who I personally place right up there with Friedman) would surely have got it, or would have begun to get it: but neither did. Yet high quality scans, several decades of study and the Internet’s million eyeballs have not yet yielded insights significantly beyond what Friedman and Tiltman managed.
And so we fast forward to 2014, where researchers continue to adopt one of two basic paradigms: (a) that Voynichese uses an unknown cipher, and so we must grind through an endless series of statistical tests that must surely eventually isolate an answer, and (b) that Voynichese is written in an unknown language, and so we must extract a set of individual word cribs to identify the language’s family etc.
After a lot of consideration, my opinion is that the Voynich Manuscript laughs in the face of both approaches: and that if you’re using either (or indeed both) of them, you’re almost certainly wasting your time. Moreover, by spamming people with the results of your research, you’re wasting their time too.
Please understand that I’m not saying that these two paradigms are worthless in all circumstances: rather, I’m saying as flatly and directly as I can that though they do have great value in other contexts, they are essentially worthless when applied to the Voynich Manuscript. They have not worked, do not work and never will work for it: hopefully that’s a clear enough position statement.
So… if they don’t work, what’s the alternative? Ay, there’s the rub.
With all the above in mind, it became apparent to me a while back that what was actually missing was an entire paradigm, by which I mean a complete and systematic way of thinking about what we are trying to do with Voynich research, with what tools, and for what purpose. Hence I’ve spent most of this year trying to work out what that new paradigm should be, and to find a good way of communicating it.
(This has basically been why Cipher Mysteries has been so quiet as far as the Voynich Manuscript goes.)
My working title for this new way of thinking about the Voynich Manuscript is the “Block Paradigm”, because as its target it seeks to identify not a letter, a word or even a language, but a block of text. That is, the idea is to use three stages:
(1) identify blocks of the plaintext that stand some chance of appearing in other manuscripts;
(2) find possible matches for them in other manuscripts; and then finally
(3) attempt to reverse-engineer the way that the two blocks map to each other.
As such, the Block Paradigm is entirely neutral about whether Voynichese is a cipher, a shorthand or an unusual language (or any combination of the three): the purpose of the first two stages is to get us to the point that researchers can attempt to do the reverse-engineering third stage for a given block with reasonable confidence that they may have something that could well be the plaintext.
Over the next few weeks, I plan to introduce and discuss a number of candidate blocks from the Voynich Manuscript. Right now, I only have a possible matching plaintext block for one of them (and that’s a particularly complicated block that I’ve been working with for some years), so this is only really the start of what I hope will be a broadly collaborative and productive process.
I’ll start with a candidate block that has already been discussed by Voynich researchers, though not nearly as fully as I think it deserves.
On 26 Apr 1996, Gabriel Landini posted to the Voynich mailing list:-
Folio 76R has a full body of text, that is, the page is almost completely filled with text. I can guess 4 paragraphs. However if we go to folio 81R, then the text looks like if it was written as a poem. Some lines longer than others and there is no drawing that is restricting the line lengths. I wonder if the pages like 81r are songs, hymns or prayers…
Rene Zandbergen replied (on 29 Apr 1996):
If I remember well […] f81r is unique is this respect. To me, it gives the impression as if a drawing was intended for the right margin, but it has been omitted. This is at variance with the generally accepted theory that all drawings were done first and the text filled in later. Another special feature of this page is that there seems to be a connection of the drawing in the left margin, through the binding gutter, to the opposite ‘page’ (which would be f78v if my above assumption for 81r is correct). […]
The ‘poem’ idea fits well with Currier’s observation that the line seems to be a functional entity. This again is strange in view of the fact that in many cases the text is clearly organised in paragraphs, i.e. several full lines followed by one short line and sometimes a somewhat larger gap between this and the next line. The length of each last paragraph line seems to be anything from one word to a full line. Note that when it is one word, it is sometimes centered on the line.
With the benefit of better scans and 18 further years of study, let’s look again at this possible ‘poem’ on f81r and annotate what we see:-
I’ve marked the two horizontal Neal keys (at the top of the two main sections of text) in red, some extraneous-looking text appended to the final line (possibly a date, or a signature?) in green, two almost identical gallows-initial words in blue, and various unusual features of the text in purple.
The text itself seems to have a line structure of 7 / 8 / 8 / 8 lines (as per the ornate line-initial gallows-initial words): so if this is a poem, my prediction is that the poem was originally 8 / 8 / 8 / 8 lines but that an entire line got omitted by mistake during the copying. (Copying ciphers by hand is surprisingly hard to get right).
As for the likely subject matter of the poem, that too isn’t too hard to predict: given that it is sandwiched between two drawings of naked nymphs in baths, it would surely shock nobody if the poem turned out to be about water or baths.
I would also expect the poem to be in Latin or Italian (OK, Tuscan), because those were (as I recall) the languages typically used for balneological poems pre-1450.
So what might the poem actually be? You might think it could be a section grabbed from Peter of Eboli’s famous early medieval Latin poem “De Balneis Puteolanis”: but that, according to C. M. Kauffmann’s “The Baths of Pozzuoli” (p.14) consists of thirty-seven sections (an introduction, thirty-five sections each covering a different bath, and a dedicatory section at the end), each section having precisely twelve hexameters. Hence I suspect we can eliminate De Balneis Puteolanis as a candidate simply because it has a different verse length – we’re looking for eight or sixteen line sections, but it is based around twelve-line sections.
All of which is where my preliminary account of this poem block comes to a halt: I simply don’t know the balneological literature well enough to take this any further forward. Were there any pre-1450 balneological poems written with eight or sixteen lines per section? I believe that this question should probably be the starting point for researching this particular block; but what do you think?
Byron Deveson and I have independently been reading up on the Electrolytic Zinc Company: newspaper summaries of its annual accounts for 1947-1948 (here also) show that it employed 1709 staff at Risdon plus a further 432 at its Rosebery mining operation. It was in the process of expanding its wharf at Risdon, but was generally hampered by staff shortages.
Here’s an Electrolytic Zinc job advert from 06 November 1948:
AN OPPORTUNITY FOR STEADY EMPLOYMENT IS OFFERED BY ELECTROLYTIC ZINC COMPANY OF AUSTRALASIA LIMITED, RISDON.
LEADBURNERS: Present rate of pay, £10/13/ per week.
FITTERS AND TURNERS. Present rate of pay, £9/5/ per week.
GENERAL LABOURERS: Present rate of pay, £6/16/ per week. Day work.
PLANT OPERATIVES-SHIFT WORKERS: Present average weekly earnings of shift workers working 40 hours per week on 7-day rotation range from £8/10/6 per week to £9/7/6 per week, according to class of work.
TRAIN SERVICE TO WORKS FOR ALL SHIFTS. Fare, 6d. per week.
40 HOURS PER WEEK: Day Work, 7.45 a.m. to 4.20 p.m., Mondays to Fridays. Shift Work: Day Shift, 7.45 a.m. to 3.45 p.m. Afternoon Shift, 3.45 p.m. to 11.45 p.m. Night Shift, 11.45 p.m. to 7.45 a.m.
PAID ANNUAL HOLIDAYS: 10 days, plus 10 statutory holidays per annum.
AMENITIES: Insurance Scheme, covering sickness and death. Health, medical and dental services. Cribtime store sells tobacco, confectionery, clothing, footwear, etc. Apply to Registrar personally, or by telephone W1111, or by letter to the Company, Box 634B, G.P.O., Hobart.
As Byron Deveson noted in a comment a few days ago, the Incharran and Era steamships traversed well-worn grooves, keeping the Electrolytic Zinc Company’s Risdon works supplied with zinc concentrates (both from Broken Hill via Newcastle in NSW, and from the company’s Rosebery mines on the other side of Tasmania), and then passing the lead-rich residues of its zinc extraction process onward to the huge lead smelting works in Port Pirie. At Port Pirie, the ships would then get loaded with calcines and drums of acid before returning to Tasmania. (Note that Risdon is treated as an output of Hobart.) And so it went on.
?? Oct 1948 – Newcastle (NSW)
— load roasted zinc ore concentrates (mined in Broken Hill?)
?? Oct 1948 – arrived Hobart
01 Nov 1948 – departed Hobart
02 Nov 1948 – arrived Burnie
— load zinc concentrates (mined in Rosebery?)
04 Nov 1948 – departed Burnie
05 Nov 1948 – arrived Hobart / Risdon
— unload zinc concentrates
— load zinc residues
10 Nov 1948 – departed Hobart / Risdon
14 Nov 1948 – arrived Port Pirie
— unload 1000 tons of zinc residues and 58 empty drums
— load 4100 tons of calcines and 58 drums of acid, plus five tons of general cargo
?? Nov 1948 – departed Port Pirie
?? Nov 1948 – arrived Hobart / Risdon
— unload calcines etc
— load 1,000 tons of zinc residues
24 Nov 1948 – departed Hobart / Risdon
29 Nov 1948 – arrived Port Pirie
02 Dec 1948 – departed Port Pirie (for Port Adelaide) “in ballast”
03 Dec 1948 – arrived Port Adelaide
09 Dec 1948 – departed Port Adelaide (for Risdon)
Note that on 17 Nov 1948, the Incharran, Moonta and Cheltenham vessels were (along with various buildings in Port Pirie) bedecked with flags to register people’s delight at the birth of a son to Princess Elizabeth and her husband the Duke of Edinburgh.
And finally: I’ve just started putting together a list of Somerton Man “known unknowns”. Which is just a clunky way of saying ‘a page full of things I know (pretty much) exist, which I haven’t yet seen, but which I’d like to’. Please feel free to suggest other things that should be on there, or ways to see any of those things (and so remove them from the list)!
Huge thanks go out to Cipher Mysteries reader Poul Gjol for responding so quickly to my request for the 3-volume Log Of Logs by posting up a link to where scans of all three Log(s) Of Logs can be downloaded.
Unfortunately, this quickly reveals that the Incharran’s logs are nowhere to be seen there: but as normal, this merely means that once again I’m starting six feet to one side of where I actually need to be. Instead, the right place to begin is by putting together a brief history of the Incharran, as culled from everybody’s favourite instant online Antipodean historical resource… Trove.
(Photo: Alex Wood)
The Adelaide Advertiser (OK, the Tizer) ran a short piece on the Incharran and its sister ship the Inchmark not long after the two arrived in Australia in mid-November 1947:-
One of six identical ships specially built in the closing stages of the war to handle heavy lifts, the British steamer Incharran is now on her first visit to Port Adelaide with timber from Cairns. She has 659 tons of timber and 113 tons of plywood. As originally rigged, the Incharran had an 80-ton “jumbo” derrick on the mainmast and a derrick capable at taking a 50-ton lift on the foremast. These, together with the heavy-duty winches, have been removed, but the outsize tubular steel masts and heavy wire stays are still fitted. Launched as the Empire Labrador in 1944. the Incharran is an oil-burning steamer of 3,539 tons owned by Williamson & Co. of Hongkong. Like the Inchmark, owned by the same firm, which is now at No 11 berth, the Incharran carries a Chinese crew. Both ships are under charter to the Australian Shipping Board.
So the Empire Labrador was an Empire Malta class ship, and it was built in West Hartlepool by the British Government to a design that broadly copied high-capacity Scandinavian cargo ships of the day.
It’s official number was 180077, its IMO number was 5151830, and it was launched on 19th August 1944, just in case you ever feel like celebrating its birthday. There’s also a list here of the convoys it was in from then until the end of WW2.
Technically speaking, it was the Inch Steamship Company (a subsidiary of Williamson & Co Ltd in Hong Kong) that bought the Empire Labrador, and renamed it in its house style to “Incharran”. Before long it was taken out to Cairns in Australia in November 1947, where it had a fairly inauspicious start to life Down Under: it was discovered to be carrying 14,250 contraband cigarettes “of English and American brands” being smuggled from Hong Kong.
Before long, it seems to have been quickly re-chartered by Howard Smith Ltd (perhaps from the Australian Shipping Board?), which almost immediately put it to work batting back and forth between Risdon and Port Pirie, much as we have seen. In late 1949, it may well be that the lead-related work for it at Risdon / Port Pirie petered out, because it started to ship coal instead.
Its last day in Australia was 12th January 1950, when it left Sydney for Hong Kong. From then onwards, the Incharran found itself hard at work along the Chinese coast, where it often found itself under attack from Chinese Nationalists, particularly near the Straits of Formosa (modern day Taiwan). It also ran aground in 1952 about 400 miles north of Hong Kong, and had to be salvaged from that difficult situation by ships including the British destroyer HMS Cossack.
1955 – sold to Indo-China Steam Navigation Co Ltd, renamed “Ho Sang”
1968 – sold to Golden River Shipping Corporation, renamed “Golden Sun”
1970 – scrapped.
The ship’s Master from 1947 continuously to at least 1953 was Captain George LeFevre.
I haven’t found out much about him: but I did find an 18th October 1932 article from the Adelaide Chronicle about a ‘Captain G. Lefevre’ who was in charge of “the Chinese-owned steamer Helikon flying the British flag” when it was taken over by Chinese pirates: very likely the same man. The Singapore Free Press and Mercantile Advertiser of 21st October 1932 has a much fuller account (detailed, though a bit slow to load).
He might also be the “Captain Lefevre” mentioned in NAA control record C1937/7600 in series SP42/1: that person arrived in Sydney on the CAPITAINE ILLIAQUER on 30th October 1937 to join the crew of the NOTOU.
And finally… the ever-reliable Port Pirie Recorder ran a story on 28th March 1949 about two Chinese crew-members (Hsu Ming Hsien and Chan San) from the Incharran, one of whom was so drunk and annoyed about not being sold a milk-based drink in a fruit shop that he attacked the shopkeeper and “broke his finger slightly”. Hsu was fined £1 with 6/3 costs on two counts, while Chan was fined 10/ with 7/6 costs for having been drunk, and £1 with 6/ costs on each of the other charges: the Master paid the fines on their behalf.
More of a request than a post: may I ask if anyone happens to have handy access to the three-volume Log of Logs?
(If you don’t already know what it is, it’s an astonishing reference work that collates references to Australian and New Zealand ships’ logs in collections all over the world – archives, museums, personal collections, everywhere.)
I am, of course, interested in digging up the logs for the Incharran that was doggedly plying the lead trade between Risdon (in Tasmania) and Port Pirie (in South Australia) in 1948. There were other merchant ships with the same name afterwards (and probably before), but that’s the particular one I really, really want to know about.
There ~appears~ to be a Big Fat Archive of merchant ships’ logs in Hobart (NAA P1196, control symbol “ALMKUK-WAUMEA”), that I found by going through all the Tasmania links here, and my guess is that the Incharran’s logs – if they’re anywhere – would probably be there. But the Log of Logs will know, it always does (pretty much), hence this request. 🙂
Note also that this page has a great description of the different types of Australian shipping forms, and also what you’re likely to find in different archives. Recommended!
Byron Deveson – and if anybody deserves an Inspector-Morse-like middle name of ‘Indefatigable’ it is surely him – recently left a series of comments on Cipher Mysteries about lead, which answered a number of questions that have been bothering me for a while. His most interesting comment began thus:-
I think that the focus should be on ships loading lead concentrates, lead ore, and “ore concentrates” “residues” and “calcines”. And also roasted zinc concentrates.The Port Pirie smelter produced lead ingots and I do not believe that anyone could mishandle these in such a way as to receive the massive dose of lead that SM appears to have received. Lead concentrates, lead ore, ore concentrates, residues and calcine, could possibly be the cause. Or roasted zinc concentrates. Lead concentrates at the time would have generally been a very fine, dusty powder, and the same for some ores and residues. If this fine powder was inhaled it could cause lead poisoning.
All of which means that while Port Pirie seems to be the right place, because of the huge lead smelting works not particularly far from where the dead man was found, so far I very likely have been looking at quite the wrong category of ships. The substantial international trade in lead ingots may be the one garnering all the kudos in the Port Pirie Recorder, but handling those ingots seems unlikely to have yielded terminally precipitous levels in the Somerton Man’s various internal lead compartments.
As so often with these archival research, the fact that this is a bright lamp post doesn’t mean it is necessarily where we should be looking beneath.
But the Port Pirie Recorder does list all the ships in and out of the port, including passenger ships and colliers (specialist coal ships). Without boring you with endless links to Trove, the non-ingot lead activity in the port from 20 October onwards looks like this:-
18 Oct – Ambassador, arrived from Melbourne
25 Oct – Ambassador, departed with 3,000 tons of concentrates
20 Oct – Era, arrived from Tasmania, with 1,047 tons of residues, 200 tons of zinc slabs, and 40 tons of general cargo.
26 Oct – Era, departed with 4,133 tons of calcines and general cargo
18 Nov – Incharran, arrived from Risdon, with 1,000 tons of residues and 58 empty drums
18 Nov – Incharran, left for Risdon with 4,100 tons of calcines, 58 drums of acid, and five tons of general cargo
22 Nov – Aeon, arrived from Port Kembla, arrived with 4,610 tons of coke and 74 tons of general cargo
02 Dec – Aeon, departed for Sydney and Port Kembla, loading lead, copper matte and speiss
29 Nov – Incharran, arrived from Risdon, with 1,000 tons of residues (Howard Smith Ltd.)
02 Dec – Incharran, departed for Port Adelaide, “in ballast”
03 Dec – Incharran, arrived at Port Adelaide
09 Dec – Incharran, departed from Port Adelaide for Risdon
Similarly, if we look at the Burnie Advocate, we can see that the Incharran was unloading calcines at Risdon on 23rd November, loading zinc at Risdon on 24th November, and sailed on the 24th November for Port Pirie with 3,539 tons.
Unsurprisingly, this is why Byron continues:-
I would look at the Incharran before any other ship because of the nature of the cargo (lead residues that are likely to be very powdery) and because the likely primitive loading and handling conditions in Tasmania could easily result in lead poisoning. Incharran seems to have been a specialist ore carrier, and it is possible that the residues from the Risdon refinery were loaded directly into the hold and that would generate clouds of dust both at the time of loading, and unloading.
Indeed, for all the Port Pirie sea traffic, the Incharran looks like just about the only “bad lead” (i.e. non-ingot lead) ship that meets the timeline criteria: so I’d tend to agree that this is where the overall “lead logic” seems to point.
I’d perhaps go slightly further: that if it is the Incharran that is involved and the timeline we have is correct, then it seems to me that the accident may well have happened during the 18th November unloading/loading at Port Pirie, but that the lead-poisoned merchant seaman then returned to Risdon (in Tasmania) on the Incharran before coming back to Port Pirie on the Incharran on the 29th November – the day before he died – and making his way to Port Adelaide, perhaps arriving early in the morning. The rest you all know by now, I hope. 🙂
All of which forms a super-plausible narrative that tightly fits the documented ship activity (and for the right class of ship) in Port Pirie: so how do we test this?
The Tasmanian archives (in the NAA and elsewhere) has a record for desertions and discharges during this period: P2562, VOLUME 1. Well worth a look, I’d say. (Note that I found this listed on this page which seems to know a little more about Tasmanian crew records in the NAA than the NAA itself does).
Alternatively, perhaps the NAA’s Tasmanian crewlists P2004 (outwards) and P2005 (inwards) series will have crew lists for the Incharran, flagging a change in crew for us: or perhaps D3064 will have crew lists for the Incharran arriving at Port Pirie. So it could be that the answer will turn out to have been in Adelaide all along: I shall ask my Adelaidean volunteer immediately just in case…
PS: incidentally, just as with poor old H. C. Reynolds, I briefly wondered whether the seaman’s employer’s archives held any personnel files from this time. The Mitchell and Dixson Libraries Manuscripts Collection, State Library of New South Wales, has 35 volumes (across 1.4m of shelving) of Howard Smith Ltd archives, item MLMSS 3565… but nothing relating to employment, alas. Just so you know! 😐