Announcing “The Blitz Ciphers”…

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A few weeks ago, some new ciphertexts pinged on my Cipher Mysteries radar: the story goes that they had been found just after WWII in wooden boxes concealed in the wall of an East London cellar that German bombing had exposed. Hence I’ve called them “The Blitz Ciphers”, but they’re probably much older than the 1940s…

They were handed down to the discoverer’s nephew (the present owner), who now finds himself caught between a desire for relative anonymity and a desire to know what they say. So far, he has been good enough to release three tolerably OK photos from a much larger set he took: but will these be enough for us to crack their cipher?

[Of course, despite the story’s plausibility, I have to point out that this might conceivably still be a hoax designed to make cryptographic fools of us: but if so, it’s such a classy job that I really don’t mind. 🙂 ]

Description

Generally, the Blitz Ciphers’ writing appears to have been added in two hands: a larger, paler, more calligraphic presentation hand, and a smaller, darker, tighter annotation hand. While the presentation hand serves to establish the content and layout structure, the annotation hand is restricted to supplementary paragraphs and additional short notes apparently explaining key letters or terms.

Broadly speaking, the text on the first page (the ‘title page’, above) seems to have been laid down in three sequential phases:-
* #1: the circular ‘boss’ / ‘plaque’ and the two large paragraphs – large presentation hand, brown ink, quite faded in places.
* #2: the third large paragraph at the bottom – mid-sized annotation hand, brown ink.
* #3: the annotations to the other paragraphs – small-sized annotation hand, darker ink.
This general construction sequence seems to hold true for the other pages too.

The second page we have contains two curious diagrams: one a drawing of an octagon (though note that there is a square missing from the lines connecting all the vertices of the octagon), and the other an abstract tree-like representation of something unknown.

Our third page contains a large “John Dee”-like 20×20 square table, where each grid square contains individual cipher letters. The table has an array of red dots gridded within it, where each of the 16 internal red dots is surrounded by a letter repeated four times in a 2×2 block. Red dots near the sides all have two dotted square characters on the edge beside them, apart from a single one near the top right, suggesting a possible copying error. There is also a single correction (near the top left of the 20×20 table) made in the presentation hand.

The support material appears to be handmade paper (I don’t have access to them to look for a watermark, sorry!), while the inks for the two hands appear to be quite different. Though I can’t prove it, I suspect that the larger presentation hand was written using a quill pen (suggesting genuine age or some kind of ceremonial presentation aspect) while the smaller annotation hand was written several decades later with a metal nib. They could possibly have been written by the same person using different pens, but differences between the two hands argue against this.

My initial dating hunch was the first layer could well be 16th century and the second layer 17th century: but having said that, the whole thing could just as well be much more recent and instead have been deliberately written in that way to make it appear ‘venerable’ and old-looking. (More on this below.)

The Blitz Cipher Alphabet

The letter forms are clear, distinct, and upright: the presence of triangles, squares and circles and various inversions perhaps points to a cryptographer with a mathematical or geometric education. It’s closer to a demonstration alphabet (designed for show) than a tachygraphic script (designed for repeated large scale use). Here’s the provisional transcription key I’ve been working with:-

Despite some apparent ambiguities in how to parse or transcribe the various cipher shapes used, the fact that the 20×20 table has only a single letter in each cell is a fairly strong indication that each table cell contains a single cipher glyph, suggesting that about 50 distinct characters are in use. The text has a language-like character frequency distribution, with “:” [E] being the most frequently used character (the “tilted Jupiter glyph” [B] and the “joined-up-II glyph” [D] are #2 and #3 respectively). The “Greek phi glyph” [S] often appears at the start of lines and paragraphs.

I’ve shown all this to some cipher historians and codebreakers for their early reactions. Glen Claston notes that “the alphabet is based on the types of symbols used by astrologers, with a few I recognize as alchemical symbols“, though – inevitably contrariwise – I suspect this might well be a coincidence arising from the simple shapes and symmetries employed. Peter Forshaw suggests parallels with some geometric cipher shapes used in Della Porta’s “De furtivis literarum notis“, though Tony Gaffney similarly cautions that such “shapes were very common back then, the numerous ‘ciphers of diplomatic papers’ in the British Library are full of them“.

The Blitz Cipher System

As with the Voynich Manuscript, the peaky frequency distribution probably rules out complex polyalphabetic ciphers (such as Alberti’s code wheel and Vigenere cipher): yet it doesn’t obviously seem to be a simple monoalphabetic substitution in either English or Latin (but please correct me if I’m wrong!)

Unlike the Voynich manuscript, however, I can’t see any obvious verbose cipher patterns significantly above chance: so the main techniques left on the cryptographic smorgasbord would seem to be:
* a homophonic cipher, like the Copiale Cipher (but if so, the encipherer didn’t flatten the stats for “:” [E] very well)
* a nomenclator cipher (i.e. using symbols for common words, like “the”, “Rex”, or “Mason” 🙂 )
* an acrostic / abbreviatory / shorthand cipher.

All the same, there are some intriguing patterns to be found: David Oranchak points out that “‘SBDBlDMDBl’ is an interesting sequence, since it is length 10 but only consists of 5 unique symbols.” I suspect that the presentation hand uses a slightly different enciphering strategy to the annotation hand, which possibly implies that there may be some kind of homophone mapping going on. The fact that there is also an annotation applied to a single letter [c] on the title page may also point to a nomenclator or acrostic cipher.

Personally, I’m intrigued by the circular ‘boss’ at the top of the title page: this has three letters (C, M and E) calligraphically arranged, i.e. the two dots of the colon have been separated above and below the M. To my eyes, this looks suspiciously like a cryptographic conceit – might it be the case that “:” (E) is in fact a kind of letter modifier? For example, it might encipher a repeat-last-letter token (if the text had a lot of Roman numbers), or perhaps a macron-like “overbar” superscript denoting a scribal abbreviation (i.e. contraction or truncation). Something to think about, anyway!

As for the plaintext language: if this was indeed found concealed in an East London cellar, English and Latin would surely be the main suspects, though Tony Gaffney tried Latin and couldn’t find any kind of match.

Blitz Cipher Theories & Hunches

If you’re expecting me to start speculating that these documents were from a 16th century Elizabethan secret society frequented by John Dee and/or William Shakespeare, sadly you’ll be quickly disappointed. Similarly, though I concur heartily with Glen Claston that these genuinely intriguing ciphertexts may well ultimately prove to be high-ranking 18th century Mason or Freemason ciphers, it is just too early to start saying. We simply don’t know as yet enough of the basics.

What I personally have learned from the tragically fruitless, long-term debacle that is Voynich Manuscript research is that speculative theories are almost always a hopeless way of trying to decipher such objects. Hunches are cool and useful, but they need to stay restrained, or everything goes bad. Please, no theories, let’s try to crack these using the proper historical tools at our disposal!

Voynich colour inference, a sure path to madness…

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Here are a couple of items for you that turned up this week. In my (thoroughly unexalted) opinion, I think both demonstrate something I’ve been arguing for years: that trying to infer things about the Voynich Manuscript based in its colours is, sadly, a sure path to madness.

Why? Well, ever since Jorge Stolfi pointed out the disparity between the Voynich’s various paints (in terms both of the range of painting materials used, and of the degree of skill employed) and suggested that a “heavy painter” may have added his/her paint much later (say, a century or more), there has been significant doubt about how much paint the manuscript originally had – really, which paints were (deliberately) original, and which were (speculatively) added later? And given that there is now strong evidence that many of the bifolios and even quires were scrambled several times over the manuscript’s history (apparently by someone with no understanding of the system) and yet nearly all the paint transfers appear to be between pages in their current order, it seems that a great deal of the Voynich Manuscript’s paint was added later on in its life by someone who similarly didn’t understand what it was saying.

It would therefore seem highly likely that the Voynich Manuscript was even more of an “ugly duckling” in its original ‘alpha’ state than Wilfrid Voynich realized – a particularly plain-looking artefact. As a result, I think that trying to reconstruct the mental state or attitude of the author based mainly on the colours used but without an in-depth grasp of the codicology is an approach that surely has ‘big fail’ written all over it.

Yet some aspect of human nature drives people to persist in employing this wobbly methodology. And so my first exhibit, m’lud, is something that popped up on Scribd this week: a 22-page document by Joannes Richter called Red and Blue in the Voynich Manuscript. I can do no better than give a sample quotation:-

The illustrations seem to follow a strange color convention, in which the primary color bright yellow is missing in all flowers. This is an uncommon practice in a manual for herbal flowers, as statistically there should at least be one singular flower colored in a yellowish paint. A missing color yellow (amidst an abundance of red, blue and green) for flowers suggests to consider the idea of a religious document, which had to be encrypted to avoid conflicts with the Church. In the Middle Age the primary color yellow had been used as a traitor’s color and an evil symbol.

Well… given that you already know my views, I needn’t add anything to this at all: I’ll just think my opinion really hard for a couple of seconds for you… … … so there you have it. But all the same, if you want to know more about how this fits into Richter’s research on the ancient androgynous sky-god Dyaeus, I can do no better than refer you to his blog Spelling Thee, U and I. Eerily, this turns out to be an anagram of “Need Pelling Hiatus“, make of that what you will. 🙂

My second exhibit is from Lincoln Taiz (Professor Emeritus in the Department of Molecular, Cellular & Developmental Biology, Sinsheimer Labs, University of California) and Saundra Lee Taiz, whose ideas I first flagged here back in March but who have now published their paper in Chronica Horticulturae, Vol 51, No. 2, 2011. Essentially, despite having countless herbal and pharmacological pages to work with in the Voynich Manuscript, they’ve instead focused their horticultural attention on the ‘balneological’ quire 13, with all its curiously-posed water nymphs and funny coloured pools.

Their working hypothesis is that quire 13 visually expresses the ideas in “De Plantis” by Nicolaus of Damascus, who lived two millennia ago. Ultimately, they somehow infer that in this particular section, the Voynich Manuscript’s “…author depicts a philosophical scene in which women represent vegetative souls located within the very marrow of the plant, driving the processes that make plants grow and reproduce.” Errrr… sorry, but I just don’t think you can build that lofty a tower on top of the use of the colour green in Q13.

And here’s why: if you codicologically reconstruct the original page order of Q13 (as best you can), I’m 99% sure that f84v sat facing f78r in the original gathering order. Here’s what they looked like:-

Voynich Manuscript, f84v placed next to f78r

Here, one set of pools is blue and faded (my guess: original paint), yet the other is green and vivid (my guess: heavy painter, added a century later by someone who had no idea about what the text meant or signified). Yet all the Taizes’ inference chains here are based on the – probably much later – green-coloured pools. As for me, I simply don’t think there’s any significant chance that any historical or horticultural reasoning based on this green colour will have any validity: but feel free to make up your own mind.

Amirdovlat Amasiatsi & the Voynich Manuscript…?

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Over the last few months, I’ve had some interesting correspondence with Thomas Spande, whose starting point was observing that the ‘Voynichese’ script seemed to have similarities with the medieval Armenian aybuben (‘alphabet’ – its first two letters are ‘ayb’ and ‘ben’). Several other people have proposed this, most recently ‘amandajm’ and ‘Lgh’ on the discussion page for the Voynich Manuscript Wikipedia page: there was also a mysterious “Voynich Armenian Experiment” back in 2000 which seems to have arrived fractionally too early to be picked up by the Wayback Machine; and another mention in the archived Wikipedia talk page.

However, I’m basically sure we can rule out oddly-written Armenian (and indeed all other it’s-an-oddly-written-but-real-language theories) because of the Voynich Manuscript’s peculiarly idiosyncratic word distribution: apart from a small number of high-frequency words, relatively few words or phrases repeat across the whole manuscript, making it a poor match for any real language, whether written directly or even in an simple substitution cipher. This is an extraordinarily deep observation, one which even now few people really grasp the power of: it sits behind Elizebeth Friedman’s 1962 comment that all attempts to interpret the Voynich Manuscript as a simple language and/or a simple cipher were “doomed to utter frustration”. Ignore this at your peril!

All the same, what Thomas Spande dug up next was, well, really rather good. He discovered that a particular fifteenth century physician called Amirdovlat Amasiatsi was working in Constantinople for the Ottomans (i.e. just after its fall in 1453), and that he wrote a large number of books in Armenian. [I added a Wikipedia stub page about Amirdovlat, but note that this still needs a lot more detail to be useful]. The best English-language book on him appears to be “Amirdovlat Amasiatsi: A 15th Century Armenian Natural Historian and Physician” by S. A. Vardanian (1999), though at £144 or so for a second-hand copy, it’s a tad beyond my modest means. 🙁 There are also various studies by John Gueriguian based on his study of Amirdovlat’s books, perhaps most notably “Amirdovlat’ Amasiats’i: His Life and Contributions” in the Journal of the Society for Armenian Studies 3 (1987) pp. 63-91.

What was nice about Amirdovlat was that despite being chief physician to Mehmed II, he was not at all elitist. In fact, he specifically wrote books in Armenian so that ordinary people could benefit from what he had learned: e.g.
* 1459: Usumn bzhshkutyan (The Study of Medicine)
* 1459: Akhrapatin (Pharmacology)
* 1474: Girk ramkakan (Popular handbook)
* 1478-1482: Angitats anpet (Useless to the Ignorant)
* ????: Vasn nshanats hivantin, zgenats yev zmahun (On the patient’s signs of life & death)

The 25 chapters of Amirdovlat’s book on pharmacology describes the properties of plenty of drugs: yet even this was dwarfed by “Useless to the ignorant”, which listed the properties of no less than 3700 drugs, arranged in (Armenian) alphabetical order. He was a serious-minded yet communicative man, widely read and clearly with a deep passion for medicine. But could he have had anything to do with the Voynich manuscript?

On the positive side, I would very much like to read more about Amirdovlat: though admittedly Galenic, his brand of medicine seems to run very much parallel to that found in the European herbal tradition, the brightest lamp post we tend to look under for our Voynichian lost keys. I also think that when the Voynich is finally deciphered, its contents will almost certainly turn out to be grounded within numerous existing textual traditions (though perhaps not quite in the ways that we expect), and so building up a fuller picture of the range of contemporary textual herbal traditions has to be a good thing. As a result, I can see why Thomas Spande considers Amirdovlat to be a possible source for (and perhaps even author of) the Voynich Manuscript.

On the negative side, I personally think it would be extraordinarily surprising if the Voynich Manuscript came from beyond the European mainland (specifically the Northern Italian peninsula, or possibly Savoy at a stretch). Its alphabet seems to appropriate a large number of 14th century Latin-like tropes; its nine-rosette castles seem to point to Italy, Switzerland or Southern Germany (Sicily at a push); it has Occitan-like zodiac marginalia; its final page handwriting seems like a late 14th-century Savoyard hand; its crossbowman seems to have European clothes; and so forth. I’ll happily grant you that all of these could conceivably be wrong simultaneously… but I’m reasonably confident that they’re not.

Of course, there are two basic Voynich camps to choose from: one that thinks we know enough basic factuality to rule out almost all speculative theories with a high level of confidence, and another that thinks we don’t, that almost everything is still in play. Of the two, I’m in the former camp: but you have to understand that it’s a bit draughty and empty in here… I’m sometimes surprised that canvas walls are able to echo so effectively, but there you go, it is how it is. So, which camp are you in?

“I want to report a murder” – Otto Kinzel rocks the Zodiac…

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If you happen to like both technical-minded heavy metal and cipher mysteries, I might possibly have a hot tip for you (thanks to Phil Strahl’s blog). Otto Kinzel has released an album on Bluntface Records called “I want to report a murder”, where every track is based on features or events in the Zodiac Killer cipher case.

Kinzel has even done a 7-minute video of the title track “I want to report a murder”: but you might want to to skip past the first atmospheric 1 minute 28 secs of video intro and get with the metal…

PS: if you’re reading this as an email & the video didn’t get embedded, here’s the direct link to the video on YouTube. Enjoy!

Phaistos disk update…

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Just to break up the monotony of far too many Unknown Man posts in a row 🙂 , here’s Anthony Svoronos’ great long list of Phaistos Disk speculative theories and wobbly decipherment attempts, together with his own notes on what he suspects it is. Peter Aleff [#47 on Svoronos’ list] recently left a comment here asserting:

There is plenty of evidence that it recorded the path of a board game similar to the Egyptian Snake Game and Senet, and surviving in today’s children’s Game of the Goose. See http://www.phaistosgame.com/volume1.htm. Enjoy that surprising story, as well as the almost self-explanatory title page of the combined volumes 1 and 2 at phaistosgame.com/phaistos1booktitlepage.htm that shows the reconstructed gameboard and will be published next Spring.

The Phaistos Disk as board game, eh? Well, Fernand Crombette suggested this some decades ago, so that is not in itself a new idea. But we shall see next Spring, I guess!

But that’s by the by: I actually wanted to post about another Phaistos Disk-related story entirely. When I was recently looking for sources on other ancient artefacts with similar symbols (e.g. the Arkalochori axe, seal fragment HM 992, etc), I found the following proper cipher mystery story in a greek ceramic website selling repro Phaistos Disks:

A very peculiar find was made in 1992 in a basement in Vladikavkaz, North Ossetia: A fragment of an apparent copy of, or draft for the Phaistos disc, with the symbols incised with a stylus rather than imprinted. It is uncertain whether this artifact is genuinely ancient, a good faith modern copy of the Phaistos disc, or a bad faith attempt at forgery. The house in the basement of which the fragment was found was built in 1880. Allegedly, the object was recognized as a fake and returned to its private owner.

There’s a picture of this “Vladikavkaz Disk” on p.16 of Il disco di Festo: Un calcolatore vecchio di 4.000 anni by Rosario Vieni on Antikitera.net, a site whose description even non-Italians can read: “Il portale Italiano dell’Archeologia Misteriosa“. Vieni’s theory (that the Disk is some kind of ancient calculator) at #60 on Svoronos’ list.

Or, you might prefer Jerome Eisenberg’s THE PHAISTOS DISK: A ONE HUNDRED-YEAR-OLD HOAX? paper, which also has a picture on p.6 of the PDF. Like Svoronos, Eisenberg includes a multi-page appendix of decipherment attempts. Having said that, I’m a bit suspicious of Eisenberg’s readiness to classify the Vladikavkaz Disk fragment as a hoax simply on the basis that it resembles a handmade version of a disk he also thinks is a hoax. Though it is true that people do occasionally use hoaxes & fakes to make fools of us all, I suspect history usually does an even better job, by helping us make fools of ourselves. Caveat decryptor!

Finally, Word Geek’s Diana Gainer concludes her own Phaistos disk roundup by saying: “You know, some of the proposals that people have come up with are so far out, I wouldn’t be surprised if one of these days somebody claimed that Bigfoot wrote it as a love letter to the Loch Ness Monster!” Such nonsense! Everyone knows that Loch Ness Monsters can’t read, tcha… 😀

H. C. Reynolds’ family…?

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Up until now, most of my historical research has been based on the Renaissance, so I haven’t had any great need to look at the kind of databases and tools people use for genealogy (which tends, unsurprisingly, to focus on the last couple of centuries before the pervasive haze of history obscures all practical vision). So, I thought I’d have a go at seeing what I could find from online newspapers about our mysterious Mr. H. C. Reynolds, though doubtless experienced genealogists would be 100x more effective than me…

I quickly found one particular “H. C. Reynolds” doing his thing in Melbourne. Trove (digitized Australian newspapers online) throws up a birth announcement from 24 April 1920 from the Argus in Melbourne:

REYNOLDS (nee Evelyn Ivory). –On the 12th April, at Sister Wain’s private hopital, Hoddle street, Elsternwick, to Mr. and Mrs. H. C. Reynolds, of 80 Tennyson street, St Kilda–a daughter (Norma Mavis).

The Argus similarly reported that (presumably the same) H. C. Reynolds was made a fellow member of the Australasian Institute of Secretaries (Inc.) on 25th May 1939. But its entry for Wednesday 30 August 1950 would seem to rule him out:-

Mr. H. C. Reynolds, secretary of Smith Mitchell & Co. Ltd., is retiring at the end of this week, after 28 years’ service. He will be succeeded by Mr. H. N. Martin, who has been an accountant for many years.

Alternatively, Trove also throws up a quite different “H. C. Reynolds” whose 1940 Chrysler Imperial Sedan (number plate BU-054) was stolen in late 1947: he was the proprietor of the Phoenix Hotel, 82 Flinders Street, Melbourne (which is due to be demolished next year and rebuilt as apartments 29 storeys high). However, this was presumably also the same H. C. Reynolds who transferred a hotel licence for Phoenix Hotel Co not long before 27th April 1950, so we can almost certainly rule him out too. We can also rule out the eminent visiting American zoologist Dr H. C. Reynolds who specialized in the reproduction of marsupials (no, I’m not making this up) and who visited Tasmania in 1954. 🙁

Finally, our mysterious man might possibly be the “H. C. Reynolds” who was a member of Murray Bridge Golf Club (SE of Adelaide), and who qualified for the club championship in July 1939. Curiously, “Harry Reynolds” (presumably the same man) is mentioned on the website as one of the club’s “chief planners” when it moved locations in 1945, so the club may still have records or some collective memory of what happened to him. Perhaps someone could contact the club and ask them if a club historian or archivist happens to know what happened to Harry Reynolds? Just a thought!

Update on the (elusive) “H. C. Reynolds”…

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The hot cipher mystery news from Australia a few days ago was the intriguing suggestion that a certain “H. C. Reynolds” might well have been the “Unknown Man” found on Somerton Beach on 1st December 1948(AKA the “Tamam Shud” case). A couple of intrepid Cipher Mysteries readers decided to see what they could find out about this mysterious person: all they had to go on was a US seaman’s ID card dated 28th February 1918, which may or may not be genuine…

Cheryl Bearden & Knox Mix quickly found a number of references to an “H. Reynolds” / “H. C. Reynolds”, and very kindly left comments on the previous post here documenting what they had found. I’d already checked a number of free online databases of passenger / crew manifests without any luck, so guessed they were using ancestry.com, which has scans of quite a few passenger lists. Hence I decided to have a quick look here myself, to see if I could pick up on anything they might have missed: so here’s what I found…

* Manuka: dep. Wellington, arr. Sydney NSW, 19 Nov 1917. H. Reynolds, age 17, Assistant Purser, born Tasmania.
* Manuka: dep. Hobart, arr. Sydney NSW 17 Dec 1917. H. Reynolds, age 17, Assistant Purser, born Tasmania.
* Manuka: dep. Hobart, arr. Sydney NSW, 26 Jan 1918. H. C. Reynolds, age 17, Assistant Purser, born Australia.
* Niagara: dep. Vancouver B.C. via Auckland, arr. Sydney NSW 17 Feb 1918. H. Reynolds, age 18, Assistant Purser, born Hobart.
* Niagara: dep. Vancouver B.C. via Auckland, arr. Sydney NSW 20 Apr 1918. H. Reynolds, age 18, 2nd Mate, born Hobart.
* (Ulimaroa: dep. Hobart, arr Sydney NSW, 22 Nov 1920. H. C. Reynolds, male passenger.)

The RMS (“Royal Mail Service”) Niagara regularly crossed the Pacific Ocean between Vancouver, Sydney, Auckland and Suva (in Fiji) for more than 25 years, making it the furthest-travelled steamship ever. But what, then, of Reynolds’ ID card? What for me seals the deal is a nice blog post I found by Haley Hughes talking about letters her great-grandfather Geo. W. W. B. Hughes sent to her grandfather Noel while travelling on the RMS Niagara back in 1931:-

“The ship departed Sydney on 25 June, with stops in Auckland, departing 30 June; Suva, Figi Islands, departing 3 July; Honolulu, Hawaiian Islands, departing 10 July; and Victoria, British Columbia, Canada, arriving 16 July, and Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, arriving 17 July.”

I think this gives us enough broad brushstrokes of how the journey worked to finally tie all the loose ends together!

It seems very likely to me that Reynolds first came on board the RMS Niagara at Suva or Auckland on its way to Sydney (perhaps to replace a sick crew member?). He then continued with the Niagara on its next trip across the Pacific to Vancouver, stopping off in Honolulu for the first time in his life. This was almost certainly where he picked up his US temporary seaman’s identification card, the one that was to become his keepsake of the experience: looking again at his photo in it, I think he looks excited, perhaps even a little exhilarated by the whole experience. Perhaps – if Reynolds was indeed the Unknown Man – this is also where he took to Juicy Fruit chewing gum, possibly as a (arguably slightly unhealthy) memento of Hawaii.

All the same, this was only a brief peak moment for him, for it seems that not long after this he left his life on the sea. Could it be that his experience dealing with the New Zealand gunners on board the RMS Niagara stirred something in him, causing the 18-year-old Reynolds to sign up to fight in the Great War?

Post-WWI, the next glimpse we see of H. C. Reynolds might possibly be as a passenger between Hobart and Sydney in November 1920 on the Ulimaroa… but it’s hard to be sure. It seems entirely possible to me that he still had a family in Hobart: a presumably quite different “H. Reynolds” made a number of trips between Hobart and Sydney early in the new century – might this have been H. Reynolds Sr?

Will all this be enough to track Reynolds down? The problem with ancestry.com (and, in fact, the Internet as a whole) is that it’s easy to fool yourself that records accessible through it are even remotely complete, when they simply are not. The world has many million times more data than that, but you just have to get at them the hard way. Still, as Cheryl and Knox pointed out, it seems that we know that his 18th birthday fell between 27 Jan 1918 and 17 Feb 1918, so I’d like to think we’re doing reasonably well! Next stop, Tasmanian off-line birth records, eh? 😉

PS: ancestry.com.au lists a “Horace Charles Reynolds” born in 1900 to Edwin Reynolds and Mary Ann Matilda Reynolds, with the birth registered at Hobart, Tasmania: and a Reynolds family tree listed there has “Horace Charles Reynolds” born 8 Feb 1900 in Triabunna, Tasmania, but (it is claimed) dying on 16 May 1953 in Hobart. Does this rule out H. C. Reynolds as the Unknown Man, or might there possibly have been two people with the same name? It’s all pretty specific stuff, so perhaps the Anonymous Lady who proposed Reynolds in the first place might know a little bit more to help narrow this down?

Amazing news on The Unknown Man…

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A massive thanks to Cipher Mysteries reader Cheryl Bearden for passing along to me some breaking news on the Somerton Man case: a story by Emily Watkins in Adelaide’s Sunday Mail dated 20th November 2011, already inserted in the Taman Shud Wikipedia page by retired Southern Australian WLRoss.

So, what’s the big news, Nick? Well, an unnamed Adelaide woman found a US identification card in her (late?) father’s collection of documents & photos, showing a fresh-faced 18-year British seaman called “H. C. Reynolds”.

The general resemblance between this person and the Unknown Man is extremely strong, but specific similarities between their ears (again) and a mole on their faces was enough to convince Adelaide University’s “internationally renowned anatomist and biological anthropologist Professor Maciej Henneberg” that the two were a perfect match. Personally, I’m not 100% convinced yet, but the parallels between this and what I concluded here a few days ago are pretty impressive.

The only downside is that searches carried out for the Adelaide Sunday Mail for H. C. Reynolds at the “US National Archives, UK National Archives and Australian War Memorial Research Centre” all drew a blank. So… what was the secret history of H. C. Reynolds?

Firstly, the date stamped on his id card is intriguing: 28th February 1918 was towards the end of the First World War, not too long after the US had joined in. A US draft of 21 year olds was already running, and would be extended later in 1918 to a draft of 18 year olds. Conscription in the UK had already been put in place in 1916 for single men aged 18 to 41, so if Reynolds (apparently aged 18) had just come from the UK, then he was apparently dodging the UK draft. Hence, I have to caution that this might possibly be a false name… just so you know!

It also struck me that Reynolds might possibly have been a British merchant seaman somehow shipwrecked or otherwise forcibly landed in a US port. One of the most notable WWI sea incidents connected to the US was the sinking just off Nantucket of three or four British merchant ships (and some Dutch ships) by the German submarine SM U-53 on 8th October 1916. This caused widespread consternation, and may well have been a prime thing that helped persuade the American people that the US should enter the war.

It’s a fascinating story, and I eventually tracked down the list of survivors and passengers of the Strathdene, the Stephano, and the West Point (it’s in the New York Times archive for 10th October 1916, if you’re interested). However, there was apparently no “Reynolds” on board any of them. I also managed to find the passenger & crew list for the Florizel which sank on February 24th 1918 (though from hitting a reef, not from another U-Boat action) off Newfoundland, but there was no Reynolds there either. (Just so you know, it was named after Prince Florizel in Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale).

Having said that, I wasn’t able to fully determine whether or not U-53 sank the British freighter “Kingston” / “Kingstonian” (the newspapers of the day ran numerous conflicting reports on this, probably the most reliable source would be Hans Rose’s reports), so it is just about possible Reynolds could have been on one of the Kingston’s lifeboats allegedly seen “30 miles SE of Nantucket”. Alternatively, if you happen to know of other British ships that sank just off the US coast between 1916 and 28th February 1918, please let me know!

To be honest, though, I find the date of the sinking of the Florizel (a mere four days before the id card was issued) more than just a touch coincidental: I do wonder whether (for example) the Florizel’s waiter “Henry Snow” (whose age we don’t know) might possibly have changed his name to “H C Reynolds” in order to somehow stay on the USA.

Right now, Reynolds’ id card would seem to have triggered far more questions than answers: but that is, at least, a better place to be in than having no questions at all, right?

Review: Gavin Menzies’ “The Lost Empire of Atlantis”…

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Ex-submariner Gavin Menzies attracted global attention with his eye-catching farragos “1421” and “1434”, books laying out how he imagined 15th century Chinese fleets sailed through a dried-up Egyptian canal to reach Renaissance Europe and beyond. And now he’s moved onwards and backwards to the Minoans, an ancient Mediterranean civilization he proposes were in fact the sea-faring glue holding European Bronze Age trade together. Yes, and he thinks that it was the volcanic eruption on Thera / Santorini that destroyed the Minoans (though via a tsunami), and that this is what Plato was talking about when he talked about “Atlantis”. Hence Menzies’ book is entitled “The Lost Empire of Atlantis“.

So far, so nondescript – nothing that isn’t already in a thousand books (and disputed or disproved by ten thousand more). However, Menzies’ particular new shine on all that rusty metal is that he has a vastly grander vision of the Minoans’ geographic sprawl. For one, he thinks not only that it was they who were the first Europeans to discover North America, but also that they mined and shipped out millions of tons of extraordinarily high-purity copper from beside Lake Superior. Oh, and that the Egyptian Pharaohs basically outsourced sea-trading to the Minoans, and that you can (if you squint at all the evidence) see evidence of the Minoans on the Red Sea and even in India, too. [Though not Australia and New Zealand yet, but perhaps Menzies is holding those back for a sequel, wouldn’t be the first time, eh?]

I think the main things just about any reader would notice are the book’s relentless stylistic tics and its metronomic structure. In pretty much every chapter, Menzies jumps on a plane or boat with his wife Marcella to some vaguely-connected place, looks out of a hotel window while musing to himself on how much it had all changed since he had last visited it while still in the Royal Navy, and then trolls round a local museum or historical site, where he is suddenly struck by the ineffable kindness of the ancients to have left him yet another glaringly obvious clue to add to his list – another cookie crumb in his global trail.

This struck me most strongly in Menzies’ mercifully brief Chapter 21, where he is transfixed in the Prado by the similarities between a 19th century AD drawing of bullfighting by Goya (Sketch No.90) and another image of bullfighting he had previously seen at Knossos. “What I’d been witnessing – had I stopped to think about it – was a calling card. It had been sitting out the centuries, but it was there, written in the colourful script of the Minoans.” Yes, in this book Menzies does indeed raise his pursuit of historical bull to an epic new level.

In many key ways, all he’s really doing is trying to fit into the idiot wet dream vision of ur-historians that TV producers have talked up over the last decade: genially talkative late-middle-age buffoons buffers who (conveniently for the constraints of the medium) practise history just by striding around, all the while making dramatic & striking connections to camera. But of course that’s simply a nonsensical fiction: to a very great degree, history is driven more by detailed textual study and a curiously rigorous kind of critical empathy than a series of ever-longer intuitive leaps towards an eerily uncanny mega-Truth That Lies Beneath.

For me, I think Menzies sees the great swathe of historical textures not with an historian’s eye but more as an abstract artist might see a series of impressive colours: as things demanding to be used, appropriated and joyfully displayed. Enjoy the scenery as a whole sequence of contested Bronze Age artefacts – the Nebra Disk, Stonehenge, the Amesbury Archer, the Uluburun wreck, the Antikythera device, Orkney voles, the Nabta stones, Cornish tin mines, the Great Orme copper mine, and countless others including (yes, finally) the Phaistos Disk – drift pleasantly past your eyes.

Of course, for a cipher mystery reader, YABOA (“yet another book on Atlantis”) ain’t no big thang at all: but sporting the Phaistos Disk on the front, spine & back of Menzies’ book is surely intended as some kind of provocation, right? But given that he clearly does not have the historical apparatus for decrypting the Disk’s mysterious spiral messages, why does his book sport it so jauntily?

The answer is that Menzies happened to meet Dr Minas Tsikritis, who has long been studying all the extant Cretan hieroglyphs, including the Phaistos Disk, the Arkalochori Axe, seal fragment HM 992 [which contains the Phaistos Disk’s distinctive “double-comb” symbol #21], together with all the known Linear A inscriptions… and who believes that he is now able to account for a large proportion of them. So, what’s the Phaistos Disk, then? Well, according to Tsikritis (p.320), “at least one side is a [Tragoudi]”… basically, a sea-shanty. Well, pickle my timbers and sell my soul to Captain Teague: who’d have thunk it, eh?

Buy Gavin Menzies’ book if you like: but please bear in mind that his ongoing Voyages of the Damned proceed despite capital-aitch ‘istory, not because of it. Despite a sensitive nose for what’s wrong with big picture accounts, his syncretistic urge to jam all his pieces together serves only to weaken his overall case, not to strengthen it. The reader departs with the impression of having met a kid trying to build a Lego wall without knowing how to make brick bonds: for as a discipline, history is far less about simply accreting evidence than about examining the nature and limits of the bonds binding those pieces of evidence together.

To me, Menzies’ Lego walls really don’t stand up to close scrutiny: though they’re formed of all the right sort of brightly coloured bricks, their bonds – those connections that move us along the continuum from coincidence to correlation to causality – are simply absent. So, even though what his approach yields is a series of vividly-coloured, imaginative accounts of how things might have been, these ultimately are little more than modern-day sea-shanties. What shall we do with him? Shave his belly with a rusty razor!

Voynich Manuscript decrypted by Finnish ‘prophet of god’ via Fox News…

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Apparently, today’s big cipher mystery news story is the announcement that Finnish businessman “Veikko Latvala, a self described ‘prophet of god’” has allegedly “decoded the book and unlocked the secrets of the world’s most mysterious manuscript.“. Voynich researchers will no doubt be amazed to learn that “The sound syllables are a mixture of Spanish and Italian, also mixed with the language this man used to speak himself. His own language was a rare Babylonian dialect that was spoken in a small area in Asia.”

Being brutally honest, though, this kind of thing makes me dreadfully sad. Cryptanalytically, the whole point about the way Voynichese was constructed was to make it resemble a nonsense language: a semantic half-entity with a great big meaning-size hole left empty in it for the reader to fill with their own pareidoilia, to gestaltically complete. As a result, the VMs is hugely attractive to people whose heads are already full of a self-contradictory chorus of noise, whose need is merely for a vessel to pour their own internal message into.

Once you grasp that in all its awfulness, it is little more than a miserable half-hop to seeing the Voynich Manuscript as a virtual car crash perpetually about to happen yet with doors wide open beckoning the unstable to jump in: a DIY tragedy that seems fated to be replayed endlessly by successive generations.

Of course, I’m perfectly happy to concede that it’s entirely possible that Veikko Latvala is right here, though doubtless it would be for utterly the wrong reasons, and at a high enough level of improbability to drive the “Heart of Gold” (as famously stolen by Zaphod Beeblebrox) all the way to infinity and beyond.

Actually, for me the big news here is that the whole miserable non-story broke first on Fox News. Even though The Da Vinci Code already seems a very long time ago (though arguably not nearly long enough), perhaps the Fox newsroom got a kick off covering Kevin Knight’s Copiale Cipher story recently (in fact, they asked Knight about Latvala’s claims, but he declined to comment, can’t think why), and wondered if they could reprise that populist cryptographic high.

All the same, I suppose I’m contractually bound to quote what Latvala says about “16152” (by which I presume he means the Beinecke’s scan “1006152.sid”, i.e. f40r):-

“The name of the flower is Heart of Fire.
It makes the skin beautiful when made as an ointment.
The oil is pressed from the buds.
This ointment is used for the wrinkles.
Is suitable for the kidneys and the head,
as the flower prevents inflammations, is antibiotic.
Plant is 10 centimeters by its height.
It grows on hot and dry slants.
The plant is bright green by its color.”

Of course, the obvious historical non-sequiturs here are “antibiotic” (~1889) and “centimeters” (~1790). But it’s also interesting that he lists 9 lines, when f40r has 11 to the left of the plant-thing and 10 to the right.

As far as my own observations on what is actually on f40r go, I personally rather like the tonal contrast between the two green paints: perhaps the stem green was original but the leaf green was from the ‘heavy painter’? I also like the way that the two root sections merge into a single vertical stem, nicely mysterious. 😉 The text also has some nice verbose cipher sequences (“ar ar al or” at the end of line #2, plus “ar ar or” at the end of line #5 quickly followed by “or or ar” at the start of line #6), and a particularly clear ‘Neal key’ at the middle-right of the second paragraph’s topmost line. But that’s just by the by: I’m sure all Voynich researchers have their own favourite features. 😉