Hot on the heels of yesterday’s Beale non-Decoder app comes something just as achingly zeitgeisty, but actually rather nice with it. OK, its uncracked historical cipher content is pretty much ‘zilch point squat’ percent, but I rather like it. So there.

On the one hand, the article (from Slate magazine) itself is little more than a short piece by Joseph Nigg to promote his nice-sounding (2013) book “Sea Monsters: A Voyage Around the World’s Most Beguiling Map”. However, given that the map in question is Olaus Magnus’ epic 1539 Carta Marina (that took 12 years to compile), and that Slate made its splendidly garish sea-monsters clickable (each one brings up Olaus’ somewhat breathless description of it), I think the page is well worth a visit.

Of them all, my personal favourite is the “ducks being hatched from the fruit of the trees” in the Orkneys, a folk tale that has a long and interesting history all of its own (for example, I’m pretty sure it came up in Andrea di Robilant’s (2011) book “Venetian Navigators: The Voyages of the Zen Brothers to the Far North”)… but really, there should be more than enough sea-monster madness going on there for anybody, perhaps even enough to inspire a whole new series of Scooby Doo Mystery Incorporated (yes, the one with Harlan Ellison). Enjoy! 🙂

Here’s something a bit unexpected you might appreciate, with a generous tip of the pasty-filled hat to the ever-mind-expanding Daily Grail.

Basically, the story goes like this: someone called ‘TramStopDan’ (actually Dan Wickham) recently posted up two galleries of scans (set #1 and set #2) of various papers inside a wooden box found abandoned on the side of the road in Asheville, N.C. in 2008.

The box is 29″ by 38″, and most of the drawings are large, heavily informed by a draughtsman’s eye for detail and line and with a few, errm, fairly spectacular pieces. In its brief online life, it has acquired the sort-of-catchy title “The Box of Crazy” (and also “The Ezekiel Box”), as if the person behind it was simply a nutter with a fixation on Ezekiel (which is explicitly referenced a number of times).

However, it turns out the truth is actually far more complicated and sad.

The author was Daniel S. Christiansen from St Petersburg, Florida: he also identifies himself as “Nesna-it-sirhc”, but (perhaps disappointingly) this is not some name given to him by our alien overlords but simply his name spelt backwards (so much for finding a Cipher Mysteries angle on the story *sigh*). He had a sister called Eva who lived back in Denmark: and it seems reasonably likely to me that he was the same Daniel S. Christiansen who was born on 27th November 1904 and died in St Petersburg, Florida on 26th September 1994… so perhaps the box was handed down to a relative who in turn died in 2008, but that’s just a guess.

From the handwritten notes, it seems that a turning point in his life came on 7th July 1977 with what he calls “The Tampa Bay Observation”: this seems to have focused all his previous thoughts about UFO visitations, Ezekiel, and unusual weather patterns into a single, tightly-draughted set of drawings, reaching towards a lucid yet hallucinatory quasi-religious UFO vision:-

the-tampa-bay-observation-sharpened

And yet, Fox Mulder need not travel down from Washington just yet… it turns out that what Christiansen saw had a surprisingly down-to-earth explanation. On the same day that a tornado travelled across Pasco County, it seems very likely that Christiansen caught sight of something new and visually striking – a cutting-edge laser light art show being projected onto the cloudy skies above St Petersburg Port.

The show was done by avant-garde laser artist Rockne Krebs: the particular one that Christansen saw was probably Krebs’ “Starboard Home on the Range, Part VI”. The story behind the story is here, courtesy of the Tampa Tribune. But nobody has so far posted any images or videos of it online… perhaps there simply aren’t any. Maybe you just had to be there.

Oh, and finally: if you’re a completist as far as Internet coverage of odd phenomena goes, you should also head over to Reddit. But be warned that there’s far less there than the length of the page might initially lead you to believe – just tellin’ ya how it is, don’t shoot the messenger, etc. 😉

I’ve been thinking for a little while about putting a post up here on the whole flat earth myth – basically, that if you read Jeffrey Burton Russell’s (1991) “Inventing the Flat Earth: Columbus and Modern Historians”, you’ll see how (mainly 19th century) anti-religious propagandists twiddled with history so much that the (fallacious) version they peddled [i.e. that Columbus thought ’round’ while everyone else thought ‘flat’] somehow became accepted wisdom. Even though it was nonsense.

Actually, the real history was simply that Columbus argued his case for why his voyage should succeed by taking the most optimistically small (though completely wrong) estimates for the circumference of the Earth, whereas his (many) detractors pointed to the generally accepted (and broadly correct) figures.

Hence, if an extra continent hadn’t happened to be sitting in the way on his hopeful way West around to the Far East, Columbus and his crew would surely have all died of thirst (which at sea kills you much faster than hunger), just as those naysayers had predicted. But luckily for him, etc etc.

As a result, I always find myself grinding my teeth a little whenever the whole Columbus-vs-the-flat-Earthers myth pops its foolish head up on TV or radio or wherever (which it does fairly regularly).

However, the only issue here is that xkcd recently made essentially the same point, but with the added power that stick figures and sarcasm bring:-

xkcd-columbus

I guess xkcd wins on this occasion, even if Randall Munroe did previously get the Voynich Manuscript flat wrong. 😉

If you know a bit about the history of cryptography, then you’ll probably know that the first well-known modern story about ciphers was Edgar Allan Poe’s (1843) “The Gold-Bug“. Poe explicitly built his narrative around the legend of Captain Kidd’s treasure, so in many ways it forms a kind of literary bridge between the worlds of buried treasure and ciphers. Of course, he was writing some 80 years before the Kidd-Palmer treasure maps and La Buse cryptograms surfaced (and long before “Treasure Island”, which appeared in 1881), so his story is unaffected by any of these.

Just so you know, the (simple substitution) cipher he devised looks a lot like this:-

53‡‡†305))6*;4826)4‡.)4‡);806*;48†8
¶60))85;1‡(;:‡*8†83(88)5*†;46(;88*96
*?;8)*‡(;485);5*†2:*‡(;4956*2(5*—4)8
¶8*;4069285);)6†8)4‡‡;1(‡9;48081;8:8‡
1;48†85;4)485†528806*81(‡9;48;(88;4
(‡?34;48)4‡;161;:188;‡?;

Previously (in 1840), Poe had challenged readers of “Alexander’s Weekly Messenger” to send in simple substitution ciphers for him to crack in print, and so had for some time been aware of a widespread public interest in cryptography. “The Gold-Bug”, then, was written to capitalize on this interest: and won a $100 prize. Later, many readers were inspired by “The Gold Bug” to develop an interest in codebreaking, most notably a young William Friedman of whom you may have heard…

However, when reading about “The Gold-Bug” the other day, my eye was drawn to one aspect to the whole affair that I found intriguing. At the time, newspaper editor John Du Solle made the suggestion (though one he quickly retracted) that Poe may have drawn inspiration from the 1839 “Imogine; or the Pirate’s Treasure“, written by 13-year-old girl George Ann Humphreys Sherburne.

It’s true that the two tales do share key elements: but as is so often the case, those ideas were without doubt very much ‘in the air’ at the time. Rather, the two stories seem related in the same way that Robert Louis Stevenson’s “Treasure Island” drew ideas from numerous earlier books, but had an entirely new style of presenting them that made it feel fresh and appealing. Basically, in both cases I’m quite sure that Poe or Stevenson weren’t (literary) pirates, but simply well-read writers with a zingy contemporary geometry to add shape and style to the narrative building blocks that they found around them.

But ever since Du Solle’s speedily retracted comparison, it seemed to me that hardly anybody had actually bothered to read Sherburne’s story (mainly because almost everyone mis-spells its protagonist’s name, *sigh*). I did, though: and I found something a little unexpected…

imogine-cover

Having trawled past all the girlish swooning chapters and then the unexpected (but unconvincing) chapter with a death, in Chapter VIII the reader finally gets to the climax of the piece where (to almost nobody’s great surprise) the pirate treasure is finally found along with a skeleton…

“Yes”, said Imogine, “and just as you came up, I was about turning over that piece of old iron near the bones.”

“Ah! I see it,” replied her father, “and it looks to me like the top of a ship’s iron pot;” and turning it over with his cane, saw under it white sea sand, [in] which, on stirring about, gold and silver pieces were seen sparkling, which caused an exclamation from all.

“What a great discovery is this!” said Mr Belmont, turning and looking with surprise at Imogine and Cornelia;

[…]

After placing the skeleton in a box, and interring it, they removed the treasure, and in doing so, discovered another similar pot to the first under it, but more valuable, which was all moved safely to the house.”

What’s so unusual about this? Well… according to near-legendary metal-detectorist Charles Garrett, it has often been the case that a large treasure cache is buried immediately below a small treasure cache. Garrett post-rationalizes / explains this as a kind of ‘trap’ for treasure hunters, i.e. for them to be satisfied with robbing out the (small) topmost treasure, while leaving the (big) treasure underneath intact for the original owner. (Though personally, I suspect it’s just as likely that they couldn’t be bothered to dig a bigger hole.)

The big question, then, is this: how would a 13-year-old girl writing in 1839 know to describe such an arrangement… except if she had been party to the ins and outs of an actual treasure dig? I’m not suggesting that recovered pirate treasure is the true secret of the Astor family fortune (mainly because that particular joke’s already been done to death)… but maybe there’s a touch more truth in Sherburne’s story than might at first be thought.

Perhaps the real giveaway in the whole thing is the curious tag-line on “Imogine”‘s cover: “This is all as true as it is strange“. What do you think?

PS: another mystery to ponder is who “George Ann Humphreys Sherburne” was? Apart from her presumed birth in 1825, there appears to be no other information on her anywhere at all. Unless you happen to know better, of course… please leave a comment if you do! 🙂

I’ve been reading more about La Buse & Le Butin, and I have to say I’m not hugely impressed by the research that has been done into either. More books on 18th century corsairs are (as Eddie Elgar might have said) ‘winging their woundabout way’ to Cipher Mysteries Mansions; but if what I’ve seen so far is any guide, I’ll be no less confused in a year’s time.

But really, I think that good historical research is painfully easy to spot, as it combines:-
(1) an appreciation of primary sources (or at least early secondary ones);
(2) a healthy scepticism towards the mythology built up around events and objects; and
(3) empathy towards the people involved (but without a lot of modern back-projection).

Even though we now arguably have better access to primary (or at least closely contemporary) historical sources than ever before, few historians now seem to have the knack for dealing with them properly. Perhaps this is from the slow-motion death of taught codicology and palaeography; or perhaps it’s from the way many of them seem eager to lock themselves into a tightly-specialized silo without no obvious broader-brush historical context or framework to bounce their research against. I guess you’ll have your own thoughts on this, it’s not exactly front page news.

Similarly, the guff that Internet sites pass off as “history” tends to be even more romantic and speculative than even Victorian historians ever managed. In particular, cipher mysteries are so plagued by this rot that I now routinely tell people it’ll take me at least a month to separate what’s real from what’s Maybelline in any new cipher strand – the whole “La Buse / Le Butin” thing is simply the exemple du jour of what is a miserable and much larger trend.

But to my hay-fevered eyes, it’s arguably empathy that I find most obviously lacking. The people of the past aren’t cut-out stick-figures jerking on a historian’s Punch-and-Judy stage, they were real people stuck in uncertain situations, operating blind of their actions’ future consequences. Their decisions were often (quite literally) life-and-death ones; so reducing past lives to mere critical reading textual exercises misses the point.

For me, empathy is that which transcends the details and defies the scepticism: it’s the negentropic force that gives History back the three-dimensionality stripped away by temporal distance, and that pulls the fragmentary pieces together into a sensible whole. Yet… I just don’t see who gives a monkey’s about empathy any more.

Do you?

The business history is simple enough: Bovril was developed in 1870 by Scotsman John Lawston Johnston in Canada to solve the problem of how to transport one million cans of beef to the war-front to feed Napoleon III’s army as it fought Prussia.

But where did the name come from? The answer turns out to be something that (with a hat tip to Frankie Howerd’s ever-present ghost, yerssss missus) left my flabber well and truly gasted.

It turns out that the brand name “Bovril” was ub fact formed from merging the genuine Latin word “bos” (meaning ‘ox“) with the made-up word “Vril” – the immensely energy-dense substance controlled and used by the “Vril-ya”, a super-powerful subterranean people described by Edward Bulwer-Lytton in his best-selling (1870) novel “The Coming Race”.

Does Bovril contain Vril?

Hence, the name “Bovril” is designed to evoke both a liquid beef extract and a fictional energy source powering an race of underground vegetarian supermen.

Now, not a lot of people know that.

In real-life the release of Bulwer-Lytton’s book caused quite a stir, yet the story about what happened afterwards is stranger still. Quite a few people (including numerous Theosophists) believed his wholly fictional account of the Vril-ya to be absolutely genuine; while some even claimed to have met real-life Vril-ya, in broadly the same way that some people claimed to have met real-life Rosicrucians.

As for Vril itself: in the mid-1930s, when the rocket scientist and sci-fi writer Willy Ley emigrated to the United States, he mentioned the existence back in Germany of a certain Wahrheitsgesellschaft (a ‘Society for Truth’) whose members researched Vril to achieve many otherwise impossible things (e.g. perpetual motion machines, etc).

By 1960, the whole story of this hunt for Vril had entered the feverishly conspiratorial imagination of Jacques Bergier and Louis Pauwels: their book “Morning of the Magicians” revitalized the whole Vril issue, by claiming that the Wahrheitsgesellschaft formed a key part of the genesis of the Thule Society and indeed the whole Nazi Party. (In fact, Jacques Bergier was convinced that there was a secret global organization sending teams of “Men In Black” in to cover up such secrets, both about Vril and other “Livres Maudits” [Forbidden Books] such as the Voynich Manuscript.)

And it’s only a short antigravity ride from there to Vladimir Terziski’s “UFO Secrets of the Third Reich”, which insisted that it was Vril that powered the German “RFZ-1” circular flying machine – the first flying saucer, able to harness Vril’s almost-unimaginable power so as to build underground bases under Antarctica or indeed the moon’s surface.

But as far as I can tell, the Nazis never got round to investigating whether Bovril might be a good practical source of Vril. Perhaps memories of the resounding Prussian victory at the Battle of Sedan (where Napoleon III was captured) in September 1870 had convinced them that Bovril wasn’t actually super-powered. I wonder: if the French had instead used their million cans of Bovril as mortar rounds, might the Prussians have attacked with far less spirit? Having one of those explode over your head would surely be enough to drain anyone’s will to life.

Finally, even though Bulwer-Lytton also wrote the famous line “The pen is mighter than the sword” (which always struck me as terribly Freudian, but perhaps I read too fast), the one line for which he is arguably most often remembered opens opens his 1830 novel “Paul Clifford”: “It was a dark and stormy night“.

Of course, this was the phrase with which Snoopy started all of his novels, including his own Great American Novel. What’s curious is that, by my estimation, the “forty thousand head of cattle” Snoopy mentions would liquidise down to roughly… a million cans of Bovril. Coincidence… or conspiracy? What do you think? And moreover, what about the king?

Titter ye not!

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!

One of the most marvellously romantic pirate cipher stories I’ve heard concerns the famous French pirate Olivier Levasseur (1688/1690-1730) AKA “La Buse” – ‘the buzzard’, so called because of his speed and ruthlessness. When about to be hanged, Levasseur (allegedly) took a necklace containing a 17-line cryptogram from around his neck and threw it to the attendant crowd, calling out “Find my treasure, ye who may understand it!”

Fabulous stuff, for sure… but in the absence of even a nano-shred of evidence to support it, probably utter b*ll*cks. But you guessed that already.

As so often happens, Levasseur’s reputation outlasted his death, to the point that he was played by the sword-swinging Basil Rathbone in the 1935 film “Captain Blood” (perhaps better known for starring Errol Flynn).

basil-rathbone-cropped-small

Incidentally, it’s a little-known fact that Errol Flynn wanted his tell-all autobiography to be called “In Like Me“, but his publishers refused. What an own goal! 🙁

Still, there remains a long-standing tale that the later (also real) pirate Bernardin Nageon de L’Estang (also known as “Le Butin”, i.e. ‘The Booty Man’, who died many years after Levasseur) was somehow linked with La Buse’s treasure, a story that was partially reinforced by Le Butin’s last will which resurfaced in the Seychelles in 1923. I couldn’t find an English translation of it, so what follows next is my own [admittedly fairly free] translation. Note that “20 floréal an VIII” is a date in the French Republican calendar which I think I’ve converted correctly to ‘1st May 1800’, but please tell me if I’m wrong! is the 10th May 1800 [thanks Helmut!]

I’m about to enlist to defend the motherland, and will without much doubt be killed, so am making my will. I give my nephew the reserve officer Jean Marius Nageon de l’Estang the following: a half-lot at La Chaux au Grand-Port, île de France, plus my treasures saved from the Indies. Having been wrecked in a creek near Vacoas, I walked up a river and deposited riches of the Indies in a cave which I marked with my initials BN. My writings are deliberately difficult to read as a precaution; I would tell Justin if I were to retrieve them first.

1st 10th May 1800. Dear Justin, if I die before seeing you, a true friend will give you my will and my papers. I recommend you follow my instructions and execute my last will and God bless you. With help from our influential friends, get yourself to the Indian Ocean and the île de France at the location indicated by my will. Climb the cliff going eastward; twenty-five or thirty steps along, in accordance with the documents, you will find typical pirate marks forming a circle with the river a few feet east from the centre. That is where the treasure is. Strangely-combined enciphered figures at this place yield the initials “BN”. Near my wreck, I lost a lot of material, and I have already removed several treasures, so there remain only four buried in the same way by the same pirates, which you will find using the cipher key and the other papers that will reach you at the same time as this. The second treasure is located in the northern part of the île de France with similar marks. With the combination of the circle at the scene and following these recommendations, you will retrieve it like that of Rodrigues.

Beloved brother, I’ve been sick since the fall of Tamatave [i.e. the Invasion of île de France, where the French finally surrendered on 3rd December 1810], despite the care of my friend the commander. I am weak, I fear death from one moment to the next, I wish to talk to you one last time dear Étienne and give you my greatest recommendations. When I am dead, Captain Hamon will give you the little that I possess that I saved during my adventurous life at sea. You know, dear Étienne, that my life’s dream was to amass a fortune to bring back our family’s splendour. With the benevolence the First Consul showed me after a glorious feat of arms, I had hoped to return. But as God will not allow me to perform this duty and I feel close to death, swear to me dear Étienne that you will execute my wishes. In my adventurous life before embarking on the Apollon, I was one of those pirates who did so much harm to our enemies Spain and England. We made many splendid captures from them, but at our last battle with a large British frigate on the shores of Hindustan, the captain was wounded and on his deathbed confided to me his secrets and his papers to retrieve considerable treasure buried in the Indian Ocean; and, having first made sure that I was a Freemason, asked me to use it to arm privateers against the English. But I abhor this wandering life, so I decided to enlist permanently and wait for France to calm down before finding these treasures and return back there. Swear to me that your eldest son will carry out my wishes and one day return to our house with the fortune. The captain will give you the documents about the treasures, three of them. The one buried on my dear île de France is considerable. According to the documents, you will see: three iron barrels and jars full of minted doubloons and thirty million ingots and a copper box filled with diamonds from the mines of Visapur and Golkonda [from whence many famous diamonds such as the Koh-i-Noor came].

Before I go on (in Part Two) to examine the cryptogram itself, I should point out that the Invasion of île de France did actually happen, so this final section of the will (if genuine) implies that Le Butin lived not only beyond 1st 10th May 1800, but also beyond 3rd December 1810 (when Tamatave fell).

Moreover, there was a Captain Hamon in the French fleet (in 18th January 1805, he was in Admiral Villeneuve’s fleet off Toulon in charge of La Naïade, an 18-cannon corvette). And the French India Company had at least four ships called “Apollon” before that time, so it is entirely plausible that Le Butin served under Capitaine Hamon on a ship called “Apollon” in the Indian Ocean.

So I wondered… which French sea captain was it who Le Butin said had been mortally wounded off Hindustan? There can’t be that many possibilities, because the loss of Tamatave was one of the last great naval events of the Napoleonic Wars, and without any substantial bases in the Indian Ocean to sail from, the French naval forces struggled to mount any more significant strikes against the British.

I believe there was a skirmish off the coast of Diu earlier in the Napoleonic Wars, but I haven’t been able to find any trace at all of one after December 1810. Perhaps a passing naval historian will be able to put me right on this, as these were wars that were intensely well-documented on both sides. Hopefully we shall see!

More (much more!) in Part Two

——————————–

Just so you know, though I found the original text of the above in the French Wikipedia entry for Trésor de la Buse, it came from Robert Charroux’s (1962) “Trésors du monde” Edition J’ai lu 1962 – yes, the same book where the story about the Templars and l’Ile des Veilleurs came from. And for the sake of completeness, here it is, so feel free to offer a better translation if you think I haven’t done it sufficient justice…

Je pars m’enrôler et défendre la patrie. Comme je serai sans doute tué, je fais mon testament et donne à mon neveu Jean Marius Nageon de l’Estang, officier de la réserve, savoir: un demi-terrain rivière La Chaux au Grand-Port, île de France, et les trésors sauvés de l’Indus, savoir: j’ai naufragé dans une crique près des Vacoas et j’ai remonté une rivière et déposé dans un caveau les richesses de l’Indus et marqué B.N. mon nom. Mes écrits sont difficiles à lire par précaution; je dirais tout à Justin si je le retrouve.

Lettre du 20 floréal an VIII. Mon cher Justin, dans les cas ou la mort me surprendrait sans te voir, un ami fidèle te remettra mon testament et mes papiers. Je te recommande de suivre mes instructions et d ‘exécuter mes dernières volontés et Dieu te bénira. Par nos amis influents, fais-toi envoyer dans la mer des Indes et rends-toi à l’île de France à l’endroit indiqué par mon testament. Remonte la falaise allant vers l’est ; à vingt-cinq ou trente pas est, conformement aux documents, tu trouveras les marques indicatives des corsaires pour établir un cercle dont la rivière est à quelques pieds du centre. Là est le trésor. Par une combinaison étrange, les figures cryptographiques donnent à ce point nom B.N. Par mon naufrage, j’ai perdu beaucoup de documents; j’ai déjà retiré plusieurs trésors; il n’en reste que quatre enfouis de la même manière par ces mêmes corsaires, que tu trouveras par la clé des combinaisons et les autres papiers qui te parviendront en même temps. Le deuxième trésor de l ‘île de France se trouve dans la partie nord de cette dernière avec des marques pareilles. Avec la combinaison du cercle sur les lieux, et suivant les recommandations tu y parviendras comme pour celui de Rodrigues.

Frère bien aimé, je suis malade depuis la prise de Tamatave, malgré les soins de mon commandant et ami. Je suis faible, je crains la mort d’un moment à l’autre, je viens te parler une dernière fois cher Étienne et te faire mes recommandations suprêmes. Quand je serai mort, le commandant Hamon te fera remettre le peu que je possède et que j’ai économisé dans ma vie aventureuse de marin. Tu sais, cher Étienne, que le rêve de toute ma vie était d’amasser une fortune pour relever l’éclat de notre maison. Avec la bienveillance que le premier consul m’a témoigné après un fait d’armes glorieux, je serais parvenu. Mais comme Dieu, ne me permettra pas d’exécuter ce devoir et que je sens la mort près, jure-moi cher Étienne, d’exécuter mes volontés. Dans ma vie aventureuse et avant d’embarquer sur l’Apollon, j’ai fait pari (partie) de ces corsaires qui ont fait tant de mal à l’Espagne et à notre ennemi l’Anglais. Avec eux nous avons fait de jolies prises, mais à notre dernier combat sur les côtes d’Indoustan, avec une grosse frégate anglaise, le capitaine a été blessé et à son lit de mort m’a confié ses secrets et des papiers pour retrouver des trésors considérables enfouis dans la mer des Indes et en me demandant de m’en servir pour armer des corsaires contre l’Anglais; il s’est assuré auparavant si j’étais franc-maçon. Mais j’avais cette vie errante en horreur, j’ai préféré m’enrôler régulièrement et attendre que la France soit calme pour retrouver ces trésors et y retourner. Jure-moi que ton fils aîné exécutera ma volonté et avec cette fortune relèvera un jour notre maison. Le commandant te remettra les écrits des trésors, Il y en a trois. Celui enterré à ma chère île de France est considérable. D’après les écrits, tu les verras: Trois barriques en fer et jarres pleines de doublons monnayés et lingots de trente millions et une cassette en cuivre remplie de diamants des mines de Visapour et de Golconde.

I think it’s fair to say that even though the French love books in general, there’s one category in particular they adore – anything revealing the long-lost secrets of the Knights Templar. To a relative outsider (such as me), the 1309 suppression of Les Templiers by the French king comes across as a wound to the national psyche that has required a mile-high Band-aid of literary retribution to attempt to heal.

Of course, the not-so-subtle questions that pretty much everyone actually wants answered are:
(a) “where was the Templar treasure hidden?“, and
(b) “can I have some of it?

Admittedly, there is a fairly strong case to be made that by 1309 the Templars were probably close to bankrupt. Following the Seventh Crusade (1248-1254), there was effectively no Jerusalem for pilgrims to go on pilgrimage to: and so the whole raison d’etre for the Knights Templar (i.e. protecting pilgrims) had basically vanished. Hence Templar historians I’ve talked with believe that, after 1254, the Order pretty much ‘withered on the vine’, not really taking any new recruits. By 1309, it was an old man’s order, and I suspect its cash reserves had dwindled to close to nothing.

All the same, the romance of secret caches of gold- and jewel-filled barrels remains: and so French armchair treasure-hunters continue to wave their virtual metal detectors over the scantiest morsels of Templar-related texts, hoping that this might just uncover the ultimate secret history haul. Really, Rudy Cambier’s biggest insult against this établissement is his idea that the Templars might deign to bury their precious cargo in Hainaut of all places – when of course, it could only genuinely have be buried in La France! (And let’s not wake up the Sinclair and Oak Island factions here, OK? *sigh*)

Compiling a list of hopeful French Templier-trésor authors would consume decades of anyone’s life: but there’s one whose cycle helmet, in my opinion, is several wheels ahead of the pack. For me the maillot jaune of Templar authors is Alfred Weysen, author of (1972) “L’Île des Veilleurs” (The Island of the Watchers).

Unfortunately, second-hand copies of this are £60+, and the best modern treatment of the same evidence seems to be Paul Amoros, Richard Buadès et Thierry-Emmanuel Garnier’s (2007) “L’Île des Veilleurs, Contre-Enquête sur le Mystère du Verdon et le Trésor de l’Ordre du Temple”, which is currently being reissued (but copies of this also go for £60+). For the moment, these remain only for researchers with particularly deep pockets.

The rest of us will have to make do with this nice French website dedicated to the whole “L’Île des Veilleurs” enigma, which I’ll briefly summarize.

“The Isle of the Watchers” denotes a 66 square kilometre area in Provence, bounded by the towns of Castellane, Le Bourguet, Jabron, Trigance, Soleils and Taloire, and containing Veydon; and by the D252 road to the east and the D955 to the west. The term was coined by Alfred Weysen, though the claim linking the area to Templar treasure first appeared in print in Robert Charroux’s (1962) “Trésors du Monde: Enterrés, Emmurés, Engloutis” [Éditions J’ai Lu].

All the same, Weysen’s book goes far beyond this, by linking all manner of local sites with Templars and other historical narratives. He asserts:
* that Veydon was the subject of Goethe’s 1795 story Das Märchen (Le Conte), or The Green Snake, with Goethe’s having previously been initiated into a centuries-spanning secret society (naturally).
* that a passage connecting La Baume Jardin (The Hermit Cave) to another cave beneath the chapel of St. Trophimus, a Templar church located (unusually) on the side of a mountain.
* that numerous authors support the notion that this area hold Templar treasure.
* that his argument is undoubtedly correct because of various numerological justifications etc etc.

Personally, I have no great interest in unearthing the fabulous wealth of the Templar hoard: anyway, it’ll already take me the rest of my lifetime to spend my share of the Beale treasure. (Ha! As if!) But what does interest me is that Weysen discusses what seems to be a genuine cipher mystery, somewhere in the gorges by Jabron (much loved by canoeists), though it would be somewhat… premature for us to agree that it’s a Templar message just yet, let’s say. And I found a passable picture of the cryptogram here:

jabron-cryptogram

What message do these scratchy glyphs hold? Weysen believed that he was able to decrypt them, and that they said…

Salut! Tu es ici dans les terres de la Vraie Croix. Céleste dominant l’éternité, baille aux languissants la clarté.

Well… I’m going to stick my neck out and say that I don’t think this makes a great deal of sense. But if we can get a better picture of this to work with, I reckon we probably can decrypt it between us…

…Is anyone here going on holiday in Provence this summer who would like to take up this challenge? Just asking! 🙂

Just the merest hint of a nudge to your collective set of virtual elbows, to remind you that the first Voynich London pub meet for basically ages is this evening (7th March 2013), at The Prospect of Whitby in Wapping. Though having said that, all cipher mysteries are fair game, not just the Voynich Manuscript: hence cipher pigeon fanciers and armchair treasure hunters are more than welcome to come along too. Plenty of room for everyone!

I’ll be there from 6.15pm or so, hoping to catch up on the latest Euro cipher gossip from Gotha and elsewhere, courtesy of Herr Cipher Skeptic himself, Klaus Schmeh, who’s on a flying visit to London having had a swift peek at the various enciphered books in the British Library (“The Subtlety of Witches”, etc). So if you can make your way to Wapping Wall for even half an hour, it would be really great to see you.

[Even stronger nudge: Tony Gaffney, what on earth do I have to do to persuade you to come along? I haven’t seen you in 25 years or so!]

Just so you know: if it’s a nice evening (or if someone happens to bring their dog along with them, John 🙂 ), the chances are we’ll be located in the terraced area through the pub to the back left (looking out over the Thames). Otherwise, we could be anywhere on the pub’s two floors, depending on how busy it happens to be. Looking forward to it!