$1000 historical shorthand marginalia challenge…

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What’s a Greek urn? About a hundred drachmas a day, Morecambe and Wise once said. Or possibly 1000 USD, if he /she can read shorthand marginalia…

The story of the day is that an unnamed donor has offered a thousand bucks to the first person to decrypt some curious marginalia in a rare 1504 edition of Homer’s Odyssey. And no, that’s not the car mentioned in The Simpsons’ segment “D’oh, Brother Where Art Thou?”, it’s a book held by The University of Chicago Library, whose librarians are no doubt being over-run with nutty emails now that the offer of a thousand bucks has gone semi-viral on the Interweb etc. You can download the hi-res TIFF files from Hightail here (though free registration is required for access).

The curious writing only appears on two pages of Chapter 11: and even with my ludicrously atrophied schoolboy Greek, it didn’t take long to work out which part the first page covers. If you start from the “πρωτην τυρω” on the second line, one translation runs:-

“The first I saw was Tyro. She was daughter of Salmoneus and wife of Cretheus the son of Aeolus. She fell in love with the river Enipeus who is much the most beautiful river in the whole world. Once when she was taking a walk by his side as usual, Neptune, disguised as her lover, lay with her at the mouth of the river, and a huge blue wave arched itself like a mountain over them to hide both woman and god, whereon he loosed her virgin girdle and laid her in a deep slumber. When the god had accomplished the deed of love, he took her hand in his own and said, ‘Tyro, rejoice in all good will; the embraces of the gods are not fruitless, and you will have fine twins about this time twelve months. Take great care of them. I am Neptune, so now go home, but hold your tongue and do not tell any one.’

“Then he dived under the sea, and she in due course bore Pelias and Neleus, who both of them served Jove with all their might. Pelias was a great breeder of sheep and lived in Iolcus, but the other lived in Pylos. The rest of her children were by Cretheus, namely, Aeson, Pheres, and Amythaon, who was a mighty warrior and charioteer.

“Next to her I saw Antiope, daughter to Asopus, who could boast of having slept in the arms of even Jove himself, and who bore him two sons Amphion and Zethus. These [two] founded Thebes with its seven gates…”

Yes, Neptune indeed “loosed her virgin girdle and laid her in a deep slumber” – these days, that kind of stuff only appears in court reports. 🙂

Anyway, what is interesting here (I think) is that you can see “Zethus | Amphion” written longhand in the bottom margin, as well as “Amythaon” above “Antiopé” in the left hand margin, all embedded inside long sequences of cursive marginalia.

zethus-amphion

amythaon-antiope

Well, I’m fairly sure you’ve already worked out what I suspect: that these marginalia are not French shorthand (as the anonymous donor believes, though admittedly without proof), but are in fact some kind of cursive late Greek tachygraphy. Personally, I suspect early 18th century rather than 19th century (the language seems a bit too clunky to my eye), but a proper French historian (or indeed palaeographer) should be able to figure that part out (i.e. from the French itself) without any great difficulty.

Unfortunately, I can’t think for the life of me where my book on tachygraphy and shorthand has disappeared to, so all I can do for the moment is note (a) that Greek tachygraphy was an in-vogue subject in Germany 1860-1900, (b) it is usually considered to be formed of three parts (a syllabary, a monoboloi, and a set of endings), (c) that there is a long-running debate as to whether Greek tachygraphy really can be considered a continuum covering different marks over more than a millennium, and (d) that the Porphyrogenitus Project at Royal Holloway might also be a good place to start (did they ever publish it all?). So, what we have here looks to me like a simplified Greek tachygraphic syllabary, but what do I know, eh?

For now, all I can do is just throw up a couple of interesting Greek tachygraphy links for any starving academics out there who are so desperate for a small heap of money that they’ll even take a Cipher Mysteries post at face value. Good luck!

* A Plato Papyrus with Shorthand Marginalia Kathleen McNamee.
* On Old Greek Tachygraphy F. W. G. Foat, The Journal of Hellenic Studies, Volume 21, November 1901, pp. 238-267. Intriguingly, Foat mentions some “crypto-tachygraphy in a 15th century Lucian” (in Cod. Pal. 73, described in p.2 of Wessely’s “Ein system altgriechischer Tachygraphie” (1896), but I wasn’t able to find a copy online).

Double pirate book recommendation…

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A bit of an unusual double-header review today, because I recently read a pair of pirate-history-related books one after the other, and they complemented each other in such a satisfying way that I thought I had to recommend you get yourself a copy of both, if you even remotely like pirate stuff.

The first half of this brace is Colin Woodard’s (2007) The Republic of Pirates, ‘Being the True and Surprising Story of the Caribbean Pirates and the Man Who Brought Them Down’ – i.e. Woodes Rogers. As you may know, the Golden Age of Piracy (well… in the Caribbean, at least) ran from 1715 to 1725, and was the extraordinary time when Bellamy, Blackbeard, Vane, Hornigold and even the faintly ridiculous Stede Bonnet were all in play. Woodard tells their stories well and with reference to a generous boatload of near-primary evidence.

Just about all you could criticize him for is perhaps throwing too many pirates at you all at once – there’s a point about halfway through when the reader almost inevitably gets pirate fatigue. But give yourself a good slug of rum (with plenty of lime, sugar and ice) and persist, it’s well worth the effort.

The second half of the twosome is something that’s both wonderfully edgy and crazily sophisticated all at the same time. You may have heard that Tim Powers’ (1987) On Stranger Tides was used – sort of – as a plot backbone for the fourth Pirates of the Caribbean film (which was hugely successful, even if it got mixed-to-poor reviews).

But Powers’ book is really much better than the big-budget film schtick loosely ‘inspired’ by it: and it sets up its darkly magical twists and turns without having to resort to the kind of special effect extravaganza the PotC film goes all-in for. In fact, Powers is often described as writing a kind of “gonzo history”, because he comes across (perhaps a little surprisingly) as a bit of a history obsessive, trying extremely hard to fit his story around the very real history of the pirates, as later documented by Colin Woodard.

For me, what is truly epic is this: read these two books back to back (Woodard first, then Powers) and at the end of it, it’s as if you’ve been immersed in a fantastically detailed, near-immersive pirate fantasy world. Much better than 3D! 🙂

Olaus Magnus’ 1539 Carta Marina (interactive version)…

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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! 🙂

The Box of Crazy.

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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. 😉

XKCD on the (non-)flat earth…

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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. 😉

Kidd, Poe, ‘Imogine’, and Charles Garrett…

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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! 🙂

Long-overdue mini-rant…

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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 Secret History of… Bovril?!?

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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!

La Buse’s / Le Butin’s Pirate Cipher (Part 2)…

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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!

La Buse’s / Le Butin’s Pirate Cipher (Part 1)…

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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…

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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.