A saunter through Philadelphia’s Society Hill to Cherry Garden…

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Following on from the 1716 treasure map letter I posted about a few days ago, it’s now time for a Cipher Mysteries historical saunter through Philadelphia. And why not?

The Blue Anchor Inn

“…at the South End of the town of Philadelphia is a Gutt of water with a few Planks Layd over it which the Inhabitants call a drau Bridge:…”

The history of Philadelphia begins with William Penn landing at the Blue Anchor Inn in 1682/1683: liking the dock and the creek beside it, he decided that this was where a “Greene Countrie Towne” should be built, between the Delaware and Schuylkill Rivers. Here’s an old newspaper reconstruction of what the Inn originally looked like:

Before very long (1691 is claimed), a drawbridge was erected across Dock Creek to allow boat access to the little harbour and foot access to the quickly growing city. Here’s a 1908 illustration by James Moore Preston (courtesy of blog page Early Philadelphia Inns and Taverns: Part 2:

Though far less colourful, Frank Hamilton Taylor’s (1922) drawing tells much the same story:

Dock Creek

Philly H20: The History of Philadelphia’s Watersheds and Sewers notes that “For many years after the creek was covered over the neighborhood was known as the “Drawbridge,” and as late as 1834 we read that the Drawbridge lot rented for $600 per year.”

Dock Creek was subsequently covered over for the simple reason that everyone put their sewage into it (and so it stank to high heaven). In the last few years, however, it has been (virtually) reclaimed by artists and historians, in the form of a walk along its former course being set out as an Art Installation by Winifred Lutz. The following nice map also shows the breweries and tanneries set up beside the creek, tipping their noxious wastes away:

Society Hill

“…a little to ye Southward of that is a Rising Ground called Society Hill…”

As noted in The Pennsylvania magazine of history and biography, Vol. XLVII (1923), this area was first settled in the early 1680s by The Free Society of Traders…

[…] which in 1682 was granted a charter by William Penn, and soon set up a warehouse and office in the infant city, on the west side of Front Street, near the south side of Dock Creek. It was located at the foot of the hill known as Society Hill and thence its city tract of about one hundred acres extended westerly in a tier of lots from Front Street on the Delaware to Front Street on the Schuylkill River. A map of the surveyor Thomas Holme made about 1683 shows its location.

Thomas Holme was William Penn’s surveyor general, and his map (which I found here) looked like this:

Hence Society Hill sat right at the heart of Philadelphia’s early history, though the Society it was named after closed in March 1723. Robert Morris Skaler’s (2005) “Society Hill and Old City” seems to be a pretty definitive reference on this subject (the first 33 pages are on Google Books), but I’m waiting for my copy to arrive in the post. 😉

All the same, Society Hill completely lost its shine during the nineteenth century, as fashion moved the City’s Centre ever westwards: many of the neighbourhoods turned into appalling slums, with W.E.B.Dubois’s famous (1899) sociological study “The Philadelphia Negro” focused on the City’s Seventh Ward, the long thin rectangle running West of the lower half of Society Hill all the way to the Shuylkill River. By the 1940s, the Hill was in almost complete disrepair.

And yet since then, the modern history of Society Hill is a rather strange thing. The area was consciously refashioned into Colonial-era kitsch, where rich owners with salvageable homes were given low-interest loans to make them nice again, poor owners were kicked out and their houses sold on to rich owners to salvage, and everything else was flattened and turned into Colonial retro townhouses. Brick pavements and faux-old streetlights added to the overall Disneyfication: the newly fictionalized Society Hill became a film set, populated by the genteel. (The 1770-era [but internally modernized] townhouse at 232 Spruce Street went on sale in 2017 for $899,000.) And now, while Philadelphia’s demographics are getting younger, Society Hill’s demographics are getting older, richer and whiter: so as neighbourhoods go, it’s a curious socio-economic and real-estate bubble that the City consciously inflated.

Just so you don’t get too taken in by it all if you happen to go on a walking tour. 🙂

Cherry Garden

“…upon which hill is a pretty good Brick house with one apple Orchard: But called Cherry Garden…”

According to an entry in the online Philadelphia Encyclopaedia, William Penn’s intention for the town was for each plot to comprise at least half an acre, with the house placed right in the middle, so that “there may be ground on each side for Gardens or Orchards, or fields”. The entry continues:

A number of wealthy Philadelphians did create gardens in their large city lots, as well as at their country estates outside the original city limits, and many Philadelphians visited these gardens in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. […] The first early gardens fully accessible to the (paying) public in the city, however, were associated with entertainment and refreshment rather than science and education. These included the “Cherry Garden” in the area that later became known as Society Hill […]

John Fanning Watson’s (1830) “Annals of Philadelphia and Pennsylvania in Olden Time” mentions this explicitly:

“Society Hill”, a name once so prevalent for all the region south of Pine street, even down to the Swedes’ church, has been discontinued for the last sixty-eight or seventy-eight years. In olden time we used to read of “Cherry Garden on Society Hill”, the “Friends’ Meeting on Society Hill”, the “Theatre (in 1759) on Society Hill”, “George Wells’ place on Society Hill, near the Swedes’ church”, &c. The name, we take for granted, was derived from the “Free Society of Traders”, who originally owned all the land “from river to river, lying between Spruce and Pine streets”.

A History of The Pennsylvania Horticultural Society (1929) tells us a little more about the Cherry Garden:

“Cherry Garden” down on Society Hill (all the section south of Pine Street) was famous in its day as a place of recreation. It had large grounds, facing on Front Street opposite Shippen Street, occupied half the square and extended down to the river. There was a small one-story house where refreshments were sold. In 1756, it was advertised for sale as the property of Harrison. When it was at its height it was said to have had “an abundance of every shrubbery and greenhouse plant.”

The quote at the end was from Martin I. J. Griffin’s (1907) “Catholics and the American Revolution Vol.1” (p.330):

The Clifton family owned also “The Cherry Garden” on Society Hill described in Watson’s Annals [p. 494].”

However, the Clifton family ownership is from around the time of the American Revolution. Before that, the sale is listed in the Pennsylvania Gazette, 23rd September 1756 and 7th October 1756:

To be sold by the subscribers, living in Gloucester county, New Jersey, the following lots of land, situate at Cherry – garden, in Society Hill, in the city of Philadelphia, viz, one bank lot, fronting Water – street, thirty feet, and extending back to Front street ; and one water lot, fronting the said bank lot on the lower side of Water street, and extending into the river Delaware two hundred and fifty feet. For title, and terms of sales enquire of Samuel Harrison, and John Hinchman.

So it would seem that Cherry Garden was a substantial plot at the time of the letter, though with but a single-storey house selling refreshments to treasure hunters 😉 . Clearly this house was the place to which the letter refers. But where in Cherry Garden was it?

The House in Cherry Garden

In fact, John Fanning Watson’s account (p.494) tells us reasonably clearly where the house was:

“Cherry Garden,” down on Society Hill, in the parlance of its day, was a place of much fame as a place of recreation. It was a large garden fronting on Front street vis-a-vis to Shippen street, occupying half the square and extending down to the river. The small house of one story brick, in which the refreshments were sold, is now standing with its dead wall on the line of Front street. In 1756, it was advertised for sale as the property of Harrison, who advertised to sell off some of it in lots “on Front and Water streets to the river in Cherry Garden.” Colonel Morris spoke of it as he remembered it in the time of Clifton as its owner — said it had abundance of every shrubbery and green-house plant. See a picture of the house in my MS. Annals in the City Library, p. 282.

Furthermore, Watson adds elsewhere that:

There was once “the hill” near the “Cherry Garden,” inclining from the southeast corner of South and Front streets towards the river. The houses still standing along Front street in that neighbourhood have their yards one story higher than Front street.

Note that the original (and rather ‘raw’-feeling) 1830 edition of Watson’s book has very different illustrations, and many curiosities and oddities that seem to be absent from the later edition. But that doesn’t contain a copy of the drawing of the house in Front Street in Watson’s Annals, “p.282”.

So, it would seem that the trail leading to the drawing of the one-storey brick house in Front Street in Cherry Garden ends in Watson’s MS Annals in the Historical Society at the City Library. My best guess is that this contained the original full-length version of his Annals prepared for the Philadelphia Historical Society, that was subsequently printed in 1830 (though with fewer illustrations and some less important sections removed, etc). However, I don’t seem to be able to find that anywhere online. So this is where I’m blocked for the moment. 🙁

Therefore… could I please put out a request for some researcher better versed than me in Philadelphia research minutiae to please help out here? Are John Fanning Watson’s “MS Annals” (the ones in the Historical Society in the City Library, and to which he repeatedly refers to in his 1830 book) scanned and/or online anywhere? Thanks!

The Society Hill Treasure Map…

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Jenny Kile has recently turned up an interesting item on her blog: a 1716 letter describing the location of buried treasure in Philadelphia, originally uncovered by Historical Society of Pennsylvania historian Daniel Rolph in around 1996 or so.

According to her commenter Buckeye Bob, though Jenny probably found it in a 2016 Philly Voice article, it was 2008 when the details first came out in an HSP blog entry. Though the original page is still there, it has mysteriously lost the image of the treasure map letter it once proudly displayed.

But no longer! Thanks to the Internet magic of the Wayback Machine, I was able to find a 2012 grab of the post including the image, and so here it is (click on it to see a much larger scan):

So (of course) here’s my first pass at a transcript:

Society Hill Treasure Map Transcript

(The main peculiarity of the spelling is the use of ‘u’ where we would now use ‘w’.)

01 – D[ea]r
02 – brother. Having said to you in my 2 Letters all that was nesisare it now
03 – remains that I give you the proper directions which is as followeth, V[i]z that
04 – at the South End of the town of Philadelphia is a Gutt of water with a few –
05 – Planks Layd over it which the Inhabitants call a drau Bridge: a little to ye
06 – Southward of that is a Rising Ground called Society Hill: upon which hill is
07 – a pretty good Brick house with one apple Orchard: But called Cherry Garden
08 – Observe at the front of the S[ai]d house which fronts the west is a porch :-
09 – Measure exactly 45 foot from that Porch along the lane due South
10 – there you will find a Stone post in the ground if not moved which may
11 – be easily done by accident or perhaps by makeing a Neu fence : 3 foot
12 – or perhaps 4 foot west from the s[ai]d stone is a Chist 4 and a half foot long 2 foot
13 – broad and half foot and the same depth accordingly being about 6 foot from the
14 – bottom of the Chist to the surface of the Ground. It contains 15 hundred peases of
15 – Silver or peases of Eight. So called and 4 times the fill of my hat in Rials and
16 – Double rials otterways Bit and double bits: and further contains 250 quadruple pistole
17 – peaces Comonly Caled Double Double Loans: perhaps ther may be a feu more or
18 – les: for time would not alou of ane exact reaconing
19 – N B: if you wil not folou my my Advice and go there with the first opportunity
20 – I order you Imediatly to burn this direction and both my Leters and send me
21 – a particular act and direct for me Exactly according to my direction. But Be
22 – sure to put the Leters in the post office and trust not to your Whistling acquaintances
23 – for I expect your Imediat answer
24 – St Jago de la Vigo in Jamaica
25 – May 14 1716
26 – PS: I have in my 2 letters to you Re[……..] actions you can make posibly

(Please feel free to suggest corrections and improved interpolations, I shall be happy to update the above accordingly. Thanks to John Comegys, James Comegys, milongal and Greg Stachowski for their corrections and comments [which I have incorporated], much appreciated!)

Finding The Treasure…

The various landmarks mentioned in the letter do make historical sense, according to the Philly Voice article:

[…] Philadelphia historian John Fanning Watson, who died in 1860, referenced the drawbridge, Cherry Garden and a “precipitous and high bank” in Society Hill in his 19th century manuscripts detailing the city’s history, Rolph said. The drawbridge and creek running along Dock Street are included on old maps, but by the 1680s – some three decades before the letter was written – many brick houses were being constructed in the area.

“I get the impression it had to have been buried many years before,” Rolph said. “By 1716, it was built up along the docks and all down that area.”

Moreover, professional treasure hunter Dennis Parada of Clearfield PA claims to have identified the exact location where the chest would be: “at one of two locations along Second Street between Spruce and Pine streets”.

The key problem is that there are all sorts of legal issues concerning treasure hunting in Philadelphia, so nobody is sure who would own the treasure if it were to be found. And so there seems to be little appetite for digging anything up to have a look, a process that might well destroy much but gain little.

All the same, it’s a great story, right? 🙂

Geoff Bath’s “Maps, Mystery and Interpretation” and Oak Island…

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Though originally published in 1998 and 2003, and most recently published in three volumes in 2013-2014, “Maps, Mystery and Interpretation” is in reality a single (very large) book, the fruits of Geoff Bath’s vast sustained effort to till Oak Island’s unproductive historical soil.

The overall title broadly suggests its three constituent sections, in that Part 1 covers (possibly pirate) treasure maps (“Maps”); Part 2 examines the evidential haze surrounding the Oak Island “Money Pit” mystery (“Mystery”); while Part 3 attempts to put the myriad of pieces together to make sense of them all (“Interpretation”). Simples.

If only the Oak Island mystery itself were as straightforward…

Part 1: Maps

Here, Geoff presents all the “Kidd” maps that Hubert Palmer ended up with, and compares Howlett’s account of them with Wilkins’ account, as well as – and this is the good bit – lots of letters written and received by both Wilkins and Palmer.

I can’t be the only reader to find himself or herself surprised by Bath’s conclusion – that Wilkins essentially got it all just about right, while Howlett got a great deal of it wrong.

All the same, as far as reconstructing the modern history of the Palmer-Kidd maps goes, Geoff’s reasoning here seems very much on the money. I’d say his account gets far closer to what happened than even George Edmunds’ account (stripping both authors’ conclusions out of the picture first).

However, Bath gets himself in something of a tangle trying to make sense of the various maps Wilkins originated (both in Part 1 and in Part 3). Was Wilkins adapting maps or documents otherwise unseen, using them as templates for his own creations, or trolling his readers to help him identify mysterious islands? Too often Bath seems content to speculate in a way that paints Wilkins in an almost Svengali-like way, a kind of Andy Warhol of treasure maps.

In reality, I’m far from sure that Wilkins was any closer to historical clarity than we are now. Given that I can’t read more than a handful of pages of his “A Modern Treasure Hunter” without feeling nauseous (the fumes! the bad accents! the ghosts!), I just can’t see Wilkins as anything like a consistently reliable source, even about himself.

Yet one of the most specifically insightful things that emerges from Part One is Bath’s observation that it isn’t necessary for these maps to actually be Kidd’s for them to be independently genuine. That is, the set of maps’ whole association with Kidd might be something that was overlaid onto a (non-Kidd) set of maps: the supposed Kidd link might easily have been added to the mix as a way of “bigging up” someone else’s maps. If this is true (and you don’t have to believe that these are Oak Island maps for it to be so), many of the difficulties that arise when you try to link them to Kidd (e.g. dating, language, etc) disappear.

It’s still hellishly difficult to make sense of these maps, for sure, but Geoff is right to point out that Kidd may well turn out to be part of the problem here, rather than part of the solution or explanation. Something to think about, for certain.

Part 2: Mystery

In my opinion, Oak Island is a wretched, wretched subject, filled with all the slugs and snails of cipher mysteries and not the vaguest flicker of any of the good stuff. It’s a bleak, barren evidential landscape, filled with unconfirmed micro-features briefly noted by a long series of individual investigators, before being quickly razed from the face of the earth by gung-ho treasure hunters. There seems little genuine hope that any faint trace of anything historical or sensible still remains.

Putting the speculative sacred geometry and shapes picked on maps to one side, there are some (though not many) good things in Part Two I didn’t previously know about. Specifically, the idea that tunnels and features might have been dug aligned with the local magnetic compass at that time is quite cool, though obviously something that has been much discussed over the decades.

So I’m terribly sad to have to say that even a perceptive and diligent researcher such as Geoff Bath can make no real difference to this long-standing disaster area. His Part 2 is therefore little more than a Ozymandian monument to the effort and greed sunk in the pursuit of the Money Pit (not that a brass farthing or even so much as a period button has come of it to date).

Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away

Part 3: Interpretation

Having struggled through the unpromising desert of the previous part, my expectations as to what Part 3 might bring were fairly low. But as Bath works his way through his interpretation section (repeatedly railing against the pox of untestable hypotheses), something actually rather odd happens.

All of a sudden, he mentions the Venatores (a early 20th century treasure hunting group) and the Particulars (a set of treasure hunting documents collected together by the Venatores). As this enters the picture, it’s as if a curious wave ripples through the whole research fabric: that, contrary to what you might have thought from the two previous books, it’s all not about whether Wilkins was credible or incredible, or whether Hill Cutler was stone cold serious or laughing all the way to the Terminus Road Lloyds Bank in Eastbourne, but instead that there might actually be something behind it all.

That is to say, what emerges – though all too briefly – is a frisson of that wonderfully engaging secret history paranoia where you can just sense stuff going on behind the scenes but which you know you probably won’t ever gain access to.

In the end, Bath’s well-researched and well-written books didn’t manage to persuade me of the existence of a link between the various treasure maps and the Oak Island mystery (and that, indeed, is a hypothesis that would seem to be politically untestable) nor of any kind of geometric cartography plan driving it all. However, it did manage to convince me that the whole Money Pit enterprise might possibly be built not on a vast hole, but instead on a history whose fragmentary parts have been scattered on the winds, and yet which might possibly be reassembled in the future.

It probably won’t happen but… who can say?

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! 🙂

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!

Review: “Rebel Gold” By Warren Getler & Bob Brewer…

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Now here’s something that’s a bit unusual: “Rebel Gold” by Warren Getler and Bob Brewer (originally titled “Shadows of the Sentinel”) is a book about codes and buried treasure with basically no actual codes and pretty much zero treasure. Yet at the same time, there’s so much (alleged) secret American history and related odd stuff bubbling from nearly every page that I found it hard to mind very much.

At its core, the book is no more than a loose record of Bob Brewer’s treasure-huntin’ exploits in them thar woods, an’ yuh’d have to say he sure ain’t foun’ hisself a whole lot of gold. Yet the real gold he seems to have uncovered is the mostly-secret history of what are essentially the book’s real heroes (or antiheroes, depending on how you look at it) – the Knights of the Golden Circle (AKA the “KGC”).

The way I read it, the KGC was merely one of several haphazardly-run pro-slavery activist wings of the Confederacy in the American Civil War. The Wikipedia KGC page asserts that it somehow morphed into the “Order of American Knights” and then again in 1864 when it became “the Order of the Sons of Liberty”, but these could just as easily have been parallel wings, sharing a handful of key people.

What emerges from Brewer’s book is a rather deeper & broader conspiracy, with the KGC ending up with a number of concealed gold-stuffed stockpiles which its loyal descendants (including some in Brewer’s own family) apparently continue to guard even now. These modern-day sentinels stay loyal to the cause just in case the people of the South are ever to rise again and need financial supportin’ for their insurrection (and what with the price of gold bein’ at such a crazily high level, whose to say it wouldn’t be a help).

Overall, my favourite part of the book is Chapter 7, “Jesse James, KGC field commander“, which builds up a beautiful alternate history for Jesse James as a KGC operative, whose stealin’ was an innately political act – and that there were simultaneously two Jesse James (Jesse Robert James and his first cousin Jesse Woodson James), both of whom also had a brother called Frank, and all four of whom were part of the KGC. (Are you following all this? See me after class if it’s not crystal clear.)

And really, what goes for chapter 7 holds for the whole book, in that I can’t possibly evaluate the whole, ummm, veridicality of this mess (“Jesse James Was One Of His Names”, really?), but I do know that I thoroughly enjoyed the ride. In my opinion, it’s definitely a must-read for lovers of tangled conspiratorial Americana. Just don’t expect to use it to guide yuh metal detectorin’, hoss! 🙂

A Beautiful Infinity…

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There are colours in my eyes, history flickering and sputtering as a beautiful infinity reaches out to hold my bloodsoaked hand…

* * * * * *

The Brazilian girl’s plan is stone-cold in its vision, fractal in its detail, awesome in its thinking. Yes, the organizers have put the necessary overnight protection squad in place: but the two guards merely notice a curious mélange of hard-to-pin-down antique odours: spirit of hartshorn, hepatic air, green vitriol, all distinct yet merging awkwardly between one another, like jelly and ice cream in a child’s pudding bowl. They both feel the nausea slowly roll over them, but neither thinks to raise the alarm, as the aqua tofani weaves its dizzying, nauseous, near-fatal spell on them both. Of course, we don’t intend killing them: tonight’s sacred mission is one of life, not death.

Our filter masks firmly in place, we silently ease out of the concealed block behind the disabled toilets and past the sabotaged air-conditioning unit. The girl’s preparation has been good, for there is no klaxon, no lights, no alarm: following her confident lead, I guide the wheely bag carefully past the two tumbledown security-suit mannequins and onwards through the exhibition. Looking ahead, always ahead, we glide swiftly past countless Ouroubos-filled stands and up the wheelchair ramp to the locked glass plinth in the arena’s central raised area – yes, to the book. Or rather, to ‘The Book’.

She reaches into her pocket and pulls out the diamond-edged ring we made together over the shimmering orange dawn-lit fire on the mountainside: looking in her eyes, I take it and slide it quickly onto my middle finger. The girl – is she young, or old? Suddenly I can’t tell any more – nods, flicking her renegade, emptily-hungry eyes at me, and deftly touches my shoulder, her fingertip feeling for all the world like a butterfly landing and quickly gently launching itself away, far away into the curious half-light. On cue, I turn my attention to the security glass, and carefully use the hard-edged symbol of our union to etch its front face with four good-size concentric circles.

The hall is starting to fill, now: our small army of alchemists is emerging one by one from their hiding places behind occult bookstalls, beneath pagan stall covers and carefully-positioned wizard cloaks, each with a red or yellow hood and a surgical mask tightly fastened down, just as she had specified. As the last of the twelve completes the circle around us, I step sharply forward and punch the ring’s diamond tip right at the centre of the design. The glass buckles a little, yet doesn’t quite give way – No, I think, something is wrong, and for an instant a cloud of burnt cinnamon doubt swirls around me, enveloping me in the riptide of fears I’ve worked so hard to suppress these past three years.

Yet perhaps sensing my edginess, the alchemists start to clap and chant, and before long I feel their resolve coursing through my veins. The bull in my soul charges forward and I punch, punch, punch the toughened glass until it starts to yield to my attacks, and its etched central circle finally gives way. Impatiently, I widen the glassy gap with my bare hands just enough to remove the book and to raise it over my head in triumph, tersely spattering its centuries-rigid vellum cover with my blood as I do so. The alchemists swoop in too to hold it aloft and to turn it to The Page, that one, marvellous page we have been waiting to see all our lives.

I look over to the girl: she nods once again and I bring out the ceremonial firebowl from the bag. Adam – dear, ever-reliable Frater Adamus – deftly removes the page with his pocket knife, folds it to shape, fills it with regulus of antimony, and ties up its gathered top using aqua vitae-impregnated handmade blue twine from his workshop. We are all trembling now, for everyone (even Baresch) was right – the Philosophers’ Stone is indeed hidden inside The Book: yet this is neither a metaphorical truth nor a pharmacological truth, but instead a literal truth. For once you have – as we have, over so many decades – worked to decode its carefully layered and allusive visual symbolism, the Voynich’s pages form a map spiralling in on itself… all pointing to one place, the single slightly-thicker-than-average vellum herbal bifolio inside which the tiny fragments of Stone were sealed all those centuries ago. We, then, are its 21st century liberators, its alchemical revolutionary freedom front: all we have to do now is light the blue touchpaper, and see the long-promised fireworks. And this ceremony marks the end of alchemy’s epic struggle, the chequered flag at the finishing line of two millennia of The Work. My queen nods once more for me to step forward with my lit taper, so that we can all make the ultimate step – beyond History, beyond pain, beyond Time itself. And I do, but…

* * * * * *

There are colours in my eyes, history flickering and sputtering as a beautiful infinity reaches out to hold my bloodsoaked hand… In this moment, I don’t know if I’m living forever or dying forever, if the girl is really human or some selfish dark spirit that is guiding me I know not where. Am I releasing her or creating her? Is she part of me or am I part of her? A flash from the the burning vellum page suddenly lights up our faces and I lay down beside her on the floor, the alchemical king and queen finally together, just as the Ancients foretold. A fire alarm finally goes off, its sprinklers lurch into action with a indoor cloudburst, but it is all too late, far too late, the Stone is here, The Stone Is Here! For all the burning, twisting sensations, we know for certain that the Stone is merely giving us a taste of ultimate Death to deliver its promise of ultimate Life. Yet though the colours in its flames are more intense than ever now, so too is the agony: I turn to the girl and see the same things I’m feeling reflected in her sprinkler-soaked face, and as we hold each other tightly I know it is both the end and the beginning, and our eternal future together lies in and beyond the Stone…

* * * * * *

Why on earth, mused the firemen, policemen, and paramedics, would anyone have gone to the trouble of placing all those strangely-posed lifelike statues in the middle of the hall? And why was just a single page missing from the precious Voynich Manuscript, on a rare two-day loan to this alchemy conference? File it under ‘M’ for ‘mystery’…

“Decoding the lost symbols” mini-conference…

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Next Sunday (8th November 2009), $99 should get you into a one-day mini-conference in LA focusing on “hidden history, signs, symbols, and secrets”, hosted by Simon Cox, author of the brand new book “Decoding The Lost Symbol”…

OK, I’m sure you’ve rumbled the secret already: that it’s basically a one-day press launch for Simon Cox’s book, with a load of sort-of-relevant speakers doing their thing (and not a cipher mystery in sight, as far as I could see). I’m sure there are plenty of people who would enjoy this, but I personally won’t be red-eyeing over to the West Coast for this. (But please leave a comment here if you do happen to go.)

All of which does raise the question of whether I should organize my own proper cipher mysteries / secret histories conference (not to promote a book, but just to have some fun) and where. After all, there are plenty of nicely evocative places in Ye Quainte Olde Londonne Towne that I could hire for the day at less than staggering expense, and finding places to put speakers up should be straightforward. The kind of stuff I’d expect it to cover should come as no big surprise:-

  • The Voynich Manuscript
  • The Rohonc Codex
  • John Dee’s secret history (a perennial favourite!)
  • Rosicrucianism and Alchemy
  • Historical code-breaking – a practical guide
  • Armchair treasure-hunting / Treasure maps / The greatest (real) treasures never found
  • Panel: “Renaissance Symbolism – True or False?”
  • The Secret History of Renaissance Astrology
  • The Phaistos Disc (possibly)
  • (…and so on)

Would that be your idea of a perfect day out? Feel free to tell me what’s missing from the agenda!