Anyone who has seen the recent (2022) Netflix series “Vatican Girl: The Disappearance of Emanuela Orlandi” (I watched this over Christmas, it’s actually rather good) will know that the story it tells – of how, in 1983, 15-year-old “Vatican Girl” Emanuela Orlandi disappeared – is nothing short of a full-blown mystery.
Many decades later, her family’s search for answers yielded an unexpected result. A five-page document (allegedly stolen from a Vatican safe) was passed to Italian journalist Emiliano Fittipaldi: this itemised many expenses (totalling 483 million lira, or roughly 250,000 euros) incurred by the Holy See in supporting Emanuela Orlandi “through her life phases”. If (as seems likely) this is genuine, it would seem to imply that Orlandi’s disappearance was orchestrated, sustained, and covered up by the Vatican itself over the period from 1983 to 1997.
There are many different sides to this story, but I thought I’d take a closer look at its London connections…
London Connections
For once, there’s a helpful Reddit thread, that contains scans of the 1998 document itself (cover-pages of an as-yet unreleased 197-page dossier). This breaks the Vatican’s funding up into four distinct phases:
Jan 1983 to Jan 1985 (p.2)
This includes “Rette Vito e Alloggio 176 Chapman [actually Clapham] Road Londra
Also include “Secondo Trasferimento”
Feb 1985 to Feb 1988 (p.3)
This includes “6 Ellerdale Road London NW3 6NB”
Mar 1988 to Mar 1993 (p.4)
This mentioned “Clinica St Mary’s Hospital Campus Imperial College London Mint Wing South Wharf Road London W2 1NY”
It also mentioned “Dottoressa Leasly [actually Lesley] Regan Department of Obstetrics & Gynaecology”
This includes “Terzo trasferimento”
Apr 1993 to Jul 1997 (p.5)
“Attività generale e trasferimento presso Stato Città del Vaticano con relativo disbrigo pratiche finali”, i.e. “General activity and transfer to the Vatican City State with related final paperwork“.
Note that in the period 1988 to 1993, Dr Lesley Regan was a recently-qualified ob/gyn specialising in recurrent miscarriages (and is now head of ob/gyn there). However, when questioned by reporter Stefano Vergine from La Repubblica (translated here), Regan claimed to have no memory of Emanuela Orlandi.
The document also mentioned two London addresses linked to the Church, both of which La Repubblica’s intrepid reporter visited (though to no avail):
Casa Scalabrini (Youth Hostel of the Scalabrini Fathers) in Clapham Road, Stockwell
Without going into too much depth, I think it’s hard not to infer from this that Emanuela Orlandi was very probably in London from 1983 to 1997; and also that she may well have suffered from significant gynaecological problems (such as miscarriages). It also seems likely to me (from the “transfer to the Vatican City State” and “final paperwork” mentioned at the end) that Orlandi died in London.
In 2017, an anonymous tip-off to Laura Sgro (the Orlandi family’s lawyer) alleged that Emanuela’s body had been interred in an old grave in the Vatican’s Teutonic graveyard. Once this grave had been opened, it was reported in the press (a) that the remains of a roughly 30-year-old woman had been found, and later (b) that this was not Emanuela Orlandi. So the mystery continues.
Might Her Body Have Been Repatriated?
If Orlandi had died in London in June/July 1997 (as seems likely to me) but had been buried in a Vatican cemetery, I was a bit surprised that the question of how her body had been taken from A to B (or, rather, from L to V) hadn’t been raised. So I had a brief look at what administrative steps would needed to have been taken to allow this, in case these left any kind of archival paper-trail that could be followed today.
In England and Wales, any request to repatriate a body has to be made by completing a Form 104 and submitting it to the Coroner. The Coroner then decides whether the requested repatriation should be allowed, and (if it should) returns a Form 103 back to the Funeral Director to release the body.
Though the document mentions no address in the period 1993 to July 1997, it would seem reasonable to guess that she hadn’t travelled far from London. Hence it sounds as though we’re looking for any Form 104s that were submitted to a Coroner’s Office in London in June/July 1997 for repatriating a body of a roughly 29-year-old woman to Europe (probably but not definitely Italy or the Vatican). Surely we could call all the Coroner’s Offices in London (there aren’t actually that many) and just ask them, right?
Well… as always with anything to do with archives, I suspect the answer is a mix of yes and no.
Firstly, what happened in 1997 would have been covered by the 1988 Coroners Act, which was then superseded by the 2009 Coroners and Criminal Justice Act: the change most relevant to our search is that Coroner Districts were replaced by (larger) Coroner Areas (presumably to shut down a load of Coroner’s Courts to save money, right?) So since 1997 a great deal of administrative turbulence has happened, which isn’t a great starting point.
Secondly, Coroner’s records are only supposed to be retained for a maximum of fifteen years, after which 10% of those records are randomly sampled and passed on to the archives (which, as I understand it for London, would be the London Metropolitan Archives). So there’s a 90% data-loss at the archiving stage, which (for a historian) is a bit mad. But really, the point of archiving these records was to enable broader secondary studies, rather than for solving individual cold cases: keeping everything is expensive.
Thirdly, my understanding is that the main bulk of Coronial records relate to inquests: and if Emanuala Orlandi died in London, there’s no guarantee that she even had an inquest. Specifically, if she had (say) died in a hospital, she could very well have been given an MCCD (a “medical certificate of cause of death”) by a doctor without ever even being seen by a Coroner. So the June/July 1997 administrative interactions with whichever Coroner’s Office might well have been fleeting (if not indeed minimal).
All in all, there seems to be no shortage of reasons why we should be pessimistic about finding anything. And did I mention anything about confidentiality or data privacy? *sigh*
At the same time, Form 104 (also known as a “Removal Notice”, or sometimes the “Out of England” form) submissions must surely be a relative rarity: and these must surely be recorded by the Coroner’s Office, perhaps in a database (or maybe even a handwritten ledger back in 1998). So there has to be a good chance that this database or ledger is still being actively filled and can be checked, right? However, without specifically asking all the Coroner’s Offices how the handle this, I suspect there’s no obvious way of finding out.
However, what is also interesting (and this is the bit that I think may prove to be of most relevance here) is that part of Form 104 gets detached and sent to the Registrar of Births Deaths & Marriages, where the information on it is presumably recorded somewhere.
In the UK, freebmd is trying to input the BDM index data and make it freely available to everyone, but it’s a huge task, and they haven’t got anywhere near 1997 yet:
However, the raw GRO index data that freebmd’s heroic transcribers are inputting looks like this (I just entered DRAGONETTI as a random surname, and picked 1991 as a post-1988 example):
From the database field guide listed at the top of this page, each entry includes a reference to the associated District Registrar’s district (e.g. “Isle of Wight”), and the register / volume / page reference to look up there. Importantly, there’s no mention here of anything to do with Form 104, so presumably that’s an extra layer of information that would (I guess) be added to the register itself (or perhaps to a separate register entirely?) by that District Registrar.
Which points to the even more annoying insight that if we were looking for Form 104 submissions for June/July 1997, I’m guessing we would have to look through the London death registers directly (i.e. not by trawling through the GRO index). Well, unless the Registrar of Births Deaths & Marriages in that District just happened to maintain some kind of separate searchable index of Form 104 submissions. Which I guess is possible, but you’d again have to ask them directly if such a pixie-dust index exists.
Which is what I plan to do next (while crossing my fingers hard). Unless anyone here has a better idea?
David Morgan has very kindly sent me through a transcript (generated using ChatGPT/Glasp) of the recent ABC “Australian Story” episode on the Somerton Man. I thought it needed a post of its own, so here it is:
[00:09] I had no idea about the Somerton Man case. I’d never heard of it. It hadn’t entered my life in any way, I was just living my life. I had no idea that I held some kind of secret to solving this case or could aid in the effort to try and trace this back to a person. I knew that they would get the name one day, I knew that technology would catch up, but I did know that even though you’ve got a name, you’re not going to really understand who the man was.
[00:42] It’s fantastic to see that this man, an unknown man on a beach, now has a name, he now has a family. He now has a place. We’d love to find out, you know, what was he doing there. How did he die and why did he die? Was it natural? Was it suicide? Anything was possible, and in this case, I think that the most unexpected ending has happened and that is in itself another twist.
[01:19] I think there are some questions there that may never be solved, and the mystery will live on. MY NAME IS CHARLES On the first of December in 1948 the body was found by two trainee jockeys early in the morning that were out on the beach exercising horses. We went over to see if he was alright. And we got fairly close to him and couldn’t see him breathing and he was dead.
[02:02] A number of people did come and view the body but were unable to identify him. One of the intriguing things about the case is that all the clothes the man was wearing had the labels removed off them. So, this is what made some people think, ‘Oh maybe this guy is a spy.’. We are seeing that there was a tie with the name ‘T Keane’ on it.
[02:31] It was strange that nobody came forward to identify the body, which led to suggestions that he was from overseas, possibly from Europe, possibly from America. The doctor who carried out the post-mortem examination said the stomach was deeply congested with blood and in his opinion, death had been caused by heart failure due to poisoning.
[02:50] The Somerton Man had a really unique body. He was very well built, he was athletic, but he had these calf muscles that were really distinct, kind of like he was a ballet dancer. I think the biggest technical problem was the fact that he was thawing out, because he was, apart from being embalmed, he was deep frozen.
[03:10] The police knew that they wouldn’t be able to keep his body forever and that it would soon start to deteriorate. So they called in a taxidermist who made a plaster cast of his face. A group of locals paid for his headstone and his plot. And his headstone reads, “Here lies the unknown man”. A couple of months later they found a tiny scrolled up piece of paper in the man’s fob pocket.
[03:36] When they unrolled it, it said “Tamam Shud.” It was a mystery as to what this actually meant. It was a newspaper reporter who was well-read, and said it came from the ending of a book called The Rubaiyat written by Omar Khayyam. And it meant :the end”, or “the finish”. And this brought forward the theory that perhaps he had committed suicide.
[04:08] A man came forward to say that he had found a copy of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam and it did have the last page torn out. He handed it into police, he said it had been thrown into the back seat of his car six months earlier. So, on the back of the book were some strange letters that the police couldn’t make any sense of, and a phone number belonging to a young 27-year-old woman, who happened to live only five minutes’ walk away from where the man was found dead.
[04:43] The police paid the young nurse a visit, but she was very reluctant to talk to them. After that incident, basically they were stumped, there were no other leads. And it basically hit a brick wall, the whole case. Everyone working on the case or had an interest in the case always thought that something would come up tomorrow, but tomorrow never came.
[05:11] Podcast excerpt: Hello and welcome to the Somerton Man and today I wanted to look at the Somerton man – one of the most mysterious cold cases of all time. Over the decades, interest in this case has just continued to grow and grow to the point it’s actually considered one of Australia’s greatest unsolved mysteries.
[05:31] There are blog sites that have been set up from all over the world with amateur sleuths trying to work out who the guy is, why he was on Somerton beach and exactly how he died. I teach electronic engineering at Adelaide Uni. I just happened to be sitting in a laundrette watching my washing going around, and there was a stack of magazines beside me, and I picked one up and it was an article about the top 10 unsolved mysteries in Australia.
[06:03] And the second one was the Somerton Man case. The great thing about the maths we do is it’s not the pie-in-the-sky maths, it’s the type of maths that has great practical value… And so I thought, ‘Hey this would make a great project for my students’. And so I started building up a lot of history and background on the case.
[06:24] And I think that just sucked me in beccause I just got fascinated by it Professor Abbott has been investigating this case for so many years now and it’s completely consumed his whole being. He’s become known as one of the world leading experts on the case. So in trying to solve the case, it seemed to me the key was to find the young woman, Jo Thompson, that lived five minutes from where he died, with the hypothesis that she had been in a relationship with the Somerton Man.
[06:58] Unfortunately, she had died two years earlier, so I found out. That was a little frustrating because I was hoping that she would have some information about who this man was, and perhaps after so many years she would be prepared to say who it was, but I ended up contacting her grand-daughter, Rachel. The first time I heard about the Somerton Man was a letter that arrived, and it was sent by Professor Derek Abbott.
[07:32] It said, “I believe that you may have a link to someone involved in this case.” I developed a hypothesis that the Somerton Man and Jo Thompson knew each other. They had a child, Robin Thompson, and if this is the case then his daughter Rachel is the granddaughter of the Somerton Man. But his hypothesis seemed to be way too crazy.
[08:00] Too fanciful. It was like something that could have been made up in some fictional novel. So I went to Brisbane to meet Rachel, and we went out to dinner in a French restaurant, and talked about the case. He was also after my DNA. It’s probably the first request I’ve had for a man to do that. By then however, I was captivated by the case, and I wanted answers, so I was a willing victim.
[08:39] So the relationship moved pretty quickly. Yeah, there was some sort of spark there. Something just magically drew us together. By the following day we had decided we were going to get married. It all happened remarkably fast. So Derek and I got married in 2010 and we now have three beautiful children together.
[09:15] People would say that I had married her for her DNA, and we would laugh about it, so that is funny. Derek has essentially spent 24/7 researching the Somerton Man case. He, if it’s possible, became even more passionate about the whole case. So in 2015 we started work on extracting DNA from hairs that were found in the plaster cast of the Somerton Man, hoping this would be a way to identify him, even though these hairs are 70 years old.
[09:56] But we were only able to extract 2 per cent of the amount of DNA that we really need to form an identification. There’s an imperative to now go ahead and do an exhumation. We need it in much higher concentration levels, which we could do with the Somerton man’s teeth or his ear bone, for example. Now the man’s body will be exhumed by police with hopes modern DNA technology will be able to solve one of the state’s most enduring cold cases.
[10:29] The Somerton Man is not just a curiosity or a mystery to be solved. It’s somebody’s father, son, perhaps grandfather, uncle, brother. So when the state government announced that the exhumation was going ahead I think for some other people, they would see that as a cue for retirement. But not Derek. I think that increased his motivation to continue at even faster pace.
[10:53] I’m reasonably confident there will be enough DNA come out of this that we’ll get an identification. He thought initially that he would be allowed to participate, but that wasn’t to be. After the exhumation, everything went silent. The police kept very tight-lipped about their processes and Derek got a little restless and he went back to his three hairs that he’d extracted in 2017 and started working again.
[11:22] He was driven to find out who the man was. The professor definitely wanted to be first over the finishing line of cracking the case. So I’d been communicating with Colleen Fitzpatrick, who is the world expert in forensic genealogy from America and like me, she was totally fascinated by the Somerton Man case I asked her if she would assist.
[11:53] So here’s a closeup of the bust and can you see all these little hairs? Yes. That’s the Somerton Man’s hair. So Colleen’s expertise and she’s a pioneer in this, is getting DNA, and from that DNA finding distant cousins. There are millions of people today who voluntarily put their DNA on these family tree-type DNA sites.
[12:22] Ever wanted to explore your family tree, learn more about your ancestry or identify your ethnic background. First take a DNA test and download your results as a DNA data file. far as unidentified human remains, violent crimes, in other words, forensic cases, it’s really been a game-changer, the first new tool really in about 30 years in human identification.
[12:48]) It’s very powerful and it’s been very successful. Around this time, DNA technology began to improve significantly. Derek joined forces with Colleen, and they began to get some results. Right off the bat, it’s sort of like a miracle happened, we passed the first test. We got the good data out of the 75-year-old hair.
[13:10] Great! Two million DNA markers fell out. And it was at that point we knew that was more than enough to identify the Somerton Man. It was in a good shape to upload to those genealogy data bases for the next step, the next genealogy step. So when we first uploaded the Somerton Man’s DNA onto a genealogical website, the very top match we got was a gentleman in Victoria by the name of Jack Hargreaves, whose DNA was already there on the system.
[13:45] So, blue shows the area of significant matching, and this is huge here on chromosome 22. And so what we did is we built out Jack Hargreaves family tree. And at one stage we had as many as 4,000 people on the tree, so which one is it? It felt like I was working on a big Sudoku puzzle, moving all these relatives around until I got it.
[14:11] We looked for people with no date of death on that tree. There was one that stood out, because A: he was male, B: had roughly the right age range, and C was very closely connected to the Keane family, and as we know, the Somerton Man had the name Keane on his tie. When I saw the name Keane, that’s when my hair caught fire.
[14:36] That’s when I really knew we were on the offensive. We were going to get it because that wasn’t a coincidence. And so this turned out to be a chap called Charles Webb, who had no date of death details. Yeah, so he was born Carl Webb but he only went by the name Charles Webb. It seemed this chap had just gone off the radar after 1947.
[15:01] This could be our man, but we had no evidence, it was just a guy on a tree with no date of death. And we set out to either prove or eliminate him as being the Somerton Man And to prove it, what we had to do was see who his mother was, then tunnel down the family tree just on the mother’s side only, and find somebody alive today.
[15:25] And see if that DNA matches or not. And that turned out to be somebody in Victoria by the name of Antero. I got a call from Professor Abbott, who wanted to know if I could help do some research and do DNA test. I hadn’t even heard of the story before. And it was like, ‘Hang on a minute, is this a scam?’. It’s not every day you get someone out of the blue calling you up and wanting to help with some unidentified body or wants your DNA.
[15:54] But did some research, made sure he was who he said he was. So I volunteered to do that and did the test, sent it away. I’ve always been interested in family history, but had no idea that there was a missing person there. So when Antero’s DNA came through and it was a match to the Somerton Man, it was at this point we knew that Charles Webb was the Somerton Man and we’d finally cracked it.
[16:24] So there was a great feeling of elation, dampened by being totally exhausted at this stage. I was taken aback but was excited as well. There’s a great, great discovery. You know, I’d played my little part in working out that great mystery, it was satisfying. There’s Charles there. So, he’s my first cousin, three times removed.
[16:50] And his mother, which is Eliza Emelia Morris, her older sister is my great-great grandmother. And there’s me down the bottom. So Colleen and I decided right at that point, this was the time to make an announcement people have been hanging on for 70 years to know the answers, I didn’t see any reason to delay.
[17:15] I just wanted to get it out there. They were determined, to quote Derek, to beat the cops. And they were a bit concerned of how the news would be received as well. The police gave no deadlines on when we could expect a result. There was just nothing, no news. Now an Adelaide researcher claims to have made a major breakthrough, uncovering the identity of the infamous Somerton Man found on a beach.
[17:40] Now a man who has dedicated his adult life to investigating the case thinks DNA has provided the answer. It’s been a marathon working on this, over the last year particularly. It was mind-blowing. It was, ‘Wow, we’ve actually got a name.’ And it was a surreal moment. It took a long while to sink in that it’s not the Somerton Man’s story now, but the Charles Webb story.
[18:03] I’m not sure we’ll ever be absolutely certain, because what we would do in a forensic context normally is take a deceased DNA and compare that directly with something we know belong to them a toothbrush, a hairbrush, etcetera, DNA from that item. We haven’t got that here. As a secondary measure, we could compare the deceased DNA to a very close family member, you know, parents, children.
[18:25] Again, we don’t have that. So my concern is that we may never be able to categorically say that we know this person’s identity. I’m not going to say I believe it until such time as the police results and the forensic results that were done at the autopsy come back and actually confirm it, which I think they possibly will.
[18:51] Police who exhumed the Somerton Man’s remains last year are cautiously optimistic the finding is in fact a breakthrough. I am 100 per cent convinced that we have the right guy. Charles Webb is the Somerton Man. PROFESSOR DEREK ABBOTT, ADELAIDE UNIVERSITY: It turns out he wasn’t a spy, he wasn’t a ballet dancer.
[19:13] And all those crazy theories on the internet all came to nothing. So this is Rachel’s DNA compared with the Somerton Man. Down at the bottom it says ‘no shared DNA segments found.’ So, that was a flop. So we’re totally able to eliminate that hypothesis that Rachel is the granddaughter of the Somerton Man.
[19:44] The hypothesis turned out to be wrong. So, when Derek said that Mr Somerton wasn’t my grandfather, as a joke I said to him, ‘How long before you serve the divorce papers on me?’ Because the media had made a comment some years back Derek only married me for my DNA. So it’s probably somewhere around here. We told the children that Mr S as I’ve always called the Somerton Man was called Charles Webb and that he’s not related to us.
[20:18] But the Somerton Man will always form part of our family and our narrative. It’s the reason that we met, Derek and I. It brought us together. It’s been like a journey for us, together, I guess. Derek: George, I guess the mystery’s not over is it? We don’t know much abut Charles Webb, why he was here. And then not wanting to just rest there, we also then were able to find other living descendants.
[20:44] So one of the people I contacted was Stuart Webb. I’d never heard of the Somerton Man case I think Derek Abbott found me because I’d done some family tree research of my own, because my grandmother was very into the family tree or genealogy. It certainly seemed very strange to be part of this larger mystery.
[21:07] I’m kind of a regular guy, I go to work. When Derek Abbott asked me to do a DNA test, I wasn’t really crazy about the idea. I wanted to think about it a little bit further, so I put it out to my family. If anybody else would be prepared to do the DNA test? And I put my hand up straight away and said, ‘yeah, I’ll have a crack’… And everything from that point just seems to have steamrolled and rolled on and on and it’s getting bigger and bigger as we keep going.
[21:37] So I’ve got a result for you. Yes. Are you ready for this? Drumroll…So you are a great, great niece of Charles Webb So I got my DNA results and…it was happiness, it was joy. But there was also some sadness about this forgotten family member You are 396 centimorgans, so you’re right in the middle of the range, right? Awesome.
[22:12] This was a person, he wasn’t just a media hit for a little while and unsolved mystery. He was our family He was born in 1905 in Footscray, Victoria but it seems that he grew up in Springvale, in the family bakery and became an electrical instrument maker. He was one of six siblings. It’s reported in the newspapers at the time that he played community football and so this could explain his good calves and good physique generally.
[22:50] And there’s so much more we don’t know. Here’s a family photo album from pa with all the mystery inside. Check it out… I started to look back through the family history and that particular wing I’ve been able to find the first photo of Charles when he was alive, to my knowledge. Nana’s actually written on this photo and named all the people.
[23:14] So you’ve got grandma, grandpa, Charlie who’s the Somerton Man, and Roy. So you can actually see them quite distinctly. It’s amazing. Yeah. What a find. There’s also a larger family gathering with all of the Webb family as it was back then. A fantastic family day, they’re all smiling, Charles in particular is playing some kind of prank on who we think is Gerald Keane.
[23:42] I wonder where that was? I don’t know. It looks to be somewhere rural; it looks like they’re having fun. So when I first saw that, I thought, wow, this is fantastic. This is a real breakthrough. And this photo is basically taken 20 years before he died. So we’re seeing him considerably younger than the autopsy photo we’re used to looking at.
[24:07] It’s quite incredible when you look at these photos and this guy obviously went missing, and nobody really came forward. The fact that Charles Webb wasn’t reported missing, I find that sad in itself. And for no-one to reach out and find out where he was or what had happened, it’s quite heartbreaking So Uncle Harry, growing up, was there any discussion? Did you hear anything about one of the relatives going missing? No, no, no.
[24:41] There’s no recollection of that. Why didn’t any of the siblings try and find out where he went? Did they know that he’d gone to Adelaide and never came back? Or did he just go off and no-one knew where, where he was? In the end when we look at the whole situation of the Somerton Man, it does appear to be a sad story.
[25:05] In the period leading up to his death, his father died, his mum died. His brother Roy, who he seems to be close with, died. He split up with his wife as well. Charles was married to Dorothy Robertson in, I think, 1941. They didn’t have a very easy marriage… Our information comes from Dorothy’s divorce decree filed several years later.
[25:31] Dorothy described Charles as violent, threatening, moody. Not at all a happy person. He didn’t have any friends and he would be in bed by 7pm. Turns out that Charles loved to write poetry and his favourite subject that he would write about was death. This is interesting, because we know that just before Charles died, he’d discarded a copy of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, which is poetry about death.
[25:59] It all fits together. One day she came home and the whole house smelled like ether. She found him soaking wet in bed, and he said he had swallowed 50 phenobarbital tablets. This very much sounds like Charles was attempting suicide. This story turns out that it’s not some wild spy drama. It’s really a sad, tragic domestic situation.
[26:29] Eventually he moved out in April of 1947, and we don’t know what happened after that. And we find him dead on a beach in 1948 in Adelaide. So what has he been doing in that intervening year? Who knows. And why Adelaide, why did he pick Adelaide? I think Charles Webb was very broken mentally. Something had happened in his life, and he wanted just to anaesthetise himself.
[27:02] It does seem to me that some form of suicide does seem to be likely, which is what the police always suspected all along, right from the beginning I think there’s no doubt that he committed suicide. If he planned it all, he certainly planned it in a way that it would leave a great, confusing issue behind, which would bamboozle people for years.
[27:28] Imagine, this guy has been sitting there for 70 odd years, no-one knew who he was. You’re related to one of the great mysteries of Australia and indeed the world. I was a bit excited to find out all I could about the Somerton Man, now that I knew who it was and my small piece in the puzzle. I’m sure that they’ll find a few more answers to those missing questions.
[27:51] But maybe eventually down the track, probably be a few unanswered questions that we just have to live with. The person that could supply all these answers that we all would like to know is dead. He’s taking it to the grave. In the end, there was no fairytale ending, but it’s been really heart-warming to learn that the family that may not have missed him when he went missing and when he died, are now reclaiming him.
[28:20]) It’s really the start of the mystery, not the end. He died alone. He’d been buried for a long time in a cemetery without a name. Whether he’s buried again at Somerton or whether the family has other ideas, it’s just really nice that he’s got a name. So, in the playroom, we have two portraits. One is my grandmother, Jo Thomson and the other one is what Charles Webb may have looked like.
[29:12] I do find them quite disturbing. And now that I know that I’m not related, I would very much like to move those paintings on and rehome them. I would quite like to donate them to a charity. I would like to get rid of those paintings. South Australia police says further DNA work is required to positively identify the Somerton Man and that the matter “will ultimately be determined by the Coroner”.
Commenter John Sanders is convinced that the man at the right-hand-edge of the Webb family photo is Leslie William Scott, husband of Carl Webb’s sister Gladys May. Here are some notes on Mr and Mrs L. W. Scott…
Leslie William Scott
Leslie William Scott was born in 1895 to Samuel William Scott (b. 1869 Gympie, Queensland, died March 1939) and Mary Elizabeth West (1870-1950): Samuel was survived by Leslie and three other sons (“Mr. Lindsay Scott, who is attached to the railway staff and is stationed at Maffra; Mr. Walter Scott, who is a member of the Australian navy, and is stationed at the Flinders Naval Base; and Mr. Pat Scott [VX123596], of Camperdown“) and three daughters (“Mrs. F. Grayland and Mrs. M. Murnane (Terang) and Mrs. C. Bateman (Bostock’s Creek)“.
He worked for 4½ years as an apprentice printer for his father (proprietor of the Camperdown “Herald”), before heading off to fight in WWI. From his AIF records (at the NAA), he was 5 feet 11 inches, 10 st 2 lbs, 32 inch chest, fair complexion, grey eyes, fair hair, Presbyterian, and had a scar below his right knee. However, a war wound at Gallipoli in 1915 led to the amputation of his left hand, causing him to return to Australia. (An initial news report saying that he had had an arm amputated was incorrect.)
Having gained a “[Certificate] of Competency under section 171 of the Local Government Act 1915 (No.2686)” (p.863), and a brief stint as secretary to Winchelsea Shire Council, he became assistant town clerk at Essendon in 1921. From there he became Essendon’s deputy town clerk by 1929, and then – don’t gasp too hard – Essendon town clerk in 1940.
Leslie Scott lived at 15 Coats Street, Moonee Ponds (telephone FV7743), which is where his parents-in-law were living when Richard August Webb died in 1939; and also at 9 Peterleigh Grove, Essendon. He died on 9th September 1971 [Thanks P!]. I’ve been unable to find any photographs of him in Trove (or elsewhere).
Gladys May Scott (nee Webb)
Gladys May Webb was born in Prahran in 1897, and (according to The Age) married Leslie William Scott on 4th July 1918 at the Presbyterian Church, Camperdown.
Though Trove has many mentions of her (as honorary secretary of this, that or the other society in Essendon), she only seems to appear in a single photograph (from 1946), with the caption “Mrs Fraser [the wife of Cr. J. W. S. Fraser, Mayor of Essendon] is seen greeting Mrs L. W. Scott [on the right]“:
She died on 03 July 1955 at “her residence, 9 Peterleigh Grove, Essendon”: and in 1958 it was solicitors trying to trace Gladys’ missing brother who believed that Carl Webb might have gone to Cottesloe.
The Family Photo
Once again, here’s the family photo:
John Sanders is adamant that the man on the far right is Leslie William Scott: he certainly looks tall enough (to be Scott’s height of 5′ 11″), and does appear to be covering up his left hand area:
Is that him? And is his wife Gladys May in the family photo as well?
Other People
On the other side of the photo, there’s another man who looks a dead ringer for the guy on the right. So I do wonder whether this might be one of Leslie William Scott’s three brothers (my best guess would be that this is Lindsay Scott whose WWI physical description is practically identical to Leslie William Scott’s, but I have no actual evidence to back this up):
I also wonder whether the older couple just next to this man might be Samuel William Scott and his wife Mary Elizabeth West (i.e. the lady with the mysterious “Thing” hand on her shoulder):
(Actually, I’m pretty sure the “Thing” hand is just an optical illusion, formed of the man’s hunched up left knee / dark trousers and the right hand of the lady sitting beside her, who similarly has her left hand on the shoulder of the lady on her other side. And might this possibly be a Scott sister?)
I wonder if there are more photographs out there to be had… any more thoughts on this?
Over at voynich.ninja, there’s an interesting recent thread on the (in-)homogeneity of Voynichese, i.e. how consistent (or inconsistent) with itself the Voynich Manuscript’s text is (either locally or globally). Given that I have been working on Q20 recently, I thought it might be interesting to take a brief look at that quire through this particular lens.
In Search of a Problem Statement
One intriguing side of Voynichese is that even though it exhibits high-level consistency (e.g. the continuous script, plus the well-known differences between Currier A pages and Currier B pages), medium-level consistency (e.g. thematic-looking sections such as Q13, Q20, Herbal-A, Herbal-B etc), and even bifolio-level consistency (more on this below), there are open questions about the apparent lack of low-level consistency.
In particular, Voynichese ‘words’ (which have been the subject of countless studies and analyses) present many apparent local inconsistencies. As Torsten Timm pointed out in the voynich.ninja thread referenced above, words that are extremely common on one page of a section can be completely absent from the next. And, awkwardly, this is sometimes even true for pages that are the recto and verso sides of the same folio.
Even though there are countless ways to airily explain away these kinds of inconsistencies (change of subject matter, change of source structure, change of underlying plaintext language, change of local cipher key, etc), all too often I think these are invoked more as a research excuse for not actually going down the rabbit hole. (And I for one am bored stiff of such research excuses.)
So, before we start reaching gleefully for such cop-out answers, we need to first properly lock down what the core low-level consistency problem actually is. Basically, what specific behaviours can we point to that indicate that Voynichese has a problem here?
Captain “ed”
It was WWII codebreaker Captain Prescott Currier himself who pointed out nearly fifty years ago that you could usually tell Currier A pages from Currier B pages simply by looking at the proportion of ‘ed’ glyph pairs on that page. (Currier A pages have almost none, Currier B pages normally have loads.)
Personally, I’d add some caveats, though:
Even though it might be tempting to think of “ed” as a bigram (i.e. a single token), it seems far more likely to be a contact boundary between an “e”-family token (i.e. e/ee/eee) and a “d” glyph.
To me, there often seems to be something funny going on with qokedy / qokeedy / etc that isn’t really captured by just looking for “ed”
Helpfully, you can use voynichese.com’s layer feature to bring to life the variation in Voynichese words containing “ed”, e.g. this query for lots of different subgroups of “ed” words. Even though Herbal A pages have basically no ed pairs at all, the ed’s nothing short of explode at the very start of Q13:
The first three pages of Q20 are very nearly as colourful:
For ed, it seems to be the case that recto and folio pages have a similar kind of ed-density: for example, if you compare f107r/f107v with f108r/f108v, you can see clearly that the two halves of each folio seem quite similar:
The f111r/f111v pair seems to buck this trend slightly, insofar as f111v (on the right) seems somewhat less ed-dense than its recto side f111r (on the left):
While I’m here, I’d note that f116r (the last proper Voynichese page of Q20) seems to have a structure break halfway down, which would be consistent with an explicit and/or a colophon placed at the end of a chapter / book:
There’s also the question of whether the two folios making up each bifolio appear ed-consistent. I’d say that this appears true for most Q20 bifolios (e.g. f103 and the top half of f116r, f104-f115, f105-f114, f106-f113) but certainly not for others (e.g. f107-f112 and f108-f111). It’s very hard to be definitive about this.
Finally, I’d also note that while Quire 8’s f58r/f58v (with their starred paragraphs) do have some ed-words, their ed-fractions are extremely low, which would make classifying them as “pure” Currier B difficult:
Torsten Timm’s “in”
Torsten Timm has similarly looked at what the usage of the Voynichese glyph pair “in” tells us. Of my own set of voynichese.com experiments, the one that seemed to me to be the most interesting was comparing “iin” with “[anything else]in”.
For example, even though iin dominates [^i]in for most of the Voynich Manuscript, the first folio of Q13 has almost no “iin”s in it at all:
Folio f111 is also a little bit odd, in that its verso side has many more [^i]in words:
“ho”-words Way
As with Currier’s “ed”, “ho” is very much a contact locus between two families of glyphs: on the left, you have ch/sh/ckh/cth/cph/cfh, while on the right you have or/ol/ok/ot/op/of etc. As such, it looks like a useful way of exploring for a group of glyph boundaries, but this does need to be carefully qualified.
If we visually group this ho-transition (via voynichese.com) in terms of the origin of the “h”, we get a query that looks like this. This reveals that most ho instances are in fact “cho” (dark blue). However, the f93r/f93v folio does look particularly unusual in this respect:
The final two paragraphs of f116r are also unusual, this time for their almost complete lack of ho-words:
From the preceding sections, I’d say that the overwhelming impression I get is that pages within a folio (and indeed pages within a bifolio, though to a slightly lesser extent) are actually reasonably consistent with each other, and with relatively few counter-examples.
Unsurprisingly, this is also what we see if we simply merge the three ed / in / ho queries into a single voynichese.com query. Here, we can easily pick out the dishonourable exceptions, such as f111 (where f111r is dominated by “ed” [blue], yet where f111v is dominated by “in” [red]):
If we instead highlight cho and sho separately, what emerges is that, unlike the rest of Q20, the f106-f113 bifolio has a surprisingly high proportion of sho-words (in yellow):
I could go on, but I think my visual argument here has pretty much run its course.
Thoughts, Nick?
Even though Torsten Timm used ed / in / ho as part of his argument concluding that Voynichese pages are independent of each other, I’m not sure I fully accept his conclusions. (He’s certainly right about words, but the details and ramifications of that are for another post entirely.)
For me, the behaviour of ed / in / ho seems to suggest something arguably even more unsettling: which is that there seems to be consistency at the bifolio level.
And so it seems that we’re facing a BAAFU (“Bifolio As A Functional Unit”) scenario here. Which is arguably even more mysterious than Currier’s LAAFU (“Line As A Functional Unit”), wouldn’t you agree?
In a recent post, I started trying to list out Q20 order-related microtheories, but got somewhat sidetracked by the microtheory that f58 (with its ‘Scribe 3’ starred paragraphs) may have preceded Q20 (which, for the most part, is also made up of ‘Scribe 3’ starred paragraphs). However, this whole idea is closely linked to the whole issue of what happened to Q8 (which f58 is part of) and Q14: and even though I had covered this issue before, I thought it was well worth revisiting.
The “ij” Marginalia
Back in 2009, I floated the idea that the mark at the bottom of f57v might have been an “ij”, probably ineptly added by an early Voynich owner who believed (from the nesting order of the bifolios back then) that this marked the start of the second ‘book’ (or chapter). (“ij” is an entirely conventional early modern Latin way of handwriting “2”).
This was actually part of a larger discussion of Q8 which I tried to put together to make sense of Q8’s curious foliation – essentially, why was there such a large folio numbering gap between f58 and f65? My suggestion was that not only had Q8’s bifolios been flipped around (i.e. the original folio order was f65-f66-x-x-x-x-x-x-f57-f58), but the large wodge of pages missing from the middle could well have been the nine-rosette folio (but folded down).
And before you start complaining that the nine-rosette page doesn’t have folio numbers matching this, my idea was that the foldout page had already been pulled out and rebound along a different fold, leaving a damaged vellum residue at the centre of Q8 that the foliator numbered around (just in case it later got bound back into its correct place).
However, I now suspect that even that binding was an ‘imposition’ (in the literal sense of the word), and that the original nesting order had been (say) f65-f66-f57-f58, before the bifolios were reversed and the nine-rosette page (Scribes 2 & 4) was inserted into their centre. So I would date the “ij” marginalia to the mid-fifteenth century, prior to the bifolios being reversed, and also to before the nine-rosette foldout was (mis-)bound into Quire 8.
But because f57r (the flip side of f57v) is a Herbal-B page, and f57v still faces f58r (with the paragraph stars), it seems very likely to me that these two folios faced each other in Quire 8’s original (unbound) gathering.
This would make the first few pages of Q20:
f57v (with the circular diagram [possibly a nocturnal, e.g. here, here and here])
(oh, plus the “ij” marginalia at the bottom)
f58r (big paragraph stars, plus a missing initial capital)
f58v (more starred paragraphs)
Quire 20 (though in an as-yet unknown bifolio ordering).
Chicken Scratches (Again)
Intriguingly, if you insert the nine-rosette page into the centre of Q8 in its original folding style, you end up putting the two pages with “chicken scratches” on right next to each other, which would seem to strongly support this whole idea. Yet because the chicken scratches line up horizontally but not vertically, I think we can reasonably infer that the nine-rosette page was only loosely bound in at this stage. Finally, because the Q14 quire number is on the correct page relative to Q14’s rebinding (i.e. not its original binding), it would seem to imply (as I described for Q13 in Curse, 2006) that these quire numbers were added after several binding iterations.
Hence the Q8 timeline would appear to be something like this:
f65-f66-f57-f58 (original order)
“ij” marginalia added
Q8 Bifolios reversed, nine-rosette foldout inserted but only loosely bound in
Chicken scratch marginalia added
Nine-rosette foldout ripped along original fold, removed from Q8, but vellum residue left in place
Nine-rosette foldout refolded along different fold, quire 14 number added, bound further along
Foliation added, folio numbers 59-64 skipped to work around the nine-rosette vellum residue
f85r2 Contact Transfer (?)
There is also the matter of what seems to be a paint contact transfer on f85r2.
Given what seems to be the connections between Q8 and Q14, you’d loosely expect this to have come from a Q8 herbal page: but this doesn’t seem to be the case. I then wondered whether this had been transferred across from the red-brown paint at the bottom of f87r (a close neighbour in the final binding order, codicologically speaking). However, unless the bottom edge of f87r has been extremely heavily trimmed, the curve isn’t really right:
Looking elsewhere in the manuscript, this could possibly have instead come from the bottom outside corner of f43r (but, to be honest, this curve doesn’t seem to match either):
Or from the bottom outside corner of f39r (but, again, the curve doesn’t seem to quite match):
So… where did it come from? This remains a bit of a mystery to me (and I’ve marched through all the pages of my Yale facsimile several times), but perhaps someone else will have a better insight into what happened here. I hope so!
f86v6 Contact Transfer (?)
There’s also a curious mark (that looks like a contact transfer) near the top right of f86v6 which I also currently have no explanation for:
In a previous post, I wondered whether the young blonde guy that the family identified (as part of a recent ABC documentary) was indeed Carl Webb, or whether he might instead have been Carl Webb’s nephew Charles Richard Webb. It all comes down to a cluster of family photos that appears to have been taken on the same day – but what day was that?
“Webbs”
The first photo gives us four names to work with:
Here, Grandpa and Grandma are without any doubt Richard August Webb (b. 1866 Hamburg, d. 2 April 1939) and his wife Eliza Amelia Webb (nee Grace) (1870-1946), while Roy is their son Roy Webb (b. 1904). (Which Charlie the young guy tagged as “Charlie” is is the question here.) We can therefore at least be sure that this photo was taken before 2 April 1939.
Putting Carl and Roy to one side, the list of people we might therefore reasonably expect to find in a Webb family photo in the period (say) 1925 to 1939 would include:
Russell Richard Webb (registered 1893, d. 1949)
Partner: Linda Webb (b. 1888, d. 1966)
Son: Douglas Russell McCluskey (b. 1911, d. 1991)
Married Amy Sarah Harriet Tomkinson in 1917 (b. 1895, d. 2 Jun 1929 “after a long illness”)
Son Charles Richard Webb (b. 1918)
Daughter Doris Amy Webb (b. 1919) who married Norman John Tomkinson (1917-2002) in 1941
Son Norman Fred[e]rick Webb (b. 1921, d. 2008)
Daughter Ethel Elizabeth Webb (b. 1926, d. 2008) – Married Holland
Freda Grace Webb (born 1896, died 1964).
Married Gerald Thomas Keane (b. 1889, d. 1960) in 1915.
Daughter Gwen[doline] M. Keane (b. ~1919, d. ~1994) (married Dickinson)
Gladys May Webb (registered 1897), died 1955.
Married Leslie William Scott (b. 1895, d. 1961) in 1933 or earlier.
Doris Maude (‘Dot’) Webb, born 22 May 1901, died 1956.
Married Daniel William Martin (b. 1894, d. 1956)
Daughter: Norma Mary Martin (later Cass), b. 1925
External Photos
As a starting point, I wondered whether WWII enlistment photographs for some of the men might be a possible help. For example, here’s Jack Keane:
Norman Fredrick Webb’s service record (157584) has not yet been digitised, alas (so no photo here).
Norman John Tomkinson’s 3-page service record (V55745) is online here (but no photo) – he was a “Cannister Maker”, and was still “single” (aged 22) in 1940, with his father as next of kin. I think there’s a later and larger (but as yet undigitised) file here.
Douglas Russell McCluskey’s service record (V500465) is online here – he was a “munitions worker”, with his mother Linda as next of kin.
Here’s Daniel William Martin and Doris Maude (Webb) with (presumably) their young daughter Norma Mary, as per a photo uploaded to the Cass Martin family tree area of MyHeritage, which (given that Norma Mary was born in 1925), would seem to date to around 1927 or 1928:
The Cass family tree also has a nice clear (but undated) photo of Doris Maude on her own:
Similarly, here’s Norma Mary Martin (aged about 17) and her mother Doris Martin (on the right) in 1942:
There are almost certainly other photos to be had out there, but these were all I was able to find.
The Big Photo
So, we have nineteen people in the big photo, fifteen of whom we are unsure of.
Given that we have some nice clear photos of Doris Maude Martin and her husband and daughter, can we identify them as a family group here? The obvious three candidates are just to the left (as we look at it) of “Charlie” at the back:
The man at the back here looks a lot to me like (a slightly older) Daniel William Martin, with his wife Doris Maude Martin right in front of her. The little girl sitting beside Doris would then very probably be Norma Mary Martin. If this is correct, I think we might then reasonably guess Norma Mary’s age as about five, which would date this photo to around 1930. However, I’d caution that this is still not 100% certain. 🙁
So, Which Charlie is Charlie?
If the photo is from around 1930, then “Charlie” simply couldn’t be Carl Webb’s nephew Charles Richard Webb (b. 1918) – he might conceivably pass for a large sixteen-year-old, but probably not a large twelve-year-old. So I think it does seem fairly likely that the Webb family has identified a picture of Carl Webb, as they thought.
…Unless you know better?
Update (29/12/2022)
Commenter Bob Nowak points out that he suggested (in a 27/12/2022 comment here) that these three were indeed the Martins (which I somehow managed to miss):
I think (as Poppins stated earlier) the tot in the front row with her hands on her head is the daughter of Daniel and Doris Martin, Norma Mary, born 1925, sitting next to her mum Doris Maude (with her husband Daniel behind)
Wasn’t it confirmed by the family that Norma was in the family photo …. I thought that was posted here a while back. Born November 1925, she looks about 3 in the photo, taken in the Summer of ’28/’29 one would think. Maybe the question is not how high are Roy and Charlie, but how high is the little tot Norma, to date the photograph.
For me, 2022 has been a long (and at times grueling) twelve months, as I’m sure it has been for many others. But even if (like me) you felt you’d aged a decade in a single year, here we now are, nearly at the end of it all.
And so all I can do is thank you for your comments, interest and support here, and even for your badinage, sledging and mildly self-defeating trollery. If I could buy you all a drink and toast your good health, I would.
My best wishes to you all, and here’s hoping for a better 2023!
In Part 1, I looked at lots of different types of evidence that each may (or indeed may not) say something about what happened to Quire 20’s bifolios to leave them in their final nesting order. So, what are the different microtheories these suggest? (What I call “microtheories” are attempts to reconstruct microhistories (e.g. about a specific feature), rather than an overarching macrohistory.)
Microtheory #1: “f116v is Q20’s final page”
It’s easy to conclude from f116v’s strange (and I suspect heavily emended) “michitonese” and doodly shapes that it must always have been Q20’s final page. Certainly, the presence of wormholes on f114/f115/f116 implies that the bifolio nesting/ordering we see now for Q20 was probably still in place back in the days when the Voynich Manuscript had a wooden cover.
However, Wladimir’s wormholes tell a rather more complicated story: because there is a substantial set of wormholes between f114 and f115 (smaller on f114, larger on f115) that doesn’t appear on f116, it strongly seems as though the present state was preceded by a different ordering (though probably also with a wooden cover) where f115 was Q20’s rearmost folio, with f114 nested immediately inside f115.
So it seems that while this particular microtheory was true for the final ordering, it was very probably not true for the ordering that preceded it. However, it doesn’t help us determine whether f116 was originally the final folio. True, it looks like it could have been: but there’s no obvious supporting evidence.
Microtheory #2: “f105r was originally Q20’s first page”
The ornate gallows at the top left of f105r certainly feels as though it ought to have been marking a visual statement of some kind, certainly more so than the rather less whizzy f103r. The fact that f105r has more ‘titles’ seems to back up the idea that this is an important page: and we might reasonably wonder whether the bottom edge of f105 was heavily trimmed (as Anton noted) to remove some kind of ownership mark in the bottom margin.
However, the suggestion that this was excised to remove the ownership mark is (unless someone can dig up any indentations on a different recto page, which – though a little unlikely – might prove possible with some kind of fancy modern scan) just plain speculation. Hence we only really have the ornate gallows and the presence of ‘titles’ to suggest that this was the case. Which is not to say that they’re bad evidence: rather, they’re both just a little weak.
Microtheory #3: “Contact transfers confirm the current ordering”
It’s entirely true that contact transfers (particularly paint contact transfers) seem to support Q20’s current nesting/ordering. I’m thinking here of the contacts between f115v and f116r; between f104v and f105r; and between f113v and f115r (via the vellum gap in the outside edge of f114).
And yet, I suspect that because the paint contact specifically between f115v and f116r is inconsistent with the wormholes highlighted by Wladimir Dulov, this would seem to imply either that much of the painting was done late in the manuscript’s binding state, or that even though the earlier bifolio nesting/ordering state was lost for an intermediate binding, it was magically restored for the final binding.
Similarly, many years ago I went through (pretty much all) the paint contact transfers: only a single instance (on f2v/f3r, see Curse Chapter 4) convinced me that contact between pages had transferred paint from the original binding. Everywhere else, it seemed that paint had transferred when the manuscript was in a later bound state.
So I don’t really believe that the (very few) paint contact transfers we see in Q20 can help us draw conclusions about Q20’s earliest nesting / ordering state, alas.
Microtheory #4: “f58r and f58v are the real start of Q20″
This microtheory gets mentioned only rarely, and yet there’s a great deal to be said for it. If you reverse the f58-f65 bifolio (i.e. turn it upside down, as VViews suggested here), f65 would appear to be the final folio of a Herbal-B section, making f58r likely the original start of the recipe section.
There’s a lot to commend this microtheory. For a start, f58 is the only page outside Q20 that has paragraph stars (though admittedly quite different-looking ones from what we see in Q20 ‘proper’). And Lisa Fagin Davis categorises f58 as “Scribe 3”, the same scribe who wrote ~95% of Q20.
f58r also has a space for an ornate capital at the top left of the page (presumably duplicated from a source page’s layout?), which makes it look as though it ought to be the start of a section / chapter / book (MarcoP mentioned this in 2018, but I’m pretty sure this was noted long before):
Incidentally, even though Lisa Fagin Davis categorises both f58 and f65 as having been done by Scribe 3, there seems to be a visual discontinuity between the two writings, to my eye making the text on f65v look more like Scribe 5’s work on f66 (though perhaps it was using a different quill & ink?):
Furthermore, in Julian Bunn’s folio similarity map, f58r and f58v are clustered closely together (so are probably content-continuous and/or structure-continuous): and they’re not too far away on his map from (say) f105r and f115r. Hence there seems to be no obvious technical reason blocking this general idea.
There are also some aspects of f58r that make it appear a little bit special. For example, f58r and the top half of f58v are made up of chunky paragraphs; f58v has a ‘title’ conspicuously at the end of the first paragraph; while f58r has more words starting with “chol-” than any other page by quite some margin (though what this means I have no idea, I just thought you’d like to know):
It also has more words starting with “chal-” than any other page (a lot of the rest are in Q20):
f58v also has an odd-looking sequence of single-leg gallows on its top line, if you’re into that kind of thing:
So, might f58r have actually originally been Q20’s start page? Personally, I think it’s not a bad microtheory at all, really not bad at all.
Having said all that, I would note that, unlike Q13 and Q20, f58r and f58v contain only a single word beginning with “l-” each. Similarly, while f58r and f58v have more instances of “ed” than is usual for Currier A, they have far fewer “ed” instances than Currier B. Compare this with f66r (in Q8), a Scribe 5 page which is simply stuffed with words that start with “l-” (particularly at the bottom), as well as many more words containing “ed”:
Hence this might well be one of the ‘intermediate’ Currier-language folios that Rene Zandbergen has mentioned at various times, e.g. we might be able to see aspects of Currier-A ‘evolving’ into Currier-B here.
Microtheory #5: “Q20 was originally made up of Q20A and Q20B”
Though I’ve blogged numerous times about this microtheory, it’s still not definitively proven. While it does (from the wormholes) now seem likely that f115v (rather than f116v) was the end folio for much of the Voynich Manuscript’s physical history, we can’t yet prove that f116v was not also the original end folio. And even if the microtheory that f105r was the first page of Q20 now seems less likely than the microtheory that f58r was Q20’s original first page, we can’t use either to prove or disprove this.
Perhaps, though, this will necessarily be more of a culmination / accumulation / combination of other codicological arguments than a supporting argument for them. The jury is still out here.
In Part 1, I collected together a whole load of evidence relating to Q20’s bifolio order that previous analyses had proposed. I thought I’d add a post suggesting other analyses that haven’t yet been done. Who knows, maybe someone will give one or more of these a go?
Vellum thickness
The class of gadget you would use for measuring the thickness of vellum is a non-contact thickness gauge (these are like double-sided laser/LED measuring devices). But why would that be interesting?
The reason is that this offers a low-cost (and non-destructive) way to match up different bifolios’ vellum edges, particularly their long edges. As I understand it, a single sheet of vellum would typically have been large enough to be cut into four bifolios (a very common gathering size): and so there is strong reason to suspect that the vellum sheets that made up the Voynich Manuscript would have been used to form individual quires. (Though very probably not the quires that we see now.)
My hunch is that mapping the Voynich Manuscript’s bifolios’ vellum thicknesses would help give us a little more information about how the original set of gatherings were manufactured and assembled (before their order was later scrambled, probably several times). I believe that this could cast light on Herbal-A pages, Herbal-B pages, Q13 pages and Q20 pages.
Sure, it would take a little bit of planning and a fair bit of subtle reasoning afterwards, but in terms of resources, it would cost relatively little. So why not try?
I should note that Michelle Lewis commented (pointing to a voynich.ninja discussion) that she thought that what I was suggesting was a little ahead of the technology – maybe it is, maybe it isn’t. There is certainly a Bovine Genome Database online (the first Hereford cow DNA was sequenced in 2009, says Wikipedia), so there may already be researchers out there who have suitable ’23AndMoo’ skills needed to, ummm, give us a steer. (Did you see what I did there?)
Lisa Fagin Davis too left a comment expressing (what I think came across as) an even more negative opinion of the idea, which was she thought that it would (basically) give no useful information. For what it’s worth, my opinion of her opinion was that there seems to be convincing evidence that the Voynich Manuscript’s support (i.e. its vellum) was prepared (and indeed cut down) in idiosyncratic (or at least unusual) ways, which would seem to point to very much the opposite of the scenarios she invoked to argue against the idea. Still, maybe she’ll come round to the idea in a decade or so.
Revisiting Julian Bunn’s page distance metric
In Part 1, I mentioned Julian Bunn’s Voynich page distance metric webpage: but on reflection, I don’t think I really highlighted how promising this kind of study could be when applied to bifolio reordering.
For example, we can see from his folio clusters map that f106v and f106r are not really that similar to each other, which suggests a change of topic / section / chapter somewhere in mid-f106. In fact, if we look at f106’s two sides, we can see what seems like a change of ‘tempo’ in the last two paragraphs of f106r, as well as a mysterious unstarred paragraph on f106v (paragraph 8, “tshod qokchy…”).
But while these high-level statistics suggest content anomalies, I don’t believe we have yet found a way to determine which specific low-level features drive those high-level statistics. In the case of f106r/v, can we identify the exact paragraph where the dictionary contents typical of f106r ‘flip over’ to the dictionary contents typical of f106v? If this difference is something we can measure, it should be something we can audit, right?
Incidentally, Julian effectively defines his metric as (Number of unique words that appear in both Page X and Page Y) / (Number of unique words in (Page X union Page Y)). I like this because it doesn’t “over-reward” high-frequency words such as qokedy (etc). However, perhaps a really good (and visually simple) tool would be something that allowed you to compare two pages by automatically drawing lines between matching unique words (while also excluding high-frequency words). I suspect that this might help you visually see where content blocks start and end.
Regardless, the other follow-on question here is simply: what recto page originally followed f106v? It of course has to be a recto page: and the ‘nearest’ recto page would seem to be f104r (and by quite some margin). This suggests that in the original nesting order, f106 may well have been followed by f104.
Here again, I think it would be helpful to visualise how the ‘dictionary intersections’ between the two pages work in practice.
I thought it would be a good idea to post up as many of the different research threads relating to Quire 20’s (‘Q20’) original bifolio nesting / ordering in a single place as I could. However, be warned that there are… quite a lot of them.
Ornate Gallows
There is only a single ornate (swirly) gallows in Quire 20. Yet oddly, it’s to be found not at the start of the quire (as you might expect), but instead at the top of f105r (i.e. the front of the third folio in):
So, if your basic assumption about Q20 is that its bifolios are in the correct order, then it would seem that this ornate gallows poses you a problem: it ‘feels’ like it’s in the wrong place.
However, as we’ll see, there are plenty of other types of evidence we can look at, and – annoyingly, but probably unsurprisingly – they all yield a slightly different spin on the same basic question of ordering.
Wladimir’s Wormholes
In a very interesting recent post, Wladimir Dulov noted various patterns of wormholes on Q20, particularly on f114, f115 and f116. One cluster of wormholes starts large on f116 (the end page), becomes slightly smaller on f115, and smaller still on f114: this seems to imply that these were made when the bifolios were in their current (final) nesting order.
As an aside, book-worms are actually woodworms, and so don’t – as Rene Zandbergen has pointed out – like eating vellum. Wormholes in vellum typically mean that the book had had a wooden cover which the worms had eaten through first, before carrying on munching into the vellum (then stopping after a couple of pages).
Incidentally, I’ve long suspected (from the curious quire numbering style and the careful vellum repairs) that the Voynich Manuscript may well have spent time in a Swiss monastery library (and, I’ve argued, probably not too far from Lake Constance): and my guess is that this was probably where it had a wooden cover added. (Perhaps even in a chained library [“Kettenbibliothek”] such as Schaffhausen.)
So far, so wormy. But Wladimir’s nice point is that there is also a second set of wormholes on f114 and f115, which doesn’t go through to f116. In fact, f114 and f115 have an abundance of wormholes (not just the ones Wladimir mentions) not visible on f116, or indeed on any other Q20 page.
This would seem to imply that even though f116 has ended up being bound as the final folio, f115 may well have previously been bound (in a previous binding) as the final folio, with f114 nested just inside it. Additionally, I suspect the absence of matching wormholes on any other Q20 bifolio also weakly implies that at the time when the two outermost bifolios were f114 and f115, none of the other Q20 bifolios was then nested just inside f114. This suggests that the bifolio that was then nested inside f114 might possibly have been the missing Q20 bifolio (f109-f110).
However, from the random bifolio shuffling that seems to have gone on early in the Voynich Manuscript’s life, I’m also fairly certain that when it entered that library, the manuscript was in the form of a set of unbound (or perhaps only very lightly-bound) gatherings. So, even though Wladimir’s wormhole reasoning is sound, I suspect it only takes us back to the manuscript’s wooden cover days, i.e. it doesn’t necessarily tell us about the original bifolio nesting order etc.
All the same, his observation does signal fairly loudly that Q20’s final bifolio order (that we see today) is very likely wrong, giving us confidence that trying to reconstruct the original order is a sensible idea.
Wladimir’s Pre-binding
Wladimir has another interesting observation about Q20. He points out a puncture mark near the bottom of each of the bifolios f103, f104, f105, f106, and f107 (he is unsure from the scans whether or not there is a matching puncture mark on f108, but thinks that there probably is). He describes this as a “pre-binding mark”, where a binder has run a small piece of twine through the bifolios to line them up ready to bind properly.
This would seem to have happened just before the final binding we see today, so it’s quite late on in the overall codicological timeline. However, because there seems to be no evidence of pre-binding elsewhere in the Voynich Manuscript, I can’t help but wonder whether this weakly implies that Q20 was bound separately to the rest of the manuscript.
Vellum Tricks
Back in 2016, I posted about the vellum colour of each of the Q20 bifolios. Here, contrast enhanced, are the vellum colours of f103-f116, f104-f115, f105-f114, f106-f113, f107-f112, and f108-f111:
My observation back then was that f103-f116 and f106-f113 seemed different from the others two bifolios: hence it seemed likely to me that the four were cut from a single (large) piece of vellum. It therefore further seemed likely to me that these other four originally sat next to each other.
(Of course, we could do better than my eye by physically sampling DNA from these bifolios and comparing their sequences, but there currently seems to be no appetite for doing this.)
To my mind, this implies that there were probably two quires / gatherings:
Q20A – f105-f114, f104-f115, f107-f112, and f108-f111
Q20B – f103-f116 (almost certainly on the outside), f106-f113, and perhaps the middle bifolio
Folio 105 is also somewhat excessively trimmed from the bottom which looks strange.
It’s a neat, clean upward cut across the bottom that continues across to the other half of the bifolio. Without close physical examination (Lisa, have you looked at this?), it’s hard to be sure whether this was in the vellum right from Day One, or whether it was cut off at a later date.
As far as I know, the two main things that typically get added at the bottom of pages are quire numbers and ownership marks. So that suggests to me that there may well have been some ownership mark added to the bottom right of f105r (or the bottom left of f105v) which a later owner wanted to remove. (Not all ownership transfers are transactions later owners want to advertise, as the heavily erased Sinapius signature on f1r seems to attest.)
Similarly, the last folio of Quire 19 (i.e. facing f103r) seems to have had a large chunk taken out of it, which is consistent with an ownership mark there also being excised: this possibly suggests that that may have been the last page of a book / section.
(Incidentally, I pointed out in 2010 that I thought that f105v shows more sign of weathering than just about every other page in Q20, which would seem to imply that it spent a good period of time on the back of the quire. However, looking at f105v again now, I’m not really sure what I was seeing back then.)
This might make the bottom part of f105v the likely location for a quire mark (in one binding), and also the bottom part of f105r the likely location for an ownership mark (in the reversed binding). What a codicological mess!
Unusual Glyph Patterns
Despite its ‘language’ similarities to other Currier B pages, Quire 20 also has a number of glyph pattern idiosyncrasies. In a 2010 comment here, Tim Tattrie pointed out:
“lo” as a separate word is only found in f104r, 106r and 108v.
“rl” as a separate word, or word beginning is only found in f104r, 108v and 113r.
“llo” as a series of letters is only found in f104r, 108v,111v, 113v,116r
Looking at these in voynichese.com, there seem to be just as many free-standing “lo” words in Q13 as in Q20, so I’m not quite taken: and the number of “llo” glyph sequences is extremely low (5 matches).
I’d add that most of the places we see “lr” are in Q20: and similarly for “dl”. There are also some instances of “dr” clustered on f105v, and similarly for “dd”. Q20 is also where the Voynichese glyph “x” appears most often. Sean B. Palmer also thought that the only “genuine” occurrence of “aa” in the Voynich Manuscript was on the third line of f115r (which ends “cholor daar oraro”).
Generally, I do think that the glyph content of Q20 words seems a bit more ‘variable’ than Q13 words, but the overall pattern doesn’t seem wildly different. Unless Rene has some stats on this I don’t know?
Repairs to f116
An interesting 2015 blog post by David Jackson takes a look at the holes, waterstains and repairs on Q20’s final folio (f116). He speculates (for several different reasons) that f116 was trimmed down to the bare minimum in response to damage to that page.
Broadly speaking, I’m not completely convinced by his argument: the main waterstain (near the top of the folios) is visible all the way through Q20, and vellum – animal skin – is basically waterproof. I think David highlights some interesting features, but they don’t quite fit together for me the way they do for him.
Contact Transfers
There are a few places in Q20 where we can see colour transfers between adjacent pages:
Paint from the top two red paragraph stars on f116r has transferred to the facing page (f115v)
Paint from the sixth red star on f113v has transferred past the vellum edge flaw on f114 to f115r
There’s a stray red paint spot that appears near the top of f104v and f105r
There’s a stray faint paint spot between f114v and f115r (look between stars #10 and #11)
Green paint (presumably from Q19?) has ended up on the outer edge of f104r, partly because f103 seems to be about 1cm narrower than f104. (And because f103-f116 is a bifolio, this 1cm different also suggests that the outside edge of f116 was not trimmed down, i.e. that was how that bifolio was originally cut.)
Contact transfers from the paragraph stars highlight the issues of (a) whether the paragraph stars were drawn in the original construction phase, and (b) whether the paragraph stars were painted in the original construction phase – because if they were, then f115v originally faced f116r and f113v faced f115r (with f114 optionally in the middle).
Lisa Fagin Davis’ Scribes
As far as Lisa Fagin Davis’ well-known (and much-cited) scribal analysis of the Voynich Manuscript goes, Quire 20’s palaeography might seem to be one of its less interesting features. She writes (p.17):
The entire Quire is written by Scribe 3 with the exception of folio 115r, where the first twelve lines were written by Scribe 2.
These twelve lines span four short paragraphs, and look like this:
For our present challenge of reconstruct the bifolio nesting order(s) of Q20, all this really does is suggest that f115r might possibly have been the original start of a quire or a section. But you’d almost certainly need to combine this with more information to form the outlines of a proper argument.
Q20 Titles
In Voynich researcher terminology, a “title” is a short sequence of Voynichese text that is positioned on a page in a slightly anomalous (and non-paragraphy) way. For example, everyone knows that f1r (the very first page of the Voynich Manuscript) has four of these ‘titles’ (on lines 6, 10, 21, and 28), a fact that has given rise to the broadly-held speculation that the paragraphs on f1r with titles might be using them to hold section / chapter / book names (in some way). Page f8r similarly has 3 titles (on lines 8, 13, and 21)
As with the scribal information, it’s hard to be sure what exactly to make of this: but it certainly makes f105r seem like a page of structural interest, title-wise.
Dictionary Distance Metric
Back in 2010, Julian Bunn posted up an interesting page computing distance metrics between folios in terms of how similar their unique word lists were. I emailed him some comments (which he then incorporated into the web-page) on what this had to say specifically about Quire 20. Here’s what I sent:
Having played with Julian’s results a bit […], it appears that while some pages’ recto and verso sides are very similar, others are wildly different. For example, just in the recipe section:- 103 good 104 very bad 105 very good 106 bad 107 excellent 108 excellent 109 (missing) 110 (missing) 111 excellent 112 good 113 excellent 114 excellent 115 very bad 116 n/a
Looking at pages within recipe bifolios, however, yields different results again: for example, even though both f104 and f115 are both “bad” above (and are on the same bifolio), f104v is extremely similar to f115r, while f104r is extremely similar to f115v (which is a bit odd). Furthermore, the closeness between f111v and f108r suggests that these originally formed the central bifolio (but reversed), i.e. that the correct page order across the centre was f111r, f111v, f108r, f108v. However, f105 / f114 seem quite unconnected, as do f106 / f113 and f107 / f112.
Re-reading my comments 12 years later, it’s clear that there’s quite a lot of suggestive information here. For example, even though the two bifolio pairs f105r/f105v and f114r/f114v are close, the disparity between f105 and f114 weakly suggests that their bifolio sat towards the outside of a quire or gathering.
Similarly, the closeness between the two halves of the f104-f115 bifolio suggests that this may possibly have been a central bifolio (though what precisely is going on remains something of a mystery).
Finally, the fact that f106r/f106v aren’t close but their opposite folio half f113r/f113v are very close suggests that there may have been a change of topic or structure somewhere on f106.
What Have I Missed?
I tried to follow Wladimir’s discussion of Quire 20 “gaskets” (as Google Translate put it), but wasn’t really able to (I believe it’s to do with things attached to the spines of individual quires that were used to bind them to a spine but without gluing them). However, I don’t believe this affects the issue of bifolio ordering I’m trying to tackle here.
I’m unaware of any multi-spectral scans of Q20 that we might be able to refer to so that we can compare the vellum used on different bifolios.
Also, I’m unaware if there are any studies that have specifically used page-to-page word list difference metrics (of the kind Julian Bunn did) to exhaustively evaluate all the different nesting permutations, i.e. to suggest what the original nesting order was.
Regardless, if you know of any other analyses of Q20 that might have some impact on the bifolio nesting order, please mention it in the comment section below, thanks very much!
