An obfuscation of Voynich novels…

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A few days ago, I hurried my seven year old son to the back door to see a crowd of twenty or more crows spectacularly circling and cawing furiously at a pair of magpies who had presumably transgressed some unwritten bird law. Of course, though, the correct collective noun isn’t a ‘crowd’, but (rather delightfully) a ‘murder‘ of crows.

What, I wonder then, would be the right collective term for a set of Voynich novels? Though I’ve settled for “an obfuscation” here, doubtless you’ll have your own ideas. 🙂

Anyway, here are five relatively new Voynich novels I’ve been meaning to mention to you for a short while…

* (2011) The Cadence of Gypsies – Barbara Casey

“On her 18th birthday Carolina Lovel learned that she was adopted and was given a letter written in an unknown language left to her by her birth mother. After years of research she travels to Italy on a mission to find the truth about her past.”

* (2012) The Book of Blood & Shadow – Robin Wasserman

“Desperate to prove [her boyfriend Max’s] innocence, Nora follows the trail of blood, no matter where it leads. It ultimately brings her to the ancient streets of Prague, where she is drawn into a dark web of secret societies and shadowy conspirators, all driven by a mad desire to possess something that might not even exist. For buried in a centuries-old manuscript is the secret to ultimate knowledge and communion with the divine…”

* (2012) Vaults of Power – Diane Echer

“When her twin is kidnapped in Southern France, Robyn Gabriel has six days to steal the precious Voynich manuscript from a bunker-like library at Yale University and break its code– […] The Federal Reserve can’t allow that. Now, they want her dead.”

* (2011) In a Celandine World – Catherine Thorpe

“The truth is going to come out. A truth that has long been forgotten. A truth that was concealed in a manuscript in the 12th century. An impossible truth. A dangerous truth that will blow Willow’s secret wide open—leaving her scrambling to save the only man she could ever love.”

* (2012?) The Voynich Cypher – Russell Blake [announced but not yet released]

“When a sacred relic is stolen from its subterranean guarded vault, Dr. Steven Cross, amateur cryptologist living in Tuscany, becomes embroiled in a deadly quest to decipher one of history’s most enigmatic documents…”

I already have the first two to read & review, though I must confess I’m finding it difficult to get into the Cadence of Gypsies, possibly because it’s aimed at a Teen / Young Adult audience. Oh well – I’ll let you know how I get on. Wish me luck! 🙂

Incidentally, I just noticed that the ebook version of In a Celandine World is free at SmashWords until February 15th 2012, so if you’d like to be entertained by Catherine Thorpe’s Victorian Knot-garden-inspired time-shifting paranormal Voynich romance, feel just as free to click on the link! 🙂

London Rare Books School 2012 – including a session on historical ciphers…

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Just so you know, I’ll be contributing a session to the London Rare Books School 2012, which is a yearly study week (this year running from 25th June to 6th July 2012) held at the University of London around Senate House, and intended to broaden participants’ exposure to the widely varied aspects of the history of writing. Myself excepted 🙂 , it has a stellar line-up of tutors covering a great diversity of subjects and eras: it’s a splendid thing, that almost anybody with a wide-ranging interest in history would benefit from (really, it’s a snip at £600).

My section, covering the early modern growth of ciphers, codes and shorthand, is provisionally titled “Writing for privacy, secrecy, brevity and speed“. The tentative session summary runs like this:-

“This session discusses many of the ways in which writing systems have been adapted to meet secondary needs such as privacy (cryptography), secrecy (steganography), brevity (shorthand) and speed (tachygraphy). It uses examples ranging from antiquity through to the 17th century. It also discusses practical issues of transcription and decryption that historians and researchers may well need to tackle if presented with an unusual historical text. It concludes with discussion of some well-known unbroken historical ciphers.”

Over the next few months, I’ll be assembling (both physically and conceptually) the source material for this, and so will blog here about various aspects as they take shape. One particular thing that has already struck me is that few people grasp the difference between privacy and secrecy: for example, what happens in a marital bed is private (i.e. not public, but condoned – it’s ok that others broadly know that it’s going on, even though they don’t know the precise details), while a spouse’s illicit affair is secret (not public, but condemned – knowledge of its existence is what needs to be concealed, far more than the precise details).

This also (roughly speaking) helps conceptually differentiate between cryptography (private writing) and steganography (secret writing): with crypto, the core model is that others know of a crypto-text’s existence but are technically unable to read it, while stego’s core model is that people aren’t even aware of a stego-text’s existence [even if they can see the document carrying it], and so aren’t even trying to read it.

How does this help us? Well, my position on the inscrutable Voynich Manuscript has long been that its drawings (such as its plants and nymphs) are intended to misdirect and distract us, rather than to inform us: it is therefore at least as much a stegotext as a cryptotext. Hence using industrial-strength statistical tools to try to cryptologically crack its crabby carapace is probably futile: ultimately, Voynichese is an array of simple ciphers carefully folded inside a steganographic blanket, much as Brigadier John Tiltman said decades ago, and it was designed for showing as much as for concealing. Something to think about.

Anyway, I’m very much looking forward to giving my session, and may even see one or two of you there!

First Voynich theory of 2012…

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To get 2012 rolling, I thought you might like to know that Walter Grosse has just started an English-language blog about his Voynich Manuscript theory.

Briefly, he proposes that each Voynichese ‘word’ super-verbosely enciphers a digit, based purely on the number of letters it contains. So, the first six words of page f1r (in EVA: “fachys ykal ar ytaiin shol shosy”) is f.a.ch.y.s [=5] y.k.a.l [=4] a.r [=2] y.t.a.i.i.n [=6] sh.o.l [=3] sh.o.s.y [=4], i.e. “542634”. By then assigning (somehow) a set of Greek letters to each verbosely enciphered digit, Grosse generates a list of permuted words, and then chooses the one that makes most sense. In this case, “542634” turns out to be two 3-letter words (“542” and “634”), which he reads as σαν ετι, i.e. “As yet”.

Inevitably, though, it seems (from other posts) that he’s experiencing difficulty applying this same ambiguous cipher-breaking methodology to other pages, because he has posted lists of permutation tables followed by the rather dour phrase “0 possibilities”.

In some ways, it’s fascinating to see how old ideas keep coming round in slightly different guises. Brumbaugh similarly converted Voynichese to digits (though not so extraordinarily verbosely, it has to be said), and tried to salvage text from the resulting digit stream, though ultimately accepting somewhat grudgingly that the digit stream was not meaningful. Claude Martin travelled much the same path as Brumbaugh, proposing instead that it was constructed from a deliberately nonsensical digit stream. In my opinion, both Brumbaugh’s and Martin’s digit stream theories explained nothing whatsoever about the nature and structure of Voynichese, and so have nothing to commend them: and σαν ετι I don’t see any reason why I should think differently about Grosse’s superverbose digit stream theory. Sorry to have to point it out, but “it’s like that, that’s the way it is”.

So there is also a depressing fatalism to Voynich theories: that if you wait long enough, someone will inevitably build a contemporary doppelganger of William Romaine Newbold’s ink-craquelure Latin shorthand pareidoiliac theory, or indeed any other theory you may have already seen. Feeling desperate to see yet another Hebrew Voynich theory? Have no fear, like London buses there’ll doubtless be one along any minute. As my grandfather used to chortle, “Aldgate East, Aldgate aht!” 😉

Nick’s (possibly new) Great Pyramid theory…

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While musing on the Great Pyramid’s four mysterious narrow shafts for my last cipher post, I was struck by an entirely different explanation for them. Since then, I’ve read through a whole load of web-pages (I know, I know) and haven’t yet seen anything similar, so I thought I’d share the idea with you all, see where it leads. Please feel free to tell me if I’m reinventing a wheel or talking nonsense, I really don’t mind. 🙂

To quickly recap just about everything important about the Great Pyramid (aka the Pyramid of Khufu, or his Greek name Cheops) that I know…
* The Great Pyramid was constructed on top of a pre-existing hillock.
* All the rooms and passages in the Great Pyramid lie in (broadly speaking) a single vertical plane.
* The lowest chamber is an unfinished underground chamber carved into the hillock.
* The next highest chamber is known the “Queen’s Chamber”, though there’s no evidence a queen (or indeed anyone else) ever used it.
* The highest chamber is known as the “King’s Chamber”, and contains a large (but poorly finished) sarcophagus.
* The King’s Chamber has five large cavities above, thought to protect it against being collapsed by earthquakes.
* The King’s Chamber has two narrow shafts that extend diagonally upwards to the exterior of the pyramid.
* The Queen’s Chamber has two (originally concealed) narrow shafts that go sideways for about two metres and then diagonally upwards, but don’t obviously go to the exterior of the pyramid (i.e. where all the robot crawlers have gone a-trundling)
* The Queen’s Chamber lies immediately below the pyramid’s central axis, but the King’s Chamber is offset to one side.

Your Intellectual History challenge here is to explain the function of the two narrow shafts in the Queen’s Chamber. Here’s my answer:-

I suspect the Great Pyramid was built in two major stages of ascending grandeur / pharaonic megalomania. That is, I think that the Queen’s Chamber was to the originally planned pyramid as the King’s Chamber is to the final pyramid. For the following image, I’ve taken a West-facing CAD image from Rudolf Gantenbrink’s exemplary website, inverted its colours, shrunk it and overlaid an arbitrarily-placed missing “virtual inner pyramid” outline in red:-

That is, I suspect that the Queen’s Chamber’s southern shaft terminates early because the pyramid itself was planned to terminate early, perhaps either at something like the red line I mark, or indeed directly at the current end of the shaft itself. Hence, it might be that what is beyond the “door” is simply the second stage of construction, the “outer virtual pyramid” if you like: the shaft stopped roughly where it was supposed to, but the construction plans changed around it.

Why, then, was the Queen’s Chamber’s northern shaft any different? My suspicion is that the south end of the pyramid may have been built up first, with the north end lagging behind. Then, when the construction plans changed, the Queen’s Chamber’s southern shaft was left (quite literally) high and dry.

Alternatively, it could be that an earthquake during the first phase of building made it clear that the Queen’s Chamber was not going to be strong enough to survive the centuries in the way originally intended. Hence the decision may have been taken to add extra blocks to the North and South walls (if not the East and West walls as well), bringing the walls roughly two metres inwards. This could be why there is a two-metre horizontal section at the start of the Queen’s Chamber’s two shafts: that they were built diagonally up from the original walls, but that the walls were then thickened (for whatever reason): the shafts were similarly extended horizontally with the walls.

With all this in mind, I think I should note it’s entirely possible that Khufu’s pyramid may have originally started life as a smaller in-progress pyramid being built for (say) one of his predecessors, who intended to be interred in the (originally larger) Queen’s Chamber: but that Khufu’s architects saw the opportunity of extending it all into an humungous des res fit for a king (or, rather, Pharaoh). So, the burning question is: might the Great Pyramid ultimately turn out to be the loft extension to end all loft extensions? Just a thought! 😉

The Great Pyramid’s secret cipher mystery… ;-)

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Unless you’ve been in something dangerously close to cryogenic suspension for the last year, you’ll know that these have been troubled times in Egypt – but you may not have heard that these have also been troubled times for Egyptology. Adding to 2011’s regime-changing brouhaha, Zahi Hawass, the Egyptian government’s 64-year-old ministry-level head of Ancient Egyptian stuff (and owner of a hat that practically has its own Discovery channel), has been fired/resigned then reinstated then fired/resigned again.

It’s a tricky one to balance: though tourists love him, I think it’s fair to say that Egyptologists basically don’t – it has often been alleged that to work for him has been to sign any chance of historical research glory over to him (oh, and to his TV channel partners too). Is he charismatic, thoughtful and generous, or egotistical, controlling and bullying? Or perhaps some combination of the above? If you track this area, you probably have your own opinion… I certainly have mine.

From an alt.history perspective, one of Ancient Egypt’s splendidly enduring unexplained mysteries is the internal structure of the Great Pyramid – in particular, the function of the four narrow shafts leading upwards from two chambers. The upper (“King’s”) Chamber has two shafts leading off right to the exterior of the pyramid: but the lower (“Queen’s”) Chamber’s two concealed shafts (only discovered in 1872 through a mixture of intuition and persistance) do not apparently reach the outside of the pyramid. So… where do they go to?

Countless theories have been devised to try to explain these curious shafts, frankly none of which I believe for a moment. Yet the shafts’ first proper unveiling moment came in 1993, when German engineer Rudolf Gantenbrink’s “Upuaut-2” robot at last crawled right to the top of the lower southern shaft, where its newly-installed video equipment discovered… “a finely-worked slab of special limestone, of a kind otherwise used only for the pyramid’s exterior sheathing and its interior chambers. And that slab is adorned with two copper fittings.”

Of course, the question on everyone’s lips suddenly became “what’s behind that slab?” However, because Hawass (so the story goes) took some kind of dislike to Gantenbrink, these efforts of 1992-1993 were only followed up by a second (different) team’s robot crawler in 2002, which again crawled right up to the top, drilled through to the other side, poked a tiny camera through, discovering… another block just beyond the first one, with a cavity between the two.

Then in 2011, yet another robot from yet another team crawled its way to the top and peered through the previously drilled-out hole with a bendy camera, to try to get a proper look at the cavity: this revealed (arguably) a cipher mystery aspect to all this. For on the floor in the cavity there is a set of unidentified red markings. What do they mean? What could they mean?

Of course, I have really no idea – it has been noted that other red measuring marks (presumably put down by Egyptian masons) have been seen elsewhere, so this could very plausibly be what we’re looking at here. But that’s basically as much as we can sensibly say for the moment.

Perhaps 2012 will see yet another team with yet another robot crawler, perhaps this time with a super-duper-mega-drill. Could it be that Rudolf Gantenbrink will finally be drawn back to the Great Pyramid, with his Upuaut robot now expanded with something like a miniaturized Thunderbirds “Pod 5” Mole? We shall see! 🙂

Well, it’s a start: H C Reynolds’ middle name was Charles!

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The flag of the Union Steamship Company of New Zealand

The indefatigable Cheryl Bearden has been filling in the gaps for our elusive “H. C. Reynolds” tenuously linked to the Tamam Shud cipher mystery man, and has dug up nine more crew manifests in the Sydney archives with his name on, two of which helpfully list him as “Chas Reynolds“. (Yes, the names are slightly different, but it’s highly unlikely that there were two 18-year-old Tasmanian lads called Reynolds both working as purser on the same ship at the same time). As Reynolds’ job on the Koonya was Purser, it would be unsurprising if it was he who wrote up the crew manifests to hand in to the Sydney port authorities: so it could well be his handwriting Cheryl has been examining. Perhaps that is what he felt gave him the licence to write his first name as “Chas” rather than just an initial, who knows?

Additionally, Cheryl points out that because the Koonya crew list dated 2nd February 1919 lists his age as 18, we can narrow HCR’s possible birth date range down yet further, which is also great!

So, it seems that the person we’re looking for is H. Charles Reynolds, born in Hobart, Tasmania between 2nd and 12th February 1900, who worked for the Union Steamship Company of New Zealand for at least 18 months between 1917 and 1919 as Purser or Assistant Purser aboard the SS Manuka, the RMS Niagara, and the SS Koonya. Also known as Charles / Charlie Reynolds. 🙂

I should add that I found a truly magnificent online bibliography relating to the Union Steam Ship Company of New Zealand, which notes that…

The archives of the Union Steam Ship Company Ltd and Wellington Harbour Board are now at the Wellington City Archives and will be accessible to researchers which has professional archivists, a facility built for archival storage, a public Reading Room and other specialist support systems. A considerable part of the Harbour Board collection is on the public access database The archives of the Union Steam Ship Company came from its head office in Wellington.

The Wellington City Archive summary notes that the Union Steam Ship Company “started in Dunedin and in 1922 its head office shifted to Wellington”: however, if you search their archives for “Union Steam Ship”, none of the 80 hits returned seem to be relevant to what we’re looking for (staff records or correspondence). It does add that “other Union Steam Ship Company records can be found at the Hocken Library in Dunedin” at the University of Otago: here’s the summary page of their USSNZ holdings.

Now that is more appealing: AG-292 “includes a wide range of records including minutes, correspondence, financial and shareholder records, staff records, shipping information, publications, some correspondence of James Mills and the records of the John Jones Trust: AG-292-009-001/005 contains “Staff Salaries Vol. 4. 1913-1917”. Similarly, AG-922 “relates particularly to employees of the Company. It includes salary books, a list of staff, and staff newsletters” (AG-922/002 is listed as “Salaries book, Dunedin Branch. 1915-1955”). Yet having trawled through the 1000+ entries for AG-292, there’s precious little I can see related to staff records for 1917-1919 (apart from correspondence, which may or may not mention anyone).

But wait! According to the first (USSNZ bibliography) page, the Museum of Wellington City & Sea apparently has “the majority of the staff records of the Company”, so that is almost certainly where our trail for the elusive H C Reynolds leads. I’ve emailed them, and will let you know what I find out…

Finally, for any passing H C Reynolds research completists, this is the current list of crew lists we have (Cheryl’s nine new entries all preceded by *, thank you again!):-

19th November 1917. SS Manuka: arr Sydney, NSW (from Wellington). H. Reynolds, age 17, born Tasmania, Assistant Purser.
* 10th December 1917. SS Manuka: arr Sydney, NSW (from Wellington). H. C. Reynolds, age 17, born Tasmania, Assistant Purser.
17th December 1917. SS Manuka: arr Sydney, NSW (from Hobart). H. Reynolds, age 17, born Tasmania, Assistant Purser.
26th January 1918. SS Manuka: arr Sydney, NSW (from Hobart). H. Reynolds, 17, born Australia, Assistant Purser.
17th February 1918. RMS Niagara: arr Sydney, NSW (from Vancouver). H. Reynolds, 18, born Hobart, Assistant Purser.
20th April 1918. RMS Niagara: arr Sydney, NSW (from Auckland). H. C. Reynolds, 18, born Hobart, 2nd Mate.
5th May 1918. SS Koonya: arr Sydney, NSW (from Burnie). C. Reynolds, 18, born Hobert, Purser.
20th May 1918. SS Koonya: arr Sydney, NSW (from Strahan & Devonport). C. Reynolds, 18, born Hobart, Purser.
* 12th June 1918. SS Koonya: arr Sydney, NSW (from Launceston). C. Reynolds, 18, born Hobart, Purser.
* 21st June 1918. SS Koonya: arr Sydney, NSW (from Devonport). C. Reynolds, 18, born Hobart, Purser.
* 30th June 1918. SS Koonya: arr Sydney, NSW (from Devonport). C. Reynolds, 18, born Hobart, Purser.
16th July 1918. SS Koonya: arr Sydney, NSW (from Strahan). C. Reynolds, 18, born Hobart, Purser.
* 28th July 1918. SS Koonya: arr Sydney, NSW (from Burnie & D’port). Chas Reynolds, 18, born Hobart, Purser.
12th August 1918. SS Koonya: arr Sydney, NSW (from Strahan & D’port). C. Reynolds, 18, born Hobart, Purser.
26th August 1918. SS Koonya: arr Sydney, NSW (from Burnie). C. Reynolds, 18, born Hobart, Purser.
22nd September 1918. SS Koonya: arr Sydney, NSW (from Strahan). C. Reynolds, 18, born Hobart, Purser.
* 6th October 1918. SS Koonya: arr Sydney, NSW (from Burnie & Strahan). Chas Reynolds, 18, born Hobart, Purser.
21st October 1918. SS Koonya: arr Sydney, NSW (from Launceston). C. Reynolds, 18, born Hobart, Purser.
4th November 1918. SS Koonya: arr Sydney, NSW (from Burnie). C. Reynolds, 18, born Hobart, Purser.
* 18th November 1918. SS Koonya: arr Sydney, NSW (from Devonport). C. Reynolds, 18, born Hobart, Purser.
* 23rd December 1918. SS Koonya: arr Sydney, NSW (from Devonport). C. Reynolds, 18, born Hobart, Purser.
19th January 1919. SS Koonya: arr Sydney, NSW (from Devonport). C. Reynolds, 18, born Tasmania, Purser.
* 2nd February 1919. SS Koonya: arr Sydney, NSW (from Devonport). C. Reynolds, 18, born Hobart, Purser.
9th March 1919. SS Koonya: arr Sydney, NSW (from Newcastle). C. Reynolds, 18, born Tasmania, Purser.
31st March 1919. SS Koonya: arr Sydney, NSW (from Devonport). C. Reynolds, 19, born Hobart, Purser.

Does the ‘Voynich = migraine’ theory make your head hurt too?

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In the pub after the Kingston Round Table of Inventors meeting this evening, a nice guy from Kingston Uni told me that he had recently had two “dry migraine” attacks, and that he was waiting for the results of the follow-up CT scan. This reminded me that I had a German Voynich explanation (i.e. not quite a theory, or perhaps a meta-theory) to post about here…

In Gerry Kennedy & Rob Churchill’s book, they float the hypothesis that the Voynich Manuscript might possibly have been written by someone suffering a prolonged (months- or years-long) migraine attack; and point to the streams of stars and the repetitive series of nymphs as vaguely supporting (if far from smoking-gun causal) evidence. However, nobody (to my knowledge) really took the notion particularly seriously until German blogger Markus Dahlem decided to carry their conceptual baton a little further in the general direction of… Hildegard of Bingen.

Might the castle in the nine-rosette page actually be a representation of the Aedificium, the piously hallucinatory City of God drawn by Hildegard in her Zelus Dei or her Sedens Lucidus? Are the Voynich’s stars simply “showers of phosphenes” cascading wildly through Hildegard’s retinal circuits?

I saw a great star most splendid and beautiful, and with it an exceeding multitude of falling stars which with the star followed southwards … And suddenly they were all annihilated, being turned into black coals… and cast into the abyss so that I could see them no more.

To me, the fact that Hildegard is discussed by both Charles Singer and Oliver Sacks is no more than an expression of her outlierness: she not only had the repeated experience of migraine auras, but also had the literary imagination to stitch that into her religious worldview. Basically, I’m pretty sure that there is almost no real chance that the author of the Voynich Manuscript was a migraine sufferer.

And besides, Hildegard drew square merlons in her City of God, not swallow-tail merlons. D’oh! 🙂

Happy Voynich New Year 2012!

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A Happy New Year to all Cipher Mysteries readers, for it might well be a good year for historical cipher mystery research!

As doubtless most of you know, 1912 was the year when Wilfrid Voynich [very probably] bought the “ugly duckling” artefact now named after him from the Villa Mondragone in Frascati in Italy, making this year (in the absence of any specific dating evidence) its modern centenary.

Now, the media love centenaries (e.g. Charles Dickens’ 2012 bicentenary) because it’s news that they can project manage in advance; and so this Voynich Manuscript centenary is bound to inspire plenty of glossy magazine articles and perhaps even documentaries and films. In fact, I know there’s at least 22 minutes of new Voynich TV documentary coming this Autumn, because the director had me running round in an Italian heatwave to make it (though as normal, I’m not allowed to talk about it until it’s all announced la-la-la).

But how should we best celebrate a hundred years of patchy history, failed cryptology and hallucinogenic theorizing? [Well, apart from cracking its cipher, of course. 😉 ] The longstanding joke on Jim Reeds’ VMs Mailing List (before it lost both its momentum and its way) was that we’d all share a pizza to celebrate breaking the Voynich, with the slices loosely signifying the many contributions different people made. Yet as the decades have accumulated, this jokey pizza base has worn rather thin: the Voynichian collaborational camaraderie dwindled long ago, to the point that we now have little or no consensus on even basic aspects: the sweet taste of Voynich success pizza looks likely to elude us for some time.

All the same, I’ve long thought it would be really great if we could collectively do something for 2012, if only to stop lazy journalists and bloggers cutting-and-pasting the Wikipedia Voynich Manuscript article for the thousandth time. Wouldn’t it be fantastic if we could conjure up – however fleetingly – a real-world forum where well-informed, thoughtful people could, well, just talk sensibly and openly about the manuscript, its curious text, its odd drawings, its murky history, its codicology… a bit like a “Voynich pub meet” but to the nth degree…

And so it is with very great pleasure that I am delighted to announce that an international Voynich conference has been organized for 11th May 2012 at the Sala degli Svizzeri at the Villa Mondragone itself, no less. The organizers are Claudio Foti (author of an Italian Voynich book) and Voynich researchers Michelle Smith and Rene Zandbergen: even though booking for attendees doesn’t open till 1st February 2012, would it be forward of me to hope that I see many of you there?

It’s entirely true that I’ve agreed to give one of the presentations: but don’t let that put you off 😀 , there are plenty of high-calibre attendees who may well be speaking too, such as (though none of these are yet confirmed):-
* Rene Zandbergen – long-term Voynich researcher, & creator of the excellent voynich.nu
* Greg Hodgins – carried out the recent vellum radiocarbon dating
* Joe Barabe – performed the ink and paint analysis for McCrone Associates
* Paula Zyats – Assistant Chief Conservator at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University
* Rafal Prinke – expert on the history of alchemy (and all kinds of other wonderful stuff)
* Philip Neal – long-term Voynich researcher and Latinist (translated many Kircher letters)
* etc

I don’t yet know if the whole day is going to be podcasted, webinared, or Twitter hashtagged. Frankly, I hope that it is, because I do appreciate that not everyone can afford to take a couple of days off from their working life to engorge (on fantastic Italian food) and engage (in Voynich-related chat). All the same, all credit to Messers Foti, Smith & Zandbergen for making this splendid thing possible – and let’s hope that it encourages someone with sufficient leverage to convince the Beinecke curators to allow a multispectral scan for Paula Zyats to announce at the conference… wouldn’t that be great! 😀

The elusive Reynolds: from HC to C…?

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Yet more for you on our elusive young Tasmanian merchant seaman H. C. Reynolds, who may or may not be the mysterious “Unknown Man” found dead on Somerton Beach in 1948, etc etc.

Firstly, I note with great interest Gerry Feltus’ comments on the whole H. C. Reynolds thing. He writes:-

In early February 2011, I received a letter from the woman (not identified in the article) containing comprehensive detail, a photograph of HC Reynolds and the circumstances under which it was found. This was followed up by a number of telephone conversations. I had no doubt about the authenticity of the information supplied to me. I became aware that the same photograph and details had been forwarded to a number of other interested parties. I was also advised that Professor Henneberg had advised her: “The similarity, however is substantial and in my opinion warrants further investigation.” I wrote in my reply inter alia, “I have no alternative but to accept his (Prof Henneberg) learned opinion. As I explained to you during our conversation I don’t see any resemblance to the ‘Unknown Man’. After studying his photograph for years (the Unknown Man) there is nothing in the face of Reynolds that ‘jumps out’ at me that is similar… Also Reynolds has a square chin with what appears to be a cleft or dimple, whereas the ‘Unknown Man’ has a rounded chin. My opinion, and I will stand corrected if I am wrong.” I provided details of a record relating to H Reynolds, Able Seaman, on ‘Empress of Asia’, Suez Canal 1941, and advised that I could not locate any details to authenticate the U.S. Identity Card.

It soon became obvious that a number of people were ‘tripping over each other’ to obtain information about Reynolds so I removed myself from that line of inquiry. I have not seen an official statement from Prof Henneberg. I have every respect for Prof Henneberg and accept his qualifications. If he is positive that Reynolds is identical to the ‘Unknown Man’ I will reconsider my views on the subject.

Personally, I’m not sure over whom Gerry thinks people like me would be tripping: just about every stone I examine seems to be turning over for the first time. Historically, the nice thing about the Reynolds claim is that (true or false) it should, with persistence and lashings of lateral thinking, be checkable: the more of his antipodean sea career we can find, the more chance we stand of uncovering some instance where he crosses over into another (hopefully land-based) archive or database.

What have I been doing? Well, without any access to the archival omniscience of the “Log of Logs” as yet, I’ve been trying to find log books for the SS Manuka and RMS Niagara. However, it turns out that this is complicated by the fact that ships can reasonably have multiple types of logbooks, which often overlap:
* rough logs (compiled on the go)
* smooth logs (copied out nicely)
* compass logs (or “compass error logs”)
* incident logs, and so forth.

For the SS Manuka, Archives New Zealand have a compass log but the ship’s log has been destroyed bar one fragmentary page. Similarly, MS 851 in Auckland Museum contains RMS Niagara’s compass log for 1917-1918 compiled by M. Clark-Campbell, who was presumably the third mate “C. Campbell” on board at the same time as Reynolds. However, this is probably both a rough log (because it’s for two ships Clark-Campbell served on, the Niagara and the HMNZT Willochra) and a compass log: Hamish Lindop at the Auckland Museum very kindly examined MS 851 for me, and told me that “the information in it is strictly pertaining to coordinates for sailing; it doesn’t have any information about what was happening on board or Reynolds.”

So, a bit of a dead end, really. But at least now we know that the Manuka and Niagara probably had multiple log books: hopefully the “Log of Logs” will point us to some of the others.

But that’s not the really exciting news. Cipher Mysteries regular Cheryl Bearden has been carefully trawling ancestry.com’s online copies of the crew lists arriving at Sydney, and has found (what seems to me, at least, extremely likely to be) the next section forward in young Mr Reynolds’ timeline. Unless there just happened to be two 18-year-old pursers from Hobart called Reynolds active in the same port at the same time, it seems very probable that the two were the same person, and that he preferred to be called by his middle name:-

19th November 1917. SS Manuka: arr Sydney, NSW (from Wellington). H. Reynolds, age 17, born Tasmania, Assistant Purser.
17th December 1917. SS Manuka: arr Sydney, NSW (from Hobart). H. Reynolds, age 17, born Tasmania, Assistant Purser.
26th January 1918. SS Manuka: arr Sydney, NSW (from Hobart). H. Reynolds, 17, born Australia, Assistant Purser.
17th February 1918. RMS Niagara: arr Sydney, NSW (from Vancouver). H. Reynolds, 18, born Hobart, Assistant Purser.
20th April 1918. RMS Niagara: arr Sydney, NSW (from Auckland). H. C. Reynolds, 18, born Hobart, 2nd Mate.
5th May 1918. SS Koonya: arr Sydney, NSW (from Bunnie). C. Reynolds, 18, born Hobert, Purser.
20th May 1918. SS Koonya: arr Sydney, NSW (from Strahan & Devonport). C. Reynolds, 18, born Hobart, Purser.
16th July 1918. SS Koonya: arr Sydney, NSW (from Strahan). C. Reynolds, 18, born Hobart, Purser.
12th August 1918. SS Koonya: arr Sydney, NSW (from Strahan & D’port). C. Reynolds, 18, born Hobart, Purser.
26th August 1918. SS Koonya: arr Sydney, NSW (from Bunnie). C. Reynolds, 18, born Hobart, Purser.
22nd September 1918. SS Koonya: arr Sydney, NSW (from Strahan). C. Reynolds, 18, born Hobart, Purser.
21st October 1918. SS Koonya: arr Sydney, NSW (from Launceston). C. Reynolds, 18, born Hobart, Purser.
4th November 1918. SS Koonya: arr Sydney, NSW (from Bunnie). C. Reynolds, 18, born Hobart, Purser.
19th January 1919. SS Koonya: arr Sydney, NSW (from Devonport). C. Reynolds, 18, born Tasmania, Purser.
9th March 1919. SS Koonya: arr Sydney, NSW (from Newcastle). C. Reynolds, 18, born Tasmania, Purser. [*]
31st March 1919. SS Koonya: arr Sydney, NSW (from Devonport). C. Reynolds, 19, born Hobart, Purser.

As before, the next plausible sighting we have is of a foot-passenger called “Mr H. C. Reynolds” travelling on the TSS Ulimaroa on the 22nd November 1920. So, thank you very much indeed, Cheryl, for this nice long set of sightings! But once again this is where the Reynolds trail goes cold. 🙁

Curiously, onboard the SS Koonya in August there’s also a fireman (i.e. for stoking fires, not for putting them out!) called “R Reynolds” age 18, but born in Birkenhead. Probably just a coincidence, though. 🙂

The SS Koonya was registered in Dunedin, on New Zealand’s South Island: its Master was the 39-year-old New Zealander P. L. Molyneux. Note that the Tasmanian archives hold a number of logs and crew records for a previous ship called ‘Koonya’ (sank in 1898), which are almost certainly no use to us. The Koonya we’re interested in was, according to this online list of Tasmanian shipwrecks, a

Steel steamship, 1093/663 tons. # 109641.Built at Grangemouth, UK, as the Yukon. Owned by Union Steamship Co. Lbd 225.0 x 34.2 x 13.2 ft. In 1908, she had towed Sir Ernest Shackleton’s Nimrod 1510 miles from Lyttleton, NZ to the Antarctic Circle and was the first steamer in the Antractic. She was then employed in the New Zealand and Tasmanian coastal trades. Captain Francis Warner Jackson. Sailed from Strahan for Burnie on 3 June 1919 but failed to arrive; wrecked on Sandy Cape, Tasmania, 6 June 1919. Vessel Taviuni sent to search and found her wrecked on Sandy Cape, north west coast Tasmania. All saved. [NH],[#TS2],[DG]

Once again, we see Reynolds employed by the Union Steamship Company. However, when the Koonya went down in 1919, Reynolds was not on board! The report of the wreck that ran in Adelaide’s Register on 9th June 1919 listed the crew (who luckily all survived) as:-

Capt. F. Jackson, S. L. McDonald (chief officer), R. Sanderson (second officer), McNeill (third officer). Ward (chief engineer), Stewart (second engineer), Davis (third engineer), Thorby (chief steward), Dodd (purser), Kohler, S. Foley, and R. Millhouse (firemen), McLeod, Mulholland, Neilson, Newlands, and Stavis (A.B.s), Harris (chief cook), Alexander (assistant cook), Marshall (donkeyman), Foley, Howard, and Armstrong (trimmers), and Allen (boatswain). The names of the second steward and two other ordinary seamen were not obtainable.

It seems likely to me that between March 1919 and June 1919, Reynolds had served a full year on the Koonya and so moved on to work on another ship, most likely within the same Union Steamship Company fleet… perhaps Cheryl will now find this! All the same, the Koonya is another ship whose various logbooks I will now try to track down when I finally get to see the legendary Log of Logs…

H. C. Reynolds: where next? Well…

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If you’ve been following the flurry of recent posts (and indeed comments) here on the Unknown Man, you’ll know we’ve done two things:
* successfully linked the “H. C. Reynolds” on the US seamen’s temporary ID card to a young “H Reynolds” working on the SS Manuka and the RMS Niagara, and constructed a six-month timeline for his sea-life from late 1917 to early 1918; and
* eliminated pretty much every other “H C Reynolds” of broadly the right age and location.
So, the question is… where to look next?

Following the Manuka trail, there are plenty of plausible looking documents in the National Archives of Australia office in Tasmania relating to the Manuka’s arrivals in Hobart. If you just happen to be passing the State Library building at 91 Murray Street on a Wednesday, Thursday or Friday and want to look these up, here are the Manuka references you’d need in volume P2005 which covers arrivals (though volume P2004 covers departures, it unfortunately has a big fat gap from June 1917 to December 1923, bah!):-
* 22 Nov 1917 – 767481 – passenger list
* 24 Nov 1917 – 767502 – ships report inwards
* 13 Dec 1917 – 767523 – passenger list
* 02 Jan 1918 – 767583 – passenger list
* 24 Jan 1918 – 767701 – passenger / crew list

Of course, it’s an outside shot that any of these would reveal (for example) H. C. Reynolds’ first name, but it’s probably worth a shot. Having said that, given that Reynolds was from Hobart, it would seem likely that he worked on other ships out of Hobart prior to Nov 1917: so it would probably be a worthwhile exercise to check the (relatively small) number of other ships’ entries in P2005 for 1917. After all, did he really land the Assistant Purser role as his first ever job on a ship? (I suspect not, but that’s just my guess…)

Alternatively, following the RMS Niagara trail, I managed to dig up the passenger manifests for Victoria and Vancouver (both in British Columbia) for what appears to be Reynolds’ final journey on the Niagara [RG 76 T-4873] and [RG 76 T-4858]. These noted the following dates:-
* 28th February 1918: dep. Sydney, New South Wales
* [no date] Suva, Fiji
* 15th March 1918: dep. Honolulu, Hawaii
* 21st March 1918: arr. Victoria, B.C.
* 22nd March 1918: arr. Vancouver, B.C.

From this, we can see that the date stamped on the US seamen’s temporary ID card was not the arrival date in Hawaii, but the departure date from Sydney. I think it likely that these cards were issued on board the Niagara at the start of the voyage by (say) the Purser – this would also account for the British date field order (which some people have flagged as implying a forgery). Sadly, though, both manifests only contain passenger lists, not crew lists: and so fail to move us any further forward. 🙁

It may seem that we’ve hit another brick wall: but given that all we’re really hoping for at this stage is Reynolds’ first name, the Australian archives still has a vast number of plausible-sounding documents for us to grind our way through, such as:-
* “Registers of ships crew engaged and discharged at South Australian outports (including Darwin).” [D8]
* “Registers of ships crew engaged for the home trade at South Australian ports” [D9]
* “Register of vessels (arrivals and departures), Port Adelaide” [D1]
* “Original Agreements and Accounts of Crew (Form M & S 3)1, with Ships Official Log Books (Form M & S 16 & 12),alphabetical series” [D13]
* “Statistical chart of ships’ movements and list of persons not required to pass education test” [SP83/11]
* Crew and passenger lists for the Port of Newcastle [C667] (even though Cairns and Townsville both have passenger lists for this period, neither seems to have crew lists).

Yet even though Reynolds was from Tasmania, I suspect that it will be New Zealand’s ships’ log books (at Archives New Zealand’s Christchurch Regional Office, descriptions accessible via Archway) that will have some answers, because the SS Manuka and RMS Niagara were both New Zealand-owned:
* Shipping Report Books, Foreign – Outwards (R18282773) – CAVL CH443 26 / 6/6/3
* Shipping Report Books, Foreign – Inwards (R18282772) – CAVL CH443 25 / 6/6/2

In fact, the definitive answer of where to look next may well come from the ominously huge-sounding 8-volume “Log of logs : a catalogue of logs, journals, shipboard diaries, letters, and all forms of voyage narratives, 1788 to 1988, for Australia and New Zealand, and surrounding oceans” by Ian Nicholson. If anyone reading this happens to have access to this truly stonking epitome of maritime bibliomania, please let me know if it lists the Manuka’s and Niagara’s log books and/or related crew records, thanks! Even knowing which volume(s) to be looking at would be a great help to me (the British Library only has an incomplete set).

As far as pursuing our elusive man via normal avenues, I hate to say it but we may well be out of luck. Because voting was reserved for the over-21s, the young H. C. Reynolds won’t appear on Australian electoral rolls prior to 1921, and I have a sneaking suspicion he had left Australia by then (probably for America). But if (as I suspect) he left the RMS Niagara in early 1918 for medical reasons, will he be listed in the Auckland Hospital Register of Patients Admission and Discharge, first series, Vol. 3 (1918-1920) (ref: R20388997), shelfmark “YCAB 15266 4/a D”? Hopefully we shall see… I remain optimistic! 🙂