For me, the way the Z340 was solved highlighted a number of issues:
It seems very likely to me that other long-standing cipher mysteries will also require collaboration between entirely different kinds of researcher
Hence I suspect that many are beyond the FBI’s in-house capabilities, and it will need to find a new way to approach these if it wants them cracked
The whole Big Data thing is starting to open some long-closed doors
With these in mind, here’s my list of what might get cracked next:
Scorpion Ciphers
The Scorpion ciphers were sent to America’s Most Wanted host John Walsh from 1991 onwards: we have copies of S1 and S5, but the rest are in the hands of the FBI. As you’d expect, I’ve blogged about these many times, e.g. here, here, here, and here. I also created a related set of seven cipher challenges, of which only one has been solved (by Louie Helm) so far.
To be honest, I fail to understand why the FBI hasn’t yet released the other Scorpion Ciphers. These are the grist the Oranchak code-cracking mill is looking for: homophonic ciphers, underlying patterns, Big Data, etc.
Nick’s rating for a 2021 crack: 8/10 if the FBI releases the rest, else 2/10
Beale Ciphers
Even if I don’t happen to believe a measly word of the Beale Papers, I still think that the Beale Ciphers themselves are probably genuine. These use homophonic ciphers (albeit where the unbroken B1 and B3 ciphers use a system that is slightly different from the one used in the broken B2 cipher).
Because we already have the hugely improbable Gillogly / Hammer strings to work with (which would seem to be the ‘tell’ analogous to the Z340’s 19-repeat behaviour), we almost certainly don’t need to find a different book
Given that Virginia is Dave Oranchak’s stamping ground, I wouldn’t be surprised if the redoubtable Mr O has already had a long, hard look at the Beale Ciphers. So… we’ll see what 2021 has to bring.
Nick’s rating for a 2021 crack: 2/10
Paul Rubin’s Cryptograms
A curious cryptogram was found taped to the chest of Paul Emanuel Rubin, an 18-year-old chemistry student found dead from cyanide poisoning near Philadelphia Airport in January 1953. As usual, I’ve blogged about this a fair few times, e.g. here, here, here and here.
The ‘trick’ behind the cryptogram appears to be to use a different cipher key for each line. Specifically, the first few lines appear to be a kind of “Trithemian Typewriter” cipher, where every other letter (or some such pattern) is enciphered using a substitution cipher, and where the letters inbetween are filled in to make these look like words. This is, I believe, the reason we can see words like “Dulles” and “Conant” peeking through the mess of “astereantol” and “magleagna” gibberish.
Right now, I’m wondering whether we might be able to iterate through thousands of possible Trithemian schemes to crack each individual line (e.g. lines 4 and 5 appear to share the same cipher key number).
The cipher keys appear to use security by obscurity (& terseness), so I suspect that these may well be defeatable. Definitely one to consider.
Nick’s rating for a 2021 crack: 4/10
Who was The Zodiac Killer?
Even if the Z340 plaintext failed to cast any light on his identity (as I certainly expected), surely a DNA attack must now be on the cards?
To my eyes, the murder of Paul Stine seems to me to have been the least premeditated of all the Zodiac Killer’s attacks, so I would have expected the crime-scene artifacts to have been a treasure trove of DNA evidence. But there are plenty of other claims for Zodiac DNA, so what do I know?
Anyway, I have no real doubt that there are 5 or 6 documentaries currently in production for 2021 release that are all racing to use DNA to GEDmatch the bejasus out of the Zodiac Killer. I guess we shall see what they find…
Nick’s rating for a 2021 breakthrough: 7/10with DNA, else 0/10
Who Was The Somerton Man?
2021 may finally see the exhumation Derek Abbott has been pushing for for so long; plus the start of a worldwide DNA scavenger hunt to identify the unidentified corpse found on Somerton Beach on 1st December 1948.
But after all that, will the mysterious man turn out to be Robin McMahon Thomson’s missing father; or a shape-shifting Russian spy; or a Melbourne crim whom everybody suddenly wanted to forget they ever met?
All the same, even if we do get a name and a DOB etc, will that be enough to end all the shoddy melodrama around the case? Errrm… probably not. 🙁
For what it’s worth, I would have thought that Robin’s father’s surname was almost certainly (Nick shudders at the obviousness) McMahon. I also wouldn’t like to bet against a Dr McMahon in Sydney (e.g. the surgeon Edward Gerard McMahon, though I expect there are others), but feel free to enlighten me why you think McMahon was actually a family name etc etc.
Nick’s rating for a 2021 breakthrough: 8/10 with an exhumation, else 1/10
Putting to one side the bombshell news that the Zodiac Killer’s Z340 cipher has been cracked, the other big cipher-related event in December 2020 was that Clarkson / Hammond / May’s Grand Tour Special came to Madagascar. The idea was to see if they could (a) drive utterly mad cars around arguably the world’s worst roads without anyone actually lynching them, and (b) find pirate treasure by solving the cryptogram attributed to the French pirate Olivier “La Buse” Levasseur.
That they managed (a) while continuing to flog their format’s dead horse(-power) probably surprised no one at all: but how did they do with (b)?
Is it a treasure map?
I have already blogged here about La Buse far too many times to mention. The short version is that the chances that the pigpen cryptogram widely attributed to him actually had anything to do with him are basically zero. Rather, it seems massively more likely that the cipher was concocted at least fifty years after his death, and that the plaintext was in fact some kind of medical recipe. And if it turns out that the pigeon hearts were simply an 18th century substitution for hoopoe hearts, my Spockian eyebrow would barely flicker.
So, is it a pirate treasure map, me (hoopoe) hearties? Not a hopoe.
What about the end five lines, then?
OK, I know that some (gullible) people think the final five lines sometimes seen added to the cipher make it sound like a right proper treasure map:
un bon verre dans l’hostel de le veque dant(S) le siege du diable r(Q)uarar(N)te siz(X) degrès f(S)iz(X) minutes deuz(X) fois pour celui qui le decouvrira juillet mil sept cent (T)rente
(…in English…)
a good drink in the bishop’s hostel in the devil’s seat forty six degrees six minutes two times for the person who will discover it july 1730
A good glass in the bishop’s hostel in the devil’s seat — twenty-one degrees and thirteen minutes — northeast and by north — main branch seventh limb east side — shoot from the left eye of the death’s-head — a bee line from the tree through the shot fifty feet out.
And, more specifically, they sound more like the 1933 French translation of Poe’s story than Baudelaire’s 1856 French translation.
It therefore seems extraordinarily likely to me that the extra five lines were speculatively added to the cryptogram by a French person after 1933. Which was nice of them.
A Turkish Dog?
All the same, the Grand Tour research minions did do a fair bit of digging. They had James May mention a “Turkish dog” (“UN CHIEN TURQ” in the decrypted text), which has been flagged only in very recent years as a phrase used in the 18th century to describe the kind of hairless state that mangy dogs get into in hot countries. (In the above link, the researcher suggests the phrase should be read as “To make a Turkish dog eat well, throw some dry shit at it”, make of that what you will). Here’s a 1755 image from the BNF showing a real (but now extinct) hairless Turkish dog:
But ultimately, this was – like most of the world seen through the windscreen in the Grand Tour – just window-dressing for the car-themed light entertainment. Which, this time round, basically consisted of repeatedly covering James May (in his big-wheeled Caterham) in high-velocity Madagascan mud to make him swear.
Bless them, they’ve all come so far, yet have ended up where they began.
Réunion, Mauritius, Seychelles, Madagascar?
It was correct of them to say (a) that La Buse tried to get himself a pardon from the newly-installed French authorities on Ile de France (Mauritius); (b) that he was captured in Madagascar; and (c) that he was hanged in 1730 in Réunion. So I think it was fair to say that they did broadly present his overall timeline right.
However, La Buse had (it has been widely written) settled down on the Seychelles, nowhere near Madagascar. He was also captured near Fort Dauphin (the main French colony on the island at the time), which was completely the wrong end of the island from the end the bumbling comedic trio drove their modded cars to.
Though La Buse had boarded the Compagnie des Indes’ ship “La Méduse” (1728-1731), it was merely as a pilot to steer it into Port Dauphin. Unfortunately (for La Buse), he was recognised by the captain (it is widely reported, which was presumably Capitaine Hyacinthe D’Hermite as per Memoires des Hommes), captured, and brought to Réunion. And from there to the gallows.
Also: the grave on Réunion that is supposedly La Buse’s isn’t his at all, it’s just a piece of much later tourist trappery. And Madagascar’s “Libertalia”? This is probably more fun as a computer game than as an historical source, so please don’t get me started on that pile of… conjecture.
So, What Really Happened, Then?
Most of the stuff written about La Buse seems to me to vastly overplay his importance as a pirate. Rather, he seems to have been bigged up by the same kind of French ‘historians’ who turned the dead bookseller Nicolas Flamel into some kind of undying alchemist. Flamel would, of course, be turning in his grave were he not still alive. Supposedly.
As to what actually happened with the treasure, I’m marginally more convinced by the account in Charles Grey’s “Pirates of the Eastern Seas” (Chapter XVII): “The pirates divided the plunder at St. Mary’s, besides the cash sharing about 42 small diamonds per man or in less number according to their proportion” (p.325). Grey finishes with Captain David Greenhill’s July 1723 report “that the pirate ship Cassandra was come into Portobello, and that the people have a free pardon for themselves and their goods, and were selling their diamonds and India goods when he came away” (p.329).
The fabulous treasures and chintzes the pirates took had (without much doubt) already been spirited back to Cochin (modern-day Kochi in Kerala) to sell to”their Dutch friends” (p.325). So this is almost certainly where the Flaming Cross of Goa was melted down and laundered, with most of the cash then spaffed on the normal mad carousing pirates specialised in.
Why? Being a pirate was a shitty thing: you expected to die young, because that’s how it normally worked. It’s just that life on board ‘proper’ ships was pretty shitty too, so why not go for the 10% odds that piracy might just work for you?
In some ways, I can’t really blame people for wanting all or any of the tongue-hanging-out-your-mouth La Buse treasure stories to be true. But in my experience, most of the stories attached to unsolved cryptograms tend to be simply historical backfill, campfire stories grafted on to help flog an uncracked cipher to the next sucker mug enough to buy it. And, in my opinion, La Buse’s cryptogram fits that template to a T.
Of course, the other scenario is where people use a bit of unsolved cipher mystery snake oil to help repackage tired old products well past their sell-by date. But that would never happen on Amazon Prime, would it?
Dave Oranchak posted today about how he (along with Jarlve and Sam Blake) cracked the Zodiac Killer’s infamous Z340 cipher. Here’s his video:
Unsurprisingly (to me), it turned out that code breakers had been (kind of) close for some time, with the single largest tell (that never quite told) being the curious results you get if you examine every 19th character of the Z340.
So, the core of the cipher system turned out to be a combination of a “knight move” transposition (down one row and along two columns) plus the Zodiac Killer’s trademark set of reflected letter homophonic cipher shapes.
However, Zodiac – clearly stung by the ease with which his first major cipher had been cracked – threw in some extra confounding factors.
At the end of the top line, he wrote the words “LIFE IS” in his homophonic cipher (not transposed)
At the end of the bottom line, he wrote the word “DEATH” in his homophonic cipher (also not transposed)
The rest of the bottom two lines were written in his homophonic cipher, but with the letter-order of some of the words reversed (e.g. the Zodiac’s signature word “PARADICE” was written as “ECIDARAP”)
The remainder of the cipher was split into two nine-line blocks, where the order of the letters was transposed using knight’s move reordering.
There was also, annoyingly, a single row of ciphered letters in the middle that were out by a single column, which skewed all the text passing through it. It’s fairly easy to see that once you’ve got everything else right, though.
This was – I hope you’ll agree – a simply epic slab of codebreaking. Congratulations to David Oranchak, Sam Blake, and Jarl Van Eycke!!!!
More details (including the FBI’s statement) can be found here.
All in all, the Z340 plaintext reads:
I HOPE YOU ARE HAVING LOTS OF FUN IN TRYING TO CATCH ME THAT WASNT ME ON THE TV SHOW WHICH BRINGS UP A POINT ABOUT ME I AM NOT AFRAID OF THE GAS CHAMBER BECAUSE IT WILL SEND ME TO PARADICE ALL THE SOONER BECAUSE I NOW HAVE ENOUGH SLAVES TO WORK FOR ME WHERE EVERYONE ELSE HAS NOTHING WHEN THEY REACH PARADICE SO THEY ARE AFRAID OF DEATH I AM NOT AFRAID BECAUSE I KNOW THAT MY NEW LIFE WILL BE AN EASY ONE IN PARADICE
The Somerton Man, found dead by the sea wall on Somerton Beach in the early morning of 1st December 1948, has had innumerable speculative theories pinned to his unnamed corpse over the years.
Was he a Soviet spy, an international man of mystery, a former lover, an errant parent, a Third Officer, a gangster, a baccarat school nitkeeper, an interstate car thief, a jockey, an accountant, a ballet dancer, a transvestite, a gold prospector, a homesick Norwegian, or a whatever-happens-to-take-your-fancy-tomorrow-morning kind of guy? The list keeps on growing.
But why so many theories?
John Does & Jane Does
In the wider world of cold cases, plenty of other John / Jane Does are arguably every bit as mysterious as the Somerton Man.
Yet if you’re expecting there to be a (socially-distanced, mask-wearing) queue of people stretching down the high street waiting to bend my weary Cipher Mysteries ear with their tediously touching theories about the Isdal Woman, for example, you’ll be looking in vain. (There’s a nice news story about her teeth here, by the way.)
“The first ten million years were the worst,” said Marvin, “and the second ten million years, they were the worst too. The third ten million years I didn’t enjoy at all. After that I went into a bit of a decline.”
So the issue here is more about why those others don’t seem to attract even a fraction of the theories that he does. What’s the difference that leads people’s minds to conjure up such a glut of (possible) Somerton Men?
Life & Death
Even by the 1949 inquest, a good deal was known about the Somerton Man’s physical condition and the details of his death:
“[S]mall vessels not commonly observed in the brain were easily discernible with congestion” – I believe this would have taken a considerable time to build up, perhaps years?
“The spleen was strikingly large and firm about 3 times normal size” – this too would have taken some time to happen, perhaps months?
“Both lungs were dark with congestion, but otherwise normal.” Like most adults back then, the Somerton Man was a smoker, so this was very probably a long-term consequence of his smoking.
“The stomach was deeply congested, and there was superficial redness, most marked in the upper half. Small haemorrhages were present beneath the mucosa.There was congestion in the 2nd half of the duodenum continuing through the thin part. There was blood mixed with the food in the stomach.” The blood in his stomach showed that he had almost certainly been convulsively sick (though, oddly, there was no vomit by the body or on his clothes or his oddly-shiny shoes);
“The heart, if anything, was contracted […] I am quite convinced that the death could not have been natural, as there is such a conflict of findings with the normal heart.” A poison or misadministered drug was suggested, though all attempts to detect what that was unfortunately failed.
“There was a small patch of dried saliva at the right of the mouth. The impression was that it ran out of his mouth some time before death when he was probably unable to swallow it, probably when his head was hanging to the side. It would run vertically. It had run down diagonally down [sic] the right cheek.“
“The post mortem rigidity was intense, and there was a deep lividity behind particularly above the ears and neck.” Blood pooling at the back of his neck was inconsistent with his having been propped up against the sea wall at the back of the beach prior to his death.
His body had been carefully posed, but with various key elements of his clothing (like a wallet, id card, money, hat, etc) missing
It was hard to avoid the conclusion that poison (or drugs) had been the cause of death; and also that many of the “difficulties” and apparent inconsistencies would disappear if the man had previously died elsewhere, and had then been carried to the beach by person or persons unknown.
But with nobody stepping forward to (successfully) identify the body, this whole line of reasoning merely raised at least as many questions as it answered: and so the inquest was not able to reach a helpful conclusion.
And that, sad as it may be, is still very largely where we are some 70+ years later. Something bad had happened, sure; but without being able to flag it as murder, misadventure, accident or suicide, what’s a coroner to do, eh?
(Human) Nature Abhors a Vacuum
Aristotle famously wrote about the Horror Vacui, i.e. the idea that Nature abhors a vacuum so much that it causes things to fill the void. (Though even fifteenth century engineers knew that this principle had its limits.)
To my eyes, though, it seems that Human Nature abhors a vacuum far more than poor old Mother Nature does. That is, where there is a causal void – i.e. a lack of explanation as to the cause – the runaway horses in our minds gallop and leap impossible fences to construct explanations.
In the case of the Somerton Man, none of the sudden death tropes of the day so familiar to newspaper readers were present – no gangland execution, no violent lover’s argument, no business betrayal, no drowning, no falling drunk down a set of stairs, no being hit by a car. In short: no smoking gun.
Ultimately, a quiet death on a beach – however posed or artificial the Somerton Man’s mise-en-scene may have seemed to those looking carefully – was a disappointment to those hoping for the theatrics of violence.
And so I think it is not the Somerton Man’s actual death that so inspired the theories so much as the absence of explicit forensic theatre. He died cleanly, with nicely groomed fingernails, and wearing shiny shoes: which is all wrong on some level.
Evidence of Absence
But above all else, I think the most disturbing thing about the Somerton Man’s death lies in none of the details that were noted, but instead in the fact that – barring a little bit of sand at the back of his head – he seems to have had no real forensic contact with his (supposed) place of death.
Really, the scenario where someone undergoes the trauma of convulsive death throes while laying on a beach and yet somehow manages to avoid ending up covered in vomit and sand makes no sense to me whatsoever. This is a direct affront to Locard’s Exchange Principle, right?
So can we please call a halt on the whole “romantic loner suicide” scenario? The whole idea that he somehow travelled to Somerton Beach just to die on his own simply makes no physical sense.
Similarly, calling him “The Unknown Man” makes no sense to me either. Rather, I suspect that he spent his last hours in a nearby house, laid out on his back on someone’s bed before dying there, and then being left there for a few hours with his head tilted backwards over the edge (while the blood pooled in his neck).
It also seems highly likely to me that people from that house tidied him up (even cleaning and shining his shoes), before carrying him to the beach and posing his body against the sea wall there.
Essentially, if the Somerton Man did not die on the beach, we can be sure that the people who knew him – and who brought him there – have carefully airbrushed themselves out of the picture. He was very much known.
The Missing Thread
In many ways, I’m not that interested in all the different people the Somerton Man might have been. The glut of possible Somerton Men we have are only ever hypothetical, a long row of Pepper’s ghosts we summon up to try to work out what happened, like CSI bullet trajectory sticks.
And yet in some ways we know almost too much about the mundane mechanics of it all: perhaps our dead man even had his final pasty at Glenelg’s All Night Cafe.
In the end, all we’re missing is the narrative thread of a single life that binds all these pieces together. It’s like we’re trying to solve an upside-down jigsaw, where all our attempts to be scientific and rigorous have failed to turn any of the pieces the right way up.
But even if – mirabile dictu – exhumed DNA magically hands us a name on a silver dish, will we really be able to completely reconstruct the jigsaw’s picture side?
Having spent so many years on this man’s trail, I can’t help but suspect that we won’t. Perhaps some secrets don’t want to be known: not all Ariadne’s threads are there to be followed.
Here’s an official document from 1760 from the Mauritian Archives relating to the Nageon de l’Estang family property:
(Click on the image to get a higher resolution JPEG.)
And here’s a transcription very largely provided by Ruby Novacna, with additional parallel transcriptions from Anthony Lallaizon and Thomas below – thanks very much to all three of you for this excellent help!
Rather than modernise the text, my preference (as per Ruby’s excellent work) is to try to stay close to the original spelling, though anyone wanting to grasp what it means might prefer Anthony’s and Thomas’ versions in the comments below:
1. Le conseil Superieur de l’Isle de France a tous Presents et 2. aVenir Salut. Scavoir faisons qu’en consequence des Ordres de 3. la compagnie inseréé dans la deliberation du deux Janvier M 4. Sept cent cinquante trois [i.e. 2nd Jan 1753] et de ladite Deliberation Nous Avons au Nom 5. De Messieurs les Sindics et Directeurs De la Compagnie Des Indes 6. Concedé et Delaissé Concedons et Delaissons Des maintenant et p[our] toujours 7. Par ces presentes au sieur André Nagëon De l’Etang fils Du sieur 8. Bernardin Nagëon Son père De son vivant officier Des Vaisseaux 9. De Côte p[our] la Compagnie ledit André Nagëon Demeurant chez M[a]d[am]e 10. Sa Mere, En ce port et Paroisse Louis a ce present et acceptant P[our] Luy 11. Ces hoirs et ayant cause la propriété D’un terrain De treize toises 12. Deux Pied(s) Delarge Sur Vingt Six toises quatre pied(s) De proffondeur 13. Scitué sur le Rempart De la grande Montagne n[uméro]te 130. Borné D’un 14. Coté par une rue qui conduit alad[i]te montagne Dautre Coté Par… 15. D’un bord un autrerue qui conduit Dans l’Enfoncement et d’autre bout par (16. Une rue Entredeux) 16. Le Sieur (?) 17. Le tous suivant le plan corigé par M Magon (?) Directeur et Commd[an]t gen[er]al 18. Led[i]t terrain accordéé au S[ieur] Nageon fils par Ordonnance Du Conseil Du 19. Sept may Mil sept cent Soixante [7 May 1760] Pour Par led[i]t Nageon fils Ses enfans 20. Hoirs, ou heritiers meme ceux D’iciluy ayant cause jouir faire et Disposer 21. Dudis terrain comme la chose luy appartenant en toute propriété roturière 22. Et néant moins reconnaitre Messieurs De la Compagnie Des Indes comme 23. Seuls Seigneurs Directs, Suzerains Hauts moyens et Bas justiciers et p[our] ce 24. est sujet atous droits de justice et Banalité quils jugerons a propos D’Etablir 25. Sera tenu ledis Sieur D’Enclore et faire Batir sur ledit terrain de faire 26. Couvrir les Batiments qu’il y fera construire En planches, Bardeaux ou 27. Arg[?] , aux termes presents par les Reglements, s’oblige de payer par 28. annéé sur les ordres et dans les tems qui seront prescrits par le Conseil 29. Douze deniers De premier Cens reputé cens commune et imprescriptible 30. Tant p[our] le fond que pour laquotité lequel Emportera lod(s) et ventes 31. S’aizinnes [saisines] et amendes, au Désir de la coutume de Paris comme aussy 32. D’executer Exactement toutes les Ordonnances et reglements faits et a faire 33. Par la suite par la compag[ni]e ou le Conseil de passer au domaine de la 34. Compag[ni]e. Declaration et reconnaissance dudit terrain et des droits 35. Cy dessus Stipuler le tout a peine de Nullité de la presente Concession De 36. Reunion au domaine Dudit Emplacement Sur le Simple Requisition du 37. Procureur General du Roy Sans estre par la compag[ni]e tenu Daucunes 38. Indemnité. Ny formalité de justice Ny Sans que ladite peine Ny rien 39. Du contenu en la presente Concession Puisse estre reputé comminatoire mais 40. De rigueur étant la condition precise du don gratuit que la compag[ni]e 41. En fait et p(9) que ces presentes ayant leur forces et valeur ou marges 42. D’Expedition d’icelle sera apposéé le sceau de la compagnie des Indes 43. Donné au Port Louis de l’Isle de France le dix de may mil sept cent soix[an]te [i.e. 20 May 1760] 44. Et a Signé 45. Nageondeleteang 46. ? Lejuge ? 47. ?
Oh, and here’s a close-up of the signature at the bottom left, which I read as “Nageondeléteang”, yet another variant spelling to add to the list *sigh*:
… he may have been referring not to the town or inland area called Vacoas, but rather to Pointe de Vacoas on Mauritius’ South-Eastern coast, which was close to the half plot of land he owned. According to his Will (BN1), what Bernardin did immediately after being “shipwrecked in a creek” was:
j’ai remonté une rivière et déposé dans un caveau
les richesses de l'Indus
So: might there be a cave next to a creek not far from Pointe de Vacoas? Generations of Mauritian treasure hunters must surely have put the same two and two together to get the same bejewelled four, right?
But perhaps more importantly, you might be asking what on earth this post has to do with three hundred dead dodos? Has Cipher Mysteries been taken over, as my son asked, by some kind of “ARK: Survival Evolved” meme?
Photo by BazzaDaRambler – Oxford University Museum of Natural History
No, this post is genuinely about treasure and dodos. Really. Read on.
The Creek
Having looked at a fair few historical maps of Mauritius, it seems to my eyes that there was only ever one winding little creek near Pointe de Vacoas. Rather than starting from beside the Point itself (as per the cadastral map I mentioned in the last post)…
…the creek actually starts a little to the side, though it does then indeed kick sideways across towards the Mare du Tabac, which became the Union Vale Sugar Estate:
Source: Mauritius Chamber of Agriculture
In this 1880 map, you can see “Pte Vacoa” in the bottom right leading round to a small river (the “Ruis[seau] des Marres”) that winds its way inland, before finishing up by the Union Vale railway station (at centre left).
Union Vale, 1880 map of Mauritius
OK, while I’m not saying that Ruisseau des Marres is ‘definitely’ the stream / creek that Bernardin was referring to, what I am saying is that it seems (to my eyes) to be a very strong candidate indeed. For if you don’t look there, where else would you to go looking first, hmmm?
Going over the map carefully, you should also be able to see the area around the Ruisseau des Marres is called “LES MARRES”. There are also a couple of odd-looking features on the map labelled as “Mare …”, the right of which is labelled as “Mare aux [something] or Dodo“. Unsurprisingly, we’ll be returning to that location before very long…
The Cave
I first started thinking about Mauritian lava tubes back in 2016, and have never really stopped. This is because Bernardin’s second letter BN2) runs:
l'entrée d'une caverne jadis formé par un bras
de rivière passant sous la falaise et bouchée
par les corsaires pour y mettre leur trésor et
qui est le caveau désigné par mon testament
…which I think sounds exactly like a description of a lava tube.
Here’s a rather nice 1820s drawing by de Sainson of a Mauritian lava tube in the Grande Riviere quartier (not too far away) that I previously mentioned in a separate post:
Though the lava tube or lava blister we’re looking for must surely have been more modestly sized than this epic specimen, it’s the same basic idea.
Mare Aux Songes
In a rather charming 2007 New Yorker article called “Digging For Dodos“, we meet a gaggle of dodo experts and enthusiasts, all inspired by the Mare Aux Songes – a (formerly) boggy pond in the South-East of Mauritius. This site was discovered in 1865 by local teacher George Clarke, after his thirty year search for dodo bones.
In fact, the Mare Aux Songes ended up yielding far more dodo bones (from more than 300 separate dodo skeletons!) than everywhere else combined. Hence even the dodo skeleton at Oxford University Museum of Natural History (yes, the photo at the top of the post) was from the Mare Aux Songes.
In response to a malaria epidemic a few years later, British engineers covered the whole boggy area with concrete to prevent mosquitoes breeding: the Mare Aux Songes then spent most of a century out of reach.
The experts (in the New Yorker article) had formed a group called the 2006 Mauritius Dodo Expedition, with the idea of revisiting the Mare Aux Songes with a more modern scientific approach, to find more about dodos. Specifically, they wondered whether they might find multiple historical layers of dodo remains. But what they actually found was that all the dodo bone fragments seem to have come from a relatively short period around 4000 years ago.
What exactly had happened? The report outlines the group’s conclusions:
The geomorphology of the rock valley, in particular being bounded by steep cliffs, suggests collapse of a pre-existing cavity in the subsurface. In volcanic settings rock valleys generally evolve from the collapse of lava tunnels (e.g. Peterson et al., 1994), and these systems are common in (SW) Mauritius (Middleton, 1995; Saddul, 2002; Janoo, 2005), suggesting that the MAS rock valley was created in a similar way. Therefore at some point after 120 ka, large-scale roof collapse led to the formation of a dry valley at MAS (Fig. 4A).
“Mid-Holocene vertebrate bone Concentration-Lagerstatte on oceanic island Mauritius provides a window into the ecosystem of the dodo (Raphus cucullatus)”
So, the basic narrative they reconstructed was this:
the Mare Aux Songes had started out as a lava blister (i.e. a void inside the volcanic basalt) with a diameter of ten or more meters;
the lava blister’s roof had weathered and collapsed, leaving behind an exposed hemispheric ‘bowl’;
there had been a long dry period, perhaps across a couple of centuries;
during that dry period, a large number of animals (mainly turtles, but a few dodos too) had found themselves trapped inside the steep-walled bowl; and
this was where, unable to climb back up its steep walls to escape, the three hundred dodos died.
And you will surely be unsurprised to find that the Mare Aux Songes mentioned on the map above is (or was) the boggy pond that formed in a roofless lava blister about 1km NNW of Pointe de Vacoas (as per the 1880 map).
Helpfully, the Baron lists the ponds (“mares”) of most interest in this quartier (my loose translation) [pp.139-140]:
The Mare la Violette, on Lahausse's land, yields a lot
of water, nevertheless sometimes drying up, but only
very rarely; its waters drain into le Bouchon.
The Mares du Tabac spring from between the Toussaint,
Avice and Buttié plots; they provide eels [anguilles],
shrimps [chevrettes], and water snails [corbeaux]; they
drain out into the Cul du Chaland, towards le Bouchon.
The Anse-Jonchais, Bambous and Albert ponds sometimes
dry up, but all provide very good water.
On M. Fenonillot's land, there is a natural pond three
to four hundred fathoms long by one hundred wide, becoming
up to 25 feet deep in the rainy season, with water springing
from the earth. This pond dries up in the dry season.
Interestingly, the Baron didn’t even consider the Mare Aux Songes to be worth reporting on, presumably because it was so marshy and boggy that you couldn’t get any useful water from it.
But more interestingly, he goes immediately on to discuss the caverns of the quartier (again, please forgive my loose translation) [pp.140-141]:
This district is very cavernous in places, especially towards
the coast going round from Chasur to the point.
In several parts of the Mares-du-Tabac area, the groundresonates hollowly under the footsteps of men. The artificial
excavations present there the certainty of a great upheaval
formerly caused by underground fires, since in addition to
volcanic stones whose soil is covered, the layers of earth
are firstly topsoil, then tuff [a light, porous rock formed
of volcanic ash], then earth again in unequal layers always
interspersed with volcanic stones.
The Pointe du Souffleur offers a rather singular phenomenon,
also found in other regions; the water pushing violently into
the cavities of this point, emerges in a jet of water rising
to a rather great height through a hole two to three inches
in diameter, with the compressed air producing a noise similar
to that of a strong forge bellows.
There are several excavations in this area that are believed
to go through to the sea, such as the Fanchon hole and the
Maignan hole. The first is located on the Chemin du Port, home
of Sieur Leroux, and the second on the Maignan land. Tests
have been carried out to map the underground routes and
interconnections between these holes; but those tests were
unsatisfactory, because the lack of air causes lights to
be extinguished beyond a certain distance.
Sieur Charroux, among others, spent twenty-four hours lost in
the labyrinths of these caves, and considered himself very
fortunate to find the opening through which he had entered
and which may be twenty feet deep.
All in all, I think there is ample reason to believe that Bernardin Nageon de l’Estang’s description of (what sounds to me like) a lava blister or lava tube beneath a cliff is entirely consistent with the geology of the area around Mare la Violette.
It may sound overly romantic, but it seems certain to me that there are still as yet unmapped voids under the ground; and it might well be that one of these once had a concealed entrance. Perhaps the notion that pirates used these voids is just a campfire story (it wouldn’t be the first or the last): but nonetheless, voids there were.
The Cave Nobody Found
The local landscape circa even 1900 was very different on the surface to how it was circa 1750. Much of the area had been razed for growing sugar cane; estates and railways had been built; marshes had been filled and capped in response to the Epidemics of Mauritius; and so forth.
And so by the time of the great explosion of interest in Mauritian treasure hunting in the early 20th century, the area along the Ruisseau des Mares was probably close to unrecognizable. Not that this probably did anything to stop the grimly determined treasure hunters of the era with their fake maps, rumours, hunches, dynamite and shovels. Who knows what features they blew up in their hunger for buried gold?
Now a large part of the same general zone is being redeveloped by Omnicane – a company formed from Mon Trésor & Mon Désert sugar companies, among others – into the Mon Trésor Airport City project. So perhaps the cave we’re looking for has already been unknowingly flattened and redeveloped ten times over, who can tell?
If (and I happily admit that it’s a big if) Bernardin Nageon de l’Estang’s treasure is still in the cave he left it in nearly three hundred years ago, then the way forward is surely through GPR (ground penetrating radar), tracking along the land beside the eastern bank of the Ruisseau des Mares. But it is (and probably will always be) a needle-shaped void in a lava haystack.
Still, even though it took George Clarke thirty years to find his cache of three hundred dead dodos, who would now say that his search wasn’t worth it? And surely that’s how Mauritian treasure hunters feel (more or less), right?
Even so, rather than hiring a load of GPR equipment, I have to point out that you would (thanks to the French treasure hunting laws that Mauritius inherited) probably be better off instead walking up and down beside that river bank until you fell down a hole into a long lost treasure cave.
As they say in the theatre, break a leg. 😉
Finishing With A Song
It’s rare that you can write a blog post that covers an unsolved historical mystery and yet brings in so many nice historical angles along the way: rarer still that you can do all that and end on a song.
So here’s my cousin Phil Alexander (AKA “Philfy Phil”, recorded at The Goat, St Albans in 2010) with “Dido Dies”, one of his… errrm… cleaner parody songs. The first verse and chorus are about dead dodos, and you already know the tune, so feel free to sing along, you know you want to:
The final dodo walked the earth four hundred years ago No more flapping wings and croaking; the dodo, yes, has croaked He’s in the doodoo He lies extinct No more delicious in Mauritius Or at least that’s what I thinkt
Then Salvador Dali died in 1989 With the oddest of moustaches Like his anti-artist predecessor, Dada Painting stuff Did he look back and then realize he’d painted quite enough? And well… let’s face it, most of it was guff
Dada died, Dali died, da dodo died Dada died, Dali died, da dodo died D’oh, da dodo died
Note that the BNF also has a second map of Mauritius that seems to be an updated copy of the first map, but with the owners’ names [rather than reference numbers into an index] inserted directly into the map. BNF shelfmark: “département Cartes et plans, GE SH 18 PF 219 DIV 2 P 24“. (The plots in this seem to my eyes to be a little more subdivided, which is why I suspect it’s slightly later.)
What is interesting, as Anthony is clearly aware, is that these two maps offer snapshots into the world of Mauritius at around the period we’re interested in (if we’re interested in the Nageon de l’Estang family, that is).
So, let’s dive deep into these maps and see what pearls we can retrieve…
The Nageon Plot
As Indian Ocean treasure hunters have known for over a century, the will signed by “Bernardin Nageon de l’Estang” begins (my rough translation):
I’m about to enlist to defend the motherland, and will without much doubt be killed, so am making my will. I give my nephew the reserve officer Jean Marius Nageon de l’Estang the following: a half-lot in La Chaux River district of Grand-Port, île de France […]
Now, as most people who have ever gone hunting for historical cadastral maps (i.e. maps that show the “extent, value, and ownership of land”, typically so that the owners can be taxed) will tell you, this can be a very hit and miss affair. (Errrm… mostly miss.)
Personally, I’d long ago given up on the faint hope that there might be any actual cadastral map of 18th century Mauritius out there: the best I had hoped to find was a later will referring back to an earlier (long lost) will.
But… what we have in GE C-9307 is indeed a cadastral map, nicely indexed. And in that index, just as sweetly as you could wish for, is “574 Nageon”.
Ah, you may reasonably ask, so where is this Nageon plot in modern-day Mauritius? Well, carefully aligning the map so that we can see (most of) the rivers depicted above, I think we can locate this plot extremely exactly.
Yes, the plot is now part of the runway and plane parking area of Sir Seewoosagur Ramgoolam International Airport, which is Mauritius’ main international airport.
So, it turns out that pretty much everyone who has flown to Mauritius from abroad will have passed directly over the Nageon de l’Estang land before they’ve even got their bag down from the overhead locker.
Which is nice.
Other Names on the Map
Anthony points to other possibly connected names that appear in GE C-9307’s index, such as 571 Pitel and 630 Clergeac.
If you had (quite understandably) forgotten why, a 2016 Cipher Mysteries post flagged that André Ambroise Nageon de l’Estang married “Perrine Clerjean” (which was probably “Clergeac”) in Port Louis on 14th January 1766; and then (after her death) married Mathurine Louise Françoise Pitel in Grand Port on 13th June 1768.
To this illustrious list I’d perhaps add quite a different name to conjure with: 467 Levasseur (there in both maps). (A piratical relation? Or no relation at all? You choose!)
Finally, I also noticed an intriguing detail just along the coast: Pte du Vaquoas (which is still marked as “Pointe Vacoas” on modern maps).
Could this be what Bernardin Nageon de l’Estang was referring to when he wrote:
j’ai naufragé dans une crique près des Vaquois
The reason I ask is that even though Mauritius has a modern town Vacoas-Phoenix (right in the middle of the island, close to Curepipe), that town does not seem to appear in these two 18th century maps at all.
So, could it be that Bernardin was simply referring to Pointe Vacoas? Sadly, because the description then goes on to describe climbing up a cliff…
remonte la rivière, remonte une falaise en allant vers l'Est
…and the area around Pointe Vacoas looks extremely flat, the odds that this is true seem small to me. But even so, I thought I ought to mention it. 😉
made in Italy (because he thinks the handwriting is distinctively Italian);
made in the 15th century (largely because of the same ‘4o’ pattern I went on about in The Curse of the Voynich back in 2006);
written in Latin (because that’s what educated Italians used back then); and
enciphered using a combination of substitution and “permutation” (I’m pretty sure he means ‘transposition’) tricks (though he doesn’t want to give any details away just yet, his book – to be published next year – will teach everyone how to decrypt Voynichese for themselves)
Having previously (in 2019) concluded that the Voynich’s author was Leon Battista Alberti, Delgado now thinks for 100% sure that it was funded by Federico da Montefeltro (though he doesn’t have any more detail than this).
He doesn’t yet know the author’s name, because the text’s combination of substitution and transposition means that it’s taking him a while to decrypt its text: so far, he has only managed to decrypt a few lines at a time.
Delgado also seems a bit cross that existing Voynich Manuscript researchers don’t seem to have taken his work seriously – in other words, that he hasn’t been given the seat at the top table he so rightly deserves.
(Hot tip: there is no top table – we all sit on the floor.)
f6r = Groundsel?
His decryption process seems largely to have been to look at the top two lines of herbal pages to see if they contain a tell-tale Latin plant-name that has been manipulated in some way. His key example seems to be f6r, which he says discusses groundsel, and how the plant is attacked by mites.
Groundsel certainly does have a long herbal medicinal history: it was mentioned by Pliny (who called it ‘senecio‘) and by Dioscorides (who recommended it as a cure for kidney-stones). Nowadays, we know that even though canaries do like a nice bit of groundsel seed, humans who take too much of it may well get liver damage. [So perhaps we’ll yet see the Donald recommending it as a coronavirus cure.]
My guess is that Delgado was looking specifically at the last word of the second line (EVA chotols), which he has matched with the -e-e– of ‘senecio’:
My guess is also that Delgado thought that he had seen a reference to “(minutum) reddas”, which some may know from Luke 12:59: dico tibi non exies inde donec etiam novissimum minutum reddas = [King James Bible] “I tell thee, thou shalt not depart thence, till thou hast paid the very last mite” (i.e. the last cent, penny, or farthing). And no, I can’t easily guess which Voynichese word of f6r Delgado thought was “reddas”.
It’s true that spider mites are among the (many, many, many) things that attack senecio vulgaris. But honestly, were any fifteenth century gardeners really that sophisticated about what was (and is) basically a weed?
Perhaps there’s an outside chance that this f6r identification is correct, but to be honest, I’m really not seeing even that much so far.
Nine-Rosette Castle = Amelia?
The decryption that Delgado seems most impressed with is that of the famous castle in the nine-rosette page:
He was so surprised to find the name of the town with the castle – Amelia (in Umbria, formerly Ameria) on this page that he plans to title his book “The Voynich Amelia Manuscript” (i.e. with a deliberate strikethrough).
As justification, he says that the text describes a “carpet of roses” (presumably that’s what the swirl of stars in the middle of the rosette represents?), and that even today there’s an Umbrian festival that has elaborate carpets of roses (he says this is “Spoleto”, but I’m pretty sure he means the Infiorate di Spello).
Spello does indeed have quite a splendidly beautiful festival, even if many of the designs do seem to my eyes to be a little too eager to combine 1960s psychedelia with 1980s crop circles:
Of course, Cipher Mysteries readers will immediately recognise this very specific point in a Voynich theory blog post: the first mention of a specific historical phenomenon. So yes, this is where I would normally point out that the first document mentioning decorating the streets of Spello with flowers (and not even with carpets of flowers) only dates back to 1831.
As a result, my confidence that this is a real decryption is as close to zero as makes no difference, sorry.
BTW, I suspect it is the second word of the Voynichese label just above the castle that Delgado reads as “amelia”, but it’s probably not hugely relevant:
Previous posts here have established (I believe) that the WW2 Pigeon Cipher was almost certainly encrypted using the British Typex cipher machine. So I think it would be a good idea to look at this message from a Typex code-breaker’s point of view.
While Kelly Chang’s (2012) master’s project on the cryptanalysis of Typex is a very useful resource here, I think it’s fair to say that she confines her efforts to purely numerical, permutational attacks. But because she doesn’t try to peer inside an actual ciphertext, I think it’s also fair to say that she doesn’t really look at Typex from a practical code-breaker’s perspective.
So, let’s get to it: let’s (temporarily) close our mathematical eyes, and instead try to look at a Typex message (the WW2 pigeon cipher) through our code-breaking eyes.
The Typex Keyboard
Whereas Enigma was just 26 plain letters A-to-Z (no numbers, no spaces, no umlauts, and not even a special Swastika symbol), Typex had two modes: Letter Mode and Figure Mode. And so the Typex keyboard (below image from Crypto Museum, or you can play with a real-looking one at Virtual Typex) encodes lots of letters in slightly roundabout ways (akin to escape code sequences).
The most notable mappings in Typex’s (default) Letter Mode are:
X –> Space
V –> Switch to Figure Mode
Z –> Switch to Letter Mode
In Typex’s Figure Mode, the top row maps to numbers (QWERTYUIOP —> 1234567890), the second row (largely) maps to punctuation symbols, while the special Letter Mode meta-letters (X/V/Z) maps to G/C/D.
So, to encipher “X” on a Typex keyboard, you’d need to switch into Figure Mode (“V”), press the Figure Mode version of the letter (“G”) and then switch back into Letter Mode (“Z”), i.e. “VGZ”.
Putting this all together, you can see that before sending the classic test sequence “The Quick Brown Fox Jumps Over The Lazy Dog” via Typex, you’d need to “escape” the letters to the Typex keyboard mapping, i.e.
THEXQUICKXBROWNXFOVGZXJUMPSXOVCZERXTHEXLAVDZYXDOG
Here, I’ve highlighted the three escape sequences (for “X”, “V”, and “Z” respectively): similarly, 1234567890 would need to be Typex-escaped as “VQWERTYUIOPZ” before transmission.
Was Typex’s keyboard a strength or a weakness? Certainly, it was more sophisticated, and gave more a concise, bureaucratic feel to messages (“£2/3/6” would have been vastly longer for Enigma). But at the same time, the added expense and physical complexity (the number of Typex machines built was only ever a fraction of the number of Enigma machines in use) seems fairly unwise to me.
Moreover, Typex’s keyboard’s escape sequences significantly modified the way technical language was transmitted. Even though shorter messages are harder to crack than longer messages, I can’t help but wonder whether Typex’s escape sequences might have added crypto weaknesses.
Typex “X”
Any enciphering system that enciphered spaces as X would instantly make X the most common letter in (escaped) plaintexts. So it should be clear that Typex’s letter “X” (which enciphers SPACE) was one possible weakness.
Moreover, right from the earliest part of the war, German codebreakers noted that the first three letters in a new class of intercepted messages were never “A”, “I”, and “R” (respectively), and the last letter was almost never “X”. From this they deduced (correctly) that:
Messages were being sent using an Enigma-style rotor cipher machine (where letters never map to themselves)
The sender was almost certainly the British Air Force (“AIR”)
The last letter was probably using X as a padding character
Even if Typex is (largely) randomising the output letters (via permutation and stepping), we still know that plaintext “X” can never be enciphered as ciphertext “X”. Can we use this to look inside the ciphertext?
If we discard the (almost certainly disguised) rotor setting AOAKN at the start and end of the pigeon cipher message, we get the following:
For this 25 x 5 = 125-character ciphertext, a completely random letter mapping would imply an average instance count of (125/26) = 4.8 instances. In fact, the instance counts of the letters (in decreasing count order) are:
H K R N P D F G Q A J M O T E I X Z B C L U W Y S V 8 8 8 7 7 6 6 6 6 5 5 5 5 5 4 4 4 4 3 3 3 3 3 3 2 2
Even if X is the most common letter in the plaintext, the amount of enciphered text would need to be very long (I’d guess 20+ times longer or more) before Typex (escaped space) X’s higher frequency would show up as a measurable dip in the (Typex ciphertext) X’s statistics.
Sadly, because of the short length of the ciphertext, the only thing to note is that the third and fifth lines have no X’s in, which we’ll return to in the next section.
Typex “Q”
From the preceding table, we can see that Q appears six times in the ciphertext. Even though Q is a relatively rare letter in English (hence 10 points in Scrabble), there are a number of different ways that Q can practically appear in an enciphered Typex messages:
As the letter Q in text (in Letter Mode)
As the digit 1 (in Figure Mode)
As part of a five-letter QQQQQ separator block (these appeared in the middle of Typex messages, and were used to help conceal messages starts e.g. coded addressees)
As a null (Typex operators were, as part of the security protocol, expected to insert a random character every few words)
As part of a Q-code
Even though Q-codes were originally used for shipping transmissions, their use quickly spread through the various armed services. A few years ago, I found a Combined Operating Signals handbook in the Royal Signals Museum archives. Its first page looked like this:
But though it is entirely plausible that a WW2-era message might include Q-codes such as QPZ (“Yes”) or QQZ (“No”), my understanding is that Q-codes were far more for radio operators than for cipher machine operators. Hence I’m not genuinely expecting to find any Q-codes in the plaintext here.
I’ve previously posted about QQQQQ here, but the short version is that if we look at the six instances of Q that appear in the pigeon cipher message, they appear to cluster in the bottom half of the message:
Of course, this might just be a sign that randomness is doing its random thing here. But there’s a pretty good chance that the lack of Q’s in the top half implies that the top half of the plaintext has more Qs than normal.
Why might that be? The two most likely reasons would be (a) the presence of a QQQQQ section divider block (say, on the “PABUZ WYYNP…” line), and (b) the presence of number sequences (because in Figure Mode, Q enciphers the digit “1”). And because of Benford’s Law, we might reasonably expect “1” to appear more often than other digits, so this perhaps isn’t quite as arbitrary as you might at first think.
I also wonder the lack of Xs on the third line might be an indication that the block of five letters immediately before the (putative) QQQQQ ends with a block of Xs, e.g. –XXX QQQQQ. It’s certainly possible…
Other Letters
If we look at the five Ts in the ciphertext, these too cluster at the bottom in a slightly unusual way:
Note also that even though the instance counts of V and Z in any given message will (almost certainly) be identical (because Figure Shift will be followed by a matching Letter Shift back again), these are small enough that they won’t show up in the instance stats. But the small number of Vs in the ciphertext might possibly be a (very weak) indication that the bottom half of the text has a lot of Figure Shifting going on.
But really: are these statistically significant results, or is it merely the Randomness Fairy laughing into her hand? A researcher with the persistence of Dave Oranchak would randomise millions of cases and see how often these conditions recur: but with such a small ciphertext, it’s hard to be sure. For now, though, it’s just a set of interesting observations. 🙂
This website may have been quiet-ish of late, but the lights here at Cipher Mysteries Mansion have been burning into the night. Yes: once again, I find myself hot on the trail of one of the ‘classic’ unbroken historical ciphers.
Intriguingly, what I’ve found is that there is some hugely useful information out there relating to that particular cipher that almost nobody knows about. The only (minor, piffling, inconsequential) practical challenge is that what I need to know about is located on the opposite side of the Atlantic from me (in the Baltimore / Washington area, in fact).
To be precise, I believe that this extra information (if I’m correct) would lift up my chances of cracking this specific cipher from a miserable 0% right up to the dizzying heights of 1 in 5040 (i.e. ~0.02% chance of success).
But that’s not the point of doing it: which, rather, is to try to recategorise this whole challenge from impossible to possible. If I can demonstrate that this is doable, then I think all manner of doors will open up… and hopefully the other 5039 chances too.
So: will anyone in the Baltimore-Washington area with an interest in crypto history please kindly step forward and offer their assistance? I need someone to take a couple of hours out to have a look at this in person. Thank you so much! 🙂
