Category Archives: Historical Ciphers

A few days ago, I tried using Fiverr.com‘s translation marketplace to enfrenchify the 598 words of my Kickstarter documentary pitch video. The required 10USD will only barely get you a round of drinks in a London pub: and yet given that this seemed to be the going rate for this size of work, I thought it would be an interesting exercise to get me some sous-titres.

All of which is a great theory, but how did it work out in practice?

The Mechanism

Fiverr.com does make it remarkably easy to order a translation: the person I chose turned out (according to his/her blurb) to be a native French speaker living in Morocco, which is absolutely fine by me.

However, I have to say that I found it hard to believe any of the brief biogs the fiverr.com translators put to their names / aliases. There was an air of polished nonsense to all of them, as though peeling back the virtual curtain would reveal a community of Nigerian scammer kiddies feeding your text into Google Translate and laughing at your compliant gullibility.

Of course, I know that’s not actually true or even remotely likely: but that was very much how it felt to me overall. So even though fiverr.com is technically quite sweet, I think it still struggles to make its vendors look credible. Doubtless others will disagree, but… I’m jus’ sayin’, is all. 😐

The Problems

Putting the core translation issue (i.e. of whether or not it’s any good) aside, the biggest problem turned out to be ‘sense reversal’. By which I mean: for the pitifully small amount of money involved, these online translators simply can’t afford to spend time deeply parsing your text, so there is a good chance that they will misread a given sentence and, as a result, accidentally flip its sense into the opposite of what you intended. This occurred three or four times (though these were all fairly easy to pick up), and I fixed them up by hand.

And so I’ve ended up with manually-fixed French subtitles based largely on the translation I bought.

Of course, what you are supposed to do when you find things wrong like that is to send them back for review, i.e. for you to flag such issues so that the translator can fix these problems for you (as part of the price). But I simply couldn’t bring myself to do that, for the simple reason that the amount of money involved was just too small: I felt too bad, if that makes sense.

Other people might possibly get around this feeling of guilt by asking for revisions and then giving a 10USD tip at the end (I wouldn’t be surprised if this is how it tends to work in practice). The only thing I did actually ask for was a single sentence early on that the translator had obviously translated but had accidentally cut-and-pasted over when putting the text together to send back, which I didn’t think was too big a request.

I don’t know: for all the good things about fiverr.com, I think that it is also a strange kind of low-end marketplace that can’t possibly give you technically tight text at the kind of prices quoted, simply because people can’t read text for the prices quoted, let alone translate it. And so I suspect that any kind of non-straightforward or strongly-logically-structured text may well end up being somewhat butchered, not out of intent but simply out of necessarily scant attention.

Perhaps all I can reasonably conclude about Fiverr is: Caveat Emptorr. 😐

Those French Subtitles In Full

As to whether it was worth it or not, here’s the translation.

Salut, mon nom est Nick Pelling.
Je dirige Cipher Mysteries, un blog des recherches historiques.
Ce que je tiens à couvrir sont les mystères historiques, quoi que ce soit avec des preuves douteuses à partir du manuscrit de Voynich jusqu’aux cartes aux trésors des pirates.
Et depuis des années, j’essayais de comprendre l’histoire d’un pirate de l’océan Indien qui porte le nom Bernardin Nagéon de l’Estang.
Il avait naufragé prétendument dans la côte Sud-Ouest de l’île Maurice, et il avait récupéré le trésor de son bateau ; il a repris un ruisseau par une falaise ; et puis il l’enterré dans une caverne souterraine qui avait été cachée par des pirates.
C’est une histoire incroyable, bien sûr, mais il faut être très prudent sur ce que vous croyez de ces mystères chiffrés.
D’une part, il n’y a aucune preuve que “Bernardin Nagéon de l’Estang” a jamais existé ; et ses lettres ?
Il n’y a encore aucune preuve que ce qui est mentionné dans ces lettres est vrai.
Tout ce que nous avons sont les différentes versions de ces lettres contradictoires qui confondent les uns des autres.
Pourtant, malgré ces problèmes profondément enracinés, ces documents ont aidé à alimenter une ruée vers l’or du pirate sur l’île Maurice.
Pendant des années – voire des décennies – les mauriciens arpentaient autour de l’île, avec impatience la recherche de tout signe de trésor des pirates, les marques secrètes de pirate – plus précisément les lettres « BN », les initiales du pirate – creusées dans les rochers qui pourraient les conduire à ce cache fabuleux trésor, à l’or au-delà de vos rêves.
En fait, ce qui s’est apparemment passé est qu’aucun de ces chasseurs de trésor ait trouvé des choses comme une boucle d’oreille en laiton du trésor de Nageon de l’Estang… mais la question se pose encore – est-il encore là-bas ?
Ou sinon, pourrions-nous être en mesure de découvrir son histoire secrète, pour savoir ce qui lui est arrivé ?
Depuis quelques années, je l’ai lu et relu tout ce que je pouvais trouver sur Bernardin Nageon de l’Estang: et je pense que je peux enfin comprendre la plupart de ce qui est arrivé.
Mais je cherche maintenant à soulever mes recherches au niveau suivant, et aller à l’île Maurice elle-même, pour parvenir finalement en profondeur ce mystère.
Mais j’ai besoin de l’aide de Kickstarter … J’ai besoin de votre aide pour le faire.
Votre soutien ouvrira beaucoup de portes qui sont restées fermées pour moi.
En discutant avec les historiens et les chasseurs de trésor, en regardant les archives et les musées, en foulant le sol que Nagéon de l’Estang prétend qu’il a sous enterré son Trésor, je pense que nous pouvons enfin aller au fond de ce mystère.
Mais il y a une touche Hi-Tech.
Si Nagéon de l’Estang a enterré son trésor dans une caverne qui a existé pour toujours, la science va surement nous aider à trouver quelque chose.
Ainsi, une partie du plan du projet est de prendre un GPR loué (radar à pénétration de sol) à l’île Maurice,
pour pénetrer ce sol, et voir si nous pouvons voir ce qui est là-dessous, voir s’il y a une grotte à trouver.
L’objectif ultime du projet est de ne pas trouver un trésor physique (même si ça va être génial), mais plutôt de faire des recherches historiques difficiles en plein air, à la caméra, complètement transparent.
Je ne sais pas ce que je vais trouver ; je ne sais pas quelle histoire sera racontée ; mais je sais que c’est un voyage que quelqu’un doit faire, et une histoire que quelqu’un doit raconter- et je pense que c’est le moment d’agir.
À la fin, nous devrions avoir un documentaire qui raconte l’histoire d’un rêve partagé de l’or d’un pirate qui a repris tout un pays.
Mais que sera-t-il en fait cette histoire, les secrets d’elle, je ne sais pas – mais je veux savoir, et avec votre aide, nous pouvons tous le trouver. Merci beaucoup !

“Capital” issue 132, 5th June 2013 has an article on page 15 entitled “Jean Giraud et ses Précieuses Pierres”, which discusses the death of Jean Giraud (who founded Mauritian company United Basalt in July 1953) on May 14th 2013 at the age of 94:

The article continues:

Grand chasseur devant l’éternel, il est aussi chercheur de trésors à ses heures. Persuadé comme beaucoup de passionnés de la catégorie, il est persuade que des pirates ont enfoui des trésors dans les îles de sud-ouest de l’océan Indien. Il decide de s’intéresser à celui du fameux Oliver Le Vasseur, dir La Buse, qu’il croit enfoui quelque part à Saint-Antoine et à celui de Nageon de l’Estang, qui, just avant d’être pendu aux Seychelles, a jeté à la foule des curieux un prétendu plan de trésor. En compagnie de son frère Lucien, de Philippe de Rosnay et de Raymond Chevreau, il va ainsi se dépenser sans compter dans la recherche de ces précieux butins qu’il ne trouvera jamais.
Mais on dit des chercheurs de trésors qu’ils ne vivent que de l’espoir d’en trouver un et que c’est uniquement cette quête, souvent vaine, qui les fait vivre…

My free translation of the above – and native French speakers, please step forward to correct me, because I might easily have gone completely wrong here – is as follows:

Ever the eternal opportunity hunter in business, in his spare time he was also a treasure hunter. He was, as are so many others of that particular ilk, firmly convinced that pirate treasure lies buried in the southwestern islands of the Indian Ocean. For many years, his focus was on Nageon de l’Estang (whose booty he believed was buried somewhere in Saint-Antoine) and on the well-known pirate Olivier Levasseur (AKA “La Buse”) who, just before being hanged in the Seychelles, allegedly threw a treasure map into the crowd. Now reunited with his brother Lucien and fellow treasure hunters Philippe de Rosnay and Raymond Chevreau, Girard is free to spend forever searching lavishly for the precious spoils he will never find.
But it has been said that treasure hunters live only for the search and that it is by their quest, often in vain, that they live…

Of course, Cipher Mysteries readers will know that it was actually Olivier Levasseur who was hanged (and in Réunion rather than the Seychelles): but it was a surprise to me that Jean Giraud believed Bernardin Nageon de l’Estang buried his treasure in Saint-Antoine (in the North of Mauritius).

Regardless, if my translation is basically right and both Jean Giraud and his brother Lucien Giraud have now both passed away, it shows just how urgent it is to try to get to the bottom of this, before there’s nobody left to help tell the story.

Of course, the question some will doubtless be asking now is: who inherited the brothers’ collections of Nageoniana? From various fragments online, it seems that Jean Giraud left at least a son (Michel Giraud) and a grand-daughter (Marine – is she the famous Mauritian tennis player born 23rd April 1986 in Riviere Noire?): but that’s as much as I can reliably be sure about.

For what it’s worth, I found no obituary or note in Le Mauricien for either brother, nor any mention in ancestry.com: but perhaps other people’s searches for the same basic BDM data will prove both luckier and more productive than mine.

Researchers studying the Voynich Manuscript use what’s called an “interlinear transcription”: this interleaves different researchers’ interpretations of the (handwritten original) Voynich text, a line at a time. So, rather than having to constantly refer to, say, a contrast-enhanced image of the first line of the first page…

…you can instead refer to its interlinear transcription, which is much more convenient, and yet lets you see the differences of opinion that various researchers have about how to read that line:

<f1r .P1.1;H>       fachys.ykal.ar.ataiin.shol.shory.cth!res.y.kor.sholdy!-
<f1r .P1.1;C>       fachys.ykal.ar.ataiin.shol.shory.cthorys.y.kor.sholdy!-
<f1r .P1.1;F>       fya!ys.ykal.ar.ytaiin.shol.shory.*k*!res.y!kor.sholdy!-
<f1r .P1.1;N>       fachys.ykal.ar.ataiin.shol.shory.cth!res.y,kor.sholdy!-
<f1r .P1.1;U>       fya!ys.ykal.ar.ytaiin.shol.shory.***!r*s.y.kor.sholdo*-

Anyway, given that I now have copies of (what might well be) all the printed versions of the Nageon de l’Estang papers, it struck me a few days ago that I should get round to putting them together into an interlinear transcription.

And there being no good reason not to, that’s exactly what I did. 🙂

The Interlinear Transcription

I’ve posted a page holding my Nageon de l’Estang interlinear transcription on the Cipher Foundation website.

The first few interlinear blocks of lines in BN1 (“Bernardin Nageon de l’Estang paper #1″) look like this:

FC: [l'an III de la République]

RC: Je pars m’enrôler et défendre la patrie. Comme je serai sans doute tué, je fais
FC: Je pars m'envoler et défendre la Patry,  comme je serai tué c'est sûre, je fais

RC: mon testament  et donne à mon neveu Jean Marius        Nageon de l'Estang,
FC: mon testament. Je donne à           Jean Marin  Justin Nageon de l'Estang,
LM:                Je donne à           Jean-Marius-Justin Najeon de l'Etang.

Here, [FC] stands for “Paul Fleuriau-Chateau”, a now-deceased Mauritian researcher from Rivière Noire, who included a transcription in his 2001 book “Aventuriers en mer”. The first line stands alone because the date Fleuriau-Chateau gave for BN1 does not appear in the other transcriptions at all. (In case you’re wondering, it’s a French Republican Calendar date equivalent to 1795).

The second set of interleaved lines appears both in Robert Charroux’s (“RC”) and in Fleuriau-Chateau’s (“FC”) copies, but not in any of the others: while the third set of lines appears in Charroux and in Fleuriau-Chateau, as well as in Loys Masson’s (“LM”) 1935 article.

Immediately you can see the kind of differences in play between the versions: but which are attempted corrections, which are miscopying, and which are insertions? What is original and what is make-believe? That is the $64,000 question (possibly even literally).

According to Le Clézio, circa 1901 his grandfather knew of numerous different copies of these papers floating around in what he called “grimoires” in Mauritius (p.105). So… might there be more versions out there?

Reading between the lines (so to speak), I think the answer is almost certainly yes: in fact, I suspect there may even be ten or more as-yet-unseen variants out there in private hands. However, only by bringing them all into the light and comparing them in a really analytical, scientific, open way do we stand any real chance of making sense of them as a whole.

Incidentally, my current interlinear transcription isn’t quite complete: the two photographs I took of page 56 of Paul Fleuriau-Chateau’s “Aventuriers en mer” turned out to be out of focus. So if anyone has access to a copy and/or can email me through a scan of p.56, that would be really helpful, thanks!

Le Club International des Chercheurs de Trésor?

Interestingly, I think that Robert Charroux’s omissions are quite telling, and this is something that hasn’t really been talked about before.

For a start, he mentions (but only includes the first couple of lines of) two further cryptic documents that I call “BN4” and “BN5” (which Fleuriau-Chateau and Le Clézio both include). His reason for not including them is that “Le teneur exacte de ces documents est le propriété du Club International des Chercheurs de Trésor“, ho-ho. But don’t worry, dear reader, he then assures you that “vous savez tout ce qu’il est permis de savoir sur les secrets de Nagéon de l’Estang“. You’re not on the list, you can’t come in.

For what it’s worth, I suspect that this also explains why Charroux left out the interesting section in BN2 from “au nord” to “testament” that says how to find the cave: because only a ‘true’ treasure hunter (i.e. a member of his club) could be trusted with such powerful knowledge.

Your Mission, Should You Choose To Accept It…

What can be done to move this research strand forward? For me, the answer is obvious: dig up more versions of these letters to add to the interlinear transcription.

I’m convinced that there simply must be photographs, scans, hand-copies, mentions, quotations, letters, newspaper articles and books (for example, in other languages) that I don’t know about out there and not just cut-and-pasted from Charroux (as seems to be the Internet norm). What can we find?

I’m similarly convinced that there must be archival documents on the Klondyke Company, and even on Le Club International des Chercheurs de Trésor, both of which tried so jealously to hold back Nageon de l’Estang’s secrets for themselves. And these documents must surely include multiple versions of the Nageon de l’Estang papers, right?

Finally, I’m also convinced that there are individuals out there who have collected their own versions of the letters: for his book, Paul Fleuriau-Chateau relied on Lucien Giraud and Jean Giraud. Is Lucien Giraud still alive?

For me, the big reason for trying to make a documentary is to find these people and just ask the right questions…

As I mentioned a couple of days ago, my Kickstarter Mauritian pirate treasure documentary pitch is now live, and has already picked up its first few backers, all of them long-time Cipher Mysteries supporters (each in their own way) – thank you very much indeed for that, it’s undoubtedly true that the first few steps of a thousand mile journey are the hardest ones. 🙂

Anyway, given that the project plan is to structure the documentary into nine sections, what I’ll be doing here over the next four weeks is writing posts on those same sections – or rather, on what I currently know about them, as well as what I hope to find out about them in Mauritius. Though this won’t quite amount to a “Nageonopedia”, my hope is that it should be the most reliable (and realistic) collection of basic data on the Bernardin Nageéon de l’Estang historical mystery on the Internet or in print.

It may well turn out that better informed (or just plain cleverer) readers can answer one or two of the key research questions without my actually having to go to Mauritius to do so. Moreover, you clever people might also suggest even better research questions than the ones I set out to answer. I don’t mind, though, because these are all positive scenarios as far as I’m concerned, and the documentary would surely continue to develop and move forward in an ever-better direction as a result. 🙂

At the same time, I’m planning (over the next few days) to do some PR to propel the idea of the documentary into the wider cultural ether: so if anyone has any good suggestions for bloggers or journalists to contact about interviews, please let me know, I’m all ears! 🙂

It’s been a little while in preparation (difficult things almost always are), but the project I mentioned a little while ago has now gone live for crowdfunding on Kickstarter (so I now have 30 days to convince you and a thousand other people to back it).

The documentary I’m planning to make is called Gold Beyond Your Dreams: the idea is to go to Mauritius and see if I can finally unravel some (though hopefully most) of the secret history of Bernardin Nagéon de l’Estang and his alleged pirate treasure, and tell the story. But I’ve included a 3-minute video (with subtitles) as part of the pitch which explains it all nicely, along with a project plan showing exactly what I’m aiming for: hopefully it’s specific enough.

Even though I think there’ll be enough source material for 120+ minutes, I’m aiming for a 45-minute final edit to keep it all tight and interesting.

What do you think?

Here is as good a collection of pre-1800 maps of Mauritius as I have been able to put together. If you have others (or even better quality versions of the same), please leave a comment below and I will update the page accordingly, thanks!

1601 – Gelderland

The Dutch colonized Mauritius (quoth Wikipedia): landing in 1598, they initially named the Island after Prince Mauritz of Nassau (hence “Maurice” and “Mauritius”). However, when in 1615 governor Pieter Both was shipwrecked and killed on his way back “from India with four richly-laden ships in the bay”, Dutch sentiment shifted against the island, thinking it was “cursed”.

This is a map of a bay in the southwest of Mauritius, drawn from aboard the Dutch ship the Gelderland.

This is historically notable because it mentions dodos, which almost certainly gets ornithology historians a-twitching (in a nice way, I’m sure).

1659 – Johann Blaeu

This early (but modestly-sized and almost impossible to recognize) map was printed in Amsterdam in 1659 as part of Johann Blaeu’s “Nuevo Atlas o Teatro del Mundo”:

Mysteriously, the auction site where I found this scannotes that this was printed on the reverse side of a map of “Vaygach Island” (in Russia), when it is actually of Staten Island (next to Hollandia Nova). Oh well! *sigh*

16xx – Portolan

A very early (but undated) Portolan map of the island, courtesy of Harold and Maryse.

1702-1707 – John Thornton

This is “A chart of the Island of MAURITIUS” by John Thornton: and though it was reprinted a number of times during the 18th century, it was first drawn between 1702 and 1707.

This scan was from NYPL, who have very kindly posted up an even higher resolution TIFF image of it if you want to download that.

Note that North is to the right, so Mauritius’ modern-day Black River district sits across the top left edge of the map, though few (English-language) landmarks here have names recognizable to a modern cartographer. Barely any internal details of the island are filled in: all in all, it’s more of an outline than a map.

1726 – François Valentijn

Here’s an early Dutch map of Mauritius, which this seller calls “the earliest large map of the island”. The cartography seems a bit suspect to my eyes, but perhaps others will disagree:

17xx – Jean-Baptiste Bourguignon d’Anville

This undated map of Mauritius was allegedly drawn for Monsieur de Noyon, who was (it says here) the Governor of the island (though I’m not sure about this myself). I found it on Harold and Maryse’s site, in their nice collection of old maps of Mauritius.

1751 – Jean-Baptiste-Nicolas-Denis d’Apres de Mannevillette

This next map is “Plan de l’Isle de France, suivant les observations de M. D’Après de Mannevillette” by Nicolas-Louis de La Caille (1713-1762), which you can download from Buchfreund, while the matching bibliographic detail is on Gallica.

Once again, North is to the right: but some rivers, internal details and many modern names are now visible – la Riviere Noire, Flic en Flac, and so forth. Nice quality draughting, but still somewhat sketchy.

1753 – Van Keulen

Here’s a Dutch map of part of the coast dating to 1753:

1764 – J.N. Bellin (Part 1)

Bellin was the Hydrographer at the Depot de la Marine: I found this copy courtesy of Harold and Maryse’s site.

1764 – J.N. Bellin (Part 2)

Bellin adapted his map for the Duc de Choiseul, adding a few useful extra cartographic bits round the edges:

Once again, this was courtesy of Harold and Maryse’s nice site.

1781 – John Lodge

A handwritten note added at the top of the full map from which this was cropped (courtesy of the Norman B. Leventhal Map Center at the Boston Public Library) says: “Cut from The Political magazine, London 1781, vol. 2, p.545”. Note the best map ever drawn, for sure, but it is what it is:

1788 – Rigobert Bonne (First Map)

Rigobert Bonne (1727-1795) was a French engineer and cartographer who was the Hydrographer at the Depot de la Marine after J.N. Bellin. This map was a part of “Cartes générale et particulières des Isles de France, de Bourbon et de Rodrigue” (a good copy is here, courtesy of DePaul University), and appeared in a number of places, such as Abbé Guillaume-Thomas-François Raynal’s “Atlas de Toutes Les Parties Connues de Globe Terrestre”, and Bonne’s own “Atlas Encyclopédique” (2 volumes, 1787-88).

Even though this is recognizably Mauritius and Bonne has obviously tried to develop a topographical angle (by adding mountains), there’s not a lot of named detail: hence this seems to have been drawn independently of la Caille’s 1751 map and even possibly of Bellin’s 1764 map(s).

1791 – Rigobert Bonne (Second Map)

It’s hard to say whether this is genuinely a second Bonne map, or just a kind of merging (say) of the toponymic detail from La Caille’s 1751 map into Bonne’s first map of 1788. There’s a good quality scan downloadable courtesy of Wikipedia.

I’ve been working away behind the scenes on the crowdfunding documentary proposal I mentioned here a few days ago, and it’s now starting to take shape. Here’s a sneak peek of the (first draft) image I’ll be putting on Kickstarter:

However, I’m finding it hard to pin down a good title for the documentary, because I want it to cover so much ground:
* pirates and corsairs in the Indian Ocean, and of the truths and lies surrounding them: about desperation, sea-faring, trade, riches, and greed;
* the secret history of Bernardin Nageon de l’Estang (and indeed of the missing corsair I’ve blogged about several times);
* early 20th century treasure hunters in a country wracked by poverty and racial inequality;
* the dynamiting and despoiling of a country’s natural resources in the name of treasure;
* modern day Mauritian treasure hunters, maps, and technology;
* the various versions of the treasure documents, and what is (and isn’t) genuine;
* using ground penetrating radar (GPR) to look for lava tubes; and perhaps even uncovering the real history…

Anyway, here are some possible film titles, please leave comments below to let me know what you think what would be best:

(1) Hunting Pirate Treasure
(2) Dreams of Pirate Gold
(3) What Lies Beneath Mauritius?
(4) Does X Mark The Spot?
(5) Thirty Million Ingots
(6) Pirate Truths, Pirate Lies
(7) Gold! Diamonds! Pickaxes!
(8) The Gold Bug

All alternative suggestions gratefully received too! 🙂