Thanks to Cipher Mysteries commenter Poppins, we now know that Carl Webb’s close relative Gerald Keane was known as Jerry Keane. This was from the souvenir programme for a J. C. Williamson production of “Victoria Regina” that ran from 1937 to 1938 (the file is dated October 1937, but the front cover has the hand-written note “Auckland NZ 1938”). Page 10 has a list of the “Heads of Stage Departments”, one of whom is:
So let’s have a look at Jerry Keane.
Gerald Thomas “Jerry” Keane
Gerald Thomas Keane was born in Ballarat East, Victoria in 1889: in 1915, he married Freda Grace Webb (1896-1964, sister of Carl Webb) in Victoria. There’s a 23 Jan 1915 news report of Gerald and “the Webb sisters” performing in a local concert. This was also the year he lost his job as caretaker of the Camperdown Mechanics Institute, as per this letter of 14 Aug 1915.
Mr. Gerald Keane, son of Mrs. Keane, of [130] Manifold street, who has been on the staff of J. C. Williamson for over twenty years was in Camperdown on Thursday, on a visit to his people. Mr. Keane has had an extended trip with the Russian ballet, visiting Adelaide, and then Brisbane.
Gerald and Freda had three children: Leo Vivian (born in Camperdown in 1915), John Russell (‘Jack’) (born in 1917), and Gwendoline Mary (born 1919). In 1943 (when his son Jack died), the family address was 194 Stewart st, East Brunswick, Victoria: before that, they lived at 226 Glenlyon Road (this was their address on Boxing Day 1940 when they were witnesses for Roy Webb’s Will). As commenter Jo pointed out, Carl Webb appears to have been living with the Keane family at that time (i.e. not long before Carl’s marriage to Dorothy).
WHEN certain lottery prizes were announced in Launceston on Tuesday, two very excited people were prima ballerina, Dorothy Stevenson, of the visiting [Borovansky] ballet company, and Jerry Keane, chief mechanist accompanying the ballet. Hear that these two visitors collected £10 each.
The Borovansky ballet company was based in Melbourne, founded in 1939 by Edouard Borovansky and his tall wife Xenia as the “Academy of Russian Ballet above a shop in Elizabeth Street”, whose studios then (from 1940) provided the home for the Melbourne Ballet Club. According to this page:
The year 1944 brought two landmarks for Borovansky: he became a naturalised Australian, and J.C. Williamson’s backed an Australian tour that took his company from Melbourne to Adelaide, Hobart, Launceston, Sydney and Brisbane, and then to New Zealand. From then until 1961 – except for occasional unfortunate breaks – the Borovansky Ballet was a permanent and popular feature of J.C. Williamson’s programming […]
Over the years, highlights of the repertoire included Laurel Martyn’s Sigrid (first presented by Borovansky in 1940), Petrouchka (1951), the complete Sleeping Princess (1952), Massine’s Symphonie Fantastique (1954), Cranko’s Pineapple Poll (1954) and, from Lichine, a full-length Nutcracker (1955) and the specially-commissioned Corrida (1956). Borovansky himself explored Australian themes for three original ballets, Terra Australis (1946), The Black Swan (1949) and The Outlaw, a 1951 retelling of the Ned Kelly saga – proving that Borovansky had become, in his own words, ‘a dinkum bloody Aussie’.
[…] Borovansky’s papers and a striking self-portrait are held in the National Library of Australia.
(PS: ballerina Dorothy Stevenson was the daughter of the Bishop of Grafton. So don’t say I don’t spoil you for interesting historical facts.)
Gerald died in 1960 in Fitzroy, Victoria.
Chief Mechanist
In a touring company (usually ballet or opera, but sometimes musicals and larger productions), the Chief Mechanist (or Head Mechanist) typically reports to the Production Manager, and handles planning, logistics and staff rostering, to ensure that each night’s performance does exactly what it is says in the souvenir programme. Hence Jerry Keane “accompanying the ballet” company on tour as its Chief Mechanist makes perfect sense.
Compared to theatre productions, where Stage Assistants (and sometimes “Mechanical Staff”) typically report to a Stage Director, the role of a Mechanist would involve wrangling not just the stage but also (in modern productions) flying harnesses, animatronics, and all manner of special staging effects. You can therefore think of the Chief Mechanist was kind of a techno-magician behind the scenes, turning a performance into a memorable production.
If you’ve previously looked at the final page of the Voynich Manuscript (f116v), you probably know exactly what I’m talking about here: the strange marginalia / pen-trials / whatever that aren’t Voynichese, but aren’t obviously anything else either. The middle two lines of “michitonese” are interspersed with crosses, making them resemble a prayer or protective charm (when reading these out, you’re supposed to make the sign of the cross when you see a ‘+’). The two michitonese words I’m going to focus on today look like “ahia maria“, which is what “Saint Mary” would sound like in Greek. But is that what they really say?
Parsing the page
To my mind, the initial challenge is working out not how to read the page (Lord knows we don’t need yet more speculative michitonese decipherments), but rather how to parse the page. Knowing that crosses are a structural feature of prayers and charms is a helpful start, but I suspect that differences in inks and letter shapes are also key things to bear in mind.
I discussed this page in The Curse of The Voynich (2006), and proposed that what we are often seeing here is a page whose writing had faded so much by the time that a later (in fact, probably much later) owner looked at it that they felt compelled to emend it before it disappeared completely from sight.
Along those same line, I’ve previously wondered whether the first two words of the pair of lines (which have been immortalised as “michiton oladabas”) might originally have read “nichil obstat”, before fading almost to nothing and being emended into their current state. This isn’t just a matter of ink density, as some people have suggested: for example, the ‘l’ of oladabas looks like it was written by a 15th century quill pen but the ‘n’ of michiton looks to me like it was written by a 16th century metal nib. And if you compare all three ‘a’s of oladabas, you’ll struggle to work out which is original and which is emended. (For what it’s worth, I believe the middle ‘a’ is original and the other two are emendations.)
So broadly speaking, I feel that the first thing we have to do is parse “ahia maria”, i.e. try to work out which parts of it are original and which are likely later emendations.
Multispectral scans
Though we only have (frankly shocking) quality multispectral scans of f116v that were left on the Beinecke’s file server several years ago, these are vaguely helpful here. Here’s what I was able to salvage from “Voynich_116v_WBRBB47_108_F.jpg”:
Though this is hard to make out, it suggests that the final ‘a’ of (what looks like) “ahia” wasn’t emended, but the rest of the word was. The first “ma” of “ma+ria” also seem to have been worked on.
In general, it seems that we can probably trust that the “ma+ria” part was what was originally written, but we need a bit more insight before we can come to a conclusion about the “ahia” part.
The History of Hail Mary
Given the prayer-/charm-like context, it would seem very reasonable to hypothesise that the two words might originally have read Hail Mary (in some language). But when did people start saying Hail Mary?
The Greek form (which begins Θεοτόκε Παρθένε, χαῖρε, κεχαριτωμένη Μαρία, ὁ Κύριος μετὰ σοῦ. ) developed independently of the Latin form “Ave Maria, gratia plena“. The latter took shape around the turn of the first Millennium, with Thomas Aquinas noting that the biblical original (“Ave, gratia plena“, from the Gospel of Luke) had had the word “Maria” inserted. The Latin form first appeared in print in 1495 in Girolamo Savonarola’s “Esposizione sopra l’Ave Maria“.
In terms of what forms of Hail Mary we might reasonably be looking to find, then, the Greek version is distinctly unpromising, while the Latin is very much limited to Ave Maria.
Yet if you search for medieval Latin charms that mention Mary, you’ll find a good number that invoke her name (e.g. “+ sancta Maria peperit +” in CUL Additional 9308, folios 49r-50r, mentioned here, footnote 155), often when hoping to ensure a good outcome from childbirth.
Additionally, “Maria Maria” appears doubled in a particular branch of Gaudendum nobis est (see MSS A-GU 30, CH-EN 1003, CH-EN 102, and Stuttgart 95, mentioned here, Table 4-6, which are from Engelberg and Lambrecht). We’ll see why this is relevant in the next section…
The Other Maria(s)
We have to be careful that we don’t let people’s prior readings over-influence our attempt to make sense of the page. The “six + marix + morix +” text on the same line is visually suspicious to me, simply because both the marix and the morix look a lot like maria, which all matches up with the rest of the line:
That is, the line could easily, when taken as a whole, be saying something like “six + maria + maria + vix + ahia + ma+ria +”, i.e. very much less than you might at first think.
Multispectrally, the morix shows signs that its ‘o’ and ‘x’ were emended, but the rest left intact:
Of course, “six” isn’t actually a Latin word, so that too is an interpretative reading of the line. Moreover, its middle “i” is shaped completely unlike the ‘i’s in any of the Mari[ax] words, so was almost certainly emended. So: if some of the original text’s a’s were later misread (and emended) as ‘x’s, might this have originally been an abbreviation for “Sancta”, and so read more like “S[anct]a + Maria + Maria + vix + Ahia + Ma+ria +”?
And again, “vix” (= hardly, scarcely, barely, only just, with difficulty, reluctantly, etc) is perhaps not a Latin word you might expect to see in a charm or prayer: its middle “i” is shaped completely unlike the ‘i’s in any of the Mari[ax] words, so also looks like an emendation. So this too is a bit of an awkward fit.
Your thoughts, Nick?
Well, I wasn’t clear on this in 2006, and to be honest I’m not much further along in 2023. It seems to me that we’re looking at this page through the wrong kind of technical lens, because we’re not really able to answer even the simplest of questions about its codicology. Multispectral imaging was a bit of a bust for f116v, though to be fair this is exactly what a lot of the literature points out for studying pages with different ink layers (you really need Raman imaging to separate out different inks).
A different approach, which I’ve proposed for a while now, would be to map the surface of f116v to see if we can detect differences in the depth of pen indentations between different codicological layers, and then pick out the earliest layer for its meaning. And in fact, in a post on BBC Futures today, this is exactly what the Factum Foundation in Madrid has been doing with the Archiox Project for the Bodleian library.
Who knows what intrepid codicologists might find hidden in the surface of the Voynich Manuscript?
Like most people, I’ve read numerous articles about ChatGPT recently. Perhaps the most entertaining was where ChatGPT (sort of) played chess against the #1 chess engine Stockfish, with hilarious consequences (if you’re a chess player, that is).
However, few articles manage to get the point across that ChatGPT is not an all-knowing Oracle, but rather something that is trying to please you by providing answers that are as realistic-looking as it can make them (rather than actually realistic). It’s entertainment, people (and definitely not real).
Perhaps if I gave some examples you’ll see what I’m talking about…
“Did Filarete have his own herbal manuscript?”
I asked ChatGPT this question, because it was something which I already knew the answer to (and had blogged about back in 2008, and also since). The right answer is that Filarete did have his own herbal manuscript (it was mentioned in fol.78r of MS Ashburnham 198, “Sed et Antonius Averlinus Philaretus lingua vernacula scripsit eleganter“), but as far as I know, nobody knows if it or a copy of it still exists.
ChatGPT started safely and correctly:
There is no known herbal manuscript that can be definitively attributed to Filarete, the fifteenth-century Italian architect and writer. Filarete is best known for his architectural treatise, the “Treatise on Architecture,” which he wrote in the early 1460s.
ChatGPT
However, our chatty digital friend then went a bit off-piste:
However, there are some herbal manuscripts from the same general period that are associated with Filarete or have been attributed to him. For example, there is a manuscript in the Bibliotheca Augusta in Wolfenbüttel, Germany, that is sometimes referred to as the “Herbal of Filarete.” This manuscript contains descriptions and illustrations of various plants and their medicinal uses, but it is not clear whether Filarete was actually the author of the manuscript or was simply associated with it in some way.
ChatGPT
Interesting, I thought, even if I didn’t believe a word of it. It went on:
There are also other herbal manuscripts from the fifteenth century that are similar in style and content to the “Herbal of Filarete” and may have been produced by the same workshop or circle of artists and writers. These manuscripts are sometimes referred to as the “Herbarium of Apuleius” or the “Herbarium of Pseudo-Apuleius” and contain similar descriptions and illustrations of plants and their uses.
ChatGPT
“What is the shelfmark of that “Herbal of Filarete” you mentioned?”
I still didn’t believe a word, so asked it: “What is the shelfmark of that “Herbal of Filarete” you mentioned?” The response I got back was a little unexpected:
I apologize for the confusion in my previous response. Upon further research, I could not find any evidence of a manuscript called the “Herbal of Filarete” in the Bibliotheca Augusta in Wolfenbüttel, Germany.
I believe there may have been a misunderstanding or confusion with other sources. While there are many herbal manuscripts from the medieval period, there is no known herbal manuscript that can be definitively attributed to Filarete.
I apologize for any confusion or misinformation my previous response may have caused. If you have any further questions, please feel free to ask.
ChatGPT
It’s certainly true that the Bibliotheca Augusta in Wolfenbüttel has at least one Pseudo-Apuleius manuscript, so it looked like there was just some confusion going on. Gigantic input dataset aside, ChatGPT really isn’t anything like Google, so it would be grossly unfair to imagine that it is doing anything like the same thing when it tries to answer a query.
So I decided to take a different tack, to see if I could flush anything out about what was going on.
“Are there any herbal manuscripts associated with Filarete?”
Maybe there’s a herbal manuscript out there that’s loosely associated with Filarete or his coterie that I don’t know about, I thought. So I tried to poke the bear again (but in a slightly gentler way than before).
Can you guess how ChatGPT responded? I think you can. As before, the first paragraph was fairly solid:
To my knowledge, there are no herbal manuscripts that can be definitively attributed to Filarete, the fifteenth-century Italian architect and writer. Filarete is best known for his architectural treatise, the “Treatise on Architecture,” which he wrote in the early 1460s.
ChatGPT
But you might find the next paragraph eerily familiar:
While Filarete is not known to have authored any herbal manuscripts, there are some medieval manuscripts that contain descriptions and illustrations of plants and their medicinal uses that have been associated with him or with his circle of artists and writers. One example is a manuscript in the Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana in Florence, Italy, that is sometimes referred to as the “Herbarium of Filarete.” This manuscript contains descriptions and illustrations of various plants and their medicinal uses, but it is not clear whether Filarete was actually the author of the manuscript or was simply associated with it in some way.
ChatGPT
Once again, this seems like an historical hallucination on ChatGPT’s part. The odd part is that it reprised the exact shape of its previous hallucinatory answer, but referring to a different top-end library. So, I again asked for the shelfmark of this imaginary manuscript…
“What is the shelfmark of that manuscript in Florence?”
That’s what I asked: and, sadly, you already know what ChatGPT’s reply is going to look like, because it’s basically the same as before:
I apologize for the error in my previous response. After further research, I have found that there is no known “Herbarium of Filarete” manuscript in the Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana in Florence, Italy.
While Filarete is not known to have authored any herbal manuscripts, there are some medieval manuscripts that contain descriptions and illustrations of plants and their medicinal uses that have been associated with him or with his circle of artists and writers. One example is a manuscript known as the “Herbarium of Apuleius,” which is sometimes referred to as the “Herbal of Pseudo-Apuleius.” This manuscript is kept at the Bibliotheca Augusta in Wolfenbüttel, Germany, and has the shelfmark Codex Guelf. 82.7 Aug. 2°.
ChatGPT
What to make of this?
ChatGPT is undoubtedly a brilliant technical achievement. But as far as I can see, for now it’s just part of the entertainment industry.
Here, I do wonder whether the format of the question I asked kind of loosely defined the format of the answer ChatGPT inferred I was hoping to receive back: and that it then hallucinated enough additional stuff to complete the gaps in the answer format to provide a well-formed-looking answer. So maybe the whole point of ChatGPT is that the shape of the question defines the shape of the answer, even if there aren’t any actual facts inside the answer. Something to think about, anyway!
I had been looking, as you’d expect, for something completely different: but when I found out that “A Takapuna Scandal” starring Hector St Clair was available online, I thought I had to share the link with all you lovely people. Filmed around Auckland in 1927, it’s a mixture of meta-infused modernity, bad puns, and panto pratfalls. But no white ties, definitely no white ties!
Pretty much everyone and their dog now knows about the mysterious white tie (marked “J Keane” or “T Keane”, depending how you interpret the markings on it) found in the Somerton Man’s suitcase in Adelaide’s railway station. And everyone seems to have a theory about that same wretched tie (heaven knows I’ve postedmorethan enough times on this sorry subject myself).
But just to prove that, like Homer Simpson, I’ve learnt nothing from that whole experience, here’s yet another white tie theory to throw on the same miserable bonfire.
Does the white tie mean that Carl Webb (the Somerton Man) was… a fake Mason?
The Craft Baker
Even though his father, baker Richard August Webb, was a member of Malvern Lodge No. 121, nobody has yet found any evidence suggesting that Carl Webb himself was a Mason.
To be fair, Freemasonry was always (and indeed still is) an older man’s game: a quick glance at the adverts in modern glossy Freemason magazines will likely yield not lifestyle tips but “deathstyle” retirement home chic. So it should be no huge surprise if, as a younger man, Carl Webb had failed to follow his father’s floury footsteps into The Craft.
Of course, I’d like to look at the member list of Malvern Lodge No. 121 just as much as anyone else with half an interest in this whole cold case: but I have a hunch he wasn’t himself a properly paid up Mason.
The Keane Mason?
Were there other Masons in his family? Researchers commenting here have been getting a little excited of late by the connection between Carl Webb’s late brother Roy (d. 1943) and the Gavey family via Roy’s wife.
The Gaveys had some bad ‘uns, for sure: and they also had enduring links to the Masons. (I’ll leave disentangling the two as an exercise for the reader.)
But I wonder… might Carl Webb’s closest practical link to the Masons have actually been via the Keane family? He was certainly close to the Keanes: he was, as Jo pointed out, living with the Keanes prior to getting married. And it was Carl Webb’s family link to Gerald Thomas Keane that famously made the hair on Derek Abbott’s arms verticalise.
It’s therefore entirely possible that Carl Webb’s nephew John Russell Keane was the original owner of the mysterious white tie, even if it wasn’t in the list of possessions returned to his family after his untimely death during the War.
So… was this also a Masonic tie? This isn’t itself a new suggestion, but that’s actually only the first half of what I’m wondering here.
Out Of Sight, Out Of Pocket?
Anyway, if you recall Carl Webb’s timeline, he seems to have disappeared in late 1947, very possibly to become invisible to the wife he was separated from (and who had got a support order served on him at his job at Red Point Tool Co. in April 1947, of which he angrily wanted to avoid paying a penny).
Looking at the suitcase found after his death in December 1948, there’s no affluence to the rag-tag mix of clothes there. Whatever he was doing (and if that turns out to have involved interstate car smuggling, I suspect few would now raise so much as a jaded eyebrow), it doesn’t seem to have been paying well.
Hence, I suspect that during 1948, Carl Webb was both out of sight and out of pocket. And despite having lived in Melbourne all his life, he ended up dead on an Adelaide beach. (Though clothed, not the raw Prahranian.)
So I wonder: while travelling round Australia, doing whatever it was he was doing, might Carl Webb have been passing himself off as a Keane family Mason, visiting from a Melbourne lodge, to scam some Masonic hospitality?
Might he have been passing himself off as his late nephew Jack Russell?
Contract bridge was a fashionable game in the 1930s and 1940s; columns presenting bridge news and puzzles were popular recent additions to newspapers. What was appealing was that bridge problems had a human, social side that, say, chess problems lacked.
Bridge columnists ran puzzle competitions for readers not only to solve, but to compete against each other. These puzzles ranged from moderate to utterly fiendish, making use of crazy-sounding techniques like “suicide squeezes” and “triple coups” (I never once saw a single coup, never mind a triple one).
It is in this febrile atmosphere of competing Master Solvers and bridge columns that we find a series of mentions of (very probably) Carl Webb.
He also submitted a solution into a different bridge column in The Age on 24 April 1937: and indeed, by the time the results to the thirteenth bridge problem of that year came round (10 July 1937), he had sent in correct answers to a very respectable five of them.
1946
After a gap of nine years, we again see “C. Webb” submitting bridge puzzle solutions to Norman McCance’s bridge column in The Age.
He starts to submit correct answers at the start of a North (of the Yarra) vs South (of the Yarra) for the South team. His name appears three times, on 28 Mar 1946, 04 Apr 1946, and 11 Apr 1946, before disappearing again.
There are no more mentions of Webb in the bridge columns. 🙁
But then again…
So, for a long time I thought that was the end of the story. But today, I took a second look at all of Norman McCance’s bridge columns up until the end of 1948, just in case there was a Webb mention there that Trove’s OCR had mangled very slightly.
As it turned out, there wasn’t: but looked at in context, the fact that the three Webb mentions in 1946 were right at the start of a North-South competition struck me as quite interesting. Might Webb have previously been submitting entries under a pen-name?
There were certainly a few pen-names, such as “Euclid” and “Dummy”, most of which I was able to eliminate. But one particular pen-name jumped out – “Interested” of South Yarra. This person was one of the five winners (out of 169 entrants) of the competition that had only just finished: they then immediately disappeared, just as C. Webb appeared.
What I found intriguing was that, at the end of that competition, Norman McCance mentioned that “Interested” hadn’t included an address when submitting their puzzle solutions. Which does sound like a Somerton Man kind of thing.
So, perhaps Carl Webb was “Interested” of South Yarra? It’s not a bad hypothesis.
I’d also add that there’s no mention in McCance’s column (which often mentioned Victoria Bridge Union events) of Webb in any pair or team there. So it seems likely to me that he was more of a bridge puzzle solver than an active bridge player.
One last thing: considering the good bridge ‘strokes’ / validation Webb must have been getting from solving McCance’s conundrums, I don’t honestly believe he was anywhere near Melbourne after 11 March 1946.
According to the Cipher Mysteries WordPress dashboard, more than 43000 comments have been posted (and approved) here. (Akismet tells me it has deleted more than 690,000 spam comments.) Moderation is a thing I have to do every day, and over the last six months this has got progressively more time-consuming (and boring). As a result, the comment policy here has to change,
No ad hominems
I’ve had more than enough of commenters’ taking ‘ad hominem’ potshots at each other (and indeed at other people who rarely if ever contribute to Cipher Mysteries). So, new comment moderation policy #1:
“Any comments containing a potshot aimed at a person (rather than, say, at a theory) will now get binned in moderation”.
So it’s still OK to comment “Proposal X sounds a bit ridiculous to me” (because 95% of supposed explanations for cipher mysteries are indeed ridiculous): but, for example, saying “Person Y’s proposal X sounds delusional to me” is an ad hominem, because you are in effect saying that Person Y is delusional.
As an aside, if you want anyone reading your comment to think of it as anything more than the sound of a yappy dog yapping somewhere off in the distance, you might perhaps consider augmenting your opinion with some reasoning? Or a fact? Or… anything, really? To anyone accustomed to Reddit this might sound like an impossible quality bar, but honestly, you can do it, trust me.
One Stupid Pseudonym per Commenter Is Plenty
I’ve also had my fill of people posting under multiple stupid pseudonyms. If you’re going to use a single stupid pseudonym, that’s your business and it’s entirely fine by me. But I’m now really strongly minded to start binning comments left by people using multiple stupid pseudonyms, because it’s just pointless noise.
If you’ve got an opinion about a given cipher mystery, that’s great (and it’s even better if you can justify that opinion in some way), so I’m normally happy to allow it through. But from the point of view of anyone trying to read all these comments (let alone moderate them), constantly swapping between in-joke / mildly-humorous names is just a pain in the neck they can do without.
So, commenters, please do me and everyone else here a big favour (that costs you basically nothing), and stick to a single stupid pseudonym. If that’s [email protected] (or whatever), fine. But just one.
Many decades ago, I wrote computer games under the pen-name “Orlando M. Pilchard QC”, so fully appreciate that there are numerous reasons why commenters might want to use a pen name. But one stupid pseudonym per commenter is enough for this site.
No Racism / Sexism / Homophobia etc
Giving people the freedom to express their opinions on cipher mysteries really isn’t the same as giving them a platform for expressing their racist / sexist / homophobic / etc opinions as well. If you’re desperate to do the latter, it really shouldn’t take you more than a couple of minutes to find a suitable social media platform, so please do that instead, thanks. Why people even begin to think this might be acceptable here, I have no idea. But it’s not.
And I’m also a bit tired of people testing out my moderation boundaries in this respect – so I may well start to delete comments that treat Cipher Mysteries moderation as a kind of lab rat to be incessantly prodded, simply because – speaking as the rat who’s being prodded – it’s not something I want.
David Morgan has very kindly sent me through a transcript (generated using ChatGPT/Glasp) of the recent ABC “Australian Story” episode on the Somerton Man. I thought it needed a post of its own, so here it is:
[00:09] I had no idea about the Somerton Man case. I’d never heard of it. It hadn’t entered my life in any way, I was just living my life. I had no idea that I held some kind of secret to solving this case or could aid in the effort to try and trace this back to a person. I knew that they would get the name one day, I knew that technology would catch up, but I did know that even though you’ve got a name, you’re not going to really understand who the man was.
[00:42] It’s fantastic to see that this man, an unknown man on a beach, now has a name, he now has a family. He now has a place. We’d love to find out, you know, what was he doing there. How did he die and why did he die? Was it natural? Was it suicide? Anything was possible, and in this case, I think that the most unexpected ending has happened and that is in itself another twist.
[01:19] I think there are some questions there that may never be solved, and the mystery will live on. MY NAME IS CHARLES On the first of December in 1948 the body was found by two trainee jockeys early in the morning that were out on the beach exercising horses. We went over to see if he was alright. And we got fairly close to him and couldn’t see him breathing and he was dead.
[02:02] A number of people did come and view the body but were unable to identify him. One of the intriguing things about the case is that all the clothes the man was wearing had the labels removed off them. So, this is what made some people think, ‘Oh maybe this guy is a spy.’. We are seeing that there was a tie with the name ‘T Keane’ on it.
[02:31] It was strange that nobody came forward to identify the body, which led to suggestions that he was from overseas, possibly from Europe, possibly from America. The doctor who carried out the post-mortem examination said the stomach was deeply congested with blood and in his opinion, death had been caused by heart failure due to poisoning.
[02:50] The Somerton Man had a really unique body. He was very well built, he was athletic, but he had these calf muscles that were really distinct, kind of like he was a ballet dancer. I think the biggest technical problem was the fact that he was thawing out, because he was, apart from being embalmed, he was deep frozen.
[03:10] The police knew that they wouldn’t be able to keep his body forever and that it would soon start to deteriorate. So they called in a taxidermist who made a plaster cast of his face. A group of locals paid for his headstone and his plot. And his headstone reads, “Here lies the unknown man”. A couple of months later they found a tiny scrolled up piece of paper in the man’s fob pocket.
[03:36] When they unrolled it, it said “Tamam Shud.” It was a mystery as to what this actually meant. It was a newspaper reporter who was well-read, and said it came from the ending of a book called The Rubaiyat written by Omar Khayyam. And it meant :the end”, or “the finish”. And this brought forward the theory that perhaps he had committed suicide.
[04:08] A man came forward to say that he had found a copy of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam and it did have the last page torn out. He handed it into police, he said it had been thrown into the back seat of his car six months earlier. So, on the back of the book were some strange letters that the police couldn’t make any sense of, and a phone number belonging to a young 27-year-old woman, who happened to live only five minutes’ walk away from where the man was found dead.
[04:43] The police paid the young nurse a visit, but she was very reluctant to talk to them. After that incident, basically they were stumped, there were no other leads. And it basically hit a brick wall, the whole case. Everyone working on the case or had an interest in the case always thought that something would come up tomorrow, but tomorrow never came.
[05:11] Podcast excerpt: Hello and welcome to the Somerton Man and today I wanted to look at the Somerton man – one of the most mysterious cold cases of all time. Over the decades, interest in this case has just continued to grow and grow to the point it’s actually considered one of Australia’s greatest unsolved mysteries.
[05:31] There are blog sites that have been set up from all over the world with amateur sleuths trying to work out who the guy is, why he was on Somerton beach and exactly how he died. I teach electronic engineering at Adelaide Uni. I just happened to be sitting in a laundrette watching my washing going around, and there was a stack of magazines beside me, and I picked one up and it was an article about the top 10 unsolved mysteries in Australia.
[06:03] And the second one was the Somerton Man case. The great thing about the maths we do is it’s not the pie-in-the-sky maths, it’s the type of maths that has great practical value… And so I thought, ‘Hey this would make a great project for my students’. And so I started building up a lot of history and background on the case.
[06:24] And I think that just sucked me in beccause I just got fascinated by it Professor Abbott has been investigating this case for so many years now and it’s completely consumed his whole being. He’s become known as one of the world leading experts on the case. So in trying to solve the case, it seemed to me the key was to find the young woman, Jo Thompson, that lived five minutes from where he died, with the hypothesis that she had been in a relationship with the Somerton Man.
[06:58] Unfortunately, she had died two years earlier, so I found out. That was a little frustrating because I was hoping that she would have some information about who this man was, and perhaps after so many years she would be prepared to say who it was, but I ended up contacting her grand-daughter, Rachel. The first time I heard about the Somerton Man was a letter that arrived, and it was sent by Professor Derek Abbott.
[07:32] It said, “I believe that you may have a link to someone involved in this case.” I developed a hypothesis that the Somerton Man and Jo Thompson knew each other. They had a child, Robin Thompson, and if this is the case then his daughter Rachel is the granddaughter of the Somerton Man. But his hypothesis seemed to be way too crazy.
[08:00] Too fanciful. It was like something that could have been made up in some fictional novel. So I went to Brisbane to meet Rachel, and we went out to dinner in a French restaurant, and talked about the case. He was also after my DNA. It’s probably the first request I’ve had for a man to do that. By then however, I was captivated by the case, and I wanted answers, so I was a willing victim.
[08:39] So the relationship moved pretty quickly. Yeah, there was some sort of spark there. Something just magically drew us together. By the following day we had decided we were going to get married. It all happened remarkably fast. So Derek and I got married in 2010 and we now have three beautiful children together.
[09:15] People would say that I had married her for her DNA, and we would laugh about it, so that is funny. Derek has essentially spent 24/7 researching the Somerton Man case. He, if it’s possible, became even more passionate about the whole case. So in 2015 we started work on extracting DNA from hairs that were found in the plaster cast of the Somerton Man, hoping this would be a way to identify him, even though these hairs are 70 years old.
[09:56] But we were only able to extract 2 per cent of the amount of DNA that we really need to form an identification. There’s an imperative to now go ahead and do an exhumation. We need it in much higher concentration levels, which we could do with the Somerton man’s teeth or his ear bone, for example. Now the man’s body will be exhumed by police with hopes modern DNA technology will be able to solve one of the state’s most enduring cold cases.
[10:29] The Somerton Man is not just a curiosity or a mystery to be solved. It’s somebody’s father, son, perhaps grandfather, uncle, brother. So when the state government announced that the exhumation was going ahead I think for some other people, they would see that as a cue for retirement. But not Derek. I think that increased his motivation to continue at even faster pace.
[10:53] I’m reasonably confident there will be enough DNA come out of this that we’ll get an identification. He thought initially that he would be allowed to participate, but that wasn’t to be. After the exhumation, everything went silent. The police kept very tight-lipped about their processes and Derek got a little restless and he went back to his three hairs that he’d extracted in 2017 and started working again.
[11:22] He was driven to find out who the man was. The professor definitely wanted to be first over the finishing line of cracking the case. So I’d been communicating with Colleen Fitzpatrick, who is the world expert in forensic genealogy from America and like me, she was totally fascinated by the Somerton Man case I asked her if she would assist.
[11:53] So here’s a closeup of the bust and can you see all these little hairs? Yes. That’s the Somerton Man’s hair. So Colleen’s expertise and she’s a pioneer in this, is getting DNA, and from that DNA finding distant cousins. There are millions of people today who voluntarily put their DNA on these family tree-type DNA sites.
[12:22] Ever wanted to explore your family tree, learn more about your ancestry or identify your ethnic background. First take a DNA test and download your results as a DNA data file. far as unidentified human remains, violent crimes, in other words, forensic cases, it’s really been a game-changer, the first new tool really in about 30 years in human identification.
[12:48]) It’s very powerful and it’s been very successful. Around this time, DNA technology began to improve significantly. Derek joined forces with Colleen, and they began to get some results. Right off the bat, it’s sort of like a miracle happened, we passed the first test. We got the good data out of the 75-year-old hair.
[13:10] Great! Two million DNA markers fell out. And it was at that point we knew that was more than enough to identify the Somerton Man. It was in a good shape to upload to those genealogy data bases for the next step, the next genealogy step. So when we first uploaded the Somerton Man’s DNA onto a genealogical website, the very top match we got was a gentleman in Victoria by the name of Jack Hargreaves, whose DNA was already there on the system.
[13:45] So, blue shows the area of significant matching, and this is huge here on chromosome 22. And so what we did is we built out Jack Hargreaves family tree. And at one stage we had as many as 4,000 people on the tree, so which one is it? It felt like I was working on a big Sudoku puzzle, moving all these relatives around until I got it.
[14:11] We looked for people with no date of death on that tree. There was one that stood out, because A: he was male, B: had roughly the right age range, and C was very closely connected to the Keane family, and as we know, the Somerton Man had the name Keane on his tie. When I saw the name Keane, that’s when my hair caught fire.
[14:36] That’s when I really knew we were on the offensive. We were going to get it because that wasn’t a coincidence. And so this turned out to be a chap called Charles Webb, who had no date of death details. Yeah, so he was born Carl Webb but he only went by the name Charles Webb. It seemed this chap had just gone off the radar after 1947.
[15:01] This could be our man, but we had no evidence, it was just a guy on a tree with no date of death. And we set out to either prove or eliminate him as being the Somerton Man And to prove it, what we had to do was see who his mother was, then tunnel down the family tree just on the mother’s side only, and find somebody alive today.
[15:25] And see if that DNA matches or not. And that turned out to be somebody in Victoria by the name of Antero. I got a call from Professor Abbott, who wanted to know if I could help do some research and do DNA test. I hadn’t even heard of the story before. And it was like, ‘Hang on a minute, is this a scam?’. It’s not every day you get someone out of the blue calling you up and wanting to help with some unidentified body or wants your DNA.
[15:54] But did some research, made sure he was who he said he was. So I volunteered to do that and did the test, sent it away. I’ve always been interested in family history, but had no idea that there was a missing person there. So when Antero’s DNA came through and it was a match to the Somerton Man, it was at this point we knew that Charles Webb was the Somerton Man and we’d finally cracked it.
[16:24] So there was a great feeling of elation, dampened by being totally exhausted at this stage. I was taken aback but was excited as well. There’s a great, great discovery. You know, I’d played my little part in working out that great mystery, it was satisfying. There’s Charles there. So, he’s my first cousin, three times removed.
[16:50] And his mother, which is Eliza Emelia Morris, her older sister is my great-great grandmother. And there’s me down the bottom. So Colleen and I decided right at that point, this was the time to make an announcement people have been hanging on for 70 years to know the answers, I didn’t see any reason to delay.
[17:15] I just wanted to get it out there. They were determined, to quote Derek, to beat the cops. And they were a bit concerned of how the news would be received as well. The police gave no deadlines on when we could expect a result. There was just nothing, no news. Now an Adelaide researcher claims to have made a major breakthrough, uncovering the identity of the infamous Somerton Man found on a beach.
[17:40] Now a man who has dedicated his adult life to investigating the case thinks DNA has provided the answer. It’s been a marathon working on this, over the last year particularly. It was mind-blowing. It was, ‘Wow, we’ve actually got a name.’ And it was a surreal moment. It took a long while to sink in that it’s not the Somerton Man’s story now, but the Charles Webb story.
[18:03] I’m not sure we’ll ever be absolutely certain, because what we would do in a forensic context normally is take a deceased DNA and compare that directly with something we know belong to them a toothbrush, a hairbrush, etcetera, DNA from that item. We haven’t got that here. As a secondary measure, we could compare the deceased DNA to a very close family member, you know, parents, children.
[18:25] Again, we don’t have that. So my concern is that we may never be able to categorically say that we know this person’s identity. I’m not going to say I believe it until such time as the police results and the forensic results that were done at the autopsy come back and actually confirm it, which I think they possibly will.
[18:51] Police who exhumed the Somerton Man’s remains last year are cautiously optimistic the finding is in fact a breakthrough. I am 100 per cent convinced that we have the right guy. Charles Webb is the Somerton Man. PROFESSOR DEREK ABBOTT, ADELAIDE UNIVERSITY: It turns out he wasn’t a spy, he wasn’t a ballet dancer.
[19:13] And all those crazy theories on the internet all came to nothing. So this is Rachel’s DNA compared with the Somerton Man. Down at the bottom it says ‘no shared DNA segments found.’ So, that was a flop. So we’re totally able to eliminate that hypothesis that Rachel is the granddaughter of the Somerton Man.
[19:44] The hypothesis turned out to be wrong. So, when Derek said that Mr Somerton wasn’t my grandfather, as a joke I said to him, ‘How long before you serve the divorce papers on me?’ Because the media had made a comment some years back Derek only married me for my DNA. So it’s probably somewhere around here. We told the children that Mr S as I’ve always called the Somerton Man was called Charles Webb and that he’s not related to us.
[20:18] But the Somerton Man will always form part of our family and our narrative. It’s the reason that we met, Derek and I. It brought us together. It’s been like a journey for us, together, I guess. Derek: George, I guess the mystery’s not over is it? We don’t know much abut Charles Webb, why he was here. And then not wanting to just rest there, we also then were able to find other living descendants.
[20:44] So one of the people I contacted was Stuart Webb. I’d never heard of the Somerton Man case I think Derek Abbott found me because I’d done some family tree research of my own, because my grandmother was very into the family tree or genealogy. It certainly seemed very strange to be part of this larger mystery.
[21:07] I’m kind of a regular guy, I go to work. When Derek Abbott asked me to do a DNA test, I wasn’t really crazy about the idea. I wanted to think about it a little bit further, so I put it out to my family. If anybody else would be prepared to do the DNA test? And I put my hand up straight away and said, ‘yeah, I’ll have a crack’… And everything from that point just seems to have steamrolled and rolled on and on and it’s getting bigger and bigger as we keep going.
[21:37] So I’ve got a result for you. Yes. Are you ready for this? Drumroll…So you are a great, great niece of Charles Webb So I got my DNA results and…it was happiness, it was joy. But there was also some sadness about this forgotten family member You are 396 centimorgans, so you’re right in the middle of the range, right? Awesome.
[22:12] This was a person, he wasn’t just a media hit for a little while and unsolved mystery. He was our family He was born in 1905 in Footscray, Victoria but it seems that he grew up in Springvale, in the family bakery and became an electrical instrument maker. He was one of six siblings. It’s reported in the newspapers at the time that he played community football and so this could explain his good calves and good physique generally.
[22:50] And there’s so much more we don’t know. Here’s a family photo album from pa with all the mystery inside. Check it out… I started to look back through the family history and that particular wing I’ve been able to find the first photo of Charles when he was alive, to my knowledge. Nana’s actually written on this photo and named all the people.
[23:14] So you’ve got grandma, grandpa, Charlie who’s the Somerton Man, and Roy. So you can actually see them quite distinctly. It’s amazing. Yeah. What a find. There’s also a larger family gathering with all of the Webb family as it was back then. A fantastic family day, they’re all smiling, Charles in particular is playing some kind of prank on who we think is Gerald Keane.
[23:42] I wonder where that was? I don’t know. It looks to be somewhere rural; it looks like they’re having fun. So when I first saw that, I thought, wow, this is fantastic. This is a real breakthrough. And this photo is basically taken 20 years before he died. So we’re seeing him considerably younger than the autopsy photo we’re used to looking at.
[24:07] It’s quite incredible when you look at these photos and this guy obviously went missing, and nobody really came forward. The fact that Charles Webb wasn’t reported missing, I find that sad in itself. And for no-one to reach out and find out where he was or what had happened, it’s quite heartbreaking So Uncle Harry, growing up, was there any discussion? Did you hear anything about one of the relatives going missing? No, no, no.
[24:41] There’s no recollection of that. Why didn’t any of the siblings try and find out where he went? Did they know that he’d gone to Adelaide and never came back? Or did he just go off and no-one knew where, where he was? In the end when we look at the whole situation of the Somerton Man, it does appear to be a sad story.
[25:05] In the period leading up to his death, his father died, his mum died. His brother Roy, who he seems to be close with, died. He split up with his wife as well. Charles was married to Dorothy Robertson in, I think, 1941. They didn’t have a very easy marriage… Our information comes from Dorothy’s divorce decree filed several years later.
[25:31] Dorothy described Charles as violent, threatening, moody. Not at all a happy person. He didn’t have any friends and he would be in bed by 7pm. Turns out that Charles loved to write poetry and his favourite subject that he would write about was death. This is interesting, because we know that just before Charles died, he’d discarded a copy of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, which is poetry about death.
[25:59] It all fits together. One day she came home and the whole house smelled like ether. She found him soaking wet in bed, and he said he had swallowed 50 phenobarbital tablets. This very much sounds like Charles was attempting suicide. This story turns out that it’s not some wild spy drama. It’s really a sad, tragic domestic situation.
[26:29] Eventually he moved out in April of 1947, and we don’t know what happened after that. And we find him dead on a beach in 1948 in Adelaide. So what has he been doing in that intervening year? Who knows. And why Adelaide, why did he pick Adelaide? I think Charles Webb was very broken mentally. Something had happened in his life, and he wanted just to anaesthetise himself.
[27:02] It does seem to me that some form of suicide does seem to be likely, which is what the police always suspected all along, right from the beginning I think there’s no doubt that he committed suicide. If he planned it all, he certainly planned it in a way that it would leave a great, confusing issue behind, which would bamboozle people for years.
[27:28] Imagine, this guy has been sitting there for 70 odd years, no-one knew who he was. You’re related to one of the great mysteries of Australia and indeed the world. I was a bit excited to find out all I could about the Somerton Man, now that I knew who it was and my small piece in the puzzle. I’m sure that they’ll find a few more answers to those missing questions.
[27:51] But maybe eventually down the track, probably be a few unanswered questions that we just have to live with. The person that could supply all these answers that we all would like to know is dead. He’s taking it to the grave. In the end, there was no fairytale ending, but it’s been really heart-warming to learn that the family that may not have missed him when he went missing and when he died, are now reclaiming him.
[28:20]) It’s really the start of the mystery, not the end. He died alone. He’d been buried for a long time in a cemetery without a name. Whether he’s buried again at Somerton or whether the family has other ideas, it’s just really nice that he’s got a name. So, in the playroom, we have two portraits. One is my grandmother, Jo Thomson and the other one is what Charles Webb may have looked like.
[29:12] I do find them quite disturbing. And now that I know that I’m not related, I would very much like to move those paintings on and rehome them. I would quite like to donate them to a charity. I would like to get rid of those paintings. South Australia police says further DNA work is required to positively identify the Somerton Man and that the matter “will ultimately be determined by the Coroner”.
Commenter John Sanders is convinced that the man at the right-hand-edge of the Webb family photo is Leslie William Scott, husband of Carl Webb’s sister Gladys May. Here are some notes on Mr and Mrs L. W. Scott…
Leslie William Scott
Leslie William Scott was born in 1895 to Samuel William Scott (b. 1869 Gympie, Queensland, died March 1939) and Mary Elizabeth West (1870-1950): Samuel was survived by Leslie and three other sons (“Mr. Lindsay Scott, who is attached to the railway staff and is stationed at Maffra; Mr. Walter Scott, who is a member of the Australian navy, and is stationed at the Flinders Naval Base; and Mr. Pat Scott [VX123596], of Camperdown“) and three daughters (“Mrs. F. Grayland and Mrs. M. Murnane (Terang) and Mrs. C. Bateman (Bostock’s Creek)“.
He worked for 4½ years as an apprentice printer for his father (proprietor of the Camperdown “Herald”), before heading off to fight in WWI. From his AIF records (at the NAA), he was 5 feet 11 inches, 10 st 2 lbs, 32 inch chest, fair complexion, grey eyes, fair hair, Presbyterian, and had a scar below his right knee. However, a war wound at Gallipoli in 1915 led to the amputation of his left hand, causing him to return to Australia. (An initial news report saying that he had had an arm amputated was incorrect.)
Having gained a “[Certificate] of Competency under section 171 of the Local Government Act 1915 (No.2686)” (p.863), and a brief stint as secretary to Winchelsea Shire Council, he became assistant town clerk at Essendon in 1921. From there he became Essendon’s deputy town clerk by 1929, and then – don’t gasp too hard – Essendon town clerk in 1940.
Leslie Scott lived at 15 Coats Street, Moonee Ponds (telephone FV7743), which is where his parents-in-law were living when Richard August Webb died in 1939; and also at 9 Peterleigh Grove, Essendon. He died on 9th September 1971 [Thanks P!]. I’ve been unable to find any photographs of him in Trove (or elsewhere).
Gladys May Scott (nee Webb)
Gladys May Webb was born in Prahran in 1897, and (according to The Age) married Leslie William Scott on 4th July 1918 at the Presbyterian Church, Camperdown.
Though Trove has many mentions of her (as honorary secretary of this, that or the other society in Essendon), she only seems to appear in a single photograph (from 1946), with the caption “Mrs Fraser [the wife of Cr. J. W. S. Fraser, Mayor of Essendon] is seen greeting Mrs L. W. Scott [on the right]“:
She died on 03 July 1955 at “her residence, 9 Peterleigh Grove, Essendon”: and in 1958 it was solicitors trying to trace Gladys’ missing brother who believed that Carl Webb might have gone to Cottesloe.
The Family Photo
Once again, here’s the family photo:
John Sanders is adamant that the man on the far right is Leslie William Scott: he certainly looks tall enough (to be Scott’s height of 5′ 11″), and does appear to be covering up his left hand area:
Is that him? And is his wife Gladys May in the family photo as well?
Other People
On the other side of the photo, there’s another man who looks a dead ringer for the guy on the right. So I do wonder whether this might be one of Leslie William Scott’s three brothers (my best guess would be that this is Lindsay Scott whose WWI physical description is practically identical to Leslie William Scott’s, but I have no actual evidence to back this up):
I also wonder whether the older couple just next to this man might be Samuel William Scott and his wife Mary Elizabeth West (i.e. the lady with the mysterious “Thing” hand on her shoulder):
(Actually, I’m pretty sure the “Thing” hand is just an optical illusion, formed of the man’s hunched up left knee / dark trousers and the right hand of the lady sitting beside her, who similarly has her left hand on the shoulder of the lady on her other side. And might this possibly be a Scott sister?)
I wonder if there are more photographs out there to be had… any more thoughts on this?
Over at voynich.ninja, there’s an interesting recent thread on the (in-)homogeneity of Voynichese, i.e. how consistent (or inconsistent) with itself the Voynich Manuscript’s text is (either locally or globally). Given that I have been working on Q20 recently, I thought it might be interesting to take a brief look at that quire through this particular lens.
In Search of a Problem Statement
One intriguing side of Voynichese is that even though it exhibits high-level consistency (e.g. the continuous script, plus the well-known differences between Currier A pages and Currier B pages), medium-level consistency (e.g. thematic-looking sections such as Q13, Q20, Herbal-A, Herbal-B etc), and even bifolio-level consistency (more on this below), there are open questions about the apparent lack of low-level consistency.
In particular, Voynichese ‘words’ (which have been the subject of countless studies and analyses) present many apparent local inconsistencies. As Torsten Timm pointed out in the voynich.ninja thread referenced above, words that are extremely common on one page of a section can be completely absent from the next. And, awkwardly, this is sometimes even true for pages that are the recto and verso sides of the same folio.
Even though there are countless ways to airily explain away these kinds of inconsistencies (change of subject matter, change of source structure, change of underlying plaintext language, change of local cipher key, etc), all too often I think these are invoked more as a research excuse for not actually going down the rabbit hole. (And I for one am bored stiff of such research excuses.)
So, before we start reaching gleefully for such cop-out answers, we need to first properly lock down what the core low-level consistency problem actually is. Basically, what specific behaviours can we point to that indicate that Voynichese has a problem here?
Captain “ed”
It was WWII codebreaker Captain Prescott Currier himself who pointed out nearly fifty years ago that you could usually tell Currier A pages from Currier B pages simply by looking at the proportion of ‘ed’ glyph pairs on that page. (Currier A pages have almost none, Currier B pages normally have loads.)
Personally, I’d add some caveats, though:
Even though it might be tempting to think of “ed” as a bigram (i.e. a single token), it seems far more likely to be a contact boundary between an “e”-family token (i.e. e/ee/eee) and a “d” glyph.
To me, there often seems to be something funny going on with qokedy / qokeedy / etc that isn’t really captured by just looking for “ed”
Helpfully, you can use voynichese.com’s layer feature to bring to life the variation in Voynichese words containing “ed”, e.g. this query for lots of different subgroups of “ed” words. Even though Herbal A pages have basically no ed pairs at all, the ed’s nothing short of explode at the very start of Q13:
The first three pages of Q20 are very nearly as colourful:
For ed, it seems to be the case that recto and folio pages have a similar kind of ed-density: for example, if you compare f107r/f107v with f108r/f108v, you can see clearly that the two halves of each folio seem quite similar:
The f111r/f111v pair seems to buck this trend slightly, insofar as f111v (on the right) seems somewhat less ed-dense than its recto side f111r (on the left):
While I’m here, I’d note that f116r (the last proper Voynichese page of Q20) seems to have a structure break halfway down, which would be consistent with an explicit and/or a colophon placed at the end of a chapter / book:
There’s also the question of whether the two folios making up each bifolio appear ed-consistent. I’d say that this appears true for most Q20 bifolios (e.g. f103 and the top half of f116r, f104-f115, f105-f114, f106-f113) but certainly not for others (e.g. f107-f112 and f108-f111). It’s very hard to be definitive about this.
Finally, I’d also note that while Quire 8’s f58r/f58v (with their starred paragraphs) do have some ed-words, their ed-fractions are extremely low, which would make classifying them as “pure” Currier B difficult:
Torsten Timm’s “in”
Torsten Timm has similarly looked at what the usage of the Voynichese glyph pair “in” tells us. Of my own set of voynichese.com experiments, the one that seemed to me to be the most interesting was comparing “iin” with “[anything else]in”.
For example, even though iin dominates [^i]in for most of the Voynich Manuscript, the first folio of Q13 has almost no “iin”s in it at all:
Folio f111 is also a little bit odd, in that its verso side has many more [^i]in words:
“ho”-words Way
As with Currier’s “ed”, “ho” is very much a contact locus between two families of glyphs: on the left, you have ch/sh/ckh/cth/cph/cfh, while on the right you have or/ol/ok/ot/op/of etc. As such, it looks like a useful way of exploring for a group of glyph boundaries, but this does need to be carefully qualified.
If we visually group this ho-transition (via voynichese.com) in terms of the origin of the “h”, we get a query that looks like this. This reveals that most ho instances are in fact “cho” (dark blue). However, the f93r/f93v folio does look particularly unusual in this respect:
The final two paragraphs of f116r are also unusual, this time for their almost complete lack of ho-words:
From the preceding sections, I’d say that the overwhelming impression I get is that pages within a folio (and indeed pages within a bifolio, though to a slightly lesser extent) are actually reasonably consistent with each other, and with relatively few counter-examples.
Unsurprisingly, this is also what we see if we simply merge the three ed / in / ho queries into a single voynichese.com query. Here, we can easily pick out the dishonourable exceptions, such as f111 (where f111r is dominated by “ed” [blue], yet where f111v is dominated by “in” [red]):
If we instead highlight cho and sho separately, what emerges is that, unlike the rest of Q20, the f106-f113 bifolio has a surprisingly high proportion of sho-words (in yellow):
I could go on, but I think my visual argument here has pretty much run its course.
Thoughts, Nick?
Even though Torsten Timm used ed / in / ho as part of his argument concluding that Voynichese pages are independent of each other, I’m not sure I fully accept his conclusions. (He’s certainly right about words, but the details and ramifications of that are for another post entirely.)
For me, the behaviour of ed / in / ho seems to suggest something arguably even more unsettling: which is that there seems to be consistency at the bifolio level.
And so it seems that we’re facing a BAAFU (“Bifolio As A Functional Unit”) scenario here. Which is arguably even more mysterious than Currier’s LAAFU (“Line As A Functional Unit”), wouldn’t you agree?
