“What Don’t You Understand” webcomic, now with added Voynich…

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Online webcomic “What Don’t You Understand” by Hong Jac Ga (“A pretty strange story about a hitman, a hermit writer, and a boy who loses his memory”, translated by Rachel Ahn) has recently put up a nice Voynich-inspired episode (#24 here).

what-dont-you-understand

It’s not often you have a story with a talking cat and dog trying to train a somewhat unwilling young dark magician: for the purposes of the narrative, the Voynich Manuscript is a kind of repository of impressions, able only to be ‘read’ (or rather ‘sensed’) by someone able to tune in to the original magician’s wavelength.

And I can affirm that there are plenty of people in the real world who truly believe that they can read the Voynich Manuscript in precisely this way, i.e. purely by affinity and/or sense. So perhaps the modern world is just as magical / irrational as it ever was, lurking beneath what is no more than a thin veneer of 21st century logico-positivist supposed hyper-rationality.

Then again, maybe dogs and cats will indeed converse enigmatically long before anyone has cracked the Voynich Manuscript in this kind of way. 😉

Tamam Shud, curiouser and curiouser…

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I recently got sent off on a chase by an anonymous commenter “Ayuverdica”, raking through the Australian archives for a certain ‘Thomas Lawrence Keane’ (here, here and here) as a possible identification claim of the Somerton Man. Having then looked at all the evidence, it was clear none of it quite seemed to stack up in the way the commenter claimed: but I decided to publish it anyway (with plenty of provisos).

However, a few days later, what appears to be the same “Ayuverdica” left a comment on Pete Bowes’ blog:

i just made up the thomas lawrence keane thing on the basis he was from charters towers and married to isabella beaumont. i have no evidence beyond that. the guy was cremated in march 26 1949. is it possible that it was a fake cremation? someone elses body? convenient huh

Errm… thanks for that, thanks a lot. *sigh*

What’s more, I’ve had a lot of commenty backchat here from “Minstrel Janet” (another nearly-nameless commenter) who has been leaving a long series of comments saying what a horrible liar Jestyn was, that Jestyn was up to her neck in two murders, etc, etc, though without ever giving any obvious reason why anyone should allege such a thing. I didn’t moderate out her comments, simply because I wanted to know what drove her to say such inflammatory things… but she now claims to have abandoned Cipher Mysteries and moved on to greener forums pastures. I wish her… as tolerant a reception from the next Tamam Shud forum she happens to descend upon. (Good luck, Pete, mate.)

However, I have moderated out a string of other comments from a pair of anonymous commenters (one from New Zealand, one from Australia), who alleged a whole series of ghastly things about Jestyn and her family. Really, there seems to be something about the whole Tamam Shud case that brings out the worst in people – the most bigoted and intolerant, the quickest to condemn, the fastest jump to conclusions from scanty evidence imaginable, all of it at the same time. Why?

Perhaps it comes down to what I called (in my 2004 Masters’ dissertation) “Keatsian uncertainty”. In an 1817 letter, Keats described Shakespeare’s genius as “Negative Capability“, “when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason“, which he used to describe the Bard’s near-unique capacity to allow his dramatic characters to remain in a continuous state of uncertainty without feeling any urgent need to resolve their quandaries and dilemmas.

This is also very much like chess, where weaker players when presented with one or more possible captures find it almost impossible to resist the urge to resolve that overwhelming tension by capturing. Shakespeare kept his plays wonderfully interesting, said Keats, by keeping those kinds of internal tensions in play: for me, I think this exhibits both a very modern kind of epistemology and a very modern kind of story-telling. Even now, how many writers have the strength of resolve not to scratch those itches, to release the reader from those dilemmas that keep the protagonists internally caged?

Perhaps what these Somerton Man commenters are displaying is this same all-too-human urge to jump to resolution from whatever evidence is at hand, simply as a way of resolving those unbearable tensions any way they can. But for me, this is more a symptom of intellectual cowardice, when in fact finding a way of living and working with such uncertainties – however difficult that may at first seem – is the difficult, brave, but ultimately right choice.

For example: right now, we don’t know whether Jestyn was utterly complicit; or just as much a victim as the Unknown Man; or somewhere in between; or possibly even entirely unconnected. So, how does arbitrarily “deciding” which of these was true make that whole difficult situation any more manageable? How does replacing an jarring uncertainty with an irritable lie help anybody, exactly?

Anyway, if you haven’t already thrown your hands up in despair at the difficult thought of staying undecided under pressure, I think you will probably enjoy this 2010 article from Cultural Studies Review by Ruth Balint called “The Somerton Man: An Unsolved History“.

Balint documents how, as she came to grasp the Somerton Man case, she felt herself being drawn into different speculative narratives, even though the evidence doesn’t support it. As a long-time fan of historian Carlo Ginzburg’s work, I also found it interesting to see Balint bring his position to bear on the Tamam Shud evidential stack.

But perhaps it’s not such a good idea to give imagination a free rein at this point in the research. Even 65 years after the event (whatever the event was), I still suspect we have yet to do the basic factuality proper justice: and so it is arguably too early in the unfolding historical process to point the big guns of Ginzburgian imaginative reconstruction at this cold case. This isn’t peasant magic in medieval Friuli, guys, sorry.

I guess the trickiest question for historians about the case is simply this: is Tamam Shud genuinely a cold case yet, or is it still luke-warm? Really, at what stage does reconstructive speculation become fair game, and not just a way of treading smartly on (living) people’s toes?

The hunt for Thomas Lawrence Keane, continued…

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Following my first post on “Thomas Torrance Keane” (and my second post correcting his name to “Thomas Lawrence Keane”, thanks Debra! 🙂 ), I’ve been wondering which particular archival wall I should bang my head against next. At some point in the next few months, his WW2 records should now appear on the web… but as to what they will reveal, I have no idea at all.

In Keane’s funeral notices, there was one tiny dangling thread asking to be gently tugged at: his membership of the RSSAILA, the Returned Sailor’s, Soldier’s and Airmen’s Imperial League of Australia:-

KEANE.—New Farm Sub-branch, R.S.S.A.I.L.A. —The Officers and Members are invited to attend the Funeral of their late Member, Mr. T. L. Keane, to move from Alex. Gow’s Funeral Chapel, as per family notice. A. L Beeston, Secretary.

The RSSAILA was originally formed during WW1 as the RSSILA: with the addition of “A” (for “Airmen’s”) in 1940, it then became the RSSAILA, before eventually becoming the RSL (“Returned & Services League of Australia”) in 1965.

RSSILA-badge

Descriptions of the RSSILA in its very early years that I’ve read online make it sound like a right-wing activist organization, with plenty of government and intelligence informers ensconced in key posts: but where the later RSSAILA found itself in the politically-divided post-WW2 years, I don’t know.

Anyway, I thought I’d see if any newsletters or documents pertaining to the RSSILA/RSSAILA’s New Farm Sub-branch still existed: so contacted the branch. “Unfortunately,” the answer speedily came back, “being situated on the Brisbane River, most of our records were lost in the 1974 floods that devastated Brisbane in that year.” Perhaps the South Eastern District did have a newsletter circa 1948-1949, perhaps it didn’t: nobody remembers any more, it all seems to be a bit of a haze.

Of course, there may yet be something relevant deep within the National Archives of Australia’s MS 6609 (which, as I noted before, contains “a rather scary-sounding 205 linear metres of RSL archives”, and may well not have any practical finding aid). But all the same, I think we ought to exhaust other avenues before searching for a spider in that particular dark hole. 🙂

Searching on the ever-surprising Trove did turn up something a little bit odd. In 1st February 1929, Mr. T. H. Keane was elected the assistant Hon. secretary of the South Eastern Queensland district branch: while on 21st July 1930, T. H. Keene was elected one of three vice-presidents of the District, as well as “delegate to the Federal executive”. By 20th July 1931, T. H. Keene was “acting president”, and again nominated for state vice-president: and on 1st September 1931 he appears (as “T. Keane”) in the list of delegates at the annual State conference.

Helpfully, the Brisbane Courier ran a short piece on him when he was voted in as president:-

At the meeting of the South-eastern Queensland district Executive of the R.S.S.I.L.A., held at Anzac House on Friday night, the district president was elected. The two candidates were Major Taylor (former president, resigned) and Mr. T. H. Keene (vice chairman), and the ballot resulted in the success of Mr. Keene. The new district president (Mr. T. H. Keene) has a fine record. He returned from active service with the 49th Battalion overseas for approximately three years, during which he was wounded several times. In 1919 he joined the Ithaca sub-branch of the R.S.S.I.L.A., and was later transferred to the Toowong sub-branch, where he has remained since. For five years Mr. Keene represented the Toowong sub-branch on the South-eastern Queensland district executive, and whilst a member of the latter-named body he acted as assistant honorary district secretary, vice-chairman, and delegate to the State managerial council, and recently was elected as emergency delegate to the forthcoming State executive meeting.

And yes, there’s even a photo of him:-

BrisbaneCourier-THKeene

It is here, however, that our all-too-fine historical thread finally snaps: this particular T. H. Keene was in the 49th Battalion, whereas the Thomas Lawrence Keane we’re interested in was “late 15th & 57th Bns., 1st A.I.F.” So, despite the many overlaps and misspellings, this T. H. Keene was apparently someone else entirely. Oh well, hopefully this will prevent anyone else from haring down this particular empty rabbit hole! 😐

The Dorabella cipher and Elgar’s *other* little ciphertexts…

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As regular Cipher Mysteries readers will know, Edward Elgar’s most famous ciphertext is the Dorabella Cipher, a tiny cryptographic walnut that continues (more than a century after it was produced) to defy all cryptologic jackhammers sent to crack it.

A confusing part of the mystery is that in the 1920s, Elgar (re-)used the same pigpen-style “rotating-3” alphabet as a simple substitution cipher in two pages of his notebooks (the “MARCO ELGAR” / “A VERY OLD CYPHER” / “DO YOU GO TO LONDON TOMORROW?” page reproduced here. These messages are easily deciphered (helpfully, the key is reproduced on the page itself), so the two ciphertexts appear to have nothing to do with each other apart from their shared alphabet.

Furthermore, what I didn’t realise until last year (but never quite got round to mentioning here) is that Elgar re-used these same cipher shapes in two other places. Firstly, the “Liszt fragment” in the margin of an 1885/1886 Crystal Palace Saturday Concert Programme, which is basically a string of the same rotating-3 alphabet:

liszt-fragment

Tony Gaffney thinks that this is trivially solvable by using one of the “clock-face” diagrams from the 1920s notebook, but I think this mainly depends on whether you think the kind of language Tony believes the main Dorabella cipher was enciphering had the same kind of allusive & abbreviated private codewords as this (short) message.

But there is also one other place we know of in Elgar’s notes where these distinctive shapes appear, and it is in a decidedly cryptographic context. In 1896, the Pall Mall Magazine published an article with an “uncrackable” code challenge for readers, one based on the Russian Nihilist cipher. However, Elgar took such great delight in cracking it that he later had it painted on the floor: he also wrote his explanation on nine cards (“the Courage card set”).

What is odd is that ten of the rotating-3 alphabet letters appear on the first card of this set. The description given of these is of the set of eight rotating triple cup shapes, followed by an upward-facing double cup and finishing with an upward facing single cup. I haven’t seen an image of this in context, but Christian Schridde reconstructed one for one of his very readable “NumberWorld” blog posts on the Dorabella Cipher:-

Courage

In Christian’s third Dorabella post, he muses on the timeline aspects: that the Liszt fragment is more than a decade earlier than Dorabella, while the “MARCO ELGAR” page is more than two decades later. By contrast, the ink was only just dry on the Courage card set when the Dorabella cipher itself was written.

Schridde therefore wonders whether the Dorabella cipher might use some element of the Nihilist cipher (which, itself, is a kind of bodged-together mix of Polybius square and Vigenère cipher): certainly, this cipher must have been almost as fresh in Elgar’s mind as the paint on his wooden floor.

On the one hand, the fact that there are ten rotating-3 symbols on the card seems to vaguely imply that Elgar was trying to see a way of mapping a set of digits [0-9] onto his rotating-3 alphabet: which, given that the Nihilist cipher system enciphers individual plaintext letters as 2- or 3-digit numbers, does seem oddly coincidental.

And yet there is no obvious sign of digit pairing or grouping, which you’d perhaps expect if you were seeing something Polybius-style or perhaps groups of digits: the ABAB-style length pattern at the start of the Dorabella (2323121312…) quickly disappear, replaced by quite different structures (e.g. 22222 and 111111 on the second line).

At one point, I also wondered whether the sequence on the first Courage card might in fact be a kind of length-10 sequence to offset the Dorabella symbols, that I previously called a “rotating pigpen”, e.g.

+0/0, +1/0, +2/0, +3/0, +4/0, +5/0, +6/0, +7/0, 0/-1, 0/-2

Well, given that this is a reasonable possibility, I tried out a few variants of it in Excel… but nothing plausible-looking jumped out at me, which was basically what happened when I tried a similar rotating pigpen in C code hack before.

I really don’t know what’s going on with all Elgar’s cipher bits, particularly the Liszt fragment. Of his three undecrypted mini-ciphertexts, the Dorabella is in some ways the least odd – it at least looks like a proper cryptogram with proper-looking statistics, something to get your cryptologic teeth into. The mystery deepens! 🙂

Revised Somerton Man id claim – Thomas Lawrence Keane…

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Having given the anonymous “Ayuverdica”‘s claim the oxygen of (a small amount of) publicity here a few days ago, a number of things quickly came to light (indeed, possibly even in record time):-

(1) As Debra Fasano speedily pointed out in a comment to that page, the man being flagged was not “Thomas Torance Keane” (as listed in the index) but rather “Thomas Lawrence Keane”, born 20 June 1892 in Queensland: his older sister Ada married Frank Charles Toten. Notices of Keane’s death appeared in the newspaper on the 26th March 1949:

FUNERAL NOTICES
KEANE.—The Relatives & Friends of Mr. & Mrs. F. C. Toten, Mr. & Mrs. L. Fuller (Argents Hill), Miss Dorothy Toten, Mr. & Mrs. A Dixon, Mr. & Mrs. J. Lohfin, & Mr. E. Toten, are invited to attend the funeral of her beloved Brother, his Brother-in-law, & their Uncle, Thomas Lawrence Keane, of 110 Terrace St., New Farm, late 15th & 57th Bns., 1st A.I.F., to move from Alex. Gow’s Funeral Chapel, Petrie Bight, This (Saturday) Morning, at 11 o’clock, for the Crematorium, Mt. Thompson. Service 10.45 a.m.
ALEX. GOW, Funeral Director.
KEANE.—New Farm Sub-branch, R.S.S.A.I.L.A. —The Officers and Members are invited to attend the Funeral of their late Member, Mr. T. L. Keane, to move from Alex. Gow’s Funeral Chapel, as per family notice. A. L Beeston, Secretary.

(2) As Debra also helpfully pointed out, the claimed link between Thomas Lawrence Keane’s mother (Isabella Beaumont) and the Beaumont family related to Jestyn via her brother’s wife Peggy Beaumont fails to stand up to closer examination.

As a result of all this, it is hard not to conclude that our anonymous informant “Ayuverdica” had only indirect (archive-based) and incomplete knowledge of Thomas Lawrence Keane, as opposed to direct (family or friend) knowledge. As such, the notion that the various pieces might be connected broadly in the way he/she proposed now seems excessively hopeful or speculative at best.

All the same, such historical ghosts can – in the ever-suspicious world of Somerton Man researchers – be hard to pacify once summoned. And it is difficult to disagree with the point that if (and I acknowledge that this is a big ‘if’, of course) the Somerton Man was indeed “T. Keane” as the labels on some of his clothes seem to imply, then we would be foolish to rule this particular Thomas Lawrence Keane out without checking him out properly.

And so for the sake of completeness, I’ve just paid 19 AUD to the NAA to get Thomas Lawrence Keane’s WW2 records (“1939-1948″) examined, digitized and placed online. The website says that this will take up to “90 days”, but I’ll post a link to it here as soon as this happens. 😉

Finally, “RSSAILA” stands for the “Returned Sailor’s Soldier’s Airmen’s Imperial League”, which later became the “Returned Services League” (RSL): but even though the National Archives of Australia’s MS 6609 contains a rather scary-sounding 205 linear metres of RSL archives, there doesn’t yet seem to be any online finding aid within it, and it’s not at all clear to me whether district-level (rather than state-level) archives are included in there.

Hence I’ve also contacted the relevant district-level RSL branch to see if they have any historical records (newsletters, minutes, correspondence, etc) stretching back as far as 1948-1949, just in case there’s any mention of Thomas Lawrence Keane during that period. As always, it’s a bit of a long shot but we shall hopefully see what emerges there…

“Prime” / Jack Sigler / Voynich Manuscript novel…

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Jeremy Robinson’s and Sean Ellis’s latest Jack Sigler novel “Prime” (2013) reveals the origins of the “Chess Team” (their super-secret Delta-of-Deltas best-of-the-best elite US army team, that’s hopefully fictional, or else I’m a dead man in the next 10 minutes 🙂) that rattles along in the other novels in the same series. Here, though, the goodies-vs-superbaddies story plays out against the backdrop of the Voynich Manuscript’s secrets, the origins of the Black Plague, and indeed the ultimate origins of Life on Earth. But with lots of guns.

Thankfully, Robinson gets one over on most of his Voynich fiction competition by finding ways of not inserting too many cut-and-pasted slabs of cod Wikipedia-esque history into his brisk narrative: while another near-first is that the manuscript stays centre-stage throughout the whole book, which is also a nice change from what has become the norm.

Yet… despite all the knowingly-contemporary ironic macho posturing and ultra-weaponry fetishism of the genre, the language of “Prime” used still feels to me like it has been written for 17- or 18-year-olds. You know: relentlessly soul-less super-soldier hyper-gun pr0n, coupled with the run-at-the-camera poisoned-sugar rush of 3d zombie films and the moral one-dimensionality of young adult fiction. And as for the crypto girl’s inner maths-geek monologues… well, best not get me started on something that badly lame.

“Prime” was certainly a quick read, and perhaps if I had previously trawled through the rest of the Chess Team series, I might just have viewed many of the sequences in a different, possibly more nuanced light. But in the end, I’m pretty sure that it is what it is: a Voynich novel that treats the manuscript with reasonable respect (mostly), yet fetishizes and objectifies just about everything else it touches. And with lots of guns.

Basically, if your secret inner you is an 18-year-old kid who thinks that big guns and heroes that are described as looking like “Hugh Jackman[‘s]… film portrayal of the comic book superhero Wolverine” (p.26) are all like totally kewl, while also being a tiny bit of a cipher mystery history geek, then maybe this is the hot book of the year for you. But for the rest of us… maybe not.

New Somerton Man identification claim – Thomas Torance Keane…?

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After all the recent troll-comment-posting kerfuffle here, I’ve been extra careful about checking comments before letting them onto the site. So, when a very specific identification of the Somerton Man was recently posted in a comment to Cipher Mysteries, I emailed the fairly-unlikely-sounding email address to verify it (but didn’t get a reply).

Despite this caginess, I decided to have a look anyway. Our anonymous commenter claims:-

“Thomas Torrance Keane, born in Charters Towers in 1896 to Isabella Beaumont and her husband[d] Francis C Keane. Himself a part of the extended Beaumont clan and known to the Harkness family through Thomas’s marriage to Clarice Isabella Victoria Beaumont. Although he is noted as being deceased in 1949 this is probably a red herring. He was the Somerton Man.“

As names go, “Thomas Keane” has quite a lot going for it: specifically
* the “Unknown Man” / “Somerton Man” was wearing a tie marked “T. Keane”;
* his possessions included a laundry bag marked “Keane”;
* they also included a singlet marked “Kean” (omitting the final “e”)

Having said that, at the time police seemed quite sure that nobody called “T. Keane” was missing… but it’s entirely conceivable that one might have somehow evaded their net. Furthermore, the commenter names two (both very real) roads where this Thomas Keane and his [alleged] wife [allegedly] lived:-

“The family lived in Frankston, on the Cranbourne Road and before that on Davey Street“

How many of these specifics could I test?

Well… because Charters Towers is in Queensland, the obvious first stop was the Queensland Births / Deaths / Marriages (BDM) website. There I found item 1892/B50671 – the birth of Thomas Torance [note the single-‘r’] Keane, son of Francis Charles Keane and Isabella Beaumont. The Queensland BDM also has item 1949/B21184 – the death certificate for (without much doubt) the same Thomas Torance Keane (which I haven’t yet seen).

On Trove, I found Clarice Isobel (“Peg”) Beaumont’s 25th August 1942 wedding to Private Thomas Lawson Harkness, A.M.F., which is why she subsequently appears in the archives (1942-1980) as Clarice Isobel/Isabella Victoria Harkness:-

The charming auburn-haired bride looked sweet indeed in her gown of ivory moire taffeta, hand-embroidered, with beads and sequins at the neck, and falling full from a tight-fitting waistline. It was buttoned up the back and extended into a long train. The long sleeves came to a peak over the wrist. She wore an embroidered net veil flowing from a top-knot of double white violets. The veil was loaned by a Geelong friend. The bride carried a sheaf of white heather and double violets.

Also according to Trove, the couple had a baby daughter on 20th June 1943: they were then living at 32 Davey Street, Frankston where they stayed until at least March 1945. Note that this was Thomas Lawson Harkness Jr: his father (Thomas Lawson Harkness Sr) was a merchant seaman born in London in 1888, who moved to Australia, and married Ellen Lee in 1916.

As numerous Cipher Mysteries readers will doubtless already be shouting at their screens, Thomas Lawson Harkness Jr’s sister was none other than Jessie Ellen Harkness (b. 1921, Marrickville, NSW, d. 13/5/2007), known somewhat better as “Jestyn“. It was her phone number on the Somerton Man’s recovered Rubaiyat that first brought the police to her door: and it was her anonymity that was protected by Gerry Feltus (and others) for so many years, up until the Internet made all such politeness and civility seem untenably quaint.

At this point, I hope you can see the problem I’m facing: I’ve been sent these anonymous messages (from “Ayuverdica”) that seem to be confusing (the very real) Thomas Lawson Harkness Jr with (the also very real, but essentially unknown) Thomas Torance Keane. Is this just an accident, memory playing tricks on someone? Or am I being set up by a particularly sophisticated online troll trying to muddy the waters for everyone, for obscure reasons currently unknown?

Really, what did Thomas Torance Keane have to do with any of this Harkness-related family history? Maybe nothing, maybe something, maybe everything. Right now, I have no idea whatsoever, I simply can’t tell.

But perhaps you can. Perhaps if we leave the Harknesses to one side and find out more about the life (and indeed the death) of Thomas Torance Keane, we will be able to eliminate him from our enquiries… or perhaps we won’t.

I don’t personally have access to Australian genealogical databases, but I know that quite a few Cipher Mysteries readers do. So this is the point where I stop and hand my (admittedly fairly thin) portfolio over to all you nice people.

Basically, what can we find out about Thomas Torance Keane? What happened to him? As always, dot dot dot… Good luck and happy hunting!

Update: I also found the following advert in Trove, placed in the 11 Jan 1941 Sydney Morning Herald. It may or may not be related, but here it is anyway:-

Keane – Any person knowing the present or past whereabouts of Thomas Keane, the husband of the late Sarah Ann Keane (who died September 13, 1940), please communicate with The Equity Trustees Company, 472 Bourke Street, Melbourne, Victoria.

Kidd, Poe, ‘Imogine’, and Charles Garrett…

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If you know a bit about the history of cryptography, then you’ll probably know that the first well-known modern story about ciphers was Edgar Allan Poe’s (1843) “The Gold-Bug“. Poe explicitly built his narrative around the legend of Captain Kidd’s treasure, so in many ways it forms a kind of literary bridge between the worlds of buried treasure and ciphers. Of course, he was writing some 80 years before the Kidd-Palmer treasure maps and La Buse cryptograms surfaced (and long before “Treasure Island”, which appeared in 1881), so his story is unaffected by any of these.

Just so you know, the (simple substitution) cipher he devised looks a lot like this:-

53‡‡†305))6*;4826)4‡.)4‡);806*;48†8
¶60))85;1‡(;:‡*8†83(88)5*†;46(;88*96
*?;8)*‡(;485);5*†2:*‡(;4956*2(5*—4)8
¶8*;4069285);)6†8)4‡‡;1(‡9;48081;8:8‡
1;48†85;4)485†528806*81(‡9;48;(88;4
(‡?34;48)4‡;161;:188;‡?;

Previously (in 1840), Poe had challenged readers of “Alexander’s Weekly Messenger” to send in simple substitution ciphers for him to crack in print, and so had for some time been aware of a widespread public interest in cryptography. “The Gold-Bug”, then, was written to capitalize on this interest: and won a $100 prize. Later, many readers were inspired by “The Gold Bug” to develop an interest in codebreaking, most notably a young William Friedman of whom you may have heard…

However, when reading about “The Gold-Bug” the other day, my eye was drawn to one aspect to the whole affair that I found intriguing. At the time, newspaper editor John Du Solle made the suggestion (though one he quickly retracted) that Poe may have drawn inspiration from the 1839 “Imogine; or the Pirate’s Treasure“, written by 13-year-old girl George Ann Humphreys Sherburne.

It’s true that the two tales do share key elements: but as is so often the case, those ideas were without doubt very much ‘in the air’ at the time. Rather, the two stories seem related in the same way that Robert Louis Stevenson’s “Treasure Island” drew ideas from numerous earlier books, but had an entirely new style of presenting them that made it feel fresh and appealing. Basically, in both cases I’m quite sure that Poe or Stevenson weren’t (literary) pirates, but simply well-read writers with a zingy contemporary geometry to add shape and style to the narrative building blocks that they found around them.

But ever since Du Solle’s speedily retracted comparison, it seemed to me that hardly anybody had actually bothered to read Sherburne’s story (mainly because almost everyone mis-spells its protagonist’s name, *sigh*). I did, though: and I found something a little unexpected…

imogine-cover

Having trawled past all the girlish swooning chapters and then the unexpected (but unconvincing) chapter with a death, in Chapter VIII the reader finally gets to the climax of the piece where (to almost nobody’s great surprise) the pirate treasure is finally found along with a skeleton…

“Yes”, said Imogine, “and just as you came up, I was about turning over that piece of old iron near the bones.”

“Ah! I see it,” replied her father, “and it looks to me like the top of a ship’s iron pot;” and turning it over with his cane, saw under it white sea sand, [in] which, on stirring about, gold and silver pieces were seen sparkling, which caused an exclamation from all.

“What a great discovery is this!” said Mr Belmont, turning and looking with surprise at Imogine and Cornelia;

[…]

After placing the skeleton in a box, and interring it, they removed the treasure, and in doing so, discovered another similar pot to the first under it, but more valuable, which was all moved safely to the house.”

What’s so unusual about this? Well… according to near-legendary metal-detectorist Charles Garrett, it has often been the case that a large treasure cache is buried immediately below a small treasure cache. Garrett post-rationalizes / explains this as a kind of ‘trap’ for treasure hunters, i.e. for them to be satisfied with robbing out the (small) topmost treasure, while leaving the (big) treasure underneath intact for the original owner. (Though personally, I suspect it’s just as likely that they couldn’t be bothered to dig a bigger hole.)

The big question, then, is this: how would a 13-year-old girl writing in 1839 know to describe such an arrangement… except if she had been party to the ins and outs of an actual treasure dig? I’m not suggesting that recovered pirate treasure is the true secret of the Astor family fortune (mainly because that particular joke’s already been done to death)… but maybe there’s a touch more truth in Sherburne’s story than might at first be thought.

Perhaps the real giveaway in the whole thing is the curious tag-line on “Imogine”‘s cover: “This is all as true as it is strange“. What do you think?

PS: another mystery to ponder is who “George Ann Humphreys Sherburne” was? Apart from her presumed birth in 1825, there appears to be no other information on her anywhere at all. Unless you happen to know better, of course… please leave a comment if you do! 🙂

“Does X Mark The Spot?” – Pirate History Talk 15th September 2013

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On 15th September 2013 at the cornerHOUSE Community Arts Centre (116 Douglas Road, Surbiton, KT6 7SB), I’ll be giving an evening talk called “Does X Mark The Spot?“, trying to answer the question: are there any genuine pirate treasure maps?

The talk will run from 7.30pm to 9.15pm with a 15-minute interval at 8.15pm (though the doors and the bar open at 7pm). The first half covers Captain William Kidd’s alleged treasure maps, and the second half Oliver Levasseur’s mysterious ciphers. I’ll be happy to answer your pirate history questions both during and after the talk as best I can.

To whet your appetite, here’s a 3-minute promo video:-

The cost is £8 on the door, or £7 in advance via Compelling Press (publishers of my book The Curse of the Voynich). To reserve one or more seats for yourself, here’s a secure Buy Now button that links to PayPal (note that this also accepts Visa, MasterCard, etc):-





But perhaps the biggest question is: why do a talk on pirate history at all? Even if International Talk Like A Pirate Day is coming up on 19th September, surely this whole subject has already been done to death on National Geographic, Discovery, History Channel, etc?

Well… with all due respect to the above-mentioned broadcasters, the way almost all TV producers treat history is pretty much unchanged from the 19th century, when the point of ‘doing history’ was to provide bracing moral stories. What I do is a modern, forensic kind of history, far more accepting of uncertainty, because history – when done properly, at least – isn’t anything like as easy as ‘television history’ would have you believe. And when it comes to pirate treasure, there are plenty of uncertainties!

What is certain, though, is that pirate treasure maps are both fascinating and hugely contentious: so what I’ll be presenting is (I hope) a far more honest and realistic take on them than anything you’re likely to have seen or read before. Come along, it’ll be a lot of fun!

Cipher Mysteries comment policy change…

by ⋅ 23 Comments

Since I started Cipher Mysteries several years ago, I’ve tried to follow a fairly laissez faire comment moderation – basically, as long as it wasn’t spammy / sweary / abusive, I’d approve it.

But recently, though, the blog has been receiving a series (i.e. they all came via the same New Zealand ISP, very close IP addresses, etc) of troll-like comments aimed squarely at XLamb, and where all the plausible-looking email addresses bounced when I tried to email them to check.

Hence I’ve reconfigured the sites plugins so that for a while (maybe longer) there will be an extra layer of comment verification in place. If you leave a comment now, you’ll be required to verify that the email address you’ve given with it is valid (though this should only happen once per email address, mind you!). If the plugin thinks that it’s suspicious-looking, it may also ask you for a CAPTCHA verification… but that shouldn’t happen very often, as I understand it.

As with all things computery, this may (of course) run into teething problems while I’m getting it going: so if you have any difficulties leaving a comment over the next few days, please email me ( nickpelling at nickpelling dot com ) and I’ll try to fix it / them. As always, the email address you give doesn’t appear on the website at all, it’s only there for me to email you if there’s some kind of problem or issue with the comment.

I’m very sorry that one person has to spoil it (a little) for everyone else, but that’s just how it goes on the Internet sometimes, I hope you understand. 😐