Review: “Rebel Gold” By Warren Getler & Bob Brewer…

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Now here’s something that’s a bit unusual: “Rebel Gold” by Warren Getler and Bob Brewer (originally titled “Shadows of the Sentinel”) is a book about codes and buried treasure with basically no actual codes and pretty much zero treasure. Yet at the same time, there’s so much (alleged) secret American history and related odd stuff bubbling from nearly every page that I found it hard to mind very much.

At its core, the book is no more than a loose record of Bob Brewer’s treasure-huntin’ exploits in them thar woods, an’ yuh’d have to say he sure ain’t foun’ hisself a whole lot of gold. Yet the real gold he seems to have uncovered is the mostly-secret history of what are essentially the book’s real heroes (or antiheroes, depending on how you look at it) – the Knights of the Golden Circle (AKA the “KGC”).

The way I read it, the KGC was merely one of several haphazardly-run pro-slavery activist wings of the Confederacy in the American Civil War. The Wikipedia KGC page asserts that it somehow morphed into the “Order of American Knights” and then again in 1864 when it became “the Order of the Sons of Liberty”, but these could just as easily have been parallel wings, sharing a handful of key people.

What emerges from Brewer’s book is a rather deeper & broader conspiracy, with the KGC ending up with a number of concealed gold-stuffed stockpiles which its loyal descendants (including some in Brewer’s own family) apparently continue to guard even now. These modern-day sentinels stay loyal to the cause just in case the people of the South are ever to rise again and need financial supportin’ for their insurrection (and what with the price of gold bein’ at such a crazily high level, whose to say it wouldn’t be a help).

Overall, my favourite part of the book is Chapter 7, “Jesse James, KGC field commander“, which builds up a beautiful alternate history for Jesse James as a KGC operative, whose stealin’ was an innately political act – and that there were simultaneously two Jesse James (Jesse Robert James and his first cousin Jesse Woodson James), both of whom also had a brother called Frank, and all four of whom were part of the KGC. (Are you following all this? See me after class if it’s not crystal clear.)

And really, what goes for chapter 7 holds for the whole book, in that I can’t possibly evaluate the whole, ummm, veridicality of this mess (“Jesse James Was One Of His Names”, really?), but I do know that I thoroughly enjoyed the ride. In my opinion, it’s definitely a must-read for lovers of tangled conspiratorial Americana. Just don’t expect to use it to guide yuh metal detectorin’, hoss! 🙂

The unknown man (who might be The Unknown Man) remains unknown…

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A friend recently had a good old moan about being given directions that involved “turning right at the pub that isn’t there any more“. Just about as good a definition of what’s wrong with the world these days: perhaps we should just be grateful that our political masters haven’t found a way to privatize the roads. Errr, yet.

Hence we perhaps ought to celebrate the constancy of something that has stayed the same now for well over sixty years: the continued unknownness of The Unknown Man found on a South Australian beach on 1st December 1948, AKA the “Tamam Shud” cipher mystery. If only more things stayed the same, straws swaying lithely against the winds of modernity, eh?

All the same, the recent claim that The Unknown Man was in fact a certain “H. C. Reynolds” continues to intrigue me: I just wish there was a way to work out if this was true or not. We’ve managed to establish a solid timeline for Reynolds’ work as a young merchant seaman in and around Hobart in 1917-1919, and also to glean a few meagre facts: that he was born in Hobart on 8th Feb 1900, and that his middle name was Charles. Pretty much everything else on the pages of his personal history remains unseen to us.

Frustratingly, he was almost certainly not Horace Charles Reynolds, a lifelong poultry farmer born on the 12th February 1900 near Hobart: so much for Ancestry.com searches, hohum! 😉

A few months back, Diane O’Donovan very generously went to look at the logbooks of the RMS Niagara (a ship our HCR briefly worked on), but sadly found nothing useful… Then again, it was a particularly big ship, on which HCR only worked one round trip to Canada via Hawaii (where the ID card almost certainly came from), so perhaps a negative result shouldn’t come as a great surprise.

All of which left (according to the Log of Logs) one last set of log books to examine: and so the intrepid John Kozak stepped forward to make a journey into the sweeping suburban jungle surrounding Sydney, to track down the SS Koonya’s log books in the Kingswood reading room.

Unfortunately, it seems that even though these contain plenty of references to HCR (in the forms “Charles”, “Chas”, “H Charles” and (most commonly) “H Chas”, says John) in the log books, that is precisely as far as they go. No first name, no passing detail to try to tie to the real world, no nothing. Even though I’m really pleased that John managed to get his much-sought-after pineapple doughnuts from the cafeteria van outside the archive, as far as The Unknown Man goes it would seem as though we’re now stuck.

Is this The End? Well… mostly, although there are a few (albeit silkily fine) threads left dangling, and (as always) any one of them might possibly yield something (after all, it’s not as if we know nothing at all about HCR). He landed a job as a purser at a young age, so he must have done well at school, surely? So, here is my collection of HCR’s-school-related archival musings, perhaps one of them will point to where we should look to find HCR getting his exam results in (I guess) 1917.,,

(1) The (possible) Waratah connection. A 26th January 1918 newspaper tea-company advertorial refers to a certain “Master H Reynolds” of the mining town of Waratah. It’s a wafer thin lead, sure, but might this be our HCR? Unfortunately, a helpful lady from the Waratah Museum Society told me that “Waratah was very prone to buildings catching fire”, particularly ones with archives in, it would seem. So it’s far from clear how to follow this up. 🙁

(2) Cheryl Bearden points to the possibility (from crew manifests) that Reynolds had a younger brother (born ~1901) with first initial M. I wondered whether this might have been Maurice Reynolds (a reasonably well-known boxer, wrestler & occasional film-star), and so tracked his life back to Hutchins School in Hobart. However, according to Margaret Mason-Cox at Hutchins (who very kindly looked this up for me):-

According to the Hutchins Roll of Scholars, Maurice Davies Reynolds, born 4 July 1907, entered Hutchins 27 July 1921, no. 2507. He was the son of W B Reynolds, of ‘Hope Vale’, Mangalore, and was a boarder. He had two older brothers who attended Hutchins: Francis Lawrence (born 1901, entered 1916) and William Thomas Reynolds (born 1903, entered 1917).

As far as I can tell, they were not related to Herbert Francis Reynolds (born 1901, entered Hutchins 1910), whose father was F Reynolds, of Montpelier Road, Hobart.

Another dead end, but which at least serves to eliminate one school from our enquiries. 🙂

(3) Cheryl Bearden noted a while back that “a C. Reynolds appeared on the 1915 roster for the Junior Derwent Football team, [so] the school he [C. Reynolds] attended is probably in the Derwent area of Hobart“… but whether the H C Reynolds had already taken to calling himself C Reynolds in 1915 remains conjectural.

(4) In an email to me, “X Lamb” (the lady who originally had the HCR id card) mentioned some kind of odd family mythology around “Virgillians” (presumably St. Virgils School in Hobart, founded 1911, which would potentially make HCR one of its very first pupils) which may or indeed may not be connected to HCR. Don’t really know what to make of this, but thought I ought to mention it anyway. 🙂

Regardless, it would seem that this barely known young man remains resolutely untraceable, and his status as a possible Unknown Man candidate continues to be unknown, leaving the whole mystery as murky as ever. Rejoice in its constancy! 🙂

Voynich Miscellany 2012, part 2…

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Just when I thought it was safe to pack my mallet away for the Olympics, a whole load more Voynich moles popped up (if you remember the arcade game Whac-a-Mole, it’s a lot like that). I go through all this stuff so that you don’t have to…

(1) Tom O’Neill claims in a YouTube video that the Voynich Manuscript is written in a polyalphabetic cipher that, after three and a half years of exhausting labour, he has finally cracked. His decrypt of the first paragraph of f1r goes something like this (I’ve had to guess at a few words, but I think it’s generally pretty close):-

Woman, this mouth sense in the daytime, Lisa do you taste on the side of rich lips, bias corely that away from love dies from will. Nymph, nymph, know this male, he adores for company. My estate because of a lover, mistress of a house, say this or mouth our love between one another, that our faith on the side of a mountain. Would that destroy this cord asunder?

Personally, I prefer his YouTube videos where he dresses up in army fatigues, calls himself Commander or Admiral Mansfield, proclaims his desire that we should all fight the New World Order, and recites his own rather gory poetry. But taste is a subjective thing, I guess.

(2) Algorithmic music programmer “Dan of Earth” has released a noise thing called Voynich Was Here, self-described on archive.org as “algorithmic composition as applied to horrible noise”. Even what appears to be its biggest fan on the Internet has trouble seeing its positives:-

“Some might find Voynich Was Here more interesting to read about than it is to listen to, but that would be factoring out the small, subtle nuances that are difficult to pick up on. The intent listener will be focused on hearing those shifts in sound, however small they are.“

(3) Here’s a quicky link to an upcoming unsolved mystery comic book thing called Hic + Hoc, that’s going to be covering the Voynich Manuscript (along with a load of other stuff) fairly soon, I guess.

(4) And lastly – inevitably, it would seem – comes a Voynich theory proposing not only that the Olympic stadium in Stratford is a pagan altar, but that the blueprints for it might well be in the Voynich Manuscript’s nine-rosette page. Shocking stuff, but very possibly not entirely true, it has to be said. 🙂

Announcing Curse 2 – the sequel!

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Back in early 2006, there came a point in my Voynich research when I suddenly realized that I knew enough to set sail. Though I didn’t have all the answers (history is rarely so extravagantly generous), at that moment I could see what happened clearly enough to tell the whole story. That quickly formed into The Curse of the Voynich, which took me a little over six months to research & write, and which I’ve had fun self-publishing and selling ever since.

Over the last few days, I’ve come to realize that I’ve now hit precisely the same point in my more recent research, and so am ready to tell an even bigger cipher mystery story. It has lots of faces and places Voynich researchers will find familiar, but plays out on a much grander historical stage. For now, let’s just call it “Curse 2”.

For Curse 1, I freely admit I was neither an experienced enough writer to give the story the treatment it deserved, nor a big enough fish for literary agents to be interested in. But fast forward to 2012 and the picture is quite different: loads of people have bought my book, 900+ blog posts have sharpened up my writing, and I’ve even been on TV. 😉

But this leaves me in a bit of a quandary.

For example, part of me thinks I should get an agent and negotiate a deal with a big publishing house – I’ve got a great story (not too technical, mind) to tell that is universal enough to stand an excellent chance of going into lots of languages and markets, making a right proper splash. However, I’ve heard that royalty advances for writers have basically gone all homeopathic, particularly if you don’t happen to already be a Named Celebrity. 🙁

Another part of me thinks I should take Curse 2 to the point of publication and only then do a deal with a publisher: I loved the cover Alian Design did for Curse 1 (even if it did blow the budget), so I have enough publishing experience to present that as a complete package. But if I can self-fund it that far, why not then go all the way?

A yet third part of me thinks I should abandon print completely and publish direct to Kindle and other e-readers, i.e. not bother with mainstream publishers but find a neat book PR company to help me get the word out big stylee. And when that’s a big enough success, only then take the print route. Incidentally, while reading a lady’s Kindle over her shoulder today (Fifty Shades of Grey, the bit about horse tranquilizers in the van? But I digress!) on the train, I noticed that there were more e-readers on view than actual books. It’s certainly reached a kind of Kindle-y tipping point in London now, it would seem.

(Though I would add that I went through all kind of hassle trying to port Curse 1 back onto a Kindle, and ultimately gave up because the pictures came out so abysmally. Perhaps doing the Kindle version first would make the print version much easier to do?)

The fourth option I thought of was to instead write it as a screenplay, and sell it to Hollywood: certainly I can see John Cusack in the title role, with Hilary Swank as his pregnant ex-army wife, and Judi Dench as his insane mother… but I’m digressing again. 🙂

Basically, I’m asking you this: what direction should I go in with Curse 2 All comments, hints, suggestions, agents’ contacts and fifth options gratefully received! Thanks! 🙂

Cat Darensbourg’s Beale Cipher 1 decryption…

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Long-time cipher-fan Catherine Darensbourg has recently been posting her decryption of Beale Cipher #1 under the name ‘BlueCricket’ to an online treasure-hunting forum called TreasureNet. She says that if you take Columns #1, #2, and part of #3 of Beale Cipher 1 (i.e. columnar transposition), you get:-

Column #1: 71, 975, 758, 401, 918, 436, 39, 18, 346, 872, 8, 102, 55, 275, 919, 81, 921, 14, 17, 121, 10, 540, 39, 230, 1300, 324, 428, 202
Column #2: 194, 14, 485, 370, 263 65, 88, 64,12, 36, 15, 120, 38, 131, 346, 861, 360, 1060, 23, 340, 67, 98, 232, 261, 460,1706, 403, 601, 35
Column #3: 38, 40, 604…

The idea is that you then take the last letter of each number as spelled in English, with the provisos:
(a) that “-Y” codes for “th”
(b) that you don’t include “and”
(c) “siX” (i.e. -X) codes for “STOP” unless it’s “60” (-Y)
(d) “0” (zero, i.e. -O) “is an option” (I’m not entirely sure what she means by this)

All of which kabbalistic longhand numeric trickery yields a raw text of:

“NEED YE NET-RDE YET RD Y(x)E ENTER(x)Y NOTE DOO YE ONE YE YE ER N-EYE-NE DR O YO DEED ED-ED ORR DY TO OO ED YRE RD-EH-YO (x) EY-T(x)E Y(x) NED YYTE DYEED Y(x) T DYEED YE D EDY YE ED ROY NE TODE O DYE RDY O D ND(x)…”

…which she reads as…

Need the net ready the Tr 500th(x)2Enter(x)Y note due the one 2 the ER 9 Dr O tho deed 2 Ed Orr 500th to 2 Ed Wire Radeo(x) 8th T(x)e-th(x) Ned Wyte died Y(x) T died the dedth the Ed Roth NE told O die ready o 500 ND(x)

Cat concludes that “There seems to be NO TREASURE in this part — just the movement of American Civil War Troops and report of their dead.”

Weeeeellll…. I’m really sorry Cat, but I think the correct description of what we have here is “a boat that’s not going to float”. It reads more or less exactly like numerous failed Voynich and Dorabella decryptions I’ve seen, and with a methodology that is interpretistic in many of the ways you’d normally hope to avoid. 🙁

She followed this up with an analysis of misspellings in Beale Cipher 2 (which also failed to convince me – most of the artefacts in Cipher 2 are more obviously down to column or row slips by the encipherer), and with an alternative anagram-based non-transposition take on Cipher 1 (which… oh, you already know what I’m going to say, goshdarnit).

Look, it’s like this. Civil War dating issues aside (1861-1865), there’s the not-at-all-small matter of the Beale Cipher 1 paradox, which I also blogged about here. Basically, I have extremely little faith that any claimed decryption that explicitly tries to sidestep the statistically improbable properties (as famously discussed by Jim Gillogly) will lead to a valid solution.

Just as “qokedy qokedy dal qokedy qokedy” and “daiin daiin” are extraordinarily problematic to claimed Voynich descryptions, the Gillogly strings form a spanner that lurks ready to be thrust into the works of any Beale Cipher theory. Unless you can account for those odd properties even slightly, I’m 99% sure you’ve got it all wrong!

Voynich, summer 2012 miscellany…

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Given that (a) I’m somewhat overstretched right now (imagine Doctor Who fighting Daleks and Cybermen with the Tardis and his underpants on fire, and you’re 10% of the way there) and (b) I’ve got a whole heap of Voynich-related bits to work through, it’s time for another Voynich miscellany post. Yes, just like last year’s one. Only better! 🙂

Firstly, the Voynich theories

Don’t inhale too deeply!

* If you first read about the Voynich too late at night through a haze of smoke, you can end up with some pretty hazy theories. Like this one, where the nine-rosette page is “a map of the general functioning of the multiverse. If you look closely, you can see eyeballs. This represents the observer effect, and the craziest part of all.” Moreover, “the manuscript is a guide for how to extract entheogenic substances or mixtures from plants, or to graft them together to create novel substances. I believe the author learned the theory of everything from a psychedelic trip, and that’s why there’s a clear galaxy picture.” Like, yeah, it all makes sense now, cool.

* The Federation of Light would like to let us know that the Voynich Manuscript was accidentally lost by “a child from Orion ( peacefull breed ) in training as a botanist“. Which is, of course, a great weight off all our minds. 🙂

* Here’s a channelling session with an entity called “Master Ruanel” who gets asked about the Voynich Manuscript. He thinks it’s nonsense! That was easy… now to solve the Euro crisis. 🙂

* Oh, and there’s a claimed Voynich decryption (“BE A RAS RABBLE”, really) on YouTube, if you like that kind of thing. Not my bag, sorry!

* Might the Voynich Manuscript actually be visual music? Composer and sonic contemplator Dan Wilson wonders so… it’s true that projecting cymatics back into the Quattrocento seems a bit of a stretch to me, but you may have a different opinion!

…and now all the other Voynichiana:

* Here’s a nicely composed photograph by Espen Gleditsch entitled “Voynich Manuscript 2009”, which basically looks like my own desk half the time (except I haven’t got a copy of Levitov’s book here).

* Pineal’s “A Key To Voynich” MP3 is available for download on Amazon. £0.89 buys you over 7 minutes of pulsing electronic dance stuff!

* However, that’s as nothing compared to “Manuscript 408”, the first track on Ice Dragon’s “Tome of the Future Ancients”, whose meatily metallic slice of bass-heavy doom rrrrock weighs in at over 10 minutes, and at whatever price you name. Basically, if you have long enough hair to flick and a virtual plectrum to air-guitar with, this could well be The Ultimate Voynich SoundTrack For Your Life:-

Words written down so long ago / In a language already gone
From hand of scribe / Down through the pen / And marked into vellum
Cloaked in darkness / The secret remains / Hidden from us for all time
The ravings of a madman / Or learned scholar / We may never know why
Brought forth while in possession / Of knowledge from other realms
Through supernatural process / One may obtain / That which is withheld
The scryer, the seer / Can talk to beings / Who remember the ancient days
When men were more / When they weren’t lost / In their mathematical ways
32 gone, 240 remain / Torn out by a dark mage
Who knew of the power / Held within / They are in use to this day
Herbal / Astronomical / Biological / Cosmological / Pharmaceutical
When all combine / Madness of the mind / Destroy all life / And reset time
When all combine / Madness of the mind / Destroy all life / And reset time

* E6 Town Hall Hoursong has released Volume 8 Voynich Manuscript, containing a number of Voynich-themed tracks. It’s all a bit experimental, you might like it, who knows?

* Here’s a nice picture by artist Barbara Suckfüll, more than a tad reminiscent of the Voynich’s nine-rosette page. (Click on it to see more detail).

* My favourite link of the day is to Rigid Hips Stockholm Motorcycle Space Sect (I kid you not), who writes that “The herbal, medical, astronomical/astrological, balneological and mechanical secrets of the Voynich Manuscript is basicly what keeps me going, and ofcourse the live albums the Ramones did in the late 70’s. […] The Ramones didn’t play all downstrokes, that’s a myth, if you analyse most their live albums Johnny and DeeDee goes 16 downstrokes / 4 up and down / 16 downstrokes / 4 up and down, and for some reason that is really important to me.” Now that’s someone with a finger on their own pulse, which I can really admire. But the real question is: would Rigid Hips like Ice Dragon? 🙂

The Unknown Man, update…

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Might the Unknown Man found dead on an Australian beach actually be an (almost equally unknown) merchant seaman called H. C. Reynolds? It’s an intriguing claim, one based – from the emails I’ve exchanged with the Australian lady from whom it originated – partly on family mythology, and partly on anatomical comparison between photos of the Unknown Man and an ID card dated 1918. It’s entirely true that uber-Tamam-Shud-meister Gerry Feltus remains somewhat skeptical: but then again, he has seen (and indeed carefully documented) many hundreds of similar claims, which so far have all proved not to be the case.

All the same, I think it would be good if we could properly identify this Reynolds person: after all, we apparently have direct evidence of his existence (an ID card). Surely it should be easy to track someone active less than a century ago, particularly with the vastly able help of such able online researchers as Cheryl Bearden & Knox Mix?

Well… recapping the story so far, we’ve found plenty of ships’ crew manifests where Reynolds appears, worked out that his middle name was Charles, and even uncovered his date of birth (8th February 1900). The Log of Logs then pointed us to the still-extant logs for the RMS Niagara and the SS Koonya… but as of earlier this year, that was as far as we had got.

So, all we needed was someone (a) indefatigable and (b) relatively nearby to go and have a look. Step forward Cipher Mysteries regular Diane O’Donovan, who extremely kindly journeyed out to Chester Hill to have a look at the RMS Niagara logbook for us all earlier thos year. (Apologies for not posting about this before, I’ve been somewhat… distracted, let’s say).

Unfortunately, the RMS Niagara turned out to be (in her words) “a dud lead… (with)no mention of Chas Reynolds“. Generally, Diane found the logs to be “fascinating if repellant reading“:

It must have been a nightmare of a ship to work on. Seasickness in crew was defined as ‘absent without leave’ or ‘under the influence of drink’. People constantly leaving with or without their possessions. Latter was defined as ‘desertion’. So plenty of incentive for navvies to adopt another name for the next voyage.

In many ways, all of this (including drawing a blank, sadly) should be no surprise: the Niagara was a huge, busy mega-ship, and it seems likely that Reynolds was merely covering for a sick assistant purser during a single round trip, a temporary, tiny replacement cog within a giant marine machine. Anyway, here’s what Diane found:-

First was a much expurgated ships log. Second of the two was a list of passengers, not of crew.

Niagara Logbook Barcode 322 304 61 81
July 1917 (Log no.A863)
Purser was Chas. Leighton. His signature appears as countersignatory at e.g. entry at 18/8/17
An assistant baker was a T.Reynolds. taken on 5/7/17; Discharged 7/8/17 after one month and three days.
reason – “failed to be on board at departure from Vancouver”

Only legalities have been preserved in this log: Initial list of crew with offices listed; dates of hose-drills; dates of absenteeism from duty or from the ship; wages docked; births, suicide, marriages..wages receipts made out for the missing.
——–
Niagara 1918 log
Barcode 1603134 SP83/11 BOX 38
Passenger list only. (To my horror, it includes reference to race as part of each person’s description, which strikes me as quintessentially un-Australian)

Ship arrived in Sydney on April 20th., 1918.

Diane also found out that the records for the SS Koonya (a very much smaller ship, upon which Reynolds worked for a whole year, finishing up not long before it sank) are at a quite different archive at Kingswood. This was independently confirmed for me by a NSW archivist who wrote:

The Log of Logs listing is correct. We hold the 1918 SS Koonya log at our Kingswood reading room at [3/4861.2].

So, who’s now going to pick up this glacially-slow-moving baton, and be so kind as to preorder [3/4861.2] and visit the Western Sydney Records Office? John K, are you still planning to be there next month? 😉

Lecture notes on history of cipher & shorthand…

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Never one to write up my lecture notes particularly far in advance, here (as long promised) is the first proper draft of the presentation I’ll be giving next Tuesday morning [3rd July 2012] for the second week of the 2012 London Rare Book School seminar series.

It’s a whacking great 12MB download, and is called Privacy, Secrecy, Brevity, Speed.

Just to give you an idea of what’s going on in my mind, I don’t actually know how the talk is going to go – given that I prepared 10x more material than was strictly necessary, I could probably talk for 20-30 minutes on each slide in turn. But given that I can’t predict sensibly what the people on the course will actually find useful and/or interesting, we’ll just have to see where it ends up on the day. 🙂

Of course, part of the reason anyone ever puts themselves through an ordeal like this as a lecturer is to find out what they actually think about things themselves. Speaking to (and indeed debating with) a live audience pushes you to move beyond the glibly overconfident text-y answers you can get away with when you’re at your PC late in the night with a cup of cocoa beside you. I’m sure you know the ones I mean. 🙁

So, here’s to finding out what I really think! Perhaps it’ll surprise me… it normally does! 😉

Girolamo Sirtori cipher mystery…

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Here’s news of a cipher mystery sent my way by generous Spanish blogger Eloy Caballero (who I enjoyed talking with at the Voynich Centenary conference in Frascati). Biblioteca Nacional de Madrid MSS/994 is “Memorial de los servicios prestados a los Reyes Felipe II y Felipe III por D. Luis Valle de la Zerda, correspondencia y documentos del mismo“. All the description of MSS/994 on p.216 of the general inventory is:-

“8. La cifra que Geronio Sertori milanes ofreció a S. M. por suya, y el Consejó de Estado la cometió para que la viese Luis Valle de la Zerda, el cual mostró al dicho Sertori un papel en que estaba la misma declarada por el al Rey Don Phelippe Segundo [hacía 15 años]” (fol.83 – 91[?]).

Now, Luis Valle de la Cerda (1552[?]-1606) was a courtier who not only had in 1590 reformed the Spanish national finances with the introduction of what was effectively state pawnshops [the ‘Montes de Piedad’, there’s a 2003 book by Anne Dubet on his role in that if you’re interested], but had also been made Cipher Secretary by Philip II: MSS/994 is a collection of a few choice cipher documents and keys collected and copied by him.

So far, so obscure: but what triggered this manuscript’s recent lurch into visibility was a PhD final year project by Sara Gómez Hernández, who transcribed this Sirtori cipher together with a Spanish cipher used when sending back descriptions of mines in India (but for which the cipher key has long been lost), and ran them through the well-known Cryptool online app. Though I might well have misinterpreted her results, her conclusion seems (to me) to be that these aren’t fancy-pants Vigenère polyalphas but rather just monoalphabetic ciphers (though she doesn’t offer anything so useful as a decryption of either, sorry all you armchair treasure hunters!)

Anyway, here’s a tidied-up version of Hernández’s Figure 8, which shows the 27-symbol transcription she settled upon for the Sirtori cipher:-

This yields this transcription:-

AYCLPDEAFGRF3RNFCSPFJPKEPOSLMEJBBNGDKNMMPPJSFPFB3SGDPKJRB3MF39ANLP
ONLPYRSRPFPFNGD2CPSALAUB3OB3KJB3NFNBECPNGANLB3PMNNBRSENF3PNBSJRNG
EDLPKEDGK20KCN4CF3JEESNLODPUPNROZNGF3JNB3BSJZDK5ANPSNPNN6GF3JNRSF3J
JNB3BKIADOCKN4F3SJB3B3SLJNBNF3GNPJPNBF3RNA3DSNANNBDNANBNB3RNSK8NC
PF3LEADUF3B3UNB3FASKSNLD24EAKGAF3NNBSJF3NP555DF3GCPB3JB3AMMPB3KRSL
PNBRSF3NPF3G5ESDF32NBCSKAF3LUKPB3NBOGRKJB3UDF3CP8KNDUPNBNRF3DAGAG
B32B3NBSPR2ANPF3DKNS3RNDFNBKD8F3NFB3UR2PF3GSFFNDP8PJJNBSB3NNBSP23Z
F3NDNS3KL3JF3B3NPNBNSGS3RPDKNAF3KL3PB3KNEDEPNF3XSRF3LPNPLXPF3GB3LDN
BFF3NPL8LNXLSKPB35DF3ZSNR2GALZAF3LKPNNBEPJRPNBKS3EBBBB3YLNGLPJMPMSN
BAPANLRB3ENKPRENANBNBYANB3B3P2DLNBPARPEJB35KF35DANBB32AJKPEPMC8SE
B3SLDF3GAPRYNPJNBDPRF3PNLBBNGEKPNKB3B3RNSLBBB3F3RYNAARPNBNEGKB3NSL
3DRF3XB3PANCPYNGJNBENL

The three pages of ciphertext Hernández includes are (I think) page 85,
page 86, and page 87.

By now, you pretty much all know me well enough to have worked out my first question, which is (of course): do I believe this transcription? Because if you start out by getting the transcription basically wrong, there’s a high chance you’ll have little or no success with all the subsequent stages that stand upon that transcription.

So, let’s look closely at the first line of the second paragraph, not because I’m trying to be difficult but because it’s slightly clearer on the page than the first paragraph. Note that I’ve split it up into two halves to make it fit nicely on the screen:

Can you see the problem yet? What seems to have happened is that nearly all the punctuation-like marks have been discarded in the transcription (and for what reason? None!)… but this is surely a recipe for disaster! 🙁 Look again at my colourized version, and I think you’ll see quite a different text…

Now, only loosely following the key above I would transcribe this not as “YRSRPFPFNGD” (and what’s that all about?) but as “YR; S.E, NS3 YS, JR, NGE. , ,“, which is hugely different. So… am I at all surprised that Cryptool was unable to break such a wobbly transcription? No, sadly I am not. 🙁

And with that, I pass the whole thing over to my esteemed friend Mr Tony Gaffney to transcribe and crack his own way. He’ll see straight through its superficial scribal flourishes, so I suspect this will be right up his street. Go for it, Tony! (And the rest of you try to keep up!) 🙂

PS: incidentally, there’s some online discussion on this here in the Spanish Kriptopolis security blog, but I didn’t notice anything that seemed hugely informative or crackworthy – please feel free to tell me if I’ve missed something big there!

Update on Cipher Mysteries…

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I’ve been a bit quiet (in the ‘not-posting-much-on-the-blog’ sense of the word) of late, and thought I ought to say a bit about what’s going on, just in case you were worried I’d tripped and fallen headlong into an over-full boxfile of voracious Voynich Theories, never to be seen again. 🙂

Right now, the #1 thing filling my thoughts is a one-off lecture I’m due to give in three weeks’ time at the London Rare Book School summer seminar series. Basically, I’m covering the history of shorthand and ciphers: but rather than romantically twiddling around with unsolved mystery texts, what I’m aiming to get across is practical knowledge that historians can make direct use of when faced with a text in an unknown alphabet.

For all their span and depth, books like David Kahn’s “The Codebreakers” don’t really help in this regard: and anyway, to be perfectly honest, from where I’m sitting the history of cryptography now looks rather different. So right now it feels as if I’m having to build up a reasonably new kind of body of knowledge – practical cryptography for historians. All of which is probably why it has taken much more effort than I thought… oh well!

One nice thing is that I have a devilish (if somewhat small) new cipher mystery kindly sent through to me by Zodiac Cipher researcher Dave Oranchak to use as a worked example, which I’ll post about here very soon (I’ll also get round to mentioning Dave O’s shiny new Zodiac blog very shortly, I promise!)

I’m also scratching my head about what to do with another cipher-related mystery I’ve been working on. It all started out as a footnote, but the more I discover about it, the bigger and bigger it gets. Anybody know any film producers who want to tell the Second Greatest Story Ever Told?