Bryce Beasley, alchemical herbals, and Voynich Herbal A…

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I first asked the question of whether there might be a mapping between the alchemical herbal manuscript tradition and the Voynich Manuscript in a 2019 post, having not long previously put up a post trying to link to scans of alchemical herbals. The fact that the Voynich Manuscript’s Herbal A pages originally (as far as we can tell) contained 97 plants and also that the (yes, very badly named) alchemical herbals list of plants has 98 plants is a coincidence I pointed out that is somewhat suspicious (but far from conclusive).

Always useful here is Philip Neal’s page on alchemical herbals. And more recently, Marco Ponzi published the Latin text of the alchemical herbals (compiled from various individual herbal manuscripts, because of various textual inconsistencies and lacunae). Minta Collins’ Medieval Herbals: The Illustrated Traditions is always good to have handy (though more to do with herbals than alchemical herbals).

And even though the book where this all really started was Vera Segre Rutz’s (2000) Il giardino magico degli alchimisti, I’d also now happily add Bryce Beasley’s 2024 thesis “Fantastic Herbals and Where to Find Them: Contextualizing and expanding the Alchemical Herbal tradition” to the list of resources I’d strongly recommend everyone interested read, particularly because it is downloadable online, and in English rather than Italian.

Beasley vs Segre Rutz

The first thing to note is that Beasley builds solidly on Segre Rutz: and while he is critical of various aspects of Segre Rutz’s foundational work (e.g. he argues that the suggested link to alchemy [e.g. via lunaria and herba folio] was inherently weak, whatever Aldrovandi thought; and he isn’t at all convinced by Segre Rutz’s use of hermeticism as a framework), his thesis is a complementary text rather than a replacement. Whereas Segre Rutz characterises the alchemical herbal tradition as having seven direct manuscripts and seventeen indirect manuscipts, Beasley extends this to 38 (though this is still far short of Toresella’s claimed 70). Note that (according to Beasley p.14, footnote 30) Segre Rutz seemed unaware of Toresella’s 1996 article on alchemical herbals.

Beasley, more generally, sees the alchemical herbal plants as falling into Jerry Stannard’s (1977) “magiferous” plants category, halfway between “magical” (fantastical) and “mundane” (real-world). For me, I suspect that Stannard’s three pigeonholes may be a little too neat, and that a lot of medieval manuscript copying was often done without any critical appreciation of the subject of the text (e.g. whether it made sense or had been miscopied), rather than a purely imaginary / fantastical plant.

Beasley’s list of 14 new manuscripts that would need to be added to the stemma codicum:

As an aside, Cipher Mysteries readers may possibly remember Ms. Chig. F.VII.158 from Alexandra Marracini’s work.

What next?

As is so often the case, even though Beasley’s thesis collects together a lot of useful information and makes it accessible, he doesn’t attempt to build up the tree of manuscripts and their (often hard to pin down) relationships. Hence, there as yet is no definitive (or even semi-definitive) ‘map’ of which herbal begat which other herbal etc: all we have is Segre Rutz’s tree for the seven direct tradition manuscripts (Beasley, p.40):

Here (as per Segre Rutz, p. XC):

  • P1 = MS Lat: 17848
  • P2 = MS Lat: 17844
  • A = MS Aldini 211
  • C = MS Canon. Misc. 408
  • F = MS 18
  • R = MS 106
  • ms. 362 = Vicenza MS 362
  • x, y, z = (missing manuscripts)

Beasley does point (p.66) to evidence that MS LJS 46 is “likely a descendant of” MS 106. Similarly, he does suggest that München, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek Ms. Cod. It. 149 may be “similar to Ms. Pal. Lat. 1078 and other manuscripts from the indirect sub-tradition” (p.60).

There are also lots of other nice details: for example, on Lucca MS 196 fol. 106r, a “left flower has a small note of a “bi” which likely is a note telling the painter to leave the flowers white or bianca in Italian”. (p.58)

What specifically set me thinking today was Beasley’s note on the Natural History Museum herbal (Mss. Her.) on p.56 that discusses the order of the alchemical plants, which I knew about but hadn’t really thought about for a few years:

The beginning 16 herbs perfectly copy the order of manuscripts Ms. 18, Ms. 106, Ms. Lat. 17848 and Ms. Aldini 211 and with a couple of exceptions Ms. Canon. Misc. 408, Ms. 17844 and Ms. 362.

And so my thought for the day is this: has anyone tried to form candidate mappings between pairs of Voynich Manuscript herbals pages (i.e. on the two sides of a folio) with pairs of adjacent numbered images in the alchemical herbal tradition? That is, it has always been easy to speculate about a single-page connection between (say) the snakes / worms in the roots of the plants on Voynich Manuscript f49r and alchemical herbal plant 74 (herba forus, which also has snakes / worms in some manuscripts): but it’s hard to go beyond mere speculation with any confidence. So my point is that in this example we should perhaps also be thinking about f49v (on the rear side of the same folio as f49r) and alchemical herbal plant 75 (the next one along) to see if there’s a connection there too.

So, let’s have a quick look. Voynich Manuscript f49v looks like this:

Alchemical herbal plant 75 is herba capalarices, which (in the manuscript used by Marco Ponzi) looks like this:

In this case there’s no obvious match, sure: but it would only take a single unexpected pair of images to be matched for us to smash through this wall. Well worth a further look? Yes, definitely. Definitely!

Commandant vs Capitaine vs Lieutenant de vaisseau…

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I thought I ought to briefly post on something which I worked out recently. In BN3 (the third Bernardin Nageon de l’Estang document, though almost certainly not written by him), the writer mentions both a “Commandant Hamon” (who was currently supporting him in his ill health) and a former “Capitaine” (from whom he had got the treasure letters BN1 and BN2).

Here’s all we know about this dying captain, via Robert Charroux’s version (on my interlinear page):

Avec eux nous avons fait de jolies prises, mais à notre dernier combat sur les côtes d'Indoustan, avec une grosse frégate anglaise, le capitaine a été blessé et à son lit de mort m’a confié ses secrets et des papiers pour retrouver des trésors considérables enfouis  dans la mer des Indes et en me demandant de m'en servir pour armer des corsaires contre l’Anglais; il s'est assuré auparavant si j’étais franc-maçon.

My freewheeling translation:

We made many splendid captures from them, but at our last battle with a large British frigate on the shores of Hindustan, the captain was wounded and on his deathbed confided to me his secrets and his papers to retrieve considerable treasure buried in the Indian Ocean; and, having first made sure that I was a Freemason, asked me to use it to arm privateers against the English.

So… what’s the difference between a Capitaine and a Commandant?

I may still have this wrong (it’s a pretty subtle thing), but I now think that a “commandant” is someone who is “in command” of a ship of any ship, whereas in the French Navy a “capitaine” was either:

  • a “capitaine du vaisseau” (captain of a vessel), i.e. the formal (typically very senior) captain of a large “ship of the line”; or
  • a “capitaine du frégate” (captain of a frigate), i.e. the formal (typically fairly senior) captain of a frigate or large ship (possibly a corvette)

So, capitaine is about rank, while commandant denoted someone who had been given command of a ship. For example, in a corsairing context, if you were a lower rank officer who had been given command of a prize ship, you would be its commandant but not its captain.

For the 1800-1810 period, the French Navy only ever sent a tiny number of ships of the line in the Indian Ocean. In fact, the only one I’ve found so far was the 74-gun Marengo which was the French flagship in the Indian Ocean from 1803-1806, taking part in the Battle of Pulo Aura in 1804, etc. For commandant, the Marengo had both Contre-Admiral Charles-Alexandre Léon Durand Linois and Capitaine Joseph-Marie Vrignaud, neither of whom seem to have suffered any injury in the Indian Ocean. Which all leads to my general doubt that the BN3 writer was referring to a capitaine du vaisseau in charge of a ship of the line.

Putting all this together, I believe that what we see in BN3 appears to tell us that its writer was referring to a ranked captain (rather than a capitaine du vaisseau), and very probably on a French corsair frigate, or perhaps a corvette. But… it’s hard to be sure. All the same, now you know.

The Tamarin Bay Cipher Mystery, revisited…

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While flicking through Robert Charroux’s (1962) “Tresors du monde : enterres, emmures, engloutis” a few days ago, I noticed that his version of the Tamarin Bay ciphertext was slightly different to the one given by Alix d’Unienville that I previously discussed:

13 800 onces or-argent
Ici se trouve une courtisane
Je vous laisse monsieur deviner
sans vous demander de part

Though very similar, the number given by Charroux here is a thousand times smaller than the one d’Unienville gives; and his final word is “part” rather than “l’argent“. So perhaps these are two different people’s transcriptions?

On the off-chance, I also searched Gallica for various phrases in the quatrain, but found nothing: so it seems that this ciphertext hasn’t appeared anywhere else. Why is there no interest in this mystery?

Dorabella Cipher update…

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You may not have known that 2024 saw a flurry of Dorabella-related activity. For example, here’s a picture of the blue plaque that was unveiled in Dora Penny’s honour in June 2024:

The Wolverhampton Society Dora Penny Intrepid Cyclist, Singer and Musician The Inspiration for Variation 10 of Elgar's Enigma Variations 'Dorabella' Lived Here 1895-1914 Supported by Wolverhampton Music School

Dan Bartlett (more about him below) also went to Mount Noddy Cemetery in East Grinstead to have a look at Dora Mary Powell (nee Penny)’s grave, which is Grave Section 5C No. 301.

And so we move briskly forward to 2024’s decryption attempts. Firstly, there’s Dan Bartlett’s claimed decryption, which you can see on YouTube or via his book on Amazon (£8.99, or £3.49 for the Kindle version). In my opinion, any Dorabella decryption that includes the word ‘DORABELLA’ in the plaintext is just plain wrong: in p.11 of Dora Penny’s book, she describes how Edward Elgar only started using the word ‘DORABELLA’ to refer to her in September 1898, yet the ciphertext is dated 1897. Perhaps others will find interest in Bartlett’s decryption methods or approach, but it’s not for me.

Another active decryption effort has come from Ian Menkins, who has been kind enough to include me in his email chains discussing it since April 2024. Ian believes that the Dorabella Cipher is simply enciphered music, and has gone to great lengths to try to demonstrate how he thinks this works. From my perspective, there is a strong case to be made that Elgar’s 1886 ‘Liszt Fragment‘ ciphertext (which was written apparently as a commentary to a discussion of Liszt in a programme) appears to be directly music-related, though whether these are enciphered musical notes or enciphered text (or indeed a combination of both) remains far from clear. The Dorabella Cipher remains yet further away from clarity (in my opinion), despite Ian’s efforts, but here’s an MP3 of how he thinks it should sound:

More generally, one thing I’ve been meaning to do is to go to the Royal College of Music and read Dora Penny’s diaries for 1897 (it’s part of the Dora M. Powell bequest). There are also papers there relating to Claud Powell (her son) which might be interesting.

  • 5571/1 Dora M Powell: Miscellaneous papers, etc relating to the theme of Elgar’s Enigma Variations.
  • 5571/2 Dora M Powell: Letters & correspondence
  • 5571/4 Dora M Powell: Draft articles, talks and notes
  • 5571/5 Dora M Powell: Papers and correspondence relating to “Edward Elgar: Memories of a Variation”
  • 5571/6 Dora M Powell: Programmes and advertisements
  • 5571/7 Dora M Powell: notes, printed and draft articles (not by Dora M Powell)
  • 5571/8 Dora M Powell: Photographs & watercolours relating to Elgar. Held by RCM Museum
  • 5571/10 Dora M Powell: Elgar reference book
  • 5571/11 Dora M Powell: Address book (with reviews pasted in)
  • 5571/12 Dora M Powell: Elgar memorial concert (3/6/34) material
  • 8753 Dora Powell (‘Dorabella’): Pocket diaries, 1896-1913. From the estate of her son Claud Powell, October 2005.
  • 8754 Claud Powell: Correspondence, lectures, papers, etc, relating to his mother Dora Powell (‘Dorabella’) and Elgar. From the estate of Claud Powell, October 2005.
  • 14088 Dora M. Powell: Letter to George Dyson. 30.1.1950. Enclosed in Dyson’s own copy the vocal score of ‘Quo Vadis” (see C190 on library catalogue)

Commandant Hamon and a slave ship Apollon…?

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In my efforts to work out exactly who the Commandant Hamon in the BN3 letter was, I found two recent issues of Outre-Mers filled to the gunwales with Eric Saugera’s somewhat epic archival research into French slaving ships during the tumultuous period 1794-1814.

Saugera has a good-sized section on Captaine Emmanuel-Hypolite le Joliff and his ship the Navigateur. Specifically, he says of Desvaux and Hamon that the first was “le second capitaine“, while the second “devant être un officier de l’État-major“. However, this notion that Hamon was an officer in the General Staff of the military seems (and I might be wrong) to be a presumption on Saugera’s part. So, while I initially got super-excited about this as a new lead on Hamon, I’ve kind of settled down a bit since.

Perhaps more interesting is that in Saugera’s section on l’Ile de France slave ships, he talks specifically about the Apollon. This was a 200-tonne three-master (30 men) that arrived from Brest in 1797 (Cap. Raoul?), going from there to Mozambique on 16 Jun 1802 (Cap. Moignot, maître d’équipage François Roguit). The name appears twice in Toussaint’s Route des Iles, firstly on p.295 for 1797:

…and p.265 for 16 Jun 1802:

This slaver Apollon would seem to be a different ship to the one (Cap. Louis le Vaillant) that was captured by HMS Leopard in 1798, which I once posted the crew list for. In fact, it seems likely to me that this Louis le Vaillant 1798 Apollon (which the famous corsair Jean-Francois Hodoul had received in May 1797 fitted up for privateering) was in fact the same 7 Jan 1797 Apollon with Cap. Raoul listed by Toussaint.

But was this 1802 slaver Apollon the one mentioned in the BN3 letter?

Dans ma vie aventureuse et avant de m’embarquer à bord de l’Apollon, j’ai fait partie du dernier corsaire de ces grand corsaires qui ont fait tant de mal à l’Espagne et à notre ennemie l’Anglais.

Even though the BN3 letter writer is talking about his “adventurous life”, note that he is talking about “before” embarking on the Apollon. So perhaps he flipped (as did Emmanuel-Hypolite le Jollif) from privateer ships to slave ships? But, in all fairness, without crew lists to hand, it’s hard to be 100% sure.

Regardless, this slaver Apollon appears to fit the BN3 timeline fairly well, so I wouldn’t bet against it right now. So… maybe/perhaps/maybe we’re starting to make some progress here (fingers crossed).

    Perhaps Commandant Hamon was a surgeon?

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    A while back, I noted that H. C. M. Austen mentioned (“Sea Fights and Corsairs of the Indian Ocean”, p.79) a ship’s surgeon called Hamon from 1796. This was on a pilot brig which the famous corsair Robert Surcouf had captured and renamed the Cartier on 28 Jan 1796: while Surcouf and the rest of his (small) crew had boarded the Diana, the ship’s Malouin surgeon (Hamon) and cook had stayed behind, shooting across at the Diana to help convince them that Surcouf’s Cartier had a much larger crew.

    This story was most famously recounted in Charles Cunat’s often breathless “Histoire de Robert Surcouf, Capitaine de Corsaire” (p.52), though modern historians such as Alain Romain prefer to rely on Captain Tapson’s account of the same attack that appeared in the Calcutta Gazette.

    Even though Surcouf was extraordinarily successfully, his ways of going about things drew sharp criticism (e.g. from Decaen) and his substantial corsairing prizes were initially withheld from him. However, after appeals to authorities in France, this was reversed: but part of this involved a letter being sent by many of the French crew recounting what happened. This letter dated 15 Vend. Ann. IV appears in Cunat (p.43), and includes a list of signatories: R. Surcouf, H. Hamon, Bourgoin, J. Croize, etc. So it seems almost certain that the ship’s surgeon’s first name began with H (e.g. Henri, Henri-Marie, etc), which is helpful.

    But the reason I’m flagging this is that my last post briefly mentioned Emmanuel Hypolite le Joliff, captain of the slaver ship the Navigateur, which ferried slaves from Mozambique to Ile de France. I had a feeling I’d seen this name before but couldn’t think where: but it was on Capitaine le Joliff’s Navigateur that Robert Surcouf was famously the Lieutenant from 27 Aug 1792 to 17 Mar 1794.

    Toussaint’s Les Freres Surcouf mentions two specific slave runs from Surcouf’s time on the Navigateur (though there were doubtless many others after that, including the one with the 1803 mutiny where two slaves owned by Messers Desveaux and Hamon were lost, presumed jumped overboard):

    • 10 May 1793 -> Mozambique, returned 25 Sep 1793 with 362 slaves
    • 10 Dec 1793 -> Mozambique, returned 04 Mar 1794 with 360 slaves

    It would therefore surely not be a surprise if the Commandant Hamon mentioned in the BN3 letter was also the same H. Hamon who had served under Robert Surcouf in 1796. This might well explain his kindly ministrations to the letter-writer: “[…] je suis malade depuis la prise de Tamatave, malgré les soins de mon commandant et ami.” Though I’d need persuading about ship’s surgeons’ bedside manners: “Anyone lost any limbs? Hands? Feet? Eyes? No-one? OK, jolly good, if you need me, I’ll be dining with the Captain“.

    Incidentally, a search of Gallica threw up a reference in “La medecine et les medicins a Saint-Malo, 1500-1820” by Dr H. Hervot (p. 219) to “Hamon, chirurgien navigant de Saint-Ideuc” in the proceedings of a St-Malo medical society dated 24 Oct 1791. Given that we know from Cunat that the Hamon on the Cartier was a ship’s surgeon from Saint-Malo (the famous “Corsair City”, and Surcouf’s and le Joliff’s home town), this could very easily be the same person.

    Where Next?

    I suspect Hamon’s full name will appear in one or more Mauritian crew lists from this time (though none of the ones I have here), and possibly also in records in the Saint-Malo archives and/or in Gallica. I’ve also looked in various other Surcouf-themed books but without any luck. But even so, I think it’s starting to feel as though these different research threads may well be converging on a single person.

    Tracing Captain Hamon / Commandant Hamon…

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    The third letter of the Bernardin Nageon de l’Estang set mentions the writer’s close relationship with a certain Commandant Hamon:

    • “[…] je suis malade depuis la prise de Tamatave, malgré les soins de mon commandant et ami.”
    • “Quand je serai mort, le commandant Hamon te fera remettre le peu que je possède et que j’ai économisé dans ma vie aventureuse de marin.”
    • “Le commandant te remettra les écrits des trésors, […]”

    But who was this Commandant Hamon? Given that this letter seems to have been written not long after the Fall of Tamatave (20th May 1811), and that the letter writer was a seaman (“marin”), I think it seems likely that “commandant” here means a sea captain rather than an army captain or politician. So this is what I went a-looking for…

    Auguste Toussaint’s “Route Des Iles”

    One excellent source for Mauritian maritime history is Mauritian archivist Auguste Toussaint’s (1967) book “La Route Des Iles: Contribution a l’Histoire Maritime Des Mascareignes“. Usefully, you can borrow this online from the Internet Archive, which is a terrific help.

    Searching this for “Hamon” yields two hits:

    • Expédition, 25 Jul 1804, Cap. Hamon, French, goëlette, from Mozambique (possibly armed in Port Louis?)
    • p.265: 05 Nov 1803. Two slaves belonging to Messieurs Desveaux and Hamon went missing after a mutiny on board the Navigator (the source says that they probably threw themselves into the sea), Captain Emmanuel le Joliff, returning from Mozambique.

    Mozambique was the centre of the (thankfully by 1804 somewhat dwindling) slave trade in the South Western corner of the Indian Ocean, so it would seem fairly likely that this Hamon was a slave trader operating between Mozambique and Mauritius.

    Note that a ship called the Expédition (also French, also coming for Mozambique, but marked up as a brick rather than a goëlette), Captain Bazin, arrived in Mauritius on 05 Jun 1805. There was also an Expédition (again French, again a goëlette), Captain Lesteine (?), that arrived in Mauritius from Bengal on 01 Aug 1801. These three similarly-named ships may or may not have been the same. Additionally, we can see Bazin listed as captain on numerous ships around the Indian Ocean from 1781 onwards, some of which were from St Malo.

    However, this is as far as (the normally very reliable) Toussaint seems to take us on our journey here.

    Slave Voyage Database

    There’s also an interesting slave voyage database, that is generally more useful for West African slave journeys (my understanding is that Mozambique slavers tended to sell slaves via country ships travelling across the Indian Ocean, and often via middlemen in Mauritius).

    This lists two separate slave ship captains from around this period with the surname “Hamon”:

    • Hamon, Guillaume-Denis (active 1753-1755), Saint Philippe, Senegambia, Nantes
    • Hamon, Jean Marie (1817), Elysée (a) Eliza, Saint-Louis, Nantes

    Unfortunately, the first seems too early, while the second had not yet been certified for long-distance sailing prior to April 1820 (and, at only 38 years old, also seems too young):

    So it doesn’t seem that we’re having much luck here.

    National Archives

    The National Archives have prize papers relating to a Charles Hamon, captain of “La Fanny” (no, I’m not making it up). On 16 Dec 1808, the corsair La Fanny (16 guns, crew of 80) was captured close to Noirmoutier by HMS Naiad and HMS Narcissus. (The prize papers are here, but have not yet been digitised.)

    Some of the documents in NA (e.g. this) assert that this Captain Hamon had previously been captain of the frigate La Venus, but this is plainly false, confusing Hamon with Hamelin. This is presumably what H. C. M. Austen was referring to, but the fact that the Naiad and Narcissus captured Charles Hamon’s corsair La Fanny seems to have been correct.

    The problem here is that this particular Hamon was presumably then escorted onwards to a prison (such as the new one nearby in Plymouth), where he presumably spent the rest of the war. Which would (I guess) argue against him then popping up in Mauritius in 1811, alas.

    Where to look next?

    Well… to be honest, I don’t rightly know. There are plenty of name hits for “Hamon” in the Memoire des Hommes (473 to be precise), but the date range there only really goes up to 1788 or so. This means that most of the seamen listed there seem to be too old to be still active in Mauritius circa 1811, but even so this meagre Venn diagram intersection still leaves a few possible candidates:

    • Charles Marie Hamon (from Port-Louis or Lorient)
    • Francois Hamon (from Saint-Malo)
    • Germain Hamon (from Lorient)
    • Joseph Hamon (from Pont-l’Abbé)
    • Pierre Hamon (from Lorient, who “déserté à l’île de France le 20/04/1788”)

    Am I confident that this will help? No, not really. But I thought I ought to mention that I’d looked under this particular rock, in case it helps anyone else attempting the same thing. For now I’m out of ideas.

    Who is this man in a prototype pressure suit? Is he John B. Werlich?

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    A few years back, I put a lot of effort into trying to identify a possibly pressure-suited 1940s US Navy balloonist at NAS Lakehurst. One unresolved lead related to a prototype full-pressure suit (the Strato Model 7) developed for the US Navy in 1947. There are some great pictures of the Model 7 in Dennis R. Jenkins’ “Dressing for Altitude: U.S. Aviation Pressure Suits—Wiley Post to Space Shuttle” on pp.180-182. One even clearly shows the face of the person testing it:

    Who is this man? The only person mentioned in the text as testing the suit was John B Werlich:

    It was tested in the Mayo Clinic altitude chamber up to 53,000 feet with satisfactory physiological results, but Akerman did not describe how flexible the suit was under pressure. John B. Werlich, a former Army pilot, tested the acceleration protection of the suit on the Mayo centrifuge under the direction of Earl Wood.

    I’m guessing the reinforced porthole behind the man is part of the Mayo Clinic altitude chamber, but it’s not clear to me from Jenkins’ text whether the person who tested the suit there was also Werlich.

    Anyway, I did some image searches recently, and found this 1959 image of rocket sled testing at AFB Holloman, and wondered whether it might be the same man (but a decade older, with a shorter haircut, and not half as happy, but to be fair if your male genitalia had just been pressed into your body at 10G you’d probably look the same):

    Is this the same guy? What do you think?

    As an aside, one of the few mentions I found of Lt. Col. John B. Werlich (based at Wright Patterson) was some brief mentions of him and his wife Dorothy in some oral interviews relating to his brother Arthur from the Sign Oral History Project, which some Cipher Mysteries readers might already know about.

    Voynich Manuscript f1r: Five Scribes, five vibes?

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    For a change, I thought it might be interesting to take a fresh look at the -n words solely in f1r. If you recall Lisa Fagin Davis’ (2020) paper, she describes (p.173) how her five putative Voynich scribes write the -n glyph in different ways:

    • Scribe 1: “The word- end [m] and [n] glyphs conclude with a backward flourish that stretches as far as the penultimate minim.“
    • Scribe 2: “The final backstroke of [m] and [n] is short, barely passing the final minim.“
    • Scribe 3: “The final stroke of [m] and [n] curves back on itself, nearly touching the top of the final minim.“
    • Scribe 4: “The final stroke of [m] and [n] is tall, with only a slight curvature.“
    • Scribe 5: “The [m] has a long, low finial that finishes above the penultimate minim.“

    f1r is right at the start of Quire 1 (Q1), and is a Scribe 1 Herbal-A page (“Quires 1–3 are written entirely by Scribe 1”, p.175). So let’s have a look for ourselves:

    f1r Paragraph #1

    Personally, I’m not seeing a huge amount of scribal consistency here: some of these -n glyphs do indeed stretch as far as the “penultimate minim”, but others reach much further back or not as far back at all.

    f1r Paragraph #2

    Same for this (short) paragraph.

    f1r Paragraph #3

    Same for this (much longer) paragraph. Note that the 14th instance seems to have been emended by a later owner. Also, the 4th instance appears to be “airin” (a Voynich ‘word’ that voynichese.com says appears only four times), but where the loop of the terminal -n goes back as far as the first [i] glyph.

    f1r Paragraph #4

    Same for this paragraph, though (to be fair) the scribal -n flourishes are perhaps the most consistent here. Note that the 2nd instance has a wormhole running vertically through it, which (as Rene Zandbergen likes to point out) probably implies that this page spent a good amount of time close to a wooden book cover (because woodworms like eating wood, and don’t like eating vellum), now long gone.

    Your thoughts, Nick?

    On the one hand, I’m not at all against the idea of Lisa Fagin Davis’ proposed Five Scribes (even if it does sound to me not unlike the name of a medieval burger restaurant).

    But on the other hand, when I look at the actual -n instances that appear on the very first page of the manuscript all side by side, I’m not getting a hugely consistent scribal vibe off that ensemble.

    At the same time as all this, it’s hard for me to look at a block of words such as “dain oiin chol odaiin chodain” with four different scribal -n flourishes and not think that something pretty fishy is going on. My code-breaking third eye keeps telling me that something is being hidden in plain sight (perhaps four plaintext digits, so maybe a date?), but the precise details evade me (and everyone else). Oh well.

    Nick’s 2024 thoughts on Ricky McCormick and St Louis…

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    A journalist contacted me this week to ask me about poor Ricky McCormick’s cryptic writing. I hadn’t written anything about this since 2013 and 2016, and even the Riverfront Times’ 2012 “Code Dead” article was now only in the Wayback Machine. An update was long overdue…

    “Meet Me In St Louis, Louis…

    …Meet me at the fair“. Do you know the song?

    All the pieces of Ricky McCormick’s life were held together by the gravitational pull of downtown St Louis. It was where he grew up and went to school (sometimes), it was where he worked (sometimes) and travelled around on the buses, it was how he talked, it was where he lived (and indeed died). In my mind, the puzzle of Ricky McCormick’s notes (here and here) is likely to be not so much a code-breaking one as a geographical and linguistic one.

    If we could only find a way to meet him in St Louis, we might stand a chance of reading (or at least reading through) his notes. To be brutally honest, I doubt that decrypting these will throw much light on his life (never mind his death), but his notes remain a puzzle, and one with its own gravitational pull.

    Ricky McCormick’s notes

    The distinctive series of letters “WLDNCBE” appears eight times in his notes: but so too does the same series with an apostrophe, i.e. “WLD’S NCBE“:

    So it seems likely that this “WLD’S NCBE” is the full version of the phrase, and “WLDNCBE” is the quick version. Both WLD and NCBE also occurs lots of other times, with the latter often preceded by a number:

    “PRSEON” is another common pattern, which I’ve long suspected could mean “person”:

    Even just “SE” is something that appears a lot more frequently than you might normally expect:

    McCormick also seems to use “XL” as a common pattern, so perhaps this was a phrase he liked? And there’s one word in there that looks a lot like a jumbled version of “special”:

    There’s also something that looks like “MR DE LUSE”, though who that was remains unknown:

    If not at the fair, then where?

    Looking at Ricky McCormick’s notes, you can see plenty of short number groups (71, 74, 75, 194, 26, 35, 651, 74, 29, 99.84.52, 3, 1/2), plenty of letters, and plenty of word-like letter structure. It might therefore seem reasonable to conjecture that these might possibly be references to places in and around St Louis, all rendered in his own idiosyncratic (and very possibly dyslexic) style, and so effectively a private language only readable by him.

    But… American street addresses don’t in general work like this at all (and certainly not in downtown St Louis). So if these are addresses, I think it’s highly likely that they’re for a specific neighbourhood with lots of adjacent-numbered flats. The most famous high-density living area in St Louis was the post-war Pruitt-Igoe high-rises: yet the last was demolished in 1976 (the site remains largely vacant). In fact, you may have seen footage of this without realising it, because some appeared in the (1982) film Koyaanisqatsi. So I’m kind of out of ideas here as to where these even might be.

    All in all, I suspect it will take someone with a grasp of the sociogeography of downtown St Louis far better than me (along with a far better grasp of McCormick’s spoken accent) to come up with any candidate places. I’ve trawled Google Maps plenty of times and yet my net has always come up empty.

    What do you think, Nick?

    Pfffft… even in 2013 I wrote that “quite unlike other cipher mysteries, I don’t actually want to read what was written on McCormick’s two notes“: and I am, alas, still bobbing along in that same boat.

    Still, it was nice to have an excuse to put up a blog post with a picture of Judy Garland, eh?