Was SM a boxer, a wrestler, or a clog dancer?

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And yes, he could have been all three, or indeed none of them. But please bear with me, there’s a lot of ground to cover here.

Boxing

The background here is that I suspect that in the late 1930s to the 1940s, the Somerton Man ended up as some kind of criminal ‘heavy’ (e.g. a standover man, a nitpicker, etc). My aim was to try to work backwards from there, i.e. to second-guess what the Somerton Man was doing in the 1920s.

So, my initial stab in the dark was that he might have been an unsuccessful amateur boxer: so that’s who I went digging for. What I found in Trove was that boxing turned into a really big-time Australian sport around 1929-1930, which is when you see an explosion in the number of stadiums, promoters, fighters, and sports newspaper column inches devoted to boxing.

Naturally, because some of the the clothes in the Somerton Man’s suitcase had the name “KEAN” / “KEANE” on them, my starting point was Australian boxers who shared that surname. This yielded Reg Keane (who trained at Ern Miller’s Goulburn Street gym, and boxed in 1931-1932), Billy Keane (1932), Telegraphist Keane in the Naval Reserve Championships (1933) who I suspect was V. C. Keane (1930), H. Keane of the Olympic Club, etc.

All seemed unsuccessful enough to fit the profile: reporting the bout between Bill Collins and Reg Keane, the 8th Feb 1931 Sydney Truth noted:

“The time was mostly spent with Keane picking himself off the floor. When he had been deposited there the fourth time, Joe Wallis stopped the fight and crowned Collins.”

However, this whole line of attack felt generally quite unproductive to me. The sports papers of the day seemed more concerned with the quantity of blood on the canvas and how long the loser spent in hospital after being knocked out, rather than any human interest side.

For instance, the only things that typically got reported about non-superstar boxers are their weight (because of the different weight categories), and which round they won/lost in (presumably because punters gambled on these). So there’s not a lot of grist for anyone’s historical mill there.

As an aside, I don’t believe we know the Somerton Man’s weight. Do you think he would have been a heavyweight?

Wrestling – Jack Keane Sr.

Because boxing and wrestling were often promoted together, I couldn’t help but notice two wrestlers both called Jack Keane.

The (much) older of the two was John Joseph (‘Jack’) Keane, described as having been an Irish-style wrestler. However, not only was he much too old to be the Somerton Man, he was also much too deceased (he died on 27 Nov 1938, aged 74 years). He and his wife Agnes Maude Keane (who died on 10 Mar 1947), had four children, John, Rita, Josie, and Kevin.

Trove has a few articles mentioning Jack Keane Sr: I quite liked this one from 1936, which included this picture:

I briefly got excited by the idea that his son (John Joseph Keane Jr.) might have been a wrestler too. However, even though JJK Jr was roughly the right age to be the Somerton Man, it turns out that he was the Dulwich bookmakers’ clerk who lived with his wife Clara Maude Keane in Union St, Dulwich (yes, the same clerk I spent so long trying to track down), and who died on the 20th January 1941.

Wrestling – the other Jack Keane

There was, however, an (apparently separate) wrestler called Jack Keane whose name pops up in Trove’s tiny margins. For example, here’s a 28 Jun 1932 sport story reporting a bout between Jack Kean and Jim Moore (one fall each in three five minute rounds).

Note that the best-known Australian wrestler of the day with the surname Keane was V. P. (‘Vin’) Keane, who was the South Australian amateur heavyweight wrestling champion in 1931. Because of (what I now think was) a typo in one article, it took me a while to be sure that this Vin Keane was (a) not Jack Keane by another name, and (b) still alive in 1949.

However, between 1939 and 1941, the Adelaide Sport ran an overtly female-oriented sports column called “Verities of Victoria” or “Sayings of Suzanne“. These tried to present a gossipy, ring-side view, often looking more at who was in the audience (and what fashionable clothes they were wearing) than the poor bloodied buggers slugging each other in the ring. For example, the 13 Sep 1940 Sayings of Suzanne noted that “Vin Keane’s wife was wearing the newest and latest in pastel grey at the wrestling“. Which was nice.

The reason this gets interesting is that the 19 Jan 1940 Sayings of Suzanne noted that:

“Jack Keane, who used to wrestle in a mask, saw somebody else taking the punishment for a change and Jimmy Bartlett aired yet another fancy shirt, buttercup yellow this time.”

So, if we are to believe the Adelaide Sport’s ‘Suzanne’ (and why not?), Jack Keane had in fact been a masked wrestler. But… which masked wrestler?

Masked Wrestlers in Australia

Yes, there were a fair few masked wrestlers pounding Australian canvases in the late 1920s and 1930s. Yet even by 1933, people were starting to tire of the gimmick, and there were calls to outlaw the use of masks in the ring.

Regardless, the first (and most famous) of these was Walter Miller, who was billed as the “Masked Man” and the “Masked Marvel”. Born in Poland (as Josef Banaski?), he had wrestled in America for some years, but following an injury moved out to Australia to keep wrestling while regaining his form. He was eventually unmasked in 1929.

Other American masked wrestlers active in Australia around this time included:

  • The “Black Panther” (Frank Sexton)
  • The “Red Shadow” (Leo Numa)
  • The “Mysterious Ghost” (????)
  • “Tarzan the Fearless” (named after the Buster Crabbe film; and no, I’m not making it up).

Australian masked wrestlers included Ossie Norman of Sydney (“The Masked Wrestler”) and Terry Morrison (“The Masked Man” and “The Masked Marvel”). Interestingly, Terry Morrison – who had also been a heavyweight boxer – later found himself in court in connection with an auto parts deal that went bad (he described himself to the Court as a “prospector”, though he seemed more like a somewhat self-defeating private detective along the lines of Jim Rockford).

So, which masked wrestler might Jack Keane have been? Though it is no doubt incomplete, my (self-compiled) list of Australian masked wrestlers from this era has only two names remaining: “Steel Grip” (who only seems to have wrestled once) and – my personal favourite – the “Masked Singing Wrestler“. And no, I’m really really not making this up.

Here’s the Queenslander’s account of the Masked Singing Wrestler’s fight from 22nd October 1936:

At the Bohemia Stadium on Saturday night, Bob King and the “Masked Singer” met in one of the fastest and most gruelling wrestling matches that have been seen for months. Having sung two ballads, the masked man divested himself of his dress suit to reveal a well-trained athlete in orthodox trunks. He kept his mask on. He gained two falls in the first four rounds—a Boston crab and an octopus. King gained falls in the fifth and seventh rounds, with a back-slam and body press and a variation of the Indian death lock. The end came in the eighth round, when King threw himself at his rival, who jumped clear for King to dive out of the ring on to his head. He was unable to continue, and the masked man got the decision.

We do know a little bit more about him:

The masked singing wrestler, who has returned from the South, is a pleasing type with plenty of personality and highly developed mat ability. He has defeated many opponents in a spectacular manner, while critics have praised his rendering of operatic airs.

Furthermore:

“The Masked Singing Wrestler” is said to be the possessor of a glorious tenor voice and is also claimed to be one of the greatest leg wrestlers at present in the game. He is tall, and of sinewy, muscular build.

And, on one occasion when the bout was delayed because of bad weather:

Special entertainment will be provided for patrons at the Allenstown Theatre tomorrow night, when a variety entertainment, to take the form of an Irish Night, will be presented. The popular masked singing wrestler has been engaged and will render popular Irish airs. Those who have heard this artist’s splendid voice over the air and elsewhere need no further introduction to his exceptional ability.

The Masked Singing Wrestler was briefly unmasked, but not identified:

Still not satisfied, he [O’Brien] raced across the ring and made an attack on the singer, who, caught in a surprise attack, had his mask ripped from his face. Few, however, were able to catch a glimpse of his features for he covered his face with his mask and hands, and made a hurried exit from the ring.

To summarize, we know that the MSW was a tall, sinewy wrestler from the South: and that he had a fine tenor voice and a penchant for operatic airs and Irish folk-songs, along with excellent mat work and leg work. He may even have sung on the radio.

Perhaps surprisingly, there were plenty of singing wrestlers at that time. My strong suspicion is MSW was not Jack Winrow or Russell Scarfe or the baritone Sam Burmister or Terry McGinnis or Tony Sanga or Pat Fraley but Al Costello, whose many years of poor luck in the wrestling business finally seemed to be turning around in 1948 (according to this story).

So, if ‘Suzanne’ was correct, under what name did Jack Keane wrestle while wearing a mask? I still don’t know, but I’m trying hard to find out…

Clog Dancing

Finally: going off on a little bit of a tangent, I was intrigued by Jack Keane Sr.’s other hobby: statue pedestal clog dancing.

Though almost completely forgotten now, this was a very specific form of clog dancing that begin in 1866 and was in vogue for several decades. Pedestal clog dancers would do a clog dance on a raised pedestal, whilst doing their level best to keep their upper body as rigid as a statue. Some performers (such as Henry E. Dixey) would even white themselves up to more closely resemble a dancing statue:

Oh, and just so you know, Charlie Chaplin started out as a clog dancer, as did Victorian comedian Dan Leno, along with Wilson and Keppel (though not any of the Bettys).

And so I couldn’t help but wonder: what if the Somerton Man’s curiously shaped feet and overdeveloped calf muscles (that Paul Lawson noted at the time) were a result of his having been a statue pedestal clog dancer?

So, perhaps what the Somerton Man was doing as a young man in the 1910s and 1920s was some form of clog dancing? Feel free to disagree, but that would makes more sense than just about every other foot-/calf-related SM theory I’ve heard. Just a thought!

“Mostly Harmless” now identified as ‘vaejor’…

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In a recent post, I briefly mentioned an unidentified hiker known as “Mostly Harmless” who had been found dead in a tent in Florida in the summer of 2018. He had a fat wodge of cash in his pocket, a very distinctive scar, and some kind of connection to an online game called Screeps.

As I posted, it seemed highly likely to me that he had been a programmer (Screeps is that kind of a thing), and I fleetingly wondered if his online identity could be worked out via a digital forensic analysis of posts to the r/screeps Reddit channel. In fact, a fair few other people had had exactly the same idea, and they soon narrowed him down to a user called ‘vaejor‘.

Anyway, Mostly Harmless has now been identified as Vance John Rodriguez (who was indeed a programmer), and the – not very happy – details of his life have been put together by Nicholas Thompson in a Wired article.

As closure goes, I have to say it makes for pretty miserable reading: but perhaps that inevitably goes with the territory. Just so you know! :-/

The Tamarin Bay Cipher Mystery…

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Mauritius has long had a surfeit of treasure hunters, though also a shortage of actual treasures. In fact, in Alix d’Unienville’s (1954) “Les Mascareignes: Vielle France en mer indienne“, M. Aimé de Sornay asserts (p.236) that almost all Mauritian treasure hunters focus on what we might call The Big Two: La Buse’s treasure and Bernardin Nageon de l’Estang’s treasure.

Yet d’Unienville also flags a number of other, more ‘pittoresque‘ treasure stories that over the years had raised Mauritian treasure seekers’ blood pressures to sphygmomanometrically dangerous levels. So I thought it would be fun to post about one of these. 🙂

The Tamarin Bay Cipher Mystery

If you are a surfer, you may already know about Tamarin Bay: its waves feature in Larry Yates’ (1974) culty surf documentary “Forgotten Island of Santosha“.These days Tamarin Bay is home to a large (though uneconomic) salt pan (which you can see in the nice aerial picture below, courtesy of Legend Hill Resort), and a whole load of Airbnb holiday accommodation.

With that all in place, let’s hear Alix d’Unienville’s story (p.246):

“En 1949, par exemple, on trouva par hasard sur une propriété située au sud-ouest de l’île, près de la baie de Tamarin, une grosse pierre où se trouvaient gravés quelques caractères chinois. Intrigués par cette découverte et voulant en avoir le cœur net, car ici le moindre signe pourrait bien donner la clef d’un trésor, les propriétaires en demandèrent la traduction à quatre membres de la communauté chinoise connus pour leur probité.”

All of which almost translates itself into English:

In 1949, for example, on a property located in the southwest of the island, near Tamarin Bay, a large stone with some Chinese characters engraved on it was found purely by chance. Intrigued by this discovery and wanting to get to the bottom of it, because the tiniest clue might yield the key to a treasure, the owners asked four members of the Chinese community known for their probity to translate it.

What did they say? What did they say? Well, here’s the “petit quatrain” the four came up with (p.247):

“13.800.000 onces or-argent
Ici se trouve une courtisane
Je vous laisse, Monsieur, deviner
sans vous demander de l’argent“

Which was, of course, exactly what les propriétaires were hoping to hear, even if it was utterly vague. And when a metal detector flagged the presence of metal just below the surface, digging commenced immediately.

Only three feet down, a flat stone bearing two long hand-chiseled parallel lines was uncovered. This was the point where police were called in to protect the gold the diggers were surely about to find, along with transport to carry it away to safety.

Of course, what they actually found beneath this second stone was… nothing whatsoever: and extending the dig to twenty feet down revealed nothing else either. Oh, and then a famous metal dowser from the Seychelles turned up, and told them that the treasure was there but just to one side of where they had dug. Inevitably, even though they then dug out several more tons of earth, they found not so much as a gold pirate earring.

Finally, it turned out that the original metal detector had been fooled by the presence of iron ore in the soil. So it had all been a waste of time and effort.

Note: The Date Might Be Wrong

At this point, I should add that when I cross-referenced this against Philippe Chevreau de Montléhu’s (1974) paper “LE TRÉSOR DE BELMONT” (available from S.H.I.M.), the two seem connected but the dates didn’t quite match up.

The story Chevreau de Montléhu tells about Belmont (on the other side of the island) is that workers who were cutting back the mangroves at Belmont in 1927 noticed a rock with very similar long parallel markings:

When he saw the H mark he mentioned it to M. de Sornay who was his superior and who was also interested in treasure excavations. M. de Sornay then went to Belmont, and at the sight of this ‘H’ mark he exclaimed: « Tiens mais c’est le même plan que nous avons appliqué par erreur à la Rivière Noire, à Anne ».

i.e. “Look, it’s the same treasure map that we got wrong at Rivière Noire [i.e. Tamarin Bay], at Anne”. [Note: I don’t know how to translate “à Anne“]

The problem here is that while Chevreau de Montléhu dates the Belmont find to 1927 (and implicitly after the Tamarin Bay find), Alix d’Unienville dates the Tamarin Bay find to 1949.

All the same, both accounts are connected to M. Aimé de Sornay (actually Marie Joseph “Aimé” de Sornay 1906-1959, of whom there’s a statue in Curepipe, and who was the Rector of the Mauritius College of Agriculture at one point), so there does seem to be a bedrock of truth to the two, even if the dates are a bit wobbly.

However, in the ever-reliable Denis Piat’s list of Mauritian treasure digs (which I discussed here back in 2016), we find “Belmont, close to Poudre d’Or” listed as 1927 and “Tamarin” listed as 1950. So it seems that Chevreau de Montléhu’s story about what Aimé de Sornay supposedly said is… less than completely accurate, let’s say.

So… Why Is This A Cipher Mystery?

Every single detail in d’Unienville’s account (the treasure, the greed, the futility, even the metal dowser from the Seychelles) rings completely true to my ears: apart from one, which I think sticks out like a teetotaller on a pirate ship.

Errrm… does anyone reading this really think that the decryption from the ‘Chinese characters’ sounds as though the respected Chinese elders nailed it? Or do you think it sounds like just about every other misinterpreted cipher mystery that’s drifted past us down the river over the years?

Currently, my best guess is that the markings the owners had uncovered were actually more like the ones you see in scratchy pigpen ciphers, whose blocky outlines can vaguely resemble the blocky outlines of Chinese ideograms. And so I strongly suspect that this was very probably a genuine cipher mystery all along… though one that was not in any way Chinese.

However, I haven’t seen any other accounts of this story apart from Alix d’Unienville’s (presumably because it makes the treasure hunters look like greedy superficial idiots). And despite having looked for any image of the actual “grosse pierre” for some time, I haven’t yet been able to find one.

All the same, perhaps someone with a bigger/better library of Indian Ocean treasure-related books than me will know where an image of this appears.

I would also expect that there would be 1949 newspaper articles with more details (though probably not in Gallica, which only goes up to 1944). If I was in Mauritius now, I’d head off to the Mauritian National Archives whose collection of Mauritian newspapers goes back to 1777 (e.g. Le Mauricien, Le Cerneen, etc). But… here I am, most definitely not in Mauritius. 🙁

All future research leads gratefully received! 🙂

Cipher mystery things I aim to find out in 2021…

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Researching cipher mysteries is almost always ponderous and frustrating: it will doubtless take all of 2021 for the work I put in to the WW2 pigeon cipher and the Bernardin Nageon de l’Estang letters during 2020 to bear fruit.

Yet what Dave Oranchak’s recent epic crack of the Z340 tells us is that if we can identify any unsolved cipher’s single most telling feature and then doggedly pursue that to its logical extreme, we stand a chance of toppling that particular Colossus (in the Classical sense of the word).

For the Z340, that telling feature was that taking every 19th character from the cipher yielded statistically anomalous results. And we now know that this was because a central part of the Z340’s cipher system was a “knight’s move” transposition step (i.e. two steps along and one step down).

So my two main challenges this year are (a) to stay laser-focused on the telling features presented by different cipher mysteries, and (b) to find new ways to pursue these telling features all the way to their logical conclusion.

Specifically…

1. Voynich Manuscript

In my mind, there’s something really wrong with Voynichese. Specifically, even though the differences between Currier A Voynichese and Currier B Voynichese run really deep, nobody seems to be talking about this.

Let’s compare a couple of lines from f1v (Herbal A)…

potoy.shol.dair.cphoal-dar.chey.tody.otoaiin.shoshy-
choky.chol.cthol.shol.okal-dolchey.chodo.lol.chy.cthy-

…with a couple of lines from f26v (Herbal B):

pchedy.dar.cheoet.chy.sair.chees.odaiiin.chkeeey.ykey.sheey-
teeedy.okeeos.cheeos.ysaiin.okcheey.keody.s!aiin.cheeos.qokes.or-

Voynich linguists typically try to downplay the differences between the two, but… really? What similarities there are tend to be either at the (low) level of (verbose cipher-like) groups (e.g. aiin, ar, al, etc) or purely positional (line-initial “p-“, word-final “-y”, line-final “-m”, etc). Even really common features like qo- are used very differently in A and B.

So, even though A & B seem to share a common framework, beneath that framework there seems to be more dividing them than joining them. And I think I’ve been guilty in not separating out A and B from the framework they share more clearly: we’ve probably all been guilty of that to some degree.

My first challenge for 2021 is therefore to look at Currier A and Currier B with fresh eyes. What do the two share, and how do they differ? Though I can’t yet properly express this, it feels as though we’ve been building our theories about Voynichese on sand, and the answers may be much simpler than we’re allowing ourselves to see.

2. Voynich Manuscript (Again)

One thing that popped up during 2020 was Antonio Averlino’s herbal. If you recall, having published The Curse of the Voynich in 2006, I was surprised to find out two years later that Antonio Averlino had his own herbal.

Thorndike’s “Science & Thought” quoted Giovanni Michele Alberto in MS Ashburnham 198, fol.78r: “Sed et Antonius Averlinus Philaretus lingua vernacula scripsit eleganter.” So it would seem that Filarete had written on plants “elegantly in the vernacular tongue”.

It’s been a while since I last picked up the Filarete trail (which I’d worked pretty much to death back in 2006), so what I’d like to do this year is to go a-hunting for Filarete’s vernacular (i.e. Tuscan Italian) book on plants. This would involve drawing up a list of Tuscan herbal mss dating to around 1450-1460 (which surely can’t contain more than 40 or 50 possibilities), then reducing it down, and finally closely examining that which remaineth.

It’s a plan, at least. 🙂

However, because MS Ashburnham 198 isn’t visible online at the Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana (please correct me if I’m wrong!), I still haven’t seen Alberto’s quotation in its full context. This annoys me because I don’t know whether Alberto was referring to an illustrated herbal or a purely textual herbal. As a consequence I don’t yet even know what kind of book to go looking for here. But hopefully I will soon…

(Note that Thorndike’s Chapter XII was “Revised and enlarged” [p.195] from the version that appeared in The Romanic Review, Vol. XVII, No.3, July-September 1926, so the latter is unlikely to have any extra information.)

3. Dorabella Cipher

I’ve recently been corrected by Cipher Mysteries commenter John Rehling, who took me to task for numerically over-egging Keith Massey’s theory about the Dorabella Cipher. Thanks to the magic of the binomial expansion, the chances of 13 cipher shapes out of 87 being immediately followed by their flipped version is in fact a mere 1 in 20815. (!)

On balance, I’m now wondering whether this is no more than a sign that the set of mirrored pairs at the end of the second line is just filler / padding, i.e. that Massey’s conclusion is still correct, but only in a very local and limited way.

However, if that is true, then the long stretches of the Dorabella Cipher that contain neither vertical E-shapes nor downward slanting E-shapes then become markedly more problematic. So I continue to think that there’s something deeply artificial about this cryptogram that messes up all our statistical analyses.

So I therefore need to have something of a Dorabella rethink in 2021. :-/

I just wish that the person who secretly owns the Dorabella Cipher (and who I can’t help but suspect sold a small piece of their Elgariana at Sotheby’s in 2016) would come forward, perhaps via a trusted third party. I believe that shining a simple UV light (even a bicycle marking light) on it might reveal Elgar’s real solution – and how good would that be?

After Z340, which cipher mysteries could get cracked in 2021?

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In the wake of Dave Oranchak’s epic crack of the Zodiac Killer’s Z340 cipher, which other unsolved ciphers might get cracked in 2021?

For me, the way the Z340 was solved highlighted a number of issues:

  • It seems very likely to me that other long-standing cipher mysteries will also require collaboration between entirely different kinds of researcher
  • Hence I suspect that many are beyond the FBI’s in-house capabilities, and it will need to find a new way to approach these if it wants them cracked
  • The whole Big Data thing is starting to open some long-closed doors

With these in mind, here’s my list of what might get cracked next:

Scorpion Ciphers

The Scorpion ciphers were sent to America’s Most Wanted host John Walsh from 1991 onwards: we have copies of S1 and S5, but the rest are in the hands of the FBI. As you’d expect, I’ve blogged about these many times, e.g. here, here, here, and here. I also created a related set of seven cipher challenges, of which only one has been solved (by Louie Helm) so far.

To be honest, I fail to understand why the FBI hasn’t yet released the other Scorpion Ciphers. These are the grist the Oranchak code-cracking mill is looking for: homophonic ciphers, underlying patterns, Big Data, etc.

Nick’s rating for a 2021 crack: 8/10 if the FBI releases the rest, else 2/10

Beale Ciphers

Even if I don’t happen to believe a measly word of the Beale Papers, I still think that the Beale Ciphers themselves are probably genuine. These use homophonic ciphers (albeit where the unbroken B1 and B3 ciphers use a system that is slightly different from the one used in the broken B2 cipher).

Because we already have the hugely improbable Gillogly / Hammer strings to work with (which would seem to be the ‘tell’ analogous to the Z340’s 19-repeat behaviour), we almost certainly don’t need to find a different book

Given that Virginia is Dave Oranchak’s stamping ground, I wouldn’t be surprised if the redoubtable Mr O has already had a long, hard look at the Beale Ciphers. So… we’ll see what 2021 has to bring.

Nick’s rating for a 2021 crack: 2/10

Paul Rubin’s Cryptograms

A curious cryptogram was found taped to the chest of Paul Emanuel Rubin, an 18-year-old chemistry student found dead from cyanide poisoning near Philadelphia Airport in January 1953. As usual, I’ve blogged about this a fair few times, e.g. here, here, here and here.

There’s a good scan of the cryptogram on my Cipher Foundation page here; there’s a very detailed account in Craig Bauer’s “Unsolved!”; and the 142-page FBI file on Paul Rubin is here.

The ‘trick’ behind the cryptogram appears to be to use a different cipher key for each line. Specifically, the first few lines appear to be a kind of “Trithemian Typewriter” cipher, where every other letter (or some such pattern) is enciphered using a substitution cipher, and where the letters inbetween are filled in to make these look like words. This is, I believe, the reason we can see words like “Dulles” and “Conant” peeking through the mess of “astereantol” and “magleagna” gibberish.

Right now, I’m wondering whether we might be able to iterate through thousands of possible Trithemian schemes to crack each individual line (e.g. lines 4 and 5 appear to share the same cipher key number).

The cipher keys appear to use security by obscurity (& terseness), so I suspect that these may well be defeatable. Definitely one to consider.

Nick’s rating for a 2021 crack: 4/10

Who was The Zodiac Killer?

Even if the Z340 plaintext failed to cast any light on his identity (as I certainly expected), surely a DNA attack must now be on the cards?

I’d have thought that the relatively recent (2018) success in identifying Joseph James De Angelo as the Golden State Killer must surely mean that the Zodiac Killer’s DNA is next in line in the forensic queue.

To my eyes, the murder of Paul Stine seems to me to have been the least premeditated of all the Zodiac Killer’s attacks, so I would have expected the crime-scene artifacts to have been a treasure trove of DNA evidence. But there are plenty of other claims for Zodiac DNA, so what do I know?

Anyway, I have no real doubt that there are 5 or 6 documentaries currently in production for 2021 release that are all racing to use DNA to GEDmatch the bejasus out of the Zodiac Killer. I guess we shall see what they find…

Nick’s rating for a 2021 breakthrough: 7/10 with DNA, else 0/10

Who Was The Somerton Man?

2021 may finally see the exhumation Derek Abbott has been pushing for for so long; plus the start of a worldwide DNA scavenger hunt to identify the unidentified corpse found on Somerton Beach on 1st December 1948.

But after all that, will the mysterious man turn out to be Robin McMahon Thomson’s missing father; or a shape-shifting Russian spy; or a Melbourne crim whom everybody suddenly wanted to forget they ever met?

All the same, even if we do get a name and a DOB etc, will that be enough to end all the shoddy melodrama around the case? Errrm… probably not. 🙁

For what it’s worth, I would have thought that Robin’s father’s surname was almost certainly (Nick shudders at the obviousness) McMahon. I also wouldn’t like to bet against a Dr McMahon in Sydney (e.g. the surgeon Edward Gerard McMahon, though I expect there are others), but feel free to enlighten me why you think McMahon was actually a family name etc etc.

Nick’s rating for a 2021 breakthrough: 8/10 with an exhumation, else 1/10

“A Massive Hunt” – Clarkson, Hammond & May take on a Cipher Mystery…

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Putting to one side the bombshell news that the Zodiac Killer’s Z340 cipher has been cracked, the other big cipher-related event in December 2020 was that Clarkson / Hammond / May’s Grand Tour Special came to Madagascar. The idea was to see if they could (a) drive utterly mad cars around arguably the world’s worst roads without anyone actually lynching them, and (b) find pirate treasure by solving the cryptogram attributed to the French pirate Olivier “La Buse” Levasseur.

That they managed (a) while continuing to flog their format’s dead horse(-power) probably surprised no one at all: but how did they do with (b)?

Is it a treasure map?

I have already blogged here about La Buse far too many times to mention. The short version is that the chances that the pigpen cryptogram widely attributed to him actually had anything to do with him are basically zero. Rather, it seems massively more likely that the cipher was concocted at least fifty years after his death, and that the plaintext was in fact some kind of medical recipe. And if it turns out that the pigeon hearts were simply an 18th century substitution for hoopoe hearts, my Spockian eyebrow would barely flicker.

So, is it a pirate treasure map, me (hoopoe) hearties? Not a hopoe.

What about the end five lines, then?

OK, I know that some (gullible) people think the final five lines sometimes seen added to the cipher make it sound like a right proper treasure map:

un bon verre dans l’hostel de le veque dant(S)
le siege du diable r(Q)uarar(N)te siz(X) degrès
f(S)iz(X) minutes deuz(X) fois
pour celui qui le decouvrira
juillet mil sept cent (T)rente

(…in English…)

a good drink in the bishop’s hostel in
the devil’s seat forty six degrees
six minutes two times
for the person who will discover it
july 1730

But that’s because they sound just like the text describing a treasure map in Edgar Allan Poe’s (1843) “The Gold Bug”:

A good glass in the bishop’s hostel in the devil’s seat
— twenty-one degrees and thirteen minutes
— northeast and by north
— main branch seventh limb east side
— shoot from the left eye of the death’s-head
— a bee line from the tree through the shot fifty feet out.

And, more specifically, they sound more like the 1933 French translation of Poe’s story than Baudelaire’s 1856 French translation.

It therefore seems extraordinarily likely to me that the extra five lines were speculatively added to the cryptogram by a French person after 1933. Which was nice of them.

A Turkish Dog?

All the same, the Grand Tour research minions did do a fair bit of digging. They had James May mention a “Turkish dog” (“UN CHIEN TURQ” in the decrypted text), which has been flagged only in very recent years as a phrase used in the 18th century to describe the kind of hairless state that mangy dogs get into in hot countries. (In the above link, the researcher suggests the phrase should be read as “To make a Turkish dog eat well, throw some dry shit at it”, make of that what you will). Here’s a 1755 image from the BNF showing a real (but now extinct) hairless Turkish dog:

But ultimately, this was – like most of the world seen through the windscreen in the Grand Tour – just window-dressing for the car-themed light entertainment. Which, this time round, basically consisted of repeatedly covering James May (in his big-wheeled Caterham) in high-velocity Madagascan mud to make him swear.

Bless them, they’ve all come so far, yet have ended up where they began.

Réunion, Mauritius, Seychelles, Madagascar?

It was correct of them to say (a) that La Buse tried to get himself a pardon from the newly-installed French authorities on Ile de France (Mauritius); (b) that he was captured in Madagascar; and (c) that he was hanged in 1730 in Réunion. So I think it was fair to say that they did broadly present his overall timeline right.

However, La Buse had (it has been widely written) settled down on the Seychelles, nowhere near Madagascar. He was also captured near Fort Dauphin (the main French colony on the island at the time), which was completely the wrong end of the island from the end the bumbling comedic trio drove their modded cars to.

Though La Buse had boarded the Compagnie des Indes’ ship “La Méduse” (1728-1731), it was merely as a pilot to steer it into Port Dauphin. Unfortunately (for La Buse), he was recognised by the captain (it is widely reported, which was presumably Capitaine Hyacinthe D’Hermite as per Memoires des Hommes), captured, and brought to Réunion. And from there to the gallows.

Also: the grave on Réunion that is supposedly La Buse’s isn’t his at all, it’s just a piece of much later tourist trappery. And Madagascar’s “Libertalia”? This is probably more fun as a computer game than as an historical source, so please don’t get me started on that pile of… conjecture.

So, What Really Happened, Then?

Most of the stuff written about La Buse seems to me to vastly overplay his importance as a pirate. Rather, he seems to have been bigged up by the same kind of French ‘historians’ who turned the dead bookseller Nicolas Flamel into some kind of undying alchemist. Flamel would, of course, be turning in his grave were he not still alive. Supposedly.

As to what actually happened with the treasure, I’m marginally more convinced by the account in Charles Grey’s “Pirates of the Eastern Seas” (Chapter XVII): “The pirates divided the plunder at St. Mary’s, besides the cash sharing about 42 small diamonds per man or in less number according to their proportion” (p.325). Grey finishes with Captain David Greenhill’s July 1723 report “that the pirate ship Cassandra was come into Portobello, and that the people have a free pardon for themselves and their goods, and were selling their diamonds and India goods when he came away” (p.329).

The fabulous treasures and chintzes the pirates took had (without much doubt) already been spirited back to Cochin (modern-day Kochi in Kerala) to sell to”their Dutch friends” (p.325). So this is almost certainly where the Flaming Cross of Goa was melted down and laundered, with most of the cash then spaffed on the normal mad carousing pirates specialised in.

Why? Being a pirate was a shitty thing: you expected to die young, because that’s how it normally worked. It’s just that life on board ‘proper’ ships was pretty shitty too, so why not go for the 10% odds that piracy might just work for you?

In some ways, I can’t really blame people for wanting all or any of the tongue-hanging-out-your-mouth La Buse treasure stories to be true. But in my experience, most of the stories attached to unsolved cryptograms tend to be simply historical backfill, campfire stories grafted on to help flog an uncracked cipher to the next sucker mug enough to buy it. And, in my opinion, La Buse’s cryptogram fits that template to a T.

Of course, the other scenario is where people use a bit of unsolved cipher mystery snake oil to help repackage tired old products well past their sell-by date. But that would never happen on Amazon Prime, would it?

Zodiac Z340 is CRACKED!

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Dave Oranchak posted today about how he (along with Jarlve and Sam Blake) cracked the Zodiac Killer’s infamous Z340 cipher. Here’s his video:

Unsurprisingly (to me), it turned out that code breakers had been (kind of) close for some time, with the single largest tell (that never quite told) being the curious results you get if you examine every 19th character of the Z340.

So, the core of the cipher system turned out to be a combination of a “knight move” transposition (down one row and along two columns) plus the Zodiac Killer’s trademark set of reflected letter homophonic cipher shapes.

However, Zodiac – clearly stung by the ease with which his first major cipher had been cracked – threw in some extra confounding factors.

  • At the end of the top line, he wrote the words “LIFE IS” in his homophonic cipher (not transposed)
  • At the end of the bottom line, he wrote the word “DEATH” in his homophonic cipher (also not transposed)
  • The rest of the bottom two lines were written in his homophonic cipher, but with the letter-order of some of the words reversed (e.g. the Zodiac’s signature word “PARADICE” was written as “ECIDARAP”)
  • The remainder of the cipher was split into two nine-line blocks, where the order of the letters was transposed using knight’s move reordering.

There was also, annoyingly, a single row of ciphered letters in the middle that were out by a single column, which skewed all the text passing through it. It’s fairly easy to see that once you’ve got everything else right, though.

This was – I hope you’ll agree – a simply epic slab of codebreaking. Congratulations to David Oranchak, Sam Blake, and Jarl Van Eycke!!!!

More details (including the FBI’s statement) can be found here.

All in all, the Z340 plaintext reads:

I HOPE YOU ARE HAVING LOTS OF FUN IN TRYING TO CATCH ME
THAT WASNT ME ON THE TV SHOW
WHICH BRINGS UP A POINT ABOUT ME
I AM NOT AFRAID OF THE GAS CHAMBER
BECAUSE IT WILL SEND ME TO PARADICE ALL THE SOONER
BECAUSE I NOW HAVE ENOUGH SLAVES TO WORK FOR ME
WHERE EVERYONE ELSE HAS NOTHING WHEN THEY REACH PARADICE
SO THEY ARE AFRAID OF DEATH
I AM NOT AFRAID BECAUSE I KNOW THAT MY NEW LIFE
WILL BE AN EASY ONE IN PARADICE

LIFE IS DEATH

The Glut of Somerton Men…

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The Somerton Man, found dead by the sea wall on Somerton Beach in the early morning of 1st December 1948, has had innumerable speculative theories pinned to his unnamed corpse over the years.

Was he a Soviet spy, an international man of mystery, a former lover, an errant parent, a Third Officer, a gangster, a baccarat school nitkeeper, an interstate car thief, a jockey, an accountant, a ballet dancer, a transvestite, a gold prospector, a homesick Norwegian, or a whatever-happens-to-take-your-fancy-tomorrow-morning kind of guy? The list keeps on growing.

But why so many theories?

John Does & Jane Does

In the wider world of cold cases, plenty of other John / Jane Does are arguably every bit as mysterious as the Somerton Man.

Yet if you’re expecting there to be a (socially-distanced, mask-wearing) queue of people stretching down the high street waiting to bend my weary Cipher Mysteries ear with their tediously touching theories about the Isdal Woman, for example, you’ll be looking in vain. (There’s a nice news story about her teeth here, by the way.)

Oh, and despite Wired’s nice story about the unidentified hiker known as “Mostly Harmless”, I haven’t so far seen a torrent of theories speculating that he was an Anglo-American Douglas Adams fan obsessed by Marvin the Paranoid Android. Or a gold prospector. Or a car thief. Or whatever.

“The first ten million years were the worst,” said Marvin, “and the second ten million years, they were the worst too. The third ten million years I didn’t enjoy at all. After that I went into a bit of a decline.”

So the issue here is more about why those others don’t seem to attract even a fraction of the theories that he does. What’s the difference that leads people’s minds to conjure up such a glut of (possible) Somerton Men?

Life & Death

Even by the 1949 inquest, a good deal was known about the Somerton Man’s physical condition and the details of his death:

  • “[S]mall vessels not commonly observed in the brain were easily discernible with congestion” – I believe this would have taken a considerable time to build up, perhaps years?
  • “The spleen was strikingly large and firm about 3 times normal size” – this too would have taken some time to happen, perhaps months?
  • “Both lungs were dark with congestion, but otherwise normal.” Like most adults back then, the Somerton Man was a smoker, so this was very probably a long-term consequence of his smoking.
  • “The stomach was deeply congested, and there was superficial redness, most marked in the upper half. Small haemorrhages were present beneath the mucosa. There was congestion in the 2nd half of the duodenum continuing through the thin part. There was blood mixed with the food in the stomach.” The blood in his stomach showed that he had almost certainly been convulsively sick (though, oddly, there was no vomit by the body or on his clothes or his oddly-shiny shoes);
  • “The heart, if anything, was contracted […] I am quite convinced that the death could not have been natural, as there is such a conflict of findings with the normal heart.” A poison or misadministered drug was suggested, though all attempts to detect what that was unfortunately failed.
  • “There was a small patch of dried saliva at the right of the mouth. The impression was that it ran out of his mouth some time before death when he was probably unable to swallow it, probably when his head was hanging to the side. It would run vertically. It had run down diagonally down [sic] the right cheek.“
  • “The post mortem rigidity was intense, and there was a deep lividity behind particularly above the ears and neck.” Blood pooling at the back of his neck was inconsistent with his having been propped up against the sea wall at the back of the beach prior to his death.
  • His body had been carefully posed, but with various key elements of his clothing (like a wallet, id card, money, hat, etc) missing

It was hard to avoid the conclusion that poison (or drugs) had been the cause of death; and also that many of the “difficulties” and apparent inconsistencies would disappear if the man had previously died elsewhere, and had then been carried to the beach by person or persons unknown.

But with nobody stepping forward to (successfully) identify the body, this whole line of reasoning merely raised at least as many questions as it answered: and so the inquest was not able to reach a helpful conclusion.

And that, sad as it may be, is still very largely where we are some 70+ years later. Something bad had happened, sure; but without being able to flag it as murder, misadventure, accident or suicide, what’s a coroner to do, eh?

(Human) Nature Abhors a Vacuum

Aristotle famously wrote about the Horror Vacui, i.e. the idea that Nature abhors a vacuum so much that it causes things to fill the void. (Though even fifteenth century engineers knew that this principle had its limits.)

To my eyes, though, it seems that Human Nature abhors a vacuum far more than poor old Mother Nature does. That is, where there is a causal void – i.e. a lack of explanation as to the cause – the runaway horses in our minds gallop and leap impossible fences to construct explanations.

In the case of the Somerton Man, none of the sudden death tropes of the day so familiar to newspaper readers were present – no gangland execution, no violent lover’s argument, no business betrayal, no drowning, no falling drunk down a set of stairs, no being hit by a car. In short: no smoking gun.

Ultimately, a quiet death on a beach – however posed or artificial the Somerton Man’s mise-en-scene may have seemed to those looking carefully – was a disappointment to those hoping for the theatrics of violence.

And so I think it is not the Somerton Man’s actual death that so inspired the theories so much as the absence of explicit forensic theatre. He died cleanly, with nicely groomed fingernails, and wearing shiny shoes: which is all wrong on some level.

Evidence of Absence

But above all else, I think the most disturbing thing about the Somerton Man’s death lies in none of the details that were noted, but instead in the fact that – barring a little bit of sand at the back of his head – he seems to have had no real forensic contact with his (supposed) place of death.

Really, the scenario where someone undergoes the trauma of convulsive death throes while laying on a beach and yet somehow manages to avoid ending up covered in vomit and sand makes no sense to me whatsoever. This is a direct affront to Locard’s Exchange Principle, right?

So can we please call a halt on the whole “romantic loner suicide” scenario? The whole idea that he somehow travelled to Somerton Beach just to die on his own simply makes no physical sense.

Similarly, calling him “The Unknown Man” makes no sense to me either. Rather, I suspect that he spent his last hours in a nearby house, laid out on his back on someone’s bed before dying there, and then being left there for a few hours with his head tilted backwards over the edge (while the blood pooled in his neck).

It also seems highly likely to me that people from that house tidied him up (even cleaning and shining his shoes), before carrying him to the beach and posing his body against the sea wall there.

Essentially, if the Somerton Man did not die on the beach, we can be sure that the people who knew him – and who brought him there – have carefully airbrushed themselves out of the picture. He was very much known.

The Missing Thread

In many ways, I’m not that interested in all the different people the Somerton Man might have been. The glut of possible Somerton Men we have are only ever hypothetical, a long row of Pepper’s ghosts we summon up to try to work out what happened, like CSI bullet trajectory sticks.

And yet in some ways we know almost too much about the mundane mechanics of it all: perhaps our dead man even had his final pasty at Glenelg’s All Night Cafe.

In the end, all we’re missing is the narrative thread of a single life that binds all these pieces together. It’s like we’re trying to solve an upside-down jigsaw, where all our attempts to be scientific and rigorous have failed to turn any of the pieces the right way up.

But even if – mirabile dictu – exhumed DNA magically hands us a name on a silver dish, will we really be able to completely reconstruct the jigsaw’s picture side?

Having spent so many years on this man’s trail, I can’t help but suspect that we won’t. Perhaps some secrets don’t want to be known: not all Ariadne’s threads are there to be followed.

The Nageon de l’Estangs in 1760…

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Here’s an official document from 1760 from the Mauritian Archives relating to the Nageon de l’Estang family property:

(Click on the image to get a higher resolution JPEG.)

And here’s a transcription very largely provided by Ruby Novacna, with additional parallel transcriptions from Anthony Lallaizon and Thomas below – thanks very much to all three of you for this excellent help!

Rather than modernise the text, my preference (as per Ruby’s excellent work) is to try to stay close to the original spelling, though anyone wanting to grasp what it means might prefer Anthony’s and Thomas’ versions in the comments below:

1. Le conseil Superieur de l’Isle de France a tous Presents et
2. aVenir Salut. Scavoir faisons qu’en consequence des Ordres de
3. la compagnie inseréé dans la deliberation du deux Janvier M
4. Sept cent cinquante trois [i.e. 2nd Jan 1753] et de ladite Deliberation Nous Avons au Nom
5. De Messieurs les Sindics et Directeurs De la Compagnie Des Indes
6. Concedé et Delaissé Concedons et Delaissons Des maintenant et p[our] toujours
7. Par ces presentes au sieur André Nagëon De l’Etang fils Du sieur
8. Bernardin Nagëon Son père De son vivant officier Des Vaisseaux
9. De Côte p[our] la Compagnie ledit André Nagëon Demeurant chez M[a]d[am]e
10. Sa Mere, En ce port et Paroisse Louis a ce present et acceptant P[our] Luy
11. Ces hoirs et ayant cause la propriété D’un terrain De treize toises
12. Deux Pied(s) Delarge Sur Vingt Six toises quatre pied(s) De proffondeur
13. Scitué sur le Rempart De la grande Montagne n[uméro]te 130. Borné D’un
14. Coté par une rue qui conduit alad[i]te montagne Dautre Coté Par…
15. D’un bord un autrerue qui conduit Dans l’Enfoncement et d’autre bout par
(16. Une rue Entredeux)
16. Le Sieur (?)
17. Le tous suivant le plan corigé par M Magon (?) Directeur et Commd[an]t gen[er]al
18. Led[i]t terrain accordéé au S[ieur] Nageon fils par Ordonnance Du Conseil Du
19. Sept may Mil sept cent Soixante [7 May 1760] Pour Par led[i]t Nageon fils Ses enfans
20. Hoirs, ou heritiers meme ceux D’iciluy ayant cause jouir faire et Disposer
21. Dudis terrain comme la chose luy appartenant en toute propriété roturière
22. Et néant moins reconnaitre Messieurs De la Compagnie Des Indes comme
23. Seuls Seigneurs Directs, Suzerains Hauts moyens et Bas justiciers et p[our] ce
24. est sujet atous droits de justice et Banalité quils jugerons a propos D’Etablir
25. Sera tenu ledis Sieur D’Enclore et faire Batir sur ledit terrain de faire
26. Couvrir les Batiments qu’il y fera construire En planches, Bardeaux ou
27. Arg[?] , aux termes presents par les Reglements, s’oblige de payer par
28. annéé sur les ordres et dans les tems qui seront prescrits par le Conseil
29. Douze deniers De premier Cens reputé cens commune et imprescriptible
30. Tant p[our] le fond que pour laquotité lequel Emportera lod(s) et ventes
31. S’aizinnes [saisines] et amendes, au Désir de la coutume de Paris comme aussy
32. D’executer Exactement toutes les Ordonnances et reglements faits et a faire
33. Par la suite par la compag[ni]e ou le Conseil de passer au domaine de la
34. Compag[ni]e. Declaration et reconnaissance dudit terrain et des droits
35. Cy dessus Stipuler le tout a peine de Nullité de la presente Concession De
36. Reunion au domaine Dudit Emplacement Sur le Simple Requisition du
37. Procureur General du Roy Sans estre par la compag[ni]e tenu Daucunes
38. Indemnité. Ny formalité de justice Ny Sans que ladite peine Ny rien
39. Du contenu en la presente Concession Puisse estre reputé comminatoire mais
40. De rigueur étant la condition precise du don gratuit que la compag[ni]e
41. En fait et p(9) que ces presentes ayant leur forces et valeur ou marges
42. D’Expedition d’icelle sera apposéé le sceau de la compagnie des Indes
43. Donné au Port Louis de l’Isle de France le dix de may mil sept cent soix[an]te [i.e. 20 May 1760]
44. Et a Signé
45. Nageondeleteang
46. ? Lejuge ?
47. ?

Oh, and here’s a close-up of the signature at the bottom left, which I read as “Nageondeléteang”, yet another variant spelling to add to the list *sigh*:

Hidden treasure, Pointe de Vacoas, and 300 dead dodos…

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In my last Cipher Mysteries post, I floated the idea that when Bernardin Nageon de l’Estang famously wrote that…

j’ai naufragé dans une crique près des Vaquois

… he may have been referring not to the town or inland area called Vacoas, but rather to Pointe de Vacoas on Mauritius’ South-Eastern coast, which was close to the half plot of land he owned. According to his Will (BN1), what Bernardin did immediately after being “shipwrecked in a creek” was:

j’ai remonté une rivière et déposé dans un caveau
les richesses de l'Indus

So: might there be a cave next to a creek not far from Pointe de Vacoas? Generations of Mauritian treasure hunters must surely have put the same two and two together to get the same bejewelled four, right?

But perhaps more importantly, you might be asking what on earth this post has to do with three hundred dead dodos? Has Cipher Mysteries been taken over, as my son asked, by some kind of “ARK: Survival Evolved” meme?

Photo by BazzaDaRambler – Oxford University Museum of Natural History

No, this post is genuinely about treasure and dodos. Really. Read on.

The Creek

Having looked at a fair few historical maps of Mauritius, it seems to my eyes that there was only ever one winding little creek near Pointe de Vacoas. Rather than starting from beside the Point itself (as per the cadastral map I mentioned in the last post)…

…the creek actually starts a little to the side, though it does then indeed kick sideways across towards the Mare du Tabac, which became the Union Vale Sugar Estate:

Source: Mauritius Chamber of Agriculture

In this 1880 map, you can see “Pte Vacoa” in the bottom right leading round to a small river (the “Ruis[seau] des Marres”) that winds its way inland, before finishing up by the Union Vale railway station (at centre left).

Union Vale, 1880 map of Mauritius

OK, while I’m not saying that Ruisseau des Marres is ‘definitely’ the stream / creek that Bernardin was referring to, what I am saying is that it seems (to my eyes) to be a very strong candidate indeed. For if you don’t look there, where else would you to go looking first, hmmm?

Going over the map carefully, you should also be able to see the area around the Ruisseau des Marres is called “LES MARRES”. There are also a couple of odd-looking features on the map labelled as “Mare …”, the right of which is labelled as “Mare aux [something] or Dodo“. Unsurprisingly, we’ll be returning to that location before very long…

The Cave

I first started thinking about Mauritian lava tubes back in 2016, and have never really stopped. This is because Bernardin’s second letter BN2) runs:

l'entrée d'une caverne jadis formé par un bras
de rivière passant sous la falaise et bouchée
par les corsaires pour y mettre leur trésor et
qui est le caveau désigné par mon testament

…which I think sounds exactly like a description of a lava tube.

Here’s a rather nice 1820s drawing by de Sainson of a Mauritian lava tube in the Grande Riviere quartier (not too far away) that I previously mentioned in a separate post:

Though the lava tube or lava blister we’re looking for must surely have been more modestly sized than this epic specimen, it’s the same basic idea.

Mare Aux Songes

In a rather charming 2007 New Yorker article called “Digging For Dodos“, we meet a gaggle of dodo experts and enthusiasts, all inspired by the Mare Aux Songes – a (formerly) boggy pond in the South-East of Mauritius. This site was discovered in 1865 by local teacher George Clarke, after his thirty year search for dodo bones.

In fact, the Mare Aux Songes ended up yielding far more dodo bones (from more than 300 separate dodo skeletons!) than everywhere else combined. Hence even the dodo skeleton at Oxford University Museum of Natural History (yes, the photo at the top of the post) was from the Mare Aux Songes.

In response to a malaria epidemic a few years later, British engineers covered the whole boggy area with concrete to prevent mosquitoes breeding: the Mare Aux Songes then spent most of a century out of reach.

The experts (in the New Yorker article) had formed a group called the 2006 Mauritius Dodo Expedition, with the idea of revisiting the Mare Aux Songes with a more modern scientific approach, to find more about dodos. Specifically, they wondered whether they might find multiple historical layers of dodo remains. But what they actually found was that all the dodo bone fragments seem to have come from a relatively short period around 4000 years ago.

What exactly had happened? The report outlines the group’s conclusions:

The geomorphology of the rock valley, in particular being bounded by steep cliffs, suggests collapse of a pre-existing cavity in the subsurface. In volcanic settings rock valleys generally evolve from the collapse of lava tunnels (e.g. Peterson et al., 1994), and these systems are common in (SW) Mauritius (Middleton, 1995; Saddul, 2002; Janoo, 2005), suggesting that the MAS rock valley was created in a similar way. Therefore at some point after 120 ka, large-scale roof collapse led to the formation of a dry valley at MAS (Fig. 4A).

“Mid-Holocene vertebrate bone Concentration-Lagerstatte on oceanic island
Mauritius provides a window into the ecosystem of the dodo (Raphus cucullatus)”

So, the basic narrative they reconstructed was this:

  • the Mare Aux Songes had started out as a lava blister (i.e. a void inside the volcanic basalt) with a diameter of ten or more meters;
  • the lava blister’s roof had weathered and collapsed, leaving behind an exposed hemispheric ‘bowl’;
  • there had been a long dry period, perhaps across a couple of centuries;
  • during that dry period, a large number of animals (mainly turtles, but a few dodos too) had found themselves trapped inside the steep-walled bowl; and
  • this was where, unable to climb back up its steep walls to escape, the three hundred dodos died.

And you will surely be unsurprised to find that the Mare Aux Songes mentioned on the map above is (or was) the boggy pond that formed in a roofless lava blister about 1km NNW of Pointe de Vacoas (as per the 1880 map).

Local Ponds and Caves in 1838

The best historical source on the geography of the local area I have found so far is the (1838) book “Statistique de l’Ile Maurice et ses dépendances” by M. le Baron d’Unienville.

Helpfully, the Baron lists the ponds (“mares”) of most interest in this quartier (my loose translation) [pp.139-140]:

The Mare la Violette, on Lahausse's land, yields a lot
of water, nevertheless sometimes drying up, but only
very rarely; its waters drain into le Bouchon.

The Mares du Tabac spring from between the Toussaint,
Avice and Buttié plots; they provide eels [anguilles],
shrimps [chevrettes], and water snails [corbeaux]; they
drain out into the Cul du Chaland, towards le Bouchon.

The Anse-Jonchais, Bambous and Albert ponds sometimes
dry up, but all provide very good water.

On M. Fenonillot's land, there is a natural pond three
to four hundred fathoms long by one hundred wide, becoming
up to 25 feet deep in the rainy season, with water springing
from the earth. This pond dries up in the dry season.

Interestingly, the Baron didn’t even consider the Mare Aux Songes to be worth reporting on, presumably because it was so marshy and boggy that you couldn’t get any useful water from it.

But more interestingly, he goes immediately on to discuss the caverns of the quartier (again, please forgive my loose translation) [pp.140-141]:

This district is very cavernous in places, especially towards
the coast going round from Chasur to the point.

In several parts of the Mares-du-Tabac area, the ground
resonates hollowly under the footsteps of men. The artificial
excavations present there the certainty of a great upheaval
formerly caused by underground fires, since in addition to
volcanic stones whose soil is covered, the layers of earth
are firstly topsoil, then tuff [a light, porous rock formed
of volcanic ash], then earth again in unequal layers always
interspersed with volcanic stones.

The Pointe du Souffleur offers a rather singular phenomenon,
also found in other regions; the water pushing violently into
the cavities of this point, emerges in a jet of water rising
to a rather great height through a hole two to three inches
in diameter, with the compressed air producing a noise similar
to that of a strong forge bellows.

There are several excavations in this area that are believed
to go through to the sea, such as the Fanchon hole and the
Maignan hole. The first is located on the Chemin du Port, home
of Sieur Leroux, and the second on the Maignan land. Tests
have been carried out to map the underground routes and
interconnections between these holes; but those tests were
unsatisfactory, because the lack of air causes lights to
be extinguished beyond a certain distance.

Sieur Charroux, among others, spent twenty-four hours lost in
the labyrinths of these caves, and considered himself very
fortunate to find the opening through which he had entered
and which may be twenty feet deep.

All in all, I think there is ample reason to believe that Bernardin Nageon de l’Estang’s description of (what sounds to me like) a lava blister or lava tube beneath a cliff is entirely consistent with the geology of the area around Mare la Violette.

It may sound overly romantic, but it seems certain to me that there are still as yet unmapped voids under the ground; and it might well be that one of these once had a concealed entrance. Perhaps the notion that pirates used these voids is just a campfire story (it wouldn’t be the first or the last): but nonetheless, voids there were.

The Cave Nobody Found

The local landscape circa even 1900 was very different on the surface to how it was circa 1750. Much of the area had been razed for growing sugar cane; estates and railways had been built; marshes had been filled and capped in response to the Epidemics of Mauritius; and so forth.

And so by the time of the great explosion of interest in Mauritian treasure hunting in the early 20th century, the area along the Ruisseau des Mares was probably close to unrecognizable. Not that this probably did anything to stop the grimly determined treasure hunters of the era with their fake maps, rumours, hunches, dynamite and shovels. Who knows what features they blew up in their hunger for buried gold?

Now a large part of the same general zone is being redeveloped by Omnicane – a company formed from Mon Trésor & Mon Désert sugar companies, among others – into the Mon Trésor Airport City project. So perhaps the cave we’re looking for has already been unknowingly flattened and redeveloped ten times over, who can tell?

If (and I happily admit that it’s a big if) Bernardin Nageon de l’Estang’s treasure is still in the cave he left it in nearly three hundred years ago, then the way forward is surely through GPR (ground penetrating radar), tracking along the land beside the eastern bank of the Ruisseau des Mares. But it is (and probably will always be) a needle-shaped void in a lava haystack.

Still, even though it took George Clarke thirty years to find his cache of three hundred dead dodos, who would now say that his search wasn’t worth it? And surely that’s how Mauritian treasure hunters feel (more or less), right?

Even so, rather than hiring a load of GPR equipment, I have to point out that you would (thanks to the French treasure hunting laws that Mauritius inherited) probably be better off instead walking up and down beside that river bank until you fell down a hole into a long lost treasure cave.

As they say in the theatre, break a leg. 😉

Finishing With A Song

It’s rare that you can write a blog post that covers an unsolved historical mystery and yet brings in so many nice historical angles along the way: rarer still that you can do all that and end on a song.

So here’s my cousin Phil Alexander (AKA “Philfy Phil”, recorded at The Goat, St Albans in 2010) with “Dido Dies”, one of his… errrm… cleaner parody songs. The first verse and chorus are about dead dodos, and you already know the tune, so feel free to sing along, you know you want to:

The final dodo walked the earth four hundred years ago
No more flapping wings and croaking; the dodo, yes, has croaked
He’s in the doodoo
He lies extinct
No more delicious in Mauritius
Or at least that’s what I thinkt

Then Salvador Dali died in 1989
With the oddest of moustaches
Like his anti-artist predecessor, Dada
Painting stuff
Did he look back and then realize he’d painted quite enough?
And well… let’s face it, most of it was guff

Dada died, Dali died, da dodo died
Dada died, Dali died, da dodo died
D’oh, da dodo died