The Secret History of the Catoblepas (Part 1)…

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Over the years, a small drawing on page 80v of the Voynich Manuscript has triggered what can only sensibly be described as all manner of Unholy Theory Wars.

The mysterious creature-like thing on page f80v of the Voynich Manuscript, posed above one of the Ms’s various wolkenbanden

This drawing has been used as ‘definitive’ proof of the manuscript’s supposed New World origins (i.e. because it is ‘obviously’ an armadillo); or that the manuscript was faked (i.e. according to Rich SantaColoma over at Koen’s blog, “Everybody who was anybody [in the 17th century] had a stuffed armadillo hanging in their kunstkammer“, which may yet turn out to be the Voynich comment of the year); and so forth, endlessly.

Whatever the drawing is actually supposed to represent, all we know for sure is that it appears in a quire / section of the manuscript that seems to be almost entirely related to different aspects of water (there are baths, bathing nymphs, showers, fountains, pipes, and even a rainbow in there). Hence it has long seemed highly likely to me that this will turn out to represent an animal somehow connected to water.

Back in 2009, I suggested as one possible candidate the catoblepas, which nowadays gets far more online attention as a fairly second-rate Neutral Evil Dungeons & Dragons monster (it later became known as a nekrozon, D&D trivia fans), or as a recurring enemy in the Final Fantasy series (it’s called a ‘Shoat’ there, though that actually means ‘piglet’, FF trivia fans) than as an actual mythical beast. Errrm… if you know what I mean.

As an aside, I can’t help but pass on that in Janick and Tucker’s (2018) “Unraveling the Voynich Codex” (whose nutty New World Voynich theory – naturally – relies on this being an armadillo), they mention my 2009 catoblepas page: and on p.360 describe me sweetly as “one of the most expansive and intemperate of bloggers”. Which they can, of course, stick right up their hairy arses, bless them. (Happy now? Good. So let’s move swiftly on.)

But it turned out that Andrew Sweeney had first suggested the catoblepas on the old VMs mailing list back in 2004. Hence I thought it was now time to revisit the entire secret history of the catoblepas, and see what I could find…

Pliny the Elder on the Catoblepas

Our first source is Pliny the Elder (AD 23–79), the well-known Roman writer and naturalist, who is also famous for having died trying to rescue friends and family from Pompeii following the eruption of Vesuvius. He describes the Catoblepas (named from the Greek Κατωβλεψ, ‘looking down’) in his 37-book Naturalis Historia as follows:

In Western Aethiopia [Ethiopia, i.e. West Africa] there is a spring, the Nigris, which most people have supposed to be the source of the Nile… In its neighbourhood there is an animal called the Catoblepas, in other respects of moderate size and inactive with the rest of its limbs, only with a very heavy head which it carries with difficulty — it is always hanging down to the ground; otherwise it is deadly to the human race, as all who see its eyes expire immediately.

Pliny the Elder, Natural History 8. 77 (trans. Rackham)

Aelian on the Catoblepas

When Claudius Aelianus (c. 175 – c. 235 AD) wrote his 17-book encyclopaedia of nature, Pliny the Elder’s book was one of many he shamelessly recycled in his own ‘honey-tongued’ prose. So it should be no great surprise that the account of the catoblepas we find there is little more than an elaborated reworking of Pliny’s account:

Libya [Africa] […] produces the animal called the Katobleps [Catoblepas]. In appearance it is about the size of a bull, but it has a grimmer expression, for its eyebrows are high and shaggy, and the eyes beneath are not large like those of oxen but narrower and bloodshot. And they do not look straight ahead but down on to the ground: that is why it is called ‘down-looking’. And a mane that begins on the crown of its head and resembles horsehair, falls over its forehead covering its face, which makes it more terrifying when one meets it. And it feeds upon poisonous roots. When it glares like a bull it immediately shudders and raises its mane, and when this has risen erect and the lips about its mouth are bared, it emits from its throat pungent and foul-smelling breath, so that the whole air overhead is infected, and any animals that approach and inhale it are grievously afflicted, lose their voice, and are seized with fatal convulsions. This beast is conscious of its power; and other animals know it too and flee from it as far away as they can.

Aelian, On Animals 7. 6 (trans. Scholfield) (Greek natural history 2nd Century A.D.):

Thomas de Kent

From there, we fast forward to the Middle Ages and to Thomas de Kent, the Anglo-Norman author of the 12th century Roman de toute chevalerie, one of several Alexander-themed romances written at the time. There are several manuscript versions of his poem (listed on Arlima), of which Trinity College O. 9. 34. (made circa 1250) is online here. However, even though some monsters are depicted in the Trinity Ms, I don’t believe that any of them is a catoblepas, e.g the sea monster on f24r:

However, the BnF has a digitized copy of the (much more exciting-looking, particularly if you like ornate towers and nicely-coloured horseback battles with swords) 14th century Français 24364, which on fol.68r (in what seems to be an inserted section on mythical animals) has this enchanting image of a catoblepas using its +10 Eyes That Paralyze to kill some poor sap:

Durham’s copy (C. IV. 27 B) I had no luck finding at all, but perhaps others will do better than me.

To be honest, though, this set of manuscripts seems not to have formed the start of any long-running tradition. So this – unless you know better – probably marks the end of this particular line of manuscripts.

Thomas of Cantimpré (c.1200-c.1272)

The mainstream medieval reception of the catoblepas seems to begin with Vincent de Beauvais (1190-1264), who mentions it in Book XVIII of his Biblioteca mundi. However it is with Thomas of Cantimpré’s De naturis rerum that things start to get properly interesting.

Even though De naturis rerum was initially just text descriptions, adaptations and illustrations appeared in manuscript copies before very long. And these were then followed by incunabula and (of course) printed books. Hence Thomas of Cantimpré’s book is a lot like the long shadow of the Batcape that falls over Gotham’s seedy streets: by which I mean that just about everywhere we will find the catoblepas depicted from 1300 onwards, it will turn out to be either in a version of De naturis rerum, or in a book adapted from or strongly influenced by it.

In short, De naturis rerum is the source of the catoblepas Niger. And here’s the ‘cathapleba’ in Valenciennes 320, one of the earliest illustrated mss:

And here’s another (slightly later) one, Brugge MS 411 (1451-1500), found by Ger Hungerink:

Der Naturen Bloeme (ca.1350)

One book adapted (and abbreviated) from Thomas of Cantimpré’s De naturis rerum was Der Naturen Bloeme by Jacob van Maerlant (1230/35-ca.1291). There’s a 2011 edition by Herman Thys, and a detailed 2001 book on its reception by Amand Berteloot and Detlev Hellfaier: in Dutch circles, it’s quite a famous medieval manuscript, so there is plenty of academic literature on it out there if you’re interested.

It is in one of the illustrated copies of Der Naturen Bloeme that we find another early visual representation of the catoblepas. The KB KA 16 manuscript copy (ca.1350) contains miniatures of all the standard Mandevillean monstrosities (people with giant feet, people with no heads, people with two faces, etc), plus an odd-looking catoblepas on this page:

Cathaplebas is een dier
zeer vreselijk en onguur
en is op de Nijl, de rivier,
van de vreselijkste manieren.
Traag is het en niet bar groot.
De last heeft het zwaar ter nood
van zijn hoofd dat hem zwaar weegt.
Van deze beesten is het dat men zegt
komt het op je aan onvoorzien
en tussen de ogen ziet het je
dan ben je weg van het lijf.
Dit dier lijkt op een deel der wijven
die het hoofd dragen gehoornd zo zeer
dat het stinkt voor Onze Heer
en schijnt of het hen verwurgde
dan komt er een dwaas die onge
past op haar ziet en wordt zo gevangen
en van hart alzo ontdaan
dat hij ziel en lijf verliest
en de dood daarom kiest.
Van de c dat neemt hier een einde,
nu hoort wat ik van de d vindt.

In the KB KA 16 copy, Der Naturen Bloeme is preceded by a calendar for Utrecht with local saints’ days (but no Dutch Cisioianus). I should mention that KB KA 16 includes an illustrated zodiac (though no crossbows), plus plenty of marginal whimsy, such as this horny rabbit:

…which is nice.

Here’s another Maerlant catoblepas in the British Library, also found by Ger Hungerink:

Conrad von Megenberg’s “Buch Der Natur”

The other well-known book derived from Thomas of Cantimpré’s De naturis rerum is Conrad von Megenberg’s “Buch der Natur”, which I and Koen Gheuens have both discussed on our respective blogs.

The main reference work for this is Ulrika Spyra’s book “Das ‘Buch der Natur’ Konrads von Megenberg”, a magisterial tome sitting next to me which I have already mentioned here a fair few times. The index references “Cathapleba”, but there’s also Spyra’s extraordinarily helpful “5.2.1 Synoptische Tabelle der Illustrationen in den Buch der Natur Handschriften” (p.382). From this (p.385), we learn that illustrations of the “cathaphleba” are to be found in 68rb of GW (Göttweig, Stiftsbibl., Cod. 389 rot), 83v of HD311 (Heidelberg, UB, Cpg 311), and 87v of M684 (Michelstadt, Nic.Matz-Bibl., Cod. D 684).

Firstly, Heidelberg UB Cpg311 (1455-1460), because it’s easy to get to. 🙂 However, the surprise here is that the drawing on 83v (reproduced as Abb 35 in Spyra) actually depicts a cockatrice rather than a catoblepas, so isn’t a lot of use to us:

This is copied faithfully in Nurnberg GNM Hs. 16538, fol. 50r (Spyra’s Abb. 47), which is hence also no use to us. 🙂

If anyone can find a copy of 68rb of Göttweig, Stiftsbibl., Cod. 389 rot, or of 87v of Michelstadt, Nic.Matz-Bibl., Cod. D 684, please let me know.

Spyra also mentions (pp.304-305) Olim Erbach, Graflich Erbach-Erbach und Wartenberg-Rothische Rentkammer, Cod. cart. ohne Signatur /Mscr. Nr 2. This has (she says) a Cathehaba on fol 50r.

Leonardo da Vinci on the Catoblepas

Leonardo briefly mentions the catoblepas in his Notebooks, though editors have noted that this derives from Pliny rather than from Aelianus:

CATOBLEPAS.

It is found in Ethiopia near to the source Nigricapo. It is not a very large animal, is sluggish in all its parts, and its head is so large that it carries it with difficulty, in such wise that it always droops towards the ground; otherwise it would be a great pest to man, for any one on whom it fixes its eyes dies immediately.

Marcilio Ficino on the Catoblepas

I found this quotation on p.84 here:

‘Are you surprised that the body of one man is contaminated by the rational soul of another? But you are not surprised that one soul is harmed by another when we gulp down alien vices from the company we keep. You are not surprised that your body is easily infected with disease by the vapor of another body as is obviously the case with consumption, epidemy, leprosy, the itch, dysentery, pleurisy, and conjunctivitis. Among the western Ethiopians purportedly lived beasts called the catoblepas that would kill men simply by looking at them (…), so effective is the power in the vapors of [their] eyes (…). Such is the power of the imagination and especially when the vapors of the eyes are subject to the emotions of the soul’

Ficino, TP, XIII, 4; Allen, IV, 195-197: Ficino, De vita III, XVI; K&C, 325.

John Jonston (1614)

Skipping past the 16th century (for now), once we get to the 17th century interest in the catoblepas somewhat wanes. Of the two famous 17th century drawings, the first was from John Jonston, which depicts something much closer to the gnu or wildebeest, which was (almost certainly) the source of the original description many centuries previously:

This was from John Johnston’s Historia naturalis de quadrupedibus, Amsterdam 1614.

Edward Topsell (1607)

Finally, Edward Topsell’s description of the Catoblepas in his (1607) Historie of foure-footed beastes (which was basically an English translation of Conrad Gessner’s epic 1551-1558 “Historia animalium“) was reproduced in John Swan’s 1643 “Speculum Mundi”, p.649:

The Gorgon or Catoblepas is for the most part bred in Lybia and Hesperia. It is a fearfull and terrible beast to look upon, it hath eye-lids thick and high, eyes not very great, but fiery and as it were of a bloudie colour. He never useth to look directly forward, nor upward, but always down to the earth; and from his crown to his nose he hath a long hanging mane, by reason whereof his body all over as if it were full of scales. As for his meat, it is deadly and poison full herbs; and if at any time this strange beast shall see a Bull or other creature whereof he is afraid, he presently causeth his mane to stand upright, and gaping, wide he sendeth forth a horrible filthy breath, which infecteth and poysoneth the aire over his head and about him, insomuch that such creatures as draw in the breath of that aire, are grievously afflicted, and losing both voice and fight, they fall into deadly convulsions.

Topsell’s drawing / engraving looks like this:

So… What To Make Of All This?

It is, alas, a complicated picture. If there is a common thread to be had, it is that nobody prior to John Johnston seems to have had the faintest idea of what it was they were drawing. Catoblepas get rendered as cockatrices, catty things, doggy things, odd blue things, whatever.

The one detail that got Ger Hungerink most excited was the apparent visual parallel between the Voynich Manuscript’s scaly ‘armadillo’ and Topsell’s scaly catoblepas. But at the same time, I should immediately caution that commentators on Topsell usually conclude that Topsell got confused in his translation, and so merged Gessner’s catoblepas with Gessner’s gorgon.

If you want to read Gessner’s chapter on the catoblepas, it is online here (pp.137-139), though there is no drawing or artwork illustrating it (and the chapter swiftly moves on to discuss the Gorgon). But really, unless someone can dig up a sixteenth century catoblepas print that Topsell could well have referred to, I’m currently not at all sure that we can, on the visual evidence we have so far, trace any kind of viable copying path from any of the Cantimpre versions all the way through to Topsell’s scaly catoblepas.

However, there are still many missing mss above, and there are also two sets of entirely different sources which I still need to go through properly, which I’ll have to cover in a separate post (because this one, I think it’s fair to say, has ended up somewhat out of control). So there’s a little way to go yet…

Jockey J. J. Kean, update…

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As you’d expect, I’ve continued trying to find out more about the South Australian jockey J. J. Kean, who I wondered might be the same as the South Australian bookmaker / bookmaker’s clerk John Joseph Keane.

The nice people at the Australian Racing Museum (a tip of the padded jockey hat to Alison Raaymakers) very kindly had a look for me, but weren’t able to find any historical jockey index card, nor any reference to him in the ARM collection records. And because the various volumes of the Australasian Turf Register would only really give a list of races he was involved in (much of which I already had from Trove), that angle wasn’t likely to yield any result.

So, it was – as has so often been the case – back to Trove for a fresh trawl through the papers. This time, I took a different tack, by restricting my search solely to mentions of Kean / Keane in the Adelaide Sport. And, I’m pleased to say, I found a lot more stuff than before…

The Adelaide Sport on Kean

Might Kean have been a great Australian jockey? The writer of the Cheltenham Comment column in the 24 Dec 1919 Adelaide Sport didn’t think so, and was indeed less than complimentary about him:

I’m waiting for McGahan to put up a jockey on Warcast, when it may be a case of look out! Last two starts Kean has been on top, and backers have been a bit shy. Perhaps he will try to slip in with this slather-and-whack rider with the chance of a good dividend, or he may wait and put up a jockey.

It’s also possible that Kean was a drinker, as per the 31 Aug 1923 Adelaide Sport, depending on what you think “indisposition” means:

Both F. Cameron and J. Kean were absent from the tracks on Thursday morning on account of indisposition, and it is just possible that Clarrie Northway will have to look elsewhere for riders for his candidates at Murray Bridge to-morrow.

Adelaide Sport 14 Mar 1924 shows Kean still riding St. Ality for Clarrie Northway (including a nice photo!). And the breakthrough here being that this shows that he was known as Jim Kean:

St. Ality’s trainer, Clarrie Northway, has not experienced much luck for some time, but his ability has never been doubted. His faith in the St. Spasa gelding, who is only a four-year-old, was vindicated on Saturday. If one of his charges fails to come up to standard on the flat, Northway has little hesitation in popping him over the sticks, and he also believes in giving chances to his own boys.

Jim Kean is not one of those reckoned as “fashionable” horsemen, but no fault could be found with the dashing manner in which he handled St. Ality.

[…]

St Ality’s pilot, Jim Kean, also had the mount on Miss Nethey, and the Macigwyn mare, who was down nearly a stone compared with her impost when Pistoleno downed her at Gawler, hung on pretty tenaciously to gain second money.

Caption: “ST ALITY RETURNING TO SCALE AFTER WINNING THE HURDLE RACE AT CHELTENHAM LAST SATURDAY, WITH J. KEAN IN THE SADDLE.
W. DICK “SPORT” PHOTO.1″

Adelaide Sport 21 Mar 1924 continues in the same vein:

Jim Kean rode a well-judged race on St. Ality at the Amateur Meeting, but the same could hardly be said of his effort on the gelding last Saturday. Had he waited for another three or four furlongs to be put past before attempting to hit the front, St. Ality would have been either first or second, instead of only third.

Incidentally, there’s a nice description of Northway’s “commodious racing stables” (and cockatoo rather than a guard-dog) here.

Kean was involved in an incident in 1932, but by now he was working for Victoria Park trainer J. C. Neate:

UNTRIED GELDING DESTROYED.
Andrewella, a five-year-old bay gelding by Bangonie from Floundress, which was attached to stables of the Victoria Park mentor, J. C. Neate, came to an untimely end on Thursday morning.
While working on the training track he dislodged his rider, J. Kean, and then galloped through the training enclosure into Wakefield Street where he collided with a passing motor. As a result of the impact he sustained severe injuries to his off hind leg which necessitated his destruction.
His trainer had hopes of the Bangonie gelding turning out a successful performer.
Andrewella was owned by Mr. Ern Hoffrichter, of Denial Bay.

By 11 Oct 1934, Kean was still riding at Tailem Bend:

[…] Mr. H. W. Reichstein saddling up the veteran, Gold Metal, and Miss Paruna, while Sam Saunders was represented by Lady Devon. Both are well-known on the Murray circuit, and Jim Keane (rider of Lady Devon) is also becoming an institution up that way.

And Finally, It All Comes Together…

Just when I thought I had exhausted this whole line of research, I found a man who I think can only be the same person.In January 1949 (i.e. just too late to be the Somerton Man) Jim Kean was an Adelaide strapper, accompanying thoroughbred Royal Gem to America. If you can’t tell from the picture (and there were plenty of them in the press), Royal Gem is on the left and Jim Kean is on the right:

Hence I think this is probably the finishing post for this particular research thread: “J. J. Kean” the young jockey became Adelaide strapper Jim Kean, but it seems highly likely that he was a different person to “John Joseph Keane” (the bookmaker / bookmaker’s clerk). And so my search for the latter still goes on.

Incidentally, there is a wonderful irony to this, in that because Jim Kean was an Adelaide strapper for the thoroughbred Royal Gem in January 1949, there was surely a good chance Kean took Royal Gem for an early morning run on Somerton Beach on 1st December 1948. So I may not have found the Somerton Man here, but I may instead have found one of the very first people to see him dead on the beach. And what are the chances of that?

Hollow River Cipher update: Île Saint-Jean, Naufrage, League…

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Long-suffering Cipher Mysteries readers will no doubt recall various recent posts here about the Hollow River Cipher. Though I had a lot of fun decrypting the word “TREASURE” (that’s something that’s not going to happen to many cipher people, let’s face it), it then turned out that I wasn’t actually the first person to decrypt it. Furthermore, it may well be that some (or indeed all) of the stories around the cryptogram are concocted faux histories.

However, much as with the Beale Ciphers, even if I happen to heartily distrust all the nonsense layered on top of it, I don’t (yet) see any reason to doubt the cipher itself.

Anyway, there’s a particularly interesting word in the plaintext that needs a bit of context in order that it can be understood properly: NAUFRAGE.

Île Saint-Jean – 17th Century

For the Mi’kmaq people, the island was Epekwitk, “Cradle on the waves”. The first Europeans to the island were the French (Cartier briefly visited it in 1534): though Champlain mentioned it in 1603, it didn’t appear on his 1604 map. Even in Champlain’s 1612 map it was little more than a speck, but by the time of his 1632 map it was the proper size, shape and named “l’Ile Saint-Jean”. In HHGTTG terms, “Mostly Harmless”, one might say. 😉

Through the 17th Century, the island was owned (among a number of others) by Nicolas Denys, “La Grande Barbe”, who was a famous entrepreneur and merchant-industrialist. However, his interest was more in fishing rather than establishing any kind of colony. All the same, Denys was more than a little put out when in 1663, Sieur François Doublet was given the island, in return for paying an annual rent to la Compagnie de la Nouvelle-France. However, when Doublet died not long after, his plans to colonise the island fell to pieces. A similar attempt (by Gabriel Gautier) to establish a fishing presence on the island in 1686 also came to naught, despite several expensive attempts.

Île Saint-Jean – 1700-1763

The Treaty of Utrecht in 1713 left the island as a French possession, but attempts to colonize it failed, according to Thomas Caulfield in a letter of 16th May 1716. However, the first reasonably successful colonization began around 1719, when a group of settlers were shipwrecked on the North-East coast, at a place subsequently called “Naufrage” (‘shipwreck’). A 1721 letter by De la Ronde mentioned twenty families settled at port Lajoie, and ten more at Tranchemontagne (South Lake), Saint-Pierre (St Peter’s) and Tracadie.

From that starting point, the population of Île Saint-Jean grew as the century proceeded. However, both the British and French forces were fighting for control over the wider area. Following the Siege of Louisburg (1745) [Louisburg was the main town of Île Royal, Cape Breton Island] by New Englander forces, the population of Île Royal was forcibly deported to Europe, though the settlers on Île Saint-Jean (now called Saint John’s Island) was left in place.

But with the Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle in 1748, both Île Royal and Île Saint-Jean were returned to the French, in return for Madras and France’s withdrawal from the Low Countries. Claude-Élisabeth Denys de Bonaventure returned to Île Saint-Jean in 1749 with a thousand new settlers, all hoping for a fresh start.

However, 1749 was when Father Le Loutre’s War began: this was a long process whereby the British governors of Canadian provinces would make life progressively closer to intolerable for French settlers. This led to a steady flow of disenchanted settlers moving from the mainland to the safer haven of Île Saint-Jean. This process then peaked in 1755, with mass expulsions of Acadian settlers, many of whom ended up on Île Saint-Jean as well.

The end-game arrived in 1758, when Lieutenant-Colonel Andrew Rollo (the 5th Lord Rollo, aristocracy trivia fans) was sent with 500 troops to secure the island, and to then deport everyone on it to Europe. About 1200 of these deportees died aboard those transport ships: it was a miserable end to what had become a horrible era.

In 1763, the island – now firmly under British control – had its name changed to Prince Edward Island, which is what it has stayed ever since. (Though personally, I have a bit of a soft spot for Epekwitk.)

Naufrage, Revisited

If we go back to the Hollow River Cipher, the date at the top places it firmly at the time of the main French colonization, when the island was Île Saint-Jean:

F R E N C H   S L O O P   L ['] A I [G] L E    [= Most likely plaintext]
G U L F   S T   L A W R E N [C] E   M A Y 10, 1738

The cipher author also tells us the specific place he’s interested in:

L E A G U E  W E S T  N A U F R A G E

From what we now know, ‘naufrage’ isn’t (as I first thought) a shipwreck, but is actually the place Naufrage (i.e. named after the 1719 shipwreck).

Naufrage is mentioned in a 1752 census, which was turned into a map for a 2008 exhibition at the Acadian Museum (online here):

The same name persisted (Anglicized as “Ship Wreck Point”) in a 1775 map:

Perhaps most interestingly, Étang du Naufrage is mentioned in a 1760 book by Thomas Pichon with a horrendously long title, which describes a picturesque 1752 journey around Île Saint-Jean that the author had taken:

Nous continuâmes notre route en côtoyant la mer pendant six lieues jusqu’à l’étang du naufrage. Cette côte, quoi qu’assés unie, ne presente à la vûe que desert où le feu a passé, et plus avant les terres sont couvertes de bois franc. Un seul habitant que nous trouvâmes, nous assura que les terres des environs de l’êtang sont très bonnes, aisées à cultiver, et que tout y vient en abondance. Il nous en donna une preuve qui nous fit plaisir, c’étoit le peu de froment qu’il avoit eu la faculté de semer cette année là; effectivement rien n’étoit fi beau que ses épics qui étoient plus gros, plus longs et mieux garnis que ceux d’Europe.

Ce fut à l’occasion d’un naufrage qu’un batiment François fit sur cette côte, qu’on a donné à l’étang le nom d’Etang du naufrage. Quelques passagers, après que le vaisseau se fut perdu à quatre lieues en mer, se sauverent sur des débris et furent les premiers qui s’établirent au havre Saint Pierre. Au reste l’étang s’enfonce un quart de lieue dans les terres au sud-ouest. Sa largeur à son extremité est d’une portée de canon de quatre livres de balle. Il s’y décharge un grand ruisseau qui ne tarit jamais, parce qu’il est entretenu par deux sources qu’on trouve à deux lieues et demie dans les terres d’ouest sud-ouest. Ce ruisseau peut fournir assés d’eau, presqu’en tous tems et malgré les gelées à plusieurs moulins qu’on y a construit.

La côte depuis le havre de la fortune jusqu’à celui de Saint Pierre où nous arrivâmes le 14 Aoust après avoir encore côtoyé pendant six lieues depuis l’étang, […]

Translated roughly (by me, so expect fluency rather than accuracy):

We continued on our journey, coasting six more leagues around the island to the étang du naufrage. This place […] looked like the empty space you get after fire has cleared it, and beyond that the lands are covered with hardwood. One inhabitant whom we found assured us that the lands around the étang are very good, easy to cultivate, and that everything is in abundance. As proof, he showed us a little wheat he had been able to sow that year; indeed, nothing was as beautiful as its ears, which were larger, longer, and better than those of Europe.

It was on the occasion of a French shipwreck on this coast that the étang was given the name of étang du naufrage. Some passengers who had clung to the debris after their ship had been lost four leagues out to sea, ended up becoming the first settlers at St. Peter’s Harbour. The étang itself extends a quarter of a league into the lands to the southwest. At its widest, its width is the range of a four pound cannonball. A large brook discharges into there: this never runs dry because it is maintained by two springs, which are found two and a half leagues west-southwest. This brook provides a water supply to several mills that were built there, almost at all times and despite the frosts.

The coast from le havre de la fortune to that of St. Peter where we arrived on 14 August after having travelled for six leagues from the étang, […]

“League West Naufrage”…

So: now that we know exactly where Naufrage is, we also know that the cipher author is directing us to go one league west from there. But… how far is a league?

This is, of course, one of those niggly questions that gets historians sighing heavily, because different people at different times and different places had different answers.

For an Englishman of the 18th Century, a league on land was three miles, while a league at sea was three nautical miles (~3.4 miles). But I have to also point out that our cipher author was on a French ship, and a French league (lieue de Paris) was standardized in 1674 as 2000 toises (~2.4 miles), and then in 1737 (the year before the cipher’s date) as 2200 toises (~2.66 miles).

Yet even the yardstick (leaguestick?) we have in Pichon’s account – that it is six (presumably French?) leagues from Naufrage to Saint Peter’s Bay, which is about 24 miles / 36 kilometers by sea (because you have to double back on yourself) – isn’t much help, because it would give a figure of 4 miles per league. So unless the geography around Saint Peter’s Bay has changed much in the last couple of centuries, Pichon’s ability to estimate distances in leagues seems to have not been as good as he imagined.

Adding all these classes of inaccuracy together, it seems likely to me that the least and most ‘one league’ could be in practice are about 2 miles and 4.5 miles respectively. So: how does this stack up with the (now widely presumed) identification of the same location with the Hollow River?

The location given for Hollow River by the local government is 46°28’00.0″N 62°30’00.0″W . According to Google Maps, this runs alongside the modern Swallow Point Road, and its mouth is about 6.8km (4.2 miles) from the mouth of the Naufrage étang. So Hollow River would seem at first to be a reasonable guess.

If we look at MapCarta’s Hollow River page, we can see two modern candidate rivers – Hollow River and Fox River, which I’ve highlighted here in red and blue respectively:

Now, remembering that the cipher says…

ONE HUNDRED AND ELEVEN YDS UP SMALL STREAM

…which is this small stream to be, Hollow River (6.8 km along from Naufrage) or Fox River (5.6km along)? I have to say that Fox River, if it was around in 1738, would seem to be a better candidate than Hollow River. And there’s even Cow River, which is a mere 2.2km along from Naufrage. So let’s look more closely at the 1775 map:

Here, we can see a decent-sized stream heading South from just below the ‘n’ of “Short Point”, marked as being ~3.5 miles (5.6km) from the mouth of the Naufrage étang, which I think lines up exactly with the modern Fox River. The next reasonable size stream along would seem to be the slightly smaller-looking stream to the right of “Beaver Point”, but this would seem to be about 5.5 miles (8.8km).

So it would seem from this historical detective work (a) that Hollow River didn’t even properly exist in 1775, (b) that calling it the Hollow River Cipher may well have been based on a misidentification from a century ago, and (c) that the stream we should be actually interested in is the modern Fox River, which appears to be the first reasonable size stream about a league west of Naufrage on the 1775 map.

“ONE HUNDRED AND ELEVEN YARDS”?

At this point I should add that 111 yards is pretty close to 50 toises (French fathoms, i.e. 2.131 yards x 50 = 106.5 yards), so I’m guessing that the cipher author heard the French sailors talking about going “cinquante toises” down the “petit ruisseau”.

Where would 111 yards down the Fox River take us? If we have a look in Google Maps, the satellite image shows us where (I’m pretty sure) the Fox River is (the first white dot down marks 100m or so from the end, which is pretty close to 50 toises):

The rest you can figure out, I’m sure. 🙂

Finally: why take treasure up a small river, you may ask? The answer would seem to be painfully obvious: that those wanting to conceal it would want to carry it as far inland on a small boat as they easily could.

In that respect, these people would seem to be brothers-in-(yard)arms to Bernardin Nageon de l’Estang (operating at the same time, though in a different ocean entirely), who wrote that he had hauled his treasure up a small creek, also presumably in a small boat. Wouldn’t it be nice if something were still there, in both cases? Not hugely likely, for sure, but a nice thing to dream about all the same.

PS: for more on the history of Île Saint-Jean in French, I found the following two articles (this one and this other one) very helpful indeed.

Update: 1752 Census entry

While looking (unsuccessfully) for decent French maps of the island, I found a nice webpage containing a detailed 1752 census of Île Saint-Jean, The census taker (Sieur de la Roque) travelled round the island on land. (The French original can be found here.) It may well be that he travelled with Thomas Pichon, because they both seem to have had the same conversation with the (unnamed) settler at Naufrage.

At Pointe de l’Est:

Next, after making another two leagues, we doubled Pointe de l’Est. This point had been reduced to a wilderness by a fire which has passed through this section, and the settlers have established themselves at a distance of two leagues from the point on the north side. The land upon which the people have settled is of the best for cultivation. Nevertheless they have sown no seed here, and the truth is that they lack the seed to sow, and if the King does not make them a gift or a loan of seed so that they can sow it next spring they will find it impossible to maintain themselves, being today at the last stage of poverty through the great mortality among their live stock.

He then moved on to Naufrage:

We left on the 13th and took the route for l’Etang du Noffrage, following the sea shore continually for the six leagues at which the distance from the Post at Pointe de l’Est to l’Etang du Noffrage is estimated. In this distance we met with nothing worthy of notice. The land is a desert owing to the occurance of the fire, but a short distance inland the country is covered with hardwood and the soil was good for the production of all kinds of grain and roots; everything coming up in abundance. Owing to the lack of seed grain the settler here was unable to seed his land this year, but the small quantity of wheat which he was able to sow is amongst the finest in the Island. The ears are long, large, and well filled. The Etang du Noffrage runs a quarter of a league inland to the south-west. The breadth averages 80 toises. At the extremity of the étang, a long brook, which never dries up, discharges its water. This brook is supplied from two large springs lying at a distance of two leagues and a half inland to the west-south-west. The brook contains sufficient water to run flour and saw mills, but as regards the latter they are considered useless as there is no timber suitable for sawing, all the hardwood, growing in the surrounding district being good, at best for the building of boats. We left on the 14th for St. Pierre du Nord. We counted the distance between the two points as six leagues by the road. We saw nothing on the way that calls for a description.

Update #2: Île Saint-Jean Forestry

Anyone who wants a list of sources of pre-1760 writing on Île Saint-Jean would be well advised to look at “Early Descriptions of the Forests of Prince Edward Island: A Source Book” by Douglas Sobey. “Part I: The French Period – 1534-1758” is online here.

Gerard Cheshire, Star Wars, space teapots, and Royal Roads…

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Gerard Cheshire’s rehashed 2017 Voynich theory has been through a full media life-cycle this week. Though the newspapers happily collaborated in an emergency Caesarean (ah, it’s a girl), they then swiftly pulled the plug (it’s for the best, poor thing), with the last (w)rites surely not far behind.

Though you might now expect Cheshire to fade away, his optimistic smile still persists. This is because he sees criticisms of his theory as the mechanism by which the self-appointed / self-important Voynich elite protects both itself and the world from his powerful, destabilizing truths.

The Magic Trick

This is, of course, an all-too familiar modern template. Once Claim X lands on our lap (Brexit, Trump, whatever), we find ourselves pressed to decide whether it is (a) outrageous, bare-faced, self-deluding nonsense on a grand scale, where the evidence is twisted to tell a story that appeals to base prejudices, or (b) a heroic outsider movement battling the Establishment, and whose noble cause is simply to Get The Truth Out To The People.

In Star Wars terms, the (small-c) conservative cadre of existing Voynich researchers is thus The Empire, while Cheshire is plucky Luke Skywalker, trying to destroy the collectively entrenched Imperial position: all of which Mustafarian metaphoricity probably makes me Darth Vader. Which is nice.

(It’s a poster you can’t buy, apparently.)

The thing we’re not supposed to notice is the headily polarized either-or-ness of it all (are you Empire or Alliance? Brexiteer or Remainer? Coke or Pepsi? etc). This modern magic trick works by presenting us with two crazy extremes that we somehow have to choose between: in Gerard Cheshire’s case, he presents us with a binary choice between his complex (yet oddly erudite-sounding) Voynich theory and siding with the same self-satisfied Voynich establishment at which he sticks two punky fingers up.

Just as with Coke vs Pepsi, this is a fake two-way choice, particularly given that drinking your own urine might be a marginally healthier third option. Allegedly.

Russell’s Teapot

Actually, this binary mode of presentation has been a mainstay of nutty Voynich theorists for most of the last decade. “If you so-called Voynich experts” (the rant goes) “can’t disprove my theory, then that proves not only that I’m right, but also that you don’t know a damn thing about the Voynich.”

It’s easy, when stripped down and taken so starkly out of context, to see what a hugely fallacious argument this really is, like an epistemological parody of Nietzsche: that which does not destroy my theory makes it True.

This is the burden of disproof, that Bertrand Russell famously likened to claims for an impossibly unobservable teapot orbiting in space. He wrote:

“If I were to suggest that between the Earth and Mars there is a china teapot revolving about the sun in an elliptical orbit, nobody would be able to disprove my assertion provided I were careful to add that the teapot is too small to be revealed even by our most powerful telescopes.”

In space, no-one can hear you ask for cream.

My point here is that whereas in the Olden Days Voynich theorists dished up their shitty theories with a bodyguard of flies (making it almost impossible not to notice which parts really stank), once modern Voynich theorists have done a ten-minute pre-flight check with Wikipedia, they’re ready to launch their theory into a suitably hard-to-reach elliptic orbit.

As a consequence, it has become almost impossible to disprove nutty Voynich theories: all the Voynich theorist has to do is to finesse their story ever-so slightly, turning the impossible back into the highly improbable. Ha! they cry (and some do indeed say ‘Ha!’ at this point), “your efforts to absolutely disprove my theory have now failed, so I must be correct“. And onwards their theory merrily spins, in its far distant elliptical orbit.

Even a Voynich theory as outrageously nonsensical as the Wilfrid-Voynich-faked-it theory (the one that Richard SantaColoma has been peddling for a decade or so) is hard to absolutely disprove. The closest I’ve got is by getting Richard to admit that for his theory to be true, the quire numbers must have been added to the vellum during the 15th century. Even though this makes no codicological sense at all (why give written instructions to a binder about how you want your blank quires to be bound?), who can prove definitively to Richard that this scenario is impossible, rather than merely utterly improbable? And so it goes ever on.

Royal Roads

Nutty theorists also typically believe that it is their coruscant intuition that has given them a shortcut to the hard-for-mere-mortals-to-believe answer: and that it is thus for other (less brilliant but perhaps more meticulous) plodding souls to do the messy follow-on business of joining the evidential start dots to their insightful end dots.

This was particularly true of Nicholas Gibbs’ Voynich theory: this was the one that popped up in in the TLS a while back. (Isn’t now about the time Gibb’s inevitable book describing his brilliant decryption should be appearing?) Gerard Cheshire similarly claimed to have made his giant intuitive leap to the Voynich’s answer in a mere fortnight.

The thing that is wrong with all of this is the idea that there is some kind of Royal Road that will carry you to a quick and easy mastery of the Voynich Manuscript’s secrets. It was Euclid, of course, who famously told the Egyptian ruler Ptolemy I Soter that “there is no Royal Road to geometry”: understanding the different aspects of the Voynich Manuscript before jumping to conclusions is arguably no less a challenge, and one which fewer people every year seem willing to take on.

Daft Ada

And that’s where we are, really: surrounded by Voynich wannabe theorists who fail to do the work, assume the transcriptions are perfect (they’re not), jump oh-so-rapidly to conclusions, use Wikipedia to avoid outright disproof, and then present their nonsensical theory (often to the media) as if it is some kind of inspiring protest vote against existing theorists’ supposed hegemony. Riiiiight.

Me? I’m not Darth Vader, nor even Daft Ada. What kills these stupid Voynich theories isn’t my Sith death grip, but their own lack of a grip on the basic facts. In Gerard Cheshire’s case, he concocts an entire dysenteric proto-language (i.e. one with no obvious grammar or rules), and a spurious timeline entirely at odds with just about everything else: and yet even with all those degrees of freedom to play with, still none of what comes out makes a flicker of sense. What an abysmal waste of time.

And don’t get me started on peer review. Or indeed ‘Ricky Sheeger’… 🙁

Plougastel Inscription Photographs!

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Thanks to the kindness (and keen photographic eye) of Cipher Mysteries commenter Françoise who visited the Plougastel-Daoulas site just a few days ago, I’m delighted to pass you all her great set of photographs. As always, feel free to click on them to see a higher-resolution version.

Setting the Scene…

The Anse du Caro is on the Plougastel-Daoulas peninsula, opposite Brest (in Brittany).
The part of it we’re interested is a little bit around the bay from any houses.
The cliffs go quite sharply upwards here: you can see heaps of rock fragments at the base.
The particular carved rocks we’re interested in are (if I understand correctly) nestled in near the bottom of a cliff.

The Main Carved Rocks

I’ve included all the photos of the main carving. Make of them what you will.
Thanks very much, Françoise! 🙂
There’s not much more useful I can say at this point, so I’m going to let the photos do the talking for a bit. 🙂
You can clearly see that the tide rises up to cover these carvings, which might well suggest that this was not their original position.

“Anddin”

Curiously, there are a number of other carvings on adjacent rocks, which I suspect would need to be understood at the same time as the main rock.


This carving seems to say “ANDDIN”, albeit upside down, and with the last letter being the typical backwards N / Cyrillic I.
Same carving but without the legs in the corner.

“PRET”…?

This quite clearly seems to say “PRET”. Though the rock may well be too heavy to carry easily.
PRET again, slightly different angle.

The Boat…?


Maybe this is an upside-down boat, maybe it’s not. I’ll leave it to others to decide.

The Last Few Carvings

This final picture might be the most interesting one of the batch, because it seems to directly support the idea that the carvings were all originally made higher up the cliff, and that coastal erosion / geological activity has caused them to break up and fall down.


With this in mind, it seems likely to me that there may well be many more carvings at this site still waiting to be found, and that there was originally a higher-order structure connecting them all.

At to what that structure actually was / what it was for / who it was by / what language it was in, I still have no useful idea. But all the same, it’s pretty interesting, hmmm?

Thanks again, Françoise, you are a Cipher Mysteries star! 😉

The mysterious stone near Plougastel-Daoulas, continued…

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I mentioned this mysterious stone here a few days ago, since when the story has been picked up by many more news outlets, largely justifying the mairie‘s decision to put a 2000 euro price on its head, it would seem.

And so I, like probably many others, emailed through a filled-out form to say I’d like more information: and received a link to a 12MB PDF, which
contained mainly photos of the rock in question.

Société Archéologique du Finistère

It also contained a copy of what may well be the only time this stone has been discussed in some kind of journal or book. This was (as I suspected) the Bulletin of the Société Archéologique du Finistère, which has a long-running kind of ‘mop-up’ feature entitled “Monuments et objets d’art du Finistère. Études, découvertes, restaurations“, for small items that don’t quite merit a full article. I don’t know precisely which Bulletin this is, but from the page numbers visible in the copy (pp. 332 and 333), I’d guess it was the 1979 Bulletin (it certainly can’t be any earlier).

Here’s what it says:

PLOUGASTEL-DAOULAS
Anse du Caro

Une inscription énigmatique du XVIIIe siècle

                Après bien des hésitations, nous livrons le relevé d’une longue inscription gravée en creux sur des rochers au nord de l’anse du Caro, dans la presqu’île de Plougastel-Daoulas. Elle nous a été signalée en 1979 par Bernard Tanguy. Nous communiquons ce que nous avons pu en relever, dans l’espoir que quelque membre de la Société y exerce sa sagacité, afin que l’on puisse obtenir des éclaircissements, comme cela a été le cas pour l’inscription de Guengat (cf. supra).

                Les coordonnées de l’inscription du Caro, selon la carte I.G.N. au 1/25000, sont les suivantes : X : 098 00, Y : 094 15, soit à 500m, à vol d’oiseau, à l’ouest de village d’Illien-an-Traon. On peut, à marée basse, suivre la côte vers le nord en partant de l’anse du Caro, et repérer les rochers entre la pointe qui s’avance dans la mer et la falaise.

                Sommairement gravée en caractères dont la majorité est en capitales, il ne fait pas de doute q’elle est en langue bretonne. Vieille de deux siècles, le rocher sur laquelle on la lit s’est débité sous l’action des marées, plusieurs signes sont érodés et la surface de la pierre est éclatée par endroits.

My rough-and-ready translation:

An enigmatic inscription from the eighteenth century
After much hesitation on our part, here is a record of a long[-ish] carved inscription found on the rocks in the Plougastel-Daoulas peninsula, north of Anse du Caro. This was first reported to us by Bernard Tanguy in 1979. We hope that, by publishing here what we have been able to discover, some member of the Société will apply his or her sagacity to it, so that we can gain greater clarity, as indeed happened for the Guengat inscription (cf. supra).

The coordinates of the inscription du Caro, according to the 1/25000 scale I.G.N. [Institut Géographique National] map, are as follows: X: 098 00, Y: 094 15; this is 500m west of the village of Illien-an-Traon as the crow flies. If, at low tide, you follow the coast northwards along from Anse du Caro, you should be able to locate the rock between the tide-line and the cliff.

Looking at the lightly engraved in characters (of which the majority are capitals), there is surely no doubt that this is written in the Breton language. Two centuries on, however, the rock on which it was carved has been damaged by the action of the tides, several of its glyphs have been eroded away, while in places the surface of the stone is smashed up.

The First Transcription

We have two basic sources for the inscription: the version that appeared in the Bulletin (just after the above-translated text), and the hand-written version that appears in the mairie‘s PDF. Firstly, here’s the SAF version:

ROC AR B…
DRE AR GRIO SE EVELOH
AR VIRIONES BAOAVEL… R I
… GENBICEN DA BEN ESOA… S E
DIASBOANT…
…EKGES…
BO…FET
DAR
ASOMGAROPA
VARLAEOERIATQDAO
NELACIEOD – ET… F… AOMA
CVLESEDAREIDIMEVSMES
ARPRIGILOD1787
(coeur et croix) OBIIE: BRISBVILAR… FROIK… AL
…ALVOA ARBORSINET
CARCLONEPR ES (SAKI) ASONRES E I BEL
(ANNDDIN) VMS
… (ABAN) SDARANDOC (SAOU) ADREIRIO
(FAN) 1786 NEIS
… CL…
… DOS…
SARMIS – UT
177IMESO
EMGAR
DALOTOGREC
TRE: C-N

D’une autre main, la date de 1920…

All the same, I have to point that this SAF transcription isn’t really doing justice to the lettering on the rock. For a start, the first letter resembles a lower case ‘d’ more than a ‘D’; several of the letters seem to have backwards ‘N’ shapes; and so forth.

Even so, this first transcription was (without much doubt) done in good faith some years ago, and we must be aware that the process of cleaning it up and preparing it for public view in 2017-2019 may possibly have added a layer of interpretation to these carvings that wasn’t originally there.

As an aside, Bernard Tanguy is without doubt the Brittany historian who was for many years president of the SAF, so it is hardly a surprise that he chose to pass his discovery on to its members. He may well have also photographed this mysterious rock when he first encountered it, but I don’t know if this particular angle has been pursued by anyone.


Bernard Tanguy, (1940-2015) – photograph fromLe Telegramme, 2015

The Second Transcription

In the following version of the hand-transcription released by the mairie, I have rendered the back-to-front ‘N’ as the Cyrillic capital I (i.e. ‘И’), and the back-to-front ‘S’ as ‘Ƨ ‘ (the Unicode character 01A7), etc. All of which is not perfect, sure, but it’s perhaps tolerably close:

GROCAR
dREAR DIOƧEEVbIO
ARVRFOИEƧLAΘENEL
PEИ AbEИEИEƧΘ182E
GEИbICEИG
EKGE (left-facing crescent moon shape)
AZOMOARΘ PA ꙋCDOFET
dAROA
AIELAChEODCET DA AOMA
CVLESELDdA RE IdIMEVƧMEƧ
ARPRIGILOd17(cross on top of a heart)87
ObIIE bRIƧbVILA
ALVQ4AKbORSIV . T
OSCARCLOIVEPRE 2 . T
ZOИREZE
VAR
dARAИdOL
AdREIRI9
1786 ИE12

Scans of the Mysterious Rock

I’ll finish up by illustrating the above with some example scans cropped from the mairie‘s kindly-provided set, so you can perhaps get a better idea of what we’re up against here.

Enjoy!

The Perplexing Mystery of the Voynichese ‘Languages’…

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Where will the first proper Voynich research breakthrough come from? To my mind, there is a good chance that this will be made by someone taking a fresh look at the mystery of the Voynichese ‘languages’.

For even though the notion that Voynichese is a simple, regular language seems to be the default decryption starting point for just about every YouTube codebreaker on the planet (e.g. “it’s obviously proto-Breton with Urdu loanwords“, etc etc), it simply isn’t.

Rather, when you put Voynichese under the linguistic microscope, you see a series of different (but closely related) languages / writing systems. And whatever you think Voynichese is, having to account for multiple variants of that thing is bemusing, if not downright perplexing.

The most fundamental challenge, then, that these variants present us is this: can we work out how these variants relate to each other? Furthermore, can work out how a letter / word / sentence written in one variant would be written in another? In short, can we somehow normalize all the Voynich Manuscript’s languages relative to each other, to step towards a single, regular system underlying them all?

For me, reaching even part of the way towards doing this would be perhaps the most significant Voynich research achievement yet.

The ‘Language’ Landscape…

It was top American cryptologist Captain Prescott Currier back in the 1970s who first inferred the presence of multiple Voynichese ‘languages’. He famously categorised Voynichese pages as having been written in either an ‘A’ language variant (now known as “Currier A”) or a ‘B’ language variant (A.K.A. “Currier B”). This was motivated by various statistical features of the text that he observed clustering together in A pages and B pages respectively. What is more, Currier’s A/B clustering largely holds true not only for both the pages on any given folio (i.e. recto and verso), but also for all the folios / panels on a single bifolio (or trifolio, etc).

Though Currier’s A/B division is a very useful categorisation tool, it remains somewhat problematic as an absolute measure, for (as Rene Zandbergen likes to point out) a few intermediate pages have both Currier A and Currier B features simultaneously. Rene points especially to the foldout folios for this: he says that Currier’s initial assessment was drawn from the herbal pages (which I think is very probably true), and that these super-wide pages behave a little differently.

Moreover, the variations of the languages used in different sections (e.g. “Herbal A”) present yet further dialect-like differences to be accounted for. Inferring from this that these differences ‘must therefore’ relate to the pages’ semantic content would be a convenient way of explaining them away: but there is as yet no evidence to support that conclusion. For now, these section clusters need to be handled with statistical white gloves too.

We additionally have codicological evidence that suggests that some sections of the manuscript were originally formed of pairs of gatherings (e.g. Q13 was Q13A + Q13B, Q20 was Q20A + Q20B), but nobody (as far as I know) has as yet gone looking for Voynichese text statistics that might support or refute these proposed divisions.

And on top of that, there is what has come to be called as ‘labelese’, i.e. the disjointed one-word-at-a-time text found on pages with ‘labels’ attached to parts of diagrams (e.g. the Astrological / Zodiac section). Here again, some people like to infer that it ‘must somehow be’ the semantic content of these labels that affects the way Voynichese works: but there is no evidence to support that conclusion, beyond wanting it to be true for an easy life. 😉

In summary, what we observe in Voynichese is a lot of language-like variation going on at a number of levels. In my opinion, we should stop trying to explain away these variations in terms of speculative concepts (e.g. ‘semantic differences’ or ‘labels’), and start instead to look at the basic statistical patterns that each text cluster presents, and use those results as our starting point moving forward.

Unsurprisingly, this is what the next section does. 🙂

A/B Observations…

It’s worth reprising Currier’s observations (which we will turn into actual statistical evidence shortly). He wrote (transcribed on Rene’s site):

(a) Final ‘dy’ is very high in Language ‘B’; almost non-existent in Language ‘A.’

(b) The symbol groups ‘chol’ and ‘chor’ are very high in ‘A’ and often occur repeated; low in ‘B’.

(c) The symbol groups ‘chain’ and ‘chaiin’ rarely occur in ‘B’; medium frequency in ‘A.’

(d) Initial ‘chot’ high in ‘A’; rare in ‘B.’

(e) Initial ‘cTh’ very high in ‘A’; very low in ‘B.’

(f) ‘Unattached’ finals scattered throughout Language ‘B’ texts in considerable profusion; generally much less noticeable in Language ‘A.’

Rene Zandbergen adds the following observations:

The very frequent character combination ‘ed’ is almost entirely non-existent in all A-language pages.

The very common character combination ‘qo’ is almost completely absent in the zodiac pages and the rosettes page, but appears everywhere else.

The common character combination ‘cho’ does not appear in the biological pages (and the rosettes page), but it does in other B-language pages.

Marco Ponzi further added:

The ‘cluster’ aiin has more or less the same frequency in A and B, but as a stand-alone word it is about three times as frequent in B than in A.

Prescott Currier also noted a number of striking language oddities in the ‘Biological B’ section:

This ‘word-final effect’ first became evident in a study of the Biol. B index wherein it was noted that the final symbol of ‘words’ preceding ‘words’ with an initial ‘qo’ was restricted pretty largely to ‘y’; and that initial ‘ch, Sh’ was preceded much more frequently than expected by finals of the ‘iin’ series and the ‘l’ series. Additionally, ‘words’ with initial ‘ch, Sh’ occur in line-initial position far less frequently than expected, which perhaps might be construed as being preceded by an ‘initial nil.’

This phenomenon occurs in other sections of the Manuscript, especially in those ‘written’ in Language B, but in no case with quite the same definity as in Biological B. Language A texts are fairly close to expected in this respect.

My own contribution to this line of inquiry has been to point out that word-initial ‘l-‘ is a very strong feature of B pages (particularly Q13). Emma May Smith similarly posted on the various “l + gallows” digraphs:

It should also be noted that <lk> is mostly a feature of the Currier B language. It is roughly twenty times less common on A pages than B pages.

The presence of digraphs composed of <l> and other gallows characters is less secure. The string <lt> occurs 107 times, <lp> occurs 40 times, and <lf> occurs 39 times. Although <lf> is the least of the three its rate is actually rather great, being nearly 8% of all <f> occurrences, approaching the 10% for <lk> of all <k>. Even so, these number are still small and could easily be overlooked if not for <lk>.

Like <lk>, <lt, lp, lf> all appear at the beginning of words, and mostly occur in Currier B. They seem to work in the same way, even if less common.

All in all, it seems to me that there are probably more than twenty Voynichese features that display a statistically significant difference between Currier A pages and Currier B pages. It also seems that many of these features have different relative frequencies between different clusters (e.g. Herbal A) and/or sections (e.g. Q13).

There is therefore plenty of work to be done here!

List of Distinctive Behaviours

Even though we have excellent transcriptions (EVA and otherwise), I think we’re collectively missing a foundational piece of Post-Currier empirical analysis here: a list of distinctive behaviours present and absent in sections of the Voynich Manuscript. This would extend Prescott Currier’s list to include many more features (such as the use of the EVA ‘x’ glyph, etc) that have been flagged up as distinctive in some way by researchers over the years, though with less of a pure A/B focus. Here is a preliminary list (based largely on the above), which I’m more than happy to extend with additional ones put forward in comments here or elsewhere:

-dyB
[chol]A
[chor]A
[chol.chol]A
[chor.chor]A
[chain]A
[chain]A
chot-A
cth-A
edB
[ar]B
qo-Absent in rosette
and zodiac pages
choAbsent in rosette
and Bio pages
cho*Rare in Q13
[aiin]Common in B as
standalone word
l-B
r-B, particularly
Q13 and Q20
lkB
lt-B
lp-B
lf-B
alyf58
xQ20
-m not at line-endBifolios f3-f6
& f17-f24

My core beliefs here are (a) that Voynichese will turn out to be fundamentally rational (if perhaps a bit strange); (b) that behaviours in one section will somehow rationally map to behaviours in many (if not all) different sections; and (c) that Voynichese will turn out to have an underlying story / evolution / growth path that we can reconstruct.

“Le mystère Champollion à Plougastel-Daoulas”…

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(Thanks very much to VViews for passing this story my way, much appreciated!) The original French article appeared in Le Télégramme, though behind a paywall (boo!). So here’s my free-and-easy English translation:

It is a rock that has intrigued Michel Paugam, councillor of Plougastel (29) for several years. In order to solve its mystery, the municipality is this month launching a national call for applications.

On a rock not far from Anse du Caro in Plougastel-Daoulas in Brittany is carved (what looks like) a message that begins “grocar drear diozeevbio …“, followed on by other strange writings. This text is further embellished with no-less-enigmatic drawings: a heart linked to a cross that might evoke the Chouans of the Vendée stranded in the peninsula, a sailboat close to the sea licking the base of the engraved rock at high tide…

Of the numbers on the rock, only two seem to be obviously decryptable: 1786 and 1787. These correspond to the construction years of the nearby Fort du Corbeau and of other batteries that protect the harbour. But that’s all! So far, no satisfactory translation has emerged, despite its having been shown to associations, organizations, and various brainy people. The only thing we can be certain of is that during the First World War, a Russian soldier in the garrison added the date of 1920 to the original message. Naturally, contacts were made with Russia, thinking that understanding Cyrillic might provide some answers: but once again, the riddle remained unanswered. The mystery is such that some have suggested calling it “le mystère Champollion à Plougastel-Daoulas” (in tribute to the Rosetta Stone).

Hence a national contest has now been launched to try to solve this enigma: the municipality has launched an appeal to linguists, historians, students, academics, enthusiasts and enthusiasts of all of l’Hexagone to finally understand the text and, thus, its history. Running until the end of November 2019, this “mystère Champollion” competition will allow entrants to submit their research in the form of reports to be analyzed by a jury composed, among others, of academics and a representative of the service départemental d’archéologie. A prize fund of € 2,000 will be distributed by the jury, though without the participants being able to claim any remuneration or compensation. To find out more, to learn about the terms of participation and the rules or to visit the site (or ask for photos), contact : [email protected]

Yes, I can already see the possible connection with the mysterious (and quite probably 18th century) rock carvings found in Mauritius. But let’s just start with getting better scans and see where we go from there, hein?

The late, great Frank Sidebottom has one last cryptic laugh…

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2010 marked the untimely death of Chris Sievey, the creator and performer of cult musical act Frank Sidebottom, prompting much sadness from friends and fans. One touching response was the genuinely charming statue erected in Timperley:

Chris’s death also prompted a great many people to step forward claiming to have been fans, even though they had never quite found the time in their busy schedules to go to one of his chaotic Frank Sidebottom gigs. But perhaps that’s the nature of silly cults.

Anyway, not many people know that Chris Sievey had originally created the (cranially) larger than life character to support his ZX Spectrum home computer game The Biz; or that Mrs Merton (Caroline Aherne) started out as Frank’s sidekick on Radio Timperley (though fans prefer his anatomically-correct hand-puppet Little Frank); or that an exhibition of the wonderfully subversive drawings Chris drew his whole life appeared at the Chelsea Space Gallery in 2007; or that his whole (so-called) ‘adult’ life was like a kind of hand-to-mouth performance art show; or that he died penniless.

No, they just remember his (pre-Frank) band The Freshies and its hit single “I’m in Love with the Girl on the Manchester Virgin Megastore Checkout Desk”. Which sounds like this:

Until recently, the biggest Frank Sidebottom news was the release of the Kickstarter-funded film-length documentary “Being Frank”, which is currently (April 2019) playing in various art cinema venues around the UK. (Excellent reviews, by the way.) Or the “Frank Sidebottom’s Bobbins Bitter” and “Frank Sidebottom’s Timperley Rhubarb Ale”, launched at FRANKAMANIA in Wigan (a free show of Frank Sidebottom memorabilia).

But that was all so yesterday. Today is really quite different…

“BOBBINS” is the new “HEIL HITLER”

BBC News (since 2016 the spiritual home of endless Brexit debate) has today put out a news story describing how GCHQ had managed to decrypt codes (actually ciphers, but let’s not let that come between us) that Chris Sievey had embedded in the borders of a number of Frank Sidebottom-related drawings. For example, the border of this Frank Sidebottom newsletter “COM 13” reads: “The Man From Fish EP is top secret“.

Much as with Enigma decades before it, the “small but dedicated [Frank Sidebottom] following” among GCHQ staff noticed a distinctive pattern of symbols corresponding to Sidebottom’s favouritest word: “BOBBINS”. And the rest is (crypto-) history.

Inevitably, the day after GCHQ decrypted it, the cipher key was found in the back of one of Chris Sievey’s notebooks. But that’s how last laughs work. 😉

Might the Hollow River Cipher be a hoax?

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I’ve had an intriguing email from Cipher Mysteries commenter Paul Relkin concerning the Hollow River Cipher.

He had thought to contact Linda Outcalt, whose (inverted) photograph of Sterling Ramsay was on the cover of his book “folklore prince edward island”. (Though the book credits only mention Hilda Woolnough.) Ms Outcalt suggested he should instead contact Harry Holman, “a prominent archivist for the Prince Edward Island government”. Paul continues:

This was a great suggestion! Mr. Holman was not only familiar with the Hollow River Cipher but he was able to produce documentation from a local newspaper establishing that the cipher was actually solved many years ago. He also provided some excellent commentary about the story behind the cipher. He has given me permission to share this with Cipher Mysteries on his behalf.

Here’s what Harry Holman wrote:

Harry Holman on Hollow River…

I have read your postings on Cipher Mysteries with interest but am afraid I must challenge your claim of being the first to decipher the coded message appearing in the Prince Edward Island Magazine. I have found evidence from 1935, and republished in 1946, that the message was deciphered by Blythe Hurst, a school teacher, naturalist and author who wrote under the pen name “Agricola.” The solution was published in the Charlottetown Guardian newspaper on 20 April 1935 p. 12 and again on 20 April 1946 p. 9.

My initial thought was that Hurst might have been connected with the appearance of the original Prince Edward Island Magazine article but it appears he immigrated to Prince Edward Island only in 1910. While he does not publish the entire text of the message it is clear that he has identified the key for interpreting the message and the main elements have been revealed.

As to the original PEI Magazine articles, it is important to place the publication in context. The Magazine, which ran from 1899 until 1905 provided a forum for a great many authors, many of who were identified only by initials or by pseudonyms. While it contained a number of high-quality and well-researched historical articles it was also a platform for a flourishing creative writing community. Many of the fiction pieces picked up on themes popular at the time. Ghost stories based on historical incidents seemed to strike a particularly responsive chord with readers. Only last week I wrote of the background of one of these, The Ghost of Holland Cove.

In that case the author was identified, but I have little doubt that the submissions by “Senachie” and “D.A.W.” are of the same character. A hint may be that the Gaelic basis of Senachie is “professional storyteller”

While a scattering of facts is essential to establish the credibility of historical fiction, a super-abundance of them is evidence of a fabrication. Such is the case here – especially in the supposed “back story” supplied by DAW. While Hollow River is a real place it is an unlikely setting for such an elaborate tale. I have been there and it is hard to imagine an area less likely to be chosen as a cache for guns and treasure. In the late 1730s it was entirely uninhabited although there was some French settlement at Naufrage to the east of the site. The river itself is a mere trickle emptying across a thin strip of sand which is backed by rocks and cliffs. It was one of the last areas of the colony to be settled and a road did not run through the thinly settled area until the 1830s. By the beginning of the 20th century the shore road had been abandoned and a new line of road dating from the 1860s or 1870s was in use.

The use of the multiply layered narrative was a common literary device during the period at the end of the 19th century. Here we have an account of an alleged diary entry recounting a mysterious note in a bottle telling of an incident. All the accounts lack credibility and have errors of fact or interpretation. The language used in the diary entry is quite unreflective of the actual writing of the mid 18th century. I have read a number of diaries from the period and they read nothing like this and the form and content is quite an anachronistic and imaginative interpretation of how a diary of the period might read.

I note that a number of contributors to the Cipher Mysteries website have raised practical objections to the facts of the story including the difficulty and pointlessness of transferring cannon to a barren shore. I think that such objections could be raised to almost every assertion made in the account but I do not think it necessary to parse it further.

For these and many other reasons I conclude that the Hollow River mystery is almost certainly a complete fabrication. The cypher message appears to be merely a “brain teaser” created by the author of the story and is unlikely to have any factual basis.

Without a single documentary support the pyramid of “facts” crumbles, but that has not prevented the story from being included in anthologies of ghost stories and folklore, particularly of the uncritical sort.

Thank you for reminding me of this tale.

Nick’s Further Thoughts…

The reason that I find cipher mysteries – long-unsolved historical ciphers where even the history surrounding them is suspect – so head-shakingly fascinating is that it can be ridiculously hard to tell the true, the false, and the merely hopeful apart. The (almost entirely false) Beale Papers wrapped around the (probably entirely genuine) Beale Ciphers form a case in point.

For the Hollow River Cipher, I share with Harry Holman many of the same doubts about the (supposed) diary entry: moreover, I think it no less likely that many other (supposedly meshing) parts of the story as presented in the PEI Magazine could have been camp-fire confabulations, back-filled around the same core cipher.

In fact, if someone were to propose to me that – more or less exactly mirroring the Beale Ciphers and Beale Papers – the Hollow River Cipher itself was genuine but that everything else wrapped around it was fake (perhaps in the spirit of multiple contributions to the same lightly-literary pirate-ghost jest), I’d be hard-pressed to demur.

And so I now find myself in the same awkward position with both the Beale Cipher and the Hollow River Cipher: that while I’m not enough of a Cipher True Believer for armchair treasure hunters (who seem to want every scrap of evidence to be true), I also seem to have more faith in the ciphers themselves than people who are comfortable writing all the evidence off in one go as no more than a long-running in-joke.

Though Holman handily highlights the presence of a super-abundance of facts (I certainly didn’t know that the settlement just East of the site was called Naufrage), this would surely seem to be more of a witness for the defence than for his prosection. In many ways, perhaps it should be best taken as an epistemological red flag to us all, signalling that we instead need to look and think more clearly at the different accounts making up the picture, to see which (if any) are true, false, or merely amusing or hopeful.