I’ve been busy behind the scenes, creating a press release for the Gold Beyond Your Dreams Mauritian Pirate Treasure Kickstarter proposal, ready to hand off to the Press Association before very long.

Back on Kickstarter, the project also now has its first (potential) “Executive Producer” backer slot filled, which I have to say was a very pleasant surprise indeed: I only hope I can get to Mauritius to increase its NPV yet further. 😉

Lined up next I have three posts on the Nageon de l’Estang family (including lots of unexpected and fascinating stuff); much more on the interlinear transcription of the papers; some surprises to do with the Missing Corsair; a bibliography; a reconstructed history of the Nageon de l’Estang papers; and plenty more besides.

It’s been a long (and trying) road to get this far already, but I really appreciate the support I’ve had from Cipher Mysteries readers: fingers crossed we’ll get to the end line with a good result.

The Pirate Treasure Crowdfunding Press Release

Pirate Treasure – can crowdfunding help to solve the great Mauritian mystery?

For more than two hundred years, the mystery surrounding ‘Bernardin Nageon de l’Estang’ has confounded treasure hunters and historians alike. His papers claim to describe the location of “doubloons, gold in coins and ingots to the value of thirty million, and a copper box filled with diamonds” hidden beneath a cliff near a river in Mauritius.

Now a British historian blogger is using Kickstarter to try to crowdfund research into this long-standing historical mystery. Surbiton-based Nick Pelling is raising money to make a documentary about the papers – and by doing so, hopes to finally solve its many puzzles and tell its secret history.

Countless people – individuals, groups, and even clandestine private companies – have spent decades criss-crossing Mauritius in their search for Nageon de l’Estang’s treasure cache, each trying to track down the ‘pirate marks’ he described having carved into the rock: but with no success at all.

Historians are just as bemused, because there is no evidence that this ‘Bernardin’ ever existed, or that anything mentioned in the papers is even true. Yet definitive historical disproof (i.e. that these papers formed part of a hoax or deception) has been as elusive for historians as pirate treasure proof has been for the treasure hunters.

For Nick Pelling, the point of making this documentary is to take a bold step into the wide-open space between these two opposite positions. “After chipping patiently away at the edges for years“, he adds, “I find myself in the situation where a single dramatic – and very public – move can genuinely act as a catalyst to reveal the much larger story. And so I feel compelled to act, to put myself on the line to get to that bigger picture.”

He sees documentary not just as something that can ‘document’ what is already well known, but as an active research tool that can help reveal new truth. And so the kind of film he is aiming to make will be quite unlike typical mainstream historical documentaries, a genre he describes as having become “far too safe to be genuinely interesting“.

What will he uncover in Mauritius? He doesn’t yet know: but if anyone out there stands a fighting chance of finally bringing Nageon’s secret history to the surface, it is surely him.

A few days ago, I tried using Fiverr.com‘s translation marketplace to enfrenchify the 598 words of my Kickstarter documentary pitch video. The required 10USD will only barely get you a round of drinks in a London pub: and yet given that this seemed to be the going rate for this size of work, I thought it would be an interesting exercise to get me some sous-titres.

All of which is a great theory, but how did it work out in practice?

The Mechanism

Fiverr.com does make it remarkably easy to order a translation: the person I chose turned out (according to his/her blurb) to be a native French speaker living in Morocco, which is absolutely fine by me.

However, I have to say that I found it hard to believe any of the brief biogs the fiverr.com translators put to their names / aliases. There was an air of polished nonsense to all of them, as though peeling back the virtual curtain would reveal a community of Nigerian scammer kiddies feeding your text into Google Translate and laughing at your compliant gullibility.

Of course, I know that’s not actually true or even remotely likely: but that was very much how it felt to me overall. So even though fiverr.com is technically quite sweet, I think it still struggles to make its vendors look credible. Doubtless others will disagree, but… I’m jus’ sayin’, is all. 😐

The Problems

Putting the core translation issue (i.e. of whether or not it’s any good) aside, the biggest problem turned out to be ‘sense reversal’. By which I mean: for the pitifully small amount of money involved, these online translators simply can’t afford to spend time deeply parsing your text, so there is a good chance that they will misread a given sentence and, as a result, accidentally flip its sense into the opposite of what you intended. This occurred three or four times (though these were all fairly easy to pick up), and I fixed them up by hand.

And so I’ve ended up with manually-fixed French subtitles based largely on the translation I bought.

Of course, what you are supposed to do when you find things wrong like that is to send them back for review, i.e. for you to flag such issues so that the translator can fix these problems for you (as part of the price). But I simply couldn’t bring myself to do that, for the simple reason that the amount of money involved was just too small: I felt too bad, if that makes sense.

Other people might possibly get around this feeling of guilt by asking for revisions and then giving a 10USD tip at the end (I wouldn’t be surprised if this is how it tends to work in practice). The only thing I did actually ask for was a single sentence early on that the translator had obviously translated but had accidentally cut-and-pasted over when putting the text together to send back, which I didn’t think was too big a request.

I don’t know: for all the good things about fiverr.com, I think that it is also a strange kind of low-end marketplace that can’t possibly give you technically tight text at the kind of prices quoted, simply because people can’t read text for the prices quoted, let alone translate it. And so I suspect that any kind of non-straightforward or strongly-logically-structured text may well end up being somewhat butchered, not out of intent but simply out of necessarily scant attention.

Perhaps all I can reasonably conclude about Fiverr is: Caveat Emptorr. 😐

Those French Subtitles In Full

As to whether it was worth it or not, here’s the translation.

Salut, mon nom est Nick Pelling.
Je dirige Cipher Mysteries, un blog des recherches historiques.
Ce que je tiens à couvrir sont les mystères historiques, quoi que ce soit avec des preuves douteuses à partir du manuscrit de Voynich jusqu’aux cartes aux trésors des pirates.
Et depuis des années, j’essayais de comprendre l’histoire d’un pirate de l’océan Indien qui porte le nom Bernardin Nagéon de l’Estang.
Il avait naufragé prétendument dans la côte Sud-Ouest de l’île Maurice, et il avait récupéré le trésor de son bateau ; il a repris un ruisseau par une falaise ; et puis il l’enterré dans une caverne souterraine qui avait été cachée par des pirates.
C’est une histoire incroyable, bien sûr, mais il faut être très prudent sur ce que vous croyez de ces mystères chiffrés.
D’une part, il n’y a aucune preuve que “Bernardin Nagéon de l’Estang” a jamais existé ; et ses lettres ?
Il n’y a encore aucune preuve que ce qui est mentionné dans ces lettres est vrai.
Tout ce que nous avons sont les différentes versions de ces lettres contradictoires qui confondent les uns des autres.
Pourtant, malgré ces problèmes profondément enracinés, ces documents ont aidé à alimenter une ruée vers l’or du pirate sur l’île Maurice.
Pendant des années – voire des décennies – les mauriciens arpentaient autour de l’île, avec impatience la recherche de tout signe de trésor des pirates, les marques secrètes de pirate – plus précisément les lettres « BN », les initiales du pirate – creusées dans les rochers qui pourraient les conduire à ce cache fabuleux trésor, à l’or au-delà de vos rêves.
En fait, ce qui s’est apparemment passé est qu’aucun de ces chasseurs de trésor ait trouvé des choses comme une boucle d’oreille en laiton du trésor de Nageon de l’Estang… mais la question se pose encore – est-il encore là-bas ?
Ou sinon, pourrions-nous être en mesure de découvrir son histoire secrète, pour savoir ce qui lui est arrivé ?
Depuis quelques années, je l’ai lu et relu tout ce que je pouvais trouver sur Bernardin Nageon de l’Estang: et je pense que je peux enfin comprendre la plupart de ce qui est arrivé.
Mais je cherche maintenant à soulever mes recherches au niveau suivant, et aller à l’île Maurice elle-même, pour parvenir finalement en profondeur ce mystère.
Mais j’ai besoin de l’aide de Kickstarter … J’ai besoin de votre aide pour le faire.
Votre soutien ouvrira beaucoup de portes qui sont restées fermées pour moi.
En discutant avec les historiens et les chasseurs de trésor, en regardant les archives et les musées, en foulant le sol que Nagéon de l’Estang prétend qu’il a sous enterré son Trésor, je pense que nous pouvons enfin aller au fond de ce mystère.
Mais il y a une touche Hi-Tech.
Si Nagéon de l’Estang a enterré son trésor dans une caverne qui a existé pour toujours, la science va surement nous aider à trouver quelque chose.
Ainsi, une partie du plan du projet est de prendre un GPR loué (radar à pénétration de sol) à l’île Maurice,
pour pénetrer ce sol, et voir si nous pouvons voir ce qui est là-dessous, voir s’il y a une grotte à trouver.
L’objectif ultime du projet est de ne pas trouver un trésor physique (même si ça va être génial), mais plutôt de faire des recherches historiques difficiles en plein air, à la caméra, complètement transparent.
Je ne sais pas ce que je vais trouver ; je ne sais pas quelle histoire sera racontée ; mais je sais que c’est un voyage que quelqu’un doit faire, et une histoire que quelqu’un doit raconter- et je pense que c’est le moment d’agir.
À la fin, nous devrions avoir un documentaire qui raconte l’histoire d’un rêve partagé de l’or d’un pirate qui a repris tout un pays.
Mais que sera-t-il en fait cette histoire, les secrets d’elle, je ne sais pas – mais je veux savoir, et avec votre aide, nous pouvons tous le trouver. Merci beaucoup !

“Capital” issue 132, 5th June 2013 has an article on page 15 entitled “Jean Giraud et ses Précieuses Pierres”, which discusses the death of Jean Giraud (who founded Mauritian company United Basalt in July 1953) on May 14th 2013 at the age of 94:

The article continues:

Grand chasseur devant l’éternel, il est aussi chercheur de trésors à ses heures. Persuadé comme beaucoup de passionnés de la catégorie, il est persuade que des pirates ont enfoui des trésors dans les îles de sud-ouest de l’océan Indien. Il decide de s’intéresser à celui du fameux Oliver Le Vasseur, dir La Buse, qu’il croit enfoui quelque part à Saint-Antoine et à celui de Nageon de l’Estang, qui, just avant d’être pendu aux Seychelles, a jeté à la foule des curieux un prétendu plan de trésor. En compagnie de son frère Lucien, de Philippe de Rosnay et de Raymond Chevreau, il va ainsi se dépenser sans compter dans la recherche de ces précieux butins qu’il ne trouvera jamais.
Mais on dit des chercheurs de trésors qu’ils ne vivent que de l’espoir d’en trouver un et que c’est uniquement cette quête, souvent vaine, qui les fait vivre…

My free translation of the above – and native French speakers, please step forward to correct me, because I might easily have gone completely wrong here – is as follows:

Ever the eternal opportunity hunter in business, in his spare time he was also a treasure hunter. He was, as are so many others of that particular ilk, firmly convinced that pirate treasure lies buried in the southwestern islands of the Indian Ocean. For many years, his focus was on Nageon de l’Estang (whose booty he believed was buried somewhere in Saint-Antoine) and on the well-known pirate Olivier Levasseur (AKA “La Buse”) who, just before being hanged in the Seychelles, allegedly threw a treasure map into the crowd. Now reunited with his brother Lucien and fellow treasure hunters Philippe de Rosnay and Raymond Chevreau, Girard is free to spend forever searching lavishly for the precious spoils he will never find.
But it has been said that treasure hunters live only for the search and that it is by their quest, often in vain, that they live…

Of course, Cipher Mysteries readers will know that it was actually Olivier Levasseur who was hanged (and in Réunion rather than the Seychelles): but it was a surprise to me that Jean Giraud believed Bernardin Nageon de l’Estang buried his treasure in Saint-Antoine (in the North of Mauritius).

Regardless, if my translation is basically right and both Jean Giraud and his brother Lucien Giraud have now both passed away, it shows just how urgent it is to try to get to the bottom of this, before there’s nobody left to help tell the story.

Of course, the question some will doubtless be asking now is: who inherited the brothers’ collections of Nageoniana? From various fragments online, it seems that Jean Giraud left at least a son (Michel Giraud) and a grand-daughter (Marine – is she the famous Mauritian tennis player born 23rd April 1986 in Riviere Noire?): but that’s as much as I can reliably be sure about.

For what it’s worth, I found no obituary or note in Le Mauricien for either brother, nor any mention in ancestry.com: but perhaps other people’s searches for the same basic BDM data will prove both luckier and more productive than mine.

Researchers studying the Voynich Manuscript use what’s called an “interlinear transcription”: this interleaves different researchers’ interpretations of the (handwritten original) Voynich text, a line at a time. So, rather than having to constantly refer to, say, a contrast-enhanced image of the first line of the first page…

…you can instead refer to its interlinear transcription, which is much more convenient, and yet lets you see the differences of opinion that various researchers have about how to read that line:

<f1r .P1.1;H>       fachys.ykal.ar.ataiin.shol.shory.cth!res.y.kor.sholdy!-
<f1r .P1.1;C>       fachys.ykal.ar.ataiin.shol.shory.cthorys.y.kor.sholdy!-
<f1r .P1.1;F>       fya!ys.ykal.ar.ytaiin.shol.shory.*k*!res.y!kor.sholdy!-
<f1r .P1.1;N>       fachys.ykal.ar.ataiin.shol.shory.cth!res.y,kor.sholdy!-
<f1r .P1.1;U>       fya!ys.ykal.ar.ytaiin.shol.shory.***!r*s.y.kor.sholdo*-

Anyway, given that I now have copies of (what might well be) all the printed versions of the Nageon de l’Estang papers, it struck me a few days ago that I should get round to putting them together into an interlinear transcription.

And there being no good reason not to, that’s exactly what I did. 🙂

The Interlinear Transcription

I’ve posted a page holding my Nageon de l’Estang interlinear transcription on the Cipher Foundation website.

The first few interlinear blocks of lines in BN1 (“Bernardin Nageon de l’Estang paper #1″) look like this:

FC: [l'an III de la République]

RC: Je pars m’enrôler et défendre la patrie. Comme je serai sans doute tué, je fais
FC: Je pars m'envoler et défendre la Patry,  comme je serai tué c'est sûre, je fais

RC: mon testament  et donne à mon neveu Jean Marius        Nageon de l'Estang,
FC: mon testament. Je donne à           Jean Marin  Justin Nageon de l'Estang,
LM:                Je donne à           Jean-Marius-Justin Najeon de l'Etang.

Here, [FC] stands for “Paul Fleuriau-Chateau”, a now-deceased Mauritian researcher from Rivière Noire, who included a transcription in his 2001 book “Aventuriers en mer”. The first line stands alone because the date Fleuriau-Chateau gave for BN1 does not appear in the other transcriptions at all. (In case you’re wondering, it’s a French Republican Calendar date equivalent to 1795).

The second set of interleaved lines appears both in Robert Charroux’s (“RC”) and in Fleuriau-Chateau’s (“FC”) copies, but not in any of the others: while the third set of lines appears in Charroux and in Fleuriau-Chateau, as well as in Loys Masson’s (“LM”) 1935 article.

Immediately you can see the kind of differences in play between the versions: but which are attempted corrections, which are miscopying, and which are insertions? What is original and what is make-believe? That is the $64,000 question (possibly even literally).

According to Le Clézio, circa 1901 his grandfather knew of numerous different copies of these papers floating around in what he called “grimoires” in Mauritius (p.105). So… might there be more versions out there?

Reading between the lines (so to speak), I think the answer is almost certainly yes: in fact, I suspect there may even be ten or more as-yet-unseen variants out there in private hands. However, only by bringing them all into the light and comparing them in a really analytical, scientific, open way do we stand any real chance of making sense of them as a whole.

Incidentally, my current interlinear transcription isn’t quite complete: the two photographs I took of page 56 of Paul Fleuriau-Chateau’s “Aventuriers en mer” turned out to be out of focus. So if anyone has access to a copy and/or can email me through a scan of p.56, that would be really helpful, thanks!

Le Club International des Chercheurs de Trésor?

Interestingly, I think that Robert Charroux’s omissions are quite telling, and this is something that hasn’t really been talked about before.

For a start, he mentions (but only includes the first couple of lines of) two further cryptic documents that I call “BN4” and “BN5” (which Fleuriau-Chateau and Le Clézio both include). His reason for not including them is that “Le teneur exacte de ces documents est le propriété du Club International des Chercheurs de Trésor“, ho-ho. But don’t worry, dear reader, he then assures you that “vous savez tout ce qu’il est permis de savoir sur les secrets de Nagéon de l’Estang“. You’re not on the list, you can’t come in.

For what it’s worth, I suspect that this also explains why Charroux left out the interesting section in BN2 from “au nord” to “testament” that says how to find the cave: because only a ‘true’ treasure hunter (i.e. a member of his club) could be trusted with such powerful knowledge.

Your Mission, Should You Choose To Accept It…

What can be done to move this research strand forward? For me, the answer is obvious: dig up more versions of these letters to add to the interlinear transcription.

I’m convinced that there simply must be photographs, scans, hand-copies, mentions, quotations, letters, newspaper articles and books (for example, in other languages) that I don’t know about out there and not just cut-and-pasted from Charroux (as seems to be the Internet norm). What can we find?

I’m similarly convinced that there must be archival documents on the Klondyke Company, and even on Le Club International des Chercheurs de Trésor, both of which tried so jealously to hold back Nageon de l’Estang’s secrets for themselves. And these documents must surely include multiple versions of the Nageon de l’Estang papers, right?

Finally, I’m also convinced that there are individuals out there who have collected their own versions of the letters: for his book, Paul Fleuriau-Chateau relied on Lucien Giraud and Jean Giraud. Is Lucien Giraud still alive?

For me, the big reason for trying to make a documentary is to find these people and just ask the right questions…

As I mentioned a couple of days ago, my Kickstarter Mauritian pirate treasure documentary pitch is now live, and has already picked up its first few backers, all of them long-time Cipher Mysteries supporters (each in their own way) – thank you very much indeed for that, it’s undoubtedly true that the first few steps of a thousand mile journey are the hardest ones. 🙂

Anyway, given that the project plan is to structure the documentary into nine sections, what I’ll be doing here over the next four weeks is writing posts on those same sections – or rather, on what I currently know about them, as well as what I hope to find out about them in Mauritius. Though this won’t quite amount to a “Nageonopedia”, my hope is that it should be the most reliable (and realistic) collection of basic data on the Bernardin Nageéon de l’Estang historical mystery on the Internet or in print.

It may well turn out that better informed (or just plain cleverer) readers can answer one or two of the key research questions without my actually having to go to Mauritius to do so. Moreover, you clever people might also suggest even better research questions than the ones I set out to answer. I don’t mind, though, because these are all positive scenarios as far as I’m concerned, and the documentary would surely continue to develop and move forward in an ever-better direction as a result. 🙂

At the same time, I’m planning (over the next few days) to do some PR to propel the idea of the documentary into the wider cultural ether: so if anyone has any good suggestions for bloggers or journalists to contact about interviews, please let me know, I’m all ears! 🙂

It’s been a little while in preparation (difficult things almost always are), but the project I mentioned a little while ago has now gone live for crowdfunding on Kickstarter (so I now have 30 days to convince you and a thousand other people to back it).

The documentary I’m planning to make is called Gold Beyond Your Dreams: the idea is to go to Mauritius and see if I can finally unravel some (though hopefully most) of the secret history of Bernardin Nagéon de l’Estang and his alleged pirate treasure, and tell the story. But I’ve included a 3-minute video (with subtitles) as part of the pitch which explains it all nicely, along with a project plan showing exactly what I’m aiming for: hopefully it’s specific enough.

Even though I think there’ll be enough source material for 120+ minutes, I’m aiming for a 45-minute final edit to keep it all tight and interesting.

What do you think?