I was stumbling my way through marine historian Joan Druett’s site when I reached a page with this image:
This led me (somehow inevitably) here:
And to here:
And to here:
And indeed to here:
This seemed to have a sensible moral message to share:
And finally (quite literally), some practical advice for us all:
A few weeks ago, I stumbled upon a website called The Great Lost Treasure: across its sequentially-numbered twenty-four pages, it builds up a case for arguably the most audacious (and certainly the most all-encompassing) cipher history / mystery theory I’ve yet seen.
The person behind this website is Ron Justron, who sees his over-arching theory as falling somewhere between [inconveniently true] and [a thorn in nearly every other cipher theorist’s side]. It’s not hard to see why such people get so annoyed by him: his cipher mega-theory aspires not only to disprove almost all the cipher theories out there, but also to replace them, insofar as – to him – they (pretty much) all are trapped within the explanatory cage of his mega-theory.
How should I try to do justice to this awesomely epic construction? I’ll try to start at the beginning…
Justron’s starting point is a treasure mystery associated with (the very real) Admiral Lord George Anson (1697-1762), and (apparently) described in Andrew Westcott’s (1999) book “El Tesoro de Lord Anson”. (If I mentioned that George Anson was born in Shugborough Hall, you might be able to guess part of where this is going).
According to Justron’s account, a treasure horde was entrusted to a certain Don Juan Esteban de Ubilla at the end of the Spanish War of Succession in 1714: the Spanish Hapsburgs, having lost their ownership of the Spanish Crown to the French House of Bourbon, passed it to Ubilla for him to secrete in South America for safety.
Note that Captain-General Don Juan Esteban de Ubilla definitely existed. In 1715 when the convoy of treasure ships he was commanding on the way back from Havana to Spain was hit by a hurricane close to the Bahamas, over a thousand people lost their lives, including Ubilla himself. Only one ship, the Grifon, managed to avoid catastrophe.
One treasure site recounts the story that the Capitana went down with the jewels Philip V had been required to provide as a dowry for his new wife, the Duchess of Parma: these included “a heart delicately crafted of 130 pearls, a 74 carat emerald ring, a pair of pearl earrings-each complemented with a 14 carat pearl, and a rosary of pure coral the size of small marbles“. This much-searched-for royal trove was used as a plot device in films such as The Deep (the 1977 Peter Benchley-written film, not the 2013 Icelandic film) and Fools Gold (which I thought was a bit pants, though not offensively so).
So is this Justron’s “Great Lost Treasure”? Actually no – for once, it is nothing so boringly mundane as gold, silver or diamonds: far more audaciously, Justron asserts that it is the “set of vessels, items and furnishings for the Tabernacle in the Wilderness” that Moses had had constructed, and which came to be housed in the Temple of Jerusalem. And then Justron raises the stakes yet higher, by asserting that the “Holy Grail” has been mistranslated, and that what we call the Holy Grail was actually part of the Davidic Temple trove.
According to Justron’s narrative, once Ubilla had concealed this heavenly stash in South America, he somehow managed to convey a map of where he hidden it to the Royal Society in London, which (he says) “then became the reluctant stewards of what was considered to be God’s own treasure”.
According to Justron, the list of things that Ubilla passed across included (though note that many of the details come from a separate cipher mystery, courtesy of Richard Latcham, which I’ll cover in Cipher Mysteries when my brain has stopped hurting from this one):
1. A chart of the region.
2. A reference to latitude and longitude using the alchemically themed colours of the fixed stars known as the Tetramorphs and their zodiacal associated constellations.
3. A series of consecutive and geographically descriptive codewords in Spanish;
* Trinidad (Trinity)
* Herradura (Horseshoe)
* Pan da Azucar (Sugarloaf). This is a ‘sailing mark’, a distinctive rock to identify the island and the pass through the surrounding reef.
* Playa Blanca (White Beach)
* Aguada (Water)
* Ebanin (Marked rock)
4. The ‘Cero tres Puntas’: literally the ‘Zero (cipher) of the longitude for the Three Points’.
Justron also asserts that Ubilla also managed to convey a copy of the map to Spain, which was used for a later treasure hunt (Diego Alverez, Luke Barrett, Archer Brown and Killorain: ‘The Treasure of the Tuamotus’ or ‘The Bosun Bird Treasure’).
As you’d perhaps expect, Justron has decrypted the map’s subtleties: he used the Shugborough monument letters, an simple substitution cipher key used by “a lawyer names Zwack in 1786 during a political raid in England of a secret society called ‘The Illuminated Ones’, the magic number 19, the Golden Section, and a map of some South Sea islands.
The trail, then, leads to Mururoa Atoll (where some atomic tests were famously carried out): if you suddenly feel the urge to book your flight there, rest assured I won’t be offended if you open another tab in your browser. 🙂
Justron also points to an odd letter dated to later in the 18th century:
I, Cornelius Patrick Webb, Captain of his Majesty’s Navy, Master of the Unicorn, only survivor of the Horseshoe Expedition depute this account to my Lord George Anson First Lord of the Admiralty (courtisualy) because I judgeth malady which ailleth me will not permit to wait. Departure Unicorn June nineteen crossed Cap Horn December six arrived at position lat thirty D eight M. January thirteenth opened royal orders, located secret entrance, translated Crown’s belongings, located eight hundred sixty four bags gold. Two hundred bars gold, twenty one barrels precious stones and jewellery one golden trunk containing rose of gold and emeralds, two foot high, one hundred and sixty chests with gold and silver coins. January twenty four fortress destroyed. When returning the twenty-eight of January before a violent storm, the ship suffered serious damage and lost a mast. We were forced to shelter on an island; the third of February found us at Longitude … Latitude… and it was impossible to carry out repairs for the safe transportation of the treasure; transferred to a new hiding place valley of Anson a cable length from the observation point in direction great yellow stone depth fifteen feet. Unicorn repaired for emergency crossing course Valparaiso; informed of plans for mutiny while the ship was becalmed to the West of Valparaiso I made use of the auxiliary boat (Pinnace). Unicorn blown up by me with all on board, six loyal men sacrificed for the cause of the Crown, I arrived at Valparaiso. 1761
Now, the problem for Justron is that even if this letter is genuine (and personally I’m still struggling to get to the stage where I believe that it is), its contents doesn’t quite fit his über-narrative. However, his resolution is to infer from internal evidence that the letter was originally written in Latin and then mistranslated into English.
When Lord Anson dies in 1762, his papers were (says Justron) found to contain a file containing enciphered or coded details of something that was called the “Horseshoe expedition”, which was presumed to refer to the Webb Letter above. Justron continues:
“As the Webb report mentioned the ‘Valley of Anson’ and with Lord George Anson having published a book [“A Voyage around the World”, 1748] with a map of Juan Fernandez Island, anyone with a modicum of imagination would have recognised the similarity in shape between the robes of the Shepherdess on the monument and the island of Juan Fernandez. From that day copies of the Shepherdess’ shape were made and circulated as a ‘treasure map’.
Justron also observes that “An interesting modification that occurs for each region where the story is retold is to give the ‘dying sailor’ a local sounding name or the name of a person known to the inhabitants.” For him, the prototypical “dying sailor” was Cornelius Webb, and every one of the numerous ones ones thereafter were merely story-telling clones of Webb.
And this tweak helps him build two additional storeys to the top of his argumentary tower: that not only are all treasure maps ever made little more than variations on Anson’s original treasure map hidden in plain sight on the Shepherd’s Monument at Shugborough, but also all “a dying sailor bequeathed me this treasure map” stories are variations of a single meta-story.
Justron then takes a long digression into the murky tunnels and waters of Oak Island. And then into the Beale Papers, which he says were written by some Freemasons in an attempt “to alert other Freemasons they had found the Cerro tres Puntas”.
Ron Justron’s next target is the wonderfully frustrating set of maps found in the 1930s: he asserts that nutty proto-Fortean hack Harold T. Wilkins had found Lord Anson’s Papers in the 1920s, and so decided to construct a long series of maps in some kind of homage to the Anson über-map. These then (so the story goes) were inserted into oldish items of furniture, which then all came into the possession of collectors Guy and Hubert Palmer in Eastbourne between 1929 and 1942.
After Hubert Palmer’s demise, the maps passed to his nurse (Mrs Dick), who then sold them all off to a mysterious Canadian/American syndicate in 1957: they have never been since since.
For Justron, however, Wilkins was pulling everyone’s legs, because he clearly (writes Justron) knew that the location referred to by Anson, Webb and Ubilla lay somewhere else entirely. And this is because – asserts Justron – it was also Wilkins and Latcham who were behind Latcham’s fake cipher / treasure maps at Guayacan.
After a digression on the Tokugawa treasure, Justron then starts to get to what I can only describe as the real meat of his argument (yes, there is in indeed more to go yet). Which links Harold T. Wilkins to…
[Wilkins] decided to leave for posterity the final part to the grand riddle. This part would be the direct pointers to Lord George Anson and his map. […] Unfortunately Harold T Wilkins selected a right bunch for his chosen dupes; rather than just carry the clues for others to find they goofed the whole thing up completely.
In the mess that the myth of Rennes le Chateau has become one could dismiss the whole thing as a fraud perpetrated by a group of French associates in the 1950s for their own gain.
In reality the story of Rennes le Chateau is that of it being just another Masonic hoax/riddle in which the real codes have to be identified and decrypted.
Yes: just when you thought there were no more cipher-related mysteries to throw into the same bubbling pot, the Priory of Sion appears. Justron’s long argument that accompanies this claim reduces to: Wilkins was the Svengali who set the whole thing up (apparently with Anson’s Great Lost Treasure in mind), but with Wilkins’ death in 1960 everyone involved seemed to lose the plot.
But Justron has left the best to last – and it is so stunning that he hasn’t even put it on his website yet. Which is that the Tintin adventure The Secret of the Unicorn (published in Le Soir in serial form between 1942 and 1943) contains embedded clues to much of the above.
Justron writes:
“Unfortunately the main part missed too was the hint given in Tintin, that is by assembling the (RLC) parchments, you’ll be led to the ancestral hall of a famous mariner where you will learn the Secret of the Unicorn.”
Of course, for Justron the ancestral hall of a famous mariner being referred to is not Hergé’s fictional Marlinspike Hall of his fictional Sir Francis Haddock, but without any shadow of a doubt Shugborough Hall, birthplace of George Anson. And the Unicorn is, well, the Unicorn (of course).
For me, there’s something endearingly syncretic – almost Rastafarian, with their “Truth of All Truths” – about Justron’s sprawlingly all-encompassing cryptophily. For him, the whole cipher/treasure endeavour appeals to an Ur-story lurking beneath the suburban drear of mere data, much like Joseph Campbell inferred a single story laying beneath all myth.
Naturally, I don’t believe it for a minute: but I wouldn’t, would I? I’m a getting-the-details-really-properly-right kind of guy who likes to understand the arguments and evidence behind each cipher/treasure/history/mystery, one at a time. Which means that I don’t really believe that Justron has sufficient evidence to prove any single one of his claims about these historical mysteries, even though he is convinced all his conclusions holistically support one another.
All the same, Justron’s mega-narrative steamrollers its way through a whole load of cipher mysteries in (what, to me at least, comes across as) a fresh new way, and I can honestly say that it has helped make me look afresh at a lot of the ground he has covered over the last decade.
In a post a couple of months back, I mentioned what I called “The Indus Problem” implicit in the first of the Bernardin Nageon de l’Estang letters: that even though the pre-1800 BN1 mentions “les trésors sauvés de l’Indus”, the phrase “Trésors de l’Indus” was from the well-known 1804/1805/1806 poem “La Navigation” by Joseph Esménard.
Hence if the phrase came from the poem, then the date of the letter must be wrong – and (by implication) the letter could well be fake. That would definitely be a problem with the basic evidence: and I didn’t really have a workable explanation for the phrase.
But today I came up with alternative scenario…
Auguste Toussaint (1911-1987) was, without much doubt, Mauritius’s premier marine archivist and maritime historian.
While looking through his (1967) “La route des Iles: contribution à l’histoire maritime des Mascareignes” this morning, I noticed some intriguing entries:
* (p.306) 4th March 1796, the ‘navire’ “Industan” (Captain Louis) arrived from Philadelphia.
* (p.262) 22nd August 1796, the American ‘vaisseau’ “Industan” (Captain Lewis) arrived from Pondicherry.
Might Captain Lewis’ ship the “Industan” have hit the rocks near Vacoas, spilling its treasures for Bernardin Nageon de l’Estang to opportunistically get hold of? It certainly seemed a far more concrete explanation than assuming the phrase was pulled from a high-culture poem written nearly a decade in the future.
(There was also (p.311) mention of the Industrie, a ‘brick’ out of Newburyport commanded by Captain Stone, arriving on 2nd April 1804: but that would seem to have been a quite different ship.)
For the sake of completeness, there was (even though the dates don’t match BN1) a later ship called the “Indus”:
* (p.312) 10th September 1804, a 400-ton American brick called the Indus (Captain Myrick), armed in (and coming from) Boston
* (p.331) 22nd February 1805, a 400-ton American ‘vaisseau’ called the Indus (Captain Myrick) of Batavia, heading for Boston.
Toussaint also lists a similar-sounding ship called the “India”, which might well have been the (later) Indus on an earlier journey:
* (p.326) 25th April 1798, Captain Armhead, a 400-tone American ‘navire’ out of Batavia (no destination listed)
(Note that this was not the British ship the Hindostan, parts of which are in Whitstable Museum, which I didn’t find time to visit when I was there this week.)
What I was looking for was an American boat called “Industan” (Captain Louis or Lewis) going from Philadelphia to Pondicherry and back, but which might possibly have hit the rocks off Mauritius (for whatever reason) in August or September 1796.
Splendidly, searching Philadelphia newspapers revealed the following advertisement from the Philadelphia Gazette that ran from March 1797 to May 1797:
So it would seem the Indostan (Captain Jacob Lewis) made it safely back to Philadelphia, and so this thread has come to an end.
Might the Indostan have then embarked upon a further – but far less successful – trip to Mauritius and India? I would expect that the ship would have left a little later in the 1797 season (say September), with a view to using the favourable trade wind pattern to make it across the Indian Ocean in the spring of 1798.
If this guess is right, I would expect the Indostan to have reached Mauritius in or around March 1798, which is – presumably – where it would have hit the rocks at Vacoas before reaching the island’s main port.
However: having now broadly reached the limits of my search tools, perhaps others would like to have a look and see if they can take this further.
Might there be newspaper reports of the Indostan’s subsequent departure and Indian Ocean demise out there, just waiting to be found? Might there be an obituary for Captain Jacob Lewis, or an account of his life? Who financed the ship in Philadelphia? Who insured the ship?
Plenty of interesting (and hopefully resolvable) questions. 🙂
Many angry arrows have been aimed in the direction of Cipher Mysteries of late (mostly by a single vociferous individual), asserting that it has got its moderation policy Just Plain Wrong.
Obviously, differences of opinion about what comments should be moderated in or out hardly amount to breaking news. But the reactive rhetoric attached to these attacks has recently reached a somewhat fevered pitch, where the blog posts being made about comment moderation had become much worse than the comments they were related to.
As a result, I thought it was high time I trawled the web to see what, as of mid-2016, is considered best practice for bloggers. After all, knowledge is power, ain’t it?
In 2007, Tim O’Reilly proposed a Blogger’s Code of Conduct, to try to promote civility online (specifically in blogs). The six points (which he also tried to connect to badges) were:
1. We take responsibility for our own words and for the comments we allow on our blog.
2. We won’t say anything online that we wouldn’t say in person.
3. We connect privately before we respond publicly.
4. When we believe someone is unfairly attacking another, we take action.
5. We do not allow anonymous comments.
6. We ignore the trolls.
For all the good ideas in there, O’Reilly was quick to recognize that he had severely underestimated the size of the issues. In practice, each of his six points has a huge number of weak spots:
1. moderating is full of edge cases (e.g. at what point does someone expressing a strong feeling about something actually become abusive? If someone doesn’t like a comment, does that mean that that comment is genuinely offensive or do they just not like to see opinions different to their own? So, to what notional person should any given comment be deemed offensive? etc etc) to the point that the notion of a single catch-all “responsibility” umbrella is woefully inadequate.
2. it is ridiculously easy for someone to cut and paste what you have written or commented or moderated and quote it out of context to deliberately distort what you said or allowed to be said. And (moreover) to say in person where? In a bar, in a church, at a football match? Given that context forms ~90% of communication, it’s almost impossible to write posts or comments that cannot be taken out of context and given a new, offensive meaning.
3. for a whole bundle of reasons, connecting privately first is something that almost never happens.
4. for a different (but very similar) bundle of reasons, it is extraordinarily rare for anyone to step forward to “take action”. Again, this almost never happens.
5. it is very hard to prevent anonymous commenting. Even tiny children are now indoctrinated never to disclose their real names or any information that might help identify them online: and from there it is the smallest of technical steps to full anonymity. It turns out that anonymity is less of a true/false condition than a spectrum of ‘anonymousness’ that is defined mainly by the cost of de-anonymizing that anonymity. So: how much time, effort and money should a moderator have to put in to determine what degree of anonymity a specific comment is employing?
6. trolls just like attention, and have many mechanisms for baiting people just below the threshold of not-OKness. At what point does a commenter become a troll? And anyway, according to whom are they a troll? And how can the people making that judgement tell that they are a troll? And what recourse can someone have if they are incorrectly accused of being a troll?
So it turns out that the main problem with O’Reilly’s proposal is that almost every aspect of blogging is a grey area, and that his approach for trying to make everything in the blogosphere OK is just too rigid and (as some critics put it) rather too corporate. He says that he’s more interested in promoting civility than in enforcing political correctness, but given the extraordinarily wide range of conversations and interactions that blog posts enable, imposing a single model upon them all seems destined never to work.
In my opinion, his heart was in the right place but he underestimated the scale and practical difficulties of the real-world problems by a factor of a hundred, to the point that his proposals weren’t fit for purpose.
Numerous other angles have been proposed over the years. A post by Daniel Scocco proposed 10 Rules for Responsible Blogging, but which I think are far more concerned with transparency and professionalism than ‘responsibility’ as such:
1. Check your facts
2. Respect Copyright Law
3. Consider the implications
4. Control the comments on your blog
5. Give credit where credit is due
6. Disclose professional relationships
7. Disclose sponsored posts
8. Be transparent with affiliate links
9. Respect Tax Law
10. Avoid “blackhat” methods
Of course, many of these issues are covered by actual legislation.
For example, according to this UK ethical blogging blog, the Office of Fair Trading would like everyone to understand that “The integrity of information published online is crucial so that people can make informed decisions on how to spend their money. We expect online advertising and marketing campaigns to be transparent so consumers can clearly tell when blogs, posts and microblogs have been published in return for payment or payment in kind. We expect this to include promotions for products and services as well as editorial content.”
But this is more of a legislative angle than anything else, and many of the interesting questions are more to do with blogging ethics.
Rebecca Blood’s take on Weblog Ethics is a slightly more journalistic angle:
“1. Publish as fact only that which you believe to be true.”
“2. If material exists online, link to it when you reference it.”
“3. Publicly correct any misinformation.”
“4. Write each entry as if it could not be changed; add to, but do not rewrite or delete, any entry.”
“Post deliberately. If you invest each entry with intent, you will ensure your personal and professional integrity. […] History can be rewritten, but it cannot be undone. Changing or deleting words is possible on the Web, but possibility does not always make good policy. Think before you publish and stand behind what you write. If you later decide you were wrong about something, make a note of it and move on.”
“5. Disclose any conflict of interest.”
“6. Note questionable and biased sources.”
While Blood is solid on the foundations of positive blogging here, I think it’s fair to say that she doesn’t offer a very practical guide to the problematic issues of moderating and offence that caused O’Reilly’s proposal ship to hit so many rocks.
Even though it was clearly adapted from what was originally a journalism code of practice, there’s a lot to like about the Bloggers’ Code of Ethics, that came courtesy of CyberJournalist.net:
“1. Be Honest and Fair”
* Never plagiarize, but always identify and link to sources where practical.
* Ensure that what you write does not misrepresent, oversimplify or highlight incidents out of context.
* Never distort photos without disclosing what has been changed, and label all montages etc.
* Never publish information you know is inaccurate — and highlight doubt if publishing questionable information.
* “Distinguish between advocacy, commentary and factual information”, and don’t misrepresent fact or context.
* “Distinguish factual information and commentary from advertising” and shun anything blurring the boundaries.
“2. Minimize Harm”
* “Treat sources and subjects as human beings deserving of respect.”
* “Show compassion for those who may be affected adversely by Weblog content. Use special sensitivity when dealing with children and inexperienced sources or subjects.”
* “Be sensitive when seeking or using interviews or photographs of those affected by tragedy or grief.”
* “Recognize that gathering and reporting information may cause harm or discomfort. Pursuit of information is not a license for arrogance.”
* “Recognize that private people have a greater right to control information about themselves than do public officials and others who seek power, influence or attention. Only an overriding public need can justify intrusion into anyone’s privacy.”
* “Show good taste. Avoid pandering to lurid curiosity.”
* “Be cautious about identifying juvenile suspects, victims of sex crimes and criminal suspects before the formal filing of charges.”
“3. Be Accountable”
* “Admit mistakes and correct them promptly.”
* “Explain each Weblog’s mission and invite dialogue with the public over its content and the bloggers’ conduct.”
* “Disclose conflicts of interest, affiliations, activities and personal agendas.”
* “Deny favored treatment to advertisers and special interests and resist their pressure to influence content. When exceptions are made, disclose them fully to readers.”
* “Be wary of sources offering information for favors. When accepting such information, disclose the favors.”
* “Expose unethical practices of other bloggers.”
* “Abide by the same high standards to which you hold others.”
Is this approaching “Best Practice For Bloggers”? In many ways, it is, insofar as it points itself squarely at Honesty, Non-Harmfulness and Accountability, three things which are hard to disagree with. Yet at the same time, I have to say that it’s not really tackling the basics.
And there are some really big basics none of the above has managed to cover.
Most of the unethical blogging practices you’ll find described on the web are to do with not disclosing that certain blog content has been paid-for or sponsored in some way. Which is fair enough.
Yet there are many more blogging practices going on out there that I would consider acutely unethical. And having recently found myself on the receiving end of what I would consider a long string of them, I thought it might be helpful to compile a list:
1. Theft, Misrepresentation, and Libel
* Writing posts culled from posts and comments all over the web
* Never giving attribution or credit to your sources
* Constantly blurring the boundaries between truth, speculation, and outright fiction
* Never posting anything that can be easily separated out into truth, speculation, and outright fiction
* Exaggerating your website’s own importance and telling lies about other people’s websites
* Writing posts asserting that a particular individual who disagrees with you has a specific mental disorder, helpfully cutting and pasting sections of text from Wikipedia to help demonstrate the accuracy of that claim [Two people have done this to me in the last six months or so, with two very different disorders].
* Telling hateful lies about other people, but then quietly deleting those lies from the website “once they have served their purpose”.
2. Baiting, Deception, and False Closure
* Writing posts aimed squarely at an individual.
* Writing posts openly baiting a particular individual.
* Writing posts openly baiting a particular individual, waiting for them to comment, then completely changing the sense of the text in the post to try to present the commenter in a bad light.
* Responding to critical or comments with a snarky, hostile, superior comment and then immediately closing comments on that post.
* Selectively editing (or often outright deleting) commenters’ comments to remove any sections that don’t happen to paint the blogger/moderator in a favourable light.
* Closing comments and then selectively editing the comments to remove any that are not favourable to the moderator.
* Claiming ‘victory’ in comments, then deleting any incoming comments that might run counter to that claim.
* Changing the title of posts to aim them (after the event) at individuals.
* Changing the title of baiting posts to pretend (after the event) that it wasn’t aimed at individuals.
* Putting up unbelievably hostile, libelous, bait-filled posts but then quietly deleting them if things get too hot.
3. Trolls, Stalkers, and Safe Havens
Sadly, you may recognize some or all of the following patterns of behaviour:
* If you leave a comment on my website that doesn’t accord 100% with my views, I will either delete your comment or post a hostile rebuttal comment specifically designed to piss you off
* If you disagree with me, you are a troll
* If you disagree with people who blogs I admire, you are a troll
* If you use a proxy server, you are a troll
* If you sympathize with someone I don’t trust, you are a troll
* If I believe you are a troll, I feel justified in openly publishing your IP address(es) and your email address(es)
* If I believe you are a troll, I feel justified in saying anything I like to you, no matter how disgusting
* If you publish a comment on your website from people who don’t like me, they are trolls and you are a disgrace
* If you publish a comment about me from someone I have loudly pissed off on my blog, your website is nothing but a safe haven for trolls and you personally are a despicable, unethical pervert.
* If I think your website acts as a safe haven for trolls, I will denounce you as a despicable troll-lover to all the domain experts whom I know you rely upon: and I will make sure that those domain experts are so disgusted by your sympathy for such modern-day devils that they don’t return your emails or calls. But that’s not actually “libel”, because… I say so.
Oh, and if you honestly think I’m making any part of the above three sections up, you have no idea at all about the depths a few irresponsible people can – and do – plumb.
Tim O’Reilly’s idealistic-sounding proposal for more civility in the blogosphere seems a world away from my own experience of the last year (particularly during the last few months): Daniel Scocco’s “responsible blogging” barely touches on my concerns, while Rebecca Blood and CyberJournalist.net’s angles on blogging ethics seem to assume everyone out there is journalistically sparring according to a rather refined set of Marquis of Queensberry-style rules.
Clearly they’re not.
What people keep telling me to do when I yet again come up against what to me – and probably to almost all other bloggers, I believe – seems like unbelievably irresponsible and unethical blogging is to just ignore it. Turn the other cheek. Take no notice: walk away.
Step away from the burning firework factory, sir. Nothing to see. Even if the fireworks do happen to be vividly writing your name across the virtual sky.
But there’s something deeply unethical about saying and doing nothing. As the CyberJournalist.net says, all bloggers should have an ethical obligation to “expose unethical practices of other bloggers.”
And yet the behaviour I have encountered would be unrecognizable to almost all other bloggers. Does what I have had thrown at me even fall in the same category as blogging? Or is it something that has grown into a sustained campaign of intensely personal, bitter hatred, merely shaped into what superficially resembles blog form? [*]
For me, the best practice for bloggers isn’t anything so idealistic as the four accounts I referred to above: but rather to read the list of Irresponsible Blogging Practices above and make sure you never – ever, ever – do any of it whatsoever. For any reason.
[*] For the record, I don’t “loathe” or even “hate” the person who has been doing this. I just wish he would spend even 1% as much time facing himself in the mirror as he does trying to devise loathsome new ways to attack me.
The problems Cipher Mysteries recently had with its last web hosting supplier were all logical consequences of scale: not only had the blog got larger and the number of comments shot up, but also WordPress (and all those ‘must-have’ caching and security plugins) had got larger (and slower) as well.
I genuinely thought that moving the site to a WordPress multisite installation on a far more heavyweight hosting account would be (despite the inevitable hassle the transition involved) a great technical fix for all those scaling issues. And in many ways, it was: Cipher Mysteries now seems (touch wood) to be working better than it has done for a long time (though I’m still looking for a good multisite redirection plugin, bah).
But having now sat down to start posting again after my enforced break, I realise that I had overlooked a quite different scaling problem, and the effects that has been having on Cipher Mysteries. And this turns out to be something I don’t yet have a fix for, technical or otherwise.
Over the last year or so, I’ve found it increasingly difficult to write blog posts on unbroken historical ciphers, and for one simple reason: that, having researched all the major ones in great detail over the last decade, a thousand words or so is too small a space to fit even a preamble to a new angle, let alone the new angle itself.
In practice, this is having the effect of dissuading me from writing anything about anything: inside the WordPress editor, I have thirty or more draft posts started that I just can’t find the energy to complete – in each case, having written a page or two or three, I can already tell that they’re all going to be too long.
In short: without really realising it, I’ve silently undergone a transition from medium-form to long-form, to the point that I can’t sensibly fit what I want to write into blog posts. And I don’t know what to do about it.
At the same time, Klaus Schmeh has arrived on the scene with his (entirely sensible, though occasionally Lego-minifigure-abusing) Krypto Kolumne, which covers a diverse collection of crypto stuff (particularly enciphered German postcards).
Klaus has a good presentation schtick, a nicely dry sense of humour, and a loyal online audience that relishes being fed unsolved cryptograms that it can (and often does) actually solve. He has taken what I would categorize as a more journalistic angle on historical ciphers: he seems less interested in solving or researching them himself than in enabling other people to grow them into a more substantial story.
By comparison, my own research interests have become far narrower and far more specific as time has gone by. This has been the perhaps inevitable result of exploring and testing the outer limits of knowledge of the “big” unsolved historical ciphers – the Voynich Manuscript, the Rohonc Codex, the Beale Papers, the Somerton Man’s Rubaiyat Page, the WW2 Pigeon Cipher, the Dorabella cipher, La Buse, Le Butin, etc. It’s a list whose elements were all individually well-worn by the time Elonka Dunin put them together and posted it on the Internet.
But this process of knowledge exploration has also meant that I have developed strong technical opinions: these are not only about the range of possible decryptions, but also about the limits of what can and can’t be known about a given artefact – i.e. what evidence we do have, and what we can infer from that evidence.
And expressing such technical opinions have, of late, brought me into repeated conflict with various people on the Internet: for example, I think that there is no evidence of “microwriting” in the Tamam Shud page whatsoever that could not similarly be drawn out from almost any digital image whatsoever – I continue to receive online abuse (and indeed accusations of mental disorders) for saying this. Which is the kind of thing only libel lawyers find enjoyable reading (simply because it pays their mortgages).
It has got to the point where I’m utterly bored of moderating snarky comments written by people who want to take a cheap shot at me: being ghastly to me has become a kind of initiatory hazing ritual for cipher nutters.
Another thing that’s going on is that, thanks to what looks like extended Turing Mania, historical ciphers have moved into the mainstream. Even today’s announcement that a teleprinter for a Lorenz SZ42 machine was bought on eBay for £9.50 (which is a nice little story, but far from cryptologically earth-shaking) emerged not via (say) the CryptoCollector mailing list, but via the BBC.
Even Kernel Magazine devoted its last issue to Codes and Ciphers: though this actually turned out to have only micro-interviews with Zodiac Killer Cipher researchers and a largely unrevealing summary of the A858 (ok, “r/A858DE45F56D9BC9” in full) subreddit code thing.
Yet arguably the only good mainstream article on cipher mysteries in the last decade has been Christopher Tritto’s excellent Code Dead on Ricky McCormick: and even that barely touched the nature of those pages.
And so even though codes and ciphers are now officially “cool”, there’s almost no good writing on them out there at all: and where Cipher Mysteries fits into the overall landscape any more is something I’m struggling to see.
So what will Cipher Mysteries’ focus be, going forward?
Right now, I don’t honestly know. But what I do know is that things have to change…
…but what a pain in the neck moving a large blog from a single-site WordPress install to a WordPress multisite install is. 🙁 I started trying to count how many individual steps it took to get it all working again, but gave up around ninety (for what it’s worth, I’d guess the final figure was closer to 150). Astonishing (and not in any good sense of the word).
Anyway, even though I *think* I’ve got everything basically working again, please use this page to let me know if you find anything broken. Which is entirely possible, unfortunately. Thanks!
If you’ve been wondering why Cipher Mysteries has been so quiet for a few days, it’s because my PC has been out of order (the old power supply died, *sigh*). But it’s now working again, no thanks to Corsair (boo).
Though this is good, it unfortunately also means I now have a lot of catching up to do, so I shall continue to be subdued for a few days while emails get replied to and everything slowly eases back into some kind of normality.
In the meantime, I thought you might like this: a song by UK indie band Fanfarlo called “Harold T. Wilkins, or How to Wait a Very Long Time“. It was used in the (2010) film “Going The Distance”, if you were unfortunate enough to end up watching that on a plane.
If you don’t know who Harold T. Wilkins was, why, you’ve missed out on sooooo much: he wrote about allegedly lost pirate treasure (particularly Captain Kidd’s), lost Atlantean civilizations, what we now call cryptozoology, and UFO conspiracies… but all more than 40 years before the X-Files. And to my eyes, he seems to have made up a large part of everything he wrote. In short: 50% bad journalist, 50% bad Erich von Daniken. Which is… an interesting mix, you might say.
Fanfarlo also released a pretty good acoustic all-in-one-tiny-room version of the song here, though (purists look aside) the bass guitar did look to me as though it was plugged into an amp.
I grabbed the opportunity to go to the National Archives in Kew for a short while this morning to have a look at some prize papers – papers in the archives relating to the capture of ships.
In almost all cases, these are made up of depositions and submissions to the Prize Court about who should be rewarded for the capture. In a few lucky cases, though, the bundles include log books and lists of crew members.
Because I’ve recently been thinking about whether the “Captain Hamon” in BN3 (the final document of the three commonly attributed to Bernardin Nageon de l’Estang) might actually be Jacques-Félix-Emmanuel Hamelin, I wanted to see La Vénus’ prize papers. Might they include a list of ensigns and sailors? It was worth a look.
HCA 32/1752 is divided into two parts: La Vénus’ prize papers are in Part 2. But unless you really enjoy grinding your way through interminable longhand legal wrangling, I would only recommend them over (say) Ant & Dec’s Saturday Night Takeaway. By which I actually mean: not at all.
But the overall process of putting together the picture of Hamelin and La Vénus has revealed what could very well be a timeline problem with the “Hamon == Hamelin” hypothesis.
19th November 1809: Hamelin and his ship La Vénus were captured by HMS Boadicea
10th December 1810: Hamelin and the other Prisoners of War were sent on the Bombay Merchant to the Port of Morlaix (near Brest)
2nd February 1811: three frigates sail from Brest – Renommée (Commodore François Roquebert), Clorinde (Captain Jacques Saint-Cricq), and Néréide (Captain Jean-François Lemaresquier)
February 1811: Hamelin arrives back in Brest.
12th February 1811: Tamatave was captured by the brig HMS Eclipse
6th May 1811: the three French frigates arrive at Mauritius
19th May 1811: Roquebert’s squadron reaches (and recaptures) Tamatave
20th May 1811: Tamatave again falls to the British (though this time for good).
Ideally, we would expect this timeline to square with BN3:
I’ve been sick since the fall of Tamatave, despite the care of my friend the commander
[…]
When I am dead, Captain Hamon will give you the little that I possess that I saved during my adventurous life at sea.
From this, it would seem that BN3 was written either after the first fall of Tamatave (12th February 1811) or – perhaps more probably – its second and final fall (20th May 1811). Yet by then, Captain Hamelin had been captured for over a year and had been returned to France. Moreover, Hamelin, despite subsequently being made a Rear Admiral by Napoleon I and having his name engraved on the Arc de Triomphe, never again returned to the Indian Ocean.
I don’t know if this timeline definitively rules out the Hamon / Hamelin hypothesis: but it’s certainly not supportive of it just yet.
More as it happens.
When I looked again at the “Le Butin” documents a few days ago, I noted that I thought BN3 (the third letter, apparently dating to not long after the Fall of Tamatave in 1810) had been written not by Bernardin Nageon de l’Estang, but by someone else entirely – someone who had ended up with Nageon de l’Estang’s Will and other documents.
Whereas Bernardin Nageon de l’Estang seems (from his letters) to have thought and acted like a pirate, this unidentified other person seems by contrast to have thought and acted like a corsair (i.e. a French privateer). I know there’s a lot of practical overlap between the two categories, but the two men’s core motivations seem to have been quite different, along with their use of language.
If we abandon the idea that the third letter (“BN3”) is in any way connected to Bernardin Nageon de l’Estang, can we use the internal evidence to identify the missing corsair who appears to have written it? It would seem that:
* he was from a family in France whose ancestral house remained but whose proud splendour had long faded;
* he had a “beloved brother” called Etienne, who had at least two sons;
* he was alive after the Fall of Tamatave in 1810 (though weak, and fearing death);
* he had (almost certainly) been on a ship under a “Captain Hamon” (Jamon?) not long before;
* his “glorious feat of arms” had been rewarded by none other than Napoleon Bonaparte, the First Consul;
* he was on the Apollon’s ill-fated last sea mission in 1798;
* at “our last battle with a large British frigate on the shores of Hindustan”, the dying Franc-Mason captain had given him “his secrets and his papers”, leading to buried treasure; and
* there were three documents about the treasures (though it would seem that we only have seen two of them).
Incidentally, I’ll return to the “last battle with a large British frigate” at a later date (I now have a strong suspicion which battle that was): but right now I’m more concerned with the Apollon.
After a previous spectacular success when captained by Jean Francois Hodoul, the 12-cannon Apollon (now captained by Louis Le Vaillant) was captured in 1798 by HMS Leopard. According to the prize documents in the National Archives at Kew, it had either 132 or 137 men on board.
If our missing corsair was – as BN3 suggests – on the Apollon’s last sea mission, then we should be able to see his name on the crew list. Furthermore, I think it would seem more likely that he was a sailor, ensign, or pilot than a volunteer, cook, or carpenter: and we can very probably rule out anyone with a non-French surname or any of the “noirs liberés” on board.
Hence I have image-enhanced roughly half of the crew list, numbered them, and placed them on a new page on the Cipher Foundation website.
The first two names on the crew list are very straightforward: Louis Le Vaillant and Jean Francois Hodoul, the latter of whom left the ship at the Seychelles (according to a note in the margin):
However, there are plenty of other names on the crew list that I’m far less certain of, so this is very much a work in progress.
Could I therefore please ask those readers with experience of reading older French handwriting if they would contribute, by suggesting what the other crew members’ names are? I have made some obvious-looking readings to try to get the list going, but this is not something I can claim any great expertise in. Please leave your comments either on this page or on the Cipher Foundation page and I’ll integrate them into the list, crediting you on the page for your help if you like.
Incidentally, I’m simply not allowed – as normal with historical archives – to publish the raw images of the crew list from Réunion on the web. But feel free to email me (nickpelling attus nickpelling dottus commus, hopefully you can read Latin email addresses) if you are a researcher who would like to see more from a particular page etc.
Thanks!
Films and TV typically depict code-breakers as genius mathematicians running clever programmes on the fastest computers of their day – but for the kind of code-breaking I do, putting it into a computer is almost always the last step, not the first step.
In fact, there are close to a hundred things historical code-breakers like to try to work out first, such as:
* Who owns it?
* Who owned it in the past?
* Does it look genuine?
* Is there anything that might prove that it’s a fake?
* Was the code connected to any other documents?
* Are there references to the code in other documents?
* Is there any extra writing directly linked to the code?
* Do we know who the code-maker was?
* What was the code-maker’s situation?
* Who was supposed to be able to read the code?
* Are there any other documents written using the same letter shapes?
* Why was there any need for a code at all?
* Is it a code, or a cipher, or something in-between?
* Was each line of text written left-to-right or right-to-left?
* What language was the hidden message probably written in?
* Does the code’s text have any unusual features?
…and so on.
In short, if you ask your computer to work out what a message says in English when it’s actually written in German, it’s never going to find an answer, is it?
And the more that you can work out for certain before you try breaking the code, the greater the chance you will actually solve it.
Though I’ve covered Ricky McCormick’s mysterious notes here before, the short answer is…
No, they’re not.
When Ricky McCormick dropped out of school, he was barely able to read or write: the system had failed him completely – perhaps he was dyslexic, it’s hard to say. His parents “told investigators he sometimes jotted down nonsense he called writing“; that “the only thing he could write was his name“; and that Ricky “couldn’t spell anything, just scribble.”
The poor quality of the handwriting in his notes is completely consistent with the suggestion that he wrote them himself. And if he could barely write English, writing notes to himself in code seems extraordinarily unlikely.
So if you start off (as the Wikipedia “Ricky McCormick’s encrypted notes” page does) by assuming that Ricky McCormick’s notes are encrypted, I believe you have already doomed your code-breaking attempts to failure.
Personally, I can’t come up with even a single reason why the FBI ever thought that they might be in code (in the sense of a cryptographic code).
But we still might be able to read them…
I think the most likely explanation for the notes is that they are written in (what is effectively) his own private language – notes to himself that nobody else needed to be able to read.
I’ve marked up the top few lines of the second note so that you can see some of the groups of letters (such as “WLD” and “NCBE”) that occur again and again:-
One mystery is why the “SE” pair occurs so often: perhaps that was related to a speech quirk he had.
Also: the bottom line of the first note has a sequence that seems to say “(194 WLD’S NCBE)”. This makes it look as though both “WLD” and “NCBE” are nouns, and that (whatever they actually are) a “WLD” can own a “NCBE”… but that’s as far as I can go.
When we read these notes, I think we’re hearing inside Ricky McCormick’s head. But until we talk with the people who knew him, know his speech patterns, know his world… we’ll probably never make sense of them.