Didac Sánchez and the WW2 Cipher Pigeon…

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Here in the UK, it all started with a story in 27th August 2015’s Daily Telegraph:-

Didac Sánchez, a 22-year-old Spanish IT entrepreneur, says he has deciphered Second World War message following a three-year effort at a cost of €1.5 million (£1.1m) – but won’t reveal its message.

Didac Sanchez

Sánchez claims he told GCHQ of the message’s contents: but GCHQ (of course) denies all knowledge of it.

Now, I have to admit that this is quite a different angle from the media’s usual cipher mystery-related tosh. But what’s in it for Sánchez? Ah, the Telegraph went on to say:

He [Sánchez] now plans to market new security software based on the code, a system he has christened 4YEO (For Your Eyes Only) and which will allow any text, document, WhatsApp, Messenger, SMS or Skype conversation to be encrypted, as well as telephone calls.

And A Didac Sánchez Cryptogram Too…

And – mirabile dictu – Sánchez’s clever people have posted up a challenge cryptogram supposedly generated using 4YEO’s software, offering a bounty of 25,000 euros to the first person who can crack its “indecipherable” secrets before, errrm, 31st December 2015:

GDNFP IUALI ZOANN EEING DUORL IELTE ROMSO EVCIS AIFON NBNTN IEPSR LAAAT JELAE IMIRN RSNEP IADIA NIATD DPVRO RURLU UAELP RLASR AAOSQ PDSOY EMINL RIDLN NSIEA AEULA AFSTO DIIUF RRRCG EEZIS BAXTI MMORI ORANO FHDER DCNNT NRADA ETAER CDNIO EEAIO EROMT TUDVI AOCDS RHSEU RLALQ CCOCC MIEON NRNIT TOESF OAAMN ANTAO OICEJ TOSBD DEPIR OIANE AOZUE ECCCN IAEIS REECI IRNUR IATCE FSEUC EIENC ROASP COPSU LNUTI VOUES RACCR SYNCA MROIU TLJOB UVSOO JIRLE SSETU TNNOT ASRNE IOBCU NALEU OMEER GINOU AAETL STHER ONLAR ROTIE LENDR AEEYO TRSBR TDRTE HETRR ICUEL TRDCE ASNND TUCOD MDUJA OESPL RESEG OMOCL TAMTI IEGLM AAERR RRSEN SIBAI EICDL RILCE LOXES ELUEO CTANP TNRYU XGGTA NSTIO DSADC CDEER EODNA SAALS CCZEE EENRE LAOOR VASHA SLEAJ CAITE HRTER ELNIA GNTEL DSAAN EOFTD NURAD OSACE MDICR IOACT NEERO OATCA IRPAO NISMD SVECT NLYLT TETNS HSACL NETNL PGIEU EEEDL DCTSR PÑMDM ATUED OOSTS YERCD TRCAO ANAIE EPSNR ZMMCI RIDIL RIAGD IOMRI SAEAN VOLEE TBEOR OEEEA SEOEA EERAO OLSLM EAERO ZUHVU ALEEM EONIA AOEEZ CEEON NNESO ANBMI DLFDP LEIIS LQCMT UROIT SRAON EICLL IQCNL LIOIT RFAAN NDMTL ECESN OCOIL STOPA OACIS SAVCN ALARE EAIEC OSBNE OOHPS TSGLO LELDP MNGCM ORNUV LCLJG IINAM AOCAS TSOIL NNELA ONTEE OAAOU LIADO VNSEL RSQAM AOMOS CLVND IUREN TTEEA IIREE FOONN OORAP IYAAT ESLAI INPSO EVARO ARONE OÑNNA IGOSI ZPENA UIAAO LUEOA OERDH SVRTO MEOUI GADLR SDNIR BOESS NDTEA PEMFI LEAUI UEEOD OSSEO RLRDI ILBEU OOLTC NDTAE OSCMO OTASR SYDNO EMLMA EAEIR MIAAA IRUOR LESSC ROULE TARAN ASNÑT UNUDS EOTHC EBEGI OEDTG LOPAL LADAB DLISI SEDOE SRGDO OTODT AROAM CLCBE FDAEA HIAAI LARAE BIBEV AAMNO AIAAE POARO IIEEA EYSAF EEIEP RAGTE ANNOS OPLEA ACEDS IIIDA INZEA INNNC YYAEB EEEPI CENCU TNOSD URJIO LDESA LIITN ODIAI MEORE AEMUP EOCLE EOCAC AOC GDNFP

Things to note about this Sánchez challenge cryptogram:
* There are three 5-letter repeats (OTASR, RLESS, GDNFP), which I think would imply that this is not a simple substitution cipher.
* From the presence of “Ñ”, it seems that the plaintext is probably Spanish or Catalan [Catalan does not have a Ñ letter].
* The most common letters are EAOINRSLTC, whereas the most common letters for Spanish are EAOSNRILDT, and the most common letters for Catalan are EASRLTINOUM.
* Hence it seems that, completely unlike the WW2 pigeon cipher, this is nothing more than a path transposition cipher of a Spanish plaintext.
* The length (in characters) is 1428, which factorises as 2 x 2 x 3 x 7 x 17. [But see the update below!]
* Hence this might feasibly be formed from four sequential transposed blocks of 17 x 21 (or of 21 x 17) characters. [But see the update below!]
* Given that no algorithm is specified, it seems that the cryptogram maker is inexperienced in cryptography and hoping for “security by obscurity”.

Naturally, my normal 15% crypto-consultancy rate applies if you manage to crack it from this. 😉

What Does Nick Think?

What do I make of all this? Well, from all this I hear the clear guiding voice of someone who appears to know almost nothing about how encryption technology works in the real world of heterogenous networks and protocols: there could be no single ‘silver bullet’ that could satisfy the technological needs of encryption in all these areas simultaneously.

So all I can honestly see here is a fake from start to finish, a homegrown transposition cipher cobbled together by someone who has perhaps seen the Feynman Challenge Ciphers (but little else besides), and designed to hype some vapourware (i.e. software which hasn’t yet been written). Do I honestly believe that Sánchez’s allegedly crack team of, errm, code crackers ever existed, never mind cracked ‘our’ WW2 pigeon cipher? No, sorry, I don’t. I really don’t.

So unless anyone has proof otherwise, I call this entire story as a Big Fat Modern Bluff, someone trying to appropriate a real-life cipher mystery to promote some crypto-security vapourware that hasn’t even been written. Would I entrust my data to any company who thinks this is in any way “indecipherable”? No, I would not, sorry.

And this is exactly where I planned to finish the whole coverage of this story…

But Then I Read This…

According to this first part and this second part of detailed Spanish exposé from last September, courtesy of Madrid-based online political daily ‘El Confidencial’:

* Didac Sánchez is just a frontman for a group of companies
* Of those (at least) fifteen companies, only three have so far filed any accounts, with a total combined turnover of less than a million euros, some 2% of the amount claimed in the press.
* The journalists were unable to find any genuine trace of several of the other companies (e.g. Hilton Clinic), despite numerous promises made by Sánchez himself to supply them documentation on the companies’ activities.
* Sánchez’s original name was Diego Giménez Sánchez, but he changed it to Diego Sánchez Giménez
* Sánchez’s real history is to be found in connection with his original name (Diego Giménez Sánchez)
* On 29th May 2005, Diego Giménez Sánchez was (at the age of 12), while living in the Casal dels Infants del Raval in Barcelona, sexually abused by a 45-year-old man by the name of José María Hill Prados. José María Hill Prados was convicted in February 2007 (and banned from contacting Giménez Sánchez for five years or coming within 1000 metres of him), but later appealed, saying that Giménez Sánchez had withdrawn all the claims. However, the court was not swayed by this, or by Sánchez’s many letters (and even TV interviews) at the time. José María Hill Prados has since been released.
* Fast forward to 2015, and El Confidencial’s journalists discovered that the person actually behind all Didac Sánchez’s companies was none other than… José María Hill Prados, whom El Confidencial helpfully labels as “pederasta del Raval”.

Personally, I have no way of knowing what the truth of this matter is. At the very least, the existence of Sánchez / Hill Prados’s company ‘Eliminalia’ that helps people remove their unwanted past from the web is an aspect to this whole affair that is either horribly cynical or spectacularly ironic. Closets have rarely held more skeletons simultaneously, it would seem.

Make of all this what you will. 😐

Update: I just now noticed (*sigh*) the connection with the WW2 pigeon ciphertext – the first five-element code group (GDNFP) is the same as the last (GDNFP). In the case of the WW2 cipher, this is almost certainly because it encrypts the initial settings for the five drums used in the Typex machines used so much by the British Army: but in this challenge cipher, who knows? But this would probably make the length of the ciphertext either (by excluding the final GDNFP) 1423 (which would be a high unlikely message length for a transposition cipher, because it’s prime 🙂 ), or (by excluding both the first and final GDNFP) 1418 which equals 2 x 709, which is also somewhat unlikely as a transposition ciphertext length.

So what is probably going on is that “GDNFP” is encrypting some kind of reordering key to the transposition cipher. If A = 1, then (in ascending order) G = 7, D = 4, N = 14, F = 6, and P = 16. If an idiot programmer was behind this, one might possibly predict that this encodes a five-letter-long hex number (i.e. 0x63D5F = 408927) as the enciphering key. If an idiot mathematician was behind this, these might be indices into a list of prime numbers, A = 2, B = 3, C = 5, D = 7, E = 11, F = 13, G = 17, H = 19, I = 23, J = 29, K = 31, L = 37, M = 41, N = 43, O = 47, and P = 53, so [GDNFP] might instead encode [17,7,43,13,53]. Chances are that these are the kinds of thing this peasanty / homegrown transposition cipher will prove to use.

Elonka and the Beale Ciphers…

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Here’s a link to a 24-minute Youtube video of Elonka Dunin making a presentation on the Beale Ciphers a few weeks ago (November 2015) at PhreakNIC 19, a hacker/tech convention held in Nashville every year.

Elonka Dunin talking about the Beale Ciphers

[ Note that in the following, I try to actively distance the Beale Papers (i.e. the pamphlet, which is hugely problematic as a source of historical evidence) from the Beale Ciphers (i.e. the three dictionary ciphertexts). ]

Elonka starts by showing a brief (but poor quality) intro to the Beale Papers courtesy of the TV history documentary series “Myth Hunters”, which you can tell is full of crackpot theorists serious historians because my face appears straight away. 🙂

Elonka’s Opinion…

Ultimately, Elonka’s opinion is that despite the crypto, both the Beale Papers and the Beale Ciphers are literary fakes, even though she appreciates that the Gillogly strings (which we should probably actually call the Hammer strings, after Carl Hammer who first described them) can very clearly be taken either as evidence of the Beale Ciphers’ fakery or as evidence of its genuineness.

In some ways, it’s not often individual cipher mysteries break down to an either/or (my apologies, I just heard Simon Munnery on “Quote Unquote”, which brought back fond memories of being filmed in a draughty warehouse for Munnery’s Kierkegaardian TV show “Either/Or” as a sort-of-quiz participant many years ago), so this is quite an unusual aspect of the Beale Ciphers. By which I mean that unlike the Voynich Manuscript’s ten thousand stupid competing theories, the presence of the Gillogly strings implies that there are only really two workable explanations for the Beale Ciphers (note: not the Beale Papers): (a) that they’re completely genuine, or (b) that they’re completely fake.

Specifically: if there’s any evidence that suggests that the Beale Papers are themselves anything but a lurid fabrication, I have yet to see it. In fact, the only actual issue would seem to be whether the papier maché fleshing out was done on top of a thin (but genuine) wire skeleton, or whether the underlying skeleton was fake as well.

My Opinion…

For me, I think it is reasonably likely that there was indeed a Thomas Beale who left a box (containing the cryptograms) behind at the Washington Hotel for safe keeping. But given that the innkeeper Robert Morriss didn’t actually start working there until 1823, it should be possible for us to directly conclude that the letters (in the pamphlet) apparently addressed to Morriss at the Washington Hotel and supposedly written in 1822 are therefore completely fake. Basically, Beale couldn’t have written letters to someone who wasn’t working there yet.

And if those letters are fake, then the backbone of the entire pamphlet is fake. And so I find it easy to agree with people who think that the Beale Papers are fake. But what, then, of the Beale Ciphers?

My own suspicion is that what we’re looking at here is – much as seems to have happened with the “La Buse” cryptogram – a fake story elaborated around the hearsay bones of a real (but poorly-understood) cryptogram. But, as again so often happens, perhaps there were several layers to the storytelling going on here.

Firstly, I suspect that Morriss made the first level of elaboration in order to justify his having broken the locks of a sealed container some years after it had been left at the Washington Hotel (presumably for safekeeping with a previous innkeeper). And I would expect that there was a second level of elaboration added by the person who became the next owner of the object (though I doubt we will ever know more about this shadowy person). And whether the topmost level of elaboration (to turn it all into pamphlet form) was added by Ward or Sherman probably matters not a jot.

So in the Beale Papers, it would seem from all this that what we have been handed down is a fictional story wrapped around a retelling of a self-justificatory lie, which itself in turn was wrapped around a set of three ciphertexts that themselves may or may not be real. No wonder it has proved difficult for people to make sense of it all!

Ultimately, though I think the Beale Ciphers are real, Elonka concludes otherwise: hence we sit either side of that particular either/or fence – but feel free to choose whichever side seems to you to have the greener grass. 😉

The Voynich Manuscript and the poverty of disproof…

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It’s a hard thing to admit, but I think the Voynich Manuscript tells us much more about History – and specifically about historical proof – than History tells us about the Voynich Manuscript.

Even though we have accumulated so much micro-knowledge about the Voynich (by which I mean how its ‘language’ works, and even – to a certain extent – how it was made and owned), we still have almost no genuine macro-knowledge about it at all. For all the long list of suggestive details, our Voynich knowledge in toto is little more than a forensic desert (and not obviously different to that surrounding the Somerton Man), one that remains so wide that none may cross it and live.

For all Rene Zandbergen’s accumulated provenancing, for all his patient and informed historical nuancery, teasing single strands out of Kircher’s Republic of Letters and weaving them into what are little more than semi-threads, we still know essentially nothing about what Kircher knew of it, or thought of it. We don’t even know if he ever saw the dratted Manuscript, or if the pages (or copies of pages) sent to him by Baresch are still extant in some unknown Jesuit cryptographic archive somewhere. Or (if they are) whether or not they will give us even a flicker of assistance in decrypting Voynichese (based on past form, I suspect they would not).

And yet…

So far, so nothing: but here’s the rub. Even though I’ve long held as a basic research tenet the notion that historians are better equipped at disproving fallacious claims than genuinely proving things, why do you think it is that even after all this time, the Internet is still awash with Voynich claims and theories that make little more than facile, superficial sense?

Example #1: why is it that Stephen Bax’s utterly foolish and superficial nine-word theory has found itself promoted to hits #3, #4, and #5 on a Google search for “Voynich” (as of today)? Is it really the case that nobody has noticed that his attempts at reading Voynichese as a natural language fail to explain more than 99.9% of the text, which is almost the very definition of “unsystematic”? Is it really the case that nobody has noticed that you can “read” almost exactly the same number of words by interpreting Voynichese as English?

Example #2: why is that that Gordon Rugg’s shudderingly awful CompSci misreading of Voynichese as a “language” generated by Cardan grilles still has any faint lustre of validity at all? Why is it that I still – all these years on – run into people whose view of the Voynich is not only coloured by this kind of anti-historical claptrap, but also utterly delimited by its faux postmodern stupidity? When will we ever manage to draw a line under this idiocy?

Example #3: why is it that Rich SantaColoma can still get away with miscasting the Voynich Manuscript’s eponymous 20th century finder as its forger? Though he “plays the game well”, if you multiply out all the individual probabilities that he has to bracket out to keep his ball in the court of possibility, it’s hard to see how he can end up with a net likelihood of more than one in a million. All of which is good for his personal position (in that nobody has outright disproved his assertion that Wilfrid Voynich hoaxed his Roger Bacon manuscript), but lousy for the overall discourse, in that he continues to waste everyone else’s time by fighting against whatever they say wherever it happens to run counter to his blessèd sub-one-in-a-million shot.

…and need I honestly extend the same face-palm of logical despair to Guiseppe Bianchi’s recent Youtube video on the Voynich, however lamentable it may be? I sincerely hope not: because disproving it (and the legions of other disappointingly rubbish Voynich non-theories) would be a full-time job, and I already have three of those vying for my as-yet-uncloned time.

The poverty of disproof

Do you see the underlying pattern here? That if Voynich theorists are happy to retreat to the far unpainted corner of possibility (however dwindlingly small a scrap of floor their ill-formed theories leave them to stand on), absolute disproof becomes almost as hard as absolute proof. Moreover, such theorists are then able to take that absence of comprehensive disproof as confirmation that they were somehow on the right track all along – that the inability of others to sumo-wrestle them out of the dohyo justifies their faith in their own worthless position.

In fact, I have become utterly bored with people sending me their worthless non-theories to disprove, because I know that however I respond with, they will then conjure up a counter-example that proves that my disproof was not absolute: and so use the opportunity that yields them to cock a snook at my so-called expertise.

And so I’m left with an uncomfortable conclusion about the Voynich Manuscript and the poverty of disproof: that if it is almost impossible to disprove a mad theory all the while a given loopy theorist can keep dreaming up flimsily etheral counterexamples of possibility, then we’ve all kind of lost before we even begin. At that sad point, the entire discourse has broken down into some kind of demented two-handed game, where one side has an endless supply of imaginative jokers to place on the table.

joker-and-joker

Ultimately, we’ve now reached a net position where the core discourse about the Voynich Manuscript is so painfully broken that there is almost nothing that can be said about it that will not immediately be opposed by wobbly counterassertions moulded out of outrageously weak possibility.

Specifically, there is almost nothing I can sensibly write about the Voynich Manuscript that Stephen Bax, Gordon Rugg, Rich SantaColoma and Giuseppe Bianchi cannot immediately oppose (sometimes in the same way, or more likely in four wildly different ways), should they wish: which, to me, speaks of a kind of pervasive epistemological collapse. It is as though knowledge’s graph of usefulness plotted against time has historically peaked, and is now steadily declining: that instead of knowing more, we are losing any sense of equilibrium about the internal dynamics that make up good knowledge. The model of knowledge as a medium for slowly accumulating sensible judgments is giving way to a model of rapidly accumulating possibilities, all as bad as each other: and we are all the worse for it.

Right now, nobody seems to grasp that cipher mysteries sit at an oddly hypermodern frontier – and that if we are not careful, this could be the beginning of the end for all knowledge. But nobody seems to care.

Happy Voynich Christmas from Cipher Mysteries!

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The way the modern world works is that I can’t possibly send you all a Christmas card without falling foul of some data protection or anti-stalking legislation. And that would be a Very Bad Way Indeed to finish the year.

So the next best thing I can think of is to send you all a downloadable Voynich Christmas card from me as a PDF for you to print out and to put on your mantelpiece. Or to put next to all the other cards you get from people you don’t know very well but who keep sending you them every year, even though you never send them one back in return. Or to just briefly look at on the computer. Or to just ignore, it’s your call, really.

christmas-card.png

To get the full Christmassy effect you need to print it out and then fold it twice so that the above image is on the front sheet. This is about a hundred times easier than the way I’ve just described it, but never mind, you’ll see what I mean. 🙂

Note that the nymph on the left is from f80v of the Voynich Manuscript: she is plainly holding some kind of clever basting device for cooking her festive turkey, though I have to say that she also seems to have had a bit of an accident with the extra-wide foil for wrapping her bird in. (I think you’ll find that “Wolkenband” is the German word for “cooking foil”, if you check your dictionary extremely selectively). And why ever she’s trying to cook it without any clothes on I just don’t know. Perhaps it was too hot in the kitchen? “And then all my clothes fell off”? Riiiight.

But all the same, I think we can safely conclude from all this that the Voynich Manuscript is clearly not the memoirs of a stranded alien (as the Internet would currently have you believe, *sigh*) but is instead an early modern cooking manual.

Who would have thought it, eh? Merry Christmas! 😉

WWI battery cipher…

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Aussie writer/blogger Pete Bowes has long had an interest in the Somerton Man: so when going through a relative’s WWI war diary recently, he was intrigued to find a cipher:

ILWCO MPAY KOMZ YB2N 2YKM QUOO AVA NJOB BOTG HYJE UT2S VRK PBYN HKP IRCG CR

“What do you make of all that?” he asks.

A good question! As I get older, I find that I appreciate good questions more and more, not entirely unlike the nuances of tasting vintage wine. Compare and contrast this with not-so-good questions (I’m specifically thinking here of “Can you disprove my 200-page cipher theory [attached]?” etc) which tend to leave a lingering metallic aftertaste. :-/

Anyway, I knew almost nothing about British Army ciphers in WWI, so my first stop was David Kahn’s “The Codebreakers” (the full length version) to see if he knew any more. However, Kahn tells us all too briefly:

“The British employed the Playfair with random keysquare. Its use extended even to Lawrence of Arabia”. (p.312)

…and that’s basically it. (In fact, the British Army had used Playfair as a field cipher since the 1890s, first using it in the Boer War.)

So: is this cryptogram a Playfair? Well, you should be immediately able to see a number of things that imply otherwise:

* The apparent presence of “OO” (Playfair almost always replaced doubled letters, e.g. “OO” would get replaced by “OX” or “OQ”)
* The apparent presence of “J” (5×5 Playfairs usually used I and J as the same letter so that the 26 letters of the alphabet would fit into a 5×5 arrangement)
* While most cipher groups’ lengths are even, some are odd (Playfair enciphers pairs of letters)
* The apparent presence of “2” (which might suggest a 6×6 Playfair was used, yet given that this is the only digit, that seems highly unlikely)

Regardless, I ran it through CryptoCrack’s 5×5 and 6×6 Playfair solvers, without making any progress. So it would seem that the cryptanalysis backs up the basic history, which is nice.

But if this wasn’t a Playfair, what was it? Pete Bowes thinks that his aunt’s father was in the Ypres Salient during 1916, and presumably this diary dates from that time: yet all the fancy American trench codes were introduced only in 1918. So I’m a little bit stuck as to what else it might be. The presence of “2” ought to be a tell-tale sign… but of what? I don’t know.

But perhaps you know better? 🙂

Announcing: “The Secret History of the Rosicrucians”…

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Here’s a book I wrote back in 2012 that reveals The Secret History of the Rosicrucians: what the people behind it were aiming at, and what the mysterious “Book M” really is.

(I mentioned a few days ago that I would be doing this to celebrate Cipher Mysteries’ having just reached its million-visit milestone, so thank you all for that once more.)

In the book, I reveal not only what I conclude was going on behind the Rosicrucians’ curtain (i.e. that a small group of German literati was trying, in the dying days of Rudolf II’s Court, to gain the Emperor’s patronage for their idealistic but far-from-ancient secret fraternity), but also its extremely surprising link with the Voynich Manuscript (i.e. that they were hoping to use the Voynich Manuscript as their leverage to persuade Rudolf II).

The Rosicrucians wanted Rudolf II's patronage

Rosicrucians: decrypted or debunked?

A bit of both, I’d say.

In many ways, my little book is like a cipher theory in reverse… by which I mean: rather than claiming to have decrypted the Voynich Manuscript, I think I may have glimpsed how the ‘Rosicrucian’ group were trying to use a fake cipher theory (i.e. ‘only our fraternity can read Book M, which you – the Emperor – have a copy of”) to convince Rudolf to back them. Hence my book is perhaps closer to an “anti-cipher-theory”, because it tries to strip away the confusing topmost layers of the Rosicrucian enigma to get closer to what really happened.

I still have work to do on it (in particular to put together a bibliography of the sources I used, such as Tobias Churton’s (2009) “Invisibles : The True History of the Rosicrucians”, etc) and it’s not quite as polished as I would make it if I were to publish it (which might happen in the future), so it’s perhaps best read as a work-in-progress.

Finally, I have formatted its ten chapters across ten webpages so that people can leave comments that relate specifically to each chapter. (I didn’t want to be in the situation where I had a single page with a thousand comments sprawling off into the distance.)

Will this turn out to be just another Rosicrucian-themed 21st Century virtual pamphlet to add to a future Carlos Gilly’s Cimelia Rhodostaurotica Redux? Perhaps… but even so, I really do think I’ve made a good amount of progress in getting to the heart of this long-standing mystery. Have a read, see what you think. 🙂

Thank you, a million times over…

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As a quick glance at the top of this page should reveal, Cipher Mysteries has finally hit the million-visit mark, and without being carried there by any random traffic spikes.

And so to every Cipher Mysteries visitor I send a great big thank you, a million times over. 🙂

But how best to celebrate this (relatively meaningless but numerically pleasing) milestone? For what it’s worth, my plan is to try to complete some of the bigger cipher-related things I’ve been working on over the last few years and put them out there for you all. After all, the whole point of this blog (in my mind, at least) is more about actual cipher history research than about cipher reportage or out-there theorizing.

Just so you know, the things I plan to finish and put out are:
* a small cipher book I was researching and writing back in 2012 (before I ran out of evidence to work with)
* my “block paradigm” analysis of the Voynich zodiac section
* a surprisingly-well-known-but-entirely-unmapped cipher mystery (which needs proper transcribing etc)
* a top secret cipher project (but that’s another story entirely)

Incidentally, The Cipher Foundation now (finally!) has a bank account, so I also plan to put its first microproject (translating Le Flibustier Mysterieux) in motion over the next few days.

Finally, I also plan to set up a celebratory pub meet one Sunday in the next couple of months, where I shall see if I can persuade an historic London pub to put on a barrel of “Enigma” for us (if Robinson’s even still brew it, because it has disappeared from their website), and perhaps stream the meet live on the Internet, so everyone can take part if they wish. Hope to see you there! 🙂

The person not on the S.S.Cimbria…

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A quick note following up yesterday’s post about Henry Debosnys and the S.S.Cimbria (that Debosnys claimed to have caught from Le Havre in June 1871).

According to a February 1980 article (in issue #105 of The Chronicle of the US Classic Postal Issues) called The Hamburg American Line – Mail Packets from New York 4 January 1870 to 23 December 1875 – via Plymouth and Cherbourg to Hamburg by Clifford L. Friend and Walter Hubbard, the S.S. Cimbria did not (just as I suspected) call at Le Havre on the crossings arriving at New York on the 21st May 1871 or 2nd July 1871.

Here’s a table containing links to all the information I have for Cimbria arrivals in New York in 1870 and 1871:

- Le Havre -/- New York -
23 Jan 1870 / 04 Feb 1870 - Roll 323, but Cumbria out of Glasgow rather than Cimbria?
05 Mar 1870 / 15 Mar 1870 - Roll 324, pp.253-264
16 Apr 1870 / 26 Apr 1870 - Roll 326, pp.299-315
04 Jun 1870 / 14 Jun 1870 - Roll 330, pp.151-166
........... / 14 Nov 1870
........... / 05 Jan 1871
19 Feb 1871 / 01 Mar 1871 - Roll 339, pp.317-323
01 Apr 1871 / 09 Apr 1871 - Passenger list
........... / 21 May 1871 - Roll 343, pp.118-139
........... / 02 Jul 1871 - Roll 345, pp.141-153
15 Sep 1871 / 25 Sep 1871 - Roll 349, pp.34-49
28 Oct 1871 / 08 Nov 1871 - Passenger list

(Say what you like: people may keep trying to stamp it out, but philately will get you everywhere.)

Hence Debosnys plainly could not have caught the Cimbria at Le Havre in Jun 1871, because the ship didn’t stop there on that Atlantic crossing.

Moreover, even though 1871 saw many people emigrating from France to America, this is not reflected in the passenger lists of the Cimbria, in which I have seen not a single French person in 1871, and but a handful in 1870 (almost all of which were people in their 20s). I cannot help but suspect that the Cimbria did not normally take on passengers at Le Havre. As a result, right now I am deeply skeptical that Debosnys travelled across on the Cimbria in either 1870 or 1871.

Hence I think it far more likely that Debosnys came over on one of the numerous ships from Le Havre during 1871 carrying French emigrants. But trawling through those passenger lists (many of which are quite poor quality in the PDFs of the microfilms) would be quite an epic task, with only a small chance of success.

It might be better to first narrow down the range of years in which he made this journey. Currently, the earliest external record we have of Debosnys in America is from the French Society in Philadelphia in December 1878, where he and his wife Celestine were the recipient of charity until her death in 1882 [Adirondack Enigma, pp.90-91]. Celestine certainly existed, because commenter Misca found this entry on ancestry.com:-


Name: Celestine Debosnys
Birth Date: abt 1839
Death Date: 5 Mar 1882
Death Place: Philadelphia, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
Age at Death: 43
Gender: Female
Race: White
Cemetery: Alms House
Marital Status: Married
FHL Film Number: 2057163

“I checked the Alms House cemetery. She is not listed there but this may be an oversight of some sort. Not sure.”

I guess the next step back in time would be finding the date of their marriage. Hmmm…

Henry Debosnys and the Cimbria…?

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As Gerry Feltus’ “The Unknown Man” is to the Somerton Man, Cheri Farnsworth’s all-too-brief “The Adirondack Enigma” is (though densely informative) self-avowedly far from the last word on the mystery surrounding Henry Debosnys. In fact, I think it’s fair to say that many doors in her book remain swinging wide open, waiting for determined readers (perhaps with access to different sets of historical resources) to march through them into the darkness beyond, wearing their well-used +10 Night Goggles of Historical Truth.

Which is, of course, exactly what a fair few Cipher Mysteries readers love to do.

For all of us, though, the central challenge with Henry Debosnys is simply this: that while it seems that a portion of what he told reporters (and while in jail he spoke to them a lot, all the while he wasn’t trying to engineer his own escape) was basically true, a second portion was misspelled or misremembered, and a third portion was outright fabricated. (“Self-serving baloney” wouldn’t be a great exaggeration). And so our difficulty is knowing where each portion starts and finishes.

For example, he wrote in a margin that he changed his name to “Henry Deletnack Debosnys” in October 1870 [Adirondack Enigma p.71] (though without any explanation); and he claimed that he travelled from Havre de Grace to New York aboard the Cimbria in June 1871 with his [presumably first] wife Judith (he says she then died in July 1871, whereupon her body was sent back to France).

Debosnys elsewhere writes that his children were (as of 1883) being brought up by a brother in England: so it is not obvious whether the children he claimed to have were with them on the Cimbria.

However, Farnsworth flags that she could find no archival trace at all of Judith Debosnys’ life or indeed death: which I for one find highly suspicious.

And My Current Hypothesis Is…

Personally, I suspect that what is happening here is that we’re being spun a great big line – a complicated, tangled line, for sure, but a line nonetheless.

I must be clear: there seems no obvious reason to conclude that Debosnys, for all his linguistic brio, was anything more than a manipulative, lazy, grotesquely egotistical sociopath, if not actually an outright psychopath. We cannot directly trust any detail of his claimed life that we cannot verify.

So… might it be that Henry Debosnys had already killed his first wife (who was perhaps called Judith, or perhaps not) back in France (perhaps in or around October 1870), and hence the primary purpose of changing his name was to evade justice? This seems the simplest explanation of all, absent any evidence either way.

Was Debosnys On The S.S.Cimbria?

…and if so, what name was he using? It may well be that the only thing we can trust to be moderately accurate is his age (and possibly his nationality): so perhaps we can produce a list of candidates of the right sort of age who all boarded the Cimbria at Havre Le Grace circa June 1871, and then use other cross-referencing means to try to whittle that down to a small handful.

As a result, I think these are certainly questions that we might be able to answer, if (and only if) Debosnys was moderately truthful about arriving on this ship at around this date.

cimbria-1867-as

From this (cached) history of the Cimbria, we can see that it crossed the Atlantic to New York 72 times between 1870 and 1882, before sinking in January 1883. (More pictures here.)

During the year 1871, the Cimbria arrived eight times in New York (according to this): here’s a link to a transcribed list of the passengers on board the ship when it landed in NY on 10th April 1871. According to this page, one person died of smallpox and one was hospitalized on the 21st May 1871 arrival, while two were hospitalized on the 2nd July 1871 arrival. So it would initially seem probable we should be looking at the 2nd July 1871 arrival, right?

The Cimbria’s arrival and passenger list is indeed noted on pp.141-153 of Roll 345. But here’s a mystery for you: apart from a few Swiss and a handful of Dutch, it seems that every non-American passenger on this arrival was actually German. So there would seem to be no reason to think this steamer stopped at Havre le Grace on its way over.

Similarly, Roll 343 covers Cimbria’s 21st May 1871 arrival on pp.118-139: and (again) apart from some Russians, some Dutch, some Belgians and a Mexican, every non-American passenger was German: not a single French person either. Did this stop at Havre le Grace? It wouldn’t seem so.

All in all, it seems probable to me that if Debosnys did arrive on the Cimbria from Havre le Grace, it wasn’t in May, June, or July 1871. The Cimbria definitely did call at Havre Le Grace on other crossings (e.g. 25th October 1871), but apparently not these ones.

Can someone who is tolerably good at reading 19th century American handwriting please have a look at these two passenger lists and see if I’m missing something really obvious?

My prediction would be that Debosnys arrived in New York after October 1870 but before 1872: and that there is a reasonable chance (though far from certain) he travelled on the Cimbria. But until I see anything verified by proper archival evidence, I’m really not sure what to believe about this man: and I strongly recommend that anyone else trying to make sense of this tale should do much the same.

17th Century Cipher Mystery Meme…

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The “Devil’s Handwriting” cipher first appeared in 1539, reproduced in a book by Teseo Ambrogio Albonesi: and, of course, nobody has yet managed to read even a word of it.

But for a short time in the mid-17th Century, oddly enough, it became hugely famous when a copy of Albonesi’s book held by Queen’s College was proudly shown to the newly-Restored Charles II (along with the Queen and the Duke and Duchess of York) on a visit to Oxford on Michaelmas Day 1663. It was the talk of court; and the matter of a small bribe to persuade someone to bring the book out on display became a necessary evil for tourists working their way around Oxford’s wondrous historical sights.

The Devil’s Handwriting then found use a kind of cipher mystery meme: that is, in much the same way that netizens now occasionally use the Voynich Manuscript as a handy metaphoric brick to virtually lob at things they deem incomprehensible, a 1674 poem by Thomas Flatman uses the Devil’s Handwriting to disparage the allegedly impenetrable poetry of Sam Austin of Wadham College:

“We with our fingers may your Verses scan,
But all our Noddles understand them can
No more, than read that dungfork, pothook hand
That in Queen’s Colledge Library does stand.”

[And in fact in 1743, Johann Christian Götze (describing Albonesi’s book) used almost exactly the same phrase to describe the shape of the Devil’s Handwriting’s letters: Mist-Gabeln. Nice.]

Another Oxonian poem (this time from 1746) celebrates rather than execrates the cryptogram:

A dark, oracular, mysterious scrawl:
Uncouth, occult, unknown to ancient Greece,
The Persian Magi, or the wise Chinese.
Nor runic this, nor Coptic does appear;
No, ’tis the diabolic character.

All in all, I think it fair to say that, circa 1665, while the Voynich Manuscript was still on its way to Athanasius Kircher’s to begin a multi-century sleep in Jesuit trunks, the most famous cipher mystery in the world was actually… the Devil’s Handwriting. Just so you know.

PS: I’ve added a page to the Cipher Foundation website containing all the above references to the Devils’ Handwriting.