Delancey vs Beale

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Well. I am surprised.

No sooner had I posted about The Two Thomas Beales and Thomas Beale Junior than I stumbled upon rather more about the Beale family’s affairs than I honestly thought possible, let alone likely.

The key source of information was in a book called “New Orleans Architecture: Jefferson City”, part of a series of books about New Orleans Architecture by Friends of the Cabildo. Pages 41-45 detail the trials (literally!) and tribulations of the Beale family from 1812 through to 1846 or so. (There’s more on page 25).

The highlights of the account are:
* Thomas Beale Senior had drank and gambled away all his money, particularly in 1810;
* He was declared bankrupt in 1812 with $26,000 in debts against ~$13,000 in credits, and indeed briefly went to jail;
* After the part his Rifles played in the Battle of New Orleans, he was something of a “hometown hero”;
* In 1817 he was given a juicy sinecure as Register of Wills (so if you see “Thos Beale Register of Wills” in the Orleans Gazette and Commmercial Advertiser, that’s him);
* Thomas Beale Junior “was as upright and economical as his father was rash”, and ran the family hotel well;
* 29th April 1818: Thomas Beale Senior bought a plantation of land from the late John Poultney, before the notary public Philip Pedesclaux;
* 27th April 1819: Thomas Beale Senior sold the plantation to Thomas Beale Junior, before the notary public Michel Armas;
* September 1820: Thomas Beale Senior died;
* October 1823: Thomas Beale Junior died;
* In 1824, Thomas Beale Senior’s widow Céleste bought the family plantation from Thomas Beale Junior’s estate (I hope you’re following this, there’s a test later), and began a series of lawsuits against Thomas Beale Junior’s natural mother Chloë Delancey alleging that the 1819 transaction between father and son was an illegal “simulated sale”;
* In 1830, the case Delancey vs Beale made it all the way to the Supreme Court in Louisiana;
* In 1846, the Beale Senior’s widow moved to Baton Rouge.

Of course, the duration and intensity of this legal process inevitably made a loser out of everyone involved, even the supposed winner in court (Céleste Beale): and over the next decade and more, the machinations of Samuel Ricker Junior (who married Céleste’s daughter Eliza) seem to have taken a bad situation and made it far, far worse… but that’s another story entirely.

Unfortunately, I’ve only been able to read “New Orleans Architecture: Jefferson City” via Googled fragments, and so despite the fact that it contains many references and footnotes supporting its statements, I have not been able to find those sources. However, I’ve ordered myself a copy and will post an update to Cipher Mysteries when it arrives (in the next week or so, all being well).

My Thoughts on the Beales

As a Register of Wills in New Orleans, Thomas Beale Senior was doubtless privy to all manner of schemes that the (often barely) living tried to put in place to avoid inheritance tax, death duties and the like. Given that the Louisiana Supreme Court (eventually) agreed that the transfer of his property to his son that he tried to put in place in 1819 was (as Beale Senior’s widow claimed) merely a “simulated sale”, it seems likely to me that this was very much part of a scheme along these same general lines.

All of which leads to the somewhat embarrassing conclusion that even though Thomas Beale Senior was a Register of Wills, both he and his son died without leaving a will: while their heirs – quickly surrounded by feckless, inept shysters, happily gouging out their estate – seem subsequently to have spent more time in Louisiana’s Supreme Court than could be considered healthy for anyone not directly making a living out of that place.

While I will be very interested to read up the historical source material on the Beales (which seems, their surname notwithstanding, as much of a soap opera as Eastenders), right now I don’t see anything happening circa 1816-1818 that leads me to even suspect that Thomas Beale Junior was a ‘gentleman adventurer’, as per the only-possibly-eponymous Beale Papers. Rather, Beale Junior seems to have been more interested in furnishing and running his family’s hotel / bar and running their only-recently-acquired plantation.

All the same, we still know next to nothing about what Thomas Beale Junior was doing before 27th April 1819 (the date when his father transferred the plantation over to him in the sham transaction), so – if you’ll forgive the almost unavoidable phrasing – the jury is still out.

Appendix: Delancey vs Beale

The case is to be found in “Reports of Cases Argued and Determined in the Supreme Court of the State of Louisiana, Volume 1”, pp.524-526. I have included it herebelow, having corrected various scanning and transcription errors, as well as what seems to be one gender error:

In 1819, Thomas Beale, sen. conveyed all his property, by notarial acts, to his natural son Thomas Beale, jr., for one hundred and twenty-four thousand dollars, for which he took his notes, with reservation of mortgage. Shortly after, Beale, sen. died intestate, leaving a widow and minor children, but no proceedings in the probate court where had upon his estate. Beale, jr. resided with his father until his death, and afterwards possessed and controlled the property until he died in 1823. The estate was inventoried and sold as that of Beale, jr. Mrs. Beale, the widow of Beale, sen. bought in a large portion of it, and gave her notes with mortgage, according to the condition of the sale. Upon the filing a tableau of Eastern District, distribution by the curator of Beale, jr. she appeared in her own behalf, as partner in community, and as tutrix of her children, and claimed to be placed on the tableau as a privileged creditor under the sales or 1819, of the father to the son. This was opposed by the natural mother (the plaintiff in this cause) as benificiary heir, and also by the creditors of Beale, jr., upon the ground that the sales of 1819 were simulated and void, as made by the father to his natural son, for the purpose of protecting his property from the reach of creditors. These sales were accordingly declared null, and the property sold by these acts of 1819, was ordered to be restored to the widow and heirs of Beale, sen., to be administered according to law.

The present action was instituted upon the notes given by Mrs. Beale, for property purchased at the sale of Beale, jr’s. estate. A want of consideration was pleaded, and after judgment for the defendant, the plaintiff appealed.

  McCaleb, for appellant.
  Seghers, for appellee.

Martin, J. delivered the opinion of the court. The plaintiff, beneficiary heir of Thomas Beale, jr., brought suit on sundry notes of the defendant, given for property purchased at the sale of the estate.

The answer sets forth that the consideration of the notes has failed, the property purchased having been declared to have been acquired under a simulated sale, which has been judicially set aside. There was a prayer for the cancelling of the notes.

There was judgment for the defendant, and the plaintiff appealed.

The record shows that the facts stated in the answer are true: but the appellee has urged that the estate of his [[her?]] son has large claims on those of his father, the defendant’s husband, for improvements on the premises, large advances and long services.

Admitting this to be true, these claims are to be preferred against the defendant and the heirs of her husband; the district court could not have acted on them in the present suit.

It is therefore ordered, adjudged and decreed, that the judgment of the district court be affirmed with costs.

Thomas Beale Junior – possible research resources…?

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What research resources might an interested historian use to find out about the very real Thomas Beale Junior (who might or might not be the Thomas Beale of Beale Papers fame)?

The various New Orleans depositions in 1824/1825 relating to Beale’s estate following his death in 1823 would be a sensible starting point (and the sooner we find a way to have these scanned and transcribed, the better in my opinion): but because they seem likely to be related to his life after 1820 (when he inherited his father’s estate), I suspect this may not carry our research into his earlier life much further.

Aside from (a) legal documents, the two other most obvious research resources would be (b) books and (c) newspapers: but before I delve into these, I need to discuss some tricky issues concerning what happened according to the ciphertext, so that we can possibly narrow our search range down.

Ciphertext vs Pamphlet

There are a number of issues to contend with:

* Ward’s pamphlet asserts that Thomas Beale’s group was made up of thirty Virginian gentlemen adventurers

…yet the ciphertext itself mentions only that it “[belonged] jointly to the parties whose names are given in [cipher] number three”, with the result that much ink has been spilled speculating how thirty names could be squeezed into B3’s plaintext.

* The pamphlet asserts that Beale entrusted the ciphers to Robert Morriss in 1822

…yet other documents indicate that Morriss only started at the Washington Hotel in Lynchburg in 1823.

* The language used in the pamphlet sits awkwardly with its supposed date of 1822

…e.g. “stampeding” only appearing in print for the first time some 50 years later, giving rise to suspicions that it is an out-and-out hoax.

* The pamphlet asserts that the decipherer numbered the pages, yet the ciphertext of B2 refers to B3 by its number

…which, by itself, consistutes nearly a complete proof that the pamphlet isn’t genuine.

What view should we take on all these differences?

Hoax vs Embellishment

To my eyes, the five basic positions about Ward’s pamphlet are that it is…

(1) Utterly genuine from start to finish, as are the ciphertexts;
(2) Largely genuine (though admittedly with some mistakes), but the ciphertexts are real;
(3) A creative embellishment upon a limited core of truth, but where the ciphertexts are real;
(4) Completely fake, though the ciphertexts themselves are actually real; or
(5) Fake from start to finish, including the ciphertexts.

I think we can rule out (1) on the grounds that the pamphlet is clearly and specifically inconsistent with the ciphertext; and – taking a dissenting position to Jim Gillogly’s viewpoint – I think the existence of some subtle cryptographic dependence of B1 upon the DoI is a clear indication that we can rule out (5). Most Beale researchers seem to be ‘pamphlet believers’ (2) or ‘pamphlet disbelievers’ (4 or 5): but I think the right position is more likely to turn out to be (3).

Yet the problem with (3) is that we are left wondering what that limited core of truth is – that if we can only very loosely rely upon the pamphlet, we’re left with almost nothing to work with.

The Thomas Beale Junior Hypothesis

If we accept that what B2 says was true; that Robert Morriss genuinely looked after the ciphertexts; that the name “Thomas Beale” was genuinely that of its encipherer; and then hypothesize that Thomas Beale Junior (d.1823) was the same person, then I think things start to get interesting.

One key research presumption has long been that the band of Virginians was formed in Virginia itself. However, the documentary evidence says that much of Thomas Beale Senior’s clientele at his New Orleans hotel was formed of older, out-of-state Virginians: so it might well be that if Thomas Beale Junior formed a band of Virginians to go adventuring, it may have been formed of the adventurous scions of those out-of-state Virginians living in New Orleans.

If that is correct, then his hypothetical timeline might then look something like this:-
1818: Thomas Beale Junior travels to New Orleans to meet Thomas Beale Senior
1819: Thomas Beale Junior forms a band of Virginians in New Orleans to go adventuring
1819: the band deposits its first treasure cache near Bufords
1820: Thomas Beale Junior returned to New Orleans: his father dies: all kinds of business to attend to
1821: the band deposits its second treasure cache near Bufords
1823: Thomas Beale Junior entrusts his enciphered note with Robert Morriss in Lynchburg: but then dies not long after returning to New Orleans

None of this is a certainty: but it might possibly help us decide where to go next.

Where To Look

If this is broadly correct (if lacking many details, and with some inevitable errors from guesswork), then I think the right place to look in some kind of concerted way would be in New Orleans newspapers in the date-range 1817 to 1825. However, it would be good to have the actual death dates of both Thomas Beale Junior and Thomas Beale Senior, so that the search can be more, ummm, focused.

It turns out that there were quite a few newspapers in French and English (and indeed some in Spanish, too):-
* L’Ami des Lois (via Google News) [largely court notices, in French and English]
* L’Ami des Lois & Journal du Soir (also via Google News)
* Orleans Gazette and Commmercial Advertiser (listing here)
* Louisiana Courier (via Google News) [ads and court notices, in French and English]

Completists might also look at the following:
* Baton-Rouge Gazette (link here)
* Feliciana Gazette (link here)
* Louisiana Planter (link here)
* The Time Piece (link here)

There’s also a useful resource showing how early New Orleans newspapers were related to each other here.

The two Thomas Beales…

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If you secretly have a deeply-felt (but timey-wimily paradoxical) desire to meet Thomas Beale, then you may well be thrilled to find out that the George C. Marshall Museum in Lexington, VA will be hosting “a special, one-time only presentation” on 1pm on Saturday 20th June 2015 that features “Thomas Jefferson Beale” himself. Or rather, slightly less confusingly, Bedford resident Tim Flagg who “has portrayed Beale on stage and in several film productions aired on BBC, the Travel Channel and PBS”.

Will Flagg/Beale reveal the location of his treasure? I’ll let you into a secret here: because Ward’s pamphlet only ever referred to the man as “Thomas Beale” (and never as “Thomas Jefferson Beale”), anywhere that you see ‘Jefferson’ inserted into the name (was it the Innises who first did this?) is likely to be just a tad unreliable. So perhaps you won’t be going back to that Virginian mini-digger hire company for their “Weekend Beale Deale” any time soon. 😐

In other Beale news, mystery writer Jenny Kile recently visited Buford’s (which I always presumed had long been bulldozed by the passage of time), and found that Buford’s original chimney was still standing. (Though it’s probably not a good idea to breathe in too deeply in the page’s comments section, secondary theory inhalation can have nasty long-term health consequences).

John Piper’s Beale Decryption

But I also recently found that Reverend John L. Piper claims to have “found the key to the Beale Cipher” back in January 2014, and “is working to complete the two decoded pages to a final draft.”

Piper’s blog posts are marked as being for “members only”, so do not currently appear on the web. Yet, oddly enough, two of Piper’s comments on those pages are publicly visible.

One comment links to a New Orleans public library probate listing for “Beale, Thomas, Estate of Beale, Thomas, absent heirs of” dating to 1824. The same listing has related probate claims made by “Henderson, C.L.” (1825); “Canterbury, P.” (1824); “Oakey, Samuel W.” (1824); and “Beale, Thomas, Jr., Estate of” (1824), which I would expect Piper has looked through too.

In the other comment, he quotes from a Cowand genealogy webpage which describes how a family member (Jesse Cowand) was “a Corporal in Captain Thomas Beal’s Company of Orleans Riflemen”: and that’s a whole different story I haven’t previously covered here…

Captain Thomas Beale

There’s quite a lot written about Captain Thomas Beale’s (somewhat ad hoc) Company – which numbered 62 or 78 men, depending on which source you believe – and the part it played in the Battle of New Orleans. It was composed of “distinguished New Orleans businessmen and civic leaders, most of them from Virginia. Each member wore a blue hunting shirt, black slouch hat and carried a Kentucky longrifle.”

This Thomas Beale was, according to “Fifty Years In Both Hemispheres” (1854) by Vincent Nolte, “a man of advanced years, a native of Virginia, and then residing in New Orleans, where he had some reputation as a fine marksman.” (p.206) Along with almost bar one of his company, Captain Beale survived the famous 23rd December night-battle (though by running away and hiding, according to the none-too-fond Nolte).

Confusingly, there was both a Thomas Beale Senior (who died in September 1820 in New Orleans) and a Thomas Beale Junior (who died in October 1823, also in New Orleans). The existence of 1824 probate documents (as noted by Piper) seems to imply that Beale Junior died without a will.

Beale treasure hunter forum members have raked through these archival coals many time since. For example, ‘ECS’ noted as recently as Jan 2015 that:

* Thomas Beale [Senior] shot Major James Risqué in a duel that concerned Risqué niece,Julia Hancock. (For a time, Julia stayed with her cousin, George Hancock Kennerly in St Louis. Kennerly also fought in the War of 1812- Julia, later married William Clark of Lewis & Clark).
* Thomas Beale [Senior] fled Virginia after this duel.
* Thomas Beale [Senior] had an affair with Chloe Delancy of Botetourt county and fathered Thomas Beale Jr.
* Thomas Beale [Senior] went to New Orleans, married Celeste Boucher de Grandpre, had an uptown plantation, the Planters & Merchants Hotel, and gambling and sporting houses.
* During the Battle of New Orleans, Thomas Beale [Senior] led a militia, Beale’s Rifles, composed of New Orleans merchants and lawyers.
* Thomas Beale [Senior] died Sept 1820 in New Orleans, and in his will, bequeathed everything to Thomas Beale Jr, which caused several claims against the Beale Estate to occur,including claims by Celeste Beale (widow) who was represented by John Randolph Grymes, Samuel W Oakley, P Canterbury, C L Henderson.
* Thomas Beale Jr died at the Planters & Merchants Hotel, Oct 1823, which brought Chloe Delancy to New Orleans to make her claim against the Beale Estate./em>

Which Beale Is Which?

Let’s try to get some clarity here. 🙂

I think we can identify Thomas Beale Senior as having been Captain Thomas Beale, who Nolte identified as “a man of advanced years”.

And we can also surely eliminate Thomas Beale Senior as a possible author of Beale Paper ‘B2’, because the cipher plaintext states clearly that the second load of treasure was deposited in “Dec[ember] Eighteen Twenty-One”, more than a year after Beale Senior died.

All of which leaves Thomas Beale Jr., who by 1821 was not ‘Junior’ any more but just plain “Thomas Beale”: might he be the same “Thomas Beale” who Ward asserted left the ciphered note?

On the plus side, both the father’s and the son’s intimate connection with Virginia seems intriguingly sensible: and the fact that Thomas Beale Junior died in October 1823 (somewhat unexpectedly, it would seem?) seems consistent with the dates in the ciphertext.

Moreover, Emilee Hines, in her (2001) “It Happened In Virginia: Remarkable Events That Shaped History“, says that though fathered by Thomas Beale Senior, Thomas Beale Junior was actually born in West Virginia and raised there by his mother Chloe Delancy: and that “when he went to New Orleans to locate his father, his father was dying and his stepmother wanted nothing to do with this Virginia son.” Geographically, Botetourt County (where Chloe Delancy lived) is immediately adjacent to Bedford County – the Blue Ridge mountains run through them both.

On the minus side, however, we know next to nothing else about Thomas Beale Junior. So right now it’s an intriguing possibility – and very arguably the best one we have – but that’s as far as it all goes for the moment.

Perhaps there is much more in the archives to be found out about Thomas Beale Junior: after all, you couldn’t really get much more specific than naming a person, his parents, and his places of birth and death, could you?

Might this be how to solve Scorpion Cipher S5…?

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As I reported in a post last year (2014), even though the fifth “Scorpion Cipher” (i.e. ‘S5’) sent to John Walsh is arranged using a 12-column layout, it has a very strong internal 16-column structure. What this means is that every single shape repeat spans a distance that is a multiple of 16: which in turn suggests that the encipherer formed the S5 ciphertext by rigidly cycling through a set of 16 simple substitution cipher alphabets.

If you therefore rearrange S5’s shapes into a 16-column layout and colourize their repeats, you get something like the following (click on it to see a higher resolution version):

S5-rearranged-colourized

Now, 155 out of S5’s 180 characters are unique, giving it a ‘multiplicity’ (155/180) of 86%, which is way too high to be cracked using a conventional homophonic cipher solver. For comparison, the three Beale Ciphers have multiplicities of 57%, 24%, and 43% respectively, while the (solved) Zodiac Z408’s multiplicity is a paltry 13%. In fact, the upper limit on solvability for homophonic ciphertexts seems to be multiplicities of around 20%-25% if you’re lucky (or 10%-15% if you’re not), so S5 would at first sight seem to be waaaaaay out of anybody’s practical range.

But I’m not so sure.

Going through what has been released of the encipherer’s letters that the ciphertexts accompanies, he/she starts by saying:-

This code took a lot of time and effort to develop, in hopes that it will defeat FBI and CIA codebreakers.

Which is ‘kind of reasonable’, though the whole enciphering activity would seem to be somewhat pointless unless the person’s overall aim was to somehow emulate the original Zodiac Killer’s ciphers. In a later letter, the encipherer’s position gets finessed somewhat:

I now realise with many hundeds of hours of […] mindracking experimentation with my complex ciphers that my first one that I sent you [S1] was comparatively simple to my second [S2], third [S3], fourth [S4], and now temporarily final cryptograph system [S5]. I have been encoding useful information for your use and have done it fairly, since all of my ciphers can be decoded simply, once the limited patterns and systems are discovered.

What we learn from this, I think, is that what we are looking at here is not the product of a psychopathic academic cryptographer, but is rather a homebrewed cipher system, based around “limited patterns and systems”. So, a bright kid; probably good at maths; and has perhaps read enough popular cryptography (through and beyond the newspaper accounts of the Zodiac Killer’s ciphers) to avoid clunkingly obvious mistakes.

But the mentions of “patterns” makes me suspect that there’s also a little bit of the vanity of the pure mathematician there, intellectual pride that all it would take to “defeat FBI and CIA codebreakers” was “limited patterns and systems”. Hence I think we are likely to be looking at something that is innately very ordered, something that we’ll all kick ourself for not seeing when it is shown to us in the fullness of time. “What a clever person the Scorpion Cipher maker was“, we’re all supposed to say (according to that fantasy script), “much better at making ciphers than the Zodiac Killer ever was“.

In the case of S5, though, I suspect we now know just about enough to break it, even with its dauntingly high multiplicity.

My first observation is that even though it uses a large number of different shapes, these are drawn from a very much smaller set of shape families: and there may well be some kind of cryptographic relationship between the members of each family to help us:-

S5-shape-families

My second observation is that, with the exception of columns 10 and 11 (which may well be random, or possibly ‘S’ vs ‘T’ in the plaintext), the most frequent symbol in any column is always from a different family from the most frequent shape in any other column. It’s not the strongest of observations, sure, but it’s what leads me to my (grandly titled) S5 Construction Hypothesis.

My S5 Construction Hypothesis

I believe that the encipherer very probably constructed 16 cipher alphabets on gridded paper, within a 26 x 16 or perhaps a 16 x 26 grid. But this is a boring activity, and the encipherer’s text suggests a kind of proto-mathematical desire for elegance, like a smart 12-year-old who has just ‘got’ the whole idea of mathematics. So I hypothesize that the encipherer filled this rectangular grid with families of shapes along downward diagonals, from top-left to bottom-right.

Hence for the sixteen component alphabets, any genuine (as opposed to accidental) family of shapes would step through the alphabets. Here, a family that had a member enciphering A in alphabet #1 would also have a member enciphering B in alphabet #2, and maybe a member enciphering C in alphabet #3 etc.

This suggests a quite different kind of cryptologic solving logic from normal, one that not only offers us mathematical means to reduce the multiplicity (because we can posit connections between letters in diffent columns, giving us fewer degrees of freedom to steer our way through), but also spatial means to do the same thing.

What I mean by ‘spatial’ here is that if we look at, say, the family of shapes formed of squares with dots in, I think we might be able to assume that not only are these all part of the same family, but also all the missing shapes on columns without a similar family member can be excluded from the search.

That is, if alphabet #1 uses a square with dots in to encipher ‘A’ and alphabet #3 uses a different square with dots in to encipher ‘C’, then we can very probably infer that alphabet #2 uses a square with dots in to encipher ‘B’, even though we cannot actually see it in the ciphertext. Hence this kind of ‘holistic exclusion’ offers a spatial way to help us reduce the search space.

Of course, turning this visuo-spatial hypothesis into an effective computer algorithm will doubtless prove quite tricky. But perhaps it offers a way of making S5’s cryptologic challenge more tractable than it would be if were a pure homophonic cipher with such a scarily high multiplicity.

Tamam Shuda Cuda Wuda…

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Pete Bowes has recently finished writing his Tamam Shud-themed novel The Bookmaker From Rabaul, a story carefully braided from the skein of loosely connected threads we like to call ‘historical evidence’. When published (in December 2015), it will feature all the Usual Suspectskis of the Somerton Man world – spies, intelligence, betrayal, death, ciphers, and so on – and, on Pete’s past form, should have a rich cast of angular characters doing some kind of crunchy dialogue thing.

But he doesn’t need me to crank out his book PR bullshit for him, he’s more than capable of doing that himself. 😉

somerton-beach

What’s nibbling at my trouser cuffs today is the distinction between literary truth and historical truth: doubtless Pete’s book will aspire to the former with a healthy nod to the latter, and that’s basically OK for novelists.

Yet the practical problem with literary truth is that aspiring to it is simply a terrible way of doing history: and this is something that Pete, for all his justified mania for details and (more recently) timelines, doesn’t really seem to get.

Perhaps the crux of the matter comes down to the difference between ‘more plausible’ and ‘more probable’ (this is known as the Conjunction Fallacy, Daniel Kahneman’s book “Thinking Fast and Slow” gives some nice examples). In the case of the Somerton Man, literary truth aspires to narrative plausibility while historical truth aspires to genuinely higher probability.

What does that mean, exactly? Well, as an example a little closer to home (if you live in South Australia, that is), which of the following two claims would you say is more probable:

(a) The Somerton Man was killed by someone he knew
(b) The Somerton Man was killed by a lover he had spurned

?

Kahneman points out that because (b) implicitly contains (a) [i.e. “a lover he had spurned” is a subset of “someone he knew”], (a) is automatically more mathematically probable than (b). And yet many people would judge that (b) is more probable, largely (I think) because it has a certain ‘ring of truth’ to it. By its cautious language, (a) is a bit ‘colder’, a little less human: people have some kind of innate need for stories to embody human values, and so (a) doesn’t quite cut it.

In my opinion, it is specifically that ‘ring of truth’-ness that literary truth aspires to: and the quality of words and thoughts that sets (b) ahead of (a) boils down to its greater plausibility. But that doesn’t make (b) more true, it just makes it a rounder-sounding story.

Agencies, spies, microwriting, uranium at Mount Painter, poison, misdirection, tradecraft, plausible deniability, even Venona: all of these are real historical things. When taken together, they can indeed be arranged to tell a beguiling, plausible story. However, none of them yet connects with the Somerton Man in a way that an historian can genuinely work with: and because none of these individual details yet offers us anything approaching a genuine, probable history, putting them all together at the same time automatically tells a mathematically less probable story – for the more elements you conjoin into a single narratove, the lower the resulting probability goes. Sorry, but that’s just the way the numbers work: I’m just the messenger, me.

For what it’s worth, I remain quite certain that we will, in due course, find out exactly who the Somerton Man was and what precisely brought him to Somerton Beach on the last day of his life. But I also have no doubt that this will come not from assembling plausible narrative macro-hypotheses, but rather from doing historical research the hard way: forming micro-hypotheses about specific aspects of what happened and then painstakingly testing them against the archives.

Pete Bowes laughs when (for example) I wonder if the Somerton Man (with elevated zinc levels in his hair) might have been somehow connected with the zinc trade between Risdon and Port Adelaide; or when I wonder if the Somerton Man might have been connected with the person who sent Fred Pruszinski from Broken Hill to Somerton Beach carrying a rifle in a suitcase just a few days earlier. But that’s probably because even though Pete and I are walking along the same beach, I suspect we’re travelling in quite opposite directions.

Radiocarbon dating and the Voynich Manuscript…

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The problem with radiocarbon dating as an analytical historical technique isn’t that the underlying science of radioactivity is hard (in fact, it’s fairly mechanical and straightforward, albeit probabilistic), but rather that mention of the S-word (‘science’) unduly raises many people’s expectations that they can use it to get to some kind of unshakeable bedrock of knowable truth about the past. “God’s smoking gun”, if you like (or not if you don’t).

Sorry, but even if you’ve paid your money to the University of Arizona to get a radiocarbon dating number in your eager hand, you still have a large number of issues to deal with.

For example, the historical curves are all twisted about thanks to human history (global pollution etc), which means that you have to go from uncalibrated raw data to calibrated historical data; another problem is that locale-specific human effects (e.g. polluted urban air vs clean mountain air, etc) can shift the likely dates forwards or backwards; another is that carbon trapped inside certain diets (e.g. shellfish or seafood) eaten by the animals whose radioactive carbon we are testing can cause yet more havoc inside the calculation; and so on and so forth.

Back in 2012, I tried to give an accessible summary of the most difficult bits of all this, but the tricky historical reasoning that necessarily has to be wrapped around radiocarbon dating remains a fiendishly technical business that few Voynich researchers can genuinely make proper sense of in toto.

One thing is fairly solid, though: of the four data points we have, three are extremely – and I do genuinely mean extremely – close. Certainly close enough for the three pieces of vellum to have come from the same decade.

Incidentally, “BP” (‘Before Present’) is the technical term for “number of years before 1950”; which means that the 500BP notches 3/4 of the way across the horizontal scale correspond to 1450. Hence you can visually see that the curves for all three of the top three samples go to around 1450.

The first counterintuitive thing about all this is that these curves are only probabilitic date curves insofar as we know nothing else at all about the object’s likely place of origin. For example, if we can determine by other means that the manuscript came from a polluted urban area, then we should (as I understand it) eliminate much of the earlier (leftmost) years’ components that make up the curve to effectively produce a new, much narrower curve biased more strongly towards the later (rightmost) years.

The second counterintuitive thing is that if you try to statistically combine just the top three samples together (by approximating their distributions as Gaussian probability distributions and then using a neat bit of stats maths), you get… pretty much exactly the same curve as any one of them. Think about that: because these three radiocarbon dates are so close together, each statistical merge brings hardly any new information to the party, giving the clever stats machinery barely anything to use to help it narrow that wider initial range.

This leads to the third counterintuitive thing: that in fact almost all the narrowing of the date range (from say [1400-1450] down to [1404-1438]) is therefore down to that pesky fourth sample, a thin sliver taken from the heavily-handled outermost edge of leaf f68. My personal prediction is that the difference in dating that this sample offers will eventually prove to have arisen from nothing more than a badly-chosen sampling site (on one of the most heavily handled areas of vellum in the entire manuscript). If Greg H. had instead taken it from the top of the page much nearer the bound edge, I expect that the radiocarbon dating would have ended up almost exactly the same as the other three.

It’s important to note at this point that I’m genuinely not trying to use this single f68 sample to try to ‘prove’, ‘verify’, or ‘validate’ my Averlino Voynich theory. Actually, the way this works is completely the other way round, in that what came first for me was a whole load of codicological, cryptographic, palaeographic and Art History analyses, which all seemed to me to specifically point to a construction date in the 1450 to 1470 range (neither before nor after). Hence for me, Averlino was simply an illustrative cherry on what was already to me a well-baked Art History cake: my identification of him as the author of the Voynich might be right or wrong (and I still don’t know either way), but all my other dating still stands.

And it is this other dating evidence which I happen to trust more than f68’s single radiocarbon dating value.

The problem with accepting nothing beyond the raw radiocarbon date range (as Richard SantaColoma is wont to argue people should do, which is somewhat ironic given that it’s the specific piece of information which his various it’s-a-hoax-but-using-unused-old-vellum theories then immediately deem irrelevant) is that it leaves you vulnerable to calculational and procedural errors. If you genuinely want to date the Voynich Manuscript, then I think you have no honest choice but to engage with ceramics, parallel hatching, cryptographic alphabets or whatever fields you choose to build up multiple sets of independent dating evidence. Unless you have these to combine with the radiocarbon dating, your results will be weak.

Which leads to the final counterintuitive thing for this post: that while radiocarbon dating itself is scientifically strong, the tricky reasoning surrounding it is historically fragile. The more you can sensible combine with it, the stronger a support it becomes: but argue from it in isolation from everything else, and your conclusions and inferences simply won’t have a great deal of strength. It’s like one leg of a tripod: you need two more legs for it to be able to stand for any length of time.

Logbooks for the S.S. Era, the other Risdon ship…

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A few months back, I asked the nice people at the National Archives of Australia if they could try to find some particular logbooks for 1948/1949 for the Howard Smith steamer S.S. Era (which I covered here at the beginning of the year).

The ever-Delphic Log of Logs said they should be there, but when I went a-looking, there was no matching record for the period we are interested in. To be precise, for the years 1930-1939, SP2/1 holds the logbooks, while SP290/2 covers 1940-1946: my guess (which proved to be correct) was that SP989/1 probably did hold the logs for 1948/1949 (but that they hadn’t yet been added to the database), so I asked the NAA to have a look for me.

Well, they found most of them in Sydney (which is really great), and have just this week added records to the NAA database (the easiest way to get to them is to click on RecordSearch, then “Advanced search for items”, and then search for the specific barcode).

* Commonwealth Record Series (CRS) SP989/1, SS ERA Log Book 14/10/1947 to 27/4/1948, barcode 13642543
* Commonwealth Record Series (CRS) SP989/1, SS ERA Log Book 27/4/1948 to 9/11/1948, barcode 13642540
* Commonwealth Record Series (CRS) SP989/1, SS ERA Log Book 10/11/1948 to 30/3/1949, barcode 13642541
* Commonwealth Record Series (CRS) SP989/1, SS ERA Log Book 10/11/1949 to 29/3/1950, barcode 13642542

All of which may not tell us anything at all, of course: but incidental details studded through the logs may possibly help add an extra interesting dimension to our understanding of what was happening in Risdon at the time. 🙂

Vrillon and Max…

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Les Hewitt’s article The Voice of Vrillon pointed me to something I just had to share.

At 5.10pm on Saturday 26th November 1977, a Southern News TV segment on Rhodesia was hacked live: its audio track (of newscaster Andrew Gardner) was overlaid by a 5-minute message from “Vrillon, representative of the Ashtar Galactic Command”. Once complete, the audio then phased back in time for the start of “Falling Hare with Bugs Bunny”, a Merrie Melodies cartoon.

Nobody has since admitted to being ‘Vrillon’: which is perhaps a bit of a shame, because he/she did a pretty good job of overriding the FM signal (probably, as was pointed out at the time, in the immediate vicinity of the Huntingdon transmitter).

Hewitt also mentions a second pair of TV hacks that took place in Chicago a decade later (in 1987), the second (much longer one) interrupting an episode of Doctor Who. So if you don’t want to see someone in a “Max Headroom” mask singing badly and then having his mooning arse lightly spanked by someone in a French maid’s outfit with a flyswatter, please look away now:

Again, nobody knows who carried this out, but the incident has its own boring Wikipedia page. No flies were harmed in the making of this hack. Which is nice.

Captain William Kidd’s “Adventure Galley” found off Madagascar?

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The treasure-hunting newsosphere is currently awash (sorry) with reports of Barry Clifford’s discovery of a 50lb 55kg silver bar near Sainte Marie, that he claims was from Captain William Kidd’s ship “Adventure Galley”.

barry-clifford-underwater-silver-bar

On the premise that there is surely no parade a well-prepared historical mystery blogger cannot rain upon, I have to say that this strikes me as stupendously unlikely: or if correct, then only accidentally so, and against all good research and common sense. 😉

Chapter 8 of Cabell, Thomas and Richards’ (2010) Captain Kidd: The Hunt for the Truth (£0.01 + postage for a used copy of the hardback) covers Kidd’s time on Sainte Marie in pretty good detail. There we find out that Kidd claimed that both the Adventure Galley (Kidd’s original ship) and the Adventure Prize (the Quedagh Merchant) were stripped bare by deserters over “the space of four or five days”: they…

“…carried away great guns [cannons], powder, shot [cannonballs and smallbore balls for hand weapons], small arms [muskets and swords], sails, anchors, cables, surgeons’ chests [including medicinal alcohol and medicines], and what else they pleased.”

Alternatively, Joseph Palmer claimed that Kidd had “ordered the goods to be hoisted out” (Kidd denied this): while the ship’s surgeon Robert Bradinham asserted that the “Captain divided out the shares” (which he also denied). Your view of what happened there depends on whether you believe Kidd or the others: and in fact I’d suggest there’s a pretty good chance all of the above were lying about one thing or another.

However, what nobody seems to be in any doubt about was that the Adventure Galley had been in great difficulty for a long time: specifically, it had been leaking in a distinctly sieve-like manner and so had had to be continually pumped out. But that pumping stopped once it reached Sainte Marie (because almost all its crew deserted or left, yet again depending on whom you believe), leaving the ship’s days numbered.

And in a final act of salvage, the Adventure Galley “was pushed up on the beach and burned so that the iron fittings could be recovered” (William Jenkins, CSPCS America and West Indies, vol.17 s. XI), which was pretty standard practice back then. If correct, then there would be basically nothing of the ship there to be found.

Of course, it’s possible that the historical evidence is utterly and completely wrong. But for a silver bar owned by Captain Kidd to have been found in the waters there, it would surely have had to have been dropped there by the sinking of a ship that was entirely different from the Adventure Galley, and hence a ship that was entirely unconnected to William Kidd. (Kidd sailed onwards from Sainte Marie in the Quedagh Merchant / Adventure Prize, so that too can’t be the source of the shipwreck that Barry Clifford seems to have found).

It’s a great underwater find, sure, but is it from the Adventure Galley? It would be nice if it were, but to my eyes it seems highly likely that it was not. Sorry ’bout that. 🙁

Vinland Map update…

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The debate concerning the authenticity of Beinecke MS 350A – AKA the Vinland Map – has raged for over half a century. Is it for real or is it early modern Maybelline?

Vinland Map Ink

Despite the numerous technical analyses that have been carried out on the Vinland Map, almost the only fact everyone agrees on is the physical age of its paper: it has been carbon dated to the first half of the 15th century, which is nicely consistent with its Briquet Tete de Boeuf (15056) watermark.

That’s the support medium – but what about the rest? The major thing pointing towards inauthenticity elsewhere is (courtesy of Walter McCrone) the analytical demonstration that the ink used in the Vinland Map is not a conventional iron gall ink, but appears to contain a particular form of anatase (titanium oxide) that was first chemically synthesized only in the 1920s. And so, McCrone’s base argument from 1974 runs, it doesn’t matter how old the paper itself is, because the ink on top of it simply cannot be genuinely fifteenth century.

Even so, people continue to try to defend the Vinland Map’s authenticity, by suggesting ingenious mechanisms by which the anatase might have been deposited in the 20th Century: Jim Enterline, for example, plausibly proposed in 2002 that anatase might somehow have been added to a genuinely old map as part of an attempt to clean it.

But when McCrone looked again at the map in 1991, he extended his claim somewhat further into the construction details. Specifically, he claimed that the lines that made up the map were – to make them more closely resemble old iron gall ink, but without actually being old iron gall ink – drawn in two distinct passes:
(1) a first yellow ink pass using a slightly wider nib
(2) a second dark ink pass in a narrower nib, immediately on top of (and steered down the middle of) the lines put down in the first pass.
If this is correct, the Vinland Map is not just a mere fake: rather, it is a painstakingly-executed two-pass modern simulacrum of an old manuscript.

The ‘smokingest’ smoking gun in all of this would seem to have been discovered by Kenneth M. Towe: when he examined the Vinland Map at the Beinecke, he noticed that the two lines diverged significantly in the English west coast.

vinland-england

Now, I’ve personally never seen a colour close-up of this specific section to test out Towe’s argument with my own eyes, but I’d really like to. Has anyone got a copy of this?

Whodunnit?

Even so, the twin issues of who it was that constructed such a thing and for what reason both remain resolutely unresolved. Kirsten Seaver’s 2004 book “Maps, Myths, and Men” tried to pin the tail on a peculiarly unsatifying Jesuit cartomanic donkey, Father Josef Fischer. However, her account failed to convince me that Fischer would have wanted to create a fake Vinland Map of the kind we see for any reason, let alone for the reasons that Seaver speculatively proposes.

So even if the Vinland Map does prove to be a fake (and the presence of modern anatase and the apparent two-pass drawing when taken together do make it seem so), we still have no idea by whom it was made, or where, or indeed when (other than post-1920 or so).

Seaver is convinced she has got the right man; but her argument only really presents a possible candidate, and doesn’t go as far as actually explaining much of what we see or what happened. Perhaps she will uncover something more substantial soon, at which point we’ll all have to revise our views: we shall see.

A Surprise Entrant

In 2013, the modern history of the Vinland Map took an unexpected turn when an amateur Scottish historian called John Paul Floyd announced (courtesy of the Daily Mail, The Sunday Times and doubtless elsewhere) that he had uncovered – thanks to Google searches – an entirely new angle on it.

Floyd believes that the document the Vinland Map appears to have been bound with – The Tartar Relation – was put on display in Madrid in 1892 at an exhibition celebrating the 400th anniversary of Columbus’ Atlantic crossing. And at that time there was no map bound with it (because the page count listed at the time would be wrong). He also found a reference to the same manuscript from 1926 when it was examined by Cristóbal Pérez Pastor (also no mention of a map at all).

Manuscripts for the 1892 exhibition were loaned from the collection of the Cathedral Church of Zaragoza, the contents of which were ransacked in the early 1950s and fenced through crooked book dealers such as Enzo Ferrajoli (who was convicted for this).

And Enzo Ferrajoli was the same rare book dealer who ultimately first sold the Vinland Map in 1957. Ouch!

It’s a pretty compelling chain or reasoning, because for once it offers actual evidence of absence 🙂 rather than speculatory absence of evidence. Of course, it doesn’t yet answer the question of who faked the map or why: but perhaps Floyd (who has been hard at work grinding out his book ever since) has found some additional evidence there too. We shall see, hopefully this year.

Nicely, I found a post on soc.history.medieval by David B that foregrounds Floyd’s evidence:-

The 1892-3 Madrid Exhibition Catalogue

“Catalogo General” of the 1892-3 Exposición Historico-Europea.
Room X:
“53. – Vincentius bellvacensis. Speculum naturale, doctrinale, morale, historiale.
El presente volumen contiene, de esta célebre enciclopedia de Vicente de Beauvais, solamente los libros 21 á 24 de la tercera parte del Speculum historiale.
Al fin se ha añadido un tratadito intitulado Historia Tartarorum dedicado por el autor Fr. C. de Bridia, al R.P. Fr. Bogardio, ministro de los franciscanos en Boemia y Polonia.
Manuscrito, á dos columnas, letra del siglo xv, las cubiertas de cada cuaderno en vitela y lo demás en papel, los epigrafes en tinta roja, el lugar de las iniciales en blanco. Consta de 251 hojas.
La Historia Tartarorum, acaba de esta manera: actum ab incarnatione domini MCCXLVII, tertio kalendas augusti.
Folio, encuadernado en tabla forrada de cuero labrado.”

About which David B comments:

Note that the above gives the number of leaves as 251, which would be almost the same as the total number of leaves with writing on in the two now-separated texts at Yale. It’s one leaf too few if you include the Vinland Map in the current count, but one leaf too many if you exclude the Map, suggesting that the now-missing first written leaf of book 21 of the “Speculum” may have been present in 1892.

Cristóbal Pérez Pastor

“Noticias y Documentos relativos a la Historia y Literatura Espanolas recogidos por D. C. Perez Pastor”:

“Speculum historiae (segunda y tercera parte). Historia tartarum.
Manuscrito, letra del siglo xv, a dos columnas, los epigrafes en tinta roja; cada cuaderno tiene la primera y última hojas en pergamino y las deniz en papel.
Al final lleva la fecha: “Actum ab incarnatione Domim M.CC.XL.VII. tertio Kalendas Augusti”; folio, encuadernado en tabla forrada de piel, con adornos de la época.
Del Speculum hist contiene los libros xxj a xxiv, que dan remate a la parte tercera de la obra.
El Codice comienza con el imperio de Teodosio el joven, y acaba en el segundo reinado de la Emperatriz Irene.
Sigue la Historia de los Tartaros, escrita por Fray C. de Bridia, fransiscano, y va dirigida a Fray Bogixdao, ministro de los franciscanos en Bohemia y Polonia, y se termina con la fecha del 30 de Julio de 1247.”