Like most people, I’ve read numerous articles about ChatGPT recently. Perhaps the most entertaining was where ChatGPT (sort of) played chess against the #1 chess engine Stockfish, with hilarious consequences (if you’re a chess player, that is).
However, few articles manage to get the point across that ChatGPT is not an all-knowing Oracle, but rather something that is trying to please you by providing answers that are as realistic-looking as it can make them (rather than actually realistic). It’s entertainment, people (and definitely not real).
Perhaps if I gave some examples you’ll see what I’m talking about…
“Did Filarete have his own herbal manuscript?”
I asked ChatGPT this question, because it was something which I already knew the answer to (and had blogged about back in 2008, and also since). The right answer is that Filarete did have his own herbal manuscript (it was mentioned in fol.78r of MS Ashburnham 198, “Sed et Antonius Averlinus Philaretus lingua vernacula scripsit eleganter“), but as far as I know, nobody knows if it or a copy of it still exists.
ChatGPT started safely and correctly:
There is no known herbal manuscript that can be definitively attributed to Filarete, the fifteenth-century Italian architect and writer. Filarete is best known for his architectural treatise, the “Treatise on Architecture,” which he wrote in the early 1460s.
ChatGPT
However, our chatty digital friend then went a bit off-piste:
However, there are some herbal manuscripts from the same general period that are associated with Filarete or have been attributed to him. For example, there is a manuscript in the Bibliotheca Augusta in Wolfenbüttel, Germany, that is sometimes referred to as the “Herbal of Filarete.” This manuscript contains descriptions and illustrations of various plants and their medicinal uses, but it is not clear whether Filarete was actually the author of the manuscript or was simply associated with it in some way.
ChatGPT
Interesting, I thought, even if I didn’t believe a word of it. It went on:
There are also other herbal manuscripts from the fifteenth century that are similar in style and content to the “Herbal of Filarete” and may have been produced by the same workshop or circle of artists and writers. These manuscripts are sometimes referred to as the “Herbarium of Apuleius” or the “Herbarium of Pseudo-Apuleius” and contain similar descriptions and illustrations of plants and their uses.
ChatGPT
“What is the shelfmark of that “Herbal of Filarete” you mentioned?”
I still didn’t believe a word, so asked it: “What is the shelfmark of that “Herbal of Filarete” you mentioned?” The response I got back was a little unexpected:
I apologize for the confusion in my previous response. Upon further research, I could not find any evidence of a manuscript called the “Herbal of Filarete” in the Bibliotheca Augusta in Wolfenbüttel, Germany.
I believe there may have been a misunderstanding or confusion with other sources. While there are many herbal manuscripts from the medieval period, there is no known herbal manuscript that can be definitively attributed to Filarete.
I apologize for any confusion or misinformation my previous response may have caused. If you have any further questions, please feel free to ask.
ChatGPT
It’s certainly true that the Bibliotheca Augusta in Wolfenbüttel has at least one Pseudo-Apuleius manuscript, so it looked like there was just some confusion going on. Gigantic input dataset aside, ChatGPT really isn’t anything like Google, so it would be grossly unfair to imagine that it is doing anything like the same thing when it tries to answer a query.
So I decided to take a different tack, to see if I could flush anything out about what was going on.
“Are there any herbal manuscripts associated with Filarete?”
Maybe there’s a herbal manuscript out there that’s loosely associated with Filarete or his coterie that I don’t know about, I thought. So I tried to poke the bear again (but in a slightly gentler way than before).
Can you guess how ChatGPT responded? I think you can. As before, the first paragraph was fairly solid:
To my knowledge, there are no herbal manuscripts that can be definitively attributed to Filarete, the fifteenth-century Italian architect and writer. Filarete is best known for his architectural treatise, the “Treatise on Architecture,” which he wrote in the early 1460s.
ChatGPT
But you might find the next paragraph eerily familiar:
While Filarete is not known to have authored any herbal manuscripts, there are some medieval manuscripts that contain descriptions and illustrations of plants and their medicinal uses that have been associated with him or with his circle of artists and writers. One example is a manuscript in the Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana in Florence, Italy, that is sometimes referred to as the “Herbarium of Filarete.” This manuscript contains descriptions and illustrations of various plants and their medicinal uses, but it is not clear whether Filarete was actually the author of the manuscript or was simply associated with it in some way.
ChatGPT
Once again, this seems like an historical hallucination on ChatGPT’s part. The odd part is that it reprised the exact shape of its previous hallucinatory answer, but referring to a different top-end library. So, I again asked for the shelfmark of this imaginary manuscript…
“What is the shelfmark of that manuscript in Florence?”
That’s what I asked: and, sadly, you already know what ChatGPT’s reply is going to look like, because it’s basically the same as before:
I apologize for the error in my previous response. After further research, I have found that there is no known “Herbarium of Filarete” manuscript in the Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana in Florence, Italy.
While Filarete is not known to have authored any herbal manuscripts, there are some medieval manuscripts that contain descriptions and illustrations of plants and their medicinal uses that have been associated with him or with his circle of artists and writers. One example is a manuscript known as the “Herbarium of Apuleius,” which is sometimes referred to as the “Herbal of Pseudo-Apuleius.” This manuscript is kept at the Bibliotheca Augusta in Wolfenbüttel, Germany, and has the shelfmark Codex Guelf. 82.7 Aug. 2°.
ChatGPT
What to make of this?
ChatGPT is undoubtedly a brilliant technical achievement. But as far as I can see, for now it’s just part of the entertainment industry.
Here, I do wonder whether the format of the question I asked kind of loosely defined the format of the answer ChatGPT inferred I was hoping to receive back: and that it then hallucinated enough additional stuff to complete the gaps in the answer format to provide a well-formed-looking answer. So maybe the whole point of ChatGPT is that the shape of the question defines the shape of the answer, even if there aren’t any actual facts inside the answer. Something to think about, anyway!
I had been looking, as you’d expect, for something completely different: but when I found out that “A Takapuna Scandal” starring Hector St Clair was available online, I thought I had to share the link with all you lovely people. Filmed around Auckland in 1927, it’s a mixture of meta-infused modernity, bad puns, and panto pratfalls. But no white ties, definitely no white ties!
Pretty much everyone and their dog now knows about the mysterious white tie (marked “J Keane” or “T Keane”, depending how you interpret the markings on it) found in the Somerton Man’s suitcase in Adelaide’s railway station. And everyone seems to have a theory about that same wretched tie (heaven knows I’ve postedmorethan enough times on this sorry subject myself).
But just to prove that, like Homer Simpson, I’ve learnt nothing from that whole experience, here’s yet another white tie theory to throw on the same miserable bonfire.
Does the white tie mean that Carl Webb (the Somerton Man) was… a fake Mason?
The Craft Baker
Even though his father, baker Richard August Webb, was a member of Malvern Lodge No. 121, nobody has yet found any evidence suggesting that Carl Webb himself was a Mason.
To be fair, Freemasonry was always (and indeed still is) an older man’s game: a quick glance at the adverts in modern glossy Freemason magazines will likely yield not lifestyle tips but “deathstyle” retirement home chic. So it should be no huge surprise if, as a younger man, Carl Webb had failed to follow his father’s floury footsteps into The Craft.
Of course, I’d like to look at the member list of Malvern Lodge No. 121 just as much as anyone else with half an interest in this whole cold case: but I have a hunch he wasn’t himself a properly paid up Mason.
The Keane Mason?
Were there other Masons in his family? Researchers commenting here have been getting a little excited of late by the connection between Carl Webb’s late brother Roy (d. 1943) and the Gavey family via Roy’s wife.
The Gaveys had some bad ‘uns, for sure: and they also had enduring links to the Masons. (I’ll leave disentangling the two as an exercise for the reader.)
But I wonder… might Carl Webb’s closest practical link to the Masons have actually been via the Keane family? He was certainly close to the Keanes: he was, as Jo pointed out, living with the Keanes prior to getting married. And it was Carl Webb’s family link to Gerald Thomas Keane that famously made the hair on Derek Abbott’s arms verticalise.
It’s therefore entirely possible that Carl Webb’s nephew John Russell Keane was the original owner of the mysterious white tie, even if it wasn’t in the list of possessions returned to his family after his untimely death during the War.
So… was this also a Masonic tie? This isn’t itself a new suggestion, but that’s actually only the first half of what I’m wondering here.
Out Of Sight, Out Of Pocket?
Anyway, if you recall Carl Webb’s timeline, he seems to have disappeared in late 1947, very possibly to become invisible to the wife he was separated from (and who had got a support order served on him at his job at Red Point Tool Co. in April 1947, of which he angrily wanted to avoid paying a penny).
Looking at the suitcase found after his death in December 1948, there’s no affluence to the rag-tag mix of clothes there. Whatever he was doing (and if that turns out to have involved interstate car smuggling, I suspect few would now raise so much as a jaded eyebrow), it doesn’t seem to have been paying well.
Hence, I suspect that during 1948, Carl Webb was both out of sight and out of pocket. And despite having lived in Melbourne all his life, he ended up dead on an Adelaide beach. (Though clothed, not the raw Prahranian.)
So I wonder: while travelling round Australia, doing whatever it was he was doing, might Carl Webb have been passing himself off as a Keane family Mason, visiting from a Melbourne lodge, to scam some Masonic hospitality?
Might he have been passing himself off as his late nephew Jack Russell?
Contract bridge was a fashionable game in the 1930s and 1940s; columns presenting bridge news and puzzles were popular recent additions to newspapers. What was appealing was that bridge problems had a human, social side that, say, chess problems lacked.
Bridge columnists ran puzzle competitions for readers not only to solve, but to compete against each other. These puzzles ranged from moderate to utterly fiendish, making use of crazy-sounding techniques like “suicide squeezes” and “triple coups” (I never once saw a single coup, never mind a triple one).
It is in this febrile atmosphere of competing Master Solvers and bridge columns that we find a series of mentions of (very probably) Carl Webb.
He also submitted a solution into a different bridge column in The Age on 24 April 1937: and indeed, by the time the results to the thirteenth bridge problem of that year came round (10 July 1937), he had sent in correct answers to a very respectable five of them.
1946
After a gap of nine years, we again see “C. Webb” submitting bridge puzzle solutions to Norman McCance’s bridge column in The Age.
He starts to submit correct answers at the start of a North (of the Yarra) vs South (of the Yarra) for the South team. His name appears three times, on 28 Mar 1946, 04 Apr 1946, and 11 Apr 1946, before disappearing again.
There are no more mentions of Webb in the bridge columns. 🙁
But then again…
So, for a long time I thought that was the end of the story. But today, I took a second look at all of Norman McCance’s bridge columns up until the end of 1948, just in case there was a Webb mention there that Trove’s OCR had mangled very slightly.
As it turned out, there wasn’t: but looked at in context, the fact that the three Webb mentions in 1946 were right at the start of a North-South competition struck me as quite interesting. Might Webb have previously been submitting entries under a pen-name?
There were certainly a few pen-names, such as “Euclid” and “Dummy”, most of which I was able to eliminate. But one particular pen-name jumped out – “Interested” of South Yarra. This person was one of the five winners (out of 169 entrants) of the competition that had only just finished: they then immediately disappeared, just as C. Webb appeared.
What I found intriguing was that, at the end of that competition, Norman McCance mentioned that “Interested” hadn’t included an address when submitting their puzzle solutions. Which does sound like a Somerton Man kind of thing.
So, perhaps Carl Webb was “Interested” of South Yarra? It’s not a bad hypothesis.
I’d also add that there’s no mention in McCance’s column (which often mentioned Victoria Bridge Union events) of Webb in any pair or team there. So it seems likely to me that he was more of a bridge puzzle solver than an active bridge player.
One last thing: considering the good bridge ‘strokes’ / validation Webb must have been getting from solving McCance’s conundrums, I don’t honestly believe he was anywhere near Melbourne after 11 March 1946.
According to the Cipher Mysteries WordPress dashboard, more than 43000 comments have been posted (and approved) here. (Akismet tells me it has deleted more than 690,000 spam comments.) Moderation is a thing I have to do every day, and over the last six months this has got progressively more time-consuming (and boring). As a result, the comment policy here has to change,
No ad hominems
I’ve had more than enough of commenters’ taking ‘ad hominem’ potshots at each other (and indeed at other people who rarely if ever contribute to Cipher Mysteries). So, new comment moderation policy #1:
“Any comments containing a potshot aimed at a person (rather than, say, at a theory) will now get binned in moderation”.
So it’s still OK to comment “Proposal X sounds a bit ridiculous to me” (because 95% of supposed explanations for cipher mysteries are indeed ridiculous): but, for example, saying “Person Y’s proposal X sounds delusional to me” is an ad hominem, because you are in effect saying that Person Y is delusional.
As an aside, if you want anyone reading your comment to think of it as anything more than the sound of a yappy dog yapping somewhere off in the distance, you might perhaps consider augmenting your opinion with some reasoning? Or a fact? Or… anything, really? To anyone accustomed to Reddit this might sound like an impossible quality bar, but honestly, you can do it, trust me.
One Stupid Pseudonym per Commenter Is Plenty
I’ve also had my fill of people posting under multiple stupid pseudonyms. If you’re going to use a single stupid pseudonym, that’s your business and it’s entirely fine by me. But I’m now really strongly minded to start binning comments left by people using multiple stupid pseudonyms, because it’s just pointless noise.
If you’ve got an opinion about a given cipher mystery, that’s great (and it’s even better if you can justify that opinion in some way), so I’m normally happy to allow it through. But from the point of view of anyone trying to read all these comments (let alone moderate them), constantly swapping between in-joke / mildly-humorous names is just a pain in the neck they can do without.
So, commenters, please do me and everyone else here a big favour (that costs you basically nothing), and stick to a single stupid pseudonym. If that’s [email protected] (or whatever), fine. But just one.
Many decades ago, I wrote computer games under the pen-name “Orlando M. Pilchard QC”, so fully appreciate that there are numerous reasons why commenters might want to use a pen name. But one stupid pseudonym per commenter is enough for this site.
No Racism / Sexism / Homophobia etc
Giving people the freedom to express their opinions on cipher mysteries really isn’t the same as giving them a platform for expressing their racist / sexist / homophobic / etc opinions as well. If you’re desperate to do the latter, it really shouldn’t take you more than a couple of minutes to find a suitable social media platform, so please do that instead, thanks. Why people even begin to think this might be acceptable here, I have no idea. But it’s not.
And I’m also a bit tired of people testing out my moderation boundaries in this respect – so I may well start to delete comments that treat Cipher Mysteries moderation as a kind of lab rat to be incessantly prodded, simply because – speaking as the rat who’s being prodded – it’s not something I want.
Anyone who has seen the recent (2022) Netflix series “Vatican Girl: The Disappearance of Emanuela Orlandi” (I watched this over Christmas, it’s actually rather good) will know that the story it tells – of how, in 1983, 15-year-old “Vatican Girl” Emanuela Orlandi disappeared – is nothing short of a full-blown mystery.
Many decades later, her family’s search for answers yielded an unexpected result. A five-page document (allegedly stolen from a Vatican safe) was passed to Italian journalist Emiliano Fittipaldi: this itemised many expenses (totalling 483 million lira, or roughly 250,000 euros) incurred by the Holy See in supporting Emanuela Orlandi “through her life phases”. If (as seems likely) this is genuine, it would seem to imply that Orlandi’s disappearance was orchestrated, sustained, and covered up by the Vatican itself over the period from 1983 to 1997.
There are many different sides to this story, but I thought I’d take a closer look at its London connections…
London Connections
For once, there’s a helpful Reddit thread, that contains scans of the 1998 document itself (cover-pages of an as-yet unreleased 197-page dossier). This breaks the Vatican’s funding up into four distinct phases:
Jan 1983 to Jan 1985 (p.2)
This includes “Rette Vito e Alloggio 176 Chapman [actually Clapham] Road Londra
Also include “Secondo Trasferimento”
Feb 1985 to Feb 1988 (p.3)
This includes “6 Ellerdale Road London NW3 6NB”
Mar 1988 to Mar 1993 (p.4)
This mentioned “Clinica St Mary’s Hospital Campus Imperial College London Mint Wing South Wharf Road London W2 1NY”
It also mentioned “Dottoressa Leasly [actually Lesley] Regan Department of Obstetrics & Gynaecology”
This includes “Terzo trasferimento”
Apr 1993 to Jul 1997 (p.5)
“Attività generale e trasferimento presso Stato Città del Vaticano con relativo disbrigo pratiche finali”, i.e. “General activity and transfer to the Vatican City State with related final paperwork“.
Note that in the period 1988 to 1993, Dr Lesley Regan was a recently-qualified ob/gyn specialising in recurrent miscarriages (and is now head of ob/gyn there). However, when questioned by reporter Stefano Vergine from La Repubblica (translated here), Regan claimed to have no memory of Emanuela Orlandi.
The document also mentioned two London addresses linked to the Church, both of which La Repubblica’s intrepid reporter visited (though to no avail):
Casa Scalabrini (Youth Hostel of the Scalabrini Fathers) in Clapham Road, Stockwell
Without going into too much depth, I think it’s hard not to infer from this that Emanuela Orlandi was very probably in London from 1983 to 1997; and also that she may well have suffered from significant gynaecological problems (such as miscarriages). It also seems likely to me (from the “transfer to the Vatican City State” and “final paperwork” mentioned at the end) that Orlandi died in London.
In 2017, an anonymous tip-off to Laura Sgro (the Orlandi family’s lawyer) alleged that Emanuela’s body had been interred in an old grave in the Vatican’s Teutonic graveyard. Once this grave had been opened, it was reported in the press (a) that the remains of a roughly 30-year-old woman had been found, and later (b) that this was not Emanuela Orlandi. So the mystery continues.
Might Her Body Have Been Repatriated?
If Orlandi had died in London in June/July 1997 (as seems likely to me) but had been buried in a Vatican cemetery, I was a bit surprised that the question of how her body had been taken from A to B (or, rather, from L to V) hadn’t been raised. So I had a brief look at what administrative steps would needed to have been taken to allow this, in case these left any kind of archival paper-trail that could be followed today.
In England and Wales, any request to repatriate a body has to be made by completing a Form 104 and submitting it to the Coroner. The Coroner then decides whether the requested repatriation should be allowed, and (if it should) returns a Form 103 back to the Funeral Director to release the body.
Though the document mentions no address in the period 1993 to July 1997, it would seem reasonable to guess that she hadn’t travelled far from London. Hence it sounds as though we’re looking for any Form 104s that were submitted to a Coroner’s Office in London in June/July 1997 for repatriating a body of a roughly 29-year-old woman to Europe (probably but not definitely Italy or the Vatican). Surely we could call all the Coroner’s Offices in London (there aren’t actually that many) and just ask them, right?
Well… as always with anything to do with archives, I suspect the answer is a mix of yes and no.
Firstly, what happened in 1997 would have been covered by the 1988 Coroners Act, which was then superseded by the 2009 Coroners and Criminal Justice Act: the change most relevant to our search is that Coroner Districts were replaced by (larger) Coroner Areas (presumably to shut down a load of Coroner’s Courts to save money, right?) So since 1997 a great deal of administrative turbulence has happened, which isn’t a great starting point.
Secondly, Coroner’s records are only supposed to be retained for a maximum of fifteen years, after which 10% of those records are randomly sampled and passed on to the archives (which, as I understand it for London, would be the London Metropolitan Archives). So there’s a 90% data-loss at the archiving stage, which (for a historian) is a bit mad. But really, the point of archiving these records was to enable broader secondary studies, rather than for solving individual cold cases: keeping everything is expensive.
Thirdly, my understanding is that the main bulk of Coronial records relate to inquests: and if Emanuala Orlandi died in London, there’s no guarantee that she even had an inquest. Specifically, if she had (say) died in a hospital, she could very well have been given an MCCD (a “medical certificate of cause of death”) by a doctor without ever even being seen by a Coroner. So the June/July 1997 administrative interactions with whichever Coroner’s Office might well have been fleeting (if not indeed minimal).
All in all, there seems to be no shortage of reasons why we should be pessimistic about finding anything. And did I mention anything about confidentiality or data privacy? *sigh*
At the same time, Form 104 (also known as a “Removal Notice”, or sometimes the “Out of England” form) submissions must surely be a relative rarity: and these must surely be recorded by the Coroner’s Office, perhaps in a database (or maybe even a handwritten ledger back in 1998). So there has to be a good chance that this database or ledger is still being actively filled and can be checked, right? However, without specifically asking all the Coroner’s Offices how the handle this, I suspect there’s no obvious way of finding out.
However, what is also interesting (and this is the bit that I think may prove to be of most relevance here) is that part of Form 104 gets detached and sent to the Registrar of Births Deaths & Marriages, where the information on it is presumably recorded somewhere.
In the UK, freebmd is trying to input the BDM index data and make it freely available to everyone, but it’s a huge task, and they haven’t got anywhere near 1997 yet:
However, the raw GRO index data that freebmd’s heroic transcribers are inputting looks like this (I just entered DRAGONETTI as a random surname, and picked 1991 as a post-1988 example):
From the database field guide listed at the top of this page, each entry includes a reference to the associated District Registrar’s district (e.g. “Isle of Wight”), and the register / volume / page reference to look up there. Importantly, there’s no mention here of anything to do with Form 104, so presumably that’s an extra layer of information that would (I guess) be added to the register itself (or perhaps to a separate register entirely?) by that District Registrar.
Which points to the even more annoying insight that if we were looking for Form 104 submissions for June/July 1997, I’m guessing we would have to look through the London death registers directly (i.e. not by trawling through the GRO index). Well, unless the Registrar of Births Deaths & Marriages in that District just happened to maintain some kind of separate searchable index of Form 104 submissions. Which I guess is possible, but you’d again have to ask them directly if such a pixie-dust index exists.
Which is what I plan to do next (while crossing my fingers hard). Unless anyone here has a better idea?
David Morgan has very kindly sent me through a transcript (generated using ChatGPT/Glasp) of the recent ABC “Australian Story” episode on the Somerton Man. I thought it needed a post of its own, so here it is:
[00:09] I had no idea about the Somerton Man case. I’d never heard of it. It hadn’t entered my life in any way, I was just living my life. I had no idea that I held some kind of secret to solving this case or could aid in the effort to try and trace this back to a person. I knew that they would get the name one day, I knew that technology would catch up, but I did know that even though you’ve got a name, you’re not going to really understand who the man was.
[00:42] It’s fantastic to see that this man, an unknown man on a beach, now has a name, he now has a family. He now has a place. We’d love to find out, you know, what was he doing there. How did he die and why did he die? Was it natural? Was it suicide? Anything was possible, and in this case, I think that the most unexpected ending has happened and that is in itself another twist.
[01:19] I think there are some questions there that may never be solved, and the mystery will live on. MY NAME IS CHARLES On the first of December in 1948 the body was found by two trainee jockeys early in the morning that were out on the beach exercising horses. We went over to see if he was alright. And we got fairly close to him and couldn’t see him breathing and he was dead.
[02:02] A number of people did come and view the body but were unable to identify him. One of the intriguing things about the case is that all the clothes the man was wearing had the labels removed off them. So, this is what made some people think, ‘Oh maybe this guy is a spy.’. We are seeing that there was a tie with the name ‘T Keane’ on it.
[02:31] It was strange that nobody came forward to identify the body, which led to suggestions that he was from overseas, possibly from Europe, possibly from America. The doctor who carried out the post-mortem examination said the stomach was deeply congested with blood and in his opinion, death had been caused by heart failure due to poisoning.
[02:50] The Somerton Man had a really unique body. He was very well built, he was athletic, but he had these calf muscles that were really distinct, kind of like he was a ballet dancer. I think the biggest technical problem was the fact that he was thawing out, because he was, apart from being embalmed, he was deep frozen.
[03:10] The police knew that they wouldn’t be able to keep his body forever and that it would soon start to deteriorate. So they called in a taxidermist who made a plaster cast of his face. A group of locals paid for his headstone and his plot. And his headstone reads, “Here lies the unknown man”. A couple of months later they found a tiny scrolled up piece of paper in the man’s fob pocket.
[03:36] When they unrolled it, it said “Tamam Shud.” It was a mystery as to what this actually meant. It was a newspaper reporter who was well-read, and said it came from the ending of a book called The Rubaiyat written by Omar Khayyam. And it meant :the end”, or “the finish”. And this brought forward the theory that perhaps he had committed suicide.
[04:08] A man came forward to say that he had found a copy of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam and it did have the last page torn out. He handed it into police, he said it had been thrown into the back seat of his car six months earlier. So, on the back of the book were some strange letters that the police couldn’t make any sense of, and a phone number belonging to a young 27-year-old woman, who happened to live only five minutes’ walk away from where the man was found dead.
[04:43] The police paid the young nurse a visit, but she was very reluctant to talk to them. After that incident, basically they were stumped, there were no other leads. And it basically hit a brick wall, the whole case. Everyone working on the case or had an interest in the case always thought that something would come up tomorrow, but tomorrow never came.
[05:11] Podcast excerpt: Hello and welcome to the Somerton Man and today I wanted to look at the Somerton man – one of the most mysterious cold cases of all time. Over the decades, interest in this case has just continued to grow and grow to the point it’s actually considered one of Australia’s greatest unsolved mysteries.
[05:31] There are blog sites that have been set up from all over the world with amateur sleuths trying to work out who the guy is, why he was on Somerton beach and exactly how he died. I teach electronic engineering at Adelaide Uni. I just happened to be sitting in a laundrette watching my washing going around, and there was a stack of magazines beside me, and I picked one up and it was an article about the top 10 unsolved mysteries in Australia.
[06:03] And the second one was the Somerton Man case. The great thing about the maths we do is it’s not the pie-in-the-sky maths, it’s the type of maths that has great practical value… And so I thought, ‘Hey this would make a great project for my students’. And so I started building up a lot of history and background on the case.
[06:24] And I think that just sucked me in beccause I just got fascinated by it Professor Abbott has been investigating this case for so many years now and it’s completely consumed his whole being. He’s become known as one of the world leading experts on the case. So in trying to solve the case, it seemed to me the key was to find the young woman, Jo Thompson, that lived five minutes from where he died, with the hypothesis that she had been in a relationship with the Somerton Man.
[06:58] Unfortunately, she had died two years earlier, so I found out. That was a little frustrating because I was hoping that she would have some information about who this man was, and perhaps after so many years she would be prepared to say who it was, but I ended up contacting her grand-daughter, Rachel. The first time I heard about the Somerton Man was a letter that arrived, and it was sent by Professor Derek Abbott.
[07:32] It said, “I believe that you may have a link to someone involved in this case.” I developed a hypothesis that the Somerton Man and Jo Thompson knew each other. They had a child, Robin Thompson, and if this is the case then his daughter Rachel is the granddaughter of the Somerton Man. But his hypothesis seemed to be way too crazy.
[08:00] Too fanciful. It was like something that could have been made up in some fictional novel. So I went to Brisbane to meet Rachel, and we went out to dinner in a French restaurant, and talked about the case. He was also after my DNA. It’s probably the first request I’ve had for a man to do that. By then however, I was captivated by the case, and I wanted answers, so I was a willing victim.
[08:39] So the relationship moved pretty quickly. Yeah, there was some sort of spark there. Something just magically drew us together. By the following day we had decided we were going to get married. It all happened remarkably fast. So Derek and I got married in 2010 and we now have three beautiful children together.
[09:15] People would say that I had married her for her DNA, and we would laugh about it, so that is funny. Derek has essentially spent 24/7 researching the Somerton Man case. He, if it’s possible, became even more passionate about the whole case. So in 2015 we started work on extracting DNA from hairs that were found in the plaster cast of the Somerton Man, hoping this would be a way to identify him, even though these hairs are 70 years old.
[09:56] But we were only able to extract 2 per cent of the amount of DNA that we really need to form an identification. There’s an imperative to now go ahead and do an exhumation. We need it in much higher concentration levels, which we could do with the Somerton man’s teeth or his ear bone, for example. Now the man’s body will be exhumed by police with hopes modern DNA technology will be able to solve one of the state’s most enduring cold cases.
[10:29] The Somerton Man is not just a curiosity or a mystery to be solved. It’s somebody’s father, son, perhaps grandfather, uncle, brother. So when the state government announced that the exhumation was going ahead I think for some other people, they would see that as a cue for retirement. But not Derek. I think that increased his motivation to continue at even faster pace.
[10:53] I’m reasonably confident there will be enough DNA come out of this that we’ll get an identification. He thought initially that he would be allowed to participate, but that wasn’t to be. After the exhumation, everything went silent. The police kept very tight-lipped about their processes and Derek got a little restless and he went back to his three hairs that he’d extracted in 2017 and started working again.
[11:22] He was driven to find out who the man was. The professor definitely wanted to be first over the finishing line of cracking the case. So I’d been communicating with Colleen Fitzpatrick, who is the world expert in forensic genealogy from America and like me, she was totally fascinated by the Somerton Man case I asked her if she would assist.
[11:53] So here’s a closeup of the bust and can you see all these little hairs? Yes. That’s the Somerton Man’s hair. So Colleen’s expertise and she’s a pioneer in this, is getting DNA, and from that DNA finding distant cousins. There are millions of people today who voluntarily put their DNA on these family tree-type DNA sites.
[12:22] Ever wanted to explore your family tree, learn more about your ancestry or identify your ethnic background. First take a DNA test and download your results as a DNA data file. far as unidentified human remains, violent crimes, in other words, forensic cases, it’s really been a game-changer, the first new tool really in about 30 years in human identification.
[12:48]) It’s very powerful and it’s been very successful. Around this time, DNA technology began to improve significantly. Derek joined forces with Colleen, and they began to get some results. Right off the bat, it’s sort of like a miracle happened, we passed the first test. We got the good data out of the 75-year-old hair.
[13:10] Great! Two million DNA markers fell out. And it was at that point we knew that was more than enough to identify the Somerton Man. It was in a good shape to upload to those genealogy data bases for the next step, the next genealogy step. So when we first uploaded the Somerton Man’s DNA onto a genealogical website, the very top match we got was a gentleman in Victoria by the name of Jack Hargreaves, whose DNA was already there on the system.
[13:45] So, blue shows the area of significant matching, and this is huge here on chromosome 22. And so what we did is we built out Jack Hargreaves family tree. And at one stage we had as many as 4,000 people on the tree, so which one is it? It felt like I was working on a big Sudoku puzzle, moving all these relatives around until I got it.
[14:11] We looked for people with no date of death on that tree. There was one that stood out, because A: he was male, B: had roughly the right age range, and C was very closely connected to the Keane family, and as we know, the Somerton Man had the name Keane on his tie. When I saw the name Keane, that’s when my hair caught fire.
[14:36] That’s when I really knew we were on the offensive. We were going to get it because that wasn’t a coincidence. And so this turned out to be a chap called Charles Webb, who had no date of death details. Yeah, so he was born Carl Webb but he only went by the name Charles Webb. It seemed this chap had just gone off the radar after 1947.
[15:01] This could be our man, but we had no evidence, it was just a guy on a tree with no date of death. And we set out to either prove or eliminate him as being the Somerton Man And to prove it, what we had to do was see who his mother was, then tunnel down the family tree just on the mother’s side only, and find somebody alive today.
[15:25] And see if that DNA matches or not. And that turned out to be somebody in Victoria by the name of Antero. I got a call from Professor Abbott, who wanted to know if I could help do some research and do DNA test. I hadn’t even heard of the story before. And it was like, ‘Hang on a minute, is this a scam?’. It’s not every day you get someone out of the blue calling you up and wanting to help with some unidentified body or wants your DNA.
[15:54] But did some research, made sure he was who he said he was. So I volunteered to do that and did the test, sent it away. I’ve always been interested in family history, but had no idea that there was a missing person there. So when Antero’s DNA came through and it was a match to the Somerton Man, it was at this point we knew that Charles Webb was the Somerton Man and we’d finally cracked it.
[16:24] So there was a great feeling of elation, dampened by being totally exhausted at this stage. I was taken aback but was excited as well. There’s a great, great discovery. You know, I’d played my little part in working out that great mystery, it was satisfying. There’s Charles there. So, he’s my first cousin, three times removed.
[16:50] And his mother, which is Eliza Emelia Morris, her older sister is my great-great grandmother. And there’s me down the bottom. So Colleen and I decided right at that point, this was the time to make an announcement people have been hanging on for 70 years to know the answers, I didn’t see any reason to delay.
[17:15] I just wanted to get it out there. They were determined, to quote Derek, to beat the cops. And they were a bit concerned of how the news would be received as well. The police gave no deadlines on when we could expect a result. There was just nothing, no news. Now an Adelaide researcher claims to have made a major breakthrough, uncovering the identity of the infamous Somerton Man found on a beach.
[17:40] Now a man who has dedicated his adult life to investigating the case thinks DNA has provided the answer. It’s been a marathon working on this, over the last year particularly. It was mind-blowing. It was, ‘Wow, we’ve actually got a name.’ And it was a surreal moment. It took a long while to sink in that it’s not the Somerton Man’s story now, but the Charles Webb story.
[18:03] I’m not sure we’ll ever be absolutely certain, because what we would do in a forensic context normally is take a deceased DNA and compare that directly with something we know belong to them a toothbrush, a hairbrush, etcetera, DNA from that item. We haven’t got that here. As a secondary measure, we could compare the deceased DNA to a very close family member, you know, parents, children.
[18:25] Again, we don’t have that. So my concern is that we may never be able to categorically say that we know this person’s identity. I’m not going to say I believe it until such time as the police results and the forensic results that were done at the autopsy come back and actually confirm it, which I think they possibly will.
[18:51] Police who exhumed the Somerton Man’s remains last year are cautiously optimistic the finding is in fact a breakthrough. I am 100 per cent convinced that we have the right guy. Charles Webb is the Somerton Man. PROFESSOR DEREK ABBOTT, ADELAIDE UNIVERSITY: It turns out he wasn’t a spy, he wasn’t a ballet dancer.
[19:13] And all those crazy theories on the internet all came to nothing. So this is Rachel’s DNA compared with the Somerton Man. Down at the bottom it says ‘no shared DNA segments found.’ So, that was a flop. So we’re totally able to eliminate that hypothesis that Rachel is the granddaughter of the Somerton Man.
[19:44] The hypothesis turned out to be wrong. So, when Derek said that Mr Somerton wasn’t my grandfather, as a joke I said to him, ‘How long before you serve the divorce papers on me?’ Because the media had made a comment some years back Derek only married me for my DNA. So it’s probably somewhere around here. We told the children that Mr S as I’ve always called the Somerton Man was called Charles Webb and that he’s not related to us.
[20:18] But the Somerton Man will always form part of our family and our narrative. It’s the reason that we met, Derek and I. It brought us together. It’s been like a journey for us, together, I guess. Derek: George, I guess the mystery’s not over is it? We don’t know much abut Charles Webb, why he was here. And then not wanting to just rest there, we also then were able to find other living descendants.
[20:44] So one of the people I contacted was Stuart Webb. I’d never heard of the Somerton Man case I think Derek Abbott found me because I’d done some family tree research of my own, because my grandmother was very into the family tree or genealogy. It certainly seemed very strange to be part of this larger mystery.
[21:07] I’m kind of a regular guy, I go to work. When Derek Abbott asked me to do a DNA test, I wasn’t really crazy about the idea. I wanted to think about it a little bit further, so I put it out to my family. If anybody else would be prepared to do the DNA test? And I put my hand up straight away and said, ‘yeah, I’ll have a crack’… And everything from that point just seems to have steamrolled and rolled on and on and it’s getting bigger and bigger as we keep going.
[21:37] So I’ve got a result for you. Yes. Are you ready for this? Drumroll…So you are a great, great niece of Charles Webb So I got my DNA results and…it was happiness, it was joy. But there was also some sadness about this forgotten family member You are 396 centimorgans, so you’re right in the middle of the range, right? Awesome.
[22:12] This was a person, he wasn’t just a media hit for a little while and unsolved mystery. He was our family He was born in 1905 in Footscray, Victoria but it seems that he grew up in Springvale, in the family bakery and became an electrical instrument maker. He was one of six siblings. It’s reported in the newspapers at the time that he played community football and so this could explain his good calves and good physique generally.
[22:50] And there’s so much more we don’t know. Here’s a family photo album from pa with all the mystery inside. Check it out… I started to look back through the family history and that particular wing I’ve been able to find the first photo of Charles when he was alive, to my knowledge. Nana’s actually written on this photo and named all the people.
[23:14] So you’ve got grandma, grandpa, Charlie who’s the Somerton Man, and Roy. So you can actually see them quite distinctly. It’s amazing. Yeah. What a find. There’s also a larger family gathering with all of the Webb family as it was back then. A fantastic family day, they’re all smiling, Charles in particular is playing some kind of prank on who we think is Gerald Keane.
[23:42] I wonder where that was? I don’t know. It looks to be somewhere rural; it looks like they’re having fun. So when I first saw that, I thought, wow, this is fantastic. This is a real breakthrough. And this photo is basically taken 20 years before he died. So we’re seeing him considerably younger than the autopsy photo we’re used to looking at.
[24:07] It’s quite incredible when you look at these photos and this guy obviously went missing, and nobody really came forward. The fact that Charles Webb wasn’t reported missing, I find that sad in itself. And for no-one to reach out and find out where he was or what had happened, it’s quite heartbreaking So Uncle Harry, growing up, was there any discussion? Did you hear anything about one of the relatives going missing? No, no, no.
[24:41] There’s no recollection of that. Why didn’t any of the siblings try and find out where he went? Did they know that he’d gone to Adelaide and never came back? Or did he just go off and no-one knew where, where he was? In the end when we look at the whole situation of the Somerton Man, it does appear to be a sad story.
[25:05] In the period leading up to his death, his father died, his mum died. His brother Roy, who he seems to be close with, died. He split up with his wife as well. Charles was married to Dorothy Robertson in, I think, 1941. They didn’t have a very easy marriage… Our information comes from Dorothy’s divorce decree filed several years later.
[25:31] Dorothy described Charles as violent, threatening, moody. Not at all a happy person. He didn’t have any friends and he would be in bed by 7pm. Turns out that Charles loved to write poetry and his favourite subject that he would write about was death. This is interesting, because we know that just before Charles died, he’d discarded a copy of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, which is poetry about death.
[25:59] It all fits together. One day she came home and the whole house smelled like ether. She found him soaking wet in bed, and he said he had swallowed 50 phenobarbital tablets. This very much sounds like Charles was attempting suicide. This story turns out that it’s not some wild spy drama. It’s really a sad, tragic domestic situation.
[26:29] Eventually he moved out in April of 1947, and we don’t know what happened after that. And we find him dead on a beach in 1948 in Adelaide. So what has he been doing in that intervening year? Who knows. And why Adelaide, why did he pick Adelaide? I think Charles Webb was very broken mentally. Something had happened in his life, and he wanted just to anaesthetise himself.
[27:02] It does seem to me that some form of suicide does seem to be likely, which is what the police always suspected all along, right from the beginning I think there’s no doubt that he committed suicide. If he planned it all, he certainly planned it in a way that it would leave a great, confusing issue behind, which would bamboozle people for years.
[27:28] Imagine, this guy has been sitting there for 70 odd years, no-one knew who he was. You’re related to one of the great mysteries of Australia and indeed the world. I was a bit excited to find out all I could about the Somerton Man, now that I knew who it was and my small piece in the puzzle. I’m sure that they’ll find a few more answers to those missing questions.
[27:51] But maybe eventually down the track, probably be a few unanswered questions that we just have to live with. The person that could supply all these answers that we all would like to know is dead. He’s taking it to the grave. In the end, there was no fairytale ending, but it’s been really heart-warming to learn that the family that may not have missed him when he went missing and when he died, are now reclaiming him.
[28:20]) It’s really the start of the mystery, not the end. He died alone. He’d been buried for a long time in a cemetery without a name. Whether he’s buried again at Somerton or whether the family has other ideas, it’s just really nice that he’s got a name. So, in the playroom, we have two portraits. One is my grandmother, Jo Thomson and the other one is what Charles Webb may have looked like.
[29:12] I do find them quite disturbing. And now that I know that I’m not related, I would very much like to move those paintings on and rehome them. I would quite like to donate them to a charity. I would like to get rid of those paintings. South Australia police says further DNA work is required to positively identify the Somerton Man and that the matter “will ultimately be determined by the Coroner”.
Commenter John Sanders is convinced that the man at the right-hand-edge of the Webb family photo is Leslie William Scott, husband of Carl Webb’s sister Gladys May. Here are some notes on Mr and Mrs L. W. Scott…
Leslie William Scott
Leslie William Scott was born in 1895 to Samuel William Scott (b. 1869 Gympie, Queensland, died March 1939) and Mary Elizabeth West (1870-1950): Samuel was survived by Leslie and three other sons (“Mr. Lindsay Scott, who is attached to the railway staff and is stationed at Maffra; Mr. Walter Scott, who is a member of the Australian navy, and is stationed at the Flinders Naval Base; and Mr. Pat Scott [VX123596], of Camperdown“) and three daughters (“Mrs. F. Grayland and Mrs. M. Murnane (Terang) and Mrs. C. Bateman (Bostock’s Creek)“.
He worked for 4½ years as an apprentice printer for his father (proprietor of the Camperdown “Herald”), before heading off to fight in WWI. From his AIF records (at the NAA), he was 5 feet 11 inches, 10 st 2 lbs, 32 inch chest, fair complexion, grey eyes, fair hair, Presbyterian, and had a scar below his right knee. However, a war wound at Gallipoli in 1915 led to the amputation of his left hand, causing him to return to Australia. (An initial news report saying that he had had an arm amputated was incorrect.)
Having gained a “[Certificate] of Competency under section 171 of the Local Government Act 1915 (No.2686)” (p.863), and a brief stint as secretary to Winchelsea Shire Council, he became assistant town clerk at Essendon in 1921. From there he became Essendon’s deputy town clerk by 1929, and then – don’t gasp too hard – Essendon town clerk in 1940.
Leslie Scott lived at 15 Coats Street, Moonee Ponds (telephone FV7743), which is where his parents-in-law were living when Richard August Webb died in 1939; and also at 9 Peterleigh Grove, Essendon. He died on 9th September 1971 [Thanks P!]. I’ve been unable to find any photographs of him in Trove (or elsewhere).
Gladys May Scott (nee Webb)
Gladys May Webb was born in Prahran in 1897, and (according to The Age) married Leslie William Scott on 4th July 1918 at the Presbyterian Church, Camperdown.
Though Trove has many mentions of her (as honorary secretary of this, that or the other society in Essendon), she only seems to appear in a single photograph (from 1946), with the caption “Mrs Fraser [the wife of Cr. J. W. S. Fraser, Mayor of Essendon] is seen greeting Mrs L. W. Scott [on the right]“:
She died on 03 July 1955 at “her residence, 9 Peterleigh Grove, Essendon”: and in 1958 it was solicitors trying to trace Gladys’ missing brother who believed that Carl Webb might have gone to Cottesloe.
The Family Photo
Once again, here’s the family photo:
John Sanders is adamant that the man on the far right is Leslie William Scott: he certainly looks tall enough (to be Scott’s height of 5′ 11″), and does appear to be covering up his left hand area:
Is that him? And is his wife Gladys May in the family photo as well?
Other People
On the other side of the photo, there’s another man who looks a dead ringer for the guy on the right. So I do wonder whether this might be one of Leslie William Scott’s three brothers (my best guess would be that this is Lindsay Scott whose WWI physical description is practically identical to Leslie William Scott’s, but I have no actual evidence to back this up):
I also wonder whether the older couple just next to this man might be Samuel William Scott and his wife Mary Elizabeth West (i.e. the lady with the mysterious “Thing” hand on her shoulder):
(Actually, I’m pretty sure the “Thing” hand is just an optical illusion, formed of the man’s hunched up left knee / dark trousers and the right hand of the lady sitting beside her, who similarly has her left hand on the shoulder of the lady on her other side. And might this possibly be a Scott sister?)
I wonder if there are more photographs out there to be had… any more thoughts on this?
Over at voynich.ninja, there’s an interesting recent thread on the (in-)homogeneity of Voynichese, i.e. how consistent (or inconsistent) with itself the Voynich Manuscript’s text is (either locally or globally). Given that I have been working on Q20 recently, I thought it might be interesting to take a brief look at that quire through this particular lens.
In Search of a Problem Statement
One intriguing side of Voynichese is that even though it exhibits high-level consistency (e.g. the continuous script, plus the well-known differences between Currier A pages and Currier B pages), medium-level consistency (e.g. thematic-looking sections such as Q13, Q20, Herbal-A, Herbal-B etc), and even bifolio-level consistency (more on this below), there are open questions about the apparent lack of low-level consistency.
In particular, Voynichese ‘words’ (which have been the subject of countless studies and analyses) present many apparent local inconsistencies. As Torsten Timm pointed out in the voynich.ninja thread referenced above, words that are extremely common on one page of a section can be completely absent from the next. And, awkwardly, this is sometimes even true for pages that are the recto and verso sides of the same folio.
Even though there are countless ways to airily explain away these kinds of inconsistencies (change of subject matter, change of source structure, change of underlying plaintext language, change of local cipher key, etc), all too often I think these are invoked more as a research excuse for not actually going down the rabbit hole. (And I for one am bored stiff of such research excuses.)
So, before we start reaching gleefully for such cop-out answers, we need to first properly lock down what the core low-level consistency problem actually is. Basically, what specific behaviours can we point to that indicate that Voynichese has a problem here?
Captain “ed”
It was WWII codebreaker Captain Prescott Currier himself who pointed out nearly fifty years ago that you could usually tell Currier A pages from Currier B pages simply by looking at the proportion of ‘ed’ glyph pairs on that page. (Currier A pages have almost none, Currier B pages normally have loads.)
Personally, I’d add some caveats, though:
Even though it might be tempting to think of “ed” as a bigram (i.e. a single token), it seems far more likely to be a contact boundary between an “e”-family token (i.e. e/ee/eee) and a “d” glyph.
To me, there often seems to be something funny going on with qokedy / qokeedy / etc that isn’t really captured by just looking for “ed”
Helpfully, you can use voynichese.com’s layer feature to bring to life the variation in Voynichese words containing “ed”, e.g. this query for lots of different subgroups of “ed” words. Even though Herbal A pages have basically no ed pairs at all, the ed’s nothing short of explode at the very start of Q13:
The first three pages of Q20 are very nearly as colourful:
For ed, it seems to be the case that recto and folio pages have a similar kind of ed-density: for example, if you compare f107r/f107v with f108r/f108v, you can see clearly that the two halves of each folio seem quite similar:
The f111r/f111v pair seems to buck this trend slightly, insofar as f111v (on the right) seems somewhat less ed-dense than its recto side f111r (on the left):
While I’m here, I’d note that f116r (the last proper Voynichese page of Q20) seems to have a structure break halfway down, which would be consistent with an explicit and/or a colophon placed at the end of a chapter / book:
There’s also the question of whether the two folios making up each bifolio appear ed-consistent. I’d say that this appears true for most Q20 bifolios (e.g. f103 and the top half of f116r, f104-f115, f105-f114, f106-f113) but certainly not for others (e.g. f107-f112 and f108-f111). It’s very hard to be definitive about this.
Finally, I’d also note that while Quire 8’s f58r/f58v (with their starred paragraphs) do have some ed-words, their ed-fractions are extremely low, which would make classifying them as “pure” Currier B difficult:
Torsten Timm’s “in”
Torsten Timm has similarly looked at what the usage of the Voynichese glyph pair “in” tells us. Of my own set of voynichese.com experiments, the one that seemed to me to be the most interesting was comparing “iin” with “[anything else]in”.
For example, even though iin dominates [^i]in for most of the Voynich Manuscript, the first folio of Q13 has almost no “iin”s in it at all:
Folio f111 is also a little bit odd, in that its verso side has many more [^i]in words:
“ho”-words Way
As with Currier’s “ed”, “ho” is very much a contact locus between two families of glyphs: on the left, you have ch/sh/ckh/cth/cph/cfh, while on the right you have or/ol/ok/ot/op/of etc. As such, it looks like a useful way of exploring for a group of glyph boundaries, but this does need to be carefully qualified.
If we visually group this ho-transition (via voynichese.com) in terms of the origin of the “h”, we get a query that looks like this. This reveals that most ho instances are in fact “cho” (dark blue). However, the f93r/f93v folio does look particularly unusual in this respect:
The final two paragraphs of f116r are also unusual, this time for their almost complete lack of ho-words:
From the preceding sections, I’d say that the overwhelming impression I get is that pages within a folio (and indeed pages within a bifolio, though to a slightly lesser extent) are actually reasonably consistent with each other, and with relatively few counter-examples.
Unsurprisingly, this is also what we see if we simply merge the three ed / in / ho queries into a single voynichese.com query. Here, we can easily pick out the dishonourable exceptions, such as f111 (where f111r is dominated by “ed” [blue], yet where f111v is dominated by “in” [red]):
If we instead highlight cho and sho separately, what emerges is that, unlike the rest of Q20, the f106-f113 bifolio has a surprisingly high proportion of sho-words (in yellow):
I could go on, but I think my visual argument here has pretty much run its course.
Thoughts, Nick?
Even though Torsten Timm used ed / in / ho as part of his argument concluding that Voynichese pages are independent of each other, I’m not sure I fully accept his conclusions. (He’s certainly right about words, but the details and ramifications of that are for another post entirely.)
For me, the behaviour of ed / in / ho seems to suggest something arguably even more unsettling: which is that there seems to be consistency at the bifolio level.
And so it seems that we’re facing a BAAFU (“Bifolio As A Functional Unit”) scenario here. Which is arguably even more mysterious than Currier’s LAAFU (“Line As A Functional Unit”), wouldn’t you agree?
In a recent post, I started trying to list out Q20 order-related microtheories, but got somewhat sidetracked by the microtheory that f58 (with its ‘Scribe 3’ starred paragraphs) may have preceded Q20 (which, for the most part, is also made up of ‘Scribe 3’ starred paragraphs). However, this whole idea is closely linked to the whole issue of what happened to Q8 (which f58 is part of) and Q14: and even though I had covered this issue before, I thought it was well worth revisiting.
The “ij” Marginalia
Back in 2009, I floated the idea that the mark at the bottom of f57v might have been an “ij”, probably ineptly added by an early Voynich owner who believed (from the nesting order of the bifolios back then) that this marked the start of the second ‘book’ (or chapter). (“ij” is an entirely conventional early modern Latin way of handwriting “2”).
This was actually part of a larger discussion of Q8 which I tried to put together to make sense of Q8’s curious foliation – essentially, why was there such a large folio numbering gap between f58 and f65? My suggestion was that not only had Q8’s bifolios been flipped around (i.e. the original folio order was f65-f66-x-x-x-x-x-x-f57-f58), but the large wodge of pages missing from the middle could well have been the nine-rosette folio (but folded down).
And before you start complaining that the nine-rosette page doesn’t have folio numbers matching this, my idea was that the foldout page had already been pulled out and rebound along a different fold, leaving a damaged vellum residue at the centre of Q8 that the foliator numbered around (just in case it later got bound back into its correct place).
However, I now suspect that even that binding was an ‘imposition’ (in the literal sense of the word), and that the original nesting order had been (say) f65-f66-f57-f58, before the bifolios were reversed and the nine-rosette page (Scribes 2 & 4) was inserted into their centre. So I would date the “ij” marginalia to the mid-fifteenth century, prior to the bifolios being reversed, and also to before the nine-rosette foldout was (mis-)bound into Quire 8.
But because f57r (the flip side of f57v) is a Herbal-B page, and f57v still faces f58r (with the paragraph stars), it seems very likely to me that these two folios faced each other in Quire 8’s original (unbound) gathering.
This would make the first few pages of Q20:
f57v (with the circular diagram [possibly a nocturnal, e.g. here, here and here])
(oh, plus the “ij” marginalia at the bottom)
f58r (big paragraph stars, plus a missing initial capital)
f58v (more starred paragraphs)
Quire 20 (though in an as-yet unknown bifolio ordering).
Chicken Scratches (Again)
Intriguingly, if you insert the nine-rosette page into the centre of Q8 in its original folding style, you end up putting the two pages with “chicken scratches” on right next to each other, which would seem to strongly support this whole idea. Yet because the chicken scratches line up horizontally but not vertically, I think we can reasonably infer that the nine-rosette page was only loosely bound in at this stage. Finally, because the Q14 quire number is on the correct page relative to Q14’s rebinding (i.e. not its original binding), it would seem to imply (as I described for Q13 in Curse, 2006) that these quire numbers were added after several binding iterations.
Hence the Q8 timeline would appear to be something like this:
f65-f66-f57-f58 (original order)
“ij” marginalia added
Q8 Bifolios reversed, nine-rosette foldout inserted but only loosely bound in
Chicken scratch marginalia added
Nine-rosette foldout ripped along original fold, removed from Q8, but vellum residue left in place
Nine-rosette foldout refolded along different fold, quire 14 number added, bound further along
Foliation added, folio numbers 59-64 skipped to work around the nine-rosette vellum residue
f85r2 Contact Transfer (?)
There is also the matter of what seems to be a paint contact transfer on f85r2.
Given what seems to be the connections between Q8 and Q14, you’d loosely expect this to have come from a Q8 herbal page: but this doesn’t seem to be the case. I then wondered whether this had been transferred across from the red-brown paint at the bottom of f87r (a close neighbour in the final binding order, codicologically speaking). However, unless the bottom edge of f87r has been extremely heavily trimmed, the curve isn’t really right:
Looking elsewhere in the manuscript, this could possibly have instead come from the bottom outside corner of f43r (but, to be honest, this curve doesn’t seem to match either):
Or from the bottom outside corner of f39r (but, again, the curve doesn’t seem to quite match):
So… where did it come from? This remains a bit of a mystery to me (and I’ve marched through all the pages of my Yale facsimile several times), but perhaps someone else will have a better insight into what happened here. I hope so!
f86v6 Contact Transfer (?)
There’s also a curious mark (that looks like a contact transfer) near the top right of f86v6 which I also currently have no explanation for:
