New Somerton Man identification claim – Thomas Torance Keane…?

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After all the recent troll-comment-posting kerfuffle here, I’ve been extra careful about checking comments before letting them onto the site. So, when a very specific identification of the Somerton Man was recently posted in a comment to Cipher Mysteries, I emailed the fairly-unlikely-sounding email address to verify it (but didn’t get a reply).

Despite this caginess, I decided to have a look anyway. Our anonymous commenter claims:-

“Thomas Torrance Keane, born in Charters Towers in 1896 to Isabella Beaumont and her husband[d] Francis C Keane. Himself a part of the extended Beaumont clan and known to the Harkness family through Thomas’s marriage to Clarice Isabella Victoria Beaumont. Although he is noted as being deceased in 1949 this is probably a red herring. He was the Somerton Man.“

As names go, “Thomas Keane” has quite a lot going for it: specifically
* the “Unknown Man” / “Somerton Man” was wearing a tie marked “T. Keane”;
* his possessions included a laundry bag marked “Keane”;
* they also included a singlet marked “Kean” (omitting the final “e”)

Having said that, at the time police seemed quite sure that nobody called “T. Keane” was missing… but it’s entirely conceivable that one might have somehow evaded their net. Furthermore, the commenter names two (both very real) roads where this Thomas Keane and his [alleged] wife [allegedly] lived:-

“The family lived in Frankston, on the Cranbourne Road and before that on Davey Street“

How many of these specifics could I test?

Well… because Charters Towers is in Queensland, the obvious first stop was the Queensland Births / Deaths / Marriages (BDM) website. There I found item 1892/B50671 – the birth of Thomas Torance [note the single-‘r’] Keane, son of Francis Charles Keane and Isabella Beaumont. The Queensland BDM also has item 1949/B21184 – the death certificate for (without much doubt) the same Thomas Torance Keane (which I haven’t yet seen).

On Trove, I found Clarice Isobel (“Peg”) Beaumont’s 25th August 1942 wedding to Private Thomas Lawson Harkness, A.M.F., which is why she subsequently appears in the archives (1942-1980) as Clarice Isobel/Isabella Victoria Harkness:-

The charming auburn-haired bride looked sweet indeed in her gown of ivory moire taffeta, hand-embroidered, with beads and sequins at the neck, and falling full from a tight-fitting waistline. It was buttoned up the back and extended into a long train. The long sleeves came to a peak over the wrist. She wore an embroidered net veil flowing from a top-knot of double white violets. The veil was loaned by a Geelong friend. The bride carried a sheaf of white heather and double violets.

Also according to Trove, the couple had a baby daughter on 20th June 1943: they were then living at 32 Davey Street, Frankston where they stayed until at least March 1945. Note that this was Thomas Lawson Harkness Jr: his father (Thomas Lawson Harkness Sr) was a merchant seaman born in London in 1888, who moved to Australia, and married Ellen Lee in 1916.

As numerous Cipher Mysteries readers will doubtless already be shouting at their screens, Thomas Lawson Harkness Jr’s sister was none other than Jessie Ellen Harkness (b. 1921, Marrickville, NSW, d. 13/5/2007), known somewhat better as “Jestyn“. It was her phone number on the Somerton Man’s recovered Rubaiyat that first brought the police to her door: and it was her anonymity that was protected by Gerry Feltus (and others) for so many years, up until the Internet made all such politeness and civility seem untenably quaint.

At this point, I hope you can see the problem I’m facing: I’ve been sent these anonymous messages (from “Ayuverdica”) that seem to be confusing (the very real) Thomas Lawson Harkness Jr with (the also very real, but essentially unknown) Thomas Torance Keane. Is this just an accident, memory playing tricks on someone? Or am I being set up by a particularly sophisticated online troll trying to muddy the waters for everyone, for obscure reasons currently unknown?

Really, what did Thomas Torance Keane have to do with any of this Harkness-related family history? Maybe nothing, maybe something, maybe everything. Right now, I have no idea whatsoever, I simply can’t tell.

But perhaps you can. Perhaps if we leave the Harknesses to one side and find out more about the life (and indeed the death) of Thomas Torance Keane, we will be able to eliminate him from our enquiries… or perhaps we won’t.

I don’t personally have access to Australian genealogical databases, but I know that quite a few Cipher Mysteries readers do. So this is the point where I stop and hand my (admittedly fairly thin) portfolio over to all you nice people.

Basically, what can we find out about Thomas Torance Keane? What happened to him? As always, dot dot dot… Good luck and happy hunting!

Update: I also found the following advert in Trove, placed in the 11 Jan 1941 Sydney Morning Herald. It may or may not be related, but here it is anyway:-

Keane – Any person knowing the present or past whereabouts of Thomas Keane, the husband of the late Sarah Ann Keane (who died September 13, 1940), please communicate with The Equity Trustees Company, 472 Bourke Street, Melbourne, Victoria.

Kidd, Poe, ‘Imogine’, and Charles Garrett…

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If you know a bit about the history of cryptography, then you’ll probably know that the first well-known modern story about ciphers was Edgar Allan Poe’s (1843) “The Gold-Bug“. Poe explicitly built his narrative around the legend of Captain Kidd’s treasure, so in many ways it forms a kind of literary bridge between the worlds of buried treasure and ciphers. Of course, he was writing some 80 years before the Kidd-Palmer treasure maps and La Buse cryptograms surfaced (and long before “Treasure Island”, which appeared in 1881), so his story is unaffected by any of these.

Just so you know, the (simple substitution) cipher he devised looks a lot like this:-

53‡‡†305))6*;4826)4‡.)4‡);806*;48†8
¶60))85;1‡(;:‡*8†83(88)5*†;46(;88*96
*?;8)*‡(;485);5*†2:*‡(;4956*2(5*—4)8
¶8*;4069285);)6†8)4‡‡;1(‡9;48081;8:8‡
1;48†85;4)485†528806*81(‡9;48;(88;4
(‡?34;48)4‡;161;:188;‡?;

Previously (in 1840), Poe had challenged readers of “Alexander’s Weekly Messenger” to send in simple substitution ciphers for him to crack in print, and so had for some time been aware of a widespread public interest in cryptography. “The Gold-Bug”, then, was written to capitalize on this interest: and won a $100 prize. Later, many readers were inspired by “The Gold Bug” to develop an interest in codebreaking, most notably a young William Friedman of whom you may have heard…

However, when reading about “The Gold-Bug” the other day, my eye was drawn to one aspect to the whole affair that I found intriguing. At the time, newspaper editor John Du Solle made the suggestion (though one he quickly retracted) that Poe may have drawn inspiration from the 1839 “Imogine; or the Pirate’s Treasure“, written by 13-year-old girl George Ann Humphreys Sherburne.

It’s true that the two tales do share key elements: but as is so often the case, those ideas were without doubt very much ‘in the air’ at the time. Rather, the two stories seem related in the same way that Robert Louis Stevenson’s “Treasure Island” drew ideas from numerous earlier books, but had an entirely new style of presenting them that made it feel fresh and appealing. Basically, in both cases I’m quite sure that Poe or Stevenson weren’t (literary) pirates, but simply well-read writers with a zingy contemporary geometry to add shape and style to the narrative building blocks that they found around them.

But ever since Du Solle’s speedily retracted comparison, it seemed to me that hardly anybody had actually bothered to read Sherburne’s story (mainly because almost everyone mis-spells its protagonist’s name, *sigh*). I did, though: and I found something a little unexpected…

imogine-cover

Having trawled past all the girlish swooning chapters and then the unexpected (but unconvincing) chapter with a death, in Chapter VIII the reader finally gets to the climax of the piece where (to almost nobody’s great surprise) the pirate treasure is finally found along with a skeleton…

“Yes”, said Imogine, “and just as you came up, I was about turning over that piece of old iron near the bones.”

“Ah! I see it,” replied her father, “and it looks to me like the top of a ship’s iron pot;” and turning it over with his cane, saw under it white sea sand, [in] which, on stirring about, gold and silver pieces were seen sparkling, which caused an exclamation from all.

“What a great discovery is this!” said Mr Belmont, turning and looking with surprise at Imogine and Cornelia;

[…]

After placing the skeleton in a box, and interring it, they removed the treasure, and in doing so, discovered another similar pot to the first under it, but more valuable, which was all moved safely to the house.”

What’s so unusual about this? Well… according to near-legendary metal-detectorist Charles Garrett, it has often been the case that a large treasure cache is buried immediately below a small treasure cache. Garrett post-rationalizes / explains this as a kind of ‘trap’ for treasure hunters, i.e. for them to be satisfied with robbing out the (small) topmost treasure, while leaving the (big) treasure underneath intact for the original owner. (Though personally, I suspect it’s just as likely that they couldn’t be bothered to dig a bigger hole.)

The big question, then, is this: how would a 13-year-old girl writing in 1839 know to describe such an arrangement… except if she had been party to the ins and outs of an actual treasure dig? I’m not suggesting that recovered pirate treasure is the true secret of the Astor family fortune (mainly because that particular joke’s already been done to death)… but maybe there’s a touch more truth in Sherburne’s story than might at first be thought.

Perhaps the real giveaway in the whole thing is the curious tag-line on “Imogine”‘s cover: “This is all as true as it is strange“. What do you think?

PS: another mystery to ponder is who “George Ann Humphreys Sherburne” was? Apart from her presumed birth in 1825, there appears to be no other information on her anywhere at all. Unless you happen to know better, of course… please leave a comment if you do! 🙂

Review of “An Anthology of Asemic Writing”…

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It’s been so hellishly busy here, what with my pirate treasure map talk and numerous real life issues to deal with *sigh*, that the list of Cipher Mysteries posts I need to write is now about thirty entries long. I’ll try and clear this over the coming months… but please bear with me as I do, ’cause I’m only ‘uman, geez. 🙂

Anyway, #1 on my list is a review of “An Anthology of Asemic Writing”, edited by Tim Gaze and Michael Jacobson (Uitgeverij, 15 euros). (You may remember my 2010 review of Michael Jacobson’s asemic “Action Figures” and “The Giant’s Fence”.)

The present anthology’s structure is of a long sequence of single-sheet images of asemic writing, arranged alphabetically by author’s surname (Reed Altemus, Miekal And, Rosaire Appel, etc). There’s a surprising range of categories represented: some are obviously inspired by Arabic, Chinese, or Japanese calligraphy, while others come across more as works of art with vaguely language-like scrawls (closer to an edgy kind of linguistic madness) or just scribbles.

In many ways, I’d say, the way the book ended up is more of a ‘showcase’ than an ‘anthology’. With my own book editor hat one, I’d have preferred the pages to have been grouped thematically or stylistically rather than alphabetically. Basically, it’s always going to be tough on “readers” (“observers”?) to jump from Hélène Smith’s Martian to Lin Tarczynski’s brutal black and white forms, and I found such sharp page-to-page contrasts more annoying than enlightening.

For me, Michael Jacobson’s “The Giant’s Fence” still remains a properly asemic work, in that it actively plays with our expectations of form and content, while not taking itself too seriously. Many of the artists and creators highlighted in this work seem far too deadpan and only peripherally asemic for my personal taste: but perhaps that’s the many-headed nature of asemicism (?) – perhaps the best to be expected from this book, then, would be that everyone will get flashes of different things from it, while fast-forwarding past the remainder.

As with asemic writing in general, make of it what you will! 😉

Roald Dahl Day 2013 – a celebratory poem! :-)

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On Roald Dahl Day 2013

Raise a toast to that Roaldest of Dahls
Whichever world language tu pahl
His witches and twits
And chocolate-based skits
Delight children from here to Nepahl

Lift your glass to that Roaldest of Dahls
Whatever your lodge or cabahl
Read his books and you’ll learn
That his twists and his turns
Are intriguing and never banahl!

— Nick Pelling

“Does X Mark The Spot?” – Pirate History Talk 15th September 2013

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On 15th September 2013 at the cornerHOUSE Community Arts Centre (116 Douglas Road, Surbiton, KT6 7SB), I’ll be giving an evening talk called “Does X Mark The Spot?“, trying to answer the question: are there any genuine pirate treasure maps?

The talk will run from 7.30pm to 9.15pm with a 15-minute interval at 8.15pm (though the doors and the bar open at 7pm). The first half covers Captain William Kidd’s alleged treasure maps, and the second half Oliver Levasseur’s mysterious ciphers. I’ll be happy to answer your pirate history questions both during and after the talk as best I can.

To whet your appetite, here’s a 3-minute promo video:-

The cost is £8 on the door, or £7 in advance via Compelling Press (publishers of my book The Curse of the Voynich). To reserve one or more seats for yourself, here’s a secure Buy Now button that links to PayPal (note that this also accepts Visa, MasterCard, etc):-





But perhaps the biggest question is: why do a talk on pirate history at all? Even if International Talk Like A Pirate Day is coming up on 19th September, surely this whole subject has already been done to death on National Geographic, Discovery, History Channel, etc?

Well… with all due respect to the above-mentioned broadcasters, the way almost all TV producers treat history is pretty much unchanged from the 19th century, when the point of ‘doing history’ was to provide bracing moral stories. What I do is a modern, forensic kind of history, far more accepting of uncertainty, because history – when done properly, at least – isn’t anything like as easy as ‘television history’ would have you believe. And when it comes to pirate treasure, there are plenty of uncertainties!

What is certain, though, is that pirate treasure maps are both fascinating and hugely contentious: so what I’ll be presenting is (I hope) a far more honest and realistic take on them than anything you’re likely to have seen or read before. Come along, it’ll be a lot of fun!

Cipher Mysteries comment policy change…

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Since I started Cipher Mysteries several years ago, I’ve tried to follow a fairly laissez faire comment moderation – basically, as long as it wasn’t spammy / sweary / abusive, I’d approve it.

But recently, though, the blog has been receiving a series (i.e. they all came via the same New Zealand ISP, very close IP addresses, etc) of troll-like comments aimed squarely at XLamb, and where all the plausible-looking email addresses bounced when I tried to email them to check.

Hence I’ve reconfigured the sites plugins so that for a while (maybe longer) there will be an extra layer of comment verification in place. If you leave a comment now, you’ll be required to verify that the email address you’ve given with it is valid (though this should only happen once per email address, mind you!). If the plugin thinks that it’s suspicious-looking, it may also ask you for a CAPTCHA verification… but that shouldn’t happen very often, as I understand it.

As with all things computery, this may (of course) run into teething problems while I’m getting it going: so if you have any difficulties leaving a comment over the next few days, please email me ( nickpelling at nickpelling dot com ) and I’ll try to fix it / them. As always, the email address you give doesn’t appear on the website at all, it’s only there for me to email you if there’s some kind of problem or issue with the comment.

I’m very sorry that one person has to spoil it (a little) for everyone else, but that’s just how it goes on the Internet sometimes, I hope you understand. 😐

Pirate Treasure Maps – Does X Mark The Spot?

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Is there any such thing as a pirate treasure map? Somewhat surprisingly, if you ask just about any academic or maritime historian with an interest in the subject, the chances are they’ll tell you no. In short, the mainstream position is that they’re all fakes, tall tales concocted by scammers to extract money from the greedy and gullible.

Well… I don’t deny that there’s an awful lot of truth in that, insofar as it does often seem that the pirate treasure hunting world (industry?) is populated almost entirely by only two classes of people – the scammers and the scammed.

But over the last year or so, I’ve been researching two very different claimed strands of pirate treasure history – the (alleged) William Kidd maps and the (alleged) Olivier Levasseur (‘La Buse’) maps. (Yes, it turns out that there are at least two versions of the Levasseur / Le Butin cryptogram… but this is all terrifically murky.) And what I’ve found is that just saying “it ain’t so” doesn’t really do these histories justice – the stories behind all of them are simply fascinating.

Anyway, seeing as International Talk Like A Pirate Day is coming up shortly, what I’ve decided to do is give an evening talk on pirate treasure maps to give all this new material a bit of a public airing.

So if you like history and/or pirates or you’re secretly an armchair treasure hunter, I’ve got some great stories for you about these mysterious pirate treasure maps you won’t have heard of or read about. I’m really looking forward to it, and I hope a good few of you can come along and be entertained.

It’s being held on Sunday 15th September 2013 at the Cornerhouse Community Arts Centre in Surbiton (not far from the A3) at 7.30pm (though the doors and the bar open at 7pm). I’ve set up the ticketing via my friend Glenn Shoosmith’s startup BookingBug, and you can book through the nifty WordPress widget in the top right of the page.

I’ll post a bit more about this as the date approaches, but that should be enough to be going on with – hope to see you there! 🙂

Voynich “Glossodahlia” book…

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Let’s imagine you had two fairly unhealthy (but specific) obsessions: (1) retro jars, bottles and containers, and (2) the Voynich Manuscript. When added together, might these two wrongs somehow make a right?

If that just happens to be a question you have long pondered, then I’m pleased to be able to tell you that your wait is over! The free electronic book Glossodahlia by Tarek Joseph Chemaly, and pulished by 7UPstairs Publishing surely places this whole contentious issue beyond discussion. Tarek writes:-

The Voynich manuscript has been decoded. Its flowers have given up their secret. They speak in tongues – glossolalia. And they tell stories of brokenhearted cosmic lovers and of a retired intergalactic bureaucrat as she tends to her garden once baking is done.

With my Voynich researcher hat on, I’d point out this whole thing feels like a collage scraped from the Beinecke’s old “CopyFlo” images. Also, not all the pages are plants (a couple of pharma jars have crept in as well), and tiny scraps of Voynichese pepper the edges of the collaged images, like hardy barnacles clinging to curiously shaped ships.

Anyway, make of it what you will. 🙂

Dorabella Cipher Ultimate SmackDown – Eric Sams vs Beatrice Gwynn?

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In the red corner we have #1 codebreaking musicologist Eric Sams: and in the blue corner, historical mystery specialist Beatrice Gwynn! Who will be the winner in tonight’s Dorabella Cipher Ultimate Smaaaaackdooooown?

A frisson of crypto excitement ripples through the crowd as Eric Sams rises to his feet. He’s humming to himself, rhythmically pounding his gloves, and with a gleam in his eyes that’s well-earned: his 1970 Musical Times article has been in the bibliography of nearly every Dorabella Cipher article that followed. Sams certainly looks in cracking form: his article Cryptanalysis and Historical Research from Archivaria 21 (1985-1986) casts light on how he decrypted the shorthand used by William Clarke (secretary to Cromwell’s army), the shorthand used by Sir John Thompson (Prime Minister of Canada between 1892 and 1894), etc. He’s got power, reach and stamina, normally an unstoppable combination in this game, as you can also see from his many articles on cryptography at the Centro Studi Eric Sams.

But his opponent tonight, Beatrice V. Gwynn, has many tricks up her fighting sleeves, and perhaps her decades of experience looking at mysteries rather than histories will guide her to victory here. She co-authored a 1977 book on the Phaistos Disc; proposed a theory on the Voynich Manuscript (it’s apparently a hygiene manual written in left-right-mirrored Middle High German, but let’s not hold that against her); and even wrote a book on the evidence used to convict Alger Hiss (“Whittaker Chambers: The Discrepancy in the Evidence of the Typewriter”). Sure, she may not have Sams’ raw cryptanalytical clout, but perhaps she can match him for reach and stamina.

The referee’s in the centre, the seconds have left the ring and… Rrrrrround One begins. The two fighters eye each other up warily over their gloves, waiting to see who will make the first move. And it is Sams who strikes first, whipsmart and sharp as ever:

STARTS: LARKS! IT’S CHAOTIC, BUT A CLOAK OBSCURES MY NEW LETTERS, α, β
BELOW: I OWN THE DARK MAKES
E. E. SIGH WHEN YOU ARE TOO LONG GONE.

Gwynn reels on the ropes, punch-drunk from the sheer interpretativeness of Sams’ claimed decryption. But she quickly collects herself, before launching her own cryptological counter-attack (in her article “The Elgar Cipher”, The Elgar Society Newsletter 1975):-

PINCH FROM TOBACCO
DORA A RIDDLE NOON
SILENT ALONE TIME

Sams is rocked on his heels by the power of the blow (though he must surely be wondering what happened to the rest of the letters – let’s just say it’s a long story). But he soon powers back with what he thinks is a knockout blow – an unpublished 1972 article containing his raw decrypt (i.e. without his wobbly interpretation on top):-

STARTS. LARKS! IT’S EXOTIC BIT A CLOK OBSCURC MY NEW LETTEE
AB BELOW. I OIN THE WARK MAKES E.E. SIGH WHEN E ARE TOO LOMMONT.

Even though Gwynn deftly dodges the wildness of this codebreaking haymaker, Sams has a follow-on jab – pages from Elgar’s archives where he uses the same shapes to encipher “MARCO ELGAR” (the name of his dog), “A VERY OLD CYPHER”, “DO YOU GO TO LONDON?” and “THE GOLD IS BURIED UNDER THE KITCHEN FLOOR” (only kidding!).

marco-elgar-cipher-enhanced

Surprised by the primary evidence, Gwynn drops to her knees on the canvas and gets up again quickly, only to receive a standing count from the referee. As the bell rings for the end of the contest, Sams punches the air in victory and the cheer of “E-ric / E-ric / E-ric” fills the arena air. Gwynn looks desolate: have all her years of effort and striving really been trumped by Sams’ nonsensical-sounding decrypt?

At last the judges pass the result to the referee, who announces it as… A DRAW – neither side managed to land a clean punch. But wait… in all the chaos, a haunting melody starts to fills the room, quieting the crowd. It’s Javier Atance playing his claimed solution (direction 1/2/3/4/5/6/7/8 = do/re/mi/fa/so/la/te/do, 1/2/3 humps = natural / flat / sharp) on a distant organ. But the sound system is quickly unplugged and the pandemonium resumes… in fact, will there ever be an end to it?

* * * * * * * * * * * *

To me, the Dorabella Cipher is a bit like the “Voynich Lite” – even though they both closely resemble simple monoalphabetic ciphers, they both employ one or more tricks that make utter fools of those who seek to break them in a classical kind of way.

Sams was keenly aware of this, and even points out that taking a traditional crypto approach will get you only as far as something like this:-

– B S C – A H C M – N E W L E – E E A B B E L O – O I N T
H E W A H C M – C S E E S A I W H E N E A R T W L O M M O N T
S T A R T S L R – I T S E A R W T I C B I T A C L O C

(or, as Decrypto 8.5 suggests, “TD INVISHE CREE ENT TEROOM HAVECNVISIDEEDNMCVEHEN YACROSSO HAD ANY A DRY MADENY CAMIT MAN IRO I”).

That’s the cryptanalytical mystery: while at the same time, the historical mystery is that Edward Elgar and Dora Penny never spoke of ciphers before or after this. What conceivable rationale would he have had for sending her a near-unbreakable cipher (disguised as a perfectly breakable cipher) in only his third ever letter to her? How can we find a solution to both of these mysteries at the same time?

Sandra And Woo do the Voynich… The Book of Woo!

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Online webcomic Sandra And Woo has just taken a detour into CryptoLand, with a Voynich-inspired page called The Book of Woo to celebrate its 500th edition. What’s more, author Oliver Knöerzer (AKA “Kernel River Zoo”) has offered a $250 reward to “the person who is able to provide a decipherment that’s sufficiently close to the plain text“, plus “another $100 to two charities determined by the readers who contributed the most useful information for breaking the code.” Really, Oliver, I’d have helped regardless. 😉

The Book of Woo’s most obvious predecessor would seem to be the Codex Seraphinianus, which is also “primarily a work of art, not a puzzle for the general public“, though I wouldn’t describe the Book of Woo as being quite as hardcore as that (but then again, what is?). The Vick Industries cipher seems to be a more design-oriented mindset entirely, though the art-house rationale behind that has yet to emerge into the light.

How is anyone supposed to decrypt The Book Of Woo? Helpfully, Knöerzer does throw a handful of hints in our path, though mainly about what it isn’t rather than about what it is. He says:-

* The encryption isn’t based on an algorithm only suitable for computers which executes a loop 100 times or something like that.
* The encryption isn’t based on some sort of device or mechanism that is hard to get.
* No “classical” steganographic method was used since that would just be impossibly hard to crack.
* The plain text is some sort of literature, as one can guess from Woo’s comment and the illustrations. A lot of time went into the plain text as well, it’s not just a copy of the first page of Rascal or something like that.

But he also warns that “[if] you think you can simply carry out a frequency analysis on the letters and be able to reconstruct the English or German plain text this way, well, that’s just a waste of time.” Indeed, even a brief look at the text reveals blocks of characters arranged in a very artificial CVCV (consonant-vowel-consonant-vowel) manner. There are also quite a few patterns that are repeated multiple times: here’s a colourized section of the first page, so you can see a bit of what I’m talking about…

book-of-woo-page-1-colourized-cropped

What’s going on here? Well… I’ve had a few brief email exchanges with Oliver recently, so have possibly at least a flicker of an idea. And given that he has already openly flagged both the Voynich Manuscript and my book on it (The Curse of the Voynich) as having been useful (he’s even reused the Voynich’s “T” gallows character in his cipher alphabet), it probably wouldn’t hurt to recap a few Voynich-related observations here. 🙂

The first thing to say about ‘Voynichese’ (the structure that shapes the Voynich Manuscript’s text) is that there seem to be two main schools of thought: (a) that it’s a cipher system that for some reason our statistical toolkits aren’t able to help us much with, and (b) that it’s a real language but we’re too in love with our analyses to see the bleedin’ obvious.

(For the record, I’m in the (a) camp, which means that when I look at a map of all the different types of Voynichese evidence, I want to understand what kind of trick was used to confound all the different statistical tests, rather than throw my hands up in the air and say “Stats, shmats!”.)

The second thing to note is that almost all of the Voynich Manuscript is written using a very compact alphabet (roughly 22 characters), whereas The Book of Woo uses something like fifty unique shapes (I haven’t transcribed it yet, but that’s how it looks). What connects them is that they are both very predictable at the character level… up to a point. That is, in some circumstances you can reliably predict what the next character along is going to be, but in other circumstances predictions can be of little use.

(For what it’s worth, I believe that it is this specific combination of predictability and unpredictability that convinces people that Voynichese is a language, whereas real languages only tend to work like that in a few very specific ways, e.g. “q” almost always being followed by “u”.)

Trying to account for this property ultimately led me to conclude that the Voynich Manuscript in part uses “verbose cipher”, i.e. employing pairs or groups of letters to encipher single letters in a misleading way. For example, the Voynichese letter-pair “or” gets repeated immediately after itself a number of times, with the best known examples being on page f15v:-

or-or-oro-r

Do any real-life languages do this? I don’t think so, but that remains a matter of opinion.

The Voynich Manuscript has a large number of extra curious properties that I believe point to other tricksy mechanisms (e.g. in-page transposition of some sort, if you please), but my suspicion right now (based only on having a nose around it) is that Oliver may have found these unnecessarily abstruse to build a cipher around.

No: I think what’s going on in The Book Of Woo will turn out to be largely based around verbose cipher – specifically a combination of paired letters. Having said that, the big problem with a simple verbose cipher is that it is, well, as verbose as it sounds: and so to make it not bloat as badly as a Microsoft application, it needs some compression tricks to be used at the same time.

In the case of the Voynich Manuscript, I suspect that verbose cipher gets combined with the kind of scribal abbreviation in use during the 15th century. Similarly, because the overall word-length isn’t too extreme for The Book of Woo, I suspect (a) that certain letters used at the start or end of words will encipher prefixes or suffixes, somewhat like a kind of shorthand; and (b) that it’s more likely to be English than German. 😉 It may well also be that certain letter pairs themselves encipher common letter pairs or even letter triples (such as “the”): these are the kinds of tricks I’d expect to see here being used to disguise the structure.

And yet… words seem to be words (i.e. it’s an aristocrat cryptogram rather than a patristocrat cryptogram), so it’s very much as if he wants to help us, not hinder us. So even though it looks a bit tricky at first glance, maybe it will all fall out nicely in the end. We shall see, hopefully before issue #1000! 😉