Cipher Mysteries online forum…

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A few days ago, Diane O’Donovan asked if there was a good place online to ask me questions about “The Curse of the Voynich”: but because I’m not a part of the main Voynich mailing list (sadly, I don’t have nearly enough spare time to sift through all that chaff), the answer was a no.

However, I’ve just now added in a “Tal.ki” forum plugin to the Cipher Mysteries WordPress install, which you can get to easily here. I don’t know how it’s going to work out, nor what open topics people would like to have there: but it’s up and working so let’s find out!

The most immediate limitation is that it uses Facebook for logging in (and I don’t like Facebook much). Still, it is what it is (both easy to install and free), so we shall see…

French researchers decode the Voynich Manuscript (errrrm… or maybe not)

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Not only can writers now get books published hyper-fast, so too can their debunkers reply no less quickly: where faulty observing, theorizing or reasoning leave holes large enough to languidly drive a truck-load of Voynich conference attendees through, you can these days expect the same to be pointed out quickly enough. So it rapidly proves to be with the recently published “Le manuscrit Voynich décodé” by mystery writers Fabrice Kircher [love the surname] and Dominique Becker, who boldly claim to have decrypted the Voynich Manuscript: but, as you’ll see, this comes with an unexpected twist in the tail…

Their four-page Chapter One briskly dismisses the preceding history of the Voynich up to 2004, before launching head-first into an explanation of their transcription and analysis. Chapter 5 transcribes the ten last words on f20r thus:

olluig ollug llug golliig hand has ouand uos uouiig lluig

This babble poetry they fearlessly translate as:-

Le mouvement du lac, le mouvement d’ouverture, l’ouverture. Marche la lumière, advient, en glissant, le mauvais esprit inférieur, la basse fumée, l’inférieure vapeur de l’eau, du lac.

They get to this point by interpreting Voynichese as a polyglot mixture of (p.157) “l’allemand, le suédois, le néerlandais, le latin, l’anglais, avec quelque notions de gaélique et de nahuatl“. Because of the presence of Nahuatl (which got to Europe no earlier than 1521) and various other features, they date the object to (p.157) “entre 1570 et 1610“.

By now, most people who’ve read anything about the Voynich Manuscript in the last three years will be sighing miserably at the futility of this whole exercise. Not only have the authors recapitulated Levitov’s sorry polyglottism, they’ve also created a reading that has little obvious to commend it over other long-failed decryptions such as John Stojko’s. Frankly, to my eyes their base theory is a mess; the way all the polyglot languages are supposedly linked together is a mess; and the final translation is a mess. And I suspect that any broadly sane reviewer would say the same.

But here’s the twist: the book comes with an afterword by Jean-Michel Grandsire, a self-taught anti-conformist with a interest in the paranormal. To my great surprise, Grandsire points out the inconsistency with the 2009 radiocarbon dating and the 15th century swallowtail merlons in the nine-rosette page; and suggests (p.170) that the authors may have fallen foul of what Pierre Barthélémy in the discussion at the front of “Le Code Voynich” called la “malédiction du manuscrit” – basically, the curse of the Voynich.

So there you have it: a Voynich theory presented in a way that preempts the need for writing a critical review of it (because they do that for you). How very modern!

Here’s the NatGeo documentary in English…

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Much as you’d expect, YouTube user weasel6666 (not me, not even slightly!) has uploaded WAGtv’s “Ancient X-Files” Series 2 Episode 4 “Sodom and Gomorrah” episode that aired on National Geographic UK only a couple of days ago. If you fast forward to 22:00, you can see the Voynich Manuscript half, which is loosely based on reprising the research I did for my 2006 book “The Curse of the Voynich” (copies still available, very reasonable postage rates, etc).

Even if you’re one of the many who don’t agree with my art history conclusions (but given that you’ll all get there in the end, I’m cool with that 🙂 ), enjoy the historical ride to Venice and Milan, and have a look-see at all the fabulous things I was able to get to for the first time, thanks to the magic of having a film crew filming my every damn move for a week. 🙂

I think it’s fair to say that the WAG team recorded enough footage for a 2-hour special and then tried to edit it down into a 22 minute half-episode slot: which in a curious way is a fair representation of my book, which similarly should probably have worked through its material at a far more leisurely pace (say, over 500 pages) than jammed into 230 pages.

But all the same… how was it for you? Leave your comments below…

Voynich radiocarbon dating, part one…

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A few days ago I promised you my post-Frascati thoughts on the Voynich Manuscript radiocarbon dating. Errrm… little did I know quite what I was letting myself in for. It’s been a fairly bumpy ride. 🙁

Just so you know, the starting point here isn’t ‘raw data’, strictly speaking. The fraction of radioactive carbon-14 remaining (as determined by the science) first needs to be adjusted to its effective 1950 value so that it can be cross-referenced against the various historical calibration tables, such as “IntCal09” etc. The “corrected fraction” value is therefore the fraction of radioactive carbon-14 that would have been remaining in the sample had it been sampled in 1950 rather than (in this case) 2009. Though annoying, this pre-processing stage is basically automatic and hence largely unremarkable.

So, the (nearly) raw Voynich data looks like this:

Folio / language / corrected fraction modern [standard deviation]
f8 / Herbal-A / 0.9409 [0.0044]
f26 / Herbal-B / 0.9380 [0.0041]
f47 / Herbal-A / 0.9389 [0.0041]
f68 / Cosmo-A / 0.9338 [0.0041]

What normally happens next is that these corrected fraction data are converted to an uncalibrated fake date BP (‘Before Present’, i.e. years before 1950), based purely on the theoretical radiocarbon half-life decay period: for example, the f8 sample would have an uncalibrated radiocarbon date of “490±37BP” (i.e. “1460±37”).

However, this is a both confusing and unhelpful aspect of the literature because we’re only really interested in the calibrated radiocarbon dates, as read off the curves painstakingly calibrated against several thousand years of tree rings; so I prefer to omit it. Hence in the following I stick to corrected fractional values (e.g. 0.9409) or their straightforward percentage equivalents (e.g. 94.09%): even though these are equivalent to uncalibrated radiocarbon dates, I feel that mixing two different kinds of radiocarbon dates within single sentences is far too prone to confusion and error. It’s hard enough already without making it any harder. 🙁

The problem with the calibration curves in the literature is that they aren’t ‘monotonic’, i.e. they kick up and down. This means that many individual (input) radiocarbon fraction observations end up yielding two or more parallel (output) date ranges, making using them as a basis for historical reasoning both tricky and frustrating.

Yet as Greg Hodgins described in his Frascati talk, radiocarbon daters are mainly in the business of disproving things rather than proving things. In this case, you might say that all radiocarbon dating has achieved is to finally disprove Wilfrid Voynich’s suggestion that Roger Bacon wrote the Voynich Manuscript… an hypothesis that hasn’t been genuinely proposed for a couple of decades or so.

Of course, Voynich researchers are constantly looking out for ways in which they can use or combine contentious / subtle data to build better historical arguments: and so for them radiocarbon dating is merely one of many such datasets to be explored. In this instance, the science has produced four individual observations (for the four carefully treated vellum slivers), each with its own probability curve.

The obvious desire here is to find a way of reliably combining all four observations into a single, more reliable, composite meta-observation. The two specific formulae Greg Hodgins lists for doing this are:-

So, I built these formulae into a spreadsheet, yielding a resultant composite fractional value for all four of 0.93779785, with a standard deviation of 0.004169. I’m pretty certain this yields the headline date-range of 1404-1438 with 95% confidence (i.e. ±2 sigma) quoted just about everywhere since 2009. But… is it valid?

Well… as with almost everything in the statistical toolbox, I’m pretty sure that this requires that the underlying observations being merged exhibit ‘normality’ (i.e. that they broadly look like simple bell curves). Yet if you look at the four probabilistic dating curves, the earliest calibrated date (on f68) yields two distinct dating ‘humps’, whereas the latest calibrated date (on f8) has almost no chance of falling within the earlier dating hump. This means that the four distributions range from normal-like (with a single mean) to heteroscedastic (with multiple distinct means).

Now, the idea of having formulae to calculate weighted means and standard deviations is to combine a set of individual (yet distinct) populations being sampled into a single larger population, using the increased information content to get tighter constraints on the results. However, I’m not convinced that this is a valid assumption, because we are very likely sampling vellum taken from a number of different animal skins, very possibly produced under a variety of conditions at a number of different times.

Another problem is that we are trying to use probability distributions to do “double duty”, in that we often have a multiplicity of local means to choose between (and we can’t tell which sub-distribution any individual sample should belong to) as well as a kind of broadly normal-like distribution for each local mean. This is mixing scenario evaluation with probability evaluation, and both end up worse off for it.

A further problematic area here is that corrected fractional input values have a non-linear relationship with their output results, which means that a composite fractional mean will typically be different from a composite dating value.

A yet further problem is that we’re dealing with a very small number of samples, leaving any composite value susceptible to being excessively influenced by outliers.

As far as this last point goes, I have two specific concerns:
* Rene Zandbergen mentioned (and Greg confirmed) that one of the herbal bifolios was specifically selected for its thickness, in order (as I understand it) to try to give a reliable value after applying solvents. Yet when I examined the Voynich at the Beinecke back in 2006, there was a single bifolio in the whole manuscript that was significantly thicker than the others – in fact, it felt as though it had been made in a completely different way to the other vellum leaves. As I recall, it was not far from folio #50: was it f47? If that was selected, was it representative of the rest of the bifolios, or was it an outlier?
* The 2009 ORF documentary (around 44:36) shows Greg Hodgins slicing off a thin sliver from the edge of f68r3 (the ‘Pleiades’ panel), with the page apparently facing away from him. But if you look just a little closer at the scans, you’ll see that this is extremely close to a section of the page edge that has been very heavily handled over the years, far more so than much of the manuscript. This was also right at the edge of a multi-panel foldout, which raises the likelihood that it would have been close to an animal’s armpit. Personally, I would have instead looked for pristine sections of vellum that had no obvious evidence of heavy handling: picking the outside edge of f68 seems to be a mistake, possibly motivated more by ease of scientific access than by good historical practice.

As I said to Greg Hodgins in Frascati, my personal experience of stats is that it is almost impossible to design a statistical experiment properly: the shortcomings of what you’ve done typically only become apparent once you’ve tried to work with the data (i.e. once it’s too late to run it a second time). The greater my experience with stats has become, the more I hold this observation to be painfully self-evident: the real world causality and structure underlying the data you’re aiming to collect is almost without exception far trickier than you initially suspect – and I can see no good reason to believe that the Voynich Manuscript would be any kind of exception to this general rule.

I’m really not claiming to be some kind of statistical Zen Master here: rather, I’m just pointing out that if you want to make big claims for your statistical inferences, you really need to take an enormous amount of care about your experimental methodology and your inferential machinery – and right now I’m struggling to get even remotely close to the level of certainty claimed here. But perhaps I’ll have been convinced otherwise by the time I write Part Two… 🙂

Here’s the NatGeo documentary in French…

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If you simply can’t bear the idea of waiting a whole week until National Geographic airs its Voynich half-episode of “Ancient X-Files” in the UK, then you now have the option of watching the French dubbed version (courtesy of DailyMotion). Fast forward the time-slider to 22:00 to see a whole load of Venetian & Milanese Averlino Voynich theory stuff, including Francesco da Mosto doing his delightful historian thing. Love that guy.

I should perhaps also add that if you can’t find the UK airing of the same episode in your various TV channel guides, it may be (a) because it’s listed under “Sodom and Gomorrah” (which occupies the first half of the show), and (b) because the half with me in is listed as focusing on the “Voyinch Manuscript” *sigh*. Perhaps I spent last week at the Livva Mongradone in Crasfati, too, and never realised it. Oh well!

PS: my behind-the-scenes page is here, if you somehow managed to miss that.

14May 2012

Right now, I have a Voynich Centenary Conference hangover…

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…though not at all from the nice Frascati DOC we were pleasantly plied with at lunchtime on the Friday.

No: rather, my head is still buzzing from the giant mass of tangled, fascinating stuff that came my way – some from the presentations, but a lot from conversations and spirited debates. So alas, anyone hoping that I’ll post some kind of a conference-in-a-nutshell micro-report here is going to be sadly disappointed: it’s going to take me months to work through it all, there’s just too much.

So, in no particular order, what you broadly have to look forward to is:
* My reflections on the radiocarbon dating
* Voynich and the Rosicrucians (yes, really!)
* Rich SantaColoma’s ‘Optical Instruments Hypothesis’ (but radically revisited)
* Claudio Foti’s new ‘Poggio Bracciolini’ hypothesis
* Rafal Prinke’s news on Baresch & Sinapius
* Rene Zandbergen’s discussion of Carl Widemann
* Johannes Albus’s new angle on f116v’s maddening marginalia
* Why I think Voynich statistics are a roadblock, not a bridge
* The three next big challenges – scans, error rates, language mapping
* etc

PS: having said all that, if you were there and have any neat photographs you’d like to share, please upload them to one of the many filesharing sites out there and send me through a link to them, as it would be quite nice to put together a bit of a visual walkthrough here. (Thanks Karsten for your photos!)

National Geographic – Ancient X Files – Voynich Manuscript documentary!

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WAGtv’s “Ancient X-Files” Voynich episode will first air at 20:40 on 10th May 2012 on the National Geographic channel in France, where the series has been retitled “De l’ombre à la lumière“. Though the episode is entitled “Sodom and Gomorrah” (“Sodome et Gomorrhe” in French), be reassured that 50% of it is the Voynich part. 🙂

And by a nice coincidence which Nat Geo’s schedulers seem, errrm, mostly unaware of, this is also when I shall be in Frascati preparing for the upcoming Voynich Centenary conference the following day. It’s time to tell some of the story behind the documentary…

1. “The Curse of the Voynich” Meets WAGtv…

Back in 2006, the general consensus was that the Voynich Manuscript was an extraordinary late 16th century hoax, constructed to part an extraordinary fool (Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II) from his extraordinary money (600 gold ducats). And without the 2009 radiocarbon dating (which dated its vellum to 1404-1438 with 95% confidence) to help ground the whole debate, the Voynich was arguably even more like a blank historical canvas (upon which you can paint whatever theory you like) than it is today. Sad, really.

2006 was also the year that I wrote and published “The Curse of the Voynich” (copies still available, and at very reasonable air mail rates 😀 ), with the aim of summing up the research I had built up over several years – basically, that the Voynich Manuscript may well have been written by Northern Italian Quattrocento architect Antonio Averlino (better known as “Filarete“).

However, put these two things together and it should be no great surprise that, a couple of nicely appreciative reviews aside, my tree of research fell onto the Voynich research community’s forest floor with a deafening silence. (If, indeed, it fell at all.) Personally, I still think my book is a great piece of historical detective work (I posted a nice summary of it here), but I suspect it remains too “out there” for almost all Voynich researchers, most of whom seem to rely more on lightweight inductive logic than on the kind of heavyweight hyper-deduction I had to employ. 🙂

Fast forward to early 2010, when London-based factual television production house WAGtv were working on the the first series of Ancient X Files for National Geographic. Their producers approached me to ask if I would contribute to a 22-minute documentary segment based on “The Curse of the Voynich”: though it just missed the cut for series 1, I was delighted to be able to take part when they subsequently wanted to include it in series 2.

This whole Voynich segment was filmed over five days last summer [2011] in locations centrally linked to Antonio Averlino’s life and works, such as the Ospedale Maggiore & Castello Sforzesco in Milan, and the Campanile in Venice (looking down onto the onion domes of St Mark’s Basilica). Just so you know, the televisual conceit was to visually reconstruct the evidence chain and associated reasoning that led to my whole Averlino theory. In case your inner historian finds this somewhat annoying, please take a few deep breaths and remind yourself that “it’s just television” – if you want to read up on it properly, there is at least a 230-page book you can buy that presents all the evidence in a reasonably compelling way. 😉

2. Meet The Experts…

Naturally, there are few things more boring than seeing some random expert (yes, even me) expound to camera for 20+ minutes (which is, of course, why Dr Who always has an assistant). Hence the producers assembled a delightfully eclectic set of experts for me to talk with on camera, basically with the idea of placing the various deductive leaps I patiently ground out of the academic literature into their helpful mouths:-


Filippo Sinagra, a well-known Venetian code-breaker with a lifelong interest in historical & Mafia ciphers;


Stefano Calchi Novati, a Milanese architect (whose motorbike I sadly couldn’t ride because of insurance issues);


Rosa Barovier Mentasti, a thoroughly delightful glassware expert descended from the Murano glassmaker Angelo da Barovier, but whom I somehow managed not to capture on camera (the image is from Mauro Vianello’s nice glass blog);


A magnificent Murano master glassblower whose name unfortunately escapes me, and whose wonderfully rich Venetian accent proved near-impenetrable even to our Italian translator; and…


Well-known Venetian architect and historian Francesco da Mosto, presenter of several top-rated BBC series with the power to make many British women of a certain age swoon unashamedly.

OK, now that we’ve got past all the raw factuality, what really happened while filming?

3. Nine Top Secret Things That Happened On The Shoot

(1) I’d only previously been to Venice out of season (if you’re going, I recommend December), and July 2011 turned out to be a raging heatwave. Despite that, John Blystone (the director) had me marching back and forth across endless Venetian bridges to the point that I nearly got heatstroke, and had to sit down in a quiet corner eating ice cream for an hour while I cooled all the way back down to merely hot. Note that I don’t hold this against him – John’s a driven guy and wanted to get the best possible coverage going into the edit, and if he can make a bald historian bloke like me come out tolerably OK on camera, I have to say he’s pretty much on fire. 🙂

(2) While getting over heatstroke, I found out that Cesira (the translator) used to run short film festivals, though she bemoaned the fact that Italian film-makers were typically so talky that they thought 20 minutes should qualify as ‘short’. I then told her how I used to write stories in 30 words or less as a writing challenge: she didn’t believe that that was even remotely possible, so insisted I write her one there and then. Knowing that the crew was flying on to Rome to film a Da Vinci-related segment, this is what I squeezed into a mere 15 words:-

“Not again, Lisa!”
“What?”
“Every time you fart, you do that smile.”
“Sorry, Maestro Leonardo!“

(3) While in the Piazza San Marco, I suddenly noticed that the columns of San Marco and San Theodoro were leaning very slightly towards each other. Luckily I managed to straighten them up before any tourists got crushed by falling stones: an excellent result!

(4) I’d be a lying hound if I didn’t say it was more than a bit of a thrill meeting Francesco da Mosto & his lovely family in their Venetian palazzo, and lightly zipping around the canals with him in his near-iconic blue boat. Francesco is an enthusiastic, positive, laughter-filled big-kid-puppydog of a man that made me want to smile every time he opened his mouth: probably half the shots were ruined because we were having too much fun to look serious in an appropriately documentary-style way. I love the guy to bits, and wish him the very best of luck with finishing his historical novel “The Black King” (which, spookily enough, one online description I read said revolved around John Dee and a mysterious enciphered manuscript).

(5) When we got back to San Marco after filming (and eating late) in Murano, the tide was so high that we couldn’t get a boat into the canal near the apartment (“Casa Cioccolata”, a nice little place). This meant the crew had to carry all the equipment barefoot across the waterlogged piazza in the moonlight: a thoroughly surreal experience!

(6) Once nice thing in Venice which didn’t make it into the final edit was that the newly-restored clock tower close to St Mark’s Basilica has a 24-hour clockface Voynich researchers may well find eerily familiar:-


(7) Another scene which didn’t make the final cut involved comparing the pinion gears in that same clock with some of the (remarkably similar) gear-shaped leaves in the Voynich Manuscript. This didn’t quite fit the narrative the producers & editors wanted to extract from “The Curse”, so never made it in. If you do get a chance to take a tour around the insides of the Horologia clock, please do – highly recommended!

(8) While we were filming in Antonio Averlino’s Ospedale Maggiore in Milan, I was showing the curious pipework in the Voynich Manuscript’s Quire 13 to the architect Stefano Calchi Novati when there was a surprised call from around the corner. The sound recordist (Stefano Varini) had noticed some decaying ancient terracotta pipework embedded in the fabric of the building – I knew it was supposed to be there, but had never actually seen it. Thanks to the “access-all-areas pass” a well-accredited film crew has, we had gone through to the far quadrant of the Ospedale that I hadn’t previously seen. It was really wonderful to see for myself what I can only conclude was Averlino’s original pipework still in situ – and that it turned out to be so very similar to the Voynich’s pipework was an even greater surprise.

(9) For me, the most amazing thing of all actually came after the documentary had finished shooting. Late on the last day, I had taken a picture from the right end of the middle wall of the Castello Sforzesco, looking out over the front wall: the reconstructed Filarete tower is in the middle, and the Duomo is clearly visible in the distance just to the right of it.

But it later struck me that if I had taken the same shot from the right-hand corner of the backmost wall (which is the only part of the castello that Averlino is known to have actually built), the Duomo would have ended up looking remarkably like the blue smudge behind the castle in the castle rosette.

Here, all the places Averlino worked are in green, the two rows of swallowtail merlons are in blue, and the place where I think the Voynich castle rosette drawing was made from (the middle of the rear courtyard) is in red. The two red lines mark the extents of the blue smudge just above the Voynich castle rosette.

4. Crew Credits

Seeing as this isn’t even remotely included in IMDb (shame!), I thought I ought to include the crew credits, give them their fifteen seconds of fame:-


Director: John Blystone


Camera: Peter Thorne


Sound: Stefano Varini


Fixer: Dario Canciello


Translator: Cesira de Vito

They were all a pleasure to work with, and I hope to work with them again very soon on the feature-length sequel “The Da Voynich Code” (though possibly not in 3D). 😉

UPDATE!

National Geographic episode rollout (I’ll update this as it propagates through the Nat Geo listings, please let me know if I’ve missed any!):-
* Indonesia: Fri, 11 May 2012 8:00 pm
* Hungary: Titkok és ereklyék (‘Secrets and Relics’): Szodoma és Gomora – 23-24 May 2012.
* UK: 9pm 22nd May 2012, and then several times a day all the way through to the 27th May 2012

Updated Voynich slides + Nat Geo announcement…

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My Villa Mondragone slides are getting ever closer to finished, which is just as well because the 2012 Voynich Manuscript conference is now a scant seven days away (*gasp*). Meanwhile here in Cipher Mysteries Towers, it should be no surprise that the caffeinated clatter of jittery journalists tap-tapping away at the walls for interesting angles on everyone’s favourite mysterious manuscript is starting to build up to a bit of a din, ahh bless.

So… here’s my latest version (#007) of Between Vellum and Prague. If you’ll be at Frascati (and I sincerely hope a good few of you will be!), please feel free to read it beforehand, I really don’t mind – in fact, I far prefer excruciatingly well-informed hecklers. 😉

However, the even bigger big news of the day is that the first screening date for the Voynich documentary I was filmed for in Venice and Milan last summer has just been announced: 9pm 22nd May 2012 on the National Geographic channel here in the UK, and then several times a day all the way through to the 27th May 2012. It’s part of a series called “Ancient X-Files”: my Voynich section time-shares an episode with a section on locating the Biblical cities of Sodom & Gomorrah.

It was a terrific lot of fun making it (despite the Venetian heatwave), as well as a truly amazing experience going to places as part of a full-on documentary film crew – doors that would stay resolutely shut to A. N. Other solo historian magically eased themselves wide, wide open. This meant that I got to see a whole load of wonderful, new surprising things – in fact, everywhere we went, everything we saw & everyone we met all far surpassed my expectations. So even if the Nat Geo documentary stands essentially zero chance of convincing you to drop your own Voynich theory for a picosecond 🙂 , I hope you’ll come along for the ride, a brief busman’s holiday to Quattrocento Italy with my Antonio Averlino / Filarete theory!

Come on, someone you know is bound to be a Nat Geo subscriber, surely? Go on, ask them! 🙂

Anyway, that’s all for the moment, but rest assured I’ll be able to post much more once it airs…

H. C. Reynolds – Chester Hill archive beckons!

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[Quick sidenote before I forget: Claudia Heilmeyer is apparently going to be reading about / from the Voynich Manuscript at 18:40 this Saturday 5th May 2012 as part of the “Prager Nacht” series in Freiburg… make of that what you will.]

Anyhow, a few days ago I posted here about what the Log of Logs had to say about the various ships on which our elusive Tasmanian Tamam Shud suspect H. Charles Reynolds worked during 1917-1919. I then found out a bit more about the RMS Niagara’s 51 log books and posted that here… all close, but no cigar.

Well, here’s a further update, this time thanks purely to the archival diligence of Diane O’Donovan and Cheryl Bearden who both very kindly put some time in to help try to resolve this…

Firstly, Diane O’D has found out where the SS Koonya’s logbooks are held: in the NAA’s Chester Hill archive, way beyond even the fabled back of beyond of Sydney. The suspicion seems to be that the shelfmark “3/4861.2” may also possibly include the archive’s number of nautical miles from civilization. 🙂 But if, kind reader, you do somehow manage to get there, please go through the 1918 logbook and tell us all if you find any mention of H. Charles Reynolds!

In fact, if you do happen to go there, please also have a look at the RMS Niagara’s log book I mentioned before (NAA SP2/1, LOG BOOK NIAGARA, 1917-1918, item barcode 464129) for the period 17th February 1918 to 20th April 1918 when Reynolds was on board, because that’s held in Chester Hill too!

Diane also noted a spectacularly-named book that came up in her search: J. Melton’s (1986) “Ships’ Deserters 1852-1900 including Stragglers, Strays and Absentees from HM Ships” (Library of Australia History, Sydney). She adds “I know the dates are out, but the title was irresistible. 😀” Yup, a hilariously tempting waste of time!

Secondly, I briefly mentioned the also intriguing-sounding NAA document A11803, 1918/89/729 “Correspondence (Intercepted). SS NIAGARA passengers” (1918). Though Cheryl B managed to find a reasonably detailed online description for this, her interpretation is (sadly) that “all messages from these files were letters and telegrams between high ranking UK-US-AUS-NZ-CAN military officials containing sensitive information. In my opinion, ‘Intercepted’ could simply mean ‘Received’, though there is the possibility it was a message intercepted by the Niagara from either a P.O.W. camp located near, I think, Canberra, or a Niagara passenger with ties to the camp.” So… a fascinating little nugget of WWI history, but not nearly nutritious enough to end our Reynoldian fact famine, alas! 🙁

So, we now know what we’re looking for and where to look for it (which is excellent!) We just need a knight on a white charger (a small white car would do) to be our virtual eyes in Chester Hill. Polish your chainmail, we’ve got a hot one for you, Penny! 🙂

So, here’s where the RMS Niagara log book is…

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I don’t know quite what was happening yesterday, but when today I tried a slightly different search interface at the National Archives of Australia, the RMS Niagara’s log books popped up immediately.

Remembering that our man Reynolds was apparently only covering on the RMS Niagara for a single round trip to Canada and back between 17th February 1918 and 20th April 1918, any reference to him is probably only going to appear in a single RMS Niagara log book.

And it seems as though there’s only one 1918 log book it might be: NAA item barcode 464129, a bound volume with contents dated 1917-1918 and held in Sydney, where it’s on open access and marked up as “SP2/1, LOG BOOK NIAGARA”. According to the overall series information, the set of log books held in NSW makes up 32.04 metres of shelfspace:-

Official Log Book(s) issued by the (United Kingdom) Board of Trade, some with Official Wireless Log attached. Entries have been kept in accordance with the provisions of the Merchant Shipping Act 1894.

History Prior/Subsequent to Transfer:
Prior to transfer: State Navigation Acts only prescribed that logs could be seized if necessary. Any so seized were held in State Shipping Master’s Office and have been destroyed. The Commonwealth Navigation Act of 1912 (No. 40 of 1913) required that an official log be deposited with the Superintendent of the Mercantile Marine Office. Under a Departmental instruction of 1919, all logs other than those containing records of birth, marriages or deaths, were destroyed.

I’m also slightly intrigued by the NAA document A11803, 1918/89/729 “Correspondence (Intercepted). SS NIAGARA passengers” (1918), whatever that might be. Finally, the RMS Niagara passenger list for 20th April 1918 on arrival in Sydney (barcode 1603134 in SP83/11, specifically 8 pages in box 38) is probably exactly what Cheryl Bearden has already gone over multiple times, but you never quite know with these things. 🙂

So… who’s planning to be in Sydney any time soon? And if so, what do I have to do to persuade you to have a look for young Mr H. Charles Reynolds in this particular RMS Niagara log book?