After many years of searching, I finally have a viable excuse reason to go to Belgium that doesn’t involve chocolate, waffles, mussels, chips, or beer. And it’s all thanks to the National Security Agency…

I should explain. A few weeks ago, the NSA very generously declassified back issues of its in-house journal “Cryptolog” from August 1974 to Summer 1997 (though admittedly quite heavily redacted in places). Hence I’ve started working my way through them, looking (unsurprisingly) for any Cipher Mysteries stories that haven’t otherwise come to my attention. (Note that there are two Voynich-related snippets listed in the overall index, but these contain nothing obviously new or particularly surprising).

Hence the September 1974 issue of Cryptolog is where I found this particular story. It’s about a church in the Belgian town of Moustier which has a pair of rather curious cryptograms, which Professor Jean Connart (who was writing a history of Moustier), “has been trying since 1961 to discover the meaning” of. Without success, of course.

The first cryptogram is on the church’s St Martin’s Altar (photo by Koen Van de moortel)…

…and the second is on its Virgin’s Altar (photo also by Koen Van de moortel, but scaled up and sharpened by me)…

What’s nice is that the Cryptolog pages answer many of the questions you’d have asked about Moustier Church if you’d had the chance:

According to parish records, the church at Moustier was in such dilapidated condition about 1836 that repairs were needed to/prevent total ruin of the building. In addition, the winds of November 1836 had taken off part of the roof. In June 1838, some work was undertaken “in accordance with the plans of Philibert Pluvinage and Pierre Joseph Lemaitre. “A stonemason (un tailleur de pierre) received board and lodging for 18 days.” (Italics Prof. Connart’s)

In spite of these repairs, the church was (c.1840?) in such poor condition that part of it collapsed when the roof was raised. The contractors had to rebuild the choir and the side chapels (where the altars are) from the ground up.

There is a published report (Moulart, Basecles; Esquisse religieuse) that the ancient altar of St. Martin was sold or offered for sale at Basecles in 1843. Basecles, a Belgian town near the French border, contains the Church of St. Martin which dates from 1779 and is considered the best product of the Tournai School. Does the Moustier St. Martin’s altar come from Basecles? Were both it and the Virgin’s altar constructed in l843? Or does only the stonecutting date from that time? Answers to these questions could have a bearing on the date of the Moustier cryptograms and their underlying message.

Given that we have reasonable photos of these cryptograms (rather than the hand-drawn monochrome copies that appear in the Cryptolog pages) to work with, we’re arguably at an advantage over the NSA right from the start. And from that I can see that the letter carving is really rather… variable. The height of each row of letters seems inconsistent, with the vertical bars on the U in “LUBΓPNID” plainly different lengths; each row is 7, 8 or 9 characters long; there seems to be no obvious rationale as to whether individual characters have serifs or not; while some characters appear to be formed of merged pairs of letters, possibly accidentally (copying ciphers onto paper is hard, let alone onto stone) or deliberately (to squeeze them into a rectangle), it’s hard to tell.

Yet from the distinctive ‘R’ shape, and the closeness of the match between the materials and framing motif, I think it very likely that the two were carved by the same person at basically the same time.

If you want to take this on, here are my (provisional) transcriptions. I’ve transcribed the “Γ” character as ‘F’, the “Λ” character as “^”, and the composite “Γ-merged-with-L” character as “[“. And being in Belgium, you’ve got Flemish, French, German, and Latin (at least) to choose from as possible plaintext languages. Just be grateful that the dating seems to rule out Klingon.

Moustier Church, St Martin’s Altar cryptogram

J N L K B F P R
V M G H W H[
Q L S B N F HP
M G [ K H V R
^ L R N F S X V

P F V B L P M R
R A [ G K T D
B N D F J V R W
L U B F P N I D
C [ T R ^ Q M

Moustier Church, Virgin’s Altar cryptogram

L F E G K R V Q
Y P Z H N R L B D
M F ^ N V D [
N ^ P V J H M ^
L F N ^ B K P

N C L X B P D W
R N [ C H Z R P
M D X R ^ P L N
H F ^ L D N X W
E N L V N D ^ P N

As far as the transcription goes, I’m far from sure about what’s going on here. I have a sneaking suspicion that part of the mystery might arise from a laziness in the carver, because “E” only appears in the Virgin’s Altar, while “[” appears twice as much in St Martin’s Altar. That is, might “[” simply be a lazy ‘E’, and “^” a lazy “A”? Or might “[” instead be a merged “L + Γ” pair?

As far as letter frequencies go (~27 unique shapes used):
16: N
12: P / L / R
10: F / ^ (note that I included the one instance of ‘A’ in the count for ‘^’)
9: V / D
8: B / H
7: M
6: [
5: K
4: W / X / G
3: J / C/ Q
2: Z / S / T/ E
1: I / Y / U

As far as the cryptanalysis goes, there are quite a few patterns:
3-grams: BFP (2 instances, both in the St Martin’s Altar cryptogram)
2-grams: R^ (4 instances), ^P, PN, ^L, PM (3 instances), plus 14 other 2-grams that repeat once.

PS: Koen Van de moortel describes the cryptograms as a “table with 700 year old secret code, referred to in the “Centuries” from Yves de Lessines, stolen and published by Nostradamus“. Basically, the story there is about a 14th century Cistercian monk called Yves de Lessines, whose book “Les Centuries” Rudy Cambier (of the University of Liège) recently claimed was reused by Nostradamus for his Prophecies. Cambier also claims in his book that “Les Centuries” also describes where the Knights Templar hid their treasure. Just so you know!

The post The Moustier Cryptograms… appeared first on Cipher Mysteries.

Over the last few years I’ve read (and indeed reviewed) plenty of Voynich-themed novels, and indeed have several queued up here I’m trying to steal enough time to read (e.g. Linda Lafferty’s The Bloodletter’s Daughter, etc).

So my default answer to the question “does the world need another Voynich-themed novel?” is normally “no, sorry, I don’t honestly think it does“. Even so, I have to say I’m looking forward to the English version of one just released in Spanish by Enrique Joven (disclaimer – whom I collaborated with on a Spanish history-of-the-telescope article back in 2008).

His previous book (“The Book of God and Physics“, I never did like that title) was a Voynich novel set in modern times, but his new book “El templo del cielo” (i.e. “The Temple of the Sky”, though doubtless his publishers will rename it “The Book of Noodles and Zodiacs”, *sigh*) is set in the early 17th century. Hence it’s kind of a “Voynich prequel”. Errrm… except if he writes a further Voynich novel set in the fifteenth century, when I guess it would become a “Voynich postprequel”. Or (more likely) “book two of the trilogy”.

In real (i.e. non-novel-writing) life, Enrique is a professional astronomer in Tenerife, and so likes to build his books around ideas that define the history of astronomy. So what’s nice here is that because he has his (historically real) team of Jesuit missionaries (supposedly) take the Voynich Manuscript with them to China (along with the 7000 volumes they did genuinely take), his story should foreground many interesting aspects of the ups and downs of that whole historical sequence. In fact, when I discussed this little-known history here back in 2010, Enrique left a comment outlining what his novel would be about. So we can’t say he didn’t warn us!

PS: here’s a link to Enrique’s blog.

The post Enrique Joven’s Voynich prequel novel… appeared first on Cipher Mysteries.

Having recently written up the Moustier Cryptograms here (thanks to a declassified issue of the NSA’s in-house “Cryptolog” magazine), I bought a copy of Rudy Cambier’s (2002) book “Nostradamus and the Lost Templar Legacy“, simply because it appeared to contain just about the only thing written about Moustier in the last 40 years.

Initially, Cambier speculated that the cryptogram’s ten pairs of lines of scrambled text contained a somehow-obfuscated version of the Ten Commandments. But given that “the [two] Tablets abound with consonants” (p.132), he dropped that notion and instead hypothesized that the original author “might not have provided the vowels – through a well-known cryptographic expedient” (p.132), i.e. an abjad. Cambier then tells us that this hunch “actually appeared to be the case, and this is what may be considered quite a stroke of luck“, and that he decrypted them on that basis “on three winter evenings in December 1995, with a little effort and a little skill” (p.130).

But what does it say? He claims that the tables “indicate [...] to the long-awaited one, to him who will be capable of deciphering them, the secret place where the [Knights Templar] belongings lie hidden” (p.130). Annoyingly, though, Cambier goes on to say that anyone interested in understanding how his lengthy argument goes should instead refer to the article by François Descy in “Le Courrier de l’Escaut” that ably summarizes it.

And therein lies a problem, in that there doesn’t seem to be a copy of this article online. On Le Courrier de l’Escaut’s website, it says that the paper has been following Cambier’s theories for many years, and that its first article covering them appeared on “le 11 février 1998″, but I don’t know whether or not that is the particular article to which Cambier is referring. I’ll try to get a copy, see what it says…

Anyway, according to local historian Jean Connart, work was undertaken on Moustier Church in June 1838 “in accordance with the plans of Philibert Pluvinage and Pierre Joseph Lemaitre”. But who were these two men, exactly?

I turns out that Philibert Pluvinage (b. 1770) was a lay clerk at Moustier Church and also Moustier Philharmonic Orchestra’s first conductor (in 1811). The Tournai archives hold an 1810 document describing Pluvinage’s church-related duties. It’s not clear if he married Françoise Joseph Lepoutte (b. 9th January 1766 Moustier, d. 30th October 1842), for I suspect “Philibert Joseph Pluvinage” was actually his father.

There’s a little more detail on Pierre Joseph Lemaître to be had:
* born & baptised 31st March 1741 in Moustier, Hainaut, Belgium.
* married Catherine Joseph Dehors on 5th May 1779. They had 11 children.
* got a law degree & became a lawyer at the Supreme Council of Hainaut.
* succeeded his father as clerk of Moustier (1794-1807).
* succeeded Willaumez as Mayor of Moustier (1807-1818).
* died 12th November 1822 in Moustier.

Hence it would seem that the 1838 work on the Church was carried out according to plans in part drawn up by the Mayor of Moustier at least 15 years earlier. But without actually seeing those plans (which may well be in an archive somewhere, you never know), that’s just about all we can say for the moment.

So… now that I’ve had a few days to think about this new (to me) cipher mystery, what do I think?

For a start, I have to say that I don’t believe that the two altars look even remotely medieval. Rather, apart from the apparently amateurish quality of their inscriptions, I think they resemble the kind of 18th/19th century monstrosities I recall seeing in churches all over France. (But please correct me if you think I’m wrong!). From the pictures in Cambier’s book, the two altars look to have been made from exactly the same material, by exactly the same builders, and at exactly the same time: so I don’t really buy into the notion suggested by Jean Connart that the St Martin’s altar may have been brought in from elsewhere (and then duplicated for the other altar). So, the only workable explanation I can currently see is that the two side altars were made together in 1838 following the collapse of the church roof during rebuilding work.

And yet the overall mystery remains… why on earth would a church of that general date have cryptograms on its altars?

Having pondered this for a while, I think the explanation will most likely turn out to be that these are imperfect copies of a much older pair of cryptograms that were in Moustier for many years. In fact, they may be not so much cryptograms as badly faded inscriptions (say, from the churchyard?), somehow tied up with the history of the church or town. As such, I suspect that we may stand little chance of deciphering them without an earlier (& hopefully less degraded) copy of them to work with. Hence I believe the best place to search for them would be in the pre-1838 notebooks or sketchbooks of Belgian antiquaries. Someone must have seen a pair of enigmatic inscriptions and copied them down, surely?

Yet I also have to note one odd possibility. Rudy Cambier’s book is all about how he believes Michel Nostradamus was simply an opportunist who took a much older book written in the Picard language (e.g. from the Franco-Belgian border area in the North) and adapted the verses to his contemporary French (Nostradamus was from Provence in the South). And, curiously, “Moustier” is directly mentioned in Nostradamus’ Century I, verse 95:-

Devant moustier trouvé enfant besson,
D´heroic sang de moine & vetustique:
Son bruit par secte langue & puissance son,
Qu´on dira fort eslevé vopisque.

Here, “besson” is an old-fashioned word for “jumeau” – twin. So this would seem to be talking about twin things in front of Moustier. OK, it’s a bit of a long shot, but… might this be a fragmentary fossil of a reference to the (admittedly putative!) earlier twin pair of inscriptions that ended up being (badly) duplicated in Moustier Church’s side altars? I don’t know, it could well be no more than a coincidence but… it’s an interesting thought, right?

The post Rudy Cambier and the Moustier cryptograms… appeared first on Cipher Mysteries.

I think it’s fair to say that even though the French love books in general, there’s one category in particular they adore – anything revealing the long-lost secrets of the Knights Templar. To a relative outsider (such as me), the 1309 suppression of Les Templiers by the French king comes across as a wound to the national psyche that has required a mile-high Band-aid of literary retribution to attempt to heal.

Of course, the not-so-subtle questions that pretty much everyone actually wants answered are:
(a) “where was the Templar treasure hidden?“, and
(b) “can I have some of it?”

Admittedly, there is a fairly strong case to be made that by 1309 the Templars were probably close to bankrupt. Following the Seventh Crusade (1248-1254), there was effectively no Jerusalem for pilgrims to go on pilgrimage to: and so the whole raison d’etre for the Knights Templar (i.e. protecting pilgrims) had basically vanished. Hence Templar historians I’ve talked with believe that, after 1254, the Order pretty much ‘withered on the vine’, not really taking any new recruits. By 1309, it was an old man’s order, and I suspect its cash reserves had dwindled to close to nothing.

All the same, the romance of secret caches of gold- and jewel-filled barrels remains: and so French armchair treasure-hunters continue to wave their virtual metal detectors over the scantiest morsels of Templar-related texts, hoping that this might just uncover the ultimate secret history haul. Really, Rudy Cambier’s biggest insult against this établissement is his idea that the Templars might deign to bury their precious cargo in Hainaut of all places – when of course, it could only genuinely have be buried in La France! (And let’s not wake up the Sinclair and Oak Island factions here, OK? *sigh*)

Compiling a list of hopeful French Templier-trésor authors would consume decades of anyone’s life: but there’s one whose cycle helmet, in my opinion, is several wheels ahead of the pack. For me the maillot jaune of Templar authors is Alfred Weysen, author of (1972) “L’Île des Veilleurs” (The Island of the Watchers).

Unfortunately, second-hand copies of this are £60+, and the best modern treatment of the same evidence seems to be Paul Amoros, Richard Buadès et Thierry-Emmanuel Garnier’s (2007) “L’Île des Veilleurs, Contre-Enquête sur le Mystère du Verdon et le Trésor de l’Ordre du Temple”, which is currently being reissued (but copies of this also go for £60+). For the moment, these remain only for researchers with particularly deep pockets.

The rest of us will have to make do with this nice French website dedicated to the whole “L’Île des Veilleurs” enigma, which I’ll briefly summarize.

“The Isle of the Watchers” denotes a 66 square kilometre area in Provence, bounded by the towns of Castellane, Le Bourguet, Jabron, Trigance, Soleils and Taloire, and containing Veydon; and by the D252 road to the east and the D955 to the west. The term was coined by Alfred Weysen, though the claim linking the area to Templar treasure first appeared in print in Robert Charroux’s (1962) “Trésors du Monde: Enterrés, Emmurés, Engloutis” [Éditions J'ai Lu].

All the same, Weysen’s book goes far beyond this, by linking all manner of local sites with Templars and other historical narratives. He asserts:
* that Veydon was the subject of Goethe’s 1795 story Das Märchen (Le Conte), or The Green Snake, with Goethe’s having previously been initiated into a centuries-spanning secret society (naturally).
* that a passage connecting La Baume Jardin (The Hermit Cave) to another cave beneath the chapel of St. Trophimus, a Templar church located (unusually) on the side of a mountain.
* that numerous authors support the notion that this area hold Templar treasure.
* that his argument is undoubtedly correct because of various numerological justifications etc etc.

Personally, I have no great interest in unearthing the fabulous wealth of the Templar hoard: anyway, it’ll already take me the rest of my lifetime to spend my share of the Beale treasure. (Ha! As if!) But what does interest me is that Weysen discusses what seems to be a genuine cipher mystery, somewhere in the gorges by Jabron (much loved by canoeists), though it would be somewhat… premature for us to agree that it’s a Templar message just yet, let’s say. And I found a passable picture of the cryptogram here:

What message do these scratchy glyphs hold? Weysen believed that he was able to decrypt them, and that they said…

Salut! Tu es ici dans les terres de la Vraie Croix. Céleste dominant l’éternité, baille aux languissants la clarté.

Well… I’m going to stick my neck out and say that I don’t think this makes a great deal of sense. But if we can get a better picture of this to work with, I reckon we probably can decrypt it between us…

…Is anyone here going on holiday in Provence this summer who would like to take up this challenge? Just asking!

The post L’Île des Veilleurs and the Jabron Cryptogram… appeared first on Cipher Mysteries.

One of the most marvellously romantic pirate cipher stories I’ve heard concerns the famous French pirate Olivier Levasseur (1688/1690-1730) AKA “La Buse” – ‘the buzzard’, so called because of his speed and ruthlessness. When about to be hanged, Levasseur (allegedly) took a necklace containing a 17-line cryptogram from around his neck and threw it to the attendant crowd, calling out “Find my treasure, ye who may understand it!”

Fabulous stuff, for sure… but in the absence of even a nano-shred of evidence to support it, probably utter b*ll*cks. But you guessed that already.

As so often happens, Levasseur’s reputation outlasted his death, to the point that he was played by the sword-swinging Basil Rathbone in the 1935 film “Captain Blood” (perhaps better known for starring Errol Flynn).

Incidentally, it’s a little-known fact that Errol Flynn wanted his tell-all autobiography to be called “In Like Me“, but his publishers refused. What an own goal!

Still, there remains a long-standing tale that the later (also real) pirate Bernardin Nageon de L’Estang (also known as “Le Butin”, i.e. ‘The Booty Man’, who died many years after Levasseur) was somehow linked with La Buse’s treasure, a story that was partially reinforced by Le Butin’s last will which resurfaced in the Seychelles in 1923. I couldn’t find an English translation of it, so what follows next is my own [admittedly fairly free] translation. Note that “20 floréal an VIII” is a date in the French Republican calendar which I think I’ve converted correctly to ’1st May 1800′, but please tell me if I’m wrong! is the 10th May 1800 [thanks Helmut!]

I’m about to enlist to defend the motherland, and will without much doubt be killed, so am making my will. I give my nephew the reserve officer Jean Marius Nageon de l’Estang the following: a half-lot at La Chaux au Grand-Port, île de France, plus my treasures saved from the Indies. Having been wrecked in a creek near Vacoas, I walked up a river and deposited riches of the Indies in a cave which I marked with my initials BN. My writings are deliberately difficult to read as a precaution; I would tell Justin if I were to retrieve them first.

1st 10th May 1800. Dear Justin, if I die before seeing you, a true friend will give you my will and my papers. I recommend you follow my instructions and execute my last will and God bless you. With help from our influential friends, get yourself to the Indian Ocean and the île de France at the location indicated by my will. Climb the cliff going eastward; twenty-five or thirty steps along, in accordance with the documents, you will find typical pirate marks forming a circle with the river a few feet east from the centre. That is where the treasure is. Strangely-combined enciphered figures at this place yield the initials “BN”. Near my wreck, I lost a lot of material, and I have already removed several treasures, so there remain only four buried in the same way by the same pirates, which you will find using the cipher key and the other papers that will reach you at the same time as this. The second treasure is located in the northern part of the île de France with similar marks. With the combination of the circle at the scene and following these recommendations, you will retrieve it like that of Rodrigues.

Beloved brother, I’ve been sick since the fall of Tamatave [i.e. the Invasion of île de France, where the French finally surrendered on 3rd December 1810], despite the care of my friend the commander. I am weak, I fear death from one moment to the next, I wish to talk to you one last time dear Étienne and give you my greatest recommendations. When I am dead, Captain Hamon will give you the little that I possess that I saved during my adventurous life at sea. You know, dear Étienne, that my life’s dream was to amass a fortune to bring back our family’s splendour. With the benevolence the First Consul showed me after a glorious feat of arms, I had hoped to return. But as God will not allow me to perform this duty and I feel close to death, swear to me dear Étienne that you will execute my wishes. In my adventurous life before embarking on the Apollon, I was one of those pirates who did so much harm to our enemies Spain and England. We made many splendid captures from them, but at our last battle with a large British frigate on the shores of Hindustan, the captain was wounded and on his deathbed confided to me his secrets and his papers to retrieve considerable treasure buried in the Indian Ocean; and, having first made sure that I was a Freemason, asked me to use it to arm privateers against the English. But I abhor this wandering life, so I decided to enlist permanently and wait for France to calm down before finding these treasures and return back there. Swear to me that your eldest son will carry out my wishes and one day return to our house with the fortune. The captain will give you the documents about the treasures, three of them. The one buried on my dear île de France is considerable. According to the documents, you will see: three iron barrels and jars full of minted doubloons and thirty million ingots and a copper box filled with diamonds from the mines of Visapur and Golkonda [from whence many famous diamonds such as the Koh-i-Noor came].

Before I go on (in Part Two) to examine the cryptogram itself, I should point out that the Invasion of île de France did actually happen, so this final section of the will (if genuine) implies that Le Butin lived not only beyond 1st 10th May 1800, but also beyond 3rd December 1810 (when Tamatave fell).

Moreover, there was a Captain Hamon in the French fleet (in 18th January 1805, he was in Admiral Villeneuve’s fleet off Toulon in charge of La Naïade, an 18-cannon corvette). And the French India Company had at least four ships called “Apollon” before that time, so it is entirely plausible that Le Butin served under Capitaine Hamon on a ship called “Apollon” in the Indian Ocean.

So I wondered… which French sea captain was it who Le Butin said had been mortally wounded off Hindustan? There can’t be that many possibilities, because the loss of Tamatave was one of the last great naval events of the Napoleonic Wars, and without any substantial bases in the Indian Ocean to sail from, the French naval forces struggled to mount any more significant strikes against the British.

I believe there was a skirmish off the coast of Diu earlier in the Napoleonic Wars, but I haven’t been able to find any trace at all of one after December 1810. Perhaps a passing naval historian will be able to put me right on this, as these were wars that were intensely well-documented on both sides. Hopefully we shall see!

More (much more!) in Part Two…

——————————–

Just so you know, though I found the original text of the above in the French Wikipedia entry for Trésor de la Buse, it came from Robert Charroux’s (1962) “Trésors du monde” Edition J’ai lu 1962 – yes, the same book where the story about the Templars and l’Ile des Veilleurs came from. And for the sake of completeness, here it is, so feel free to offer a better translation if you think I haven’t done it sufficient justice…

Je pars m’enrôler et défendre la patrie. Comme je serai sans doute tué, je fais mon testament et donne à mon neveu Jean Marius Nageon de l’Estang, officier de la réserve, savoir: un demi-terrain rivière La Chaux au Grand-Port, île de France, et les trésors sauvés de l’Indus, savoir: j’ai naufragé dans une crique près des Vacoas et j’ai remonté une rivière et déposé dans un caveau les richesses de l’Indus et marqué B.N. mon nom. Mes écrits sont difficiles à lire par précaution; je dirais tout à Justin si je le retrouve.

Lettre du 20 floréal an VIII. Mon cher Justin, dans les cas ou la mort me surprendrait sans te voir, un ami fidèle te remettra mon testament et mes papiers. Je te recommande de suivre mes instructions et d ‘exécuter mes dernières volontés et Dieu te bénira. Par nos amis influents, fais-toi envoyer dans la mer des Indes et rends-toi à l’île de France à l’endroit indiqué par mon testament. Remonte la falaise allant vers l’est ; à vingt-cinq ou trente pas est, conformement aux documents, tu trouveras les marques indicatives des corsaires pour établir un cercle dont la rivière est à quelques pieds du centre. Là est le trésor. Par une combinaison étrange, les figures cryptographiques donnent à ce point nom B.N. Par mon naufrage, j’ai perdu beaucoup de documents; j’ai déjà retiré plusieurs trésors; il n’en reste que quatre enfouis de la même manière par ces mêmes corsaires, que tu trouveras par la clé des combinaisons et les autres papiers qui te parviendront en même temps. Le deuxième trésor de l ‘île de France se trouve dans la partie nord de cette dernière avec des marques pareilles. Avec la combinaison du cercle sur les lieux, et suivant les recommandations tu y parviendras comme pour celui de Rodrigues.

Frère bien aimé, je suis malade depuis la prise de Tamatave, malgré les soins de mon commandant et ami. Je suis faible, je crains la mort d’un moment à l’autre, je viens te parler une dernière fois cher Étienne et te faire mes recommandations suprêmes. Quand je serai mort, le commandant Hamon te fera remettre le peu que je possède et que j’ai économisé dans ma vie aventureuse de marin. Tu sais, cher Étienne, que le rêve de toute ma vie était d’amasser une fortune pour relever l’éclat de notre maison. Avec la bienveillance que le premier consul m’a témoigné après un fait d’armes glorieux, je serais parvenu. Mais comme Dieu, ne me permettra pas d’exécuter ce devoir et que je sens la mort près, jure-moi cher Étienne, d’exécuter mes volontés. Dans ma vie aventureuse et avant d’embarquer sur l’Apollon, j’ai fait pari (partie) de ces corsaires qui ont fait tant de mal à l’Espagne et à notre ennemi l’Anglais. Avec eux nous avons fait de jolies prises, mais à notre dernier combat sur les côtes d’Indoustan, avec une grosse frégate anglaise, le capitaine a été blessé et à son lit de mort m’a confié ses secrets et des papiers pour retrouver des trésors considérables enfouis dans la mer des Indes et en me demandant de m’en servir pour armer des corsaires contre l’Anglais; il s’est assuré auparavant si j’étais franc-maçon. Mais j’avais cette vie errante en horreur, j’ai préféré m’enrôler régulièrement et attendre que la France soit calme pour retrouver ces trésors et y retourner. Jure-moi que ton fils aîné exécutera ma volonté et avec cette fortune relèvera un jour notre maison. Le commandant te remettra les écrits des trésors, Il y en a trois. Celui enterré à ma chère île de France est considérable. D’après les écrits, tu les verras: Trois barriques en fer et jarres pleines de doublons monnayés et lingots de trente millions et une cassette en cuivre remplie de diamants des mines de Visapour et de Golconde.

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The Voynich Manuscript is a dismal reality TV channel, where every participant’s ten minutes of fame segues quickly into an eternity of opprobrium: few people dipping their feet into its toxic slurry get to keep all their toes for very long. I’m sorry to have to say such a thing, but as the modern philosophers Run and DMC put it, “it’s like that, and that’s the way it is“.

All of which is a long-winded way of saying that, somewhat surprisingly (at least to me), Gordon Rugg has this week returned to the Voynich’s rancid riverside with a fresh supply of podalic digits for dunking. But this time around he’s appropriating its mysteries not to promote the claimed benefits of his “Verifier Method” (a meme which seems not to have taken root), but to promote his newly-patented toy for 2013, that he somewhat grandly calls the Search Visualizer (rather as if he’s inventing a whole new field).

Yet unless I’ve misunderstood it significantly, all the Search Visualizer actually does is:
* draw a rectangle representing an input document
* draw dots on it wherever one of a user-defined set of syllables or words appears, with each dot a different colour.
Thus a SV user can, for example, map out that ‘witch’ and ‘sleep’ appear in different clusters within Macbeth. So far, so facile.

Nonetheless, I (perhaps) hear you ask eagerly, what can the Search Visualizer teach us about – dan dan darrrr – the Voynich Manuscript? Unsurprisingly (given the amount of exposure his Voynich claims gave the Verifier Method all those years ago), that’s the subject of this week’s blog post from him.

Having used SV to draw a lot of diagrams of (in the EVA transcription) “daiin”, “qo”, “dy”, and “ol”, Rugg concludes from the “banding” (basically, section structure) visible in those diagrams that…

It’s completely inconsistent with the theory that Voynichese is a single unidentified language, or with the theory that Voynichese consists of two dialects of a single unidentified language.

If we’re looking at dialects, then there are at least six of them, and some appear to be more different from each other than English is from German, at least on the preliminary results from my work so far (I looked at other German texts, and saw the same distribution patterns as in the book example above).

If we’re looking at a coded text, then there appear to be at least half a dozen different versions of the code, or at least half a dozen different codes producing similar but not identical types of text.

Of course, the main person who failed to grasp that the whole Currier-A-&-B-languages things wasn’t anything like a binary either-or (despite Rene & I telling him several times, as I recall) was, errrm, Gordon Rugg himself. So this is, unusually, a straw man argument where the straw man is the researcher himself (but 9 years in the past).

Anyway, even though his “Verifier Method” (in my opinion) falls well short of David Hackett Fisher’s splendid book “Historians’ Fallacies”, let’s apply it to the Search Visualizer:-

1. Accumulate knowledge of a discipline through interviews and reading.

I’ve read the article and most of his website, too. I’m an IT professional and a computer scientist. I can see what he’s doing: rectangles and coloured dots.

2. Determine whether critical expertise has yet to be applied in the field.

As far as the Voynich Manuscript goes, I don’t see any reference to:-
* codicology (though he’s added an addendum noting that the order of the pages may be wrong in “some cases”, this clearly isn’t reflected in his conclusions, which are almost entirely about the whole “banding” and “sub-banding” thing)
* Prescott Currier’s famous analysis (A pages, B pages, but plenty of intermediate ‘dialects’ too) isn’t mentioned once. That’s right, not once. Anywhere.
* statistical analyses carried out by researchers other than Gordon Rugg or his students.

Sorry, but that seems like a very uncritical, self-contained way of working.

I would add that I don’t see a lot of critical expertise being applied to historical cryptography: what instead appears seems to be a partial rendering of the history to support previously held positions.

3. Look for bias and mistakenly held assumptions in the research.

There’s plenty of bias towards his grille method, as well as naysaying against mainstream historical cryptography (which, let’s remember, he is trying to rewrite to support his particular story).

There’s also bias towards his 16th century dating in the face of fairly rock-solid scientific, art history, codicological, and palaeographic dating to the start/middle of the 15th century, which doesn’t really appear in his presentation.

4.Analyze jargon to uncover differing definitions of key terms.

What Rugg calls “Search Visualization” (drawing a rectangle of coloured dots) surely seems rather a low-grade kind of search. The point about “search” (in the Google sense) is surely that it finds things you didn’t previously know about and includes filters that promote relevance: whereas feeding pre-determined syllables and drawing coloured dots in a rectangle is only barely pattern-matching, and only barely visualization.

5. Check for classic mistakes using human-error tools.

* Using an outdated transcription
* Not filtering out all the embedded comments (is there a better explanation for this than sheer laziness?)
* Relying on computer science alone without integrating genuine historical research
* Arguing from possibility rather from probability or fact
* Not responding to criticism from actual domain experts

6. Follow the errors as they ripple through underlying assumptions.

(Too boring to do if so many mistakes have been identified in steps 1-5.)

7. Suggest new avenues for research that emerge from steps one through six.

Surely a proper academic would be building a tool that would find telling letter clusters for you from an input text, using Hidden Markov Models and all kinds of proper statistical mechanisms? Shouldn’t something like the Search Visualizer be about finding things you don’t already know about, and only then helping you visualize them?

All in all, I find it extraordinarily hard not to get cross about this, because Rugg seems to be exactly reprising what he did all those years ago, once again at the cost of the whole research area. And once again, his driving force appears to be “ask not what you can do for the Voynich Manuscript, ask what it can do for you.” Sad, very sad.

The post Gordon Rugg, the Search Visualizer, and the Voynich… appeared first on Cipher Mysteries.

Cipher Mysteries reader Keith Walker was intrigued by the Moustier cryptogram story I recently ran here, and decided to try to hunt down the “published report (Moulart, Basècles; Esquisse religieuse) that the ancient altar of St. Martin was sold or offered for sale at Basècles in 1843” mentioned by the NSA. And just so you know what we’re talking about, here’s a picture of the big old altar in question:

What’s good is that he found a scan of the 1910 report by curé Moulart. But what’s confusing is that the relevant passage (near the bottom of page 7) appears to say the opposite of what the NSA article said. Specifically, it says:-

“Dirigeons nos pas vers le bien-amié patron de Basècles, Saint Martin.
Son autel nous est venu de Moustier en 1843. On y voit un rétable avec colonnettes sur lesquelles des corbeilles, d’où s’échappent des flammes, image de la dévotion ardente qui doit animer notre amié dans la prière.”

…which Keith (quite reasonably, I think) translates as…

“Let’s make our way to the beloved patron saint of Basècles, Saint Martin.

His altar came to us from Moustier in 1843. There is an altarpiece with small columns on which baskets, out of which flames are escaping, the representation of the burning/ardent devotion that must animate our souls in prayer.”

So it seems fairly clear that the altar of St. Martin in Basècles actually came from Moustier in 1843, rather than went to there then. Hence I think what we are looking at here is quite probably the altar of St. Martin that was in Moustier before the two new [and apparently enciphered] side-altars were built & installed in 1838. Hence the old altar probably sat around in a shed or similar store for 3 or 4 years before being cleaned up and moved on to Basècles in 1843. Certainly, I think it looks slightly older than Moustier’s two side altars… but probably not a century older, I’d hazard.

Keith wonders whether the Moustier cryptograms may therefore be connected with this altar in some way: though, against that notion, curé Moulart does transcribe lots of other inscriptions from Basècles, and it would probably be fair to expect that if there was something noteworthy about the Basècles St. Martin altar he would have included that too. Even so, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence; so the old Moustier altar might well be worth a closer inspection, if anyone just happens to be passing by the church in Basècles.

Incidentally, Moulart happily mentions a chronogram from the church (p.5) placed above the main door in 1779, though (oddly) the letters he highlights in the text apparently making up the chronogram seem to add up only to 1768:

CUNCTIS HIS OPTANTIBUS
A MANDO PROELATO SURREXI

Here, C + V + C + I + I + I + V [+ S???] + M + D + L + V = 1768.

I’m pretty sure that Moulart forgot to include the “XI” at the end of “SURREXI“, which would bring the total up to 1779 (i.e. the number you first thought of).

PS: there’s a little more history on Basècles church here, including a close-up of the carving of St. Martin on the altar. Note the lack of funky inscriptions!

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Ulrik Heltoft’s “The Voynich Botanical Studies and The Origin of Specimen 52v” artworks will be at Andersen’s Contemporary art gallery in Copenhagen over the next few weeks (20.04.2013 to 11.05.2013), and I have to say that they’re really rather… eerie. But in a nice way!

Essentially, what Heltoft and his collaborator Miljohn Ruperto have done is recreate (after a fashion) a number of the Voynich Manuscript’s curious plant drawings. Their manipulated images were then fixed as large silver gelatin prints, lifting the Voynich’s unpindownable unworldliness (and indeed impracticability) to curious new heights. Having said that, I’m not sure what “The Origin of Specimen 52v” specifically refers to (apart from f52v itself, of course). Perhaps it will become obvious as photos of the installation start to appear on the Internet.

Anyway, here’s their 52r plant side by side with the Voynich’s f52r plant:

If you want to see some more, here’s a link to four pretty high-resolution Voynich Botanical Studies images.

But why did they do it? Well, according to this site…

Ulrik Heltoft (b. 1973) graduated from The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in 1999 and from Yale University in 2001. He is an associate professor of photography at The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts and has had solo exhibitions at Kirkhoff Contemporary Art, Raucci e Santamaria in Naples and Wilfried Lentz in Rotterdam. His works have also been shown at places such as Participants Inc., New Museum, Anthology Film Archive in New York, and the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles. Heltoft’s artistic activity is characterized by formally rigorous, technically perfect works in which minimal displacements suggest that “something else” is at play.

So basically, Heltoft is a Yale-graduated photography professor specializing in a rigorous-looking, false-historic aesthetic. Really, could there ever have been a flicker of a doubt in anyone’s mind that one day he’d ‘do’ the Voynich? Hmmm… maybe next he’ll do pages from its balneo section, but where every ‘nymph’ is the same model. Or perhaps instead he’ll move on to the Vinland Map? It’s always nice to have a Plan B, right?

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To summarize Part 1, an ex-pirate known as ‘Le Butin’ left a will, two letters, and an enciphered note describing where he had buried treasure on Île de France (the former French name for Mauritius). But even though this is widely referred to as the “La Buse Cryptogram”, I can’t see any obvious reason to connect the pirate Olivier Levasseur (‘La Buse’) with it. Anyway, our story continues…

The documents were retrieved from the Archives Nationales de la Réunion in 1923 for a lady from the Seychelles called Rose Savy(who was descended from Le Butin’s family): she to flew to Paris with it to try to solve its mysteries. In 1934, the eminent French librarian Charles de La Roncière at the Bibliothèque National de France wrote a book about the affair called “Le Flibustier mystérieux, histoire d’un trésor caché“.

Spurred on by the promise of gold-gold-gold, numerous treasure hunters have poured decades of their lives into this whole, ummm, ‘hopeful enterprise’. Savy herself believed that the answer was somehow connected with some strange carvings that she found on her property, depicting “chiens, serpents, tortues, chevaux“, as well as “une urne, des coeurs, une figure de jeune femme, une tête d’homme et un oeil monstrueusement ouvert“. [Do I need to translate those for you? I don't think so!]

Reginald Cruise-Wilkins (1913-1977) “had done code-breaking work with the British forces and he found references to Andromeda in Levasseur’s enigma”, says John Cruise-Wilkins, who even today continues searching for the treasure that so obsessed his father from 1949 onwards. Just so you know, John C-W himself “believes [Levasseur] buried the bounty according to a complex riddle inspired by the 12 labors of Hercules”, ten of which he believes he has solved.

Well… another famous Levasseur story goes that as he was crossing a bridge over what was known as “la ravine à Malheur”, he said “Avec ce que j’ai caché ici, je pourrais acheter l’île” – ‘with what I’ve hidden here, I could buy the whole island‘. So perhaps it’s no wonder that people desperately want to believe that there’s pirate gold in (or perhaps under) them thar island hills. [Though as I say, I'm fairly unconvinced that this cryptogram has anything to do with La Buse. But perhaps that's just me.]

Another famous La Buse treasure hunter was called Bibique (real name Joseph Tipveau, he wrote a book called “Sur la piste des Frères de la Côte”), but who shot himself in 31st March 1995, I’m sorry to say.

But with my crypto hat back firmly on, I have to say that the cipher system ascertained by de La Roncière could barely be more straightforward: a pigpen cipher, with letters of the alphabet arranged in a very simple manner, and with some of the shapes also used to represent digits (AEIOU=12345, LMNR=6789). Arranged in traditional pigpen style, the key looks like this…

…while the cryptogram itself looks like this (click on it to see a larger image)…

And yet despite all that clarity, the cipher mystery remains, because if you use the above key to decipher the above ciphertext, what you get is an extremely confusing cleartext, to the point that perhaps “clearasmudtext” would frankly be a better word for it. Here’s one version from the Internet with spaces added in for marginal extra clarity:-

aprè jmez une paire de pijon tiresket
2 doeurs sqeseaj tête cheral funekort
filttinshientecu prenez une cullière
de mielle ef ovtre fous en faites une ongat
mettez sur ke patai de la pertotitousn
vpulezolvs prenez 2 let cassé sur le che
min il faut qoe ut toit a noitie couue
povr en pecger une femme dhrengt vous n ave
eua vous serer la dobaucfea et pour ve
ngraai et por epingle oueiuileturlor
eiljn our la ire piter un chien tupqun
lenen de la mer de bien tecjeet sur ru
nvovl en quilnise iudf kuue femm rq
i veut se faire dun hmetsedete s/u dre
dans duui ooun dormir un homm r
esscfvmm / pl faut n rendre udlq
u un diffur qecieefurtetlesl

The best single page presentation of it I’ve found comes from this French site that tries to colour-code the letters. Certainly, there are indeed errors in the text: but I don’t personally think that throwing your hands up and guessing at the correct plaintext values (which is what most treasure hunters seem to do) is methodologically sound.

Far less cryptographically naive would be to try to classify many of the errors as probable pigpen enciphering errors (where, for example, the difference between A and B is simply a dot). The fact that the ‘Z’ shape apparently occurs both with and without a dot implies (to me, at least) that a number of dots may well have slipped in (or out) during the writing. Moreover, there is no suggestion as to which of the ciphertext letters might be enciphering numbers (the two instances of “2″ given are actual ’2′ digits, not carefully interpreted ‘e’ ciphers), and aren’t pirates always pacing out distances from curious rocks etc?

For example, “doeurs” is a mere dot away from “coeurs”; while mysterious non-words such as “filttinshientecu” might actually start “fils…” rather than “filt…”. Might it be that (Voynich researchers will perhaps groan at this point, but…) some of these were emended by a later owner?

Or might it be that the image we’re looking at is actually a tidy copy of an earlier, far scrappier cryptogram, and what we’re most plagued by here is copying errors? I would say that the presence of some composite letters in the text is a reasonably strong indication that this is a copy of a cryptogram, rather than the original cryptogram itself.

Hence I suspect that properly decrypting this will be an exercise rich in cryptology, French patois, and codicological logic. Good luck, and let me know how you get on!

But after all this time, is there any Le Butin booty left? I read an online claim that several of Le Butin’s treasures have already been found:-
* one allegedly found in 1916 on Pemba Island (part of the Zanzibar Archipelago), allegedly marked with his initial “BN” (Bernardin Nageon)
* one allegedly in Belmont on Mauritius in a cave near the river La Chaux
* one possibly found on Rodrigues (is this the one mentioned in the letter?)
* one allegedly found at a cemetery on Mauritius in 2004, though I found no mention of it in the archives of the weekly Mauritian Sunday newspaper 5-Plus Dimanche.

However, I haven’t yet found any independent verification of any of these claims, so each story might separately be true, false, embellished, misheard or merely mangled in the telling. Please leave a comment below if you happen to stumble upon actual evidence for any of these!

The post La Buse’s / Le Butin’s Pirate Cipher (Part 2)… appeared first on Cipher Mysteries.

The business history is simple enough: Bovril was developed in 1870 by Scotsman John Lawston Johnston in Canada to solve the problem of how to transport one million cans of beef to the war-front to feed Napoleon III’s army as it fought Prussia.

But where did the name come from? The answer turns out to be something that (with a hat tip to Frankie Howerd’s ever-present ghost, yerssss missus) left my flabber well and truly gasted.

It turns out that the brand name “Bovril” was ub fact formed from merging the genuine Latin word “bos” (meaning ‘ox“) with the made-up word “Vril” – the immensely energy-dense substance controlled and used by the “Vril-ya”, a super-powerful subterranean people described by Edward Bulwer-Lytton in his best-selling (1870) novel “The Coming Race”.

Hence, the name “Bovril” is designed to evoke both a liquid beef extract and a fictional energy source powering an race of underground vegetarian supermen.

Now, not a lot of people know that.

In real-life the release of Bulwer-Lytton’s book caused quite a stir, yet the story about what happened afterwards is stranger still. Quite a few people (including numerous Theosophists) believed his wholly fictional account of the Vril-ya to be absolutely genuine; while some even claimed to have met real-life Vril-ya, in broadly the same way that some people claimed to have met real-life Rosicrucians.

As for Vril itself: in the mid-1930s, when the rocket scientist and sci-fi writer Willy Ley emigrated to the United States, he mentioned the existence back in Germany of a certain Wahrheitsgesellschaft (a ‘Society for Truth’) whose members researched Vril to achieve many otherwise impossible things (e.g. perpetual motion machines, etc).

By 1960, the whole story of this hunt for Vril had entered the feverishly conspiratorial imagination of Jacques Bergier and Louis Pauwels: their book “Morning of the Magicians” revitalized the whole Vril issue, by claiming that the Wahrheitsgesellschaft formed a key part of the genesis of the Thule Society and indeed the whole Nazi Party. (In fact, Jacques Bergier was convinced that there was a secret global organization sending teams of “Men In Black” in to cover up such secrets, both about Vril and other “Livres Maudits” [Forbidden Books] such as the Voynich Manuscript.)

And it’s only a short antigravity ride from there to Vladimir Terziski’s “UFO Secrets of the Third Reich”, which insisted that it was Vril that powered the German “RFZ-1″ circular flying machine – the first flying saucer, able to harness Vril’s almost-unimaginable power so as to build underground bases under Antarctica or indeed the moon’s surface.

But as far as I can tell, the Nazis never got round to investigating whether Bovril might be a good practical source of Vril. Perhaps memories of the resounding Prussian victory at the Battle of Sedan (where Napoleon III was captured) in September 1870 had convinced them that Bovril wasn’t actually super-powered. I wonder: if the French had instead used their million cans of Bovril as mortar rounds, might the Prussians have attacked with far less spirit? Having one of those explode over your head would surely be enough to drain anyone’s will to life.

Finally, even though Bulwer-Lytton also wrote the famous line “The pen is mighter than the sword” (which always struck me as terribly Freudian, but perhaps I read too fast), the one line for which he is arguably most often remembered opens opens his 1830 novel “Paul Clifford”: “It was a dark and stormy night“.

Of course, this was the phrase with which Snoopy started all of his novels, including his own Great American Novel. What’s curious is that, by my estimation, the “forty thousand head of cattle” Snoopy mentions would liquidise down to roughly… a million cans of Bovril. Coincidence… or conspiracy? What do you think? And moreover, what about the king?

Titter ye not!

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Though I haven’t posted much about the Voynich Manuscript here recently, I have actually been doing a lot of research into it (for Curse 2), as well as a lot of thinking about how to decrypt it, mainly by trying to devise cryptological mechanisms that stand even a passing chance of achieving that (an “attack vector”, if you like).

Yesterday, I came up with something new (well, new to me, anyway). Having recently read a pile of books on WW2 codebreakers (e.g. the excellent “The Man Who Broke Purple”) and WW2 codebreaking (thanks to the whole cipher pigeon thing), an idea fresh in my mind was that one way to break a cipher system would be to get multiple instances of the same plaintext enciphered in different ways, and use that to understand how the cryptographic framework works. So… might there be any plaintext in the Voynich that was enciphered multiple times?

Well: it’s well known that a fair number of the herbal pictures reappear as small versions in the two pharma sections. These might well be visual recipes (as normally believed); or a visual cross-referencing hack (in the Quattrocento style of Mariano Taccola); or nonsense; or something else entirely. At the very least, however, this does tell a visual story about the content: that the drawings are far from completely arbitrary [as would be convenient for some people's Voynich theories], but instead are consistent and rule-based, even if we can’t yet discern what those rules are.

But what struck me as possibly offering us a chink into the Voynich’s cryptographic armour is the presence of two herbal pages as well as a recipe page all containing what seems to be the same plant… f17v, f96v & f99r:

Might it be that these three pages not only contain the same plant, but also the same (or very similar) plaintext enciphered in different ways? As readers of The Curse of the Voynich will doubtless know, I have a whole constellation of long-standing hunches about how Voynichese works: but finding effective ways of testing all these ideas has proved immensely tricky.

Anyway, let’s have a look at the texts (in EVA) [I've used Stolfi's transcription as a broad starting point, and 'bold'ed the Neal keys on the two herbal pages' top lines]:

f17v.P.1;F pchodol chor fchy opydaiin odaldy -
f17v.P.2;F ycheey keeor ctho dal okol odaiin okal -
f17v.P.3;F oldaik odaiin okal oldaiin chockhol olol -
f17v.P.4;F kchor fchol cphol olcheol okeeey -
f17v.P.5;F ychol chol dolcheey tchol dar ckhy -
f17v.P.6;F oekor or okaiin or otaiin d -
f17v.P.7;F sor chkeey poiis chor os saiin -
f17v.P.8;F qokeey kcha rol dy chol daiin sy -
f17v.P.9;F ycheol shol kchol chol taiin ol -
f17v.P.10;F oytor okeor okar okol doiir am -
f17v.P.11;F qokcheo qokoiir ctheol chol -
f17v.P.12;F oy choy keaiin chckhey ol chor -
f17v.P.13;F ykeor chol chol cthol chkor sheol -
f17v.P.14;F olor okeeol chodaiin okeol tchory -
f17v.P.15;F ychor cthy cheeky cheo otor oteol -
f17v.P.16;F okcheol chol okeol cthol otcheolo -
f17v.P.17;F m qoain sar she dol qopchaiin cthor -
f17v.P.18;F otor cheeor ol chol dor chr oreees -
f17v.P.19;F dain chey qoaiin cthor cholchom -
f17v.P.20;F ykeey okeey cheor chol sho ydaiin -
f17v.P.21;F oal cheor sholor or shecthy cpheor daiin -
f17v.P.22;F qokeee dar chey keeor cheeol ctheey cthy -
f17v.P.23;F chkeey okeor char okeom =

f96v.P.1;F psheas sheeor qoepsheody odar ocpheo opar ysar aso* -
f96v.P.2;F ytear yteor olcheey dteodaiin saro qoches ycheom -
f96v.P.3;F dcheoteos cpheos sar chcthosy cth ytch*y daiin -
f96v.P.4;F dsheos sheey teo cthy ctheodody -
f96v.P.5;F tockhy cthey ckheeody ar chey key -
f96v.P.6;F yteeody teodar alchey sy -
f96v.P.7;F sheodal chor ary cthol -
f96v.P.8;F ycheey ckheal daiins -
f96v.P.9;F oeol ckheor cheor aiin -
f96v.P.10;F ctheor oral char ckhey -
f96v.P.11;F sar os checkhey socth -
f96v.P.12;F sosar cheekeo daiin -
f96v.P.13;F soy sar cheor =

f99r.P4.13;F tol.keey.ctheey-{plant}
f99r.P4.14;F ykeol.okeol.o!ckheo.chol.cheodal.okeo!r.alcheem.orar-{plant}
f99r.P4.15;F okeeey.keey.keeor.okeey.daiin.okeol!s.aiin.olaiir.o!olshl-
f99r.P4.16;F qokeeo.okeey.qokeey.okisy.qokeeo.sar.sheseky.or.al-{plant}
f99r.P4.17;F **aiin.c!!!!khey.acthey.dy.daiin.okor.okeey.shcth!!!*!sh-
f99r.P4.18;H ychor.ols.or.am.air.om

The first thing I’d note is that, even though both herbal pages are marked up as “Herbal A” pages, their ciphertexts appear to have a completely different internal structure from each other. Specifically, f17v has lots of repetitive sequences such as “ychol chol dolcheey tchol ” / “chol chol cthol” / “okeor okar okol“, etc; while f96v has a different (dare I say more sophisticated?) feel altogether, with a nicely fluid use of letters. By way of further contrast, f99v is full of “ee” shapes such as “keey etheey” / “okeeey.keey.keeor.okeey” / “qokeeo.okeey.qokeey“, which looks clunky and repetitive in a quite different way from f17v.

The fact that all three text sequences accompany broadly the same diagram is surely some kind of indication that their contents could well be related in some way. However, there is (as far as I can see) no obvious textual overlap between the three of them. Hence I really don’t think the significant differences here can be accounted for purely in terms of presumed content. As a consequence, even though all three texts share the same glyphic building blocks, I think the precise ways the cipher system was employed in all three differ quite widely.

Unfortunately, this probably points to a weakness in the way we tend to talk about Voynichese: that we haven’t really established anything like a proper cryptographic ‘roadmap’ of the system’s evolution to help us navigate these differences with confidence. The page classifications we have inherited from Prescott Currier remain helpful in a fairly high-level sense, but I think our cryptanalytical needs have outstripped their low-level utility – they aren’t really strong enough tools to help us deal with the ciphertext itself.

And so my real Voynich research lead of the day is simply this: that I think we don’t yet know enough about the cryptanalytical differences between individual pages of Voynichese to be able to group /categorise / classify them effectively. What were the stages of evolution of the cipher system? What shapes or groups evolved into (or were replaced by) what? And why has it taken us more than a century to ask such basic questions?

Maybe, though, this is simply a consequence of the lack of detailed codicological insight we have into the original bifolio nesting and gathering layout (as well as composition order). If we had all that properly locked down, then perhaps we’d start to be more inquisitive about the changes going on in the cipher system, rather than just saying “it’s an A-page” or “it’s a B-page”.

Right now, looking at these three short sections, I have to say that it feels to me as if we still know next to nothing about how this cipher actually works.

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Part I
It was a dark and stormy night. The world-famous WW2 codebreaker furiously twiddled his moustache. Suddenly, a shout – “I’ve solved the Voynich!” It was the television! A small boy and his beagle were smiling at the camera, holding a book up. They had “proved it was a hoax”. This meant one thing: war! The codebreaker slammed the door and drove to the library.

Part II
Seven hundred years earlier, Knights Templar pounded the monastery door. Roger Bacon answered. “We’ll taketh that”, said the knights, grabbing the mysterious book from his hands. “My secrets are safe with you idiots”, sneered the codemaker monk.

Part III
The security guard approached. The codebreaker was in his pyjamas, waiting at the library’s front gate. “You’ll have to wait till morning, sir”, said the guard. A shot rang out. The guard slumped. The codebreaker hid the body in a snowdrift. The history graduate walked warily past the man in bloodstained pyjamas on her way home. The boy on TV carried on smiling.

Part IV
The Knights Templar couldn’t decipher the book. “Torture him!”, the Grand Master screamed. They tried, but Bacon had a heart attack and died. Nobody would ever know. Or would they? And then the whole Templar Order was suppressed. Or was it?

Part V
The gate opened, and the codebreaker ran in past the history graduate, again. The librarian shrugged. But where was the security guard? The codebreaker sped through all the pages one last time, until – yes, there it was! A bloody fingerprint, overlooked by everyone. It wasn’t a hoax! Outside, the librarian noticed the trail of blood and called the police. The dog smiled even harder.

Part VI
Leon Battista Alberti borrowed the book from the Vatican, his oily fingerprints messing up the radiocarbon dating. Suddenly, a thud! Alberti lay unconscious in the street, mugged: the thief ran away with his prize, for his great-grandchildren to sell to the Holy Roman Emperor, and from there to Athanasius Kircher in 1665, the Jesuit archives, and then Wilfrid Voynich in 1912.

Part VII
Bang! The codebreaker lay shot, slumped by the book, his vividly red blood mingling with the ink, the paint and the blood spatter from Alberti’s head. His life ebbing away, he suddenly realized: nobody would ever know. They’d all think it simply a hoax, forever. He lifted his hands to the sky and shouted “Noooooooo!” The boy and the dog danced on top of the kennel, one last time.

THE END

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And now for something completely different… “The Voynich Experiment”, a free online Voynich-themed computer game by Marwane [Wan] Kalam-Alami, a software engineer from Lyon, France. Use the cursor keys to roll the ball around, and occasionally press [Enter] to “evolve” your ball, and then press [down]+[left] or [down]+[right] to rotate the evolved entity, solving puzzles as you go.

OK, OK, I admit that the history makes no real sense (dated 1642, and signed “A.K.”, presumably Athanasius Kircher a full 13 years before he had the real thing sent to him), and all that’s really taken from the Voynich is a blanked out scan of f67v and f68r (plus a few bits of Voynichese floating around in the intro), but… give the guy a break, it’s a bit of fun. *sigh*

Enjoy!

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Petra & Frank Mehler emailed me a nice photo of a curious plate they recently encountered in a restaurant in Rome:

Yes, it is indeed Luigi Serafini‘s signature in the corner:

It turns out that Luigi Serafini is (when in Rome) a regular visitor to the Armando al Pantheon restaurant, Salita de Crescenzi 31, Rome, which is where the Mehlers saw the plate. The menu explains…

Nostro Amico da Sempre, Luigi Serafini, ha creato per noi il logo del Ristorante. Per chi si domandasse il significato del disegno vi do l’interpretazione che ci e’ stata data da lui : Il foro del Pantheon, compie attraverso il suo linguaggio, una metamorfosi trasformandosi in Uovo. Ora, simbolicamente, per Luigi Serafini, l’Uovo e’ Appunto l’inizio del tutto… quindi essendo alla fine del disegno… L’Uovo Primordiale e’ al Centro dell’Universo e porta con se Il Pantheon e di conseguenza « Armando al Pantheon » !!!

Translating freely for flow and fun (rather than for strict accuracy), I think this means:-

Our restaurant’s logo was designed for us by our Eternal Friend Luigi Serafini. For those who would ask us its meaning, feel free to interpret the explanation that he gave: that the hole [at the top of the Pantheon's dome] undergoes a linguistic metamorphosis into an egg. Now symbolically, according to Serafini, the Egg is eggsactly the beginning of everything… so placing it at the end of the design shifts the Primordial Egg to the Center of the Universe, thereby bringing with it the Pantheon and consequently the “Armando al Pantheon”!

Indeed, if you stand in the middle of the Pantheon in Rome (which is, unsurprisingly, only a few steps away from the restaurant) and look right up, do you not see a Cosmic Fried Egg hidden in plain sight in the cupola overhead?

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The WW2 cipher pigeon message we’ve been trying to crack is addressed to “X02″… which is what, exactly?

Speculation in the initial Daily Mail article was that X02 was a code denoting RAF Bomber Command in High Wycombe. However, against that notion runs the facts that (a) the message was written on an Army Pigeon Message pad, (b) the message was inside a red-coloured (probably British Army) canister, and (c) the British Army enciphered much of its communications.

The problem here is that even though this “Bomber Command” suggestion is therefore fairly threadbare, nobody has yet come up with any properly credible alternatives. It appeared to be yet another aspect of the message that was destined to stay mysterious.

But now I can reveal what X02 actually means.

If you spend the day in the archives at the Royal Signals Museum in Blandford Forum, Dorset (as Stu Rutter and I did yesterday), you might just happen to ask their very helpful archivist if the museum’s archives contains any boxes on codes and ciphers cyphers. And you might then just happen to find at the bottom of one of the two boxes of files a small blue handbook:-

This booklet briefly describes a selection of common “X-codes” used in signalling, most of which are made up of “X” followed by three digits. (There is also a large set of three-letter Q-codes and a large set of three-letter Z-codes.)

However, there’s one very specific exception to the three-digit X-code layout: and that is for codes beginning with “X0″, which are specifically to do with addressees:-

Hence “X0234″ would mean “pass to the 2nd, 3rd, and 4th addressees”. In the case of our pigeon message, “X02” simply means “pass to the 2nd addressee“. Which would strongly imply that the (already very short) ciphertext includes at least two addressees. (It was perfectly normal Army practice to include addressees inside ciphertexts: an encrypted address / addressee was known as a codress, while an encrypted address that was concealed within a message (rather than in a consistent place) was known as a “buried codress”.)

And that’s basically it: the mystery of the X02 solved.

OK, I’m sorry Stu & I weren’t yet able to crack the rest of our cipher pigeon’s message, but rest assured we’re hot on its trail…

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In the 1970s, Captain Prescott Currier noted that the Voynich Manuscript’s text seemed to contain two separate ‘languages’ (“A” and “B”), each containing sub-languages that varied yet further. For him, the language differences were primarily statistical rather than linguistic: to tell what we now call ‘Currier A pages’ & ‘Currier B pages’ apart, he observed that (using the EVA transcription):-

“(a) Final ‘dy’ is very high in Language ‘B’; almost non-existent in Language ‘A.’
(b) The symbol groups ‘chol’ and ‘chor’ are very high in ‘A’ and often occur repeated; low in ‘B’.
(c) The symbol groups ‘chain’ and ‘chaiin’ rarely occur in ‘B’; medium frequency in ‘A.’
(d) Initial ‘chot’ high in ‘A’; rare in ‘B.’
(e) Initial ‘cTh’ very high in ‘A’; very low in ‘B.’
(f) ‘Unattached’ finals scattered throughout Language ‘B’ texts in considerable profusion; generally much less noticeable in Language ‘A.’“

Similarly, he thought that the writing seemed to have been done by at least two hands (specifically, a larger, rounded hand he called “1″ [mainly on A pages], and a more cramped, tighter hand he called “2″ [mainly on B pages]), which he was convinced were those of at least two different people. He also pointed out that certain Voynichese letters appeared to have a very position-dependent behaviour, and that a line of text seems to be a functional unit in some way.

I would argue that Currier’s work has been arguably the single most influential piece of Voynich research of the last few decades, because it in effect erects a pragmatic conceptual framework for working with the Voynich Manuscript that every researcher who follows should strongly bear in mind, if not actually use.

So when I get told about so-called Voynich ‘research’ that treats the entire Voynich Manuscript as a uniformly homogenous linguistic entity (i.e. ignoring Currier completely), I give a little sigh of muted exasperation and move swiftly on. This is simply because Currier’s languages are to the Voynich manuscript what the Gillogly strings are to the Beale Ciphers: hence any claimed explanation or decryption that fails to account for Currier’s raw (yet actually rather unexpected, if you think about it) set of statistical observations is simply doomed to failure, period, even 40 years on.

I think it’s important to point out that Currier wasn’t some technical-minded Army codebreaker doing a bit of Voynich moonlighting: having graduated in Philology (with a focus on Romance Languages) from the University of Washington, he was surely perfectly placed to contribute a balanced analytical insight into the elusive internal structure of Voynichese. Hence I think the real reason that Currier’s work has been so influential in the field is that he really cared about what he was doing, and that he wanted to make a constructive, positive difference to Voynich studies.

Sadly, Currier’s insights failed to inspire a community-wide statistical assault on the Voynich Manuscript: researchers trundled on with their existing ad hoc studies, perpetually reinventing wheels – the big red revolution bus never arrived at the Voynich stop. The only obvious difference was that at least a few sensible people (Rene Zandbergen, Mark Perakh, etc) did manage to do statistical tests on A and B pages separately, which is a start, I guess… but only a start.

But because Currier restricted his work to statistical observations, he never built his framework up into the kind of thing Annales historians call a problematique, i.e. a fully rounded research question that drives future research forward. It’s all very well cleverly spotting the presence of different languages (some people prefer to say “dialects”, but it’s an open question) within the text, but that does beg some rather big questions, so-called “elephants in the room” that everyone can see but nobody talks about:-

* Why are the different languages fragmented across the document, often mixed up within a single quire?
* What gives rise to all the variation both within Currier A and within Currier B?
* Why was there a need for multiple languages at all? Why not just stick with Currier A?

Fast forward to 2013, and I think we can answer at least one of these questions, and provide reasonable (if tentative) answers to the other two.

Firstly: the simple reason that the Voynich languages are in disarray appears to be that the bifolios themselves are in disarray. I and others have uncovered numerous different codicological artefacts that strongly suggest the initial gatherings were disrupted, bound, rebound, and indeed misbound; and there is even specific evidence that quite a few bifolios ended up reversed relative to their original facing direction (i.e. folded back to front across the central crease).

Essentially, as the bifolios themselves were scrambled, so too were the languages: which is why A bifolios and B bifolios appear juxtaposed within individual bound quires. Yet given that there are large homogenous stretches of A and B bifolios, it seems likely that the scrambling wasn’t absolute – while I don’t think the Voynich bifolios were ever blown down a street in the wind, I do believe that what we see arose from a combination of planned shuffling (e.g. moving the large multi-panel bifolios towards the back and binding them there) and unplanned shuffling (binding breaking on some quires, spilling the bifolios onto the floor).

Secondly: I strongly believe that the structural and palaeographic differences between A pages and B pages tells a strong story of two major writing phases (let’s call them the “A phase” and the “B phase”). Identifying different composition phases through close reading is the kind of thing that modern historians do all the time, so this isn’t a fundamentally new approach: the only nuance here is that rather than close textual analysis (for Critical Reading) or art technique de-layering (for Art History), we’re instead looking at a cryptanalytical close reading. But then again, isn’t that what Currier was hoping for?

Note that I’m not speculating here about why there were two writing phases: at this point it’s enough just to identify them and give them names. But it does point to some interesting questions about why there should be both Herbal A pages and Herbal B pages, and what the difference between them might turn out to be (a topic upon which I’ve previously speculated more than enough for one lifetime, some would say).

Thirdly: within each of the A & B writing phases, I believe that the variations in the statistics will turn out to have arisen because of cryptographic evolution during each phase. By this, I mean that the core cryptographic system in use at the outset of each phase evolved during the various writing phases, as the author(s) finessed the system to work around specific cryptographic challenges encountered along the way, and so ending up a very different beast at the close.

I suspect that this will prove to be a set of “ratchet” effects, in that once changes were made to the system they would probably tend to stay in place until they in turn were replaced or finessed. I therefore believe that the cryptanalytical challenge we face is working out the evolutionary curves that the A system and the B system traced out – quantifying and then mapping them as if the system driving them were a probabilistic Markov state machine, its configuration relentlessly evolving as the text flows from page to page to page.

As to the specifics of how we should do this, you’ll have to wait for the next post…

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A pirate is a thief on a ship, a privateer is a pirate licensed to steal from other countries’ ships, while a corsair is a French or Muslim privateer. (Oh, and a buccaneer was a hunter from Hispaniola who had turned pirate or privateer, but that’s another story.)

For the story behind the La Buse / Le Butin pirate cipher, it’s important to understand that while La Buse (Olivier Levasseur) was a pirate through and through, Le Butin (Bernardin Nageon de L’estang) seems to have been a nationalistic pirate who then turned official privateer before finally becoming a sailor in Napoleon’s Indian Ocean fleet (such as it was), where he died.

Specifically, Le Butin’s will (as described in Part 1) says “In my adventurous life before embarking on the Apollon, I was one of those pirates corsairs who did so much harm to our enemies Spain and England.”

At first, this didn’t mean much to me: but while reading “Forgotten Eden” (1968) by Athol Thomas, fragments of the larger story began to emerge. It turns out that the 16-gun Apollon (built in 1796) had been one of the most famous corsair ships in the Indian Ocean, because during a six month period in 1797 she captured over 700 million francs’ worth of treasure. Her illustrious captain was Jean François Hodoul whose grave at the Bel Air cemetery in the Seychelles’ Mahé Island sports (according to Thomas, though I haven’t been able to verify this) a carving of the Apollon.

The Apollon then passed from Hodoul to one of the other “Kings of the Corsairs”, Louis La Vaillant: there’s a line drawing of her from 1798:-

However, the Apollon’s shimmering career was then abruptly terminated by Captain Thomas Surridge on H.M.S. Leopard on 24th October 1798 (according to the London Gazette): the prize papers taken from the Apollon are HCA 49/13-5 at The National Archives in Kew (though these are marked as “1799″, perhaps the date they were archived).

By far the best account of the Apollon’s end I’ve found so far is from the extremely well-researched and well-informed Henri Maurel:-

A son retour à Port Louis, L’Apollon, dont Hodoul aurait possédé la moitié des parts, fut vendu au corsaire Le vaillant, qui en assura le commandement. L’Apollon appareilla pour une campagne le 22 Août 1798, captura une riche prise portugaise, puis fut lui-même arraisonné par le HMS Leopard, le 10 Novembre 1798, à environ 500 miles au NE de Mombasa, près de l’équateur et Longitude 45° 30′. Son équipage fut emmené à Anjouan, aux îles Comores, mais purent, plus tard, retourner à Maurice. Il est improbable qu’ Hodoul ait été parmi eux, en dépit de l’affirmation de Toussaint, comme officier en second. [xxii]

Si l’on considère la date de naissance du premier enfant de Hodoul, Raymond, le 20/06/1799, et “en comptant sur les doigts”, on arrive à la conclusion que son enfant avait été conçu en septembre 1798. Hodoul n’était donc pas à Bord de L’Apollon lors du départ de ce navire de Port Louis. Cet argument est conforté par deux éléments irréfutables: Un exemplaire du rôle d’équipage de L’Apollon retrouvé au Archives Départementales de la Réunion [xxiii], indique que le navire avait relâché dans cette île, certainement pour “faire le plein” de volontaires. La mention marginale en face du nom de Hodoul indique “à Prendre aux Seychelles”. L’Apollon n’ira point le chercher, car dans ses mémoires, le matelot Tabardin [xxiv], écrit ” … nous partons et nous voilà voguant sur les flots. Nous passâmes à Bourbon pour y prendre des volontaires, et continuant notre voyage, la première terre que nous vîmes fut la baie de Lagoa, ensuite celle de St Augustin; Puis nous dirigeâmes notre route vers Mozambique pour y établir notre croisière.” Hodoul échappa donc à cette fâcheuse aventure.

[xxii] Auguste Toussaint: Dictionnaire de Biographies Mauricienne.
[xxiii] Liasse L408
[xxiv] Mémoires de Tabardin, manuscrit, Carnegie Hall Curepipe Ile Maurice

My typical free’n'easy translation of Maurel’s text runs like this:-

On her return to Port Louis, the Apollon (which Hodoul had owned half the shares of) was sold to the corsair Louis La Vaillant, who also became her captain. The Apollon embarked on a new campaign on August 22nd 1798, captured a rich Portuguese ship, but was herself then taken by H.M.S. Leopard on November 10th 1798 about 500 miles NE of Mombasa near the equator, at Longitude 45° 30′. Her crew was brought to Anjouan in the Comoros Islands, but may later have returned to Mauritius. Despite the assertion to the contrary of Toussaint, the second officer, it is unlikely that Hodoul was among them. [xxii]

This is because if we count backwards ‘on our fingers’ from Hodoul’s first child Raymond’s date of birth (20th June 1799), we arrive at the conclusion that he was conceived in September 1798. Hence Hodoul was not on board at the start of the Apollon’s journey in Port Louis. This argument is strengthened by two irrefutable facts: (1) a copy of the crew list of Apollon found in the Archives Départementales de la Réunion [xxiii], which indicates that the vessel put in on the island, almost certainly to “fill up” its complement of volunteer seamen; and (2) the marginal note in front of Hodoul’s name indicates that he was “Taken to the Seychelles”. Apollon didn’t go looking for him at all because, as the sailor Tabardin [xxiv] wrote in his memoirs, “… we departed and straightaway we were sailing on the waves. We went to Bourbon [i.e. Reunion] to take on volunteers; and, continuing our journey, the first land we saw was Delagoa Bay, then on to St. Augustine’s Bay [in Madagascar]. After that we proceeded on our way towards Mozambique to get our cruise properly underway.” Hodoul thus escaped this unfortunate adventure.

Personally, this leaves me with little doubt that it was indeed the famous corsair ship Apollon that Le Butin served on: but under which captain – Hodoul or La Vaillant? I’m reasonably sure that it will turn out to be Le Vaillant, which is probably why Le Butin’s corsair career came to an end there: but perhaps a definite answer will be found in the crew list on Réunion, or in the prize papers at The National Archives.

Next step is to find enough time & money to get down there to see for myself (Réunion would be nice, sure, but I’ll probably have to settle for the bus fare to Kew & back, oh well!)…

The post La Buse’s / Le Butin’s Pirate Cipher (Part 3)… appeared first on Cipher Mysteries.

As we saw in Part 1, Bernardin Nageon de L’estang (“Le Butin”) said in the note added to his will that he had been in a French corsair ship when the captain was mortally wounded:

We made many splendid captures from them, but at our last battle with a large British frigate on the shores of Hindustan, the captain was wounded and on his deathbed confided to me his secrets and his papers to retrieve considerable treasure buried in the Indian Ocean; and, having first made sure that I was a Freemason, asked me to use it to arm privateers against the English.

To my historical eyes, the problem with this part of his story is that, as a rule, French corsairs were many times more interested in capturing treasure-laden English merchant ships coming from the East Indies than in engaging with English frigates off the coast of Hindustan (far from the main Booty Route). In fact, I would estimate that during the period 1790 to 1800, there would have been less than five (and, indeed, quite possibly zero) naval actions involving French corsairs off the coast of Hindustan.

All the same, our starting point here ought to be to take Le Butin’s account at face value, and we only need to find one such action to make it substantially more plausible: and in fact, the fewer the actions we find, arguably the more likely we are to have identified the ship that Le Butin was on. But where on earth might we find primary evidence of an inconclusive sea battle in that place & at that time?

Step forward our white knight of the day – Roger Houghton who, according to his Guardian user profile, “spent a couple of years as a Purser’s Clerk on Union-Castle ships then joined the Hong Kong police for a tour and finally became a private investigator for thirty years“. His admirable website A Peoples’ History 1793 – 1844 from the newspapers contains a frankly unbelievable amount of primary evidence culled from old newspapers all over the world.

For our purposes, his France in Asia chapter contains hundreds of extracts from those editions of the Bombay Courier held in the British Library (though with several sizeable gaps, e.g. the whole of 1797), many of which relay news items culled from Mauritian newspapers brought to India on neutral ships. And it was there that the following article leapt out at me:-

Sat 12th March 1796 [date of the report]

The French have attacked the small Portuguese enclave of Diu, north of Bombay. On 9th February 1796 three warships under British colours were seen. Capt Josef de Souza of the Portuguese frigate Real Fidelesima supposed them to be Admiral Elphinstone’s squadron returning from the Cape.

He was anchored 2 miles off Diu fort and was preparing to honour the inbound ships in the required way when he received a broadside. The three ships then raised the tricolor and fired a second broadside. De Souza cut his cables and ran in under the fort. The three ships then exchanged fire with the frigate and the fort for about 4 hours when, with dusk approaching, the French left. One of their ships had to be towed away. Afterwards about 500 shot (from 9- 12- and 18-pounders) were collected from the beach where they had rebounded from the stone walls of the fort.

The Real Fidelesima then sailed to Goa with the Diu Governor Caetano de Souza and the colonial supervisor Antonio Baptiste de Cunha as passengers.

According to the 3decks website, the Portuguese ship (actually the “Real Fidelissima”) was a 24-gun corvette built in 1777 in Damao (a Portuguese enclave not far from Diu). Later, the ship was loaned to the British but ended up wrecked in 1817 near Perim Island in the Gulf of Aden (there’s correspondence on this in the archives). Similarly, a Portuguese site records her as having 28 artillery pieces (22 twelve-pounders and 6 six-pounders) and 200 men on board, used mainly as a coastguard ship and for protecting convoys out of India. Here’s what she looks like:-

All of which seems strongly consistent with the news report. So… might we have found our mysterious naval action? Might the captain on the towed-away French ship have been (as per Le Butin’s letter) mortally wounded?

Though this is certainly possible, we’re still a long way from being able to tell the whole story. The next challenge would be to try to find primary evidence from February-March 1796 as to what was going on – a set of three ships sailing under false flags would have been a suspicious sight. At that date, moreover, a crippled French corsair ship near Diu would have to be towed a very long way to find a friendly port – perhaps even the Seychelles. What is nice here is that we have a very specific date range to look for, which might strongly limit the amount of searching we need to do to find this ship & captain.

As far as Diu itself goes, one very useful secondary source is a paper “Diu, the commercial activity in a small harbour in Gujarat (1680-1800) : the Portuguese documents” (in English) by Luis Frederico Dias Antunes, published in the book SOURCES EUROPÉENNES SUR LE GUJARAT, because this refers directly to a good number of archival sources for what was happening there during the period we’re interested in. The most relevant archive he summarizes would seem to be the Filmoteca Ultramarina Portuguesa in Lisbon, whose Manuscript #12 covers the period 1791-1797. All the same, there is (as he notes) relatively little relating to Diu in the archives, so the chances are high that this will not yield the results we hope for.

In summary… to my eyes, the supposed link between Le Butin’s pirate cipher and La Buse’s (legendary) pirate cipher looks ever weaker. All the while that Le Butin’s letters largely seem to be checking out (even if the historical records on this are generally quite thin), the less need his story has of La Buse (who, after all, was hanged some 70 years earlier). But even so, there is plenty of room for manoeuvre on these volatile tides, and pirates have always proved difficult to pin down! We shall, with a spot of luck, see!

The post La Buse’s / Le Butin’s Pirate Cipher (part 4)… appeared first on Cipher Mysteries.

I’ve been reading more about La Buse & Le Butin, and I have to say I’m not hugely impressed by the research that has been done into either. More books on 18th century corsairs are (as Eddie Elgar might have said) ‘winging their woundabout way’ to Cipher Mysteries Mansions; but if what I’ve seen so far is any guide, I’ll be no less confused in a year’s time.

But really, I think that good historical research is painfully easy to spot, as it combines:-
(1) an appreciation of primary sources (or at least early secondary ones);
(2) a healthy scepticism towards the mythology built up around events and objects; and
(3) empathy towards the people involved (but without a lot of modern back-projection).

Even though we now arguably have better access to primary (or at least closely contemporary) historical sources than ever before, few historians now seem to have the knack for dealing with them properly. Perhaps this is from the slow-motion death of taught codicology and palaeography; or perhaps it’s from the way many of them seem eager to lock themselves into a tightly-specialized silo without no obvious broader-brush historical context or framework to bounce their research against. I guess you’ll have your own thoughts on this, it’s not exactly front page news.

Similarly, the guff that Internet sites pass off as “history” tends to be even more romantic and speculative than even Victorian historians ever managed. In particular, cipher mysteries are so plagued by this rot that I now routinely tell people it’ll take me at least a month to separate what’s real from what’s Maybelline in any new cipher strand – the whole “La Buse / Le Butin” thing is simply the exemple du jour of what is a miserable and much larger trend.

But to my hay-fevered eyes, it’s arguably empathy that I find most obviously lacking. The people of the past aren’t cut-out stick-figures jerking on a historian’s Punch-and-Judy stage, they were real people stuck in uncertain situations, operating blind of their actions’ future consequences. Their decisions were often (quite literally) life-and-death ones; so reducing past lives to mere critical reading textual exercises misses the point.

For me, empathy is that which transcends the details and defies the scepticism: it’s the negentropic force that gives History back the three-dimensionality stripped away by temporal distance, and that pulls the fragmentary pieces together into a sensible whole. Yet… I just don’t see who gives a monkey’s about empathy any more.

Do you?

The post Long-overdue mini-rant… appeared first on Cipher Mysteries.

Who was the mysterious French sea captain who Le Butin (Bernardin Nageon de L’estang) got his pirate cipher from?

Le Butin claimed that this captain was mortally wounded in a naval battle with “a large British frigate on the shores of Hindoustan”, and on his deathbed – and having confirmed that Le Butin was a Freemason – he passed Le Butin his pirate treasure secrets, now widely presumed to be La Buse’s pigpen cryptogram.

All in all, taking this at face gives us a pretty specific historical puzzle to solve – we know where it happened (off the coast of Hindustan, so not too far from the ports of Surat, Diu, and Daman), broadly who did it (a large English frigate), and broadly when it happened (sometime in the 1790s). But can we be more specific?

Trying a little too hard for a quick answer, I drew up a list of Indian Ocean French corsairs who died during that period (perhaps surprisingly, many of them seemed to live to a tidy old age – crime may not pay, but state-licensed crime apparently does). For example, the French corsair Claude Deschiens de Kerulvay died on 11th September 1796 on his ship the Modeste having been wounded in a sea-battle with two well-armed English whalers the previous day… but that was off the coast of Mozambique. So, no real match there, it would seem. And the same proved to be the case with just about all the others.

I also previously dug up a mention of a sea battle of the coast of Hindustan that happened on 9th February 1796, where three French warships sailing under false flags engaged with the coastguard ship Real Fidelissima just off Diu. But that was a small Portuguese ship, guarding a Portuguese port in India… once again, “close, but no cigar”.

Even so, I worked out that two of the three French warships that attacked Diu were almost certainly the Cybèle (under Captain Renaud) and the Prudente (under Captain Tréhouart). The third ship might have been the brig Coureur (under Lieutenant Garaud), the corvette Pélagie (under Lieutenant Latour-Cassanhiol) which had joined Renaud’s division in 1795, the Jean-Bart (formerly the Rosalie, under Captain Loyseau), or even Deschiens de Kerulvay’s Modeste. Incidentally, the Modeste was laid up in May 1796, which would be broadly consistent with its having been the ship that the Portuguese coastguard and fort cannons damaged in the action off Diu… but that’s a bit thin as inferences go.

I think we can be a little more specific about the timing, though. Specifically, it seems very unlikely to me that it would have been after the summer of 1796, when the truly formidable Admiral de Sercey (who is commemorated on the Arc de Triomphe!) took control of the French Mauritius fleet. And given that the number of attacks by French corsairs on the British East India ships ballooned after 1793, the date range we’re interested in is probably from late 1793 to July 1796. That’s a reasonably good start… but not quite good enough. And so it was there that my train ran out of steam.

But then a copy of H.C.M. Austen’s (1934) “Sea Fights and Corsairs of the Indian Ocean” arrived through the post (the Cipher Mysteries budget only stretched to the 2003 paperback 2nd edition, but even that was hard enough to find). Having this lovely old slab to hand allowed me to cross-reference everything I’d found so far with Austen’s detailed accounts of the various Indian Ocean naval actions [even if some parts of it have clearly been superseded by modern research].

Even though I’m only half-way through it (it’s a big old thing, really it is), I’m now pretty sure that Le Butin’s dying captain will turn out to be none other than Jean-Marie Renaud, head of the French Navy’s Indian Station.

Renaud’s main claim to naval fame came from the action of 22nd October 1794, when he proposed a way to break the British blockade of Mauritius’ Port Louis. The Cybèle and the Prudente were badly damaged in the sea fight (and Renaud himself was wounded, though not fatally), but Renaud’s plan worked, and the blockade was lifted… for a few weeks, anyway.

Austen continues (p.64)…

Early in 1795, as soon as the two frigates had been repaired, Renaud took them out as naval corsairs. On 30th June, in the Straits of Sunda, they captured the Sea Nymph; on 8th July, in the mouth of the Palimban River, a Dutch and many other ships, one of which, the Acheines of 400 tons, was ransomed by the Nabob of Arcot for 120,000 francs.

…before finishing with a sentence that is both mysterious and unsatisfying…

No historian has as yet been able to trace the ultimate fate of Renaud.

The the Wikipedia page on Renaud asserts that (and:-
* “capitaine de vaisseau Renaud” was in Guyane in 1799 [BB4 139. CAMPAGNES. 1799. VOLUME 10]
* “capitaine Renaud”, captaining the Frigate Syrène in 1801 as per this quote from Guerin’s “Histoire maritime de France” (p.211) [note that "Cayenne" was the French colony in Guyana]:-

“La corvette le Berceau remplaçait, dans la station de Cayenne, la frégate la Syrène, capitaine Renaud, qui, après un beau combat contre deux frégates anglaises, était allée déposer dans cette colonie le commissaire Victor Hugues, et elle avait en levé, le 10 juillet 1800, une bonne partie d’un convoi anglo-por tugais, amariné une corvette et mis en fuite un brig d’escorte, lorsque ayant conduit à bon port ses prises évaluées à plus de quatre millions, elle fut rencontrée par la frégate le Boston, de 32 canons, avec laquelle il lui fallut soutenir trois combats successifs à portée de pistolet.“

I also found one further possible Renaud reference listed in the French Marine archives:
* “cdt. Renaud, enseigne de vaisseau” was commanding a ship called the Unité full of prisoners between Toulon and Mahon in 1801 [BB4 156. CAMPAGNES. 1801. VOLUME 6]

But no, I don’t believe that any of these references are to the same M. Renaud who sailed the Indian Ocean. For a start, I don’t believe that Renaud ever returned to France – the hero of the 1794 naval action would surely have merited some kind of official response, whether a pension or an honour. And for another, I simply don’t believe that he would have gone completely silent for 3-4 years at what was essentially the peak of his career.

No, the French marine archives of the period are sufficiently detailed and complete that any move by a well-thought-of figure would have been carefully noted (particularly by the enthusiastically bureaucratic Admiral de Sercey, whose letters fill the French Marine archives), but honestly, there’s nowt t’see there. OK, you may say that “absence of evidence isn’t evidence of absence”: but here we do have plenty of evidence in the archives, all saying nothing about what Renaud was doing. To me, that’s arguably as close to “evidence of absence” as you’re likely to get.

I’d agree that a man about whose family, birth (place and date) and death (place and date) we currently know nothing is always going to be an easy lapel to pin a mystery medal on. But if I’ve got him figured out right, what’s the next step, hmmm?

Well… so far, I’ve played most of this from the French archival side: but now it’s time to (you’re way ahead of me) jump ship over to the British archives.

Hence my plan (such as it is) is to try to work out what large British frigates were anywhere near the Hindustan coast between 9th February 1796 (when Diu was attacked) and late March 1796 (when Captain Galloway of the American ship Restoration said “the Prudente, the Cybèle and a corvette returned to Port Louis … without any prizes.“). It’s a pretty tight window.

Really, the list of possible British ships who were in the exact place at the exact time must surely be quite short (no more than three or four?), so finding those out should be relatively straightforward. The carrot on the stick is that the papers of many British ships of this period are still accessible, along with contemporary Admiralty reports etc: so once those ship names are in hand, I believe it should be possible to go straight to the primary evidence and see what it tells us. There may be quite an unexpected story to be found there, you never know…

PS: there may possibly be more to see in BB4 86. CAMPAGNES. 1795. VOLUME 23 in the French Marine archives, as I’ve only seen the item summary: “Frégate la Prudente (croisière autour de Sumatra ; Saint-Denis-de-la-Réunion), cdt. Renaud, capitaine de vaisseau à titre temporaire. 2 frim. an IV” (i.e. cruising around Sumatra, 23rd November 1795). Even so, I suspect that’s where Renaud goes off the French radar and possibly onto the British radar… hopefully we shall see!

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