![]() Might it be that ( Voynich researchers will perhaps groan at this point, but…) some of these were emended by a later owner? 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?įor example, “doeurs” is a mere dot away from “coeurs” while mysterious non-words such as “filttinshientecu” might actually start “fils…” rather than “filt…”. 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. 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.įar 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 best single page presentation of it I’ve found comes from this French site that tries to colour-code the letters. ![]() Povr en pecger une femme dhrengt vous n ave Here’s one version from the Internet with spaces added in for marginal extra clarity:-ĭe mielle ef ovtre fous en faites une ongat …while the cryptogram itself looks like this (click on it to see a larger image)…Īnd 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. Arranged in traditional pigpen style, the key looks like this… Īnother 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.īut 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). 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. 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‘. Just so you know, John C-W himself “believes buried the bounty according to a complex riddle inspired by the 12 labors of Hercules”, ten of which he believes he has solved. 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. 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“. Spurred on by the promise of gold-gold-gold, numerous treasure hunters have poured decades of their lives into this whole, ummm, ‘hopeful enterprise’. ![]() 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“. 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. 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. ![]() 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).
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