An Introduction
If the gentle reader is familiar with the story of the Beale Papers, I hope that the introductory material will be useful in summing up my knowledge, to open myself up to being checked and to frame the ciphers in what I feel to be the most accurate contexts. If one is just coming to, or just coming back to, the Beale story, then the hoped for value of an introduction should be obvious. Also at the beginning, I would like to call attention to the sources that drew my attention to the Beale Papers, the book The Code Book, by Simon Singh, and the Disney XD series Gravity Falls, created by Alex Hirsch.
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| This jerk right here played a part |
Additional thanks should be given to Stephen M. Matyas’s website, which is written around the conclusion that the ciphers conceal genuine text, but still proved invaluable because of the breadth of information he has gathered, and his willing to include sources that disagree with his conclusions, as well as making responses to a wide variety of arguments to his conclusions. At the very end of this series, I will take the time to address his arguments and counter-arguments, making my best effort to live up to the fair-mindedness and courtesy that Mr. Matyas used. My selecting his work to be responded to is intended as a gesture of respect.
Now let us begin with the story of the Beale Papers, a story that gives a bit of my conclusion away by starting in 1885 instead of, say, 1817, 1820, or 1822.
In 1885, James B. Ward published a pamphlet describing jewels and literal tons of gold and silver buried within a few miles of the town in which the pamphlet was published. This made a bit of a stir, as well as fifty cents apiece (about fourteen dollars apiece in 2021 money). The action described in the story of the treasure was primarily contained more than sixty years before the printing of the pamphlet. If anyone in the area had been alive and old enough to remember local innkeepers, and had lived their whole lives in the town, I know of no comment, letter, or evidence they left that might say anything at all about this story. The long stretch of time serves to insulate the time of the printing from the time of the alleged treasure very effectively.
The story has three primary characters, a traveling adventurer named Thomas J Beale (who started out with the treasure), an innkeeper named Robert Morriss (who held enciphered clues to this treasure), and an unnamed friend of Robert Moriss (who slid into want due to spending more than twenty years trying to decode the message himself). I will refer to Thomas J Beale as “TJB”; I will refer to Robert Morriss as “MTF”, because his role in this story is as a Most Trustworthy Fellow; the unknown friend as “MP” for “Mystery Pauper”; and the pamphlet author as “PA” (the pamphlet author, and possibly the author of the whole darn thing, was either – if the pamphlet describes reality – MP, or – if the pamphlet was false – almost certainly publisher James B Ward). I am using initials instead of names because I am not convinced that any part of the story is real, and one effect of using names is to make the story more accessible and make trusting the story easier. I do not want to do that. I hope that at every step I will be as fair and impartial as I can be, and I hope that someone who is convinced that the Beale Papers represent a genuine treasure can still read this, enjoy it, and even gain useful information from it.
Many versions of the Beale Pamphlet are available online, differing mostly by “helpfully” correcting errors apparently made by the PA. I will try to work as closely back to the original as I can, and try and find images of the originals. I will only summarize the story here; for a version of the complete story, please look at the link at the beginning of this paragraph. My strongest recommendation is that when basing an analysis on the Beale Papers, try and get as close to the originals as possible. In a number of cases, online versions have been cleaned up (just a bit), or have had helpful information added, implicit mistakes repaired, such that actual data in the “messiness” can get lost. (There is an important point at which I contend that this might even have happened when the pamphlet was first typeset!) I will point out where I have found these places when they appear.
I said that I shall try to be as fair as possible, so I will attempt to describe each topic as neutrally and factually as possible, and then diverge into clearly labeled sections in which I try and approach what we have as if the ciphers are a hoax, and as if the ciphers hold real information. I will label these sections as “IF THE BEALE PAPERS ARE REAL”, and “IF THE BEALE PAPERS ARE A HOAX”. Also out of an interest on fairness, I am going to admit at the beginning that I am convinced that the two unsolved Beale ciphers do not contain any real information, and were generated semi-randomly in steps that I think can be teased out. I think that The Beale Papers was not the result of a long and involved process including a tremendous amount of work, but was constructed in an economical enough way to make the fifty cent price of the pamphlet a reasonable return on investment. If you would like to compare this to a point of view that is absolutely convinced that the Beale Papers are real, I would recommend Stephen M. Matyas’ website. The author covers a lot of arguments and refers to and responds to Beale agnostics. Bear in mind, though, that this site is entirely from the point of view that the ciphers are absolutely real, which can lead to assessing possibilities in a way that I will argue can lead into error.
According to the pamphlet, different sections were created by different people. There is writing that claims to be written by TJB, some by MP, and some by the pamphlet author PA. There will be time when I refer to the writer as “the hoaxer”. I am not trying to take it for granted that it is a hoax, but when actions are being described that only serve a purpose in the case that the papers are a hoax, I will describe that actor as “the hoaxer”.
I will now attempt to fairly summarize the Beale Pamphlet.
The claimed story behind the claimed treasure
A Summary of the Beale Papers, Published by James B. Ward, the Only Person We Can 100% Guarantee Had Something To Do With Them.
As we go through the original pamphlet, we will see that a tremendous amount of space is spent discussing the uprightness, trustworthiness, honesty, and honor of TJB, MTF, MP, and MTF’s wife, Sarah. These people are claimed to be the source for the story in the pamphlet, so it does make some sense why so much effort is put into this, since in order for a reader to accept the story as true, they will have to have to trust everyone through whom the story passed. It will also be needed to explain why a stranger who knew MTF for about four months or so would entrust him with the care of about current value sixty million dollars in treasure for, at minimum, years, and that MTF would take on that responsibility for a traveler he had only known for that time period himself. Therefore, a big part of the narrative is “These people were all extremely trustworthy!”
There are people who have attempted to check the facts stated in the narrative with what information about those times and places can be gathered. I do not feel that I can add to their work, though I will try and fairly summarize the different results at the end, after what work I can do has been done.
The actual ”facts” (please adjust the quotation marks depending on your level of confidence in the reality of the Beale Treasure) are given out of chronological order, into the order in which the pamphlet author became aware of them, presumably to keep the reader’s interest up at the story is built toward the first big climax, the revelation of the treasure. I will make no criticism of the pamphlet author’s choices in this regard, but I am aiming at a different target, and since I would like clarity from the get-go, I will change up the order a bit. Please be kind enough to include “allegedly” before every declaration of fact in the story below. I am not doing this strictly due to the level of frustration that would accrue to the gentle reader.
In 1820, MTF became acquainted with TJB who stayed with MTF in Buford County while the two traveling companions of TJB continued to near to Richmond, where they had homes. (These two fellows, who I am going to nickname R and G – for Rosencrantz and Guildenstern – will come back into my analysis, if not into the story.) TJB, in the story, was from Virginia, possibly the western part of Virginia (as opposed to, but including, what is now West Virginia) but NOT from the immediate area. At no point is it ever claimed or intimated that TJB has any connection to Buford County besides the time he lived with MTF from January to March of 1820, and then from January to March of 1822.
When leaving MTF in March of 1822, (possibly alone; at the very least R&G have sadly left the Beale Pamphlet) TJB left a sturdy iron lockbox in the possession of MTF. Later, MTF received a letter from TJB as he was staying in St Louis for a week or so, indicating that there were documents in the box of great value. The letter is dated May 9th, 1822, but that does not prove truthfulness; a good lie has details. (Were I to present as true a story in which Mohandas Gandhi gets picked up by an alien spacecraft, and develops his principles of nonviolence by spending several months in bloody interstellar conflict with the Zooblukeans, the truth value of this story would not depend on one’s opinion of the worth of Gandhi’s word. The documents in the box included materials he could not read without a key, and TJB said that he had left the key with a friend in St Louis that would be sent to MTF in June of 1832 if nothing had been heard of TJB or someone acting in his name before that point. He was also given permission to appoint another caretaker of the box, if MTF became sick or died. Nothing more was ever heard from TJB; it was as if he had ceased to exist – though even a slightly suspicious reader might wonder if TJB had existed in the first place.
Receiving no contact or letter in 1832 or at any other time, MTF forgot about the box until 1845, when he opened the box. (Even at this point, we are now twenty-five years away from the events claimed for 1820-1822, but even more insulating time is on the way.) Opening the box, MTF discovered letters telling him that in 1817, TJB and some friends set out west looking for adventure, buffalo, and grizzly bears, in some uncertain order. A total party of at least thirty financially independent individuals set out from Virginia in April of 1817 aimed at St Louis, where they intended to equip themselves for adventure. They left in May for Santa Fe which at this time was part of New Spain; in 1821 it became part of the independent nation of Mexico. (If the past really is a foreign country, this is the second international border involved in this story.)
The party chose TJB to be captain. This may be another reason why so much praise is heaped on TJB’s character in the beginning of the story – he needed to be the one making the decisions in order to explain the part that MTF, his friend of four months, will play. From December of 1820 until March of 1821, the adventuring party stayed in Santa Fe, New Spain, until some of the group went north hunting buffalo. More than a month later, a couple came back to inform the rest that the subgroup had stumbled upon a fantastic exposed vein of gold, and “visions of boundless wealth and future grandeur” brought the rest of the group up to work the mine, which also turned out to be generously supplied with silver as well.
When a substantial amount of gold and silver had been mined, it was agreed that some of the group would take it 1,700 miles to Buford County, which all of the Virginia gentlemen of the adventuring party had visited, but where none of them lived and bury it. The whole party went five hundred miles, and then ten went the rest of the way, burying the treasure when they got there. (If the party existed, it is possible that they took a path that took them through Kansas, so that 500 miles would take them out of New Spain and into the United States territories, although the alleged treasure site 250-300 miles north of Santa Fe could have the gold and silver discovered in United States territory.)
When the ten were burying the first wave of treasure, the ten decided that TJB should pick a reliable person to entrust with papers describing the location of the treasure. The group then went back and successfully continued mining. When a second wave of treasure was added to the vault, the strongbox was left with MTF. After this, the entire group of thirty well-off Virginians disappeared, whether it was due to being massacred by Native Americans (PA’s apparent favorite choice), or eaten by grizzlies, or stomped on by buffalo, or some other mischance, including the mischance of never having existed in the first place. The strongbox was said to contain a letter to MTF, allegedly from TJB describing the three pages of numbers.
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| Always a danger. |
The box stayed with MTF until he opened it in 1845. In 1862, dying, he handed the box including the location of the treasure, a list of its constituent parts, and a list of the heirs of the thirty members of the group. The papers were said to be otherwise unmarked, though references found in the one that can be converted into clear text has led to them being generally labeled as “1”, “2”, and “3”. I will refer to these papers as Beale 1 (B1), Beale 2 (B2: The Treasure), and Beale 3 (B3: Names and Addresses). These designations are, as far as I can find, universally accepted.
From 1862 until shortly before the publication of the pamphlet, MP, given the box and its contents by MTF, was said to have worked on deciphering the three papers. The ability to encipher a document was much more difficult and limited before encryption could be mechanized. One of the oldest forms of encryption involves replacing the letters of the message with other letters, or numbers, or symbols. The Sherlock Holmes story “The Dancing Men” calls upon Holmes to solve a substitution cipher, and is an excellent example of a complicated form of this type. A substitution code in which each letter is simply replaced by another of the length of the Beale papers would be exceptionally easy to break, as the different letters occur in English in relatively predictable commonalities, so a frequency analysis of the symbols would quickly put a large crack in the code.
In each of the Beale papers, there are far more than 26 different numbers, so we are dealing with something far more complex than a mere substitution cipher (assuming that we are dealing with anything at all.) MP describes being able to translate B2 by considering it as a form of book cipher. There are different types. It is possible to define a code by numbering the words in a text, and replacing the number with the word; for example, if one wanted to encode the word “gold” using this text, they could replace it with the number “13”, although if the sender and receiver differed over whether “1885” and the initial B should be considered as words, this would break down. This is secure as long as each number is used sparingly, though enciphering a message might require a very varied, perhaps quite long, text.
Besides, with 520-762 numbers, this would be a very long message compared to 520-762 characters. It is also possible to encode a text if the value of the word is given by its first letter, so that in this case, the number “13” would mean “g”. These codes are still vulnerable. The source must be available to both the encoder and the decoder, and since it will then probably be available to a much wider group, the identity of the source has to be kept secret. The Sherlock Holmes novel “The Valley of Fear” begins with Holmes breaking a book code starting from the inferences above, with the book code weakened severely as page numbers and column numbers also have to be included. A book code is still vulnerable the more numbers are overused; the most secure code would use each number only once or twice, though that will make decryption longer. Still, for a code that is to be broken back down once and only once, and stay secure for years until that time, this would seem to be a reasonable place to do just that.
Which, again, the encoder did not do. Time after time in the analysis, we will see that the endoer resorted to, "Screw it, that's good enough."
The cipher B2: The Treasure was broken (if it even needed to be) before the publication of the pamphlet, not by looking at the reused number blocks, but by so-called luck. I will discuss observations from my decryption of B2 right after looking at some of the largest problems that I see with the story itself. (Sadly, for reasons I will then go in to, there are no problems with the story itself that could ever be universally accepted as disproving the existence of a treasure. Even if the entire story could be proved to be false, there are still rationalizations available.)
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