This is the second in a series of x posts (I intend to cheesily sneak back and edit this part of the post after the whole thing is done, don’t tell anybody), after this first one, discussing the Beale Papers, a pamphlet published in 1885 and with a following that carries into today.
Before looking at the construction of the three purported ciphers, there are a few major problems with the story that I think must be at least examined before moving on. While it perhaps lacks literary elegance, I will take that risk for an attempt at clarity.
First, I must provide a note on the answering of questions and the Baker Street Irregulars. In the Sherlock Holmes stories, the Baker Street Irregulars were a group of urchins who served as Holmes’ eyes and ears on the street. In our world, this is the name of a group of Sherlock Holmes enthusiasts whom assume for entertainment’s effect that the Holmes stories are real, and who have produced amusing articles explaining the many inconsistencies in the stories that in actuality came about because Arthur Conan Doyle just didn’t care about his invented world’s continuity. The human mind from the earliest stages is desperately looking for patterns, so creating nonexistent patterns is fairly easy. When using one’s mind like so with regard to Sherlock Holmes, or Star Trek, or something of that form, this can add enjoyment to the world, but it can be quite the trap when trying to apply this to the physical world. I will use the letters “BSI” when I want to warn that a possible answer to an objection may be true, or it may just be something the brain throws up to fit a pattern in which one really, really wants to believe. Remember, this is “BS*I*”; that last letter is really important.
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| Franchises with continuity problems that have caused varying degrees of social harm. |
And now onto what I consider to be some of the strongest objections, one way or the other.
1) Why publish a set of hoaxed ciphers? Wouldn’t James B. Ward be risking his good name if it came out that he made money selling a paper that was at its heart a hoax, even if he insulated himself behind a mysterious author?
IF THE BEALE PAPERS ARE A HOAX, then they are part of a solid and substantial stream of the American press of that day, as well as today (unless Batboy really is going to run for president in 2024). The concept that newspapers and presses are in business to make money, and not to worship at the altar of abstract truth. This would be of a type with a tremendous range of other examples, from the Great Moon Hoax of the New York Sun in 1835 to the idea of sabotage in the sinking of the Maine in 1898. There were also great masses of purported treasure maps produced during the conquest (I mean this term with no positive connotations) of the West. The hoaxer’s cleverness came in accounting for the movement of treasure from the 1858 Pikes Peak gold rush into the nearby area, where it would be theoretically accessible to the reader.
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| Which will be a problem if 61 Cygni wasn't directly over the United States when he was born. |
They would be far from unique and stand out from a great mass of printing of their day only because the Beale Papers managed to strike a spark of inspiration in a large enough part of the popular consciousness to propagate the legend forward.
The 1835 Great Moon Hoax would actually be a very close example, as it was a series of invented articles based upon the public trust of science – the news of Sir John Herschel’s construction of a tremendous new telescope without an understanding of that telescope’s limitations – and the story took place at a great distance: in the case of the Moon Hoax, the distance was a different continent in a different hemisphere, in the case of Beale the distance was sixty years with an added layer of complexity due to “Indian massacres” and foreign lands.
IF THE BEALE PAPERS ARE REAL then this is a non-question. The phrasing of the question makes all of its demands of those who hold that it is a hoax.
2) Why bury treasure, and why bury it here? Why take valuables out of your hand, away from where they can be used to procure goods and services, and conceals them where they provide the owner no good? Buried treasure is far more common in fiction than in legend, and far more common in legend than in real life. Sometimes valuables are buried if hostile forces are expected, and one wants to keep items of importance out of their hands
IF THE BEALE PAPERS ARE A HOAX, then no treasure was hidden, and there is no problem.
IF THE BEALE PAPERS ARE REAL then this has to be answered. A possible answer might be that the party was not intending to stay west much longer, and within two years (the gap between the first two visits) they would all come east on their ways back home, to pick up the money at close to the end. The treasure was coming back to Virginia anyway, why not take it back as quickly as possible? In that case, why bury it at all? The party traveled from Santa Fe to Buford County. Why not keep going the little, little, additional way to Richmond and leave it there? Is there no one they could trust among their heirs and relations to hold the money? Why bury it instead of converting it into some other form of property such as land?
3) Why encrypt the names and addresses of the heirs? One of the pages is said to contain the names and addresses of the heirs of the thirty members of the party. To me, this is the biggest problem. I consider myself an honest person with a strong moral compass, but if I got the unencrypted list of what the treasure consisted of, and I was able to break the encipherment on the part with the location of the treasure listed, the third list could start, “ohnJay ithSmay of orthNay ichmondRay”, and a loud voice in my head would be saying, “Golly gee, but that there cyphering fellow has certainly outsmarted me on this one! I guess I just don’t have the skill to translate this part!”
IF THE BEALE PAPERS ARE A HOAX, then this makes complete sense. There is a “decoded” cipher that describes literally tons of treasure, and there is a cipher purporting to describe where the treasure was located. BUT why would the treasure be hidden? If the treasure was simply being abandoned, why bury it? The hoaxer needed something accounting for “rightful owners”, so a third set of numbers was generated. Despite all the effort that the Papers take to emphasize the nobility of TJB, MTF, and MP, people haven’t been putting the effort into finding out who the heirs are, they’ve been concentrating on finding the treasure. (This is another benefit to sixty years of insulation – even the noblest of the treasure-hunters were from the beginning seeing the treasure as “public domain”, if you will.)
A person producing a fake to make a quick buck from sales of the pamphlet and perhaps hotel rooms and shovel sales would certainly not want to produce a list of names that could be checked. This might result in a list of nonexistent people. If the hoaxer did find a list of people living in the area at the right time, even with a gap of sixty years between the claimed events the publication would risk finding descendants who could say, “Heck no, no one from the family ever went out west prospecting! See? They’re all buried right there!”
IF THE BEALE PAPERS ARE REAL then I honesty can’t think of a single good reason why the heirs would be hidden. (I can think of a couple bad ones, that I will get into when I describe B3: Names and Addresses.) If the story was real, then the chance of finding an heir who might be able to say “Did I have an family member who mysteriously disappeared after bragging about incipient wealth? Why yes! I wonder what ever happened to Uncle Zebulon “Grizzly Chow” Dunchester!” This would demonstrate the truth of the story, and focus attention on the search among the heirs for someone who might have the key without realizing it.
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| If'n you don't skin critters before making chaps, ya stay warmer - Z Dunchester |
If I allow myself
to go into full BSI mode, the only reason that I can think of is that the
cipher describing the location is double encrypted, and the plaintext of the
list of names is needed to decipher it. (I’ll go into one way this might work
in the discussion on B1.) This is the only thing that I can think of, and to be fair, it's a pretty stupid.
If anyone can come up with anything else, I’d love to hear it.
4) William Poundstone undertook a stylometric analysis of the pamphlet for a 1983 book and found that while different authorship is claimed for different parts of the pamphlet, all parts of the pamphlet were almost certainly written by the same person. Why would three different people all be speaking in the same voice?
The initial pamphlet has a number of voices in it. The narrator seems to be the person I identify as MP. The text continues for some pages and then quotes MTF directly. (While this is written as a quotation, it is then described as “the substance” of what MTF told MP.) There are also two letters of TJP to MTF included.
IF THE BEALE PAPERS ARE A HOAX, then all the sections have the same voice because all of the parts were indeed written by the same person, almost certainly James B. Ward. Words are put into the mouths of MP, MTF, and TJB because those characters were closer to the claimed events, and their words would sound as truer.
IF THE BEALE PAPERS ARE REAL, then the MTF quote sounds like PA because it was PA/MP, giving “the substance” of their conversations with MTF. If, however, this section was not meant to be taken as a quote then I fail to see the value of writing this MTF section as though it were a quote. Why, that might mislead people into misjudging the authoritativeness of those sections! It would also mean that MP, who writes about how carefully they went over MTF’s and TJB’s words “syllable by syllable” carelessly transcribed those words, editing them into his own form of language as MP rewrote, which would include adding words like “stampeding”, “appliances”, and “improvised”, words which did not appear in print in English until years, even decades, after 1822. Was MP so careful that they spent years going “syllable by syllable”, but so sloppy as to not notice that the major revisions made in the retelling that pretended to be a quote?
A possible way out of this that is a permutation of a possibility described by Simon Singh is that the author deliberately left out information in the text or the code so that if someone worked how to break the code, they would still have to find a way to contact PA to get the treasure, and PA could force a share. This would consistent with how people are, but inconsistent with how everyone in the pamphlet was described to be.
5) The ciphers are described as lists of numbers, and it is never mentioned that the pages are numbered or arranged in any way, yet B2 is universally referred to as “B2” because it contains references to “Paper Number One” and “Paper Number Three”. The other two sheets of codes are presumably listed as B1 and B3 because “Paper Number Three” is supposed to have a list of the names and addressed of the heirs of thirty people, and even the longer of the remaining ciphers would seem hard pressed to do that. If these papers are “1”, “2”, and “3”, why aren’t they numbered?
IF THE BEALE PAPERS ARE A HOAX, then this is the result of sloppy writing. In a later entry “Considerations and Responses to Many Concerns and Suggestions”, I will argue that sloppiness in writing (as if the author only wanted a quick buck) can explain a lot of characteristics of the Beale Papers.
IF THE BEALE PAPERS ARE REAL, then it has been suggested that not including numbers could have been a further form of security, and that the letter from St Louis would have explained which paper was “1” or “2” or “3”.
This is true in a BSI sort of way, but I fail to see what security is gained when no one would know what was in each section anyway.
THE UNIVERSAL SOLVENT: The Universal Solvent is a legendary material that dissolves anything. In the Beale Saga, at least with respect to the treasure, there is a response that can brush aside all of the problems here. All of the problems listed here with the story concern the accuracy of the account. There are those who contend that the ciphers are real, and the codes are real, but the story is fake, and the Beale story is intended to disguise the true origin of the hidden treasure, whose source ranges from the former Confederacy to Jean Lafitte. A willingness to jettison the entirety of the narrative means that every problem with the narrative can be abandoned, and one can even use every problem above in order to prove that the narrative is fake and still hold that the treasure are real and the ciphers hold real information.
Everything I an going to talk about, starting in the next post, is aimed at the numbers themselves.
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