Cryptogram of Olivier Levasseur
The cryptogram of Olivier Levasseur is a 17-line pigpen cipher allegedly created by 18th-century French pirate Olivier Levasseur, and first attested by French historian and librarian in his 1934 paperback novel Le Flibustier Mystérieux: Histoire d'un trésor caché.
La Roncière claimed the cryptogram and the treasure to which it purportedly refers originated from a raid on the Portuguese cargo ship Nossa Senhora do Cabo in 1721 by a group of pirates including Levasseur, Jasper Seagar and Captain John Taylor. On board the Nossa Senhora was a large amount of valuable cargo, along with the Viceroy of Goa, who was later released for ransom. With a share of the loot and currency, Levasseur went into hiding for nine years until he was captured in July 1730, when he was executed. A popular legend claims that immediately before his execution, Levasseur threw a piece of paper into the watching crowd and shouted. The written cryptogram supposedly ended up in the possession of La Roncière, who then decrypted it in his 1934 novel. Though the 1721 raid of Nossa Senhora by Levasseur and his associates is well attested by historians, no concrete evidence for the treasure's existence has ever been uncovered, despite many searches and investigations, which suggests the cryptogram may have been an invention of La Roncière for his novel.
Historical background
Raid of the ''Nossa Senhora''
Olivier Levasseur was born in Calais in 1688. Levasseur received a high standard of education in his early life and later became known for being a ruthless and efficient pirate. Receiving a letter of marque from Louis XIV, he became a privateer during the War of the Spanish Succession as a raider of enemy ships in the Caribbean for the French. Early on, Levasseur decided to serve himself rather than his government and began accumulating wealth as a pirate, earning himself the nickname of "La Buse". In 1716, during what is now known as the Golden Age of Piracy, Levasseur, using the alias of Louis de Boure and working with Benjamin Hornigold and Samuel "Black Sam" Bellamy, began to build a reputation as an efficient pirate.On 8 April 1721, Levasseur, Jasper Seagar and Captain John Taylor, aboard the sailing ships Victory and Cassandra, arrived at the island of Réunion. There they found the Portuguese cargo ship Nossa Senhora do Cabo anchored at Saint-Denis. The masts and two-thirds of the cannons were reportedly missing upon discovery, with the ship damaged in a recent passing storm.
The band of pirates boarded the Nossa Senhora without resistance and allegedly discovered a trove of valuables including gold and silver bars, precious silks and gemstones, spices and furniture collectively valued in the millions of the local currency. Along with the highly valuable treasure, the Nossa Senhora was ferrying Luís de Meneses, 1st Marquis of Louriçal and Viceroy of Goa, en route to Portugal. Before splitting the treasure and going into hiding, the pirates released the viceroy in exchange for a ransom.
The Fiery Cross of Goa
An artifact said to be on board the Nossa Senhora was the golden Fiery Cross of Goa, from the Se Cathedral. Goa is a state on the southwestern coast of India's Konkan region. It was a colony of Portugal from the 16th century until 1961, when it was annexed by India. The Cross itself was described as being as much as seven feet tall and covered with high-value gemstones such as emeralds, rubies and diamonds. Being made of gold, the Cross would have required multiple individuals to carry it. Despite the legend of the Cross existing now, it is not mentioned by name anywhere prior to La Roncière's 1934 novel, which itself does not mention the Cross.Execution of Levasseur
Nine years after the Nossa Senhora raid, in 1730, Levasseur was captured and transported to Réunion by Captain d'Hermitte of the naval vessel La Meduse, followed by execution for his crimes. However, the details surrounding what took place leading up to his execution vary by source. The most famous story of Levasseur's execution speaks of him throwing a piece of paper with a 17-line pigpen cipher written on it to the watching crowd. This message is said to encrypt the location of his share of the treasure, stolen during the raid on the Nossa Senhora. As he threw it, Levasseur reportedly shouted. Some accounts say that the cryptogram paper was concealed within a necklace, though neither the necklace nor the original paper containing the cryptogram have ever been seen.Cryptogram
''The Clavicles of Solomon''
In 1934, wrote a novel, Le Flibustier Mystérieux: Histoire d'un trésor caché, for the Parisian publishing house Le Masque. Written entirely in French, Le Flibustier Mystérieux begins by presenting the idea of The Clavicles of Solomon as a non-fiction cabalistic manual, both authored by and passed down from King Solomon himself to his son Rehoboam. A testament left to Rehoboam by King Solomon engraved on the bark of a tree read, La Roncière then draws on poet Edgar Allan Poe's The Gold-Bug, writing that when heated the poetic instruction written in an opaque ink would appear on the parchment, revealing the existence of a hiding place.La Roncière then pivots back to The Clavicles of Solomon, introducing a young woman and an island in the Indian Ocean, unnamed so that the treasure remains undiscovered. Three bodies are observed, two in coffins with a ring on the left ear, identifiable as sailors. The young woman is then handed two documents from the landowner, one being a cryptogram, which could only be deciphered by using the characters of The Clavicles of Solomon. The young woman wrote to La Bibliothèque Nationale de France, asking for access to The Clavicles of Solomon. A connection between the cabalistic signs and the signs on Levasseur's cryptogram was assumed, however it is left ambiguous as to whether this was surmised by La Roncière or the young woman. La Roncière presents this in Le Flibustier Mystérieux, with further context provided in his 1941 book Explorateurs et pionniers français.
The Cryptogram of Olivier Levasseur
The next section of the novel, titled, discusses the cryptogram which has come to be attributed to Levasseur's share of the treasure from the 1721 raid on the Nossa Senhora. The sixth page of Le Flibustier Mystérieux provides a description of the written cryptogram symbolage and their attributed values, translated by La Roncière, on the seventh page. La Roncière writes that Levasseur's cryptogram uses handwritten signs, reminiscent of Hebrew letters, each of which represent two letters, known as a digraph. The first of these letters is usually removed, leaving only the second letter readable. Levasseur was not consistent, however; a dozen of the signs translate "indifferently", meaning sometimes the first letter of the digraph is not removed, for example a sign representing "il" may only show as "i" or "l". This may have been due to a difficulty on the part of the encrypter in telling apart certain letters or numbers. Some signs also represent a letter or a number, with no clear distinction, their meaning instead determined by context and placement within the text. Ambiguity plays a deliberate part in the composition of the cryptogram.La Roncière's decryption
Pages eight and nine offer an attempted decryption of the cryptogram, written line by line in French on the eighth page and the cryptogram in full presentation on the ninth page. Whilst mostly matching more modern versions, La Roncière's decryption deliberately leaves out certain letters, instead leaving it up to the reader to "guess" the parts that are not filled in. The decryption in Le Flibustier Mystérieux is written as follows:From these 17 lines, Le Roncière extrapolates on the words from the decrypted cryptogram, describing them as strange "bizarreries" and hypothesising on who the encrypter could be. He quickly establishes that the encrypter is likely of French origin, specifically the North-East of France, one factor being attributed to the harsh pronunciations of certain words. Both 'kort' and 'k'unne' —despite neither originating from French—can be derived from. Moreover, 'piter' can be synonymised to bitter, which means to roll a rope around the 'bitte' of a ship. On the twelfth line, two points following the word are described by La Roncière as being easily replaced. These are not elaborated on, instead being left to the reader to guess.1. I. Prenez une paire de pijon virez les
2. 2 cœurs... tête cheval... une kort
3. fil winshient écu prenez une cullière
4. de mielle.. outre vous en faites une ongat
5. mettez sur le pasage de la.........
6. ........... prenez 2 liv cassé sur le ch-
7. emin, il faut..... toit à moitié couvé
8. pour empecher une femme....... vous n'avé
9. qu'à vous sere la........... pour ve-
10. nir........ épingle... juilet.....
11. ........ faire piter un chien turq un
12. ..... de la mer.. bien sèche et sur
13. ................... k'unne femme q-
14. i veut se faire d'un..............
15. dans......... dormir un homm r
16. ......... faut rendre... q
17. u'un diffur ..................
Possible location of Levasseur's treasure
Using a drawn map of an island, on page ten La Roncière begins "controlling" the cryptogram's data, matching words to various things that provide "clues" as to the location of Levasseur's treasure. 'Les deux cœurs' meaning 'the two hearts' is attributed by La Roncière to a matter of, as in 'drawing' meaning 'to arrive' at the. La Roncière then mentions a roughly drawn out glacier to the south, where and are located. Finally La Ronciere lists what he describes as an "abundance of rock engravings" from the surrounding area including a. Altogether, these excerpts from the cryptogram describe the location of where the privateers stayed.With this cryptic information extrapolated from the cryptogram, La Roncière questions where this mysterious island could be. He states that they have "astronomical data that denotes the trained eye of a seasoned sea captain", providing the reader with the following data:
'Pr N nord 24 B 39 Pas 2° sud — 2° sud S T 62.39 jaites 3 toises.'
La Roncière attributes this data to one of the cryptogram's aforementioned petroglyphs, the "half-cut roof". The latitude is said not to match, with the exact map plotted questioned also. Reference is made to the first accurate map of the Indian Ocean, published by in Le Neptune oriental during the latter half of the 18th century, decades after the privateers disappeared. La Roncière states that longitude was so difficult to determine before the 20th century that God had "forbidden human knowledge of it" and reasons that without the chronometers of the day or instantaneous wireless telegraphy to determine the meridian to within a few metres, locating the treasure using the intersection of latitude and longitude would be an "illusory investigation". Instead, on page eleven, La Roncière uses a rebus to attempt further placement of the treasure:
'Pr Ier passe avec pre de pqtx
En prendre L 2 V L f S N I Clot de même
Et de L Sce E fre la ge Cm Io gat L me
Sur 1'0 : pge de la source
pr I h2 8 Ca ghe ps0 pour L ch de la Me
Bn ghe L frote Ctre la pse Srd g L V t qe
pser cher S fre X d lde L D glo D Lo
D du Cble du Ceur.'
is indicated to be a spring near the sea, located within the estate of the aforementioned landowner, who allegedly passed Levasseur's documents to the young woman. Unfortunately, the "ingenious" explanation given by the landowner to La Roncière for the petroglyphs is not shared with the reader out of discretion. The is also mentioned by La Roncière, "cable" being interpreted as a measurement of length meaning height, and "heart" meaning a person in control. Put together, "cable of the heart" could refer to "height of the Commander". Another interpretation is that "the heart" could be interpreted as "the Curator", a title held by a French pirate leader. Both of these conclusions are left open-ended for the reader's deliberation. La Roncière adds further context to the reading of "the Commander", which he says is understood to mean the foreman of enslaved Africans. La Roncière attributes this to the historical English pirate Henry Every, who owned a number of slaves, and whom the latter half of the novel focuses on.
Search attempts
Reginald Cruise-Wilkins and Savy family's search at Bel Ombre
During the 19th century, the Savy family of Mahé, Seychelles, came into possession of Levasseur's papers. The information they extracted from the papers led them to Bel Ombre, Mauritius. Here, at the National Archives of Mauritius, they discovered other scarcely seen papers containing Levasseur's cryptogram. From 1913 onwards, the Savy family excavated the beach at Bel Ombre. It was during this time that an unidentified cryptographer studied the cryptogram finding no solution until Charles de La Roncière's publication in 1934. Fourteen years later in 1948, former King's Guard and Kenyan settler Reginald Cruise-Wilkins visited Seychelles during a holiday. Unable to return home until another boat departed three months later, he chose to reside at Bel Ombre. Cruise-Wilkins was shown Levasseur's cryptogram by Mrs Charles Savy of the Savy family and the unidentified cryptographer. Using the information they had learned, along with the petroglyph identifiers from La Roncière's work, Cruise-Wilkins became set on finding Levasseur's treasure, which he believed was located under the beach at Bel Ombre.In 1949, Cruise-Wilkins enlisted the help of retired Indian Army officer Colonel D. M. Hennessey, after seeing an advert by him in a local paper offering services for water divination. After a year, they were unable to locate anything of note. From 1951 to 1955, Cruise-Wilkins continued to dig under a giant rock he named "the glacis", funded by an investment from the Government of Seychelles. Previously having funded the search himself and with help from his mother, by 1955 Cruise-Wilkins had run out of money. Under Kenyan accounting firm Gill and Johnson, he managed to secure £24,000 from 400 shareholders, each of whom would receive a share of his percentage should the treasure be discovered. The prospectus was subsequently authorised. Returning to Bel Ombre, Cruise-Wilkins continued to search, with updates being provided to shareholders in Kenya by Colonel J. Kent, an arrangement which ended in 1957. Reginald Cruise-Wilkins continued to search for Levasseur's treasure at Bel Ombre until his death in 1977.