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| Look here for buried treasure information |
Last weekend, I was cleaning out some files and came across a clipping from January 1982's Omni Magazine (magazines, remember those?) about Masquerade (the first armchair puzzle hunt) and a much older treasure hunt, known as The Beale Ciphers.
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| This lottery ticket costs just 50 cents |
The Beale Ciphers
As summarized in Omni, a man named Thomas Jefferson Beale went out West with some friends, found some treasure, took it back East and buried it in Virginia. He left an envelope with an innkeeper for safekeeping, with instructions that it be opened if he did not return in ten years. Beale never returned, and the innkeeper opened the envelope and found three ciphers he could not decode. He passed them on to a friend, who deciphered #2 using a copy of The Declaration of Independence as a key (because Thomas Jefferson. Ain't that clever). The one he deciphered described the treasure: millions of dollars in gold and silver. But he couldn't decipher the other two, so he passed it on to another friend who published a pamphlet with all three ciphers. Whoever decoded the other two (or at least #1, which detailed where the treasure was) would find millions in lost gold!
Or at least, that's what Omni told me. This was back in the days before the Internet, where treasure hunters got their info from magazines and sending off SASEs and meeting with like-minded people in suburban pizza parlors to discuss theories. Now, of course, we have Wikipedia, where we can figure out that, more than likely, this story is a load of 19th century hokum.
Let's start with sources and evidence. Even if you believe the general outlines of the story, you're getting it, by its own admission, fourth-hand (Beale->innkeeper->friend->pamphleteer). All the original papers were conveniently destroyed in a fire. No evidence of the treasure has ever been found, and Thomas Jefferson Beale doesn't seem to have existed. So it's doubtful from the start that you're getting the full story.
And then you start thinking about this full story. Guy travels to what is now Colorado in 1819 -- that's decades before John Fremont, the Great Pathfinder. He and some friends find loads of gold, and somehow get it all back to Virginia back before there are anything resembling roads between Colorado and the Missisissippi River. Once in Virginia, he buries it and takes off back west, without, apparently, even taking a little bit out to help cover his expenses. He leaves the secret to finding the treasure in 3 pieces (why?), apparently decipherable in 3 different ways. Cipher #3, incidentally, tells how to find the heirs of the treasure finders. Why even encode that at all?
On top of this difficult-to-swallow story, there are a few more interesting facts, such as that if take cipher #1 and use the same key as #2 (The Declaration of Independence), you get mostly nonsense, although you also get strings of non-random nonsense like the alphabet. Sounds like someone was deliberately creating a bogus message. And speaking of bogus messages, the pamphlet included some letters from Beale, supposedly dating from the 1820's, that include words like 'stampeding' that weren't used before 1850.
The pamphlet cost 50 cents back when it was published, roughly $10 in today's money. Seems to me that someone was looking to make some relatively easy money off people's greed.
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| High tech treasure hunting, a century or so ago |
Oak Island's Money Pit
I lived in Germany for a while, and took part in a puzzle hunt sponsored by a dictionary publisher. The prize was a Golden Book buried somewhere in the countryside. After solving most of the clues, a friend and I took off to a location about fifty miles away to start digging. We found what seemed like a likely spot, which I especially liked because a nearby tree had bark that looked like one of the clues, a number (I forget what number, say 17) that was crossed out, like so:
I pointed this out to my friend, who didn't know what I was talking about. After a few minutes I finally got my friend to see the crossed out 17 as well. We dug and dug, but never found the treasure, because we were completely wrong, and it was a hundred miles away. It was only my mind that saw the 17 in the bark.
Which is to say that if you're hunting for treasure, you can find patterns that just aren't there. For an excellent example, see Oak Island's Money Pit.
Like the Beale Cipher, I first read about Oak Island in a magazine (probably Games). It all sounded so convincing: kids find evidence of buried treasure, dig a bit, come back years later, dig a lot more and find suggestive log platforms and a rock with mysterious inscriptions. Just when they think they're getting to the real treasure (more than 80 feet down!), they come back one day to find the hole has flooded. Apparently whoever hid the treasure added some booby traps. Here's a good summary.
This treasure story is probably also hogwash, although this time it's nature, not a human being, who's fooling people. Let's start with the first (purported) diggers, a boy or group of boys who go out to an island and find 'evidence' of buried treasure. This sounds like a classic case of juvenile imagination gone wild. As this article explains, all their supposed 'evidence' could just be natural phenomenon (sinkholes, tropical fibers deposited by the gulf stream, natural debris piles that look like they were placed there by people). And the rock with its writing just sounds a lot like the bark on my '
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| National Orienteering Day is September 15th. Wear orange and white. |
Upcoming
(italics = new since last time)
- Premium Rush The Alleycat - August 24, downtown. The opposite of a bum rush? No, I think this is a poorly punctuated alleycat race related to a new bike messenger movie. Damn you, Hollywood, was Kevin Bacon not good enough for you?
- Amazing Ring Race - August 25. Free entry. Prizes: a local jeweler puts up a ring purportedly worth $15,000. If this is anything like past years, 2nd prize is also nothing to sneeze at. You run around a small area downtown solving clues using a mobile phone application called SCVNGR.
- Choose Your Own Adventure #3 - August 25, North SeaTac Park. Orienteering where you find as many checkpoints as you can in 75 minutes. If you ever lose your bearings just wait for the next plane to come by and remember the airport is due south.
- First Thursday Adventure Run - September 6, Green Lake.
- Rebel Without a Cog/Vagina Monocogs - September 7-8. Alleycat + Time Trial + Lap race for single speed bikes only. Unicycles count. I totally want to see a unicyclist win this thing.
- Orienteering Course Design Class - September 8, Lynndale Park. Here's a class on designing orienteering courses, put on by Cascade Orienteering Club. If you end up designing a course, you will definitely get a free entry or two (or three). So have at it, cheapskate orienteering fanatics. The fact that it's being held at a park makes it likely there will be some hands-on work assigned.
- Hood Hunt Phinney Ridge - September 12. The Hood Hunt is turning two! But it is not terrible! Like a Street Scramble, but absolutely free. Print out your own map (that's one way they keep it free).
- Choose Your Own Adventure #4 - September 15, Woodland Park. It's National Orienteering Day, so get out there. If you've never orienteered before, this is the event for you. It's Woodland Park, so there are woods (duh), but you can't really get lost in them (just follow the traffic noise to Aurora or the sporty yelling to the ballfields). Also, off-leash dogs, lawn bowling, and maybe a few bunnies. Mass start at 11:15am.
- Oyster Urban Adventure Race - September 15. They also put on an outdoor adventure race in Bend, Oregon.
- Redonkulous Scavenger Hunt - September 15, Seattle Center. Sounds like an honest-to-goodness scavenger hunt. First prize is a longboard (that's a type of skateboard, grandpa), but you don't actually have to know how to skateboard to compete.
- San Juan Island Quest - September 22. 12 or 24 hour adventure race. Mountain biking, foot and (quelle surprise!) kayaking will be involved.
- Fremont Oktoberfest Street Scramble - September 23. Course design by yours truly. I'm halfway done, and it's already awesome.
Still going on
- Book Scavenger hunt - Seattle Public Library's Teen Summer Reading Program.
- Letterboxing on Mercer Island - They make it sound like a summer-only program. Does this mean all the letterboxes go away when school starts?
Puzzle cache of the week: Jurassic Snakes Moan on a Plane. --- This one's for you, Samuel L. Jackson fans.
Photo Credits
Beale cipher and Money Pit: public domain in US.
Orienteering: photo credit: owls-count via photo pin cc
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