About a century and a quarter ago, a slim pamphlet was published in Virginia. Amazingly, for such an unassuming little document, it has ruined numerous lives and led to the flattening of buldings and a mountain top. It tells the story of buried treasure, and has captivated those who think that the American Dream is easier dug out of the ground than realised through hard work and dedication. It is hard to imagine a treasure better referred to as 'fool's gold' than that described in The Beale Papers. It is also the story of a set of ciphers that have resisted every effort to break them so far. Fools, read on and be enthralled...

Lynchburg, Virginia, 186-

Robert Morriss was reportedly born in 1778, in the state of Maryland, but moved to London County, Virginia where he married a Miss Sarah Mitchell. He set up in the tobacco business, as did so many people in Virginia, where for a while he prospered. Unfortunately for Mr Morriss he behaved like a bull in a bear market, and invested large amounts of money in tobacco stocks whose projected market value was never realised.

Morriss found himself facing financial ruin. He had reason to be grateful to his very resourceful wife who suggested that they lease a local hotel and set it up as a business. He found that being a hotelier was as lucrative as selling the 'deadly weed', and very soon became the foremost in the town. He had a happy and prosperous existence, passing away in 1863, 2 years after his wife.

A year before his death, he invited an unnamed associate into his confidence with a tale of a guest who left a valuable item in his charge. Many years beforehand, a gentleman called Thomas Beale had come to stay at his hotel. Beale was a handsome and swarthy man who had spent several years on the open range. Quite what he'd been doing out there was anybody's guess, but he was a regular guest of Mr Morriss and had come to trust him.

As a result of this trust, he left with Morris a small, locked iron box in the spring of 1822, saying that it contained valuable papers. Morriss though nothing more of the box until Beale sent him a letter from St. Louis elaborating on the box's contents. According to the letter, Morriss was to open the box ten years after he received it, at which point he would find that the papers were totally unintelligble without the aid of a key. The 'key' was contained in another letter that Beale had left with a friend of his and which was not to be delivered until July 1832.

The second letter never arrived, Beale was never seen again by anyone and Morriss, beyond the call of duty, refrained from opening the box until 1845. When he did, he found that the papers were covered in seemingly random numbers. Morris did not breathe a word about the box to anyone else until 1862 at which point, aware no doubt of his encroaching mortality, he confided in the associate.

The Treasure

In his adventures, Beale and his party had apparently stumbled upon a crevice containing seams of gold. They agreed to divide the gains between them and immediately set about mining the gold. Eighteen months later, in 1819, they had a huge amount of gold worth about $30M by today's reckoning (also some silver and gems bought with some of the gold) but no means of securing it, so they argued about the best course of action. Eventually, they agreed that Beale should take the treasure back to Virginia where he would sequester it in a cave near Buford's Tavern. When they got to the cave they found it unsuitable and soon found another hiding place for their cache.

The Ciphers

Quite where this hiding place was located was 'about four miles from Buford's Tavern.' How do we know this? After Morriss had passed the papers onto his friend, the latter set about deciphering them - a task which was to take his lifetime (and several others since). There were three ciphers: the friend managed to decipher only the second. he did this by realising that the cipher was a book cipher.

In all kinds of cipher, the original plaintext is encrypted using a key to yield the ciphertext. Generally, the same key also serves to effect the reverse process and allows the original plaintext to be obtained¹. In a book cipher, the key is a passage from a printed text. The encryption proceeds as follows: take the first letter of the plaintext, look up any word that begins with the letter and then write down the position of the word in the text. Book ciphers are pretty secure as they prevent cryptographic attacks through frequency analysis², providing that the same word is not used over and over again for the same letter.

The friend eventually hit upon the American Declaration of Independence as the key, and managed to decipher the second of the three ciphers. What he got was:

I have deposited, in the county of Bedford, about four miles from Buford's, in an excavation or vault, six feet below the surface of the ground, the following articles, belonging jointly to the parties whose names are given in number "3," herewith. The first deposit consisted of one thousand and fourteen pounds of gold, and three thousand eight hundred and twelve pounds of silver, deposited November, 1819. The second was made December, 1821, and consisted of nineteen hundred and seven pounds of gold, and twelve hundred and eighty-eight pounds of silver; also jewels, obtained in St. Louis in exchange for silver to save transportation, and valued at $13,000. The above is securely packed in iron pots, with iron covers. The vault is roughly lined with stone, and the vessels rest on solid stone, and are covered with others. Paper number "1" describes the exact locality of the vault, so that no difficulty will be had in finding it.

And that is precisely how far the associate was ever able to get with the ciphers. Eventually, he gave up, after spending the subsequent twenty-three years neglecting work, family and other aspects life in the vain hope of discovering the whereabouts of the treasure. One of the obstacles he ran into early on was the range of numbers in the other two ciphers. Attempts to decrypt Cipher #1 using the Declaration soon ran aground when the numbers exceeded the number of words in the Declaration. And much the same result can be expected when other methods of numbering are used, such as starting at the end and working backwards.

In a sane world, this is where the story would have ended. The associate would have quietly given up and got on with what remained of his life and no more would have been heard about the matter. The papers would have been consigned to much the same fate as the notorious 'Singing Frog' in the Warner Brother's cartoon One Froggy Evening. Obviously they weren't, otherwise the following story would not now be being related. The associate, much to the subsequent dismay of the people of Buford's Tavern and delight of treasure hunters, decided to publish the whole sorry story through the agency of a 'James B. Ward' in 1885 in an apparent attempt to put the matter firmly in the public domain and thereby wash his hands of the affair.

Hoard or Hoax?

Hoard!

So, is there anything to the story in the pamphlet? Lots of people seemed to have thought so. Even discounting the difficulty of decipering the remaining two papers, the phrase 'about four miles from Buford's' contains enough information to entice intrepid treasure hunters out into the Blue Ridge Mountains. Couple it with the occasional nugget of seeming sense that can be extracted from the papers when other keys are used, and you have a sure-fire recipe for all kinds of misadventure.

One of these nuggets pans out from trying to decipher Paper #1 using the Declaration. Mostly it fails, the numbers being greater than the number of words in the Declaration, but there is a sequence of letters ABFDEFGHIIJKLMMNOHPP visible in the 'deciphered' text. The chances of these occurring spontaneously in sequence of letters in a randomly arranged plaintext is next to zero.

From the treasure-hunter's perspective, this sequence of letters is a deliberately placed hint to the decipherer that they are on the right lines in using the DoI to decipher the remaining papers. If this is what the author intended, it is highly likely that not one but two or more encryption processes were applied to the original plaintext, a practice known as 'superencipherment'.

There is another explanation for why the papers may be genuine, but the remaining two codes yield gibberish. Suppose that the confidant of Morriss believed that the person with the key, who was due to turn up in 1832 was still alive but did not know about where the papers were concealed. Under such circumstances, the confidant may well have decided to publish one correct cipher in the Beale Papers and replaced the other two with random numbers in the hope that it might flush out this second person and bring them to Lynchburg in the hope of discovery where the treasure lay. The confidant could then have struck a deal to split the gains in return for the original ciphertext. Both would have gone away considerably richer men.

The third and least likely explanation, and therefore the one beloved of conspiracy theorists, is that the shadowy National Security Agency³ (or someone in it), home to the country's best cryptographers, has already deciphered the message and made away with the treasure, under which circumstances nobody would be any the wiser.

Whatever one makes of such explanations, they don't yield any real information about the contents of the ciphers. All the same, in the absence of such information, people have managed to convince themselves that the ciphers were genuine mainly because it was much more difficult to prove otherwise. Some have even managed to convince themselves of the treasure's location.