The Week Junior - Science + Nature
Beale’s buried treasure The Caesar shift
More than 200 years ago, in 1819, a man named Thomas J. Beale buried some treasure in the US state of Virginia. The secret stash of gold, silver and jewels is estimated to be worth around £67 million in today’s money. To find out where it is buried, you simply have to crack one of three coded messages. Or at least, that’s how the story goes...
Treasure by numbers
In 1885, a leaflet called The Beale Papers introduced the world to the mystery of Beale’s buried treasure. The paper included three coded messages, called ciphers, and a letter from Beale himself. According to the letter, Beale had discovered the treasure in a mine in Nuevo México (now the state of New Mexico). He took it back to Virginia and hid it somewhere in the Blue Ridge Mountains, near a town called Buford. Beale then concealed the location of the hoard, its contents and a list of the treasure’s owners in three encoded messages.
The ciphers are all substitution codes – a series of numbers in which each number represents a letter. To crack such a code you need the “key”, which is often
One of the earliest examples of a substitution code is called the Caesar shift. It was used by the Roman ruler Julius Caesar in around 100BC to send secret messages to his soldiers. Rather than substituting letters for numbers, it “shifts” them a certain number of letters up or down the alphabet. For example, if the “shift” was three to the left, then the letter D would actually be A, the letter E would be B, and so on. Although it sounds simple, it took mathematicians 500 years to crack the code. a book or document. For instance, if you were using this article as a key, 8 would refer to N – the eighth letter, counting from the top of the main text.
Cracking the code
In the late 19th century, an amateur cryptanalyst (someone who studies coded messages) stumbled on the key to one of Beale’s ciphers. It was The Declaration of Independence
(a document declaring the independence of the US from Britain). Once decrypted, the secret message revealed the contents of the treasure and also that its location could be found in one of the other two ciphers. To this day, nobody has found the keys to them.
Over the years, many other cryptanalysts have tried to crack Beale’s ciphers, attracted by the riches on offer. However, without the key, their efforts have proved fruitless. Others took a more direct approach and simply started digging, but without any luck. One man hired a psychic (a person who claims to have strange mental powers) who predicted the treasure was buried near Goose Creek Valley but they were wrong. For others, the answer was obvious – the whole story was a hoax and there was no treasure.
Computer power
In 1970, Dr Carl Hammer used a computer program to compare the ciphers to randomly generated number sequences. The aim was to spot whether the digits were randomly thrown together or if there was any evidence of a pattern behind the numbers. Hammer concluded that the ciphers were real. “They are not random doodles but do contain intelligence and messages of some sort,” he said. However, 10 years later, computer scientist Jim Gillogly used a different program to analyse one of the ciphers using the Declaration of Independence and found that some sentences were just long strings of characters in alphabetical order. Gillogly thought this so unlikely that he was convinced that the whole thing was an elaborate hoax.
A phony letter
In 1982, a linguist (someone who studies language) named Dr Jean Pival compared The Beale Papers leaflet to Beale’s letter and concluded they were written by the same person. He also argued that some of the words used, such as “stampeding” and “improvised”, didn’t even exist when the letter and the codes were supposed to have been written.
Despite the evidence to the contrary, many people still believe in the secret treasure trove. Perhaps one day someone will discover the key that will unlock this mystery once and for all. However, for Hammer, the true value of the Beale ciphers is the power they have to capture the imagination. “The work – even the lines that have led into blind alleys – has more than paid for itself in advancing and refining computer research,” he said.