#beale treasure

[archivist-crow]

On this day:

BEALE TREASURE

On May 9, 1822, news of a hidden treasure arrived for Virginia innkeeper Robert Morris. The letter was from Thomas Beale, who had left a padlocked iron box in Morris's keeping the previous winter. The letter instructed Morris to hold the box for ten years, and if no one called for it in that time, Morris was to open it. Beale then vanished. Twenty-three years later, Morris opened the box. It contained a letter and three sheets of encrypted paper. The letter told the following story.

Beale had put together a group "who were fond of adventure, and if mixed with a little danger all the more acceptable, determined to visit the great Western plains and enjoy ourselves in hunting buffalo, grizzly bears, and such other game…” Beale's expedition of thirty individuals had tracked a herd of buffalo to a ravine. There the group discovered incredibly rich veins of gold and silver; which they mined over the next eighteen months. Beale transported the wealth to a cache in a cave which they all knew. Unfortunately, when Beale arrived he found that the cave was being used by local farmers to store vegetables. So he found another place for the treasure.

“I have deposited…in an excavation…six feet below the surface of the ground...ten hundred and fourteen pounds of gold and thirty eight hundred and twelve pounds of silver deposited Nov. Eighteen Nineteen ... Dec. Eighteen Twenty one... nineteen hundred and eighty eight of silver, also jewels... 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.”

The encoded pieces of paper contained instructions for finding the treasure and how it should be dispersed to the heirs of the original thirty adventurers. Unfortunately, neither Morris nor anyone else ever found Beale's hiding place or the treasure.

Text from: Almanac of the Infamous, the Incredible, and the Ignored by Juanita Rose Violins, published by Weiser Books, 2009

[krjpalmer]

RUN August 1984

This issue’s cover program wasn’t a mere adventure game, but an invitation to decode a 19th-century cipher said to provide the location of buried treasure (in Virginia, not the Old West as the illustration might have you think). Creative Computing had included an article on the same topic a few years before, so the cipher perhaps wasn’t that yielding.

[unexplained-mysteries]

The Beale Ciphers are a set of three ciphertexts that supposedly reveal the location of one of the grandest buried treasures in U.S. history: thousands of pounds of gold, silver and jewels. The treasure was originally obtained by a mysterious man named Thomas Jefferson Beale in 1818 while prospecting in Colorado.

The second cipher can be decrypted fairly easily using any copy of the United States Declaration of Independence, but some editing for spelling is necessary. To decrypt it, one finds the word corresponding to the number (e.g., the first number is 115, and the 115th word in the Declaration of Independence is "instituted"), and takes the first letter of that word (in the case of the example, "I"). Note that this method of encryption is slightly different from a standard book cipher. Beale used a version of United States Declaration of Independence different from the original. To extract the hidden message, the following 5 modifications must be applied to the original DOI text:

after word 154 ('institute') and before word 157 ('laying') one word must be added (probably "a")

after word 240 ('invariably') and before word 246 ('design') one word must be removed

after word 467 ('houses') and before word 495 ('be') ten words must be removed

after word 630 ('eat') and before word 654 ('to') one word must be removed

after word 677 ('foreign') and before word 819 ('valuable') one word must be removed

The Beale Treasure Ciphers - Unexplained Mysteries