The Beale Ciphers and the treasure buried in Virginia

In 1885 a pamphlet entitled The Beale Papers was published in Lynchburg, Virginia. It told of a treasure of gold, silver and jewels buried in nearby Bedford County, and contained three ciphertexts made up solely of numbers. One of them had been deciphered; the other two, which were said to give the exact location and the names of the owners, never have been, despite more than a century of attempts.

The story told by the pamphlet

According to the pamphlet, in the 1820s a man named Thomas J. Beale entrusted a locked box to Robert Morriss, who kept a hotel in Lynchburg, asking him to open it if he had not returned within a certain time. Beale never came back. Morriss opened the box many years later and found the three ciphers, but could not read them, and before his death he passed them to a friend.

The friend, who remained anonymous, supposedly spent years on the decipherment, managing to read only the second text. The pamphlet was published by James B. Ward, who appears in it as the author's agent. The narrative, full of detail, is the only source for the whole affair: there are no independent documents confirming the existence of Beale, his expedition or the treasure.

The key of the Declaration of Independence

The second cipher had been solved by using the United States Declaration of Independence as the key. Each number indicates a word of the document, counted from the beginning, and the first letter of that word gives a letter of the message. The text obtained in this way describes the contents of the treasure and its approximate location, about four miles from a place called Buford's.

The first and third ciphers, according to the story, contain respectively the exact position of the hiding place and the list of those entitled to a share. Applying the same key produces nothing meaningful, and no other known text, among the hundreds tried by enthusiasts and cryptographers, seems to work as a key. Some suppose a lost key, others that no key ever existed.

Signs of a hoax

Many scholars believe the story is an invention. Linguistic analyses have found in the letter attributed to Beale words that seem anachronistic for the 1820s. In 1980 the cryptographer Jim Gillogly also noticed that, when the first cipher is decoded with the Declaration, long sequences of letters in almost alphabetical order appear, a clue hard to attribute to chance.

Those who defend its authenticity argue that these oddities may have other explanations. But the absence of any document about Beale, together with the fact that the pamphlet was put on sale, makes a literary hoax the most widely accepted hypothesis. What remains open, in that case, is who devised it and for what purpose. Some have suggested it was a ploy to sell the pamphlet itself.

The Beale Ciphers have fuelled more than a century of expeditions, digs and calculations, often costly and sometimes carried out illegally on private land. They show how a well-built puzzle can generate a tradition of its own, independent of the truth of the story behind it, and live on even when the evidence suggests there is nothing to find.