A book from 1983 contains a cryptogram that is still waiting to be deciphered. Can a reader solve it?
“I have a cryptogram that I (and others) have been trying to solve since 1983,” Roger J Morgan of London wrote me a few days ago. “We feel that it is about time to put this thing to bed.”
Roger J Morgan may be familiar to Cipherbrain readers because he has written a paper on the cryptological activities of Rudyard Kipling. Of course, I’d love to help him solve a nearly 40-year-old mystery. Perhaps some reader will find the right approach.
Before going into detail, however, I would like to mention that I will be giving a talk at the Espionage Museum in Berlin on Thursday at 7 pm. The title is “The Ciphers of Spies.” Two blog readers have written me that they will be there. Maybe someone else from the Berlin area would like to attend. And maybe we can finish the evening in a pub afterwards.
The Don Shaw cryptogram
But back to the request of Roger J Morgan. The cryptogram in question is contained in the 1983 book “The Golden Key to £50,000 Treasure” by Don Shaw. A PDF and information about this work is available here.
The plot revolves around Francis Drake’s circumnavigation of the world in 1577-1580. Using the information contained in the book, it was possible to determine the location of a golden key for which there was a prize of £50,000. However, no one succeeded in doing so. After five years Shaw finished the project. To this day, it is not known how the puzzle could have been solved and the golden key found.
According to Morgan, it is striking that on many pages (when the book is open, they are always on the left) a letter is depicted in an ornament. Here is an example:
Quelle/Source: The Golden Key
If you string them together, you get the following sequence of letters:
MCSE****IERSDEAXREEBROVUTUBLEOESEEOYGBVDSESBEEDQ**NEOSOU
The stars stand for pages on which no letter is shown.
One can assume that this sequence is a coded message and that it provides clues to the hiding place of the golden key. However, all this is not certain. In any case, it would be interesting to know the plaintext.
Possible solutions
The letter frequencies of the Don Shaw cryptogram correspond approximately to those of the English language. Only the number of Es seems to be a bit too high. This could be due to the fact that English from the time of Fancis Drake (Tudor) was used. This contains the E particularly often, for example in expressions like “Ye Olde”.
Such a frequency distribution speaks for a transposition cipher. Presumably the simple variants (e.g. reading every third letter) have already been checked.
Roger J Morgan fears that the book was put together quickly and carelessly, and that errors have crept in as a result. This would, of course, complicate matters. It is noticeable, for example, that some of the left-hand pages bear decorations without letters, while on others there is neither a decoration nor a letter. Whether this is intentional is not known.
Can a reader contribute to solving this mystery after almost 40 years? It would be about time, even if there is no £50,000 to be won today.
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Further reading: Ein Krypto-Klassiker: Das Fair-Game-Kryptogramm
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