Intro music... History is replete with stories of cipher makers and cipher breakers. Some ciphers have never been broken. Today we will tell the story of the swarthy stranger and an enormous treasure that still has yet to be found. Intro music fades...
In January 1820 Thomas Jefferson Beale walked into Robert Morriss’s hotel and booked a room for the winter. He was mysterious, not sharing anything about his past, and was apparently very popular with the ladies. He left in March and didn’t return again for two years. When he left again, he gave a locked box to the Robert Morriss. Later the Morriss received a note from Beale saying that the box contained a few letters, some for the manager and some that were in a code. Beal informed the manager that if he did not return in ten years Morriss was to open the box. He would receive the key for deciphering the letters from a friend.
Ten years came and went and Mr. Morriss never heard anything more from Thomas Beale. Mr. Morriss finally opened the box and found a letter addressed to him as well as three letters full of lists of numbers. The letter to Morriss explained how Beale and some of his associates had found gold in the west and brought it back east. The gold was buried in a location disclosed in the three enciphered letters.
Morriss spent the rest of his life trying to decrypt the messages. After 19 years, he still hadn’t made any progress and so before he died he shared the letters with a friend named James Ward. Ward’s entire life then began to revolve around cracking the code. He was able to decipher one of the letters using the Declaration of Independence as a key. Each number in the cipher text corresponded to a word in the Declaration of Independence. The first letter of each word was then put in place of the number. The note gave the county that the treasure was buried in, but not its exact location saying that it would be given in one of the other letters. Ward spent the rest of his entire life obsessing over the cipher and was never able to crack it. He then published everything in a pamphlet to see if anyone could find the answer.
Still to this day, no one has cracked the code or found the mysterious treasure. Some believe that the ciphers are all a hoax. The president of the New York Cipher Society did a statistical analysis of the writing style of James Ward and Thomas Beale and found that they are remarkably similar. There was no one other than Ward that corroborates any part of the story about Beale. There is also no surviving physical evidence of the cipher or the lock box. It all burned up in a mysterious warehouse fire. Words used in the letters, like stampede, postdate the time that the letters were supposedly written. This all points toward it being an elaborate hoax dreamed up by James Ward.
Other people argue that it is a legitimate code. The word stampede wasn’t printed in anything until after the letters were written, but it could have been common language in the West before it ever got written down in anything official. A different statistical analysis, this one done by a member of the Beale Cipher Association, found that the numbers are not random and must contain an English message. Perhaps the key to unlocking the ciphers was a text written by Beale himself that was lost before anyone could use it, thus making it impossible to crack the code.
Outro music... Although no one has found the treasure, that doesn’t mean the search hasn’t been fruitful. Due to the lure of the treasure and the difficulty of the ciphers, the science of code making and code breaking has improved. Outro Music fades...
Hoffman, P. (1988). Archimedes Revenge: The Joys and Perils of Mathematics. New York: Norton.
Singh, S. (2016). The Code Book: The Secrets Behind Codebreaking. New York: Ember.
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