For the first time information about Bale's treasures appeared in 1855 in a brochure with a long title. The original manuscript is still in the Library of Congress. The book tells about the innkeeper Robert Morris, with whom Thomas Jefferson Bale, a hunter and gold prospector, has stayed more than once. Although later it was suggested that the famous pirate Jean Lafitte was hiding under this name, who robbed English and Spanish ships.
And then one day a guest left Morris for safekeeping an iron box locked with a key, "which contained papers of exceptional importance." Bail allowed to open it only after ten years, if he himself did not show up. Bale disappeared, and the owner opened the box, which contained three encrypted messages. Cryptogram # 1 reported the location of the cache; No. 2 - about its contents; № 3 - names and addresses of heirs.
Want to know the details of this story? Let's go under the cat …
By early 1885, James B. Ward was ready to admit defeat and give up trying to solve mysterious cryptograms. Twenty years of hard work brought very limited success, and it seems that he had no chance of solving this most difficult problem until the end of his life.
After much deliberation, Ward decided to make this secret, known only to him alone, into the public domain: what if someone still succeeds! So in 1885 in Lynchburg (Virginia) a small brochure with a very long title was published: “Bale's Papers, Containing Corresponding Information on the Treasure Buried in 1819 and 1821. near Bufords in Bedford County, Virginia, and which has never been found."
In this pamphlet, Ward told a strange story that came to him twenty years ago from a certain Robert Morris, an innkeeper in Lynchburg. In 1817, a man named Thomas Jefferson Bale, at the head of a party of thirty people from the Western United States, went to northern New Mexico to hunt buffalo. Somewhere out there, Bale and his companions stumbled upon a rich gold mine. Hunting, of course, was immediately forgotten, and the hunters turned into prospectors. By 1819 they had accumulated considerable reserves of gold.
But what to do with him in this desert area, where at any moment you can face Apaches or bandits? According to The Bale Papers, “… the question of transporting our wealth to a safer place has been discussed frequently. It was undesirable to store such a large amount of gold in such a wild and turbulent place, where its possession could endanger our lives. It was pointless to hide it there, because under duress any of us could indicate the location of the cache at any time."
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In the end, the miners decided to ship the gold by van to Virginia. In two flights, they managed to deliver 2921 pounds of gold and 5100 pounds of silver.
For the time being, the treasure was buried in iron pots about six feet below ground level, in a secret basement, roughly lined with stone. Bale's group elected Robert Morris of Lynchburg as their confidant, as the Papers … says. Going west for the third and last part of the cargo, Bale gave Morris a sealed metal box and strictly ordered: this box can be opened only after ten years and only if during this time no one from Bale's party returns to Lynchburg.
Honest Morris unsuccessfully waited for the prospectors not even ten Years, but twenty-three years. When it finally became clear that Bale and his people would never return - they probably laid their heads in the mountains of New Mexico - Morris opened the mysterious box. In it, he found a sealed package, and in the package - three cryptograms and a letter briefly explaining the meaning of this "message to descendants". The cryptograms contained secret information about where the first piece of Bale's treasure was buried. Using the keys contained in the cover letter, Morris had to decipher these cryptograms, find the treasure and distribute the gold and silver among the direct descendants of the prospectors in the male line, if any.
Cryptogram 1 - the location of the cache.
Each cryptogram consisted of a series of numbers ranging from one to three digits. However, no matter how much Morris shook the envelope, how much he reread the letter, how much he turned the tin box, he did not find any of the promised keys to the cipher. What to do? At his own risk, Morris tried to decipher the mysterious cryptograms, but he failed. In 1863, about a year before his death, he initiated James B. Ward into the secret. And … quite by accident, Ward managed to unravel the secret of cryptogram number 2!
Cryptogram 2 - decrypted. The contents of the cache.
Ciphers are huge series of different numbers. Attempts to read them have been made repeatedly. Thus, the author of the brochure himself initially assumed that “each number represents a letter”. But he counted their number and came to the conclusion that it was several times the number of letters in the alphabet. Then he applied the method of "one-time cipher pad" - when a certain book is a key. After a long search, the key book became the one that was constantly in the hotel room where Bale often stayed - the United States Declaration of Independence. The author numbered the words on the first page, and then substituted for each digit the first letter of the word that received the corresponding number. And I read it!
The key to it turned out to be the text of the United States Declaration of Independence, and the text of the cryptograms was a list of the contents of the cache left by Bale and his comrades.
The note reported a treasure "of two wagons of gold and silver." These treasures, according to Bale, came to him by accident: in the 1820s, he and his companions stumbled upon a gold mine, pursuing a herd of buffalo. It was located "somewhere 250 to 800 miles north of Santa Fe." And the loot was hidden in an underground mine "not far from Buford". The value of the treasure in terms of modern money should be about $ 30 million. “All of the above is safely hidden in iron pots,” wrote Bale, “closed with iron lids. The location of the cache is marked by several stones laid out around it, the vessels rest on a stone base and are also covered with stones from above. Paper number 1 describes the exact location of the cache, so you can find it without any effort."
In this case, the other two cryptograms seem to contain information about the location of the cache and a list of people who were part of Bale's group, whose heirs are to be found.
The first success was also the last. The Declaration of Independence did not provide a clue to any of the remaining cryptograms. Researchers have tried to find the key in other books that Bale supposedly used while living in a hotel: the constitution of the United States and even the complete works of Shakespeare. To break the Bale ciphers, about 8 thousand documents have already been used, among which are the statutes of the United States, the agreement between the government and the Apaches, the bull of Pope Adrian IV regarding the invasion of Ireland, and even the treaty in Brest-Litovsk (1918). Wasted!
Cryptogram 3 - names and addresses of heirs.
In 1885, Ward, in his own words, "decided to get rid of this case once and for all, and to remove from his shoulders the burden of responsibility to the late Mr. Morris … For this I could not find a better way than to divulge the secret."
Since the publication of Ward's brochure, many people have tried to decipher the mysterious cryptograms. Most of the enthusiasts did not succeed in doing this. Others, after many attempts, eventually managed to get more or less coherent texts, but for some reason all these variants of decryption were radically different from each other, and attempts to find treasures on their basis each time led to disastrous results. Finally, the third, having waved their hand at the texts, simply began to dig up the ground in Virginia, hoping to find the treasure "by typing". To find Bale's treasure, clairvoyants, dowsers, and finally bulldozers were used … The temptation was great: in 1982, a journalist calculated that the current value of the treasure could be $ 30 million.
However, there were skeptics (or maybe just offended by the failure?) Who began to argue that "The Bale Papers …" is just a tabloid novel, composed in the traditions of the late 19th century: mystery, treasures, pirates. Some even attribute the authorship to the renowned American novelist, poet and cryptographer Edgar Allan Poe. His contemporaries testified that Poe loved to lead the public by the nose. And in our time, computer analysis has shown a similar possibility, but researchers are afraid to make a final verdict. The military also took up the Bale cipher. For example, the famous cryptographer in the service of the US government, Colonel George Fabian, took up the calculations in 1924 - and also suffered a fiasco. According to him, the Bale cipher belonged to the category of the highest complexity.
In 1968, a group of enthusiastic cryptographers was formed, called the Bale Cipher Association, of which Karl Hammer, one of the pioneers of computer cryptanalysis, was a member, but they also failed to move forward. In defiance of skeptics, Hammer even managed to prove by means of mathematical statistics that cryptograms are by no means a set of random numbers and in all three cyclical relationships can be traced that are characteristic of the cipher text, and, according to his opinion, encrypted by the substitution of numbers instead of the original letters.
The treasure hunters tried to find it in the simplest way: they dug in those places that Bale indirectly referred to in the second cryptogram. So, in particular, based on the words "4 miles from the Buford tavern" and "surrounded by stones", every summer crowds of people wanting to get rich flood the vicinity of Goose Creek. They buy metal detectors, hire dowsers and clairvoyants, and, much to the displeasure of local farmers, dig deep holes near every rock dump.
From time to time, information appears on the Internet that some lucky man managed to get close to the solution or even find Bale's cache. But upon examination it turns out that all such declarations are unfounded. And lately there has even been a rumor that the treasure has passed into the hands of NASA, because only this agency, which has the world's best cryptanalysts, mathematicians and the most powerful computers, can decipher the 155-year-old secret.
The efforts of the association in this direction were in vain, but quite unexpectedly a different path opened up for the researchers.
How reliable are The Bale Papers and who is their true author? Without an answer to this question, all further searches are meaningless. Researchers looked for traces of Thomas Jefferson Bale in the archives, but found no evidence that a person with that name existed in Virginia in the early 19th century. Also. there are no documents confirming the fact that a party of hunters or prospectors left Virginia in the late 1810s to the west - to New Mexico or California. Finally, it has been established that the original "Bale Papers" - that is, the original texts of the cryptograms and the cover letter to them - does not exist. Back in the 1880s, Ward reported that they allegedly died in a fire. The question is reasonable: is this whole story a hoax?
The researchers drew attention to a number of minor errors contained in Ward's brochure: the discrepancy of dates, the presence of neologisms not typical of the language spoken in America in the 1820s, the discrepancy in names … For example, in Bale's letter, traditionally dated 1822, in the description running herd of buffaloes, the word "stampede" - "stampede" is used. However, this word (from the Spanish "estampida") entered the American lexicon not earlier than 1844, twenty-two years later.
If The Bale Papers is a hoax, then who could have authored it?
Obviously Bale himself (if he existed), Morris and Ward. It is the latter that most skeptics point to. Lexical analysis of the text of the pamphlet published by Ward showed that all the texts in it (including the texts of "Bale's letters") were written most likely by one single person, most likely - Ward. Moreover, unlike Bale, the historicity of Ward's figure is beyond doubt.
What was Ward's inspiration for this story? Some researchers point to the story of Edgar Poe "The Golden Beetle", where there are similar details of the plot. Another source could be a legend in the state of Kentucky: it tells of a man named Swift who discovered a silver mine, and this mine is still considered lost.
But if the Bale Papers are just fiction, then what do the two undeciphered cryptograms contain? Or are they just a random collection of numbers? However, a computer analysis of the cryptograms in 1971 showed that there are cyclic correspondences between the numbers that cannot be considered random, and that in both cases the cryptograms are text encoded in the same way as cryptogram # 2. Only the key (or the keys) to this cipher should be sought not in the Declaration of Independence, but in some other texts …
What can unencrypted messages tell us? Tell about the place where the treasure is buried? Or … to confirm that this whole story is Ward's idle invention? We will not know this until someone finally decrypts the mysterious "Bale cryptograms".