The Beale Papers

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Misc

The last day for grading will be Tuesday, December 21 (the last day of finals).

All grading meetings (including late ones, redos, etc.) must finish by 5:00 PM that day.

Warning: do not assume you’ll be able to make appointments when you want them; that will get harder as the deadline gets closer.

The Beale Papers

Based on the online copy at http://www.unmuseum.org/bealepap.htm.

Summary

What is this, what’s the story line, etc.

Very short version: Thomas Beale & 29 friends find treasure “out west,” which they hide, leaving enciphered messages about where they hid it.

More specifics: Beale leaves encrypted messages and a cover letter in a box with inn-keeper Robert Morriss. Morriss is to hold the box for 10 years in case someone claims it. No-one does, even though Morriss waits 20-ish years. He finally opens the box but does little with the documents it contains. He eventually gives them to a friend who tries and mostly fails to decipher the encrypted messages.

Credibility

Do you believe that there’s really an undiscovered treasure from circa 1820 buried somewhere in Virginia?

• No, the claim is implausible: too many people were involved to keep the secret, there’s too much treasure to just bury and give up on, Morriss comes across as unbelievably honorable. The failure of even modern technology to break the code or find the treasure also makes it unlikely that there’s anything out there.
• The long time between the supposed burial of the treasure and publication of the papers is also suspicious, it conveniently leaves no-one from the time to check the story against.
• Subsequent researchers have pointed out that some of the vocabulary is anachronistic, that there’s no record of a “Thomas J. Beale” living at the time, etc.
• The author is unidentified, conveniently making it impossible to vouch for his or her credibility.
• The inconsistency in counting words in the Declaration of Independence is very suspicious: why and how would the person who deciphered the one decrypted message make that correction, and then not mention it in their account of how they broke that code?

How do you judge the credibility of this document (or any other)? We talked about some things you can look for when sifting through library search results, before reading the document in detail; here are some things you can consider after or while reading:

• Factors internal to the document
  • Plausibility
    • Is what the document says intuitively plausible (e.g., not “too good to be true,” etc.) 
    • Does the document make logical sense (e.g., is it internally consistent, does it avoid logical fallacies)
  • Timeliness
  • Author’s credentials
• External factors
  • What do critics or reviewers say?
  • How well does it agree with other sources?

Next

Book ciphers: the kind of cipher used in The Beale Papers.

How a book cipher works:

• The key is a known text (e.g., the Declaration of Independence)
• You encrypt letters of plaintext as numbers, namely numbers that give the positions of words in the key whose first letter is the plaintext letter.
• To decrypt ciphertext, use each number to look up a word in the key, replacing the number with first letter of that word.

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