The Beale ciphers: a Virginia treasure between history and suspicion

In 1885 a pamphlet of a few dozen pages entitled The Beale Papers was printed in Lynchburg, Virginia. It told of a treasure of gold, silver and jewels buried in Bedford County in the 1820s, and published three ciphered texts made up of long series of numbers. Only one had been deciphered. Since then the Beale cipher has become one of the most discussed cryptographic mysteries, and also one of the most suspect.

The pamphlet's story

According to the text, a man named Thomas Jefferson Beale entrusted a locked box in 1822 to Robert Morriss, keeper of a Lynchburg hotel, asking him to open it if he did not return. Beale never came back. Morriss, opening the box many years later, found in it the three cryptograms and some letters, and before his death handed them to a friend, who devoted much of his life to deciphering them.

The pamphlet was published by James B. Ward, who stated that he was acting on behalf of Morriss's friend, who remained anonymous. Later research has not securely identified in the records of the period the Beale described in the story, and the report that many copies were destroyed in a fire cannot be verified either. From the outset, therefore, the story rests on a single source.

The deciphered text

The second cryptogram is the only readable one. Each number refers to a word of the United States Declaration of Independence, and one takes the initial letter of that word: the number ten, for example, indicates the initial of the tenth word. It is a book cipher, in which the key is a known text. The resulting message describes the contents of the treasure and the general area where it was supposedly hidden.

The other two texts, which according to the pamphlet give the exact location and the names of the rightful heirs, have never been deciphered, despite more than a century of attempts, including those of professional cryptanalysts and countless amateurs armed with computers. Some treasure seekers have even dug without permission on land in the county, sometimes ending up in trouble with the law.

The reasons for doubt

Many scholars believe the affair is a fabrication. Linguistic analyses have noted that the style of the letters attributed to Beale resembles that of the pamphlet's author. An even stranger observation concerns the first text: decoded with the same Declaration, it produces long sequences of letters in alphabetical order, hard to explain if it were a genuine message and more consistent with numbers chosen artificially.

No reliable documentary evidence confirms the existence of the treasure or of the expedition described. The pamphlet itself, moreover, mixes plausible details with the tone of an adventure novel and openly invites the reader to join the search: a feature that some historians consider typical of a publication designed above all to arouse interest and sell copies.

The Beale cipher should therefore be approached with caution. It is an interesting chapter of American popular culture and a useful case study for understanding how the authenticity of a cryptogram is assessed. Presenting it as a reliable map to a treasure, however, would mean confusing a fascinating story with an established historical fact.