Paragraph 1

As previously stated, the five paragraphs that make up the cryptogram do NOT seem to give clear directions for locating the La Buse treasure (luckily for us, in a way, otherwise it would already have been found long ago). So either the cryptogram is just a joke that is not intended to lead us to the treasure or else there are hidden clues in the cryptogram. The fact that these clues are hidden is one of four observations that make our job so difficult, the others being that:

• French has evolved a lot in the nearly 300 years since the cryptogram was made

• We are looking at a very bad copy of the original cryptogram

• La Buse was a bad speller!

Some people think that the hidden clues are in the form of a map that is incorporated into the cryptogram – that's a possibility but since the cryptogram we have is such a poor copy of the original, judging by the number of symbols that were mis-copied, the map must have been badly distorted too and may not be usable. Other people see hints towards Greek mythology or constellations of stars. What I see is a couple of dozens embedded symbols that seem out of place and which may point to certain words or characters that should be extracted from the text to obtain directions to the treasure. All the embedded symbols that seem out of place are from the special group of symbols that can be interpreted either as letters or digits – this cannot possibly be a coincidence so that suggests to me that they probably represent digits. A digit '5' for example, might mean 'take the fifth word to the right of this one'. Paragraph 1 contains several of these special symbols, shown as digits in my interpretation below… (my interpretation is copyright June 2017).

Paragraph 1 is the paragraph for which contains the most legible French words without much 'correcting' and therefore my word interpretation of this paragraph is similar to those of other people. 

Note that in my interpretation every 'correction' except one has a green chevron , meaning that the correction I am proposing requires only a minor modification to the corresponding symbol. This means that my proposed corrections for this paragraph are highly plausible.

Pigeon conchs grow to a maximum of 77mm in length and their flesh is entirely edible. I don't think that conch is on the menu any more in the Madagascar region – I assume they were overfished and are now rare or protected, but back in the early 18th century human populations were much smaller (the global population was less than a tenth of what is is now!), overfishing had not happened and these conchs were no doubt more abundant and perhaps also larger. Nowadays we associate conchs more with the Caribbean – they are a well-known delicacy on the islands of the Bahamas, for example.

I'm guessing also that when La Buse refers to the 'heart' of the pigeons he is in fact simply referring to the 'flesh' of the pigeon conchs. After all, the word 'heart' does not have to refer to an organ – I can speak of the 'heart of Paris', for example.

There still remains the question of why La Buse specifies a pair of pigeons and 2 hearts. I think it is wrong to assume that the 'paire' referred to in the cryptogram must refer to TWO things. La Buse was born in Calais which is more or less in Flanders and the local dialect would have been heavily influenced by Flemish. Calais is situated in what used to be called 'Nord/Pas de Calais' and this page says 'During most of the last 1,000 years, the people of what is now Nord/ Pas-de-Calais would not have thought of themselves as French.' This page says that 'The border between France and Belgium may well be some 200 years old, but the Flemish character of the north of France remains' and that even today 50 thousand people in the on the French side of the border still speak 'French Flemish'.   In Flemish the word 'paar' can refer to two objects but more usually means 'a few' or 'several'. I believe this is what La Buse meant in his cryptogram – it would be more natural for him to suggest that you should cook the flesh of several conchs rather than exactly two. But then why would he refer to '2' hearts in the second sentence? It's a bit like the word 'couple' - if I say I had had a 'couple' of beers you would probably assume I had had several - not just two! 

The '2' appear as an uncoded digit (as it does in one other location in the cryptogram) rather than as an encoded symbol (the same symbol that can represent the letter 'E'. Why would La Buse not have encoded this digit, as he apparently did for many other digits according to my interpretation? At the moment, I don't have an answer for this, but if I am right that 'paire' is intended to refer to several pigeon conchs then it would follow that the '2' does not refer to these conchs but is instead part of the next layer of clues to be solved in order to locate the treasure. 

By the way, all my discussion about birds versus conchs and about 'two' versus 'several' probably doesn't matter to those interested in finding the treasure – all five paragraphs have at first glance nothing to do with treasure or even with La Buse himself. Treasure hunters will only be interested in identifying and interpreting the hidden clues in these five paragraphs of text. But at least my interpretation is more plausible that the usual interpretation (ripping out the hearts of two pigeon birds) which seems like some weird black magic ritual – my interpretation of this paragraph is that it is just a brief tip for how to prepare conch meat, a local delicacy.

Other notes

• In my interpretation I suggest that La Buse wrote 'TIRE' meaning 'tiré' as a phonetically correct mis-spelling of 'tirez', intended to mean 'retirez' or, in English, 'remove' or 'take out'. In fact it's odd that in modern French the word 'retirer' begins with 're' as if it implies removing something that had already been removed before. And we mustn't forget that French has evolved significantly in the last 300 years - it may be that back then 'tirer' was perhaps sometimes used where we would now expect 'retirer'.

• La Buse correctly wrote 'prenez' and not 'prené' in the first sentence (I'm ignoring the 'j' which I believe belongs to the next level of clues) so why would he have made, in the second sentence, the error of writing 'tiré' instead of 'tirez'? I can't well explain this inconsistency but want to point out that 'tiré' and 'tirez' are phonetically equivalent and La Buse was writing to a large extent phonetically, making frequent spelling mistakes that make sense phonetically.

• Similarly, my interpretation includes the word 'FAITE' whereas correct modern French would require 'FAITES'. Again, I deduce that La Buse has made a spelling mistake, writing a word that is at least phonetically correct.

• The fifth symbol, which looks like a half moon, is not a member of the expected set of symbols. This half moon symbol appears nowhere else in the cryptogram. Is it another example of a badly-copied symbol - it may well be, and I have just assumed, like most people, that it corresponds to the 'square' symbol that corresponds to the letter 'J'. Some people have suggested that it does indeed represent a half moon and that the disc symbol in line 15 may represent a full moon. I don't have much of an opinion on this.

• The eighth symbol, which looks like a dotted upward-pointing chevron or a letter 'A', has been given enormous importance by many people since the un-dotted upward pointing chevron is thought to represent the letter 'Z' and therefore the use of a dotted version seems unnecessary and surprising, suggesting that it may have some special meaning. The dotted version appears in two other locations in the cryptogram. My opinion is that it seems clear that copying errors involving the omission or the incorrect inclusion of a dot are among the most common errors made by the copier (very easy errors to make), so one should not attach much significance to the unexpected dots on these symbols. To me, the dotted upward-pointing chevron is just a bad copy of the un-dotted version. To all those people who have attached great importance to the dotted version: sorry! Note that in my interpretation I have, for interest, distinguished between the un-dotted version which I represent as 'Z' and the dotted version which I represent as 'z'.

• Nearly everyone assumes that the first paragraph includes the words 'TETE CHEVAL' but my interpretation does not include this. For all those people who have been looking for geographical features with the form of a horse's head: sorry! Anyway, wouldn't La Buse have written 'tête de cheval' and not 'tête cheval'?

• In my interpretation, the first character in the cryptogram is not part of the main text. It is one of those extra characters that can be interpreted as either a letter or a digit and which is probably part of the next level of clues. The symbol can be interpreted either as 'A' or as '1' which makes one wonder whether the text is made of numbered paragraphs. But I don't see any other similar numbering for the other paragraphs so I think this is in fact not the case. 

• You probably didn't know until you read this page that 'pigeons' can refer to a type of conch specific to the coasts around Madagascar. I'm pretty certain that Charles de La Roncière would not have known about the existence of these molluscs either, and to me this is further evidence that the cryptogram was NOT a fake created by De La Roncière as some people have suggested.

• The assumption is that 2DOEURS should be read as '2 coeurs' (2 hearts) but it also possible to read it as '2 soeurs' (2 sisters) which could be a hint towards the Seychelles archipelago, which has the nickname the '7 sisters'. The digits 2 and 7 resemble one another somewhat. Furthermore, there are a pair of islands 60 north-east of Mahé which are called 'Grande Soeur' and 'Petite Soeur' - could La Buse have been referring to these two 'sisters'?

• Still looking for possible geographical references, I note that some maps show a 'Pigeon Mountain' at the north end of Mahé, the main island of the Seychelles.

• I also note that there is a kind of cherry and a kind of tomato called 'coeur de pigeon' (pigeon heart) as well as a kind of pea called pigeon pea.

• La Buse spelt pigeon as 'pijon' which is taken by some to be a Créole spelling but I read somewhere that pirates generally did not speak Créole so it may just be another example of La Buse spelling words phonetically. In Erik Alexander Dresen's book 'Paragon Island' he says that the 'j' in old French was changed into 'ge' in modern French, so perhaps we need to look no further than that. That book has an interesting interpretation of the La Buse cryptogram but very little of the book is about the cryptogram and the translation from German to English was very poor so it's hard work to read and I can't recommend it.

• La Buse wrote 'PIJON' where we might have expected him to write 'PIJONS'. Again, this seems to be an error but it is one of many errors that is phonetically correct - the kind of error made by someone who is a poor speller.

• Some people, looking for geographical clues in the text, have suggested that 'pijon' may hint at 'piton' which is a French word meaning 'rocky outcrop'. If you look at a map of Réunion you will see that there are indeed more than a dozen 'pitons' on the island, the main ones being 'Piton de la Fournaise' (a volcano) and 'Piton des Neiges' which, at 3,069 m (10 000 feet), is the highest peak on the island. 

• Is it possible that the word 'dry' in my interpretation really means 'dry' rather than 'cook'? Perhaps by drying the conch meat one obtains a meat which keeps for a long time, useful for long journeys at sea?