Synopsis

I strongly recommend that you don't look at this page until you have first worked your way through the pages that discuss each paragraph in detail. If you look at this page without looking at those other pages first you may reject my interpretation too readily, not realising that I have very strong arguments and a wealth of supporting resources to support my interpretation, based on many weeks of research. With that said, this page presents:

• The cryptogram as published by Paris-based historian and librarian Charles De La Roncière in 1934 as part of his book 'Le Flibustier mystérieux: Histoire d'un trésor caché, (The Mysterious pirate: Story of a hidden treasure). It is understood that this is a very poor copy of the original cryptogram of La Buse, which has been lost. Indeed it may be that the cryptogram was made by someone other than La Buse, but I think there is sufficient evidence within the cryptogram to feel confident that it was made by someone who was living off the east coast of Africa, and thus I am inclined to believe that the cryptogram is not a fake made by Charles de La Roncière himself - there are too many details specific to the region off East African coast that Charles De La Roncière would not have been aware of.

• The standard translation of the symbols of the cryptogram into French, done by De La Roncière himself. This was not a major achievement since the cryptogram is based on a variation of the pigpen cipher which was a well-known cypher, popular with freemasons.

• My interpretation of the cryptogram in several steps:

  • A guess as to what were the symbols of the original cryptogram, and the plain text characters associated with each symbol. Colored chevrons are included to indicate how faithful each 'corrected' symbol is to the symbols of the cryptogram published by De La Roncière. In this version of the interpretation, embedded symbols are evident which do not belong to the main text. These embedded symbols may represent the next level of the cryptogam, and may be the clues that could lead to the treasure. Remarkably, every embedded symbol is from the special group that can be interpreted either as a letter or as a digit. It's very unlikely that a set of letters would all happen to be from this special group, so I am inclined to interpret these special symbols as digits, though I have not yet been able to determine the meaning of those digits and have not yet located the treasure...

  • a version in which the embedded symbols are omitted to make the main text easier to read. In this version, punctuation and French accents have been added.

  • a version in which the spelling and other errors made by La Buse have been corrected

  • an English translation

• A version which wraps lines as in the original cryptogram and which includes the embedded symbols.

The Cryptogram

Plain Text Version

I have added line numbers.

01 APREJMEZUNEPAIREDEPIJONTIRESKET

02 2DOEURSQESEAJTETECHERALFUNEKORT

03 FILTTINSHIENTECUPRENEZUNECULLIERE

04 DEMIELLEEFOVTREFOUSENFAITESUNEONGAT

05 METTEZSURKEPATAIEDELAPERTOTITOUSN

06 _VPULEZOLVSPRENEZ2LETCASSESURLECH

07 EMINILFAUTQOEUTTOITANOITIECOUUE

08 POVRENPECGERUNEFEMMEDHRENGTVOUSNAVE

09 QUAVOUSSERERLADOBAUCGEAETPOURVE.

10 NGRAAIETPOREPINGLEOUEIUILETURLOR

11 EILJNOURLAIREPITERUNCHIENTUPQUN

12 LENENDELAMERDEBIENTECJEETSURRU

13 NVOVLENQUILNISEIUDFKUUNEFEMMRQ

14 IVEUTSEFAIREDUNHMETSEDETE?DRE

15 DANSDUUI●_OOUQNDORMIRUNHOMMR

16 ESSCFVMM/PLFAUTNRENDREUDLQ

17 UUNDIFFURQECIEEFURTETLESL

My interpretation

Since you have already read through the detailed pages, you know that La Buse (or whoever wrote the cryptogram) was a very poor speller, and that (s)he often spelt words phonetically, often writing, for example -é in place of -ez or -er at the end of words (these endings all sound the same). 

Also, as you read though the interpretations below, recall that I use colored chevrons to indicate how faithful  my 'corrected' symbols are to the original ones. Green = quite faithful since the two symbols differ only by the absence or presence of a dot or line, or by a dot/line confusion, or by a rotation of 45°. Orange = somewhat similar and red= quite different.

Similarly the 'embedded symbols', which I assume are intended to be interpreted as digits, are colored black if I am very confident that they are correct, and red if I am less confident because other interpretations are  possible.

I don't use chevrons when I 'change 'u' to 'v' since I don't consider this to be a correction - these two letters were more or less interchangeable at the time of La Buse.

For each paragraph, click the section heading to jump to the page that interprets that paragraph in detail.

My interpretation is copyright June 2017.

Paragraph 1

I emphasise once again that you should not be reading this synopsis until you have first read the detailed pages that provide all the support for my interpretation. In particular, the interpretation of this paragraph suggests some startling new angles, such as the suggestion that 'CHIEN TURQ' (Turkish dog) refers to the many dogs that were roaming around this part of the world with little hair because they were suffering from mange, which was widespread. At that time there was a type of dog in Turkey which had  little or no hair, as recognised later even by Charles Darwin. Note that this interpretation of 'Turkish dog' is analysed in the interpretation of paragraph 4 rather than paragraph 2, since Levasseur refers to them again in paragraph 4.

My interpretation of paragraph 2 gives lots of support for the idea that at the time it would not have been unreasonable to treat canine mange  (scabies) with sulfur and honey, and also for the idea that heating an ointment made with these substances would make sense (possibly half-covering the container while heating). I interpret the text as suggesting that the ointment should be placed on the animal's head ('patate' was sometimes used for 'head' at that time). Every dog owner knows that it is a good idea to put ointment on a the back of a dog's head so that the dog cannot lick it off.

One of the most daring suggestions that I make is that 'LECHEMIN' should not be taken to mean 'le chemin' (the path), as everyone takes to be obvious, but should instead be taken to mean 'légèrement' (lightly), which in spoken French sounds quite similar to 'le chemin' (and may have sounded even more similar in the dialects of the time). Of course 'le chemin' and 'légèrement' have very different meaning, so how could it have come to be written as 'LECHEMIN' in the text? There is an obvious answer to that: the text may have been dictated at some point prior to being converted into symbols, or the text could have been written  by someone with very poor writing skills who did not know how to spell 'légèrement' so went for something that's phonetically similar. Of course 'very poor writing skills' would also explain all the spelling mistakes and phonetic spelling that we see throughout the text.

As you have already read the detailed interpretation of paragraph 4, you already know that:

• 'Turkish dog' meant 'hairless dog '

• In this region there were many dogs that had lost their hair because they had canine scabies (canine mange)

• Canine mange can be caught temporarily by humans, which can cause irritation

• At the time of La Buse 'piler' could mean 'eat well'

• Dogs sometimes eat excrement, especially if they are sick. They are thought to do this because the excrement contains enzymes, etc. which can be beneficial to them.

So the suggestion is that trying to make a mangy dog eat shit could have amused La Buse, who was after all a pirate, no doubt with a coarse sense of humour and little moral sense. Recall that this is the same man who ordered the burning of the Duchesse de Noailles in December 1721 while hundreds of slaves were trapped on board.

Having read the detailed interpretation of paragraph 4, you will also be aware that I propose alternatives to certain words in this paragraph: 

• FILER instead of PILER. We then get 'Pour faire filer un chien turc, flanquez de la merde bien sèche dessus'. In English: 'To make a Turkish dog (a mangy dog) run away, throw some dry shit at it'. Wanting to make the sick dog run away may seem more plausible than wanting to see it eat excrement, but in that case why throw 'dry shit' at it - wouldn't you just use a stone?

• JETEZ instead of FLENKE (flenké, phonetically equivalent to flanquez) . Both 'jetez' and 'flanquez' can mean 'throw', though this is a slang use of 'flanquez'. Using JETEZ instead of FLENKE affects the embedded symbol in the first line.

Paragraph 5

Embedded Symbols and Line Breaks

Most of my site focuses on the main text of the La Buse document, which is clearly made up of jestful tips for dealing with women and certain creatures typical of the region, namely 'pigeon' conchs and mangy dogs (which La Buse calls 'Turkish dogs').

But people who would like to get their hands on several hundred million dollars' worth of treasure should be more interested in the clues that are embedded in the main text. According to me, these clues are the unexpected 'embedded symbols' that I have identified, all of which happen to be from the special set of symbols that can be interpreted either as letters or as digits. Since it is extremely unlikely that a group of letters would all happen to be from this special set, I think these symbols should be interpreted as digits, as I have done below. I haven't yet figured out from these digits the location of the treasure - the digits cannot simply be geographical coordinates since it was not possible to measure coordinates (especially longitude) with sufficient precision back then. It's possible that these clues are independent of the main text, but it's also possible that they connect to the main text with meanings like 'take the 4th syllable to the right of this digit' etc. At the bottom of this page you will find the embedded characters extracted from the text to form strings, both as digits and as letters since these special symbols can be interpreted either way.

In the following image I have wrapped the lines at the same places where they were wrapped in the cryptogram, in case this is important for the reading of the clues. I do believe that the person who made the copy of the original cryptogram wrapped lines in the same places as in the original cryptogram made by La Buse(?) since why else would the lines get shorter and shorter towards the end - why do these lines not approach the right side of the page? However I believe that whoever made the original cryptogram did not care about where the lines wrapped because the lengths of the lines are very variable, suggesting that the original symbols weren't carefully arranged in columns.