The Thomas Beale Cipher

The Origins

In 1885, a remarkable pamphlet was published in Lynchburg, Virginia. Authored — or at least edited — by a man named James B. Ward, it told the story of a mysterious treasure buried somewhere in Bedford County, Virginia, and the three coded documents that supposedly revealed its secrets.

According to the pamphlet, the story begins decades earlier, in 1820, when a man named Thomas J. Beale checked into the Washington Hotel in Lynchburg. Beale was described as a striking figure — tall, dark-haired, and possessed of an easy confidence that won the admiration of all who met him. He stayed at the hotel for several months before departing westward, leaving behind little more than a favourable impression.

The Discovery

Beale returned to Lynchburg in 1822 and again lodged at the Washington Hotel, this time under the proprietorship of Robert Morriss. During this second stay, Beale confided in Morriss and eventually entrusted him with a locked iron box, instructing him to keep it safe. Should Beale fail to return or send word within ten years, Morriss was to open the box.

Beale and his party had, it was claimed, discovered a fabulously rich vein of gold — and some silver — near Santa Fe in what is now New Mexico. Over the course of several expeditions, the group mined and transported the precious metals back east, burying them in a secret vault in Bedford County for safekeeping.

The Three Ciphers

Inside the iron box, Morriss found three sheets of paper covered in numbers, along with an explanatory letter. The letter stated that the three ciphertexts described, respectively:

Morriss waited — far longer than the stipulated ten years, in fact — before opening the box. He then spent years attempting to decipher the coded messages, without success. Eventually, growing old and despairing of ever solving the puzzle, he passed the papers on to an unnamed friend, who is believed to have been James B. Ward himself.

The One That Was Solved

This new custodian succeeded where Morriss had failed — at least partially. He discovered that Cipher No. 2 was a book cipher, keyed to the United States Declaration of Independence. Each number in the cipher corresponded to a word in the Declaration, and the first letter of each word spelled out the plaintext message.

The decoded Cipher No. 2 described a treasure of astonishing value: thousands of pounds of gold and silver, together with jewels, deposited in iron pots lined with stone, buried six feet beneath the ground in a vault in Bedford County. At today's prices, the hoard would be worth tens of millions of dollars.

The Unsolved Mysteries

Cipher No. 1 — the one describing the location of the vault — and Cipher No. 3 — listing the owners and heirs — have never been publicly decoded. Countless amateur and professional cryptanalysts have attempted to crack them over the past century and a half. The key texts for these ciphers, assuming they are genuine book ciphers like No. 2, have never been identified.

Various candidates have been proposed — the Magna Carta, the Virginia State Constitution, the Book of Genesis — but none has produced coherent plaintext. Until now, the Beale cipher has remained one of the great unsolved puzzles in the history of cryptography.