/sci/ - Science & Math

bump, would like to know what happened after i left.

>>5691859
Well that would depend on WHEN you left.
It's all there for you anyway.

I guess it could work...

But I'm not really keen on sharing people's telephone numbers to strangers on the internet just like that. Especially when it comes to demented 90-year old ladies.

I'll guess I give it a few more tries, if it doesn't work I just might consider this option.

>>5691775
I guess it could work...

But I'm not really keen on sharing people's telephone numbers to strangers on the internet just like that. Especially when it comes to demented 90-year old ladies.

I'll guess I give it a few more tries, if it doesn't work I just might consider this option.

>>5691965
You said you got the number of the previous owner's cousin and husband, whose aunt is the senile old woman, correct? If so, couldn't you ask either of them about this woman or ask them to talk to her for you? Or, as long as I'm throwing out ideas, could you be referred to another relative closer to the old woman?

I'm only suggesting this because I have serious doubts that you will be able to directly get anything from her. I doubt she was just fucking with you, so unless you happen to luck out and catch her when she's lucid, you're probably better off finding another angle to approach this. Given her initial response, I don't think more calls would improve the situation.

>>5691977
My mistake, I just realized half of this had already been suggested in the post you linked. I got too wrapped up in my own thought.

Alright just to recap from the last thread:

Things we believe we have solved:
>the numbers at the top are actually a message in French
>the letters followed by a number on the lower left translate into lattitude and longitude coordinates given with North and West designations
>both of the above were solved using the arrow above the coordinates
>the drawings to the right of the coordinates closely match the island of Les Saintes from above and might possibly indicate to Fort Napoleon

Things we don't know:
>why the message required the numbers to be mirrored in order to decoded, but not the coordinates or map drawings
>why was so much effort put into hinting at the location of Fort Napoleon
>why the author would include so much information to solve the cipher
>who was the intented recipient and why did they not get the message

Encoded messages between people who know eachother, they would see and understand any hints left behind that we overthink, however I don't think this message was to be delivered to someone, maybe just left to find for someone. I reason that, since the fort was a prison, the prisoner had a cell with a window, he put anything he could see out his window on the paper, maybe the JB ship was one of them.

>>5692044
The problem I have with the prisoner idea is the method of hiding the message. How and why would a prisoner acquire a mirror and conceal it in this manner?

>>5692044
we don't know the meaning of j.b., and it that scenario seems odd to me. it would be weird for an inmate to record the things he saw out his window in code, and then send it off to... wherever... but it would be even stranger that of all the things he saw out his window, he managed to see a ship, identify it, and then put that on his coded message, but not code just that part.

>>5692058

He could have written the message, given it to someone who was to be released and he put the note in the mirror, but then it must have had a recipient. But we don't know the message was hidden in the mirror when it was made, the recipient could have got it, understood it and hidden it so nobody would find it.

>>5692082
That seems like an awful lot of leaps of logic. I'm not saying it's impossible, but it's hardly the most plausible explanation.

>>5692092

Yes definitely, jb standing for both the ship and fort, unlikely. But this seems odd, if you send someone an encoded letter, 3 options apply, 1. The recipient is expecting a letter from you, 2. You put your initials on it, or 3. You hide some info that would let the recipient know who sent the message.

OP, we could use some new pictures of the note itself to help us get a time period. As someone else in the previous thread said, old paper has a lot of imperfections in it, and old ink will turn a brownish color as the iron in the ink oxidizes.

If you don't have a great camera, try to put the note in the sunlight with a plain white piece of printer paper behind it. Set the white balance on the camera to match where you are and hold the camera very still.

Better yet, see if you can't get the note scanned with a high quality scanner. Although from what you said the paper sounds very fragile so be careful when handling it. Maybe try a museum?

>>5692005
I think you need to add this to "Things we don't know":
>The actual meaning of the encoded message

We know what it says, but in my opinion we don't know what it *means*. The location of the islands are pinpointed by the coordinates and the shape of the islands already. I'm not so sure that the text are sailing directions.

If they are not sailing directions, they may pinpoint the actual "treasure" more precisely.


>>5692044
>>5692082
The letter never mentions the Fort in any way, as far as we know. There are more things on the island. It is likely that some rich people lived there, together with a community of workers, slaves, natives, and the crew of a lot of passing vessels. All this fantasy about a potential prisoner is just that, fantasy, and so far it seems highly unlikely. So far the thread has managed to keep the conspiracies at bay, and IMHO theories like this just pollutes the thread.

>>5692490
One problem with this is that the OP almost literally lives in the middle of nowhere. Sweden is a large country to the surface and not densely populated, but where the OP lives is extreme. 110000 square kilometers (43000 square miles) and the largest city has a whooping 18000 inhabitants. Population density: 0.86 persons per square kilometer. :)

Just travelling south to a well-equipped museum and back could take a whole day..

>>5692494
The fort has been there since long before the note could have ever been written, so I could only assume that the map references the fort in some way. You're right that ultimately we just don't know.

At this point it's more or less up to OP to do the leg work in researching the mirror or taking it to a museum/university where people more knowledgeable about history can take a crack at it. Overall I feel like we've done as much as we can for now. And hey, it's a hidden encrypted message someone found hidden behind a fucking mirror. It's hard not to fantasize about what it all means.

Assumptions are bad.
>>5692044
Just because it was a prison at one time doesn't mean it was a prison when this was written.
>>5692058
Or further still, get an inkpen and some paper on what appears to be a tiny island. I'm thinking it must be someone who has access to both, so a pirate/ship captain/journalist/writer/tourist/etc would make more sense.
>>5692080
Sure, we don't 'know' the meaning of 'JB,' but we can infer with a reasonable amount of confidence that the letter was written at some time after the ruins would have been referenced by Napoleon's wife, or are simply initials to indicate who sent it. Could be some secret military code/codename even, but I think it's superfluous anyway.
>>5692082
Yeah, but it would have been a lot simpler just to, you know, say the message to the released guy or whatever. And if he wanted no one to find it, a fire would've been much easier than hiding it in some mirror. Besides, how often does one hide a note addressed to oneself? I can't think of a logical situation where I would get a top-secret document and then just kinda hide it behind my mirror, especially something so simple...
>>5692092
This, basically.
>>5692109
No, that assumes we know the recipient was expecting it. I don't think we can judge that quality yet. Also, we're assuming the JB must be initials, and they belong to either the author or recipient, which I think may ultimately be wrong (maybe JB refers to nothing at all - that would throw one off).
>>5692490
I don't think that's gonna help as much as you think. You can pretty plainly see in the first picture on the other thread where the paper has logical bits of fiber and stuff off-color as would have been used on older paper. You can tell even with the white balance being crappy that the ink is reasonably brown as you might expect (assuming all the ink in the world was manufactured exactly the same way back then - which I doubt, but I'm not the expert here).

>>5692531
No, but this is /sci/. We are empirical.

If you want to fantasize, have a go at
>>>/lit/
>>>/x/
>>>/a/
>>>/b/
>>>/r9k/

>>5692541
Well we've gotten just about as far as we can. Unless OP can dig up some dirt on the owners or somebody else can really put the pieces together historically there's not much left to discuss.

So today I phoned this old woman again, this time she was totally calm and cooperative, and didn't even seem to remember anything from yesterday(!)

And. She actually remembered the mirror. It had apparently been in her family since the day she was born. She didn't know where it originally came from or when it was made. She had given it away to her nephew because it "brought back bad memories". What kind of bad memories she wouldn't tell me.

I even told her about the map, but she said she didn't know one thing about it.

Of course, she got pretty curious and I had to explain all the things I knew surrounding the map to her. She got pretty excited and had me promise I would call her if I found out more about it.

When I asked her if she knew anyone who could tell me more about the mirror she said I could try to phone her younger sister in London. She's apparently her only living sibling.

So, a new phone number. However I'm afraid this might be the last.

>>5693634
i wouldn't give up hope.. the sister may have some contacts, you never know

i think you should visit or contact people at fort napolean.. have you done this?!

>>5693634

take this role playing shit over to /x please

>>5693653
Les Saintes D214
97137
Terre-de-Haut
Antilles Française

Telephone: +590(5)90995860
Fax: +590(5)90995848

Sorry I haven't been following the threads, but do you know what the message says?

>>5693816
They think it was a map the numbers are coordinates to fort napoleon or someplace close to it.

>>5693816
no

What if we called someone on the island, explained the situation, had them look at this thread and then had them explore the area for us.

I mean, if someone showed me a potential treasure map pointing out a place near my house I would've been more than happy to help.

>>5693678
/x/ is for paranormal shit.

>>5693816
>>5694086
Please read OP's post before you tell people it hasn't been deciphered. The link is in the post to the previous thread archive.

>>5694194
Yeah, and then OP is out millions of dollars in 1800s porn mags...

>>5694194
and let them take OUR treasure?!??

just kidding, there's probably no treasure.
I agree talking to someone on the island, hopefully an historian or something like that, could turn out to be useful. I'm always tfor talking to people who could potentially have some good insight on the matter, it usually solves a lot of time you'd waste working on dead ends.

Assuming this is not just a hoax from OP (which i haven't ruled out).
Or a marketing campaign for pirates of the carribean 5, or national treasure 3...

>>5694252
Yeah, but I doubt it's a hoax because tripcodes and whatnot. Similarly, it doesn't look like most other hoaxes, and /sci/ isn't exactly the board to hoax a movie like National Treasure or DaVinci code on (Pirates would even make more sense on /int/ or something...). Besides, I'd find it hard to think Hollywood would be quite this creative, what with the fonts used and such, and the consistency of detail.

Still, can't wait to see what OP finds, unless it is hoax. If hoax, it was still fun, I think.

>>5694341
I don't really see this being a hoax. If OP were playing a trick on us, he put way too much time and effort into this, given how often he comes back to the thread and what have you. And it seems like it would make a really shitty stealth marketing campaign, and I don't see any reason any sort of advertisers would target a slow board like /sci/, that in itself makes no sense. Basically what I'm saying is that I don't see a logical reason why someone would present this the way they have if it is a hoax.

>>5694341
>>5694342
i was mostly kidding.
You can continue the search.

J.B.

Joséphine de Beauharnais

"The strategic position of Petite Martinique (former name of Îlet à Cabrit) always served of sentinel's place. In 1777, France built, at the top of Morne de la Reine hill (Former name of Morne Josephine hill), a fortification named Fort de la Reine renamed later Fort Joséphine. It formed then a defensive system with the Fort Napoléon and the numerous battery of the archipelago."

Let's go to Guatemala then...

If someone is seriously going to do this, a metal detector would surely come handy.

>>5694542
I was thinking about this earlier. People walk around on beaches with metal detectors all the time. If a cheap metal detector is all that you would need to find whatever this is, it has already been found. If there is anything to be found, it is either not metal, too deep for most metal detectors, or not actually buried under the mainland (perhaps in an underwater cave near the coast).

>>5694604
Indeed. The smaller, "zoomed in" map fragment does *not* point to the beach, but to the forest/jungle further in.

And if the jungle looks like this, even if it's just a couple of acres it would be virtually impossible to search in. :/

But maybe the jungles on those island are just backyards for rich people these days, filled with paths.

So much information flying by.

My side of the thread via google and some random text information for Jean Baptiste supplied:

Jean Baptiste Carrier: Nantes + Spy.
Jean Baptiste Chavannes : Haiti Soldier and whatnot, linked loosely to Guatemala location.

Notation concerning mapping: Older maps are notoriously inaccurate, mostly due to humans being lazy in the accuracy department after the first half dozen checks.

One of the difficulties of the map and quotation bit is that there seems to be a certain amount of information missing. As such, I would make the determination that the parties involved in the conversation knew the general location already.

You might be able to cross-reference some of the name guesses of the writer with a social-reference map to correlate where the mirror went when the mirror was transported. If their history matches just 1 name within the first 3 tiers of association, it would strongly point to the originator of the code. (UK nantes and germany?)

>>5694499
>>5694778

Where did you get Guatemala from? Are you just trying to spell Guadeloupe but failing, or do you know something the rest of us don't?

>>5694858
I mixed it up, sorry.

>>5691848
now

Could go to >>>/int/ to see if anyone who lives close to that place knows anything?

Just be careful they don't try and steal your shit.

>>5695467
>Going to /int/ for help

They would laugh at us for years

>>5696121
It isn't as though we'd be asking them to do science. I'm sure /int/ can handle something as simple as walking through the woods... I hope anyway...

>>5696475
>>5696121

/int/ is a pretty nice board usually, from my experiences

>>5694499
>>5694542
We discussed that in the time this note was written, that maps and coordinates were not as accurate as they are today. I believe we have located the described geographical location, but I still seriously doubt the note is referring to any sort of treasure.

Think about it. If you were going to hide treasure you stole from the French or British government at the time, or even a private vessel, would you fucking hide it within walking distance of a military fort? The Fort has been there since the 17th century, long before the note could have been written.

And if it were a treasure map, wouldn't it be a little bit more cryptic? The author used a Caesar cipher, and included the shift to use. The author included two drawings of the geographic location. I don't think some pirate hiding a lifetime's worth of stolen gold would be so careless.

I'm sure that the East coast of the cape has significance. I don't think that the map has any significant military history behind it. If if were a military note, the encryption would be more sophisticated. Perhaps it was a drug smuggling message, and a boat was to arrive or leave from that more protected and less visible coast of the specific cape?

>>5698854
Hm. I'm not sure I'm buying that.

First, the cipher:
Today we can sit at home and look up ciphers on Wikipedia, but I doubt that crypto systems were well known back then. The military, sure, but not your common thief/pirate. I doubt they would even teach a plain soldier in the navy encryption stuff, in case of desertion or capture. This cipher is something that a moderately literate person can come up with alone, and when he does, he'll believe it to be pretty safe and obscure.

Regarding the maps:
These islands are extremely small, the island we're looking at is 4-5 km. There are thousands if not hundreds of thousands of islands like this. Assuming we place the message some time during the 19th century, the maps over the area from that time doesn't make much sense. Someone could have managed to match the zoomed-out drawing on a map, but you would have needed access to a good map, and you would have needed to know where to look. Remember that the map coordinates are encoded, and someone who doesn't know the cipher doesn't know it's in French.

(part 2 follows)

>>5698854

(part 2)

Regarding the location of the "object":
Let's say that you end up near the fort with something to hide. Maybe you're a guard who stole something from the inmates, maybe you're an escaped inmate, maybe you're just working there and want to hide something from your boss, etc. When I check in Google Earth I can see that the fort is on a hill, and to the south there is a valley that now has a lot of buildings. Seeing how it's between two hills and close between two shores, I find it likely that the soil is rich and that it has always been populated. The valley covers about 500 metres. Going that way means certain detection. However, up north there is nothing, just wilderness. If you want to escape prying eyes, going north from the fort seems like a decent idea. It could even be that there's a smaller hill that will create a temporary "hidden spot" from the lookouts at the fort, not to mention that the fort was in disuse between 1809 and 1867.

It would be real nifty if we could narrow down the age of the letter a bit more.

I prepared a somewhat high resolution image of the cape in question, but from the wrong side of the hill. The vegetation doesn't seem very tall, which is to be expected from a small island like this. You can't just walk around there unnoticed in daylight, if you want to hide a treasure or search for one.

However, on the other side of the hill, there seem to be some cliff without vegetation, which could contain a lot of crevices. The rocky patch is about 30 times 60 metres, and is located very close to where the 'point' is in the drawing.

Ok guys, I found a high resolution photo of the exact area that we're talking about.

I prepared an annotated composite of the photo and a screenshot from google earth so that you can see for yourself that it is a match.

The photo shows some interesting locations for hiding whatever is hidden. I have not really marked any of that. My bet is in a crevice in the bare cliff but it's really pointless to guess.

>>5700212
I do like this map. Could the triangle indicate the hill you marked in yellow? The dot could then indicate a stretch of relatively flat land well hidden between the hill with the fort and the hill you marked. (draw a straight line to connect the ends of the red map you overlapped).

Perhaps the lack of reference to Fort Napoleon really is a clue to the date. As you said, the fort was not used between 1809 and 1867. Perhaps the author really didn't have any knowledge of the fort. The flat land between the peaks of the hills would be a good solid hiding spot, not in danger of eroding into the sea and relatively difficult to reach. I don't think it is possibly to exactly match that dot to a specific point on the map however. Like you said, maps back then just weren't as good as they are today. I just can't see somebody sketching a perfect recreation of the specific spot from memory.

However, we are still very far from explaining why the note was hidden behind a mirror. Could it be that someone found the treasure and wanted to share it's location with a friend? Maybe it just designates a meeting spot for a group of people?

From the wiki article on the island:
"In September 1928, les Saintes, like its neighbouringislands of Guadeloupe, were violently struck by a strong cyclone which destroyed an important part of the municipal archives"

Means that what we're searching for might have already been found and forgotten, though the area seems relatively inhospitable, it is possible there is something still out there.

>>5700212
Isn't that a hole right there?
What if there are caves and/or tunnels under the island?!?

wow, can't believe how far you guys have come.
I bumped the old thread twice like a week ago and you guys are still working.

Keep up the good work, I really just want to know the meaning of the message, whether it will be a message dedicated for a meeting or some random doodling.

>>5700670
The island was struck by a 6.3 magnitude earthquake in 2004. A majority of those geographic features you see are most likely a result of the quake.

Although, we seem to have forgotten that we are acting upon the assumption that the coordinates are correct (as they weren't reversed as the rest of the note). Anyone try finding any potentially sunken islands in the vicinity of the other coordinates? I mean, this cape appears to match, but what if it's purposefully misleading? What if, and I don't have a program here to do it, but what if it's not in French (but our first one just so happens to work) and the order of the characters is in reverse, just like the numbers? What if 6, 12 starts the note and not 42, 21? Anyone care to try parsing it backwards?

Also, if we could get a higher-res shot of that triangle in the second picture, I think we'd find something of interest, especially if those scribbles are initials or common markings we just can't make out at this resolution. Wonder if Karta is still with us...

Although, I'm crap with ciphers, but if the note is fully in reverse, wouldn't that explain the coordinates a bit more?

And since the note's numbers are reversed, could it be possible the shift is too? What if we go 5 back instead of 5 forward? If our cipher hound is still here, could you parse it a few different ways like that? Just curious.

Also, and this is just another thought, but what if the second (on the right) isn't a zoom, but like a cross-section or something, where the left one is from above, but the right one is head-on, such that the top of it is literally toward the sun and the bottom is literally toward the center of the earth? Those markings could be a key or a symbol for a door or a cave or something, or a passage...?

>>5694341
Haha.
>I can tell this isn't a shoop because of pixels and whatnot
>and because it doesn't look like most other shoops I've seen in my day

Pipe -> I'm mostly using the guesses from this thread and running different Google parameters for what it was worth. Those 2 Jean Baptiste names gave the closest co-relations.

We can't even confirm if the mirror went to the address of the recipient; as it could of been loot/ etc.

There are a few more Jean Baptiste variants, but nothing that struck out as useful. One of the nice things about the crypto analysis that was shown had a nice bonus of being decipherable quite easily with a pen/paper and key system; which provides support for being authentic.

I'm actually more interested in the scratched out section, and the scratched out position before ZU. The differences in the way they get scratched out show a dissimilarity in their purpose for being on the note in the first place. (I am however not a cryptologist in any way.)

>>5701350
Everything you have written was tried and tested. The cipher has been run forward and reverse, with all types of offsets. In fact, it was of course tried forward first, but nothing was found. All combinations of coordinates were tried, nothing points to anything except the one we finally arrived to. If you read the original thread you will find all this information and can see for yourself the only matching sentence.

Statistically, accidentally ending up with a valid sentence in another language while applying a cipher incorrectly is impossible. It would be possible to craft such a special message that can be decoded to two valid versions, but not with such a cipher.

The note is of sufficient resolution to see that there are no details in the drawings that could have been made with technology older than 80 years or so.

And if you seriously claim that the details are misleading on purpose, then there's no point in anything, because all information could be lies, they just randomly happen to match? The text, the map fragments and the coordinates all match up.

>>5700861
Where did you read about the earthquake?

>>5700670
Getting to that location without a boat looks more or less impossible or at least very dangerous, not to mention it's likely flooded many times per year.

Not to mention that the drawn map fragment actually shows a triangle and a dot relatively far from the coast, not at the actual coastline.

But yes, there could be tunnels, unfortunately they would probably have caved in a long time ago. :/

>>5700286
Good idea, I didn't think about the triangle. Someone did think from the beginning that it might indicate an elevated position, and I wasn't very thorough when I did the overlay.

The dot under the triangle could in a stretch perhaps also mean that something is **below** the hill, as in, hidden within. Someone else got the idea about caves here.

If the triangle means the hill, and the dot is the "treasure", it means that my previous theory about trying to hide it out of sight from the fort doesn't hold up, but there wasn't necessary a fort when this was hidden.

>>5701843
>>5701863
All the info I've gotten about Iles des Saintes has been from the Wikipedia article on it. I've tried to find other sources but there is next to no info about the island. In English anyway.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%8Eles_des_Saintes

>>5701647
In my opinion, the author of the note started writing his code on the back of the paper, but messed up (maybe wrote too small or something) and started over on the other side.

When he got the the coordinates, he most likely messed up again. I'd assume that because he didn't want to waster paper, OR he just didn't have any other paper, he was forced to really cross out that mistake before the ZU.

>>5701350
I initially decoded the coordinates without reversing them, which lead to us finding the island in the last thread, but I still can't explain why they weren't encrypted in the same manner as he message. Perhaps it was just a layer of extra security. If you decoded the not and used the same message to decode the coordinates, you wouldn't find anything.

>>5701900
And by that logic, the text was written first and the coordinates added after. The mirroring of the script was likely difficult for the author, so maybe he just didn't feel like reversing the coordinates. Could also explain the typo of "West", but it is worth noting that the islanders of Guadeloupe and des Saintes speak an Antillian creole dialect French, so perhaps the mispelling is just the way they spell "west" in their language. Or the author just made a mistake, or the author isn't totally literate.

The numbers in the coordinates match the numbers in the message text code, but look how well the letters "Z", "U", "Y", and "W" are written. They are very neat while the numbers are nowhere near as carefully scrawled. Could the note have originally only contained the numbers, and latter "J.B." decoded the note and added the coordinates and map sketches? Perhaps that seperate person found the location and hid his finding behind the mirror for safe keeping?

bump

The fact that this is on a scrap of paper is interesting. I mean, if you were hiding a valuable treasure, wouldn't you try and find a nice big sheet? And if you fucked up while encoding your message, would you really just half assedly scratch out the numbers and restart on the back? Especially if you fucked up again with the coordinates. Obviously paper wasn't always so widely available. Maybe this was torn out of a book or something?

The script should also provide clues. Handwriting, especially with fountain pens is taught. Can anyone recognize the style? The numbers and even commas are very distinct, it should be possible to narrow down a time period in which that style of handwriting was taught.

Welp looks like this thread is destined to die. Unless OP is already at des Saintes unearthing his treasure.