BEALE_CIPHER

BEALE_CIPHER is a dataset directory which contains the texts of the three Beale Cipher documents.

The three documents that form the "Beale Papers" are supposed to have been left in a box entrusted to an innkeeper in 1822. When opened in 1845, the documents were found, along with a note explaining that they described the location of a hoard of silver and gold. A pamphlet, published in 1885, is the only source of this information.

The second document can be deciphered by taking the Declaration of Independence, numbering each word, and replacing each number in the Beale document by the first letter of the corresponding word in the Declaration.

The first and third documents have never been deciphered, and one may conclude that the entire matter was a hoax.

According to Wikipedia, the following adjustments must be made to the text of the Declaration of Independence:

• after word 154 ('institute') and before word 157 ('laying') one word must be added (probably "a");
• after word 240 ('invariably') and before word 246 ('design') one word must be removed;
• after word 467 ('houses') and before word 495 ('be') ten(!) words must be removed;
• after word 630 ('eat') and before word 654 ('to') one word must be removed;
• after word 677 ('foreign') and before word 819 ('valuable') one word must be removed;

Furthermore:

• The first letter of the 811th word of the modified text ('fundamentally') is always used by Beale as a 'y'
• The first letter of the 1005th word of the modified text ('have') is always used by Beale as an 'x'

Finally, in the decoded text there are 4 errors, probably due to wrong transcription of the original paper:

• 84 (should be 85) 63 43 131 29 ... consistcd ('consisted')
• 53 (should be 54) 20 125 371 38 ... rhousand ('thousand')
• 84 (should be 85) 575 1005 150 200 ... thc ('the')
• 96 (should be 95) 405 41 600 136 ... varlt ('vault')

Licensing:

The computer code and data files described and made available on this web page are distributed under the GNU LGPL license.

Reference:

1. Simon Singh,
   The Code Book,
   Anchor, 1999,
   ISBN: 0-385-49532-3,
   LC: Z103.S56.

Datasets:

• beale_cipher1.txt, document 1.
• beale_cipher2.txt, document 2.
• beale_cipher2_deciphered.txt, the deciphered text of document 2.
• beale_cipher3.txt, document 3.
• declaration_of_independence.txt, the Declaration of Independence.

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