Eccentric art dealer in 2010 Forrest FennBelieving he was terminally ill, he buried $2 million worth of bronze treasure in the Rocky Mountains. He also published a memoir: The Thrill of the ChaseIt reportedly contained the key to the location of the treasure.

Ten years later the treasure was discovered by a medical student. Jack StuefFollowing the deaths of the other five treasure hunters and just a few months before Fenn’s death. Stuef sold the treasure, the treasure then rose for auctionbut to this day he refuses to reveal the secret of how he cracked the code or where he found the loot.

Fenn’s story bears many of the hallmarks of the enduring obsession with buried treasure that reached fever pitch in popular culture in the 19th century and has never truly abated. A secret code or map passed on by a property owner who thought (or at least) was on his deathbed reveals the location of untold riches.

A selection of items from Forrest Fenn’s hoard. Photo: Lynda M. González/Heritage Auctions.

As a cultural trope, buried treasure is almost completely divorced from reality. We all know, thanks to Robert Louis Stevenson and the countless forgeries he produced ( puppets According to The Simpsons), “X marks the spot.” It is difficult to name another cultural phenomenon that completely embodies the world of hearsay, legend and calculated fiction.

large quantities treasure Of course, it has been unearthed by archaeologists and metal detectors over the centuries. However, the distinguishing feature of this myth is that it was buried with him. intent one day it will be found. Leaving aside contemporary acts of extortion such as that of Forrest Fenn, surprisingly there is not a single verifiable case of treasure being deliberately hidden with its location encrypted and later discovered.

as long as unicorns And dragons Although rooted in interpretations of narwhals’ tusks or dinosaurs’ tusks, the origins of a mysterious hoard of loot uncovered by intrepid clue hunters lie in a small kernel of historical truth. takes shape Captain William KiddIn the late 17th century, he gained fame as a pirate hunter protecting British maritime interests in North America and the West Indies, before succumbing to the temptation to become a pirate himself.

Knowing that he was a wanted man, he (allegedly) buried much of his loot somewhere along the East Coast near Long Island, hoping to use the secret to bargain for his freedom. The gamble was unsuccessful and when he was captured in 1699 he was sent back to England and executed in 1701.

Forrest Fenn’s downloadable treasure map is produced in partnership with Benchmark Maps in Denver, CO.

More than a century later, Washington Irving wrote: Tales of a Traveler (1824) says Kidd’s history “gives birth to an innumerable lineage of traditions.” Most of it had to do with the fact that he had “buried great treasures of gold and jewels” which “fermented the minds of all the good people who lived along the coast”. “There were rumors (…) that coins bearing Moorish characters had been found, Kidd’s prize in the east, but which ordinary people perceived as demonic or magical inscriptions.”

Stories of sea adventure have been sensationally popular since Daniel Defoe’s novel. Robinson Crusoe (1719), but Irving’s short story Wolfert Webber; or Golden Dreams (1856) was the first to use the buried treasure motif. On Manhattan Island, Wolfert Webber, a “worthy townsman”, has a dream that reveals to him the whereabouts of Captain Kidd’s stash.

The Life and Adventures of Robinson Crusoe Written by Daniel Defoe. It was first published in London in 1719. Illustration from the 1895 edition. Photo: Culture Club/Getty Images.

Speaking of his debt to Washington Irving, Robert Louis Stevenson declared that “plagiarism was seldom carried further” when he began writing his own work. Treasure Island (1883). This may be overstating the point, given that X-marked treasure maps and one-legged pirates carrying parrots on their shoulders are Stevenson’s inventions.

But our obsession with buried treasure has another, equally influential early source. Short story by Edgar Allan Poe Gold Beetle (1843) also depends on the investigation of the legendary fortune of Captain Kidd. But Poe’s contribution was to bring something quite different to the genre. A password that looks like this:

53‡‡†305))6*;4826)4‡.)4‡);80
6*;48†8¶60))85;1‡(;:‡*8†83(88)
5*†;46(;88*96*?;8)*‡(;485);5*†
2:*‡(;4956*2(5*-4)8¶8*;40692
85);)6†8)4‡‡;1(‡9;48081;8:8‡1
;48†85;4)485†528806*81(‡9;48
;(88;4(‡?34;48)4‡;161;:188;‡?;

In the story, the golden scarab of the book’s title (discovered on Sullivan’s Island in North Carolina by William Legrand, a learned but eccentric naturalist) is wrapped in parchment for safekeeping. This wrapper is accidentally held over the fire, at which point secret signs are revealed, including the image of a goat as well as the above cryptic strings of numbers and symbols. Legrand then tells the story of how he was able to crack the code.

The obsession with ciphertexts has roots dating back to ancient times, but Poe’s genius was to combine it with the contemporary obsession with adventure stories.

Then again, if one particularly strange legend is to be believed, maybe it wasn’t this one. completely new. An anonymous pamphlet was published in 1885: Beale Papers. He was referring to Thomas J. Beale, who went to Lynchburg, Virginia, in January 1820 and checked into the Washington Hotel. Beale spent the rest of the winter there charming “everyone, especially the ladies”, before disappearing as mysteriously as he arrived. He returned two years later, this time entrusting a locked iron box to the hotel’s owner, Robert Morriss, and disappeared once again, which he said contained “valuable and important documents”.

Morriss’s patience finally cracked after 23 years and he managed to open the box in 1845. What he found was three pages filled with passwords and a handwritten note explaining that Beale had won the gold medal with a group of 29 men who had traveled across the American border in search of buffalo. Beale had been chosen by the party to find a safe haven for the wealthy, so this was his first visit to Lynchburg.

The second journey was partly to amass more wealth, but also to ensure that a trusted third party would ensure that the treasure reached the men’s families in case anything happened to them. The note promised a letter containing the key to the code. That letter never arrived.

illustration Treasure Island By Robert Louis Stevenson. First published in 1881-82. Photo: Bridgeman via Getty Images.

Morriss spent the rest of his life trying to solve the mystery, but without success. When he realized that he was going to die in 1862, he passed this secret on to a friend, the anonymous author of the pamphlet. This person made a significant breakthrough.

“J.” Beale’s name meant “Jefferson,” and he found that the numbers in the second Beale cipher corresponded to words in the Declaration of Independence, and thus deciphered the exact description of the treasure to be found: “Two thousand nine hundred and twenty-one pounds of gold and five thousand one hundred pounds of silver; also savings on transportation jewels obtained for silver in St. Louis”.

This equates to more than $60 million in today’s money. However, the key did not work on the other two pages, which probably contained the answer to the treasure’s location. Twenty years later, the desperate pamphleteer published his account in the hope that someone else might be luckier.

Many people have since attempted to decipher Beale’s papers; They all failed. For a while, rumors were believed that Poe had somehow orchestrated the whole thing from beyond the grave.

Carl Hammer, an influential figure in computerized code-breaking, declared in 1999 that the mystery “occupies at least 10 percent of the best cryptanalysis minds in the country.” And not a penny of this effort should be envied. “This work, even the dead ends, has done itself a lot of good in advancing and improving computer research.”

When it comes to buried treasure, perhaps the story really is its own reward.