The UNEXPLAINED Mysteries of Mind Space and Time

The Uncrackable Code

In 1931, Professor John Manly (right) published an analysis of Professor William Newbold's work that threw open, once again, the question of the authorship and meaning of the Voynich manuscript (above: two pages from the script, illustrating some of the many unidentified botanical specimens). Newbold had attributed the script to the 13th-century philosopher-scientist Roger Bacon but, said Manly, his method was open to objections of so grave a character as to make it impossible to accept the results' and, he added, these results threatened 'to falsify; to no unimportant degree, the history of human thought'

Roger Ascham, 16th-century English scholar and writer who, according to Dr Leonell Strong, was the author of the manuscript. Dr Strong, a highly respected cancer research specialist, made this claim in 1945 after allegedly transcribing certain medical passages in the script, including an effective contraceptive formula. However, linguistics experts did not support his theory and, since Dr Strong has failed to explain satisfactorily his method of cryptanalysis, it remains unproved Who was the author of the tantalising Voynich manuscript? What was the message encoded in its cryptic text? In the1920s it seemed the solution had been found - but, asks FRANK SMYTH, had the script really given up its secrets? FEW DOUBTED PROFESSOR NEWBOLD when, in 1921, he announced that the mysterious Voynich manuscript was a treatise written by the 13th-century philosopher-scientist Roger Bacon, containing advanced scientific information concealed by a complex code that Newbold claimed he had cracked. But, 10 years later, his former colleague Professor John Manly published a criticism that showed that his conclusions could not possibly have been correct. Manly's first objection - in retrospect, an obvious one - was to the 'anagramming' process by which Newbold had arrived at his final Latin text. He pointed out that several anagrams could be built from any given line, making several meanings possible - thus breaking the cardinal rule that only one solution should be admissible for any given code passage. Constructing anagrams is an ancient pastime; for example, the salutation of the angel to the Virgin Mary at the Annunciation - Ave Mana, gratia plena, Dominus tecum - had long afforded a sort of devout game to scholars as a source of anagrams. Containing only 31 letters, the line had yielded 3100 anagrams in prose and an acrostic poem to one experimenter, while another had turned out 1500 pentameters and hexameters, and a third had produced a 27-anagram life of the Virgin. By comparison, Newbold had 'anagrammed' Bacon's alleged writing in blocks of 55 or 110 letters - rendering thousands of translations possible. But, asked Manly, was Newbold on the right track at all? His examination of the text under a magnifying glass had failed to turn up the secondary, 'shorthand' script that Newbold had seen; all he found was that the vellum had cracked and distorted with age, breaking up the original inked characters to give the appearance of minute lines and squiggles beneath them. What of such pieces of evidence as the Andromeda nebula, of which Newbold had claimed to know nothing before he read the Voynich text? Without questioning the Professor's integrity, Manly suggested that with his vast reading, he must have come across the facts before; 'he was a victim of his own intense enthusiasm and his learned and ingenious subconscious.' The essay ended firmly. 'We do not, in fact, know when the manuscript was written, or where, or what language lies at the basis of the encipherment,' wrote Manly. 'When the correct hypotheses are applied, the cipher will perhaps reveal itself as simple and easy.' For your eyes only The use of ciphers was widespread in past centuries, and not always for reasons of military or diplomatic secrecy. The Voynich manuscript may have been written in code in order to avoid charges of witchcraft for the advanced scientific knowledge it may contain, But perhaps the most famous example of such a cryptic manuscript is one that was written in code for quite different reasons -the diaries of the 17th-eentury English man of letters and naval administrator Samuel Pepys. In 1724, in accordance with Pepys's will the diaries were given to his old Cambridge college - and there they remained, undeciphered, until their rediscovery in 1818. The task of translating them was given to an undergraduate of the college, one John Smith. He spent three years on the task of breaking the code and transcribing the manuscript, often working 12 or 14 hours a day. The result was published, at last, in 1825 -revealing a colourful and scandalous account of life in London at the time of the Restoration. The last laugh, however, was on poor John Smith. When a new edition of the diaries was being prepared in the 1870s, it was discovered that, had he known the library in which he worked better, the solution would have been available to him all the time. For Pepys had used no abstruse code, but a well-known system of shorthand whose key formed part of the very same library that had held the Pepys diaries for so long. The greatest challenge There was silence for several years after the echoes of Manly's clinical denunciation had died. Although many cryptanalysts still worked away at the manuscript, which they utihably looked upon as the greatest challenge ever to face them, they did so in private. In 1943 a New York lawyer was rash enough to produce his solution, a garbled Latin text that amounted to little more than gibberish. Two years later a leading cancer specialist,Dr Leonell C. Strong, perhaps feeling that his reputation in his chosen field was secure enough to withstand most academic brickbats, claimed he had successfully transcribed certain medical passages. They were the work,he announced,not of Bacon but of Roger Ascham,a near contemporary of John Dee who had been tutor and private secretary to the young Queen Elizabeth I.Like many scholars of his age,Ascham was a man of many interests,who had published several translations of classical works, a treatise on education and a handbook explaining and defending the dying practice of archery. According to Dr Strong, one of Ascham's passages in the Voynich manuscript described a contraceptive formula that, as Dr Strong demonstrated, worked, though the doctor did not explain his cryptological methods beyond saying that they were 'a double reverse system of arithmetical progressions by means of a multiple alphabet'. Nor did he explain why Ascham, a devout and discreet scholar, should have concerned himself with contraceptives. In any case, several of Dr Strong's assertions about Ascham's alleged linguistic style failed to stand up to expert scrutiny. Antiquarian bookseller Hans Kraus (right) bought the manuscript on the death of Ethel L. Voynich ( left) in 1960 and, in 1969, presented it to Yale University Library. He believed that, when transcribed, the script would provide new insights into Man's history; others are of the opinion that it will tell nothing new that it is, after all, nothing more than an elaborate herbal. But no one yet knows the mystery remains An extra dimension What was perhaps the most promising effort to find the solution began in 1944, instigated by an old colleague of Professor Manly named Captain William F. Friedman, of the Army Signal Corps, who had helped demolish the Newbold theory. Captain Friedman assigned part of his huge team of experts then based in Washington to breaking the ancient mystery. Working after hours, they managed to reduce the text to a series of symbols that could be handled by tabulating machines -but they abandoned their task, leaving it unfinished, after the war. One curious result, however, was that Friedman's team showed that the words and phrases of the manuscript were repeated more often than those of an ordinary language: this gave it an extra, and unique, dimension, for all known cipher systems strive for the opposite effect. A theory that sought to account for this was that the book was an herbal, as had been first suggested, and that the repetitions were of chemical formulae - repeated often, as they tend to be in modern medical textbooks. When Wilfred Voynich died in 1930, his principal legatee was his wife Ethel Lillian. Ethel L. Voynich was a strong minded and independent woman, as she could afford to be; in 1897 she had published a romantic novel about the Young Italy movement, entitled The gadfly, which became a world best-seller, particularly in post-revolutionary Russia. Before her death it had sold over 2,500,000 copies there, putting her in the same Soviet league as Shakespeare, Dickens and Robert Burns. She was not really interested in the entanglements of the 'Voynich controversy' and placed the manuscript in her safe deposit box at the Guaranty Trust Company, New York. When she died at the age of 96 in 1960, her estate put her effects up for auction and the manuscript was bought by another New York antiquarian book-dealer named Hans P. Kraus. Two years later. Kraos offered the book for sale at 160,000 dollars. Further reading Robert S. Brumbaugh (ed.), The most mysterious manuscript the Voynich 'Roger Bacon' cipher manuscript, Southern Illinois University Press (Carbondale) 1978 David Kahn, The codebreakers, Sphere 1973 William R. Newbold (ed. Roland Kent), The cipher of Roger Bacon, University of Pennsylvania Press (Philadelphia) 1928 At the time he told the press that he had originally bought it in the belief that 'the manuscript contains information that could provide flew insights into the record of man. The moment someone can read it, this book is worth a million dollars.' Perhaps it does, perhaps it is, was the essence of the response of various American literary and academic foundations; on the other hand. perhaps it really was written as a simple 'herbal' - the work of some late medieval scribbler who did not quite know what he was doing and devised a secret code that he himself lost track of. Hans Kraus gave the book to Yale University Library in 1969-and there it remains, guarding its secret. Mysterious 500

Reproduced from THE UNEXPLAINED p1418