Beale Ciphers - The Deciphered Message

The Deciphered Message

The plaintext reads:

I have deposited in the county of Bedford, about four miles from Buford's, in an excavation or vault, six feet below the surface of the ground, the following articles, belonging jointly to the parties whose names are given in number three, herewith: The first deposit consisted of ten hundred and fourteen pounds of gold, and thirty-eight hundred and twelve pounds of silver, deposited Nov. eighteen nineteen. The second was made Dec. eighteen twenty-one, and consisted of nineteen hundred and seven pounds of gold, and twelve hundred and eighty-eight of silver; also jewels, obtained in St. Louis in exchange for silver to save transportation, and valued at thirteen thousand dollars. The above is securely packed in iron pots, with iron covers. The vault is roughly lined with stone, and the vessels rest on solid stone, and are covered with others. Paper number one describes the exact locality of the vault, so that no difficulty will be had in finding it.

The second cipher can be decrypted fairly easily using any copy of the United States Declaration of Independence, but some editing for spelling is necessary. To decrypt it, one finds the word corresponding to the number (e.g., the first number is 115, and the 115th word in the Declaration of Independence is "instituted"), and takes the first letter of that word (in the case of the example, "I"). Note that this method of encryption is slightly different from a standard book cipher.

Beale used a version of United States Declaration of Independence different from the original. To extract the hidden message, the following 5 modifications must be applied to the original DOI text:

• 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')