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The Pacific Bird Sanctuary
1 May 2005

Dear Miss Butler,

Thank you so much for your recent letter. We are very much looking forward to your visit in the week of the 15th. We have made arrangements for you and your companion to stay at the Melody Inn, which is a lovely guest house on the south side of the island, not too far from the sanctuary. On the 17th, we would be honoured for you to attend the opening of the Peter Butler Community School, and the Peter Butler Animal Care Centre. We can also show you the plans for the Francis Stevenson Museum, the initial building work for which, as you already know, will go ahead next spring.

I still cannot quite express to you what the last year has been like not just for me but for all the trustees. To find that your bird sanctuary, or to be more specific, the public picnic area of your bird sanctuary, is the site of treasure worth almost two billion dollars – this is certainly something that doesn’t happen every day! As you know, the Peter Butler memorial buildings have been constructed on land that had been earmarked for development by a US toxic-waste-management company. We were thrilled to be able to buy back this land ourselves. As
for the rest of the money, well, we can discuss it further when you are here. Obviously, we will now be the richest bird sanctuary in the world, but we have been rather touched by the ‘generosity bug’. Can you suggest some other uses for the money? Some worthwhile charities? I never thought we would be able to say this, but we really have too much!

With love and warm wishes – and wishing you a safe trip!

Helèna Rico
Pacific Bird Sanctuary

From
The Cryptogram
2005, Issue ––

Those of you out there working on the Stevenson/Heath Manuscript – stop writing. Put down your pens. This puzzle, almost four hundred years old, has, at last, been solved. The late Cambridge, UK-based cryptanalyst Peter Butler (known to members of the ACA as ‘The Cam Buster’) came up with an answer back in 1982. Now, almost three years after his death, we talk to his granddaughter, Alice Butler, about just how he solved the puzzle and why he kept it a secret for so long.

‘My grandfather started working on the Stevenson/Heath Manuscript just after the Second World War finished,’ she says. ‘From what I’ve been told, he worked on it every single day until he had cracked it.’ Butler didn’t announce his success with this code, however, because he was concerned about the environmental impact of people going to get the treasure. Butler, a keen bird-lover, had discovered that the treasure was buried right in the middle of a bird sanctuary on an island in the Pacific. ‘He just didn’t want to be rich,’ Alice tells us. ‘He didn’t do it for the treasure. For him it was just the thrill of solving the problem that was important. But then he found he couldn’t tell anyone about his success. I remember him being very frustrated about this conundrum!’

Butler did tell two people, however, his wife, the mathe
matician Elizabeth Butler, and his son in-law, Alice’s father William Bailey. He did not tell anyone exactly how he had done it, of course, but he did reveal that he had cracked this notoriously difficult puzzle. But what about the proof? Is there any point in solving a puzzle unless you can tell everyone about it? While he considered this, Butler had a locket made up with a code of his own engraved within it. This code took the form of the following: 2.14488156Ex48. He placed this locket on a chain, gave it to his then nine-year-old granddaughter and told her never to take it off.

‘As a child I lived with my grandparents,’ Alice says. ‘My mother had died some years earlier. I was fascinated with my necklace and tried my hardest to understand it but it took me years to work out what it meant. I remember having one breakthrough when I was about twelve. I was fiddling around with my calculator and I suddenly understood the way the letters and numbers were arranged. I realised that it was shorthand for a longer series of digits, and expanded it accordingly. So then I had a string of digits – but I still didn’t know what to do with them. Then teenage life took over and I stopped trying to work it out. It was only after my grandfather died that I properly looked at it again. When I finally realised what to do with all these digits, I saw that my grandfather had taught me how to decode my necklace years before. It was quite clever of him.’

The code that Francis Stevenson used to create his treasure map was based on a numbered system similar to that found in the Beale Papers, in which, as readers will know, each number in the ciphertext stands for a word from a famous document. In the Beale Papers, the first of the three documents was decoded using the American Declaration of Independence. But no one has had any luck cracking the next two texts, (Unless …? No, Alice Butler assures us that Peter Butler didn’t also work this out in secret.)

‘I knew that my grandfather had worked out which text Francis Stevenson had used to create his code,’ she explains. ‘He had told me that much. But of course he wouldn’t tell me what the text was. He did, however, drop clues sometimes but I didn’t pick them up until much later. I remember once he said that he’d had to reconstruct the text, as it didn’t exist any
more. When I finally cracked the code on my necklace, I knew immediately what the text was. All I had to do then was find my grandfather’s reconstruction of it, although that was harder than it sounds. I had all his papers but, of course, so many of these papers – including the ones I wanted – were in code!’

Then Alice had to work out what she would do, now that she also knew the location of the treasure. ‘More than anything, my grandfather wanted his achievement to be recognised. However, in his lifetime, he never saw a way that this would be possible. You can’t just suddenly tell the world you have a treasure map. You’d have absolute chaos on your doorstep! After a while, he stopped talking about Stevenson/Heath and immersed himself in his new challenge, the Voynich Manuscript. And no, he didn’t solve that one either.’

So what to do about the treasure? It turns out that Alice Butler didn’t want it either. ‘I felt it was wrong for me to have it,’ she says. ‘So I did something that seemed logical. I simply gave the information I had to the trust of the bird sanctuary on which the treasure was buried. I thought, “Well, it’s really your treasure, since you own the land.” I also thought they would know how to dig it up without disturbing the birds. I made an arrangement with them that if there did turn out to be treasure down there, they would use some of the money to build a school and a rescue centre for animals. I also suggested that a Francis Stevenson museum would be a nice idea, too. His story is very fascinating, and deserves a much wider audience. I left it up to the trustees to decide what they wanted to call these structures. But I know my grandfather would be very proud to know that they chose to honour his name. And now that the Peter Butler Community School and the Peter Butler Animal Care Centre are both about to open, I can finally tell everyone that he worked out the location of the Stevenson treasure. The treasure is of course now gone, so there is no risk of people pounding on my door in the middle of the night wanting a copy of the map.’

However, Alice is more reluctant to tell us the name of the document which Stevenson used to encode his map.

‘I thought I would leave that as an open puzzle,’ she says, with a smile. ‘Now that everyone knows what was on my necklace, it should be easy for your readers to work out.’

There’s another reason, too. Alice Butler has written a novel. ‘It’s not just about the Stevenson/Heath Manuscript,’ she says. ‘But the story is there. In the first UK edition of the book I have left the puzzle open, so I don’t want to spoil it for any potential readers by revealing it now.’ Never fear, though, you don’t have to wait for later editions of the book to come out to get the answer if you really want it. The whole story of the solution to the Stevenson/Heath Manuscript will be a key exhibit in the Francis Stevenson Museum, due to open in the fall, and the answer will also be posted on their website.