Page 28 : Beale Ciphers Analyses

The Case for Edgar Allan Poe

     During the existence of this website, the evidence favoring Edgar Allan Poe as the author of The Beale Papers has been steadily increasing. This page presents the arguments for and against.

The Last Haunting of Edgar Allan Poe

    One of the best Beale websites is "The Last Haunting of Edgar Allan Poe " by Robert Ward. It presents convincing circumstantial evidence that Poe is the author of the Beale Papers. He has written several excellent essays and analyses which are listed here: http://www.lasthaunting.com/essays/galleryPage

• Poe was an accomplished cryptologist, and was the person mainly responsible for popularizing cryptology in America. This analysis shows similar errors in Poe's cryptography and the Beale ciphers. See "A Comprison of 'Errors'"
• Substantive correlations between Poe's writing style and that of the Beale Papers. See "An Identification of 'Poe Preferences'"
• A long list of striking similarities between Poe's personal life and his relatives, and those of the Beale Papers.
• In particular, The Beale Monograph , downloadable here in pdf format, presents an almost conclusive case that Poe either wrote The Beale Papers, or was extensively plagiarized by the author. The list of correlations is too extensive, too precise, and too clear to be dismissed without proof of another author.
• The same author presents a fascinating analysis of the similarity of the vocabulary used in the Declaration of Independence and The Beale Papers. He hopes this may provide the basis for an eventual solution of the ciphers. Download now in pdf format.
• In another essay, he compares the character development for Thomas Beale and Robert Morriss to Poe's writing. See "Character Development". This seems clear proof, at the very least, that the author of The Beale Papers was a professional and talented writer.
• Poe loved mysteries and used cryptography in his stories (See The Gold Bug).
•  Although not specifically related to E. A. Poe, another essay examines one of the most authoritative sources of the early history of the Santa Fe Trail, Commerce of the Prairies, published in 1844, and the influence it may have had on the author of The Beale Papers. See "Commerce of the Prairies". This is excellent reading from the point of view of the historical context of the Beale story.

    A correspondent has made the following suggestion.

    In 1850, at the end of his career, E. A. Poe published his only novel, 'The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket'. Like 'The Gold Bug' it is a story involving cryptographic messages. Chapter XXIII of the novel contains the following cryptogram:

The following passage from The Gold Bug, found by Heath Smith, contains interesting similarities (underlined) to The Beale Papers.

Edgar Allan Poe's cryptology

    In some of the crypto websites on Poe there is some criticism of his cryptographic abilities; that he used monoalphabetic substitutions almost exclusively; that his knowledge was limited, having been garnered from reading an encyclopedia.

    Poe left cryptograms for posterity to solve. See The Edgar Allan Poe Cryptographic Challenge for several links with historical information on Poe's cryptographical interests. One was solved in 1992, and another in October 2000. Details of the last solution, and the cryptogram itself, are provided.

    Was The Beale Papers one intended for posterity?

    I have found no analysis criticizing the Poe hypothesis. Some authors on Beale dismiss the idea off-handedly. There are many scholarly websites on Poe the writer, and Poe the cryptographer, but I have found none that mention a link between him and the Beale Papers. At least one noted Poe scholar, Burton R. Pollin, categorically rejects the notion that Poe is the author. He has written a paper on this subject which we are trying to locate.

Method of Encryption Found?

   Brothers David and Charlie Mason have been resolute Beale analysts for many years, and are previous contributors to this website (see Page 10). In this new paper, the Masons find code-based indicators to Edgar Allan Poe as author. The paper is brief, well researched, and intriguing. Download now (.rtf format 18.6 Kb)

The mystery-shrouded death of Edgar Allan Poe

    There are many versions of the cause of Poe's death. These include alcoholism, opium, heart failure, tuberculosis, rabies, a beating during an election campaign, to name a few. Even his burial site is controversial.

    The excerpts below are from these websites:

http://www.eapoe.org/geninfo/poedeath.htm

http://www.eapoe.org/papers/misc1851/18670300.htm

http://www.eapoe.org/papers/misc1851/18651009.htm

The parentheses are my own.

    "Shrouded in opinion and contradiction, the essential details of Poe's final days leave us with more questions than answers. In the end we must accept that the few tantalizing facts we have lead to no certain conclusion. Poe's death must, probably, remain a mystery -- but the puzzle still teases and entices us."

    "I now proceed to give the true version of the place and manner of Mr. Poe’s burial. Among the false statements I have met with was one to the effect that he had been 'buried in the Potter’s Field of his native city.' As one of only three, or perhaps four, persona -- not counting the undertaker and the drivers of the hearse and a single carriage, which made up the entire funeral train of the author of 'The Raven' -- who followed the body to the grave, I am happy to be able to testify that the truth, bad enough as it is, does not sustain this story. The burying-place of Poe was an old one belonging to the 'Westminster Presbyterian Church,' which had ceased to be used much, in 1849, because of its location in a populous portion of Baltimore -- in Green street. There were many old vaults in it; and, when our little cortege reached it, I naturally consoled myself with the thought that his relatives -- two of whom were present, and one of these the officiating clergyman -- had secured him at least a temporary resting-place in one of those family tombs. But it proved to be otherwise. A grave had been dug among the crumbling mementos of mortality. Into this the plainly-coffined body was speedily lowered, and then the earth was shoveled directly upon the coffin-lid. This was so unusual even in the burials of the poor, that I could not help noticing the absence of not only the customary box, as an inclosure for the coffin itself, but of even the commonest boards to prevent the direct contact of the decomposing wet earth with it."

-Joseph Evans Snodgrass

    "Mr. Nelson (Neilson) Poe, Judge Nelson and myself (Henry Herring, Poe's uncle), together with Mr. Charles Suter, the undertaker, were the only persons attending his funeral."

-Henry Herring

    "Neilson, Poe's cousin, spoke briefly at the dedication of Poe's memorial grave in 1875, but made no statement concerning the circumstances of Edgar's death. If Neilson Poe had specific information about Poe's final days, he apparently took it with him to the grave."

    "...an ardent search for a death certificate or any official hospital records, but found nothing..."

     "Death certificates were apparently not required at the time and none is known to have been filed for Poe.

Rosalie MacKenzie Poe

   I thank David Mason for reporting the following.

    Rosalie MacKenzie was Edgar Allan Poe's sister, and they maintained close ties during his lifetime. Their complex history and relationship is described here: Rosalie MacKenzie Poe

    Although she was the natural heir to Poe's literary estate, she lost control of it to another. She died in 1874, but for several years before, being needy, she is known to have sold Poe memorabilia in Richmond and Baltimore. In The Beale Papers, James Ward makes a statement which appears totally irrelevant to the story. With reference to the year 1862, he states "About this time, however, affairs of importance required
my presence in Richmond...". Is this the manner by which a work in progress at the time of Poe's death wound its way to James Beverly Ward and John W. Sherman, to be completed and published in 1885?

    Many details regarding the contents and disposition of Poe's literary estate are available here:

http://www.eapoe.org/papers/MISC1990/JS200402.htm

Stylometry: Edgar Allan Poe and The Beale Papers

    Stylometry is defined as a method of studying literary style, frequency of word usage, etc. by means of the statistical analysis of a text, usually with the aid of computer programs, which allows for the charting of historical changes in style, the investigation of questions of disputed literary authorship and the authentication of written evidence.

    The first person to apply this technique to the study of The Beale Papers was Louis Kruh. He wrote two papers which were published in Cryptologia. (See Page 22)

    In his analysis, he compared the texts of The Beale Papers and of the three letters allegedly written by T. J. Beale, and concluded that all were written by the same person, and that therefore, the treasure story was a hoax. For lack of any other suspect, and without any specific proof, he presumed the author to be James B. Ward.

    Science News Online of December, 2003 has an article on stylometry titled Bookish Math - Statistical tests are unraveling knotty literary mysteries. Stylometry is ‘the science of measuring literary style’. The article describes methods in some detail.

"At first glance, it might appear that the way to pinpoint a writer’s style is to study the rarest, most striking features of his or her writing. After all, it’s the unexpected words and the unusual rhetorical flourishes that seem to mark a work as unique..."

"Yet the most venerable, commonly used approach of stylometrists does the opposite: It examines how writers use bread-and-butter words such as 'to' and 'with.' Although this approach seems counterintuitive, it’s based on sound logic."

    The following revisits the question of The Beale Papers authorship, using stylometry to compare with a selected work from Edgar Allan Poe.

    Three documents were used, as follows:

1. The Journal of Julius Rodman, Poe's work which most resembles the Beale adventure. The title and chapter headings were removed.

    2.    The Beale Papers with the following items removed:

• The title
• The three ciphers
• The text of the Declaration of Independance
• The duplicate text of the C2/DOI solution
• The three letters from TJB to Morriss

    3.    The three letters from TJB to Morriss with the following items removed:

• The datelines
• The salutations
• The signature lines

    The same Science News Online article notes: "Stylometry is now entering a golden era. In the past 15 years, researchers have developed an arsenal of mathematical tools, from statistical tests to artificial intelligence techniques, for use in determining authorship."

    For this purpose, I selected a freeware stylometry program called Signature written by Dr. Peter Millican,  Head of Joint Honours Computing, and Senior Lecturer in Philosophy and Interdisciplinary Computing at the University of Leeds in the United Kingdom. He also lectures on programming for the School of Computing. Signature is designed to facilitate stylometric analysis and comparison of texts, with a particular emphasis on author identification. More information, and download of Signature are available here: http://www.etext.leeds.ac.uk/signature/

  The startling results follow:

Word length:

Sentence length:

Usage of letters:

Punctuation:

Common words:

    It is tempting to look at these graphs, conclude they are virtually identical, and hence that Poe wrote The Beale Papers.

     However, the Signature program provides a more precise statistical test called "Chi-Square". In the words of the author...

The Chi-Square value is calculated as a number, and the larger the number, the less likely it is that a text like the sample could have arisen by chance.

This number is usually compared against a standard value to indicate whether it counts as "significant" to the corresponding degree. Typically in scientific research, only a result which is at least "significant at the 5% level" is taken to be worthy of note.

Many people who use statistical tests fall victim to a natural misinterpretation of their results. The p-value does NOT give the probability that the sample actually "came from the same population as" the reference text.

Rather, it gives the probability that a difference of at least the magnitude measured between the sample and the reference would arise by chance if a sample of similar size were to be taken at random from the reference population.

    First, I performed the chi-square tests on the categories shown in the graphs above for The Beale Papers as the reference text and the TJB letters as the sample text, with these results:

    I swapped the sample and reference texts and the new test results were as follows:

      Asked to comment on these results, Dr. Millican responded:

"There are a number of problems with authorship identification using stylometry.  When a comparison of two texts using the chi square test yields a result which is 'very highly significant, at the 0.1% level', this means that according to that test, the texts are significantly DIFFERENT.  The problem is that this sort of significant difference can easily occur, even with texts by the same author, especially if the samples are short, or if there is any systematic difference between them (e.g. prose style, dialogue content, repeated use of specific names). 

For this reason, stylometric results have to be interpreted with great caution, and I’d suggest that to assess the significance of the comparisons you want to make, you should test them not only on your target texts, but also on a number of others, e.g. other writings by the 'suspects', AND other comparable writings from 'non-suspects'.  Then you can look at a battery of results, and get a reasonable impression of what is significant in the context and what is not. 

 To be frank, I suspect that on texts of the length you’re dealing with (i.e. very short texts), only Signature’s word list test is likely to be of much use.  Eventually I hope to put more sophisticated tests into the system, because things like word length, sentence length and letter frequency are pretty crude, and tend not to discriminate authors very reliably (though sentence length gives very interesting results if texts are long enough, e.g. novels)."