The Friar and the Cipher

by Lawrence Goldstone

  In fact, Kircher was the end of that line of mysticism that had embraced John Dee and the myth of Roger Bacon, which had had its heyday in the alchemy of the court of Emperor Rudolph. He was magnificent, flamboyant, spellbinding, and prolific. But he was also the Church's man, doomed to watch the great rolling ocean of scientific advancement wash over him, as a shell on the beach, before it finally ground him down to sand. For all the façade of mathematics and prolific knowledge, Kircher's science—when it was not outright fiction—was wishful, not empirical. The Royal Society could not confirm any of his results.

  Isaac Newton, although much less well known, was already at work on his Philosophia Naturalis Principia Mathematica when Kircher died in 1680. Its publication seven years later sounded the death knell for those who still clung to the Bible as the literal source of all knowledge. The experimental science first formulated by Roger Bacon in his Opus Majus had finally come into its own.

  AFTER KIRCHER'S DEATH, all of the curiosities in his Musaeum, carefully cataloged, became the property of the Jesuits in Rome. The cipher manuscript was never listed among his effects. Still, when Wilfrid Voynich pored through the chest containing the manuscripts of Pierre-Jean Beckx, 22nd General of the Jesuit Order, at Villa Mondragone 250 years later, there it was.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  The Making of the Most Mysterious

  Manuscript in the World

  • • •

  WHEN WILLIAM ROMAINE NEWBOLD CONFIRMED Wilfrid Voynich's suspicion that the author of the cipher manuscript was Roger Bacon, it caused a sensation throughout the bibliographic and scientific communities. But Newbold had just gotten started. Two years later, on April 20, 1921, after enormous fanfare (generated largely by Voynich), Newbold presented a paper to an audience of top-level scientists and cryptanalysts at a meeting of the American Philosophical Society, where he announced his truly momentous achievement—he had cracked the primary code.

  The results were astonishing. Although Newbold had been able to transcribe only about four percent of the cipher, it was apparent that this manuscript was perhaps the most important scientific document ever uncovered.

  Within these encrypted pages lay knowledge centuries before its time, and in a fantastic array of scientific disciplines. According to Newbold's transcription, Roger Bacon had not only predicted the microscope and the telescope, but built them. Through his telescope, Bacon had viewed the Andromeda Nebula (illustrated in the manuscript), and, through the microscope, spermatozoa and a fertilized ovum (also with illustrations). He had predicted and described a solar eclipse in 1290, discussed steam power, dated a comet that appeared in 1273, described riots at Oxford between knights and ecclesiastics, also in 1273 (in which he played a decisive role, dispersing the crowd with an explosion of gunpowder), and detailed a process for refining copper ore.

  Voynich manuscript illustration of the Andromeda Nebula as interpreted by Newbold BEINECKE RARE BOOK AND MANUSCRIPT LIBRARY, YALE UNIVERSITY

  Before he went into what was admittedly a circuitous method of encryption, Newbold assured his audience that he had no knowledge of chemistry and that he had been unaware of either the Andromeda Nebula or the Oxford riots. This, he claimed, was proof that he had not force-fit the transcription into a predetermined solution and that what he had found in the manuscript must be genuine.

  The cipher itself was almost impossibly complex, six layers in all, although each of the layers had been described by Bacon in his letter of 1248. Newbold began with the Latin text on the last page, the first line of which read, “michiton oladabas multos te tccr cerc portas.” Eliminating what he first assumed were nulls, Newbold came up with “michi dabas multos portas,” which he translated as “thou hast given me many gates,” although “multos” should have been spelled “multas.” Aware that Bacon was well versed in the Kaballah, Newbold then assumed that “gates” referred to the convention in Kaballah that meant letter pairs, and so deduced that individual plaintext letters were represented by two adjacent letters in the ciphertext.

  That got him closer, but he was still unable to make sense of the manuscript. Returning to the key and looking more closely at the individual letters, especially the o in “multos,” Newbold noticed that what appeared to be an o written with flourishes was actually a symbol fashioned from three individual pen strokes. Each of these was highly reminiscent of a symbol in Greek shorthand with which Bacon had been familiar. Remembering that Bacon had praised shorthand as the best way of obscuring secrets, Newbold studied the shorthand, and patterns began to emerge.

  Soon he had his alphabet—a substitution transcription of Latin letters, punctuation, and other symbols, based on frequency and position of the Voynich characters—but even then he was not yet home. Bacon, he claimed, had further hidden his true meaning in anagrams. The first confirmation occurred when he applied this alphabet to the discarded nulls in the key and came up with “R Baconi.”

  Newbold's last completed worksheet reprinted in The Cipher of Roger Bacon by William R. Newbold

  Had this pronouncement come from someone with lesser credentials than the Adam Seybert Professor of Intellectual and Moral Philosophy at the University of Pennsylvania, a man who had received only the second Ph.D. the university had ever granted in philosophy, a former dean of the graduate school, a scholar of soaring reputation and unimpeachable credentials—he was to be acknowledged the very next year by Theodore Roosevelt, Jr., for his code breaking for the navy—the members of the audience might have scoffed. As it was, none did.

  Newbold's “key” worksheet reprinted in The Cipher of Roger Bacon by William R. Newbold

  Major newspapers and magazines across America reported the great discovery—the New York Times headline proclaimed, “Bacon 700 Years Ahead in Science.” Both Newbold and Bacon burst from the cloistered confines of medieval scholarship into the popular arena and became instant celebrities. As David Kahn noted in The Codebreakers, “Sunday supplements had a field day.” Even the Catholic Church jumped on board, willing to let bygones be bygones. Two separate articles in Catholic World lauded Bacon's achievements and proclaimed them testaments to the power of thirteenth-century scholasticism.

  Later, Bacon was even featured in a short story by Rudyard Kipling entitled “The Eye of Allah.” Bacon is described as “a learned and famous philosopher [who] holds his liquor too, valiantly,” and is cast as a cantankerous friar decrying the unwillingness of the Church to encourage scientific experiment. The “eye of Allah” itself is a lens that Bacon wants to use for scientific purposes, but he is thwarted by more conservative and superstitious colleagues. The future Pope Clement and Peter Peregrinus make cameo appearances.

  With Bacon's newfound popularity, cryptography itself became a fad, and code breaking a public fascination as never before. But the drama was just beginning. Even as Newbold returned to the manuscript to try to complete the transcription, nagging questions began to arise. Scientific American found the solution tortured and said that Newbold seemed to have described a one-way cipher—one that could be decrypted from code text to plaintext but not encrypted the other way around (although a different article in the same publication lauded both Newbold's conclusions and his scholarship).

  In 1923, a history professor at Western Reserve University named Lynn Thorndike published a two-volume work entitled A History of Magic and Experimental Science. Thorndike had been working on this study for twenty years—he would add six more volumes, the last of which would be published in 1958—and it was so extraordinarily researched that he had unearthed documents in the Vatican Library that the librarians did not know they had. For all the detail, however—and Thorndike covered everyone—the longest single section was devoted to Roger Bacon, “who,” he wrote, “in modern times has received so much attention and admiration at the expense of contemporaries and his age. Happily in the present volume we are in a better position to estimate him fairly.” Then, caustically and with extremely selective use of data, he dismissed Roger Bacon
as a minor figure in the history of science, vastly overrated and with no original work to his credit.

  Debunking Bacon had become something of a crusade for Thorndike. Throughout the previous decade he had written articles in which he tried to diminish Bacon's achievements and paint him as a crank or mystic. What others had described as courage, Thorndike painted as stubbornness. Conviction became spite, persistence became jealousy. Thorndike's prejudice toward the Dominicans was palpable. He ridiculed Bacon for his belief in spirits and monsters but neglected to mention that Albert was every bit as superstitious, and Thomas even more so. Nowhere in Thorndike's work, for example, can one find Aquinas's conviction that wind storms were sent by a vexed God to discipline man. In A History of Magic and Experimental Science, Thorndike did not mention Newbold or the Voynich manuscript specifically but did include a scathing critique of Colonel Hime's assertion that Bacon had employed an Argyle cipher to disguise the formula for gunpowder.

  Still, through the 1920s, Thorndike and Scientific American notwithstanding, most scholars continued to find Newbold's work brilliant and ingenious and his conclusions persuasive. Newbold won his greatest victory two months after his presentation when, in the July 1921 issue of Harper's Magazine, John Matthews Manly, who had been second in command of MI-8, wrote an article tentatively accepting both his methods and his conclusion. Manly had been one of the cryptanalysts who had failed to crack the cipher in the years immediately after Voynich acquired it. He had been a highly respected scholar before the war and afterward had returned to the University of Chicago to become chairman of the English department. Manly was the same age as Newbold (and Voynich) and had known and become friends with Newbold during the war.

  The article also contained a compelling argument for the manuscript's authenticity. “It does not seem possible,” Manly wrote, “to doubt that this is a real cipher, based upon a real language. No man in any century previous to the sixteenth could ‘fake' a cipher system that possessed so many marks of genuineness as this and carry it consistently through nearly three hundred pages of closely written text.” As to Newbold's esoteric assertion that the pen strokes in the key indicated shorthand, Manly added, “It would be easily possible to incorporate [Newbold's] microscopic signs into the strokes forming these symbols without in any way producing interference or difficulty.”

  With Manly on his side, Newbold had little to fear from the far less celebrated Thorndike.

  As great a coup for Newbold as the Harper's article was, everyone in the field wondered whether Manly's old boss at MI-8, Herbert Osborne Yardley, who had also taken an interest in the manuscript but failed to crack the code, would weigh in as well.

  Yardley, an inaugural member of the Hall of Honor at the National Security Agency's Cryptologic Museum, is one of the most famous and controversial figures in the history of cryptography, and the spur of perhaps the most famous epigram about the practice. He began his career in his early twenties as a code clerk in the State Department, but after privately cracking Woodrow Wilson's own enciphered telegrams, he was granted a commission in the army. After the United States entered the war in 1917, Yardley was sent to France as a cryptanalyst, and then, still not yet thirty, made head of MI-8, where he immediately recruited Manly to run the department in Washington. When Yardley returned home after the war, he induced the army to establish a permanent unit to penetrate and monitor other countries' coded messages, a group he floridly nicknamed “The Black Chamber,” a French term for any government agency that opens and reads mail. Yardley's main objective was to track one particular nation's traffic, a country that he was convinced would soon be a threat to American security—Japan. Manly returned to the University of Chicago, but the men would remain good friends.

  Yardley's group, whose funding came from the State Department as well as the army, was wildly successful, breaking the diplomatic codes not only of Japan, but of more than two dozen other nations as well, including Great Britain, France, and Italy. In 1929, the new secretary of state, Henry Stimson, upon discovering that America was spying on its allies, issued his famous (and astonishingly naive) pronouncement: “Gentlemen do not read each other's mail.” MI-8's funding was cut off and Yardley summarily dismissed.

  Yardley was bitter, furious, and out of a job. There weren't too many places that an unemployed spy could offer his services, at least without committing treason. With the Depression eating away at his meager savings, Yardley sat down and wrote his memoirs. Published in 1931, The American Black Chamber was a record of his wartime activities but also revealed the extent of the United States' cryptanalytic work in the 1920s. At the time, there was no law against publishing such a book, and it caused the pedictable red faces at the State Department. Stimson was livid. (As a direct result, two years later, a law authorizing hefty jail terms for anyone betraying America's cryptologic activities was passed.)

  With no legal recourse against Yardley, Stimson wrote his own book, The Far Eastern Crisis, in which he strongly suggested, among other things, that the Japanese revise their codes. The Japanese took the advice (although Yardley's revelations themselves would certainly have been enough) and were therefore able to communicate in secret in the days leading up to Pearl Harbor. Stimson, of course, later served as Franklin D. Roosevelt's secretary of war during the conflict with Japan.

  Herbert O. Yardley exhibit at the National Cryptologic Museum COURTESY OF THE NATIONAL SECURITY AGENCY

  Yardley eventually worked for Chiang Kai-shek (and wrote another book, The Chinese Black Chamber) but was shunned by his native country until his death in 1958. He never took another shot at the Voynich manuscript.

  MANLY'S CAREER TOOK A FAR DIFFERENT TURN. Although he had been Yardley's subordinate, he was more than twenty years older and lacked both Yardley's intuition and charisma. But he brought to any task the painstaking thoroughness of the accomplished scholar. Three years after publishing his article in Harper's, Manly began a project sufficiently massive to be worthy of Roger Bacon himself. His goal was no less than to complete an authoritative compilation of the works of Geoffrey Chaucer with the aim of producing the definitive text of The Canterbury Tales. He recruited Edith Rickert, a former colleague at MI-8, into the English department and then set to work on a project that would occupy both of them for the rest of their lives.

  John M. Manly (left), Edith Rickert, and an assistant returning to America in 1932 after a summer spent in Britain on the Chaucer project UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO LIBRARY

  The Chaucer project is as fitting an example as one can find of the combination of intelligence, scholarship, doggedness, and endless immersion in detail that characterizes the elite cryptanalyst. What Manly had in mind was as bibliographic as scholastic, and he set up an academic version of MI-8 to do the job. According to the University of Chicago, the task included “collecting, photographing, and collating all existing Chaucer manuscripts and studying their provenance. A Chaucer textual laboratory was organized . . . where a team of graduate students meticulously analyzed photostatic copies of the eighty-three fragments and complete manuscripts of the Tales found by Manly and Rickert. Lettering styles, paper markings, and types of ink were examined to find clues that might help establish each manuscript's origin.”

  Manly and Rickert stretched their personal finances to travel to Europe each year to visit museums, libraries, and private collections. They carefully examined manuscripts, searching for clues—any difference in the ink, paper, or binding might help differentiate a correct, early version of the text from a later imitation. Erasures were important, as was the manner in which the paper was trimmed. Provenance was vital, so they probed any surviving records concerning Chaucer's family or where he had lived for further clues.

  The obsessive hunt for material began to wear down both Manly's and Rickert's health, as well as their finances. In fact, when Yardley came to Manly for a loan in early 1931, Manly was forced to turn his old friend down, after which Yardley immediately began his memoirs. Although Manly and
Rickert completed what was to be the eight-volume Text of the Canterbury Tales, Rickert, exhausted, died in 1938, before the work was published. Manly died two years later, living just long enough to see his great effort in print. Both Manly and Rickert hold honored places in University of Chicago history, and there is now a John Matthews Manly distinguished service professorship at the university, which at one point was occupied by the great African-American historian John Hope Franklin.

  One would think that while proceeding with such a single-minded effort even a scholar of Manly's capacity would have no time to revisit the Voynich manuscript.

  But he did.

  PROFESSOR NEWBOLD CONTINUED TO WORK and transcribe according to his alphabet and anagrams, uncovering more and more of the marvelous legacy of Roger Bacon. Then, on the evening of September 25, 1926, he was struck with what the New York Times described as “acute indigestion.” The next day he was dead. His friend and colleague Roland Grubb Kent collated all of Newbold's transcriptions, notes, and papers on the Voynich manuscript and published them in 1928 as The Cipher of Roger Bacon.

  Bacon remained largely unchallenged as a great mind of science who was centuries before his time. Thorndike continued to grumble—he wrote in 1929 in American Historical Review, “There is hardly one chance in fifty that Roger Bacon had any connection to the production of the Voynich manuscript”—but the fascination of the cipher was irresistible, and naysayers were dismissed with a wave of sour grapes.

  Wilfrid Voynich died in March 1930. In his will, he named a panel of five experts, led by his “associate” Anne Nill, to sell the manuscript to an appropriate—and wealthy—public institution. (There is no specific evidence of how far this association went, but Voynich and Nill spent lots of time together, even taking sea voyages on which his wife, Ethel, was not present. Recently, a rumor has surfaced that Ms. Nill was the Voynichs' adopted daughter, but, as with almost everything else having to do with this manuscript, nothing is certain.)