On the gallows in Saint-Paul, on the island of Réunion, a pirate reached under his shirt, pulled out a scrap of parchment, and threw it into the crowd.
That was July 7, 1730. The man was Olivier Levasseur, known to everyone as La Buse, "the Buzzard," a veteran of years spent raiding shipping lanes across the Indian Ocean. The parchment carried a cipher nobody in the crowd could read, seventeen lines of numbers and symbols. As the noose went around his neck, he is said to have shouted something close to a dare.
The trapdoor opened. La Buse died. The cryptogram outlived him by nearly three centuries, and it is still, as far as anyone can prove, unsolved.
A Career That Started With Paperwork
Levasseur began legally, commissioned as a privateer for the French crown, which meant piracy with official sanction attached: fair game against enemy shipping during wartime, backed by government paper. When the wars ended and the money dried up, he simply carried on without the paperwork.
His largest score reads like fiction. In 1721, off Réunion, he and his crew seized a Portuguese galleon, the Nossa Senhora do Cabo, carrying the fleeing Viceroy of Goa, the Archbishop of Goa, and a hold stacked with gold, diamonds, pearls, silk, and jewel-encrusted religious relics. Some historians rank it among the richest single hauls in the history of piracy, worth an estimated $1 billion to $1.4 billion today. That is the fortune the cryptogram is thought to point toward.
The Man Who Gave Twenty-Seven Years to a Riddle
The seventeen-line code has since become one of the most famous unsolved treasure ciphers in existence, copied, recopied, and chased by serious cryptographers and obsessive amateurs in roughly equal number. Nobody pursued it harder than Reginald Cruise-Wilkins, a former RAF pilot who settled in Seychelles in the 1940s after hearing a version of the legend from his father. Convinced the treasure lay buried at Bel Ombre, a specific beach on Mahé, he spent the next twenty-seven years digging there, constructing a theory that tied the cipher to Greek mythology and the twelve labours of Hercules, with the exact location supposedly encoded into the shapes of the granite boulders themselves.
He died in 1977 having unearthed old coins, tool marks that looked deliberately placed, and a skeleton arranged in the shape of a crucifix, but no treasure. His son, John Cruise-Wilkins, picked the search up without pause. Between father and son, more than fifty years have gone into excavating a single beach, making it one of the longest continuously worked treasure hunts anywhere on record.
Part of the difficulty is that no two cryptographers fully agree on what the surviving copy of the cipher even says. Some argue it has drifted from the original after centuries of hand-copying, picking up small errors with each transcription. Others suspect it was never a genuine map at all, just a final act of theatre from a condemned man aimed at everyone who had ever crossed him. Bel Ombre remains an active dig site regardless, its granite boulders, the same formations scattered along much of the Seychelles coast, still bearing the marks of decades spent looking for an answer that has yet to surface.