The Beale Ciphers

Cipher 2 decodes to English with the Declaration: “I have deposited in the county of Bedford…”. Beale's copy of the Declaration differed slightly from the standard text, so the “Beale's numbering” key drops or adds a few words to match. The few wrong letters left over (consistcd, thirteenr) are Beale's own mistakes.

Cipher 1 with the Declaration doesn't produce English, but it does contain long runs of the alphabet in order, such as abcdefghiijklmmno. James Gillogly found these in 1980. The numbers behind them jump all over the Declaration (alter, bodies, changed, direct…), so whoever wrote the numbers was looking up words by first letter. The common explanation is that ciphers 1 and 3 are fakes, and the writer got lazy in places and picked words in alphabetical order.

Cipher 1 needs more than one key word list: it uses numbers up to 2906, and the Declaration has only about 1,300 words. Try other keys, offsets and settings, and watch the English score. A real solution should score close to 100%.

Short words turn up by chance. Any 500 letters will contain a few real words and hundreds of near-misses. The “real words” tile compares the decode with its own letters shuffled, and “Try every setting” runs the same search on randomly ordered numbers. A find only means something when it beats those.