On July 7, 1730, French pirate Olivier Levasseur, known as La Buse (“the Buzzard”), was hanged on Réunion Island after years raiding shipping in the Indian Ocean. According to a legend that didn’t appear in print for another two centuries, he threw a folded note into the crowd at the gallows and shouted, “My treasures to those who will know how to understand.” The note supposedly held a coded map to a fortune no one has ever found. Unlike most pirate treasure legends, this one comes with an actual cipher that still circulates among treasure hunters, which makes it a useful case study in how a modern invention can get mistaken for a 300-year-old clue.
A Real Pirate, a Documented Raid
Levasseur himself is not in doubt. Born in Calais around 1688, he sailed first as a privateer under a letter of marque from Louis XIV before turning to outright piracy in the Indian Ocean. His one confirmed windfall was real and enormous: in 1721 he took part in the capture of the Portuguese galleon Nossa Senhora do Cabo off Réunion, seizing a cargo historians believe included gold, diamonds, and other treasures belonging to the fleeing Portuguese Viceroy of Goa. Years later, worn down and negotiating for a pardon that never fully materialized, he was captured and executed at Saint-Paul.
The Cipher That Surfaced in 1934
The cryptogram itself has no documented trail back to 1730. It first appears in print in 1934, in a book called Le Flibustier Mystérieux by the French historian and novelist Charles de la Roncière. The seventeen-line document uses a pigpen cipher, a simple substitution system that replaces letters with geometric symbols, and La Roncière supplied his own decryption in the same book, while admitting he had left parts of it deliberately incomplete for readers to fill in themselves. Decoded in full, researchers who have examined it say the plaintext reads less like treasure coordinates and more like a garbled set of instructions resembling an old folk remedy, hardly the dramatic map a 200-year hunt would seem to deserve.
A Second Cipher, Almost Certainly Fake
Complicating the story further, a second and longer 22-line version of the cryptogram began circulating later, mostly online, with no documented origin earlier than the 20th century. Cryptography researchers who have studied it point to close parallels with Edgar Allan Poe’s short story “The Gold-Bug” and with artwork by the American illustrator Howard Pyle, both describing it as very likely a modern fabrication layered on top of an already uncertain original. Where the first cipher’s authenticity is merely unproven, the second’s is considered actively doubtful by people who have studied the handwriting and symbolism closely.
A Legend That Keeps Digging
None of that has stopped the search. The Savy family of Mahé, in the Seychelles, acquired papers said to have belonged to Levasseur in the 19th century, which pointed treasure hunters toward Bel Ombre on Mauritius. Englishman Reginald Cruise-Wilkins began excavating there in 1948 based on his own reading of La Roncière’s clues and spent decades on the site without recovering a confirmed treasure. Searches linked to the legend continue to this day, feeding documentaries and expeditions, even though no historian has ever tied either cryptogram conclusively to Levasseur himself, and no treasure linked to his name has ever been recovered.
Sources consulted: Wikipedia’s “Cryptogram of Olivier Levasseur”; the Cipher Foundation’s analysis of the La Buse cryptogram’s authenticity; secondary reporting on the Bel Ombre excavations.
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