I was gonna start this off by saying: "Legend has it that...", but the thing is that Olivier Levasseur's existence has been well-documented and his treasure is not only known to have existed, but the clues leading to it have also miraculously survived to our times as well.
Unlike many of his fellow pirates, Levasseur was born to a wealthy bourgeoise family and recieved an excellent education, which allowed him to become a naval officer.
During the War of Spanish Succession (1701-14) he recieved a Letter of Marque from King Louis XIV and became a privateer for the French crown. Like many other letter-holders, Levasseur ignored orders to report back to France with his ship at the end of the hostilities and instead joined Benjamin Hornigold's pirate company in 1716.
What happened next is very interesting on its own right, but it's best explained on the provided link (and it's not what I wanna focus on anyway) because, despite being a pirate and living a rather crude life, Lavasseur was a seriously smart cookie, perhaps even one of the smartest persons who has ever lived.
Why? Because he was not only able to design his own "semi-language", but also to write a code around it... a code so strong that it has yet to be broken, nearly 300 years after the fact.
Moments before being hanged for piracy on Reunion, Levasseur is recorded to have said: 'Find my treasure! The one who may understand it!" and to have thrown a necklace containing a cryptogram of seventeen lines into the crowd. The necklace has been, sadly, lost to time, but the cryptogram has survived to our days and very few of its contents have been unveiled.
The code is said to have been based on Masonic symbolism and to have connections to the Zodiac, the Clavicles of Solomon and the Twelve Labours of Hercules, but that's about as we know.
Later investigations have confirmed that various tasks representing the aforementioned Labours of Hercules have to be undertaken in a very strict order and that the treasure chamber is somewhere underground, requiring to be approached carefully (because it was apparently booby-trapped and would get flooded if a certain --probably now entirely broken-- mechanism is triggered). The treasure chamber apparently also requires to be dammed in order to be protected from the tides and must be approached from the north.
It just won't stop fascinating me how this pirate was able to crate such an expertly-made puzzle and that it has yet to be cracked, despite our knowledge being infinitely more complete than his ever was, through centuries worth of findings and development. Whenever Levasseur's treasure is finally dug up, it will be because a great deal of effort went into getting into this person's incredible fertile, abstract mind... and that's so in-line with what Hollywood has made pirates and their treasures to have been, it's fitting that the location of this one has been avoiding us for so long.
A friend of mine says that La Buse's treasure has probably been found long ago and was just kept a secret, which actually does have some logic, considering that we have been snooping about in search of it for literal ages... but the thing is that some people have devoted their entire lives to the search and they didn't find an empty, violated and ransacked treasure vault or chamber, no, they have found no chamber at all. The ill-gotten riches of Olivier Lavasseur are still his, and perhaps they will always be.
Unlike many of his fellow pirates, Levasseur was born to a wealthy bourgeoise family and recieved an excellent education, which allowed him to become a naval officer.
During the War of Spanish Succession (1701-14) he recieved a Letter of Marque from King Louis XIV and became a privateer for the French crown. Like many other letter-holders, Levasseur ignored orders to report back to France with his ship at the end of the hostilities and instead joined Benjamin Hornigold's pirate company in 1716.
What happened next is very interesting on its own right, but it's best explained on the provided link (and it's not what I wanna focus on anyway) because, despite being a pirate and living a rather crude life, Lavasseur was a seriously smart cookie, perhaps even one of the smartest persons who has ever lived.
Why? Because he was not only able to design his own "semi-language", but also to write a code around it... a code so strong that it has yet to be broken, nearly 300 years after the fact.
Moments before being hanged for piracy on Reunion, Levasseur is recorded to have said: 'Find my treasure! The one who may understand it!" and to have thrown a necklace containing a cryptogram of seventeen lines into the crowd. The necklace has been, sadly, lost to time, but the cryptogram has survived to our days and very few of its contents have been unveiled.
The code is said to have been based on Masonic symbolism and to have connections to the Zodiac, the Clavicles of Solomon and the Twelve Labours of Hercules, but that's about as we know.
Later investigations have confirmed that various tasks representing the aforementioned Labours of Hercules have to be undertaken in a very strict order and that the treasure chamber is somewhere underground, requiring to be approached carefully (because it was apparently booby-trapped and would get flooded if a certain --probably now entirely broken-- mechanism is triggered). The treasure chamber apparently also requires to be dammed in order to be protected from the tides and must be approached from the north.
It just won't stop fascinating me how this pirate was able to crate such an expertly-made puzzle and that it has yet to be cracked, despite our knowledge being infinitely more complete than his ever was, through centuries worth of findings and development. Whenever Levasseur's treasure is finally dug up, it will be because a great deal of effort went into getting into this person's incredible fertile, abstract mind... and that's so in-line with what Hollywood has made pirates and their treasures to have been, it's fitting that the location of this one has been avoiding us for so long.
A friend of mine says that La Buse's treasure has probably been found long ago and was just kept a secret, which actually does have some logic, considering that we have been snooping about in search of it for literal ages... but the thing is that some people have devoted their entire lives to the search and they didn't find an empty, violated and ransacked treasure vault or chamber, no, they have found no chamber at all. The ill-gotten riches of Olivier Lavasseur are still his, and perhaps they will always be.
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