Gunpowder and Ammunition, Their Origin and Progress

by H. W. L. Hime

.....

... Sisyphus was damned

To roll the ceaseless stone, only because

He would have made Ours common.”[340]

A man who boldly, even fiercely, avowed such opinions as Bacon’s, was bound in consistency to employ some cryptic method in recording his own secrets; and when we closely examine the course Bacon actually followed, we find that his practice was rigidly in accordance with his theory—in fact, too rigidly. Those steeped in the Cabbala of Alchemy in his own age may have grasped his meaning, but to those who came afterwards it was obscure, if not hidden. Even to the early copyists of his MSS. it was unintelligible. In one of the MSS. consulted by Professor Brewer, the scribe has written on the margin of Chap. IX. of the De Secretis:—Hæc sunt œnigmata; “these things are enigmas,” and enigmas they have remained for seven centuries.

The presence of two anagrams in Chap. XI. is sufficient of itself to arouse a suspicion that some cryptic method (of a different kind) has been employed in Chaps. IX. and X., and this suspicion is strengthened by their whole manner and diction. Their style is involved, and their meaning (as they stand) unintelligible. Bacon passes from one subject to another in bewildering haste; from the unfinished description of one process to instructions about a second, which he leaves half told in order to plunge into a third. Among directions of seemingly primitive simplicity he interpolates such phrases as “catch my meaning if you can” (intellige si potes); “you will see whether I am speaking riddles or the plain truth” (videas utrum loquor œnigmata aut secundum veritatem); and he warns us that the purport of Chap. IX. may wholly escape us, unless we distinguish the (real from the apparent) meaning of his statements (in hoc capitulo decipieris, nisi dictionum significata, distinguas). These special peculiarities of Chaps. IX. and X. can be only explained by the use of some cryptic method, to which Bacon points plainly in Chap. VIII. He there names two cryptographers, Ethicus and Artephius, in connection with the seven cryptic methods already given, and he broadly hints that he may make use of some of these methods (forsan, propter secretorum magnitudinem, aliquibus his utar modis). It is needless to pursue the matter further: Chaps. IX. and X. are not, as they appear to be, nonsense, but the cryptic exposition of some secret which Bacon believed to be of great value.

Few of the difficulties we experience in investigating the meaning of these three chapters were felt by the correspondent to whom the Friar addressed them as letters. He and Bacon had long been in communication with each other, and as both knew the substance which formed the real subject of these letters, Bacon was at liberty to call it chalk or cheese or what he willed. They appear to have had some system of numerical signs, the meaning of which is lost to us. The tenth chapter begins with a reference to a letter received by Bacon from his correspondent in the year 602 A.H., and as the date is given in words, not figures, it can hardly have been mistaken by the scribes. Now the year 602 A.H. began on 18th Aug., 1205 A.D., nine years before Bacon was born. The number 602, therefore, is either a blind, or a conventional sign or key. The same may be said of the number 630 in the first line of Chap. XI., and of the totally unnecessary 30 which occurs just before the anagram in the same chapter—“(sit) pondus totum 30,” i.e. let the total weight be 30. No one can have ever wanted to know the total weight of the mixture in question: every one wanted to know the proportions of the ingredients. Our ignorance of these signs creates difficulties for us which did not exist for the initiated in Bacon’s time.

As will be shown hereafter, Bacon has occasionally availed himself in Chaps. IX., X., and XI. of Nos. 2 and 4 of the cryptic methods he has given us; but these methods apply only to words and phrases, and the wily Franciscan did not think it necessary to allude to the more general method by which he set forth so much of his statement as is contained in Chaps. IX. and X. We cannot discuss cryptograms here: suffice it to say that some of the early methods were too tedious and some too complicated to be employed throughout the whole length of Chaps. IX. and X. The method he appears to have adopted (as the result will show) was that known long afterwards as the “Argyle cipher,” of which the following letter from Thackeray’s “Esmond” is an example. The real contents of this letter are the phrases within brackets:—

“[The King will take] medicine on Thursday. His Majesty is better than he hath been of late, though incommoded by indigestion from his too great appetite. Madame Maintenon continues well. They have performed a play of Mons. Racine at St. Cyr.... [The Viscount Castlewood’s passports] were refused to him, ’twas said; his lordship being sued by a goldsmith for Vaisselle plate and a pearl necklace supplied to Mademoiselle Meruel of the French Comedy. ’Tis a pity such news should get abroad [and travel to England] about our young nobility here. Mademoiselle Meruel has been sent to Fort l’Evesque; they say she ordered not only plate, but furniture, and a carriage and horses [under that lords name], of which extravagance his unfortunate Viscountess knows nothing.

“[His Majesty will be] eighty-two years of age on his next birthday.... All here admired my Lord Viscount’s portrait, and said it was a masterpiece of Rigaud. Have you seen it? It is [at the Lady Castlewood’s house in Kensington Square]. I think no English painter could produce such a piece.