READING · 4 MIN
A PIRATE'S LAST WORDS.
A TREASURE NO ONE'S FOUND.
The pirate was real. The hanging was real. What he supposedly threw into the crowd on his way to the gallows is where documented history stops and 300 years of treasure legend begins.
“La Buse” - a real pirate, a real execution ◢
Olivier Levasseur, a French pirate nicknamed “La Buse” (“the Buzzard”), operated in the Indian Ocean during the early 18th century, a golden age for piracy along the trade routes past Madagascar and the Mascarene Islands. He was captured and executed by hanging in 1730 on Bourbon Island - modern-day Réunion. That much is documented history, not legend.
A cryptogram thrown to the crowd - according to legend â—˘
The story that follows is where things shift from record to folklore: as the account goes, Levasseur threw a necklace or parchment into the crowd gathered at his execution, shouting some version of “find my treasure, those who can understand it.” A cryptogram - around 17 lines of symbols mixing astrological glyphs with Masonic-looking marks - has circulated in published form since at least the 20th century, tied to this story. No verified 18th-century original has ever been authenticated by historians, and the tale carries the same shape as other pirate-treasure legends (Captain Kidd's among them) that grew substantially in the telling over the centuries after the fact.
Decades of searching, on three islands â—˘
Treasure hunters have searched RĂ©union, Mauritius, and the Seychelles - where Levasseur is also linked by legend - for generations, without a confirmed find. Whether there was ever a real cipher to solve, separate from the folklore layered onto a genuine execution, is itself part of what makes this one different from the others in this list: it's less a cryptographic puzzle like a solvable substitution and more a treasure legend that happens to include one.
Play the ciphers in this story