About the online event
Between 1850 and 1855, the London-based newspaper The Times published over 50
encrypted advertisements apparently intended for the same recipient. As we know today,
the ads in that series were meant for the sea captain Richard Collinson, who at the time
was on a mission in the Canadian Arctic trying to solve the mystery of the lost John
Franklin expedition.
Before Collinson’s departure, his family was taught how to encrypt
brief reports about what was going on at home and to publish these messages as
encrypted ads in The Times once a month. The cipher used was based on a signal-book
of the Royal Navy.
As the circulation of The Times stretched far beyond the UK, Collinson
would have the chance to get his hands on a copy even at the remotest of ports.
The Collinson ads were finally broken in the 1990s. The lecturers of this talk are members
of a project aiming to decrypt all of Collinson’s ads and to place them in their geographic
and cultural context.
