Spionage met groente
De tsaar liet vertrouwde, rijkelijk vergoede kapiteins kistjes met documenten bij hun overige scheepslading van Amsterdam naar Archangel varen – een levensgevaarlijke reis vol ontberingen – om te voorkomen dat onderweg andere vorsten en hun geheime diensten zijn ‘KGB’rapportages konden inzien. De Britse methode was wat vegetarischer. Met een video die een en ander uit de doeken en de groenteblaadjes doet, toont de Leidse historica Nadine Akkerman hoe de artisjok in vroeger eeuwen werd gebruikt als leverancier van onleesbare inkt.
Pas als de kaars…….
“In September 1656, a female spy based in England wrote to her brother, who was living under exile in Antwerp. She feared their letters were being intercepted, broken into and sealed up again with counterfeit seals before being sent on their way. She urged caution: only ‘let mee know your minde – By the olde way [,] the hartichockes [,] as soone as you cane’.
Her directive to communicate by artichokes seems peculiar, but it is possibly hinting at a recipe of invisible ink, concocted ‘by the olde way’, a phrase that refers either to folk wisdom, or even some measure of witchcraft. To test whether it was possible to turn artichoke juice into a useable invisible ink we chose globe artichokes, because those are native to the old world and allow for a second harvest in the autumn, when our cunning spy wrote her letter.
The juice of a mashed-up, raw artichoke can instantaneously be used as invisible clear ink: the secret writing is revealed when the paper was exposed to the heat of the open flame of a candle.”
De video is gemaakt door MIT Academic Media Production Services Directed by Dr. Nadine Akkerman, Leiden University and Jana Dambrogio, Thomas F. Peterson (1957) Conservator, MIT Libraries.
