A glass vial containing a coded message from a Confederate commander across the Mississippi from where Lt. Gen. John C. Pemberton’s forces were losing the battle of Vicksburg has been decoded. The commander reports that Pemberton can expect no help from him. The message is dated July 4, 1863, the day Pemberton surrendered to Gen. Ulysses S. Grant’s Union army.

The tiny sealed bottle was donated to the Museum of the Confederacy in 1896 by Capt. William A. Smith who fought on the Confederate side at the siege of Vicksburg. It remained unopened and unexamined in the collection for 120-plus years, until collections manager Catherine M. Wright decided to open the bottle and see what the message said.

Inside the bottle they found the coded note, a .38-caliber bullet and a white thread. The bullet was a weight that would allow the vial to sink if the messenger had to hastily dump it in the river upon discovery.

Wright asked a local art conservator, Scott Nolley, to examine the clear vial before she attempted to open it. He looked at the bottle under an electron microscope and discovered that salt had bonded the cork tightly to the bottle’s mouth. He put the bottle on a hotplate to expand the glass, used a scalpel to loosen the cork, then gently plucked it out with tweezers.

The sewing thread was looped around the 6 1/2-by-2 1/2-inch paper, which was folded to fit into the bottle. The rolled message was removed and taken to a paper conservator, who successfully unfurled the message.

But the coded message, which appears to be a random collection of letters, did not reveal itself immediately.

Wright tried to decipher the note herself but was unsuccessful. She contacted David Gaddy, a retired CIA code breaker, and he was able to crack the code in just a few leisurely weeks. Navy cryptologist Cmdr. John B. Hunter confirmed Gaddy’s interpretation.

The note was written in a Vigenère cipher, a fairly simple code that shifts letters a certain number of places, first described in the 16th century by Giovan Battista Bellaso. Blaise de Vigenère created a stronger version 30 years later for the court of Henry III, and in the 19th century its invention was misattributed to him.

The full decoded text of the note is:

Gen’l Pemberton:

You can expect no help from this side of the river. Let Gen’l Johnston know, if possible, when you can attack the same point on the enemy’s lines. Inform me also and I will endeavor to make a diversion. I have sent some caps (explosive devices). I subjoin a despatch from General Johnston.

It wasn’t signed, but it was probably sent by Maj. Gen. John G. Walker of the Texas Division. William Smith served under him at Vicksburg. General Johnston was Gen. Joseph E. Johnston who commanded 32,000 troops south of Vicksburg. He and Pemberton’s forces were separated by 35,000 of Grant’s troops.

Grant’s force besieged Vicksburg for six weeks, reducing the city to near starvation. People were eating dogs and wallpaper paste by the end. They were so bitter about the surrender that for 80 years the city refused to celebrate the Fourth of July.

An 18th century birch-bark canoe, thought to be the oldest one still in existence, was found in a shed on the Enys Estate, near Penryn in Cornwall.

The canoe was bought in Canada by Lieutenant John Enys (b. 1757, d. 1818), a British soldier with the 29th Regiment who fought in the siege of Quebec during the Revolutionary War. He was deployed in 1770, defended Quebec City in 1776, and was posted to various forts in Upper Canada in the 1780s. He recounted in his journals traveling around eastern Canada after the military campaigns wound down, which is probably where he bought the canoe.

Canoes were popular souvenirs for British visitors to Canada, but they were usually smaller so they could be easily transported home and displayed. This one is full size. Jeremy Ward, curator at the Canadian Canoe Museum in Peterborough, Ontario, believes that it was the work of a Maliseet First Nations tribe who lived in the Maine and New Brunswick area during the Revolutionary era.

He hasn’t had a chance to inspect it in person yet, though. When Enys’ descendants found it among discarded toilets and other junk in the shed, they called the National Maritime Museum to find out what exactly they had.

Estimated to be almost 250 years old, the boat was found in two pieces, but has weathered time well, according to Mr. Ward.

“It’s a beautiful boat, except for the midsection, which looks like it’s been hit by a snowplow,” he said.

What caused the damage is unclear, but Mr. Ward said it does not appear to have happened recently.

Birch-bark canoes from this era were held together by tree root lashings, he said, the hull almost spring-loaded against itself.

“When the lashings come apart, the whole thing comes undone, so it’s very hard for them to live over 150 years, certainly if any weather’s getting at it,” he said.

They were also so common in Canada that few people bothered to keep them. It’s not entirely surprising, therefore, that this treasure was found in the UK where it was treated as a cherished memento rather than used and discarded.

The canoe is currently on display at the National Maritime Museum. They’re working on shoring it up and preserving it with a very light hand so that next year it can be transported back to Canada. When the Enys family learned about the Canadian Canoe Museum and their extensive collection of 600 historical canoes, they decided to donate theirs to the museum where it will be welcomed with some pomp and much excitement in the fall of 2011.

Ward and his colleagues are exploring a variety of restoration and display options. Right now they’re thinking they won’t try to put humpty dumpty back together again, but will instead build a structure that will keep the canoe looking like it’s in one piece.

A complete Monopoly game set handmade by unemployed heating engineer Charles Darrow in 1933 sold at Sotheby’s Malcolm Forbes Toy Collection auction on December 17 for $146,500. The set includes a circular gameboard made out of oilcloth and decorated with pen-and-ink gouache, the rules sheet, playing cards, money, deeds and tokens. It was purchased by the National Museum of Play in Rochester, New York to add to their impressive collection of 65 historical Monopoly sets.

Monopoly has a storied history. Its earliest iteration was a British game called The Landlord’s Game, invented in 1904 by Elizabeth Magie to illustrate the dangers of unequal wealth distribution. It migrated across the Atlantic in various forms as people created their own boards and pieces to play with their friends. Ruth Hoskins played a version called Finance in Indianapolis which she customized with the now-familiar Atlantic City place names after she moved to New Jersey.

It was the Hoskins version Darrow was first introduced to by friends in Philadelphia. Darrow saw the real money-making potential of the game and began to produce handmade sets to sell. He produced one or two a day at most, and although they were only publicized by word of mouth from his friends and family, soon he had more orders than he could keep up with. Within months he had copyrighted the game and contracted with a local printer to make complete Monopoly sets (on the cheap, though; he still colored the boards by hand).

In 1934 he offered the game to Parker Bros. but they thought it was too complicated for us stupids to figure out, so they turned him down. Darrow kept at it, now ordering full color printed versions which he sold to major retailers like F.A.O. Schwarz in New York. The next year Parker Bros. came calling, hat in hand, and the rest is history.

The set bought by the National Museum of Play is the earliest Darrow set that has all the pieces including the rules. Since Darrow was the first Monopoly hobbyist to actually codify the rules — the predecessors’ rules were all just informally determined at the table — this set illustrated a pivotal moment in the evolution of the game, when it went from playful trend to cultural icon.