John Gerard, a Jesuit priest immured in the Tower of London in 1597, and tortured by being hung from manacles until he temporarily lost the use of his arms, was a resourceful as well as courageous fellow.
Dependent on the kindness of his jailer, a warder named Bonner, for such intimacies as washing, dressing and shaving, Gerard also persuaded the turnkey to bring him a bag of oranges. Regaining the use of his hands, he employed the fruit for two purposes: to fashion crosses and rosaries from the discarded peel, and to make invisible ink from the juice.
Using this secret script, and writing with a toothpick, Gerard made contact with Catholic co-religionists outside the Tower’s walls, and arranged for them to ‘spring’ him and another imprisoned Catholic, John Arden, in one of the Tower’s most spectacularly successful escapes. Warder Bonner, converted by the force of Gerard’s personality, joined his former charges on the run.
This benign use of secret writing is just one of scores of similarly entertaining stories told by the American academic Kristie Macrakis in her beguilingly informative and sweeping survey of hidden communication from the classical world to today’s al-Qa’eda terrorists, who use un-Islamic porn to conceal their murderous messages in microdots.
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