Six numbers with identifiable meanings
Turn from the network to the actual entries. Mount Vernon's transcription of the Culper dictionary assigns 711 to General Washington, 722 to Culper Sam and 723 to Culper Junior. These entries belong to the proper-name portion of the list. They are not dates, troop strengths or sums of money. Their numerical appearance should not distract from their purpose: each stands for a term selected in advance. The value comes from the agreed correspondence, not from arithmetic performed on the digits.
The place entries give 727 for New York and 745 for England. At the end of the displayed list, 763 represents Head Quarters. Keep those associations distinct. A number that denotes a place tells a reader which word to supply, not whether an agent actually visited it. A dictionary can name locations that never appear in a particular surviving letter. Similarly, the existence of an entry for headquarters does not establish where headquarters stood on every date.
For this book's number search, write every one of these six identifiers in four-digit form by adding one zero on the left. Thus the historical entry remains 711, while its puzzle form is 0711. This normalization is a modern search rule, not a claim about how Tallmadge always wrote messages. Preserve the sequence of digits and do not add the values together. The task is to recover six documented associations and represent them consistently. The constructed workshop that follows uses a different, deliberately small dictionary so that its practice message cannot be mistaken for a newly discovered Culper letter.
The account does not identify the disputed figure popularly called Agent 355 or present the familiar clothesline-signal story as a firmly documented event. Those questions are not needed to understand the surviving codebook.
The later workshop mentioned in the excerpt belongs to the book. This free sample shows the number search and its six codebook associations; it is not an authentic intercepted letter.
This excerpt and its puzzle come from the finished edition. Authoritative sources are linked below.