The Curse of Oak Island - The Fourth Season

I have been waiting for something to happen on Curse of Oak Island before I made comments about it. There seemed to be great promise this season. They had millions to spend on the Money Pit (reaffirming the idea that the term referred to throwing money into a pit rather than taking money out of it). They hinted of things to come, have found some coins that seem to have been minted by the

Oak Island

English, a hint that part of that stone allegedly found 90 feet down with strange symbols on it had been recovered, and that the shiny, glittering thing found so far beneath the surface in their borehole that captured their attention on the remote camera might be part of the treasure.

But so far the show has been basically the same. They drained the swamp again and found wood. (Did anyone notice they all stood around saying things like, “I’ve got wood?) They thought some of it might have been a plank from the deck of a ship and a spike that might also been from the deck of a ship but I’m just not impressed. They assume it was a ship scuttled with treasure on board but I wonder if the more likely scenario isn’t a repurposing of the wood and the spike for something else… but the real point is that they have found nothing in the swamp but trash.

They created a larger borehole as they attempted to penetrate a vault that might have been discovered in 1897… but once they pulled up the wood (Hey, we’ve got wood), it was clearly something from the late 19^th century or maybe early 20^th and had nothing to do with pirates burying treasure or anything else of real importance. It was just another example of all the tunneling that has been done on the island. I’m surprised the surface hasn’t collapsed entirely.

They’ve also sort of scraped the land around the original Money Pit flat so that they can bring in their machinery for these big projects. As they were looking at the dirt scraped up, Rick Lagina, I think, found a couple of bits of pottery and his pal, found a stone that might have some marking on it… an “X” with a tail that we’re told Scott Wolters had at some point on another show linked to the Templars (though I don’t think the connection is very solid). I wondered why, after finding these artifacts, they didn’t use a shaker box to search for more of the same which might have yielded a few clues but they were content with this pottery debris and single marked stone fragment… so much for archaeological research… but I digress.

I was going to talk about the coins found at an English campsite that they thought significant… Except, of course, the English had been all over the area hundreds of years ago, not to mention during the French and Indian War… so an English camp there in the mid-18^th century doesn’t seem to be so significant and wouldn’t have anything to do with the treasure anyway.

Here we get to the point of all this and it’s Samuel Ball. He owned quite a bit of Oak Island in the 18^th and 19^th centuries. They can’t explain his suggested wealth. They just note he also owned more land on the mainland, indicating he was a rich guy. He is established as a resident of the area who had won his freedom from slavery by serving in the British Army. There is a suggestion that he might have found some of the treasure and that was the source of his wealth…

But what I found interesting was that in some of the very early documentation of the discovery of the money pit, there were three young men involved. In those earlier reports, Samuel Ball was identified as one of the three. Why did his name drop out of the later reports? Did he get one of the chests that some have suggested were already removed? Did he get the only chest and the two have been looking for other, similar chests hoping there was more treasure buried on the island? I don’t know… just found it interesting that Ball had been reported as one of the original three in the earliest of accounts but then his name disappeared.

Randall Sullivan, who had written an article for Rolling Stone about Oak Island, was back to conduct more research for a book. I wouldn’t have mentioned him except that his favorite theory is that the Money Pit housed the original Shakespeare manuscripts which would be worth hundreds of millions if true… but my question is, “If they’re digging into areas that are submerged, in what did they store these manuscripts? Wouldn’t the water have turned them to pulp? I mean, everyone believes that the treasure is under water and has been for what, 225 years. The water would have destroyed a wooden chest, or that chest would have leaked so the manuscripts are probably gone, if they were ever there. Just my thoughts on that theory.

So, where are we after what, eight episodes in the fourth season? Well, they’ve found more coins on the surface. They’ve found wood from deeply buried areas that showed markings proving it was from about one hundred years ago. They’ve seen a map that is dated hundreds of years earlier but don’t seem concerned that the provenance is shaky at best. Really, someone found it in a book… can we be any more vague? They’re still worried about Borehole 10 X, in which nothing they thought was at the bottom, was there but they want to look again just in case the guy who walked around down there wasn’t good enough to make the proper examination.

Or, in other words, they haven’t found anything that can be linked to someone on the island burying a treasure of great importance, no matter how many times they tell us of missing Inca treasure or Templar treasure, and religious relics from long ago. They make leaps of logic but in the end, they have found nothing of consequence, but each “discovery” is labeled significant when all they have is the debris of human occupation from the last two or three hundred years.