The Curse of Oak Island - Season Seven

Yes, I know that a new season of The Curse of Oak Island is beginning, but I’m just not sure I have the patience or the stamina to participate in it. There are too many unanswered questions that no one on Oak Island wants to answer.

Oh, you want an example.

Oak Island

They mention that stone tablet found at the 90-foot level with a strange code on it, that has been deciphered as saying that below is more than two million pounds. No one seems to want to know why those who buried the mythical treasure would leave such an artifact. It serves no useful purpose for those who buried the treasure. They know what is down there. They put it there. They would have no reason to advertise the fact.

However, if I’m looking for investors in my company with a mission to find the treasure, then such an artifact would be valuable. It is hard evidence (pun intended) that the treasure exists. Of course, the stone has disappeared… or rather, it seems to have been traced to a book bindery operation that used the stone in part of the binding process. They have found what might be a couple of letters on that stone, but why, if it is valuable and related to the treasure, was it allowed to be ruined in that fashion?

And there is one clue that no one seems to notice. The alleged code refers to two million pounds… is that the weight of the treasure (unlikely) or a reference to the monetary system of the English. Doesn’t this rule out pirates and others who weren’t from England? Doesn’t that suggest something about the treasure that tells us that it wasn’t the Knights Templar (as opposed to the Night King)? Doesn’t that rule out the manuscripts of Shakespeare, or the Arc of the Covenant or some of the other speculations?

No one seems to question the story of the teenagers who started this whole thing with their attempted excavations back in 1795. Has anyone ever seen teenagers get obsessed with something? Can you imagine the teenagers sitting round, spotting what they think might be an indication that something had been buried and escalated that into pirate gold and buried treasure? Has no one ever wondered if they just didn’t make it up about the treasure as a way to spend an afternoon? Maybe there is treasure down there. Maybe it’s pirate treasure. We might be about to become rich… and then overwhelmed with their speculations and imagination they begin to dig.

Has no one worried that nearly everything they have found is on the surface of the island? It is no secret that people had been around it for more than 200 years. But the discoveries in Smith’s Cove seem to suggest something of a port facility or an

Joy Steele

emergency repair facility rather than anything to do with pirates. Joy Steele’s theory makes more sense each time they make another find in Smith’s Cove. The island wasn’t used to hide a treasure but as a repair facility for British ships.

Has no one wondered why the “discoveries” of the past haven’t been found again. I mean, there was talk of a buried vault found decades ago. Though they know the approximate location, they have not been able to find it with all the modern equipment and technology that they bring to the search. Could it be that the “evidence” of the vault was little more than finding the remains of attempts to get at the treasure some time earlier? I mean, they hit the beams and logs bracing those tunnels dug early in the search rather than some sort of a treasure vault.

Does no one remember the exciting finds that would suggest a treasure that have shown nothing of the sort? Dan Blankenship dug Borehole 10X and put a camera down it. The poor video seemed to suggest abandoned tools, a box of some sort and human remains. This was touted as evidence of the treasure in the early years of The Curse of Oak Island. But when a diver finally reached the bottom of the hole, he found nothing of the sort. The alleged artifacts were optical illusions recorded by the video camera rather than actual artifacts.

I could go on but there really is little point. We have been disappointed time and again by this hunt. Last week’s “astonishing” find is replaced by this week’s “astonishing” find. Do any of you remember the Roman sword found so long ago? Here was evidence that Europeans had arrived at Oak Island centuries before Columbus… but analysis showed it to be a modern replica.

Yes, I have been interested in Oak Island for half a century. I have mentioned this before. I have read the books and the magazine articles. In fact, in a book I wrote in the mid-1990s, I had a long chapter on Oak Island. I concluded the long discussion of Oak Island, writing:

It seems that we’ll have the answers in just a few years. When the story began in 1795 the technology to recover the treasure didn’t exist. The booby traps were big and clever enough to prevent the boys from finding anything. It could have been recovered fifty or hundred years ago if the work had been well planned and sufficient financing had been in place. Those problems are being resolved. Once they are, it seems that the Triton Alliance, or any of the treasure hunters that follow them, will finally solve the puzzle. The only downside will be if the treasure is so small that it doesn’t cover the expense of the search.

The Laginas have done everything they possible could to find the treasure. Their efforts have been extraordinary. What they have discovered, instead of a treasure, large or small, is that nothing of consequence is buried on Oak Island. It had been an exciting journey, but one that should have ended a couple of seasons ago.

Curse of Oak Island - We've Seen All This Before

Yes, it has been a while since I mentioned The Curse of Oak Island. There is a good reason for that. Nothing new is really going on. We’ve seen everything before. We’ve seen them drilling down. We’ve seen them use cameras to search the bottom of their various boreholes. We’ve seen them find structures and coins and artifacts on the surface. And we’ve seen them consult with experts only to cherry pick the responses and make huge leaps in logic.

So, they’ve found structures at Smith’s Cove where they have dug up the beach after erecting a somewhat impressive coffer dam. It seems as if these structures could have been built a couple of hundred years ago and they could have been used for ship repair as Joy Steele suggested. There is nothing there to suggest a complex system to protect a treasure.

They found a concrete or cement structure and for some reason mention that the Romans had created a form of cement. I don’t why they would want to bring the Romans into this when we’ve spent years hearing about the Knights Templar and that iron cross they found last year. It would seem that they could test that cement for its composition and that could provide a clue as to when that particular structure was build. Oh, it’s all very interesting, but it is not getting us any closer to that nonexistent treasure.

We were teased with another coin that was found and for a time I thought that it was something they had pulled up from one of the many deep holes they have dug on the island. But no, it was something else found on the surface. All these things they have found on the surface suggest human habitation but not a treasure. They have found very little actual, expensive artifacts. Everything they have is the kind of thing you’d find using a metal detector in an area where humans have lived for a couple of hundred years.

The attempts to dig down, deeper into the island, are impressive, but what they are pulling up is not; like all that wood that had been used by all those others attempting to get to the treasure. All those tunnels and shafts and other structures that suggest the island has been occupied but nothing to prove there is a treasure. I sometimes wonder if the whole island isn’t propped up by those timbers and removing them will cause Oak Island to sink beneath the waves.

The point here is that each exciting find is on the surface. The point is that they are doing a wonderful job of digging down, reaching to the very bedrock of the island, answering questions from the past, but producing nothing to tell us the treasure is still there if it ever was. So much breathless excitement over a find that is no more impressive than me finding a quarter in the parking lot at Target.

Dan Blankenship

Take bore hole 10X. We were shown those pictures made in the 1970s by Dan Blankenship that seemed to indicate a body, a tool, and a possible box at the bottom. But when they got down there, they found… nothing. Shapes in the soil that seemed to look like a body and a rock that had a square shape. We hear nothing about this any more but I have to admit it was a mystery solved.

So, we see the same things. We jump to same big conclusions. We find more structures that were built by those who were looking for the treasure. And we have evidence that ship repair was at one time the reason for human occupation on the island. But we have no indications that there is any treasure still there which is the big disappointment. I was really hoping they would find some. I do think they have solved the mystery, however.

Curse of Oak Island - In the Year 2019

Yes, I know that I haven’t written much about the new season of Curse of Oak Island… probably because there isn’t much that is new. They are still chasing that iron cross they believe was created and then dropped by the Knights Templar. Sure, they have an analysis that suggests it was made from iron mined in the Middle Ages but that doesn’t mean that it was dropped on Oak Island at that time.

We have them using seismic detonations to determine what is hidden below the surface of the island. They found a void that seemed to be in the place that a deeply buried underground vault had been located by earlier researchers. Turned out that it was a place filled with sand as opposed to the harder ground around it. There was no vault there.

They’ve installed a coffer dam so that they can dig up a beach looking for proof of the booby trap system created to protect their nonexistent (yes, I said it) treasure. The beach may, in fact, be something of an artificial construct but I think it was to facilitate the repair of British ships in the 18^th century and not a clever way to protect a treasure.

Of course, we see that the metallic wall erected to protect the beach is now leaking… not badly, but leaking none-the-less. When the Laginas called the company that erected it, it seemed that their solution was some sort of silicon gel that the Laginas had to apply. I’m wondering why the company didn’t want to get it right the first time, especially when the problem was being broadcast to what is basically an international audience.

I could go on in this vein, but what’s the point. The problems might be new but the solutions are the same. They might be finding more “treasure” on the surface of the island, but it is more like the debris you would find in any area that had been inhabited for hundreds of years. Random losses and not some kind of hidden wealth.

As I have said, I have been interested in Oak Island for decades. I first learned about it in a book I bought in the 1960s. I have followed the expeditions and commentary on it in other books, in magazine articles and television documentaries. I applaud the Laginas for their attempts to find the treasure, but when you bring in a rock that has been squared and used in a leather tanning

Joy Steele... Oak Island Researcher.

process that smoothed it out, only to claim this is THE stone tablet found centuries ago, I lose my patience. Are we really to believe that this stone, that has no writing on it, once held the clue that treasure was hidden below?

I had hoped they would find treasure. I believe they have solved the mystery. The answer does not involve treasure but a very different history that has been exploited for profit for a couple of hundred years. I think Joy Steele is closer to the answer than a claim of pirate treasure. I don’t think the Knights Templar were involved. I think it was a repair facility created in the 18^th century. I’m sorry to say that because I really would have rather seen a huge treasure found, even if I don’t get any of it. That would be exciting. Instead we have Al Capone’s Vault (don’t get the reference? Google it.)

Oak Island, Red Glass and the Knights Templar

No, I wasn’t going to review each episode of The Curse of Oak Island because it just doesn’t seem to be worth the effort. They have all fallen into a pattern, and last week’s episode (No.2) was no exception. However, they did one thing that annoyed me.

Once again, near the surface, meaning buried in six or seven inches of soil, they found a hunk of jewelry that had a large red stone set in the center. This, they believed, was their first real find of treasure. They took it to a university geology department for analysis.

So far, so good.

Under microscopic analysis, it was determined that the stone was, in fact, red glass. The geologist mentioned that the formula for red glass had been found and lost multiple times over the centuries. The formula was either a family secret or a trade secret and because of that, the formula was something written in code…

WRITTEN IN CODE?

That perked up the ears of the treasure hunters, not to mention the narrator. Then, it was off the rails, again… The Knights Templar

Templar Battle Flag

used codes. They were the main bankers of the 14^th century until they were wiped out in one night, (just as the Jedi had been, but that is irrelevant to us here).

Doesn’t code imply some sort of nefarious purpose? Code implied that maybe the Knights Templar were responsible for the Oak Island treasure (though I’m unsure how they made this leap in logic).

Or maybe, just maybe, those who had discovered a way to create red glass had wanted to keep the secret for themselves. They used a code so that others couldn’t steal their formula. Maybe there just wasn’t a hidden purpose in that code at all and just maybe, or much more likely, it had nothing to do with the Knights Templar.

This is the thing that annoys me. They pick up something on the surface, clearly something created centuries ago, and then pile speculation upon guesswork upon faulty reasoning, and run with it. A piece of red glass, no matter how old, does not a treasure make, nor does a comment that some glass makers in ancient times tried to protect their formulas using codes does not lead to the Knights Templar.

Sure, there were other outrages in the episode, but this was the most egregious of them. I couldn’t let it pass without comment

Curse of Oak Island - Season 6, Episode 1

So, yes, I watched the first episode of the new season of Curse of Oak Island and have to say that nothing seems to have changed. We’re still teased with what is being found, including a gold coin but we don’t know if it was found deep inside one of those holes they have dug, or if it was discovered on the surface as

Oak Island

practically everything else has been. In other words, without some sort of context, this means little and is just one more example of what we have seen season after season.

In the preview show that ran in the hour before the new season started, we saw the coffer dam that they will erect at some point. That is an impressive structure but I have to ask, how would pirates, or British sailors, or whoever, do that in the 16^th or 17^th century? If we are to believe that these long-gone people built some sort of drainage system that would flood the Money Pit, we have to wonder how they could have done it so long ago with their state-of-the-art shovels and pulley systems that would have been all they had. And, we’ve seen that the Laginas boys have scraped down, below what was the surface of the beach, and there was no evidence of that boobytrap or drainage system. In years past, we did see they found some sort of channel or stone lined ditch that didn’t seem to be the legendary boobytrap that we’ve heard so much about. It’s not really the same thing though.

Anyway, this episode didn’t give us much in the way of new data. They did test the lead “Knights Templar” cross they had found, on the surface, last year. The tests seemed to show that the lead didn’t originate on the North American continent, but we didn’t find out where the lead had been mined. But then, we do know that ships from Europe had landed on the island in centuries past, not to mention people living on the island so the cross really doesn’t tell us much of anything.

I didn’t really expect much from this first episode. They weren’t going to solve the mystery or find the treasure. In fact, I had heard or read somewhere that this season will be longer than those aired in the past. That means they’re going to drag this one out for a lot longer.

However, I have to say, that I don’t think they’re going to find the treasure. I have been interested in this since the 1960s when I first heard about it. I have read many of the books and articles about it, and for a time believed that there was a treasure hidden on the island. Since that time, I have watched each season of Curse of Oak Island and I think the Laginas accidently solved the mystery long ago. I think, once they got to the bottom of Bore Hole 10X, which Dan Blankenship had explored so long ago, and which held some interesting images, we had the answer. There was no chest down there. There was no body that seemed to be lying down there. Everything seen in those old videos or photographs turned out to be nothing more than optical illusions of the rough bottom.

They also have put a diver down, in a new hole they drilled, and he found that there was a current down there. It seemed that the area was connected with the ocean, and that the reason the Money Pit flooded was not really a boobytrap, but they had tapped into that underground water source. The flooding was the end result of tapping into the source of the water that filled the pit.

But we also have to ask, once again, who had the technical ability to build a structure of that nature. While the engineering capability might have existed in Europe or China in that time frame, it wouldn’t have existed on a pirate ship or a British man-of-war. They simply couldn’t have dug down more than 90 feet, created the elaborate drainage system that boobytrapped the Money Pit, and certainly wouldn’t have been able to block the boobytrap to get back at the treasure if and when the wanted to retrieve it.

Joy Steele

Joy Steele, I think, have provided the true story of Oak Island. I think her theory, that Oak Island have been some sort of way station, a place where British ships could go for repairs, is the correct one. Her theory explains everything that has been found to this point without inventing a treasure. Her theory is based on history rather than speculation. I have reported on this in other blog postings. You can read more about it here:

http://kevinrandle.blogspot.com/2017/05/the-mystery-of-oak-island-solved-by-joy.html

When we get to the end of this season, which will probably be the last season, there will be no treasure found. Given all that we have seen in past seasons, and all the speculation that has not panned out, there really is nothing more to learn. I hate to say it, but I don’t think there was ever a treasure. I think the story evolved from a trio of boys who had heard tales of pirate gold, found something that they didn’t understand on the surface and wildly speculated on what they would soon dig up… They found nothing, family legends notwithstanding, but that didn’t mean that others didn’t buy into the story. We’ve had two centuries of digging, mythmaking, and speculation but we’ve had nothing in the way of real evidence. At the end of the season, I think that everyone will agree that even if there was a treasure at some point, it is no longer there.

Curse of Oak Island: Season (Series?) Finale

I didn’t write anything about the Curse of Oak Island episode that aired on February 28 because, it seemed, based on the previews at the end, that we were about to be treated to some real, important revelations in the season finale. Not to mention that there was the steel plate they had run into some 70 feet below the surface in the latest hole they dug, they had found a ruby ring with a huge stone that suggested that maybe they had discovered the lost French crown jewels and there was a glimpse of a table filed with what looked to be treasure. I was, quite naturally, skeptical, but wondered if, finally, they had cracked the mystery of Oak Island and that they had finally beaten the curse.

We had now reached that season finale and we were waiting for the diver to take, well, the plunge. He headed on down, in the hole they had drilled that was much wider than any of the other holes and didn’t seem nearly as dangerous as dives taken in the narrower holes that had been drilled so much earlier. The water was filled with debris, clouds of mud so that there wasn’t much to see, but he reached the bottom and told us that there was a buoyancy that tried to lift him back to the surface. As I have said, this seemed to indicate that the water was surging up from below the island rather than falling down from some sort of booby trap. It seemed to indicate that the problem encountered two hundred years ago wasn’t from a system designed to protect a treasure, but from the naturally high-water table and to what seemed to be a network of natural tunnels or caves under the island.

The real point of the dive, however, was to identify material that had stopped the drilling and maybe gain a clue about what it protected. They had suggested it was a steel plate but no one seemed to know how it would have been put there hundreds of years ago or what purpose it might have served. It suggested a technology that was advanced for the time and added to the mystery, that is, until the material was identified. It wasn’t a steel plate but a granite boulder. It was a natural barrier and not an artificial one. Mystery solved… which, of course, didn’t allow them to penetrate that barrier. It just stopped them. They had no immediate solution about penetrating the plate, but then, it probably made no difference.

We were again treated to more Knights Templar connections and had to suffer through another of the segments in which the lead cross found on the beach is compared to a cross carved on a prison wall that seemed to match. I still say this Templar connection is weak and still wonder if that lead cross wasn’t planted there to underscore the Templar connection. We have seen, over the years, television shows and documentary producers salt an area so that the cast has something exciting to find. They’re just trying to jazz up the show which, when we get to the bottom line, is actually entertainment rather than a true search for information.

Finally, we end up in the war room with a huge group of people sitting around that table with all the treasure laid out on it. Both the Lagina boys and their kin are there, as well as Dan Blankenship and others who have been part of the search for these last several years. While the treasure looks impressive, Blankenship makes a comment that is quite telling. He said that 80% of the material on the table had been found on the surface. Though he didn’t mention it, much of that material had been found some distance from the money pit area as well.

So, we see the coins that they have found and which they deem important because of the dates on them. Many of them were from a time more than a hundred years before the money pit was “discovered.” But I’m thinking that I have a half dollar that was minted in 1855 and several pennies from 1857 and 1858. The point being that the date on the coin is not necessarily that date the coin was lost… and a quick Internet search shows that many similar coins available at a very low cost in case someone needs them to spice up the action.

No, I don’t believe the Lagina boys or those helping them, are responsible for salting the area. I am merely pointing out that these coins, found on the surface, well, down a couple of inches in the soil, don’t prove that anyone was running around the island at the time the coins were minted. I’m suggesting that having them dated from the late seventeenth century is not proof that they were dropped there at that time.

As an alternative, it is possible that inhabitants of the island, in the nineteenth century, were the ones who lost the coins, and not some treasure hiding group whether they were pirates, the Knights Templar or those who had escaped France with the crown jewels. That none of this was pulled up from any of the holes drilled around the original location of the money pit is the important point here. It is not proof of anything other than someone had lost these coins.

The few things that have been pulled up out of those holes, again, do not provide much in the way of evidence of a treasure. They are scraps of paper, a few bits of broken pottery, and, of course, those bone fragments. But these merely prove that the island has seen human occupation for a very long time, not that there is a treasure hidden on it, a point that seems to have gotten lost.

Red garnet in its natural environment.

That ruby that was so important the week before, with speculation that it was proof of a treasure turned out not to be a ruby. I thought the color was rather anemic and I do know that the deeper the color, the more expensive the ruby is, but this was a garnet, a semi-precious stone, that certainly could have been part of a treasure, but again, it was found, basically on the surface and away from the money pit area.

While they were sitting around the table, Marty Lagina, swept all the coins they had found, what 20 or 25 of them, into a pile to make the point that here was what the treasure would look like. But they weren’t gold and silver coins of any real value, but coins made of cheaper metal. Not much of a treasure, and worth, what, a hundred bucks or less.

Marty Lagina

And let’s not forget that on that table with their treasure was that toy pistol they had found. It wasn’t something from a hundred years ago, but a toy dropped by a child in the 1950s or 60s. Certainly not proof a treasure, but an interesting bit of the history about the search for that treasure.

As they wind down, they all look to the grand master at the table, Dan Blankenship. He’s the one who has been searching for the treasure for decades, and it was clear to me that he was extremely disappointed. They asked if he thought they should give up and his response was, “How much money do you have?”

To me that suggested he would sort of like to continue but realized that it might be useless to do so. He didn’t want to spend more money unless there was a lot of it around to spend. It was not the sort of enthusiastic answer you would expect from a man who’d spend more than half a century trying to find a treasure. It suggested that deep down he now realized that there was no treasure to find but he wasn’t willing to throw in the towel quite so soon.

Dan Blankenship.

They did go around the table asking about continuing the search, but I didn’t get the feeling there was much enthusiasm for that. Sure, they looked at what they had found and they talked about the Templar connection, and they sort of said they should go on, but the attitude reflected that of Dan Blankenship. In the end, the question was left in the air. The Laginas were going to reevaluate the season, study what they had learned, and then decide what to do.

I think this might have been the series finale rather than the season finale because they didn’t say then needed to finish the work. They didn’t talk about another hole to be drilled or a place to be searched and they didn’t seem to have a direction. They had taken it as far as they could and they had found nothing to indicate there was a treasure. Sure, there might have been something buried there at one time, but that treasure, if it ever existed, is long gone.

I think that the decision to return is going to be based on the ratings of the new treasure hunt they talked about last night. This one, Confederate gold at the bottom of Lake Michigan, had better historical documentation… which, of course, doesn’t mean it exists, only that there is documentation for it. If that show does well, if the ratings are high enough, I think the Curse of Oak Island will fade away as they begin the attempt to recover that gold… after all, one treasure hunt is as good as the next and as I have said, repeatedly, the gold is not in the ground by in the ratings.

Curse of Oak Island - A Mid-season Analysis

This is going to be rather short because there is really nothing new to report here. The Laginas boys are still digging up the island, but now they have another new, high-tech piece of equipment that will create a relatively huge hole in the island. This will make access to the bottom easier and maybe a little safer for the divers

Boring operations a long time ago... and yes, I said
"Boring operations," for a very good reason.

who will be going down into it but won’t yield anything of importance. We’ve been down this road so many times that it is beginning to look like the boy who cried “Wolf!”

Sure, they have made some interesting finds, but none of them actually suggest a treasure on the island. There were the two bone fragments, one apparently from a person of European heritage and one from someone from the Middle East. That doesn’t put a treasure on the island, but apparently it was enough to move us back to the idea that the Knights Templar had a hand in all this.

For those who don’t know, the Knights Templar were organized as a sort of military force (think Jedi) who became quite rich and powerful. Those not engaged in combat operations, organized a system of early banking (think Iron Bank). King Philip IV (think Lannisters) of France, heavily in debt to the Iron Bank… I mean the Knights Templar, ordered most of them arrested on the night of October 13, 1307, and eventually executed (didn’t that happen to the Jedi?).

The point is that the Knights Templar had accumulated massive wealth, and it is now suggested that in the nearly two hundred years before Columbus (yes, I know the Vikings had landed in Canada long before this and nearly every educated person knew the world was round), made their way to Oak Island to hide much of their wealth. With that, they’re off again, meaning the Laginas, to France to begin their quest for more knowledge of the Knights Templar, even though that had been explored in the past.

Don’t get me wrong. I enjoy seeing the interiors of those old buildings and a look at that cities of Europe, which is why I watch The Amazing Race. You get a good look at life in other parts of the world, but with Oak Island, we’re supposed to get a look at the treasure and not some new excuse for touring parts Europe.

At this point, with History telling us every chance they get that Curse of Oak Island is the number one rated cable show, we know they’re going to stretch it out as long as possible. This is why we keep coming back to points from the past that seemed to go nowhere and its why little reference is made about the provenance of documents and debris they have found, unless it fits into their narrative. Yes, the bones were from people who lived in the decades before the treasure hunt began in 1795, but they are also from a period in which travelers from around the world were finding themselves on the North American continent. Without some sort of context, the Laginas’ discoveries don’t actually lead anywhere. The narrator asks, “If such is true, then couldn’t this mean that such is also true,” which might be the case, but probably isn’t.

Given all this, I predict that there will be no major discovery this season. While the ratings remain high, they’ll just keep milking this for all they can. When we reach the end of the season, they’ll have drilled down to a reasonable depth and there will be hints of greater things to find… but we won’t get those results just yet. We’ll have to wait to see what was found with hints that it is extraordinary.

The problem here is that we’ve been through all that before. Remember the gold object and the treasure vault they seemed to have found just as one (the third, I think) season ended? Yet in the next, they were still looking for that vault and they couldn’t find that gold object even with a diver in the shaft looking for it.

Yes, I will be tuned in each week, trying my best to stay awake while they wander around with metal detectors, stand on the surface and watch as more drilling takes place and sitting around in their high-tech war room where they discuss the “exciting” finds of the week or the month or even seasons passed.

And next season, I’ll hope they make some progress in finding actual treasure rather than a few old coins, bits of wood, iron nails, and a cap gun from the 1950s. And yes, it seems that I’m writing this season off, but what have the found, really, that has any relevance to finding a treasure. I fear we’ll have to wait longer to learn any truth about the Curse, but then, I guess that’s why we all tune in. 

Curse of Oak Island - Season 4 Finale (sort of)

Well, that certainly was a disappointment. After a week of teasing us with the discovery of a gold coin from deep in the fourth hole they dug, and with their archaeological expert (Dr. Lori and whose last name I didn’t write down) saying that it was an important discovery, we finally learn the truth. It wasn’t a gold coin but a gold-plated button and Dr. Lori wasn’t talking about the button when she talked about the amazing artifact but about the cross that a couple of the McGinnis sisters had which had been handed down through several generations. We’d seen it before.

Or, in other words, the tease had been deceptively created to give a false impression that something very important had finally been found during their dig, pointing to a treasure in the Money Pit. That wasn’t the case.

In the two-hour season finale, we got the same old tired rhetoric that they were on the verge of finding proof that there was a treasure hidden in the Money Pit. And when the two, somewhat boring hours were over, they had found nothing to prove there was a treasure, only that lots of people had spent lots of time, lots of effort and lots of money to come up with just a few, tiny gold relics, some old British coins, and lots of wood that had been used in all the other attempts to find the treasure.

The most important revelation, which had been made before, was when the McGinnis sisters returned. One of the three had died of cancer and the remaining two had a small, glass globe with some of her ashes in it to be buried on the island. And while I certainly emphasize with them for their loss, it wasn’t actually relevant to the hunt for the treasure.

They also brought with them that small, gold cross that they had shown to the Lagina boys some time ago, saying that it was part of the treasure recovered by their ancestor. But here’s the thing, or rather two things. First, if what they say is true, then the treasure is gone, found by that ancestor and his two pals, and second, there really is nothing to prove that the cross came from a huge treasure trove. Their expert, Dr. Lori, said that it was old, of a style that suggested it was of Spanish origin, and that at one time it was covered by jewels (emeralds) that had been removed.

Once we have disposed of this, and seemingly forgotten about the gold-plated button, they returned to continue their digging which reportedly has cost three or four million this year alone. They keep pulling up wood until they hit a metal obstruction that others had reported in the past and had failed to penetrate. But in the world today there are methods that weren’t available a century ago and they break through. They had pulled up pieces of metal that might have protected or been part of equipment used in those earlier excavations. They don’t know what they have other than it doesn’t seem to be modern and a suggestion that it is not from a treasure but from the search of others for the treasure.

Having penetrated the metal obstruction, they continued down but had to stop because their casing which guided the equipment wasn’t long enough to protect the equipment. In other words, they could lose a valuable piece of equipment and the owner/operator didn’t want to take the risk. Digging, for the season, was over.

They did pull up another bit of metal that was bent in the middle and had several holes in it. Again, they thought it looked old. They returned to Dr. Lori who told them that the piece of metal was just the sort of thing they would use on treasure chests back in the time of pirates and chests of gold. The problem, as I understood it, was that the metal would be used on all sorts of chests including those storing clothes and other personal but not necessarily valuable items. On Oak Island, everything is related to pirates, treasures or the Knights Templar.

Dr. Lori looked at other things they had found including the spike that she identified as part of an old sailing ship which also suggested pirates, the old coins which were established as British, and then learned about the wooden planks and parts found in the swamp. This seemed to underscore the theory that a ship had been sunk into the swamp centuries ago which bolstered Dan Blankenship’s theory that they hid the treasure, or parts of it, in plain sight.

So, let’s recap the four years of digging, diving, traveling, exploring (and maybe throw in some stuff that went on decades and centuries ago). They have found lots of wood from other attempts to find the money. They remind us that there was a stone found at the 90-foot level that had strange makings on it but that no one bothered to photograph and that has since disappeared. There was a three-link gold chain of which we do have pictures. And then all the stuff that is not particularly valuable or relevant for us. Nothing that proves there is treasure on the island, only that people have been there for centuries, many of them looking for the treasure.

I don’t know how much money has been spent, I do not know what the Laginas or any of the others are paid for being on the show and I don’t believe they will ever find anything of value because there is nothing of value to find. Had they taken the money and invested it in blue chip stocks or even money market or savings accounts (and with the amount of money they had, they could have hit some very favorable rates) they would have made a great deal more.

Next season they will be back but I’m not sure (with the exception of the Blankenships) if they still believe they will find anything of value. It might just be for the excitement of doing a TV show, getting a nice summer vacation without having to pay for it, and getting a nice check for being a reality TV star. If there is money to be made on Oak Island, it is in the TV show and in any books that are written about it and not treasure from the Incas or the Aztecs or the Knights Templar or the Spanish pirates or British pirates. As I have said, the real treasure is in the TV show and not the ground.