(Blogger's Note: Early postings about this follow. The entire article is more than 12,000 words and should contain a good history of Oak Island.)
As of today,
the big dig has not taken place. The Triton Alliance has had to postpone their
plans a number of times. Some of it has had to do with financing, but part of
it has to do with the credibility of the story. After all, there is no solid
proof that anything of value is in the Money Pit. Theories about it abound.
Some believe it is pirate gold, some believe it was treasure from Europe, some
believe it is the lost original manuscripts of William Shakespeare, and some
are convinced it is nothing more than some sort of a hoax based on faulty
reasoning and bizarre natural phenomena. A few think that treasure had been
there once, but has been removed, probably by the original designer.
Evidence pulled
up during the many test drillings have produced some interesting results.
Tobias had some of the material, the coconut husk, samples of wood recovered at
the bottom of the pit, and iron spikes, analyzed. According to the National
Museum of Natural Sciences, the spikes had probably been forged prior to 1790.
The wood was carbon dated to 1575, plus or minus 85 years. That means the treasure
could have been put down there as early as 1490 or as late as 1650. In other
words, the Money Pit had been dug at least a hundred and fifty years before it
was found according to that analysis.
Of course, if
the coin dated 1713 found by the boys back in 1795 was inside the pit, it means
that it could be no older than 1713, the date of that coin. If it was found on
the surface and outside the pit, then the date on it had little to do with the
pit and could have been dropped by almost anyone at any time between 1713 and
1795.
Clearly the
evidence, from the stone triangle found in the summer of 1965, the cofferdam
erected in Smith's Cove, to stones that were carved and scattered on the
island, shows a presence there. The Money Pit is a worked area, constructed for
some purpose. That is not really in dispute. And, it could have been constructed
two years before Columbus set sail for the New World. More likely, it was build
some time after that, long after that, but the point is, it predates 1795 by
decades.
So, is there a
treasure? It seems unlikely that someone would invest the time and effort to
construct the pit without putting something valuable at the bottom. Whoever
built it would have been able to recover that treasure if he had decided to do
so. The secret to the recovery is there for all to see. It’s in the shaft dug
around the Money Pit, parallel to it, with tunnels to the pit. The original
builder of the Money Pit would have known about the booby traps and would have
known the way to defeat them. Only those who didn’t know, which would be
practically everyone else in the world, would dig into the Money Pit. That
would trip all the booby traps before they could get to the treasure. Digging
that parallel pit and then connecting with the original pit trouble leaves the
“plugs” in place.
Another theory is
that the Money Pit itself is a red herring. Those who built it, dug a side
tunnel, or two, or three from the main shaft, and used these tunnels to hide
their treasure. A hundred yards, two hundred from the main pit, closer to the
ground, was the treasure. The Money Pit was then filled in with the booby traps
set. If the original owner of the treasure returned, he could dig down thirty
or forty feet, out the proper distance from the main pit, recover his loot and
be gone. The main shaft would be undisturbed. And, anyone who found the island
and the evidence of the Money Pit would dig that up assuming, incorrectly, that
the treasure had to be at the bottom of it.
The treasure
then could be somewhere else on the island, or it could be gone, recovered long
before the pit was found in 1795. There have been indications of loose metal
held in chests, but no one has recovered the chests and that evidence has not
been duplicated in more than 100 years. There are the three gold links brought
up during one of the drilling operations if that is not legend... or even
worse, a marketing ploy of the mid-nineteenth century. So, there is an
indication that something was buried or maybe that was all that was left to
find... sort of.
Oak Island is
unique in the field of treasure hunting. Everyone knows where the treasure is
supposed to be. At the bottom of the pit. Modern technology should be able to
defeat the booby traps, but financing, legal squabbles, and bad luck has prevented
that. Any archaeological benefits have been destroyed long ago by all those who
dug before. The huge earth moving machines that plow up tons of dirt certainly would
have destroyed any archaeological evidence. They did ruin the stone triangle
and some of the carved stones near Smith's Cove have disappeared.
The Latest Attempt by the Lagina Brothers
I had thought,
twenty years ago, given the improvements in our technology, given what we could
do, and how much water we could pump, with infrared and satellite mapping, it
would seem that we could defeat the Money Pit’s builders whose technology was
now centuries out of date. That didn’t happen, of course. The Big Dig never
took place and no one seemed interested in making a new attempt until the
Lagina brothers, who had been fascinated with Oak Island for decades, decided
to make a try.
It doesn’t seem
as if they have bothered to learn the history of Oak Island and why all the
others failed but that could just be editing by the producers. The Laginas do
seem to understand that the Money Pit has been excavated so many times that no
one is sure where the real pit is. They seem to think that it might have been a
red herring and have looked for something else on the island that could lead
them to the treasure which explains all that mucking around in the swamp. But
they have discovered nothing exciting other than some coins found on the
surface, and have done nothing other than bring in some really big machines in
their attempts to gain the treasure. For all their time, effort and money, they
have charged around without getting much return. Why head to Europe to talk
about the Knights Templar when the Money Pit was created centuries after the
disappearance of them?
For me, this
whole thing, meaning the show, has dragged out much too long. I didn’t really
need to see a segment on someone saying that he had deciphered the code on the
stone saying that it was a double cypher but without adding anything of value
to the search. According to this theory, the code tells them to dump corn into
the channel to block the water flowing into the Money Pit. Corn, according to
them, is dry and would absorb the water. It would expand and block the tunnel
but the real question is why not just dump dirt and rock into the channel to
block the flow. This seems to be an overly elaborate method to defeat the booby
traps and seems to come from nothing other than wildly irrelevant speculation.
The truth seems
to be that the symbols were created in the 1860s to sell shares in one of the
companies that wanted to recover the treasure. That the man who displayed the
stone in the 1860s turned it into some sort of a heavy weight on which to
create paper or the like suggests that he knew the real value of the message. I
would suggest that the message was added to the stone long after it was
originally found and is therefore meaningless.
I have to laugh
when the Laginas created some sort of square diving platform and then pushed it
into the round hole of Bore hole 10X. Their plan was use it to lower diver into
the pit to see what was at the bottom of it… but all I could think of was the
square peg in a round hole.
There is
something else. Remember that decades ago there was a collapse in the 10 X that
seemed to drop everything into a deeper hole creating a blockage at the bottom
of the enlarged hole. There is four foot of debris and trash that blocks
entrance into the narrower section of 10 X that leads down into some sort of
natural chamber. Remember that divers did enter that and found themselves in
what might have been a natural chamber that had strong currents suggestion a
connection to the sea. It could be that if there was anything left in the Money
Pit, it dropped into that natural feature and the treasure would no longer be
in a place where it could be recovered.
For all their
effort, for all their traveling around half the world, for all the experts they
have brought in to consult, they haven’t added much to our knowledge other than
some things about the triangular swamp that they don’t believe to be natural.
They haven’t found anything in there other than a tree stump that they attach
some significance to. I don’t know what it might have been. Someone, long ago,
might just have discarded it into the swamp for no other reason than to get rid
of it.
Yes, I know
their drilling has brought up some bits and pieces that seem to confirm a vault
and treasure, but the evidence is quite thin. I wonder if some of those things
found in the mid-nineteenth century might not have been planted to entice
investors to produce more money though these results by the Lagina expedition
seem to be real.
They show us
the result of various technological gadgets that seem to confirm something
buried on the island. Using high-tech metal detectors, they found what they
believe are large stashes of nonferrous metals, but in the end, they haul
nothing out of the ground. Using ground penetrating radar, they find void
underground that suggest something has been buried or the soil has been worked
but in the end, that produces nothing other than speculation.
And when that
fails, and they find a strange clearing, they resort to dowsing. That’s right,
they used dowsing to locate what they thought might be an underground tunnel
system carrying water to the money pit. They brought in digging equipment, dug
two holes and found… nothing. But that didn’t stop the narrator from sort of
suggesting there was some science to back up the idea of dowsing. So, when all
else fails, slip off the deep end.
They attempted
to recreate the experiment with the dye from decades earlier, looking for the
source of the water in the Money Pit and fail. Instead of using the Money Pit
(which I’m beginning to think they may not have found) they toss the dye into
Borehole 10 X. Using a helicopter, they found what they thought was some of the
dye, but it turned out to be algae growing near the shore. It is interesting
that they failed to duplicate the dye experiment and wonder if it was because
they used the borehole rather than the actual Money Pit.
I wonder this
because, in the last episode of the season, which was hyped with announcements
of a major discovery, they use divers in Borehole 10X, but they divers find
nothing. The dive is called when the communications cables and air hoses become
entangled and I have to say, that was probably a good call. The dive was
extremely dangerous. In fact, though the divers were willing to try again, the
Laginas refused to allow it and I say good for them.
Instead they
use some high-tech radar, lowering it into a six-inch in diameter tube that
they had drilled the year before. I don’t know why this wasn’t done earlier in
this season because it would have saved a great deal of nonsense with them
running around the world chasing the Knights Templar.
That radar
seemed to find a chamber some 235 feet below the surface, which might have been
rectangular, which might have contained two chests, which might have been
supported in part by a large wooden post, and which might have two entrances to
it. I use the qualifiers and while there were times that these words were not
used, in the end, in listening to the expert, he did use them. They thought
this chamber had been made by humans because it seemed to contain objects that
had been made by humans but in the end, it was all speculation based on their
interpretation of what the radar showed.
And that was
the thing… it was interesting and sort of exciting if you didn’t pay close
attention to the words being used. They were all excited by the results and
said it was the first real evidence of something valuable hidden under the
island but that isn’t exactly accurate. It was a suggestion of something hidden
in a chamber created by humans that might contain a treasure but it was no
evidence of anything real. You might say it was the interpretation of evidence
of something real. But this was their last attempt to learn anything for the
season. Winter is coming.
The show, Curse of Oak Island, was interesting in
the beginning, but they have been diverted in their search so often, they have
spent so much time exploring ideas and theories that don’t work (really, we
have an old manuscript that seems to have a star code on it that translates to
something on the ground at Oak Island which points to the spot where the
treasure is hidden but we seem to have lost interest in that by the final
episode) and listen to people with wild ideas that have little or nothing to do
with finding a treasure (such as filling the channels that seem to be filling
the various pits with water and using corn to block them) or taking trips to
Europe to chase down the Knights Templar, that I suspect we’re never going to
get a resolution. This will continue as long as the ratings hold up, but I
think there is a limit to the patience of the audience. They better find
something significant quickly and I’m not sure that the season finale is as
significant as they all suggest, or no one is going to care if they do get to the
bottom of the hole.
