~ W a y m a r k s ~: The Oak Island Mystery

I am a latecomer to the History Channel’s reality-TV-style documentary The Curse of Oak Island, but not a latecomer to the treasure hunter’s story of the so-called “Money Pit” which is thought to be located there, on Oak Island, just off the coast of Nova Scotia in Canada. I first read about the Money Pit mystery in a kid’s history book about pirates and buried treasure when I was at school. I found the book in the school library and I’d often seek it out and sit reading it, engrossed in the various stories it contained, until sadly one day I found the book had been long laboured over by another pupil, who had graffitied every page to such an extent that the book was ruined and no longer readable.

The story of the Money Pit though was one of the more intriguing chapters it contained. It begins in the 1790s, like something out of the pages of Robert Louis Stevenson or R. M. Ballantyne, with a group of boys led by Daniel McGinnis finding a depression in the ground beneath the broken branch of a tree with a discarded block and tackle mechanism lying nearby. The boys began to dig and soon uncovered a shaft with pick axe marks still visible in the pit’s vertical sides. As they continued to dig, they hit a platform of oak beams or logs. Further excavation revealed similar platforms every ten feet as the shaft descended. Some of these were sealed with clay, others with coconut fibre. Eventually the boys were unable to dig any further by hand, but they’d dug deep enough to plant the seed of a very fertile mystery which has continued to grow over time.

The Money Pit, 1931

Subsequent searchers using a variety of tools, techniques, machines, and motivations have attempted to reach the bottom of the original shaft, but all to no avail as the removal of one of these oak platforms is thought to have broken a seal and set in motion a suspected “booby trap” which flooded the shaft with sea water. Reports of a stone slab engraved with mysterious hieroglyphs found lying on one of the oak platforms has simply added to the speculative allure of the Money Pit. No one alive now knows what the stone inscription actually looked like, and, of course, no one knows where the original stone is today; although someone is supposed to have deciphered it and claimed it read as follows: “Forty feet below two million pounds are buried.” Over the decades treasure hunting fever has led to the area becoming dangerously honeycombed with other shafts and tunnels which have long since flooded, been abandoned, collapsed and obscured the location of the original Money Pit. Proving that the more people searched for it, the more the mystery receded from anyone’s reach. Surely, whatever treasure lies at the bottom must be cursed!

The Money Pit, 1947

In 2014 The History Channel began to broadcast The Curse of Oak Island. The show, now beginning its eighth season this month, follows the exploits of two brothers, Rick and Marty Lagina from Michigan, who, like me, first read about the Oak Island mystery when they were young boys. Intrigued and enthralled by the story all their lives, the Lagina brothers have managed to unite various interested local parties and other Oak Island landowners who have been involved in the search for the Money Pit over generations. This combined force is a formidable one, extremely well-funded and supremely motivated, they are apparently stinting no expense in their search. From simple prospecting on foot in the woods, swamps, and foreshores of the island with handheld metal detector machines, to giant earth-boring engines and mechanical excavators, they are seemingly pursuing every lead they can in the search, and, similarly, in the pursuit for top-ratings-winning TV. However, for anyone with even a passing acquaintance with professional archaeology, or avid viewers of popular archaeology TV programmes such as the UK’s Time Team, watching The Curse of Oak Island is rather like very slowly passing a huge car crash on a busy road – you know you shouldn’t, but you can’t help looking, watching aghast at what horrors you might possibly see …

The "Lost Works" of William Shakespeare?

All sorts of outlandish theories have arisen around the ‘mystery’ of Oak Island. Everything from the seemingly straightforward pirates’ treasure of the 18^th century (Captain Kidd’s perhaps?), looted gold from a Spanish Conquistador treasure ship, or (try not to raise an eyebrow) Marie Antoinette’s lost jewels, to the even more unlikely ‘lost manuscripts’ of William Shakespeare or Francis Bacon, or perhaps the fabled treasures of the Knights Templar – the lost Ark of the Covenant or the Holy Grail. Decidedly Dan Brown-esque ideas are regularly considered a distinct possibility in each episode. As the Laginas like to repeat, they are keeping very open minds about what might lie at the end of their search; that is, if they ever succeed in locating and reaching the bottom of the original Money Pit.

The Lost Ark of the Covenant

Their dedication to the search and the evident expense it entails is a remarkable thing to behold. Yet what I find most fascinating is when they stray off on tangents, exploring the foreshore and interior regions of the island. Some of the smaller finds they make, notably a small lead cross, coins, pieces of jewellery, to the far more prosaic iron chisels and quarry hammers or swages, etc., are the things which fascinate me the most, and not least as someone who has spent his whole life working on archaeological excavations and in museum stores.

Conjectured sectional plan of the Oak Island "Money Pit"

They’ve also made some significant archaeological discoveries too, in-situ features such as a wooden slipway and a wooden revetment in an area of the island known as Smith’s Cove. Plus, the environmental investigations they’ve undertaken in an area of swampland which seems to have been artificially made, or is a wetland environment inadvertently induced by some sort of human activity thereabouts. These are the really interesting elements which the more they find, the more the island cries out for a proper professionally led scientific investigation. Instead, the island is being ripped to shreds by a bunch of otherwise well-meaning enthusiasts. That said though, it could be a lot worse. They do appear to make an effort to consult with ‘experts’ – some of the finds are taken to local university labs and analysed, dated, etc. And the team do take time out to sit down at collective team briefings to talk through their findings, to evaluate theories, and to come up with next-steps and plans of action. But really, the educational value of this programme is virtually nil.

Marty & Rick Lagina (centre) and the Oak Island Search Team (History Channel)

The whole enterprise is ultimately an exercise of carefully staged and heavily stylised ‘gung-ho’ masculinity, of men and machines (there are seemingly very few women involved), with team meetings in their man-cave-like “War Room.” Every sequence ends with someone decisively motivating everyone else to “Get to it!”, “Let’s do this thing!” – Yet each piece of evidence they uncover appears to be used to fit a preconceived idea of what they are already very definitely looking for, or what they most want to find – namely, treasure! … Every artefact examined is automatically assumed to date from the earliest point in its possible date range, even when that date range can span several centuries. Oddly unconnected and widely disbursed items and ‘pieces of evidence’ are quickly tied together in a kind of quantum leaping exercise in joining the dots. And always, everything seems to circle back to that mesmeric and mystifying term – the Templars!

Seal of the Poor Fellow-Soldiers of Christ and of the Temple of Solomon - the Knights Templar

The Oak Island team may well be seeking to rewrite history, and some of their findings so far certainly have the potential to do that, both locally and perhaps even more broadly within the immediate region. The Laginas are right to keep an open mind, and I wouldn’t fault them in that respect; but it’s the show’s tendency to chase wishful projections, constantly pushing tendentious theories, and making overly assertive speculations based on the slimmest evidence in an exhausting effort to ratchet up and maintain the tedious cliff-hanger or 'click-bait'-like hype which winds me up the most. As every archaeologist knows, older things can end up in newer (later) places and positions in time on any given site, and so that is why every archaeologist will tell you that “context is key.” Hence, poking about in the earth with a shovel following the indication of a metal detector’s bleep will never give you the full story. That’s why in the UK, since the advent of the Treasure Act in 1996 and the subsequent setting up of the Portable Antiquities Scheme, professional archaeologists have sought to find a way to work in tandem with metal detectorists to get the most out of such finds for both parties – treasure and fame for the treasure hunter, and scientific information properly recorded for the greater benefit of all.

Aerial view of Oak Island, 1931 (note distortion from double exposure)

I realise one shouldn’t expect too much from the History Channel, which at times feels like it’s directed by the likes of Erich Von Däniken or David Icke, but the format of this show is very pointedly all fluff and padding. It’s TV aimed at credulous people with goldfish-like attention spans. The programme makers seem to assume the viewer’s minds will constantly be wiped blank by the all too frequent commercial breaks. We get constant repetitions of things we saw only moments before, reiterations of simple facts and finds with which even the casual channel-hopping viewer has probably already managed to get their head around fairly quickly, let alone those who have actually been following the show for any length of time. I’ve seen frustrated viewers following the show’s Facebook page complaining in the comment sections about these repetitive 'dumbed-down' elements of the show. Plus, the Oak Island team’s ever-excited obsession with finding “wood” in every core sample sucked, pulled and bagged from every bore hole they drill or each context destroying bucketload they drag out with a huge one-armed digging machine.

Plan showing 18th Century Oak Island Landowner Lots (Chester Municipal Heritage Society)

It’s interesting to note though, for all those long strenuous stretches of imagination they make when joining the dots, they almost always circumvent the more readily apparent or everyday explanations. We sit and listen to presentations about how random stones found on the island seem to mark out ‘cross formations’, or more spookily yet geomantic ‘pentagrams!’ and ‘sephiroths!’ – Yet we are constantly shown useful graphics, such as maps delineating the plots of the island’s landowners from the 18^th century, without any thought or effort to see if the placing of these random stones might conform to such maps, thereby indicating their possible purpose as simple boundary markers. For me, watching such scenes is like listening to fingernails being dragged down the face of a blackboard. But still, I can’t look away – still I watch, fascinated by the conflicted emotions and thwarted intellectual interests this travesty of a TV show slowly drip, drip, drip-feeds us each week. It can be excruciating to watch, like a kind of history lover’s masochistic form of Chinese water torture!

Map showing Oak Island and Louisbourg (Chester Municipal Heritage Society)

For me, the most interesting angle that they have touched upon is undoubtedly the French colonial connection. In one episode they listen to a presentation given by Chipp Reid, an independent researcher specialising in naval history, who shows them plans and drawings of similar wooden revetments to the one they have uncovered in Smith’s Cove, which conform to French military water batteries or fortifications. Such large-scale earthworks, wharfs or slipways would require substantial time, labour and materials to construct. The French military, as Reid demonstrated to the Oak Island team, are known to have undertaken such large scale works further up the coast, notably the Fortress of Louisbourg on Cape Breton Island. Hence, I think this offers the most plausible archaeological lead yet for much of what they have found so far in terms of structures and subterranean engineering works (drainage tunnels, etc.), but … of course, the Oak Island search team instantly make the quantum leap from the 18^th century French colonial military to the Medieval era ‘L'ordre du Christ’, supposed successors to the Knights Templar, and there the treasure hunter’s fallacy comes neatly (and perhaps all too predictably) full circle once again.

As The X-Files knew only too well and adeptly proved every episode, the allure of a mystery isn’t found in solving, answering, or understanding its truth – the allure is in the never-ending search and the myriad speculations such a mystery can inspire: “The truth is (still) out there” … like a dog chasing its tail.

Billy Bones, by N. C. Wyeth

I wouldn’t mind betting that even if “the Laginas and their business partners” ever reach the bottom of the original ‘Money Pit’, the mystery of what it was, or why it was constructed will always remain unsolved. Sidestepping the serious scientific job of archaeology on such a site is definitely one way of ensuring that particular outcome. Much like the kid’s history book which I was fascinated by in the school library all those years ago that was thoughtlessly graffitied over and ruined, I fear The Curse of Oak Island will end up destroying the history they are seeking, and, with it sadly, the very thing which makes the Oak Island mystery so intriguing.