The Oak Island Mystery - Curse, Conundrum, or Con?

 

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.

Blind Pew, by N. C. Wyeth

~

Also on 'Waymarks'

Missing Man - Colonel P. H. Fawcett

Searching for the Real Robinson Crusoes

Robert Drury - Madagascar

Where possible the images used above have been linked to their original sources, please click on the image to follow the link.

Shandley Williams - Totem

Souvenir Series #1

I thought I’d begin the first blog post of the New Year by making it the first of my occasional ‘Souvenir Series’ too; and nothing makes more sense than to begin at the beginning – so here is the very first ‘souvenir’ I ever bought. That is to say, it’s the oldest art object / artefact which I purposefully collected and still own today. And, rather appropriately, it fits in well following on from my recent journeys along the north-west coast of the USA to Canada.

It’s a small wooden carving, 8 ½ inches or 21.5cms tall, painted in black, red, green and blue – perhaps carved from some sort of cedar wood. As you can see from the illustrations it depicts some kind of (mythical?) creature which stands on the back of what looks like a frog or toad while holding a fish. The back of the carving bears a signature in pencil: ‘Shandley Williams’, but no date.

I bought this piece – not in the USA or Canada – but in Cornwall, from a small bric-a-brac stall overlooking the sea whilst I was on my summer holidays in the late 1980s / early 1990s. How this item came to be on sale there I have no idea, but it’s now been in my possession for almost 25 years. I’ve just returned from a flying visit to Portland, Oregon and this, along with my recent travels in that part of the world last year, prompted me to finally try to find out a bit more about this little object.

I spoke first to a friend who lives in the region who showed a photo of the totem to a colleague of theirs who specialises in north-west coast art, and it seems like this figure is an unusual one. It doesn’t appear to represent a traditional motif and so seemed to suggest some kind of possibly European ‘hobby-craft’ origin, but – place of purchase isn’t always an indicator of true provenance – a check on the pencil signature would seem to suggest that there is some kind of connection to the NW Pacific coast. ‘Shandley Williams’ or ‘Leonard Shandley Williams’ seems possibly to have been a local artist working from around the late 1950s to the 1970s. Some of his work appears to have recently been sold or auctioned in the Seattle area as well as in Ontario, Canada too. Beyond that, I’ve not been able to trace any further information on the artist or his work. 

Consequently, any tips or further information would be very gratefully received! … Please do get in touch.

Other items which I’ve seen of his work on the web seem to include more traditional motifs, with the notched black-painted display base being a characteristic feature.

Working on various exhibitions over the years I’ve been lucky enough to have handled some genuine pieces of both ancient and more modern NW coast art – particularly pieces from the Haida, Tsimshian, and Nuu-chah-nulth peoples. Also, when I reached Vancouver at the end of my trip along the Cascades last year, I spent a morning wandering around the galleries of the University of British Columbia Museum of Anthropology – which has a truly fantastic collection of NW coast art, most famously including works by the Haida artist, Bill Reid (1920-1988), whose artworks are very well known in Canada and also feature on certain Canadian banknotes. It all brought back memories of undergraduate lectures on long houses, ‘sweat lodges,’ and the ‘potlatch' festival when I was doing my Anthropology BSc.

UPDATE: (June 25th 2014) Shandley Williams (1938-1986) was a NW Coast artist from a Ditidaht family, originating in Vancouver Island, B.C. Several generations of the Williams family were and still are to this day noted wood carvers. (See the comments below)

'The Carver's Life' - Seattle Met news article about John T. Williams, by Neal Thompson (April 22, 2011)

The North-West Coast by Rail - USA to Canada

I recently returned from a trip along the north-west coast of the USA to Canada, travelling from Portland, Oregon, through Seattle, Washington, to Vancouver in British Columbia. It was a fantastic journey involving planes, trains, trucks and automobiles, as well as a cable car – and almost a boat ...

This stretch of the North American continent is a truly beautiful part of the world. I began my journey in Portland, Oregon where I made a couple of day excursions – first, to Astoria and Cannon Beach in Oregon, and then, second, over into Washington State to the national park around Mount Saint Helens. Portland is a wonderfully relaxed and laidback city, notable for its many micro-breweries and delicious food stalls, as well as the legendary Voodoo Donuts store. But the main highlight for me has to be the famous and truly vast Powell’s Bookstore. If you are a bibliophile you will almost certainly find yourself truly lost in here, but if so you’ll probably never want to find your way out again, it’s a book lover’s paradise!

Around 96 miles north of Portland, the Port of Astoria is a small city situated at the mouth of the Columbia River, named after John Jacob Astor (1763-1848), who established his American Fur Company here in 1811 to compete with the British Hudson’s Bay Company – he is also an ancestor of John Jacob Astor IV (1864-1912), who famously was the wealthiest passenger to perish when the Titanic sank on its maiden voyage across the Atlantic in April 1912. It was also close to Astoria that the Lewis and Clark Expedition wintered in 1805-1806 (I think I’ll save saying any more on Lewis and Clark for future - more detailed - blog post). However, my real reason for wanting to visit Astoria, I have to confess, was in fact rooted a little more closely to the present day … I wanted to visit Astoria because this is where the 1985 kid’s adventure movie The Goonies was filmed! I was nine years old when this movie came out. I remember going to see it at the cinema and loving every minute of it; consequently, it remains to this day one of my favourite films. So it was quite a nostalgic - if a little surreal - moment to find myself standing outside the Walsh family’s house on the very spot where Chunk performed his legendary “Truffle Shuffle” dance! 

Having made this little pilgrimage to childhood memory I then set off in pursuit of the noisy sounds of sea lions which were echoing loudly up the hill from the docks. Here the piers were full of pungent smelling sea lions all basking in the sunshine, with others periodically slipping into the water where they swam with amazing speed and grace amongst the moored boats. 

Leaving Astoria, heading south down the coast road, the next stop was Cannon Beach. This is a truly beautiful stretch of coastline. Here the restless sea was roaring loudly, kicking up a white haze of mist from the surging breakers of the surf, out of which emerged the distinctive ghostly shape of Haystack Rock.

My second excursion out of Portland was to the Mount Saint Helens National Volcanic Monument. I remember learning about the famous catastrophic eruption of May 18th 1980 in geography lessons at school, only eight years after the event. This was a major eruption which was preceded by a series of earthquakes and steam-venting episodes which weakened the north face of the volcano such that it eventually gave way; the earthquake which triggered the blast measured 5.1 on the Richter scale. This exposed the molten layer of magma beneath and the sudden pressure differential released torrents of gas, steam and ash, along with a rapid flow of lava which actually overtook the initial avalanche of overlying rock and debris, also triggering massive torrential mudflows. The resulting environmental devastation left a wasteland of several hundred square miles, raining ash and debris over eleven States, and claimed the lives of 57 people, as well as untold numbers of animals and trees in the surrounding region. Even today many of these dead and scorched trees are still visible standing on the surrounding hillsides; bleached as dry as bone they make quite a stark and eerie landscape in some places. 

Prior to the eruption scientists from the US Geological Survey persuaded the local authorities to close the Mount Saint Helens area and thereby saved many thousands of lives which undoubtedly would have been affected otherwise. The initial eruption column rose 80,000 feet into the atmosphere (compare this to the recent ash plume from Eyjafjallajökull in Iceland which reached around 30,000 feet, causing the closure of the entire airspace of northern and western Europe for several days in early 2010 – if you think of this in terms of the contrails you see overhead from airliners, most long haul flights cruise at an altitude of around 36,000-38,000 feet).

Eventually leaving Portland I boarded the Amtrak Cascades train at Union Station – a wonderful old railway station dating back to 1896. The train journey up to Vancouver in British Columbia (passing through Vancouver, Washington) took 8 hours, and was a wonderful way to see the country as the train travels up to Seattle and then along the coast of Puget Sound. These are the waters - from Oregon all the way up to Alaska - which were explored and charted by George Vancouver (1757-1798), a Captain in the British Navy, in 1792. 

Along the way the train passes under the twin suspension bridges at Tacoma Narrows. This is another place which stuck in my mind from my schooldays as I recall my class being shown a remarkable film as part of a physics lesson on wave frequencies, resonance properties, and elasticity. The 16mm film was shot by a man who owned a local camera shop, and it shows how the bridge began to oscillate in a 40 mile an hour crosswind until it eventually shook itself apart. At the time the newly constructed bridge had only been open for a few months when it collapsed in November 1940. It was eventually rebuilt ten years later, with the second parallel bridge being completed in 2007. There’s a rather striking moment in the film in which a man abandons his car on the bridge and runs to safety. Apparently no one was injured or killed in the collapse, except – sadly – for the car owner’s dog which was so terrified it refused to move and even bit the man when he attempted to pull it from the car in order to try to save it.

 

When it was first built the original bridge, which was nick-named “Gallopin' Gertie” by its construction workers, was the third longest suspension bridge in the world. Its 1950 replacement was the first suspension bridge design to be tested in a wind tunnel and also the first to incorporate hydraulic dampeners in its design. Since its completion it has withstood several major earthquakes. The collapse of the first bridge has since become a classic case study which has informed and altered subsequent bridge design technology and still gives cause for scientific debate. 

After Tacoma there was a wonderful view of Mount Rainier. Like Mount Saint Helens this too is a stratovolcano. These are tall conical shaped volcanoes built up of layers (strata) of hardened lava, pumice, and volcanic ash. They are sometimes called ‘composite volcanoes’ due to the manner in which they grow by accreting layers upon layers. They are also prone to sudden explosive eruptions – other famous stratovolcanoes include Krakatoa in Indonesia, Vesuvius in Italy, and Mount Fuji in Japan. Mount Rainer is considered one of the most dangerous volcanoes on Earth given its type and its location in close proximity to large areas of population – Seattle, for instance, is around 55 miles away.

Finally arriving in Vancouver at Pacific Central Station at almost midnight, I spent the following week exploring the city; visiting the Museum of Anthropology at the University of British Columbia, which has a magnificent and extensive collection of Haida and other First Nation peoples’ art; strolling around Stanley Park, watching the seaplanes taking off from Burrard Inlet; as well as taking a tour of the Molson Brewery. Two day trips of particular note were to Grouse Mountain and to the old Britannia Mine, both to the north of Vancouver. 

 

Grouse Mountain, some 4,000 feet high, is a popular ski resort in winter it’s also famous for the “Grouse Grind”, a steep two mile hiking trail to its summit. I cheated though and took the cable car up to the top. The day I went inclement weather had begun to set in and so it was a happy surprise to find the cable car suddenly emerging through the unbroken cloud layer to reveal that the top of the mountain was all blue skies and sunshine. At the top of the mountain there is an enclosure where two brown bears, rescued as orphans when they were young, have been raised. I was lucky to find these grizzly bears playfully lolling about in their pool; both were very active, play-fighting with one another rather spectacularly. I seem to have taken so many photos of this very captivating David Attenborough-like view of them, up-close and personal, such that the sequence of shots play almost like a stop-motion animation on my camera! 

The old Britannia Mine has now been converted into a museum, and may well be familiar from The X-Files – which, like so many other locations in and around Vancouver, formed the backdrop to various episodes of the famous cult Sci-fi television series from the 1990s. Copper was discovered here in 1888 and was mined until 1975. Back then the only way to reach the mine was by sea and so the small town which grew up to facilitate the mine must have had quite a pioneer-like atmosphere, now of course it can easily be reached by road. At the museum they take you on a tour into the mine itself riding on one of the old miner's trains, where they then demonstrate how the copper was extracted using different types of drilling equipment over time. They then explain how the ore was processed before it was shipped out across the whole world. The mine itself is huge with passageways running for miles deep into the hillside at a number of different levels extending well below sea level. Our tour guide was a former miner who had worked in the mine for his entire career and so he was able to give us a very clear picture of what that kind of working life had been like, and what had followed after the closure of the mine. Once all the machinery and the processing plant had been shut down in the 1970s the water run-off from the tunnels began to accrue and concentrate levels of acidity and subsequently this began to poison the water off the coast of Howe Sound. A water treatment plant has since been built in order to deal with this problem by reducing and maintaining the levels of contamination, which in itself is quite a feat of engineering.

Sadly, because of the change in the weather I wasn’t able to take a boat trip as planned out into the Georgia Strait to go whale watching – but, one could probably spend a lifetime exploring here, there’s so much to see and do in this part of the world amidst such spectacular natural scenery. I was very sorry to have to leave after what was only a very brief visit. Still, this just means that there’s plenty to go back and explore properly at some point, after all, we never get too old for another adventure!