Message #255550

[Valerie]

 Jason Drake SinclairR • 8 months ago

One thing I think everyone has to understand about the money pit... until the last 1970s everyone thought it was all about Captain Kidd's treasure. Therefore it was all about treasure hunting and retrieval. This is since been shown as ridiculous. Even on Tortuga pirates never had enough organization to construct something that would have taken months and engineering involved. Now most of Kidd's treasure is accounted for so those theories are pretty much put to bed and are a fantasy at best.
It has to have been a military engineering project (or perhaps a well organized group like Templars etc) that had resources, resolve and skills to build this. These flood tunnels they talk about are amazing (and I really am curious to see if they can find the remnants). A coffer dam was built on smiths cove back in the 1890s (I think that is the timeframe) which revealed them - there is at least one photo showing them I wasn't able to find a digital copy to link here) but it was washed out before they could properly excavate (the north Atlantic is NOT forgiving).
The big issue with Oak Island (other than Nolan's surveying) is there was no scientific study, or slow measured "take it all down slowly and methodically" approach... it was all tear the island apart to get the gold and when they didn't find it they went backrupt or moved on. This in some respects changed when Nolan and Blankenship bought the island as this slowed down and there was a bit more concentrated search but always done quietly/privately without formal backing. It is not even an island anymore since the owners in the 1960s (prior to Blankenship) built a causeway to move escavators out to it and dig it all up. This disturbed all the flow in the back bays and would never be allowed today due to environment concerns. As an example my parents have wharf rights in the deed since their property had a wharf 80+ years ago, but to pass the current environment regulations it would cost them $250K+ to build (they can only use an escavator on a barge for example - can't go from shore).
In regards to my aforementioned gold chain.... in rural NS in the 1920s and 30s no one would have bothered to check the purity of the gold.... it was gold so some rich person in NY (I think they were bankrolling it) gave another $10K+ to keep digging. Different times than today to be sure where anything will be scrutinized and studied.
I am sure this will be 10 hours of TV and very little found and more questions than mystery. I would have heard I am sure if there was some huge world changing discovery (people talk down there).... Still I am interested to see if they find more clues that can help tie at least some of the "artifacts" discovered over the years and narrow the focus. These include (but are not limited to)
* Vials with traces of Mercury
* The parchment fragment
* Coconut Husk (it would take a hell-of-a big storm/current to wash the amount on shore that there is on that island)
* Spanish "scissors"
All of these (with the exception of mercury and manuscript theory) contradict each other....
The other interesting point is whether any of this is related to Nolan's surveying of the island and rock placements as he believes.
In case you are interested... the name Oak Island is because in the 1800s it was the only island in the bay with Oak trees. making it easily identifiable (which is very difficult from sea without buildings and other modern landmarks). This is not the case today. From a navigation perspective the key is Quaker Island. There are no trees on it. This would have been an easy navigatable point from the Atlantic... find Quaker and go due West till you find the Oak trees. I don't know if Quaker ever had any trees, but if you have every been there Quaker gets horrid winds (much worse than other areas) and the water is always choppy so it is possible that trees never got established.
Also New Ross Castle mystery is ~ 25 miles up the gold river which dumps out into the bay (about 2.5 miles north west) which is another interesting mystery and there is a possibility that this is all related....
I hope they simply don't destroy it all to the point that I can't continue after them in 30 years! (wink)
I've been following this now for near on 20 years... the builders and the reasons and engineering behind it are what interest me.