<\/p>\n
\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0The aptly named \u201cMoney Pit\u201d on a little two lobed island off the coast of Nova Scotia, Canada was purportedly discovered in 1795.\u00a0 In a mere seventy years after the discovery, numerous groups of treasurer seekers from near and far had landed on Oak Island. Their explorations saw at least ten shafts and an unknown number of tunnels dug in the quest to find the fabulous treasure everyone assumed lay at the bottom of the original Money Pit shaft.\u00a0 As my old friend often repeats from his days studying to be a lawyer, \u201cMoney makes people funny.\u201d I will now include an addendum to this saying: \u201cbut treasure makes people crazy.\u201d If insanity is defined as, \u201cDoing the same thing over and over again expecting a different result,\u201d then these erstwhile treasure hunters provide a classic case in point.\u00a0 Repeated digging in the 100 foot circle around the Money Pit destabilized the whole area enough to cause a massive cave in which sent that year\u2019s group of treasurer hunters home. By 1863, this 1861 subsidence proved to be a major hindrance to further exploration. The tangled web of timbers, earth, and discarded equipment made it difficult to even find the original Money Pit shaft, but do not for a minute think that the search was over.\u00a0 \u201cMoney Pit\u201d indeed: it seems that there had already been a king\u2019s ransom dumped into exploring the Money Pit before Upper Michigan brothers Rick and Marty Lagina mounted the latest attempt to uncover the truth about the whole Oak Island mystery.<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Author Randall Sullivan\u2019s 2017 book (<\/span>The Curse of Oak Island:\u00a0 The Story of the World\u2019s Longest Treasure Hunt <\/span><\/i>– Atlantic Monthly Press) began with the publication of an article he wrote for <\/span>Rolling Stone <\/span><\/i>magazine.\u00a0 The piece was published in January of 2004, but Sullivan was not totally happy with the final product.\u00a0 Editorial and deadline pressures left his magazine feature with gaps and loose ends he wanted to tie up.\u00a0 When he visited Oak Island during the filming of season four of The History Channel\u2019s wildly popular series (the long running reality show <\/span>The Curse of Oak Island <\/span><\/i>is airing year seven episodes as this goes to print), he found the Lagina brothers as anxious to read his book as Sullivan was to get it finished.\u00a0 The Lagina\u2019s interest in Oak Island had been fueled by a 1965 feature they had seen in <\/span>Reader\u2019s Digest<\/span><\/i> when they were just kids.\u00a0 It turns out that there were other modern day treasure hunters inspired by the same article,\u00a0 but we will have to come back to the Lagina brothers after we dig a little deeper into the history of the Money Pit.<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0By December of 1900, the efforts of several more companies had added another ten shafts and even more tunnels to the search.\u00a0 In each case, the twenty shafts and assorted tunnels discovered evidence of earlier explorations but no treasure. That each of these attempts to find the Money Pit ended when the tunnels and shafts were repeatedly flooded with sea water astounds one\u2019s sensibilities.\u00a0 The default setting for all of these \u2018plans\u2019 seems to have been \u2018dig another hole\u2019. When Frederick Blair\u2019s Treasure Company went bust in December of 1900, he wrote a new business perspective to try and scare up more investors for the project: \u201cWhen we went to work at the Island two years ago, we knew comparatively nothing about the conditions as they existed.\u00a0 We supposed at the time that the Money Pit was not over 120 feet deep and that the treasure was not over 110 feet down. Our work has since proven that the Pit is not less than 180 feet deep, that there are two tunnels instead of one, and one of them is not less than 160 feet down, and there is treasure at different points in the Pit, from 127 to 170 feet down, <\/span>without a doubt.<\/b>\u00a0 We have also found that work by the Halifax Company is a greater hindrance to the procuring of the treasure than the original work.\u00a0 <\/span>We now claim that there is nothing that can prevent us from getting the treasure.\u201d\u00a0 <\/b>(the <\/span>bold<\/b> print added for emphasis by the author).<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Remember the definition of \u2018insanity\u2019?\u00a0 Just to clarify, the \u2018two tunnels\u2019 mentioned are flood tunnels that were apparently built along with the Money Pit to keep treasurer seekers (who did not know how to circumvent the booby traps) at bay.\u00a0 The flood tunnels seem to have done their job marvelously in the first century of the treasure hunt. Secondly, the \u2018Halifax Company\u2019 was one of the previous organizations that contributed to the collapse of the original Money Pit by digging the aforementioned shafts and tunnels.\u00a0 The bottom line in December of 1900 was pretty simple: The Money Pit had swallowed a lot of investor\u2019s money, produced no treasure, and tweaked that part of the human psyche that can\u2019t let a mystery go unsolved. Another old adage should have come into play to make the Oak Island Mystery fade away:\u00a0 \u201cThose who ignore history are doomed to relive it.\u201d As you may already have suspected, even those who attacked the problem by doing copious amounts of research about Oak Island over the next century ignored all the lessons and kept digging more holes with the same results. The reasoning here must have been along the lines of, \u201cYeah, but we have bigger machines and better technology so we are going to just dig deeper and crack this nut wide open.\u201d\u00a0 Insane? Possibly. Crazy? Without a doubt!\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Sullivan devotes a good deal of his research and book trying to uncover exactly who might be responsible for planting a treasure on Oak Island in the first place.\u00a0 Let me encourage you to find the book if you want all the specifics and theories that Sullivan gets into (I borrowed a copy via Inter-library loan from the Engadine Public Library and it arrived in a short period of time at the Ontonagon Township Library). The shortlist of \u2018who may have done it\u2019 would include:\u00a0 Acadians (some of whom would become \u2018Cajuns\u2019 when driven from Nova Scotia), pirates or privateers like William Kidd, Henry Morgan, and William Phipps, Huguenots, Incas who fled South America with their treasurers, the Knights Templar, the Freemasons, agents of the French Crown who spirited away the crown jewels, and of course, (wait for it . . .) we would have to give aliens consideration.\u00a0 Sullivan would like to dismiss most of these, yet in some cases, there isn\u2019t enough evidence for some of these wild theories to be accepted or rejected. For example, one group has speculated that the whole Money Pit was a hoax perpetrated as a kind of \u2018in joke\u2019 among the Freemasons. Sullivan does point out that some of the searchers who happened to be Freemasons spent small fortunes hunting the treasure.\u00a0 Perhaps they missed the \u2018wink-wink\u2019 clues that were left to warn the brotherhood\u2019s members that it was just a joke?<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0For the sake of brevity, let us skip to 2019 and check in on the progress the Lagina brothers have made up to the current season of <\/span>The Curse of Oak Island<\/span><\/i>.\u00a0 I got interested early on but the \u2018needle in a haystack\u2019 nature of the search made me skeptical that they would be any more successful than their predecessors.\u00a0 Who knew that the ongoing quest would become one of the History Channel\u2019s most popular reality shows! The Lagina\u2019s team has grown each season and every time they try a new investigative technique, they uncover more mysteries than they solve.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Older brother Rick is a retired postal worker from Kingsford, Michigan.\u00a0 His brother Marty runs an engineering firm in Traverse City, Michigan and was involved in a proposed wind farm project in Baraga County that was ultimately discontinued.\u00a0 When they learned that a good chunk of Oak Island was up for sale in 2007, they jumped on the chance to live their treasure hunting dream. They hooked up with the History Channel who obviously fund some of their exploration costs.\u00a0 Marty Lagina made his fortune in oil and gas exploration before he got into the wind farm business. When he sold his original exploration business for $58 million, the brothers had the capital needed to get into the Oak Island game.\u00a0 As of 2020, they have extended the series documenting their search much longer than most figured it would last. The one theme that keeps popping up has become the brother\u2019s eternal mantra: \u201cOak Island does not give up her answers easily and the more clues we dig up, the more questions we end up trying to answer.\u201d\u00a0 I give them credit for setting up both an on-site museum and an on-site research center to better help them explain and display their finds. They are not afraid to use some very high tech science and machinery to try and get to the bottom of the mystery. Twice they have had to put major money into repairing the causeway to and roads on the island that were damaged by violent north Atlantic storms.<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Their explorations revolves around three main objectives.\u00a0 The first is to locate the original Money Pit. To this end they have done numerous drilling projects and explosive seismic soundings to get a better picture of what hides beneath the surface.\u00a0 They spend a great amount of time looking for a five fingered \u2018box drain\u2019 system in an area known as Smith\u2019s Cove. The idea is to find the confluence of this five part water collecting system. This single conduit delivering water to flood tunnels has befuddled searchers repeatedly in the past.\u00a0 The Laginas began the Smith Cove investigation reasoning that, \u201cIf we find the main box drain, it will lead us to the Money Pit.\u201d Evidence now leads them to believe there may be a second flood tunnel system in place from the south, opposite the Smith\u2019s Cove area.<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0The search for the box drains in Smith\u2019s Cove uncovered a host of structures that only deepened the mystery.\u00a0 They did eventually find at least one of the drains (and in season seven are trying to follow it to the Money Pit), but they also found a slipway, a concrete wall that would have had to have been constructed under water, and several wooden structures of unknown origin and function.\u00a0 When they built a \u2018bump out\u2019 in their extensive cofferdam they found, to no one\u2019s surprise, even more structures that appear to have been built below the low tide line.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0A third area of interest is a triangular shaped swamp that occupies the area between the two main \u2018drumlins\u2019 (or hills) that make up Oak Island.\u00a0 Some have speculated that the swamp is man made and may hide an entire ship scuttled there for some reason, a treasure vault separate from the Money Pit, or perhaps the entrance to a secret tunnel that leads either to the Money Pit or the real treasure vault (assuming that the original Money Pit is just a red herring to throw treasure seekers off track).\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0As the seven seasons of <\/span>Oak Island<\/span><\/i> have unfolded, the team has found themselves exploring more and more of the island for clues.\u00a0 They have uncovered many interesting artifacts including a small lead cross, uniform buttons, iron spikes, jewelry, coins, and fragments of human bones and china.\u00a0 These artifacts point to something having taken place on the island and they are hoping that the search will prove that it was something big. The more they find, the longer the window of historical activity on the island gets and the more historical groups become part of the island\u2019s story.\u00a0 About the time I think they will throw their hands in the air and depart for good, they find another compelling piece of evidence. Each discovery forces them to sit down in their War Room, consider the implications of what they have learned, and then modify their search plan accordingly. At the end of each season, they agree that the exploration must continue.<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0The scale of the equipment they have brought to the island is mind boggling.\u00a0 A massive crane was brought in to build a steel panel coffer dam so Smith\u2019s Cove could be drained and excavated.\u00a0 Once the slipway was discovered, they had to come back to pull part of the coffer dam and build a \u2018bump out\u2019 in this barrier to follow up on this discovery.\u00a0 Massive drilling rigs have been on site to bore six inch and sixty inch steel lined holes. Debris from previous explorations and possibly an original treasure vault are brought to the surface and then painstakingly sorted for even the smallest clues.\u00a0 How thoroughly are these spoils examined? In this current season, they were able to identify the paper wrapping from dynamite that had been detonated in an attempt to seal off the drain boxes. Having made multiple explorations of the strange triangle shaped swamp between the two lobes of the island.\u00a0 Late in season seven, they had drained and begun to excavate the swamp where their underground soundings have shown anomalies (which was promptly set back by Hurricane Dorian). They do not dwell on the paperwork involved in continuing their exploration of the island, but they do make it known that they must have the proper governmental approval for all of their activities.<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0I would truly like to end this FTV by telling you that they have found the treasure, revealed who put it there, and finally put an exclamation point on this whole mystery.\u00a0 Sorry, the best I can do is add more dots to the ongoing story . . . and encourage you do tune into<\/span> The Curse of Oak Island<\/span><\/i> and come to your own conclusions.\u00a0 If you suddenly pack up and head there yourself, don\u2019t blame me.\u00a0 Blame the Island that has lured so many there before the Lagina brothers.\u00a0 What about the \u2018curse\u2019? Their opening teaser to the program always reminds viewers that, \u201cSix men have died seeking this treasure and the legend say a seventh will have to die before the treasure is revealed.\u201d\u00a0 If you want a quick way to catch up on the whole story, I highly recommend Sullivan\u2019s book. Binge watching also works, but the book will bring one up to speed faster than endless hours in front of the TV.<\/span><\/p>\n Top Piece Video – Finding a related music video for the Oak Island Mystery came down to a choice between\u00a0Heart of Gold<\/em> or\u00a0Rock You Like a Hurricane.<\/em>\u00a0 The Scorpions won as Hurricane Dorian played a big part in last summer’s dig!