I anticipate that there will be complaints that I have failed to mention some of the many theories of Oak Island that have been put forth over the years. I’d like to consider a few briefly.
There are those who have suggested the native people of Nova Scotia, the Mi’kmaq, were responsible for the works on Oak Island. The idea is dubious. There is absolutely nothing that connects the tribe to Oak Island other than that they were living in what would become Nova Scotia long before even the earliest Europeans arrived. The Mi’kmaq themselves have no stories or legends associated with Oak Island, which one would expect if this had occurred.
Some theories sound plausible at first, but they fall apart upon even a cursory examination. A number of investigators, for instance, have energetically promoted the idea that the works on Oak Island were done by the British army during the Revolutionary War in the years between 1776 and 1783. After the British evacuated Boston in March 1776, they had good reason to fear that their New York command post was next, these theorists point out. The New York garrison contained several million pounds for the payment of troops and the purchase of supplies. Also, there were rumors that George Washington intended to attack Halifax (something Washington is known to have considered). The theory goes that to protect its assets, the British sent engineers to Oak Island to supervise the construction of a repository for its colonial treasure that would not be threatened with seizure by the upstart Americans.
There is also a sort of opposite theory that it was the American revolutionaries who created the works on Oak Island as a weapons cache to be used when the War of Independence spread north into Canada’s Atlantic coast. Some other theorists have suggested that the pits on Oak Island were used as a part of a smuggling operation run by those who supported the American cause. The problem with both of these—as with the theory that the French army buried a Louisbourg treasure on the island—is obvious. By the middle of the eighteenth century, Mahone Bay was increasingly populated with Europeans who would have been well aware of any major operation on Oak Island. Along with the fact that the carbon-dating points strongly to the late seventeenth or early eighteenth century, this makes these scenarios extremely unlikely.
Even when one has to be impressed by the time and energy an investigator has devoted to the problem of Oak Island, one does not have to treat it with great regard. George Young of Queensland, Nova Scotia, was the project manager for an engineering firm that in 1975 installed a sewage disposal system for the community of Western Shore on behalf of the city of Chester. Part of this work involved constructing a pumping station for the Oak Island Inn, on the mainland about three thousand feet across the bay from Oak Island. During that work, an excavator bucket broke through the earth into a 10-foot wide cavern that was 52 feet deep. From this discovery, Young developed an elaborate theory that hundreds of years before the birth of Christ, Mediterranean peoples were operating a number of trading settlements on the Atlantic coast of North America and that one group of them—people from the coast of Libya who were of mixed Phoenician and Greek blood—were using the cave he had found along with others, including some on Oak Island, as living quarters. This arrangement was ended by the Punic Wars, circa 260 BC, and at that point, Young would assert, those who had been living in the caves were integrated into the Mi’kmaq tribe. Later a group of Copts from Egypt inhabited the abandoned caves, Young’s theory went on, then around 1384 AD a large party of Copts arrived on Oak Island with something of extraordinary value that they wished to conceal (Young doesn’t claim to know what) and converted the old living quarters on Oak Island into what would become the Money Pit. He doubted they ever intended to reopen the vault they created. Young speculated that they may have been “interring one of exalted rank,” which for him was an explanation of the flood tunnel system. It’s every bit as outlandish as the theory that Oak Island holds the lost secrets of Atlantis—and one hell of a lot more complicated.
A couple of former miners have proposed theories of Oak Island that probably don’t deserve to be dismissed out of hand. The first was John Steadman, a New Brunswick man who had worked at Oak Island with the Truro Company. His claim was that the Money Pit was an old mine that had been dug by the earliest French inhabitants of Nova Scotia. The major problem with that claim is that there is no evidence that valuable minerals were ever on Oak Island to be mined. A former miner named John O’Brien did an extraordinary amount of research in support of a book he titled Oak Island Unearthed! A Miner’s Investigation into the Enigma of Oak Island, the Mesoamericans, and the Treasure Buried Within. O’Brien at least claimed that the Money Pit was dug to mine something that actually exists on Oak Island, the strata of blue clay found deep underground. It was the ancient Mayans who first dug the mine, O’Brien claimed, and the Aztecs who came later, after the Spanish conquest in the fifteenth century. There is evidence that the Maya were maritime traders whose reach extended as far north as the coastal lagoons of Mexico, Belize, and Guatemala. Their only watercraft, though, is believed to have been the dugout canoe. No intact Mayan canoes have ever been discovered, but there are depictions in Mayan art of royal figures being ferried about by canoe. Also, Christopher Columbus’s son Ferdinand wrote a fairly detailed description of seeing the Mayans paddling offshore in their canoes. There is absolutely no evidence, however, that the Maya ever got as far north as even Florida, and the notion that they paddled all the way to Nova Scotia to mine blue clay strains credulity to the breaking point.
A fringe theorist who got to make an on-camera presentation to the Laginas for The Curse of Oak Island is Gary Clayton, a former Baptist minister from Arizona, who had acquired Little Mash Island, a tiny blot of sand very near Oak Island. He had found evidence of tunnels and chambers connecting Oak Island to Little Mash, claimed Clayton, who asserted that a treasure that included several hundred tons of gold bullion had been deposited in those chambers following a 1740 voyage from England by a group with “ties” to the Freemasons and Templars. He was there to offer a consulting contract, Clayton told the Laginas, for which he would receive 15 percent of any treasure found.
What was not mentioned but I knew was that Clayton had been claiming to know exactly what was buried on Oak Island and where since the 1970s, when he and two partners put together a theory that involved the Aztecs and Mayans. As late as 2004, Clayton was boasting that he had invested “forty-five thousand hours’ research” to the problem of Oak Island and had figured it out completely by breaking the various clues and codes that had been left on the island by the original depositors and was ready to prove beyond all doubt that the Aztecs or Maya had had engineered the Oak Island works. He had “mathematical proof,” asserted Clayton, who was equipped with elaborately drafted engineering blueprints of the various vaults, passageways, flood tunnels, and underground living quarters he claimed were on Oak Island. Now, forty-four years after he started, Clayton had left the Aztecs and Maya behind and was claiming he had absolute proof instead of a Freemason/Templar treasure.
I WAS FAIRLY CERTAIN when I left Nova Scotia at the end of August 2016 that the Laginas would continue their treasure hunt and their television show for at least another year. In the months that followed, though, a disturbing thought struck me: Now that the treasure hunt and the television show had become not just intertwined, or even symbiotic, but had merged to the point of being completely indistinguishable, what would happen when the show ended? When the show was cancelled, might the treasure hunt be as well?
That the show would go on wasn’t completely confirmed in my mind until November, when the fourth season began to run on the History Channel. Shortly after the season debut, Kevin Burns called me to talk about my work on the show. Early in the conversation he told me that this first episode of the new season had been the highest rated program on cable that week. At some point we got on the subject of another season. I mentioned Rick Lagina’s remark about not continuing unless they made a breakthrough discovery that summer. Was he sure there would be a fifth season of The Curse of Oak Island? I asked Burns. Of course there would be a fifth season, I thought, answering my own question. I just wouldn’t be part of it.
Even as I was putting myself at the distance from the show that would be required to write a book about Oak Island, I knew I would be rooting for the Laginas and their cohort to find the “game changer” Dan Henskee had written to me about. I told those who inquired that I was content to watch from the sidelines with the rest of the audience. What I didn’t say was that while I was certain the mystery of Oak Island would be solved someday, I doubted it would be any day soon. I would be long gone by then. The most I could hope for, probably, was that someone who read what I wrote about Oak Island would carry the search forward and allow me some small contribution to the end of the story.