It's hard not to read the whole thing and think the people involved were very foolish, and it's an example of the lengths to which people can push wishful thinking and confirmation bias and ignore basic arguments like 'how could someone bury treasure in such a difficult to excavate way without anyone noticing them constructing it all, and how did they ever expect to retrieve it?' For example, we're repeatedly told about the scanty traces of things dug up like coconut, and then later this bombshell is dropped:
> In 1937, Hedden and his contractors returned to Oak Island. This time the company would encounter intriguing findings. Burrowing down one of the many auxiliary tunnels pock marking the island, the team stumbled upon a number of fascinating items including a miner's oil lamp with whale oil and unexploded dynamite at 65 feet.
Where on earth did those come from? Are the pirates supposed to have brought dynamite with them a century or two before? This suggests to me that (1) all the previous expeditions and drillings have littered the island with all sorts of equipment and junk, and hence nothing found after the first expedition means much of anything or (2) the flood tunnels and other geological oddities move debris around and that is responsible for the dynamite, in which case there may never have been anything to explain in the first place.
> It appears far too simple to dismiss the efforts of respected lawyers, businessmen, doctors, actors and even an esteemed president.
How someone could bury the treasure without anyone noticing them? Well, the same way they dug the hole without putting the treasure into it, I would think.
Why nobody would notice you is that it's 1600- or 1700-something and you're somewhere in the woods of what will be Canada one day.
What I don't get is why someone would play an elaborate prank, knowing that they probably won't be around to watch people's faces who try to find the treasure. No, it was no prank: this was a real pirate cache site.
I think that treasure had been there before, but it had been removed by the time those boys discovered the site. The encrypted sign was left behind, that's all.
I believe the encrypted sign was originally at the surface, perhaps not buried at all. Heck, maybe that sign had been put up in a nearby tree or whatever. The pirates used that sign so they can return to the site and recover the treasure. The treasure was 40 feet below that. When the pirates (or whoever) removed the treasure, they just threw the sign deep into the hole and buried it. So then the idiots who came later thought that the sign pointed down another 40 feet from there. (Why would anyone do that, doh!)
Pirates often left themselves clues to find their caches, like encrypted signs and such. Think about it: thousands of miles of ocean and coast-line (all of it self-similar) in a world without GPS navigation.
I suspect that this might be more accurate, in that several times folks put things there and took them back. There are interesting questions about sand deposits and the history of the island, and of course if it was a "good spot" to bury treasure during a time of privateering then perhaps there are several interesting places. Some of the more elaborate underground construction though seems to be in support of prohibition[1] (well in support of smuggling in liquor during prohibition).
A couple of things are hard to dispute, square cut timbers don't just "appear" underground, so someone put them there. But it could be for much more mundane reasons (like gold mines in the Sierra Nevada Mountains)and it makes for a spicy tale to through in pirates.
You're assuming the original descriptions are trustworthy and not heavily biased. Yeah, maybe they were 'square-cut timbers'... or maybe it was driftwood and they were desperate to find something (see the 'treasure chests' in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8149351 ), or maybe natural processes produce squarish timbers (are the Giant's Steps produced by giants?), or maybe the original reports of squarish timbers were made up (wouldn't be the first time, to say the least).
Everything you say is true, and it could all be one giant hoax by some land owner who said "I know, I bet if I make up a great story I can sell this worthless land for a few bucks!" What I did, and its useful for any story, is to make a "Charitable Assumption" which is to converse on the topic with the assumption that the other party is being as truthful and/or as accurate as they can. By doing so we can engage in conversation and perhaps learn new things. The trick is that one can make a charitable assumption and continue the conversation without believing that the assumption is "true" in the literal sense. It is sort of like a temporary stipulation for the purposes of discourse.
If we take the story at face value then the existence of non-natural artifacts, both timbers and other things, are considered "true" during our discussion. Then we can explore alternative reasoning (or even carry the existing reasoning further down the path) as to how or why that came about. What is important here is that there is no compulsion, either explicit or implied, in that sort of discourse that "forces you to believe" something which you don't.
You gotta decide which story to take at face value, though. In some versions it's only one layer of wood of unspecified shape and arrangement. In others it's layers of wood at regular intervals. In others it's specifically square-cut timber. Generally the more recent retellings of the tale have more of these juicy details than the older ones.
The thing about a good story is, it's hard to resist the urge to make it even better.
The choices aren't only "true" or "hoax." gwern pointed out that it could be due to wishful thinking, or lack of knowledge about certain natural events.
Those last two accept that people are "being as truthful and/or as accurate as they can", but also recognize that people are imperfect observers and imperfect interpreters. As your charitable assumption doesn't allow for something that we know happens frequently, I think it's fair to say it's a non-realistic assumption.
For example, astronomers from Schiaparelli to Lowell said there were canals on the surface of Mars. Some made quite detailed maps. There was no hoax, only a combination of wishful thinking and optical illusions.
At some point we have to stop being charitable in the way you mean. But we can still be charitable by saying that people are imperfect. This path, which gwern took, also leads to learning new things, though about human psychology and not putative pirate treasure.
Another quite plausible hypothesis is that it was a not-so-elaborate prank, and many of the more elaborate details of the story are actually folklore that has built up over time.
> How someone could bury the treasure without anyone noticing them? Well, the same way they dug the hole without putting the treasure into it, I would think. Why nobody would notice you is that it's 1600- or 1700-something and you're somewhere in the woods of what will be Canada one day.
Supposedly, the diggings were noticed as they went on. From the very start of the article:
> By most accounts, the story of Oak Island's Money Pit begins in the summer of 1795 when a teenager named Daniel McGinnis saw strange lights on an island offshore from his parent's house. According to author Lee Lamb, upon investigating the island for the source of the lights, McGinnis noticed a peculiar circular depression approximately 13 feet in diameter on the island's forest floor (2006).
Personally, I find the encrypted sign pretty suspicious. There were a lot of people very desperate to find any scrap of evidence to indicate that there was buried treasure once they had committed themselves (and of course, the landowner at any time had incentive to stoke flames of speculation); how convenient that a stone with easily-deciphered crude ciphers which could have been manufactured and thrown in by anyone just happened to show up, despite the complete lack of any more concrete evidence (if you'll forgive the term) like some gold...
> What I don't get is why someone would play an elaborate prank, knowing that they probably won't be around to watch people's faces who try to find the treasure.
Because it's funny. I think you are right, the stone was probably on the surface or the tree, after someone collected the treasure they dropped the stone down there. thinking, wouldn't it be funny if someone dug up the stone and kept digging? Those idiots will waste their time while we spend all this loot on girls and booze!
I had a similar read on things. While I love a good mystery, and I'll indulge a good conspiracy theory (if only for the entertainment value), I feel this writeup takes the mystery too much at face value. In doing so, it misses a golden opportunity to mine the irony of the situation.
There's money buried in that pit, alright, and it's the money, time, and effort of dozens of fruitless and unintentionally self-replicating expeditions. The zeal to uncover a money pit has become, in and of itself, a money pit. That this zeal ensnared the imaginations of respected lawyers, businessmen, doctors, actors, and a future president speaks volumes about human nature.
> 'how could someone bury treasure in such a difficult to excavate way without anyone noticing them constructing it all, and how did they ever expect to retrieve it?'
That's a simple enough argument to reason around: when pirates buried the treasure there was no flooding. Remember, flooding didn't start until partway through one of the expeditions: this could be explained by shifting geological patterns in the rock in the island. All it would take would be for a crack to form in or current to erode a protective stone barrier which was previously keeping water out. Pirates unencumbered by water might have had a much easier time burying (and, they thought, retrieving) treasure.
The fact is, regardless of difficulty, someone did dig down that deep, and it seems like a lot of work, even without the water, to do as a prank or diversion. So I do think there is probably treasure there, or at least there was at one time.
However, as the many attempts show, the excavation is a very risky endeavor to undertake for treasure that May or may not still be there.
EDIT: And for the record, I think the treasure theory is the only plausible part. Kidd makes some sense, as do Vikings or naval treasure, but that's all speculation unless some real evidence is found. The "vi" bit is completely useless, and the Templars/masons/Shakespeare ideas are an embarrassment to the people who came up with the ideas.
To me, the presence of the stone found at 90 feet makes me think the whole thing was just a fake treasure pit designed to waste your adversary's time. If you were truly trying to hide a treasure, why would you intentionally leave semi-cryptic clues about what lay below?
It's kinda like a reverse-proof-of-work. It takes you a constant amount of time (probably a few weeks of work for a crew working on digging the ~100 foot pit and leaving a few fake clues). Then, once you tell someone else about it, it has the potential to occupy years of their life attempting to discover the "treasure" you told them about.
> In the Late Medieval and Early Modern periods, locals destroyed many of the standing stones around the henge, both for religious and practical reasons. The antiquarians John Aubrey and William Stukeley however took an interest in Avebury during the 17th century, and recorded much of the site before its destruction.
> The majority of the standing stones that had been a part of the monument for thousands of years were smashed up to be used as building material for the local area. This was achieved in a method that involved lighting a fire to heat the sarcen, then pouring cold water on it to create weaknesses in the rock, and finally smashing at these weak points with a sledgehammer.
They don't really mention what happened to it but they never said it was misplaced or that it was lost. The mention of the fireplace was during the time where no one had a clue what was written on the stone.
Indeed, As a pirate I would certainly not spend weeks digging an elaborate treasure vault that would need a full crew. Putting all of my goods at one location wouldn't look like a good idea either. I would rather bury my treasure at different locations, and not too deep so that the job can be done quickly with the help of a couple of "expandable" guys. This has the extra advantage that retrieving it is easier, and may serve as a life insurance if I get caught and tortured (or at least buy time and give chances to escape or be rescued).
This also probably requires a map. Carving it in stone is probably the best (memory fades, paper burn), but here I would use caution again and would not write everything on a single stone.
Perhaps it is more apt to imagine yourself as a semi-autonomous band of pirates, rather than as an authoritarian individual.
Their design challenges were both to hide loot from outsiders and to make it difficult for any smaller group of band members to return to the scene without alerting most of the others. This elaborate arrangement could have been designed to buy time for the rest of the group to hear about excavations and return to claim their share.
From having only read the article, my theory is that the band had discovered a naturally occurring shaft part-filled with sea water. They somehow blocked the base of the shaft then drained it with lowered buckets. It is feasible that their skin-divers were able to work from air pockets in the cavern below. Also, that the divers may have discovered a swimable route to open water.
With an empty shaft, they now needed to shore up and back-fill several times to make looting from below difficult and dangerous. They'd have been concerned about one of their number draining all the back-fill and treasure into the cavern using gunpowder. Hence they built many layers, each of which would have been very risky to tunnel into, even for someone who knew the design. The depth of the earth layers, partial air gap and strength of shoring materials might have been calculated to be particularly unstable, when not supported from below.
Since the treasure was be recovered from the top, it is most likely that the pit had worked exactly as intended. The treasure was already long gone before anyone else noticed the pit. Its trappings were left in place and made generations of greedy people the poorer. The message stone, if it existed, was a wind-up. Its spirit suggests it was done at the time of recovery. Pleased as they were to find everything as they'd left it. This had cost almost no effort for a lasting glow of satisfaction.
The pit itself had not been tremendously difficult to make either. So there is no reason to believe it had ever hidden more than just ordinary wealth.
This theory is not flawless. Nevertheless, I believe it makes sense to consider design parameters around building an untrusted network.
Nostalgia trip. I remember reading about it as a kid in an illustrated book about lost treasures and being enthralled by it.
It´s not difficult to see the fascination that a "mystery" like this can have on men, to the point of fueling the actual belief themselves, for opportunistic reasons or simply for not being seen as fools (another famous example, Rennes Le Chateau).
People ended up investing tons on money in the project, I wouldn´t be suprised if many of these reports of "coconut fibers", "timber platforms" were actually made up by the people making a living out of it, and not wanting the financing money to dry up.
The "undecipherable" tablet that perfectly translates to current English with a basic substitution cipher is particularly laughable.
To me the most interesting part is the equally spaced wood platforms. They went pretty deep and if it's true they were there before the digging began, I can find no real explanation for them.
Sounds to me like this was just a well that was dug by whoever was living there at the time, and later filled in. Every other aspect of the story just sounds like some kind of elaborate troll.
> Are the pirates supposed to have brought dynamite with them a century or two before?
Yup. Didn't you know pirates have the ability to transcend space and time? Captain Kidd regularly traveled to the late 19th century in his tricked-out DeLorean to score all sorts of goodies for his crew. Not just dynamite, but also souvenir coconut monkeys (they make great gifts) and clean-tasting pasteurized lager beer.
> Where on earth did those come from? Are the pirates supposed to have brought dynamite with them a century or two before?
This is an obvious point which the OP does not entertain at all. Dynamite was invented by Alfred Nobel in the mid 19th century, so pirates in the 17th century would not have been able to bring dynamite to the site. It must have been left by excavators from the The Oak Island Association or by other excavators trailing them.
Even assuming that there is treasure (in the form of gold, gems, etc) the money spent attempting to recover them must be nearly equal or exceed the monetary value of the treasure by now.
Two million pounds sterling was a horrendous amount of money at the time. Enough to stretch plausibility to the breaking point.
Assuming the money in question came in the form of 18th century British gold coinage, we're talking somewhere in the area of 10 or 15 tonnes of loot. To propose that people would use human power to lower that much gold into a pit over 100 feet deep is. . . optimistic.
OTOH, assuming it was wasn't in the form of precious metals, then by now it's in the form of compost.
> In 1937, Hedden and his contractors returned to Oak Island. This time the company would encounter intriguing findings. Burrowing down one of the many auxiliary tunnels pock marking the island, the team stumbled upon a number of fascinating items including a miner's oil lamp with whale oil and unexploded dynamite at 65 feet.
Where on earth did those come from? Are the pirates supposed to have brought dynamite with them a century or two before? This suggests to me that (1) all the previous expeditions and drillings have littered the island with all sorts of equipment and junk, and hence nothing found after the first expedition means much of anything or (2) the flood tunnels and other geological oddities move debris around and that is responsible for the dynamite, in which case there may never have been anything to explain in the first place.
> It appears far too simple to dismiss the efforts of respected lawyers, businessmen, doctors, actors and even an esteemed president.
Does it now.