Tuesday, February 5, 2013

The Treasure of Oak Island

I came across  a piece by David MacDonald entitled, "Somebody Buried Something Here." (In Search of Canada, The Reader's Digest Association (Canada) Ltd., Montreal, 1971.)

Oak Island is a small piece of land off the southern shore of Nova Scotia.  In 1795, a 16-year-old boy discovered an odd depression, with the remains of an old ship's tackle block hanging from a tree above it.  Since nearby Le Have had once reputedly been a lair for pirates, he returned with two friends and started digging.  Every ten feet they countered a platform of oak logs.  Over the following centuries, further efforts have encountered what amounts to diabolical engineering.  People have been digging since (including one effort backed in part by a young lawyer named Franklin Delano Roosevelt).   Fortunes have been spent and lives lost but no one has yet discovered the treasure

MacDonald explains:
"Mining experts say the elaborate safeguards of the Money Pit could have been built only by an engineering wizard with plenty of help--and plenty to hide.  As petroleum engineer George Greene put it in 1955, after drilling on Oak Island for a syndicate of Texas oilmen, 'Someone went to a lot of trouble to bury something here.  And unless he was the greatest practical joker of all time, it must have been well worth the effort.'"
Google it.

Below, from the 1971 source.  
 

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