The Mysterious Hunt For The Enigmatic Treasure of Oak Island
Oak Island holds a mystery that has defied the ambition of treasure hunters for more than 200 years. Oak Island is a tiny island, located in Lunenbuklirg County, in southern Nova Scotia – Canada. According to myth, an old treasure has been abandoned there by the Spanish Templars. Many believe that there, in addition to incredible wealth lie the original writings of William Shakespeare. The Oak Island treasure ‘officially’ started off in 1795, when Daniel McGinnis, a 16-year-old teenager, discovered a circular hollow at the south end of the island next to a tree that had hoist marks on one of its branches. McGinnis and his friends, John Smith (in other stories, Samuel Ball) and Anthony Vaughan, dug into the hole and found a layer of slabs 30 cm deep. On the walls of the well, there were clear pickaxe marks. They continued digging and found a layer of trunks at 3 meters below the surface. They abandoned the excavation after reaching a depth of around ten meters. Around eight years after the excavation of 1795, according to Vaughan’s original articles and memoirs, a company examined the well. The Onslow Company traveled 300 nautical miles (560 km) from the heart of Nova Scotia, near Truro, to the island to recover the alleged treasure buried on Oak Island. They continued digging to a depth of around 27.43 m and found more trunks and “marks” every 3 meters, as well as layers of coal, putty and coconut fiber at 12, 15 and 18 meters respectively. According to one of the first written accounts, at a depth of around 27 meters, treasure hunters from the Onslow Company found a flat stone with a set of mysterious symbols written on its surface. Apparently, someone managed to translate the alleged carvings which read “14 feet down, 2,000,000 pounds [sterling] are buried”. No pictures or drawings of the stone and its symbols exist, and the stone reportedly disappeared by 1912. However, symbols associated with this translation appear in the book True Tales of Buried Treasure, by the explorer and historian Edward Rowe Snow, in 1951. In that book, he states that the Reverend AT Kempton of Cambridge, Massachusetts, handed him a copy of the registration symbols. Nothing more was known of Kempton after that. The well was subsequently flooded at a depth of 10 m and the water level could not be reduced, so the excavation was abandoned. Researchers of the old Truro Company, in 1849, continued digging up to 26 m deep, producing another flood, and continued to drill. According to a nineteenth-century account, the perforation went through a wooden platform at a depth of around 30 meters. They continued digging but found nothing more than pieces of metal and wooden fragments. Abundant amounts of human bones and coconut fibers are also said to have been found. Recently the obsession of Oak Island conquered two Michigan brothers; Rick and Marty Lagina, who bought much of the island in order to unveil the Islands treasure. Finding the hidden treasure was the obsession of many: engineers, miners and even President Franklin Roosevelt. However, nobody has managed to discover any treasure there yet. Regrettably, many people have even died trying to find that treasure that supposedly rests somewhere on the island, some 60 meters beneath the surface. Meanwhile, the more treasure hunters dig, the underground holes become flooded due to a system of channels that exist on the island, complicating the already dangerous task even more. Featured image credit: Monsters And Critics
