gjb
Sr. Member
- Apr 21, 2016
- 281
- 333
- Detector(s) used
- Garrett Ace 300i
Garrett EuroAce
- Primary Interest:
- All Treasure Hunting
No criticism intended, Imagine imagine imagine
I don’t see we have much alternative but to imagine based on what we have. So, let’s imagine we’re intelligent, and go back three hundred years to a time when there were no banks or safe deposits. It was common enough practice at that time to bury valuables to keep them safe. We’re intelligent people, and we know a few things about people in general. So, we know that we have to take precautions.
We don’t want to be seen burying our loot so we hide it in an out of the way place. We want to make depositing our treasure fairly easy, and also its recovery, so we perhaps store it in sturdy chests (not canvas bags). We may not keep it all in one place, spreading the risk of discovery. But unless we work entirely on our own, somebody else is going to be in the know. So, we have to keep the secret close. We don’t want somebody to stumble across our treasure, so, we cover our tracks, leaving no trace of our presence, and certainly no trace of the hole we’ve put it in.
Now come into the future, to Oak Island. What’s wrong with this picture? We know immediately that we weren’t responsible for the Oak Island deposit because the originator broadcast to everyone exactly where on the island the treasure was deposited, and made damned sure that when somebody stumbled across the spot they would, by their predictable response, make it near impossible for us to retrieve it ourselves!
It seems that we’ve suddenly ceased to be intelligent, or maybe we've ceased to think! It’s not that we fail to apply this reasoning to Oak Island - we do - but then we simply ignore the conclusion. We want to believe in the Money Pit, so we introduce special arguments to overcome the obvious fact that if the record of the discovery is correct then it’s highly likely that if there’s something there at all then it’s probably peanuts (though maybe still worth digging up in the present day).
The obvious implication is that if there’s a really huge treasure on Oak Island then it’s somewhere other than in the Money Pit. Superficially, that’s not a great help, because there’s a lot of somewhere else on the island. However, we should be intelligent enough to appreciate that were we the depositors, and were we leaving the loot for our heirs, we might leave them instructions, if not a map.
We should also be intelligent enough to appreciate that our map can’t be written in everyday language; it has to be written in such a way that only our heirs will understand it. It also has to be precise. This means we can’t use a unit as vague as a pace, we wouldn’t use a magnetic compass, but true bearings, we should use precise markers, and we should expect these to be permanent.
The point is that such ground markers have been found on Oak Island, but nobody seems to want to believe that they're present simply due to there being a map, or maps, that use them - because the idea of a treasure map is a thing of fiction, and definitely for the weak minded. And we certainly wouldn’t want to be considered weak minded.
Petter Amundsen has come up with a map he suggests was hidden in the text of the First Folio of the works of Shakespeare (1623). On this very forum, Robot has come up with a map in plain sight that he believes dates to a deposit in 1762. We’re intelligent people, intelligent enough to come up with hundreds of different maps for our own deposit, but we’re far too intelligent to apply to Oak Island cryptic instructions on maps previously linked to the island that have now been in circulation for some eighty years, and predate the discovery of some of the ground markers they may well refer to
It makes far more sense to believe in a deposit in the Money Pit, and to spend millions to dig it out. Let's do that, because we certainly wouldn't want to explore far-fetched hypotheses! After all, I imagine we’re all intelligent people.