gazzahk...
" I find the salt theory not plausible for a whole range of reasons."
I would be interested in your thoughts on this...here is what I have found..
Thoughts?
Thanks for asking..
I have read this guys article
Dennis King's article on the "Finger Drains"
I would start by saying no other authors of any of the research on Oak Island has suggested this theory.
This author’s theory is based on no visit to Oak Island and no investigation of the actual site or data
I find the theory pretty full of holes
Firstly the dating of the coconut fibers is all wrong and that in itself brings his 1700s theory into question . There is also the issue raised by the previous poster when I raised the drying fish theory. Why would people bring coconut fibers from the other side of the world to setup a questionable and ineffective filtering system to try out a yet unknown and possibly ineffective method of drying saltwater to get salt.
If the box drains were covered in the coconut fiber and eel grass then sand the only thing that would drain into them would be the water that was directly over the top of the drains. There is no logic as to why the water that passes through the whole beach would drain into those five small pipes. This would mean the whole job of building the dam would be to simply get the salt from directly above the drains and not from the whole beach. If they just wanted the water for the boiling pit it would have been a lot easier just to dig a channel to the boiling area. The amount of salt would be the same as if the water just flowed straight into the drains.
If the tide was allowed to wash over the beach it would just see the water going through the sand the same way it does on any beach. Why would the salt accumulate on the beach. This does not happen on any other beach. The sand is porous and the water simply flows through it. Every time the water comes in it would simply re mix with the ocean and be the same salt concentration as the ocean there is no reason for the salt concentration to get larger each time the ocean comes in. There are no references to the beach being covered in salt. To accumulate salt you would need a surface where the water could not just soak through each time the water was let go over the beach.
In methods I have seen where the salt was collected from sand the salt sits on top of the sand and is collected as salt not as water. Ie the salt does not drain through the sand. The water does and the salt stays on top.
The only reason that the salt makers would of needed to try to filter their sand would be because they themselves put their sand over their inlets to where they got the water.
The amount of water that would have to be boiled to get any significant amount of salt would be massive. So where is the evidence of tonnes of charcoal. There would be mounds of the stuff as 10s of thousands of gallons of water must have been boiled. There is no reference anywhere to very large deposits of charcoal. Think of how much charcoal burning 1000 trees would create. There would be no reason for the fisherman to have removed it. There is also no evidence of significant deforestation which would have been needed to get the wood they would need to burn to boil there massive amount of gallons of water.
Why is there no evidence of what must have been a significant long term presence of man here to build the dam and live and work making the salt. The fisherman would have no reason for hiding the evidence of their presence. There would be much more evidence of the community that would have been required to live here to justify such a significant enterprise.
He quotes a variety of salt making historic practices. None of these are the same or even that similar to what he is theorizing here. They are quite different. Why is there no evidence that this method of making salt has ever been used anywhere else in the Americas.
I have shown this article to three of our science teachers in the past and they just laughed. They pointed out many reasons as to why this process would not see any increase in the waters salt concentration.
Why have none of the treasure seekers ever explored this theory. Why have the Lagina brothers never even mentioned this theory.
To go through the effort of building a substantial dam and regulating the amount of water that was allowed to pass up to the very small beach in a very controlled way would be a massive effort for a very small return.
This method takes no account of the effect of rain (which is pretty common in the area) and would cancel out the effect of the dam to a large degree. It also takes no account of winter where water is frozen and evaporation is likely to be almost nothing. Thus it would only be usable for a very limited time of the year.
Therefore I find this explanation highly improbable..
