An Oak Island Reconstruction

[gjb]

Although you do not state “Who” was the Master Mind and Benefactor behind the construction of the Oak Island Money Pit…a large portion of your research points to “Captain William Kidd”.

Building the extensive workings of Oak Island with his limited skills, knowledge and loyalty from his crew would have been very difficult.

Your post seems like a fair brief outline and assessment of the case for (against) Captain Kidd.

I see you're a keen believer in the Siege of Havana as a setting, which seems to me one of the better scenarios, but not without problems of its own. The British military as a background would appear to overcome many of the difficulties.

The killer in all this is the apparent lack of public record, which leads so easily into conspiracy theory: somebody managed to destroy all the orders, and suppress all letters and diary entries, and nobody appears to have whispered word of the affair to someone else.

It’s possible to find 18th century British military buttons and cap badges simply detecting at old inns and staging posts. Why not here? They apparently found 17th and 18th century coins on the island from a few fairly random passes.

Maybe it’s time to get a crew of local detectorists to mark out and systematically field walk areas at the east of the island, plotting the results. That would make for a few outings: vegetation, safety and security permitting! They could at least do all the beaches.

I've not heard of this having been done before, but it would be interesting to know the range and nature of the finds, and any close groupings. The 19th and 20th centuries should be fairly well represented, but the period before this ..?

 

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[Robot]

Yes, your points are well taken!

My research shows that these Freemasons used the secrecy of their oath to protect any information from leaking out.

Military records of ships going to Halifax NS, Lost ships, Military and Canadian Grenadiers being sent to Havana and other records were reported.

Why I believe very little British military evidence has not been found on Oak Island, is the island beside Oak Island which is Frog Island was the center of their operation.

The main ships and military would have camped on Frog Island, shown to have had a large camp presence.

Small boats ferried a rotating shift crew of Cornish Miners to Oak island to perform the necessary work. Cornish Miner's items have been found on Oak Island.

I totally agree that a precise sweep of the island should be done, recording all stone markers and anomalies.

 

[Robot]

Pirate...The Buzzard...Olivier Levasseur?

Hi gjb

While looking up Colonel Jean LeVasseur, and your research on 3 Triangles located on the Island, I happened to notice these coincidences about the Pirate known as "The Buzzard".

Levasseur had "Pirated" the coast of Oak Island from Newfoundland to New England in the early 1700's.



"Olivier Levasseur (1688 or 1690 — 7 July 1730), was from a wealthy French family and very educated, he became the pirate nicknamed La Buse (The Buzzard), called thus because of the speed and ruthlessness with which he always attacked his enemies. He is also known for allegedly hiding one of the biggest treasures in pirate history, estimated at over £1 billion, and leaving a cryptogram behind with its whereabouts."



"Levasseur captured the Portuguese great galleon Nossa Senhora do Cabo (Our Lady of the Cape), loaded full of treasures belonging to the Bishop of Goa, also called thePatriarch of the East Indies, and the Viceroy of Portugal, who were both on board returning home to Lisbon. The pirates were able to board the vessel without firing a single broadside because the Cabo had been damaged in a storm and to avoid capsizing the crew had dumped all of its 72 cannon overboard, then anchored off Réunion island to undergo repairs."

"The booty consisted of bars of gold and silver, dozens of boxes full of golden Guineas, diamonds, pearls, silk, art and religious objects from the Se Cathedral in Goa, including the Flaming Cross of Goa made of pure gold, inlaid with diamonds, rubies and emeralds. It was so heavy, that it required 3 men to carry it over to Levasseur's ship."

The Buzzard..."was captured near Fort Dauphin, Madagascar. He was then taken to Saint-Denis, Réunion and hanged for piracy at 5 p.m. on 7 July 1730."

Legend tells that when he stood on the scaffold he had a necklace around his neck, containing a cryptogram of 17 lines, and threw this in the crowd while exclaiming:
"Find my treasure, the one who may understand it!"

Olivier Levasseur was a Freemason

In 1947 Englishman Reginald Cruise-Wilkins found three cryptograms compiled in mysterious alphabet, a rebus, or at least in initiatory writing which could be put in relation to masonic symbolism and the Clavicles of Solomon





Some of his translation:

"The treasure chamber is somewhere underground and must be approached carefully, to avoid being inundated. It is protected by the tides, which require damming to hold them back, and is to be approached from the north. Access is through a stairwell cut into the rocks, and tunnels leading under the beach."



"Something weird stunned me: how come that in The Buzzard's cryptogram, we only find three pointy "A" when all the others are squared?"

The Buzzard had referred to the location of the Island...Look for the three large piles of rocks that each form a Triangle

"He compares and convinces himself that the "A" in the text are the same as on the rock. On the rock, the "A" forms a triangle. And Bibique as a trigonometry amateur is then convinced that we just need to trace a bissector in the right way to find the location of the treasure. Except that we first need to find the original location of the stone!"

And why would a pirate go to all that trouble to hide a treasure that no one was trying to steal?

"It's amazing what these guys did... the passion," Cruise-Wilkins marvels. And after all, what else did a semi-retired pirate have to do?

 

[Real de Tayopa Tropical Tramp]

Rebel., best, and most logical cadidate so far.

 

[gjb]

While looking up Colonel Jean LeVasseur, and your research on 3 Triangles located on the Island, I happened to notice these coincidences about the Pirate known as "The Buzzard".

Over the years, I’ve had a number of shots at the LeVasseur cryptogram, because of the similarities between the Seychelles treasure hunt and Oak Island. I give some thoughts on this in my second book.

I did play with the idea that there might have been a connection between Jean LeVasseur and Olivier LeVasseur. This led me to the worrying thought that the Seychelles treasure might be the Oak Island treasure after having been removed!

There are two traditions linked to La Buse: on the Seychelles and on La Reunion. Many of the web sites, and the two key books, are in French. The book that kicked it all off is Le Flibustier Mysterieux, by Charles de la Ronciere, 1934, and is very rare, though I do have a copy. The cryptogram you posted comes from this. The other tradition can be found in Sur la Piste des Freres de La Cote, by Bibique. There are also chapters in The Treasure Seeker’s Treasury by Roy Norvill, and Forgotten Eden by Athol Thomas, if you want to follow it up.

Jean LeVasseur is mentioned in several books on the buccaneers, but the source is Du Tetre's Histoire Generale des Antilles ..., 1667-1671. I'll see if I can dig it out and post a translation, or a summary.

 

[gjb]

While looking up Colonel Jean LeVasseur...

Robot

To provide some information on Jean LeVasseur, I decided simply to load an extract from my book onto a web page. You can find this at Oak Island: Jean Le Vasseur

The information on LeVasseur comes from Du Tertre (Histoire generale des Antilles...), who was his contemporary and obviously didn’t like him.

The link from Tortuga to Oak Island is, of course, speculative, but my point is to demonstrate that this particular setting demonstrates there are circumstances that render tenable suggestions of a pirate deposit on Oak Island consisting of loot from the Spanish possessions, in which the pirates would have been quite capable of undertaking a project on the scale envisaged.

In addition, if Olivier Le Vasseur (La Buse) was responsible for the Bel Ombre undertaking (as Cruise-Wilkins and his son report it) then he could no doubt have accomplished a similar enterprise on Oak Island. However, doing so with the British in possession of Nova Scotia would probably have made the task somewhat difficult.

 

[mdolan]

Does Nolans Cross connect Denmark to Washington DC?

 

[Charlie P. (NY)]

No.