After 15th Episode of Season 12.... Still any believers...?

We don't actually believe it was done with slaves. There was a literal army of tradespeople who made a living in residence nearby doing this large public works project. There was great collective pride taken in it. Of course, even a wage slave is a form of slave, but the great many did not have to be whipped to produce it. Narratives alone can get people on board.

But that would defeat the most basic requirement of burying treasure, which is secrecy. If you have dozens of people digging a hole to bury treasure, you're totally defeating the purpose of burying that treasure!
 
Not if you of the same group with all the same reasons for doing it with the plan that years from then their groups decedents would retrieve it. Plus the fact that most would never be able to find there way back to this island if they came from over seas even if they wanted to. Only the navigator would know how which would be passed down some how to whoever needed it within their groups decedents..
Plus maybe everyone does not know what they a burying and or why...
 
Plus the fact that most would never be able to find there way back to this island if they came from over seas even if they wanted to. Only the navigator would know how

That's an interesting idea. For all the different groups that have been postulated, would the average member of the labor force have been able to make their way back if they wished? One imagines that even among a group of Templars or other religious or martial order of above average skills, not every member would have the seafaring suite. Even if they managed to get back to the right spot, then the question of resources to go down that far again ... could they have managed enough manpower on the return trip to make the task reasonable?

I was pondering yesterday, after reading more about Captain Kidd's trial, whether a cache that deep was simply for the purpose of making the largest possible set of obstacles to casual discovery and retrieval. Just for the sake of argument, let's say Kidd did have stuff buried. He'd want the task of retrieving it to be too big a job for any but the most organized expedition, i.e. one that he arranged or bargained for. Any given deckhand simply wouldn't have the set of resources and skills necessary, even if they were free to try.

--GT
 
It has finally shown us its true colors is what I would argue. While it "explored" various ridiculous suggestions over the years it was always angling in with Rick's pet theory in the background waiting to be declared champion. This show has always been about arriving at a great Templar quest conclusion. Where we are at is pretty much approaching that sorry end. Absolutely nothing about this show has explored the value of the story as a cautionary tale about chasing unanswerable questions and wasting your life (the real treasure) in the process. Curiosity kills cats.
Dear SSR, you who know everything... or almost everything... Do you think it is possible that the treasure well crosses the globe and that a sort of whirlpool on the opposite side of the globe... namely in the Indian Ocean not far from the Kerguelen Islands sucked up the treasure?... This theory would also explain the constant flooding of the wells... By digging, the treasure hunters may have reached the seabed of the Indian Ocean... I think that this would allow us to understand quite a few mysteries and that it could be a usable theory for the next OI season....
 
Dear SSR, you who know everything... or almost everything... Do you think it is possible that the treasure well crosses the globe and that a sort of whirlpool on the opposite side of the globe... namely in the Indian Ocean not far from the Kerguelen Islands sucked up the treasure?... This theory would also explain the constant flooding of the wells... By digging, the treasure hunters may have reached the seabed of the Indian Ocean... I think that this would allow us to understand quite a few mysteries and that it could be a usable theory for the next OI season....
I know of many ways to criticize claims to scrutinize them. Some know of none and pick from what they like.

Your idea of a pole actually does appear in the thinking that leads to this type of allegory. Cygnus was viewed as the home of the Occidental star, the Sun was the Oriental star.

That point in the Indian ocean was imagined to be the ground point of Sirius, which had mattered greatly to Ancient cultures. It does not matter to me, but I can guarantee you that is started mattering when Mercator made his flat map projections (1560-70s) of the globe. It immediately drew a whole host of people into games of Geo-metry. That is to say, into checking for Euclidian relationships on those new flat map projections.

By involving the polar star marker (Polaris) there is also the possibility to write about its antipode at the South pole, Octans. I'm not aware that this was done. There's no reason to use it or not use it. Story tellers make their own choices.

What can be known about OI from details given is out there. I find it disingenuous that many would build up from unknows to theories of unknown treasures. One cannot be grounded in unknowns and end in certainty. My advice is to start is to deal with historical givens and avoid rewriting history when it feels advantageous. Playing dumb, as with Rick and company, is about exploiting a general lack of effort. I'm 40+ years into sorting out this mess. I do not know how exactly I could quantify my effort, but it will surpass that of passive consumers of the current entertainment product. I put a lot of weight on what one very influential observer on the ground wrote about this in 1847 in NS.
 
Last edited:
That's an interesting idea. For all the different groups that have been postulated, would the average member of the labor force have been able to make their way back if they wished? One imagines that even among a group of Templars or other religious or martial order of above average skills, not every member would have the seafaring suite. Even if they managed to get back to the right spot, then the question of resources to go down that far again ... could they have managed enough manpower on the return trip to make the task reasonable?

I was pondering yesterday, after reading more about Captain Kidd's trial, whether a cache that deep was simply for the purpose of making the largest possible set of obstacles to casual discovery and retrieval. Just for the sake of argument, let's say Kidd did have stuff buried. He'd want the task of retrieving it to be too big a job for any but the most organized expedition, i.e. one that he arranged or bargained for. Any given deckhand simply wouldn't have the set of resources and skills necessary, even if they were free to try.

--GT
You can fumble your way there without knowing exactly where you are going before this Bay was charted. Once there you have only celestial navigation to help you get your bearings. Where you are on this planet is given by latitude and longitude. Latitude has always been easy to determine (it's related to celestial declination of stars), longitude was not really workable until a body of map making using many celestial observations in time was built up. Very reliable longitude observation dates to about 1760. The laying of the Mason-Dixon line by celestial observation is the prime example. Shortly after, Harrison's invention of the nautical timepiece "solved" longitude determination.

As an exercise, you could imagine yourself fumbling to OI and taking some declination readings. You'd know where you were in latitude. Longitude would require a series of preexisting time dependent observations of the Sun or moon and knowledge of the constant daily shift in these. These simply did no exist yet to reference. The earliest English attempts at scouting areas for colonization were done by Gilbert in the 1570-80s. John Dee had personally trained Gilbert to take solar measures with a device he had invented, the paradoxical compass to build up a body of observations. This was a compass with an extended arm that allowed solar declination to be noted and used to figure out where you were on a loxodrome spiraling to the North pole. Gilbert actually died off of NS in his last voyage. Ports of call for him were the areas that would later become the first British settlements: Cuper's Cove, Newfoundland; Newport, Rhode Island and Jamestown , Virginia. He travelled along the coast of NS in his voyages. Dee had sent him to specific locations that were satisfying of symbolically loaded geometry one could perform on Mercator's new flat map projections of the globe. Dee and Mercator corresponded. Dee understood that headings (angles) were conserved on Mercator maps.

This is where it gets hokey and religious beliefs enter the fray. If you examine Dee's oddball ideas, he appears to have noted that you could project from Egypt (pyramids) through the pillars of Hercules at Gibraltar and end up in NA off of Nova Scotia in a very large Bay that stood out even on early French maps. That was not precise enough to signal OI, btw. But it does perhaps suggest that Dee may have asked Gilbert to visit this symbolic end point. Later, this would get paired to an observation that a Great Circle between points in this Bay and Jerusalem would help define points in colonial America to give them religious meaning.

What we can say about OI is that it at least matches one older geo-specified location given esoteric meaning a Bologna, Italy (lat. 44.51N). In Mahone Bay there is a location which satisfies a "theological arithmetic". That point is 44.4N and 66.6W of Paris. The arithmetic sum here is 111 which was, in esoteric terms to Dee, recognizable as Agrippa's alchemical planetary constant for the Sun. So, in Mahone Bay, to Dee as least, was the symbolic location that is in Mercator alignment to the monuments to the Sun god in Egypt. The coordinates (from Paris) are also in 3:2 proportion, which is the Pythagorean harmonic that preoccupied Dee too as celestial harmony was believed to be part of Gods plan.. If you actually look where this location is, it's not giving you OI. It's giving you Hobson's Nose in Mahone Bay. That island is the one that Desbrisay noted had apparently launched the OI story when details of a retrieval there in 1830 were used in the later OI origin stories. He had no explanation for that borrowing.

It is most likely that all this is just a set of historical oddities. What we seem to be getting with OI is Freemasons dredging this up and using it to drum up new interest. It's likely that Phillips brought the historical links to American colonialism to NS when he brought Freemasonry from Boston to Annapolis Royal. One of his cohorts and Masonic brothers there was Charles Morris who later planned and surveyed OI in 1762 as surveyor general of NS. That's as direct as we can get to tracing influences. The Archibalds of Truro would have been later Masons exploiting the historical oddities to drive searches for the unknown "to them". They may just have had a free look at the expense of speculators. An early version of Rick and his brother...
 
Last edited:
But that would defeat the most basic requirement of burying treasure, which is secrecy. If you have dozens of people digging a hole to bury treasure, you're totally defeating the purpose of burying that treasure!
What treasure? Why are you going on about treasures? No one buries a treasure in a riddle that isn't a symbolic one. OI is about digging a hole into your mind and planting the seed of a suggestion. Do you see how well it grows in various minds? It's super fertile ground. If you first dip the seed in growth hormone (enticing ideas of treasure) watch it really take off. It might be more like a tower of Babel that gets built.
 
I have no diea how to answer your comment. If you've been following my posts, you'd know that I do not beleive there is any treasure on Oak Island. Doubtful if there ever was anything there in the first place, but definitely nothing there now.
 
I have no diea how to answer your comment. If you've been following my posts, you'd know that I do not beleive there is any treasure on Oak Island. Doubtful if there ever was anything there in the first place, but definitely nothing there now.
We all agree on that, except that what counts as treasure can be defined as anything to anyone. For me who is interested in the fiction, it is about understanding the players and their motivations. It is akin to looking into Walt Disney's influences to find where Mickey Mouse comes from. It is never purely imagination or deception. Part of the success of the COOI franchise is to get you focused on an alleged practical search. I knew in 1985 that even the most deluded searchers had abandoned that. The morons operating there now are simply faking a spectacle. Many levels of partners go along with it. It's a simulated treasure search, so it is a form of hyperrealism. The money pit is a hyperobject that has no authentic precedent. It has sign/symbol value which can be converted into market exchange value if an observer immerses himself in the simulation and partakes in the spectacle.
 
We all agree on that, except that what counts as treasure can be defined as anything to anyone. For me who is interested in the fiction, it is about understanding the players and their motivations. It is akin to looking into Walt Disney's influences to find where Mickey Mouse comes from. It is never purely imagination or deception. Part of the success of the COOI franchise is to get you focused on an alleged practical search. I knew in 1985 that even the most deluded searchers had abandoned that. The morons operating there now are simply faking a spectacle. Many levels of partners go along with it. It's a simulated treasure search, so it is a form of hyperrealism. The money pit is a hyperobject that has no authentic precedent. It has sign/symbol value which can be converted into market exchange value if an observer immerses himself in the simulation and partakes in the spectacle.
Now you've made a spectacle of yourself.....
 
I'm more convinced they will find Bigfoot on that island than any treasure.
Agreed... They now spend more time looking for artifacts, identifying them and traveling abroad then they do looking for something of value. What do ya think they'll cook up on the last couple shows to justify another season of the same...? Or are we gonna see one last meeting then watch'em all high five and that's it...?

What possibly could emerge to justify another season if you think it will happen...?
 
Now you've made a spectacle of yourself.....
Your interaction with me is in a hyperobject (a hyperspace we call the internet ). Everything here is spectacle on one level.
 
Huh? What's going on?
Where are my spectacles?
I think they need to be grown. The spectacle is the scene. If you ad the prefix "ob", which means "in the direction of" you will observe that it is the obscene that gives us the best view of the spectacle. COOI is obscene. It tells you of the scene which makes up the spectacle. One can loose one's self in a hyperreal quest that is a good surrogate for what many want their lives to be or feel like. Effective spectacle works because it touches a nerve in us. At times it is the optical nerve, but not always.
 
I think they need to be grown. The spectacle is the scene. If you ad the prefix "ob", which means "in the direction of" you will observe that it is the obscene that gives us the best view of the spectacle. COOI is obscene. It tells you of the scene which makes up the spectacle. One can loose one's self in a hyperreal quest that is a good surrogate for what many want their lives to be or feel like. Effective spectacle works because it touches a nerve in us. At times it is the optical nerve, but not always.
what have you been smoking..................?
 
what have you been smoking..................?
Isn't that a question best asked to Rick and his brother? What kind of powerful drug makes anyone want to paint a scene that draws people away from reality? Is it the high one gets from amassing lucre?
 
Isn't that a question best asked to Rick and his brother? What kind of powerful drug makes anyone want to paint a scene that draws people away from reality? Is it the high one gets from amassing lucre?
how do you know it all ? nobody knows what happened on oak island but YOU..... do who dug the tunnels ? who built the roads and most of all.....WHY explain yourself....
 
how do you know it all ? nobody knows what happened on oak island but YOU..... do who dug the tunnels ? who built the roads and most of all.....WHY explain yourself....
The only tunnels dug on oak island were dug by scam artists hoping to dupe investors out of money.

Common roads were just that, roads built by inhabitants, not unlike any other place in the world.
 
The only tunnels dug on oak island were dug by scam artists hoping to dupe investors out of money.

Common roads with no access to the island were just that, roads built by inhabitants, not unlike any other place there ware plenty of fat pirates and scam artist taking ocean voyages.....
 

Users who are viewing this thread

Back
Top Bottom