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...
