SSR - Mathematics is fascinating enough, with the thousands of interesting and often profound correlations one can find in numbers and nature - however too often there are those that take these naturally-occurring coincidences and assign imagined importance to them. You observation of the ratio of the distances of Giza to Gibralter to Oak Island being "equal to about Phi" (1.618...) can be said about an INFINITE number of other ratios that can be calculated. If I had the time and inclination, I could come up with a mathematical correlation between France, St. Louis MO (patron Saint of France) and Pierre, ND ("Pierre" is a French name), and then tie it all together with some esoteric knowledge of Chateau Montségur, the Priory of Sion, and the origin of the Merovingian line of Kings...all based on coincidental mathematical ratios and formulas. What you have presented above would be more intriguing if perhaps ALL the ratios and proportions had the EXACT same constant or conversion factor, rather than requiring different divisors or multipliers to get the numbers to match up....and "ALMOST equal" doesn't really add much credibility, either.
Bacon did not see real world significance in that coincidence, so certainly not profound significance either. He wasn't that easily impressionable. You seem to be thinking he did. It's what is called coincidence by us and that is what he would have called it too, and coincidence is everywhere in the world as you say. What coincidence allows is for anyone to build a story that has no bearing on inductive reasoning; it would be just a story using a coincidence. Please do not think that I am implying Bacon was tricked in thinking nonsense. He simply observed that there was a linear projected line that went from Giza through the Pillars of Hercules to the NA coast. No one can deny that that is doable! To project beyond two points to a third is not a massive leap in theorizing. That gave him an area in NA to build an interesting symbolic narrative with. It's an area that is under the Swan in celestial globes of this era. This is exactly as it would have been done in ancient times when people actually observed natural coincidences and used them to base their religions in (erroneously, of course). Bacon wasn't trying to rewrite History here.
The ratio is 0.6103 if I use my graphing tool, but Bacon would not have had such precision. Like we both say, that's purely coincidence. It's as much coincidence as the Earth and moon's diameter working out to give almost perfect overlap in total solar eclipses. The distances of both from the Sun form a ratio that are mirrored in the diameter ratios. Problem is those distances are ever changing in geological time. It just so happens that during humans' lifetimes the distances work out to an almost perfect 1:1 eclipse coverage. In truth, what we do get are annular eclipses, but the match can appear quite remarkably perfect when you think about it. Similarly, the distances on the globe between two points changes with moving continents. It would be insane to claim that an observed ratio was God given if it is always changing. Mercator maps in 1620 were not that precise either. All Bacon ever observed was an approximate value of Phi, which would have tickled his fancy and started him off.
If it does appear strange that he would be looking at this sort of thing think again. He is known to have been laboring quite a bit to use the charts and maps of Elizabeth I to try and devise a geometric system to determine longitude using Thales' intercept theorem. One actually came out of this period. The "Great Circle" method of navigation requires one to draw lines around the globe from which the straight bearings of Mercator maps could be related to allow a working out of position. The line from Alexandria to Gibraltar already had a very long and Ancient history of having been used to sail the Mediterranean and could be sighted with constellations on the ground. All that Bacon would have done is projected it to the North American coast. It's useful as a reference line because it is in proximity to two of the colonies Bacon was already involved with, the Virginia colony and the Cuper's Cove colony in Newfoundland.
What I think is particularly clever for him to have done is use the observed Phi ratio to then define a large isosceles triangle with a third location in order that it's height to half-base ratio be Pi. That he certainly did not observe; he made it happen on paper by choosing the third location at the Great Turks. That's not a coincidence. That's a willful act. At that point you have a very tidy bit of symbolism to start to write allegories with that involve pi and Phi, Sun and Moon, and silver and gold symbolism. Let's not forget that Bacon was an allegorical writer too. He wrote a fanciful allegory of a Utopian island that we all know at one point based on the old Atlantian myth of the Greeks. With Pi and Phi signaled on his charts, the lead is there for all the allegory that follows, his and and those that came after who have built on it. All of it just comes out of an observation and a bit of basic calculation.
I won't even bother to show you where he illustrates this very thing in his works. That's not really important. What is important is that others way before our time suspected they knew of these geometric games. This is actually why you have this long literary tradition of Bacon associated with OI that is at least 150 years older than Petter Amundsen's unrelated Shakespearean Ark fantasies. It was written about in Nova Scotia before there were documented excavations looking for the money pit. As far as History goes, a money pit has never been found. It wasn't found because it originates in a story. The story is Enoch's legend and the theme of the allegory of the day which presented it was the quest for immortality, something Bacon was experimentally consumed with and sought to depict symbolically also.
I'm sorry if all this offends you, but the legends at OI are based in events that are themselves about fictions (the writing of stories). What is real that you can look up is the prediction of a symbolic eclipse that occurred in 1651 which occurred precisely at Sunrise. It was written about allegorically before it happened. It's time and place were given in symbolism in "The Chymical Wedding of CR". An American alchemist of note even left Harvard around 1650 looking to find this place as he thought it to be related to the philosopher's stone (another bad assumption). The signaling of the event and the place has a literary tradition. Good luck finding anything there, though. That's what Haliburton also suggests. His exposure to the idea came out of England from his high society relatives, the Burtons, who were in part consumed with the study of Francis Bacon. You will not separate the OI stories from Bacon because they are all written with Bacon in mind. When Haliburton's now famous British niece started writing in 1891 that Bacon was Shakespeare the search at OI shortly morphed into search for a vault of documents. The suggestion of that came well before the purported evidence, which should slightly trouble fans of the ground searches. It suggests evidence was being produced to conform with theories, and not the other way around.
Still there is stuff signaled on OI. I believe that it realistically dates to or slightly after the surveying of the Shoreham grant there by Charles Morris. From that point on it's basically a Nova Scotian recreated Masonic mystery. The modern Bible of OI history was written by a well known NS Rosicrucian. Of course, these same Rosicrucians see Francis Bacon as their Imperator. Bacon has always been close to OI and nowhere in the long story are there Templars except that the symbolism can be used to write new stories involving them with. Please keep Montsegur out of it please. That belongs to another mystery and other versions of story telling.
- if it had carvings, it wouldn't be smooth.)
