About 700 years after the dawn of the Christian era, the Mi’kmaq Indians seem to have migrated northwards into Nova Scotia from what is now the U.S.A. While William the Conqueror was getting a firm grip on England, several thousand Mi’kmaqs were spreading themselves around the coastal area adjacent to Oak Island and its hinterland.
But the Mi’kmaqs were a travelling people — like the Bedouins of Arabia and North Africa. They carried their homes and their few goods with them and they tended to travel light. There is no known motive — religious or cultural — which might have induced them to construct the elaborate system below Oak Island.
Although the theory is still controversial with some of the more cautious and conservative historians, it now seems virtually certain that Vikings — and some formidable wild Welsh sea warriors — reached North America and Canada centuries before Columbus. Was the mysterious “Wineland” or “Vinland” which Lief Eiriksson reputedly reached one thousand years ago really Nova Scotia? Thorfinn Karlsefni took three shiploads of adventurous pioneers to an equally mysterious “Markland” a few years after Lief Eiriksson’s epic voyage. Was “Markland” also Nova Scotia?
Men who could build ships sturdy enough to be rowed across the Atlantic would have been more than capable of excavating or adapting the subterranean system on Oak Island — but what might their motives have been? Norsemen, of course, were not averse to burying dead kings and chieftains complete with their ships and their treasures. Visigoths diverted rivers to bury their great leaders, then let the waters flood back to protect the tomb and the king’s wealth.
If the radio carbon dating is five hundred years adrift, there’s a remote possibility that some great Viking warlord, or Celtic sea-rover, lies below Oak Island.
John Cabot raised the English flag on Cape Breton Island before 1500, thus laying claim to what he fondly believed to be part of Eastern Asia in the name of Henry Tudor! Shortly after the turn of the century, Basques and Bretons came in search of fish.
The French baron de Lery got to Nova Scotia before 1520, while the Italian explorer Giovanni de Verrazano made an unsuccessful attempt to found a settlement there during the third decade of the sixteenth century. Both of these visits are of very considerable significance: firstly, because any Oak Island activity undertaken by their people would harmonize with the radio carbon dating, and, secondly, because some researchers believe that Verrazano named the area “Arcadia.”
To justify the importance of the word “Arcadia,” we need to look briefly at another mystery. Central to the riddle of the Priest’s Treasure at Rennes-le-Château in Southwestern France is the curious Latin phrase “Et in Arcadia ego.” It recurs in old paintings and on the Shugborough Hall Shepherds’ Monument, in Staffordshire in England. It also appears in the controversial coded parchments which Bérenger Saunière is said to have found inside an ancient Visigothic altar pillar in his mountain top church of St. Mary Magdalene. The classical interpretation of the cryptic Latin phrase is usually taken to be: “Even in Arcadia (the idyllic, innocent, and joyful land) I, Death, am present.”
Alternatively, the message, carved on the side of a table tomb in Poussin’s paintings, may be taken to mean that the dead man inside the tomb is saying: “Don’t grieve for me: I too, am in Arcadia.” Nicholas Poussin had a great love of Rome, and worked there for many years. Significantly, his own tomb bears a carved representation of the Shepherds of Arcadia canvas bearing the same puzzling “Arcadia” inscription.
Art historians trace the theme back from Poussin to the Italian painter Guercino whose work on the same motif depicts a skull beside which the words “Et in Arcadia ego” appear. What if the French adventurer, Baron de Lery, or Verrazano, the Italian colonial pioneer, had a very good reason indeed for naming their respective abortive settlements “Arcadia”?
One of our Nova Scotian friends, George Young, who was himself an expert on the Oak Island mystery, came up with the brilliantly innovative idea that the characters depicted in the Poussin paintings might actually be signalling letters in the old Ogham script. It was George who drew our attention to the fact that Ogham letters are capable of being denoted by the positions of the hands and fingers — as though Ogham were a very early progenitor of the sign language used to help those with a hearing challenge today.
What if whatever mysterious, wealth-generating secrets were (and perhaps still are) hidden at Rennes-le-Château and/or Glozel, have some curious duplicate, counterpart, or accessory hidden on the other side of the Atlantic? And what if Guercino, Poussin and the other painters who knew at least part of that secret hid ancient Ogham letters in their compositions?
What if Verrazano’s apparently failed attempt to establish a colony in Nova Scotia was no failure at all but a deliberate cover, or elaborate camouflage, to enable something of immense value and importance to be concealed in the Money Pit on Oak Island?
The mind of a brilliant Renaissance Italian would have been the ideal spawning ground for the plans of the Oak Island System. Compare it with the catacombs of ancient Rome. The skill of the craftsmen who built, furnished and decorated Renaissance Italy would have been more than adequate to design and build the Money Pit. The question remains: what could have been so vitally important that they went to such lengths to transport, conceal and protect it?
During most of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, British and French forces fought long and hard for possession of Nova Scotia. One civil or military pay chest or another, legitimately or illegitimately, could have found its way to the base of a secret subterranean “safe deposit” on Oak Island — if that’s what the Money Pit actually was!
The massive fortress of Louisbourg at the eastern end of Cape Breton cost the French millions to build. Were some of those funds misappropriated and secretly hidden on Oak Island?
The Oak Island story may go back much further into the mists of time than is generally realized: fearless Celts, Coptic Christian refugees, grimly determined Norsemen, the noble and heroic Sinclair branch of the Knights Templar after their betrayal and downfall in 1307, Drake’s Devon lads, Kidd’s bloodthirsty pirates, or a detachment of meticulously disciplined British army engineers … who constructed the Money Pit and why?
The historical and geological background of Oak Island and its immediate surroundings abound with exciting and intriguing possibilities.
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Smith, Vaughan, and McGinnis
in 1795
To understand Daniel McGinnis and his pioneering companions, it is first necessary to know something of the political and social background of Nova Scotia in the eighteenth century. The Chinese have a proverbial “curse” which runs: “May you live in interesting times.” The eighteenth century was — in that subtle Chinese sense — an interesting time to be in Nova Scotia, and particularly if you lived on, or near, its coast.
The French and English had long disputed the ownership of what was then termed “Acadie” (or, perhaps, more significantly “Acadia,” “Arcadie,” or “Arcadia”). Champlain had been there in 1603 and De Monts in 1604. The Treaty of Utrecht gave Acadia to the English in 1713, but in 1755 the danger of war with France led the English to deport the Acadians to New Orleans. This caused great hardship, and many personal tragedies of the kind Henry Wadsworth Longfellow described so poignantly in “Evangeline.”
There is an evocative and mysterious tone to the opening lines of the poem:
This is the forest primeval. The murmuring pines and the hemlocks,
Bearded with moss, and in garments green indistinct in the twilight,
Stand Druids of eld, with voices sad and prophetic,