The search for ancient treasures confidently passes into the hands of professionals equipped with the latest technology. Brothers Rick and Marty Lagina have invested millions of dollars to uncover the mystery of Oak Island once and for all.
Mine under the oak
On the east coast of Canada, in Mahon Bay, there is a small island that has haunted treasure hunters for four centuries. It all began in 1795 when curious boys landed on the banks of the Oak, Daniel McGuinness and his friends. The adults were afraid to visit the island. The inhabitants of Nova Scotia saw ghostly lights among the trees and believed that the spirit of a dead pirate was walking there. The sinister story only fueled the curiosity of the teenagers.
Deeper into the oak grove, the guys came across a huge tree. A rope hung from its branch, pulled by a heavy block. The ground beneath him subsided, indicating that someone was digging and lifting heavy loads. Friends decided that a pirate treasure was buried there, and, returning with shovels, began excavations.
At a shallow depth, young treasure hunters stumbled upon a layer of hewn flat stones. It was not chests with gold that opened under it, but a mine that went four meters in depth. Several picks and shovels lay in the mud at the bottom.
Under the old tools, the guys stumbled upon a ceiling made of logs. When they were cut through, another section of the mine was opened. It was already unbearable to dig further, and the adults did not want to visit the damned island.
McGuinness returned to the mine as an adult, leading a group of treasure hunters. But the treasure did not want to be given in hands: the mine went to an incredible depth, and nothing indicated that it was about to end.
Promotional video:
At a depth of 10 meters, the shovels went through a layer of coal. A layer of clay lay two meters below. Treasure hunters twice stumbled upon layers of coconut fiber, which in those years was used for packing cargo in the holds of ships. Every now and then they had to cut through the floors of oak logs to get to the next section of the mine.
When the shaft reached 30 meters, the shovel came across something solid. There was a flat stone with an encrypted inscription. The cipher turned out to be a simple replacement for English letters with strange symbols and was easily cracked: "Two million pounds were buried 40 feet deeper." Skeptics suspect that Daniel McGuinness himself planted the rock to whet enthusiasm and make him dig deeper. But soon water poured into the mine. The work had to be stopped.
Underground traps
In 1848, treasure hunters made a third attempt to get to the treasure. A drilling rig and powerful pumps were brought to the flooded mine. The drill reached the point from which the flooding began, overcame two floors of oak logs and groped for something like chests. When they pulled him out, everyone saw a piece of gold chain stuck to the steel tip!
“Having passed through a layer of wood 13 centimeters thick, the drill fell through 30 centimeters and went through 10 centimeters of oak planks and 55 centimeters of metal in pieces,” the written protocol read. “The Boer brought nothing upstairs that spoke of the treasure's being, save for three links in an ancient chain. Then he passed through 20 centimeters of oak planks, which we took for the bottom of the first chest and the lid of the second; then 55 centimeters of metal, the same as before; further 10 centimeters of oak and 15 centimeters of spruce, after which the drill went deep into the clay for two meters, without encountering any obstacles.
The treasure hunters could not remove the water - it arrived faster than the pumps were pumping. In 1850, a second mine was laid to get to the side of the treasure, but it suffered the same fate. The workers found that the water in the mines was salty, and its level fluctuated with the ebb and flow in the bay. The clayey soil of the island does not allow sea water to pass through. So, somewhere, there is a tunnel leading to the ocean.
After excavating the beach, the treasure hunters discovered a complex drainage system. The beach turned out to be artificial. Under a layer of stones and sand lay layers of algae and coconut fiber. Below there were five gutters leading to a stone-lined tunnel one meter high and 150 meters long. The fiber prevented the tides from filling the gutters with sand, keeping the trap in working order. The tunnel was closed, but the water in two shafts was not going to leave.
In the 1860s, new equipment was brought to Oak. The number of side mines has reached seven. Workers have drilled dozens of wells trying to find other water tunnels. Lack of money forced to stop searching.
Slabs and voids
The right to conduct excavations passed from hand to hand. The ruined treasure seekers were replaced by others, continuing to turn the bowels of Oak inside out. By that time, no one knew the exact location of the first mine. She disappeared among the numerous dumps, boreholes and craters.
1896 brought another surprise. At a depth of 38 meters, the drill stumbled upon solid metal. The obstacle was overcome with carbide drills. There was a gaping void beneath the metal, not filled with water or earth.
At a depth of 48.5 meters, a layer of stone, paved with oak boards, went. There was some kind of soft metal under it. Gold? Nobody knows this: not a grain of metal stuck to the drill. But a piece of parchment with the letters "W" and "I" was raised to the surface. The luck ended there: the drill entered the underground tunnel, and the gushing water filled the cavity under the slab.
In the XX century, expeditions fell on the island like a horn of plenty. They took place in 1909, 1922, 1931, 1934, 1938, 1955 and 1960. Powerful dredgers sucked tons of liquid mud from the mines, bulldozers and excavators dug up everything that had survived from previous excavations, but the treasure remained elusive. In 1965, Robert Dunfield started up a 70-ton excavator, but left empty-handed anyway.
Having worked on the island since 1965, businessman Daniel Blankenship decided to approach the problem from a different angle. Walking around with dowsing frames, he found an anomaly 60 meters from the old mine and began drilling using a casing with a diameter of 70 centimeters. At a depth of 65 meters, the bedrock has gone. Blankenship was so confident of success that he ordered further drilling. After passing 18 meters in the rock, the drill fell into the void.
Blankenship lowered a television camera into the well. A clear picture of a huge cavity filled with water appeared on the screen. In the middle was a hefty box - perhaps a chest of gold. But this was not what shocked the treasure hunter. A hand was floating in front of the lens, severed at the wrist. Someone's body was lying at the bottom …
A 70-centimeter pipe allowed a person to go down. Daniel several times dived into the bowels of the island, but to no avail: the slightest movement in the cavity - and everything was covered with heaps of silt. The powerful lights didn't help.
Blankenship has begun expanding the 10X well to 2.5 meters, reinforcing its walls with steel, but even a businessman may run out of money. Daniel remained to live on the island, most of which belonged to him. A smaller part of the island at one time was bought by treasure hunter Fred Nolan, who does not want to communicate with a competitor.
Science is storming the island
In 2013, Rick and Marty Lagi resumed their search. To understand what they were dealing with, the brothers dug up the beach catchment again and retrieved samples of coconut fiber. Radiocarbon analysis showed that this ingenious structure was built in the XIII-XIV centuries, long before the first voyage of Columbus.
If there is no error here, only one hypothesis of the origin of the treasure remains. Just at this time, the treasures of the Knights Templar, defeated in 1307-1314, disappeared. The Templar Knights had their own fleet. Some of the ships took refuge from the anger of the Pope in Portugal and Scotland. Other ships sailed in an unknown direction - possibly towards America.
The Lagin brothers discovered that there were Spaniards on the island in the 17th century. They left behind copper coins and tools of those years. One of the coins found in the swamp is dated 1652. Perhaps the Spaniards found out about the treasure and tried to get it, but for some reason they stopped the search, hastily filling up the already excavated part of the mine. The "Ghost Lights" on Oak could have been the lanterns in the hands of treasure hunters who had been privy to the mystery long before McGuinness's sortie.
Rick and Marty brought in specialists to investigate the strange cavity in the bowels of the island. Scanning sonar was lowered into the “borehole 10X”. He confirmed that the cavity contained what looked like a chest and a wooden rack supporting the ceiling. A controlled high-resolution underwater camera was unable to see almost anything in the mishmash of silt and water. Then it was the turn of the non-claustrophobic diver. He was able to crawl through a 70-centimeter hole and inspect the cavity at a depth of 72 meters. He saw that this was a natural cave, and the "chest" was just a stone of an unusual shape. The “body” and “severed hand” were an illusion caused by flakes of silt and the poor picture quality of a 1970s television camera. The wooden post likely fell into the cave while expanding the well.
The fiasco with the "10X well" did not cool the ardor of both brothers. Blanken-thorn's mistake prompted them to start searching for the first mine and metal plate using new geophysical instruments, bulldozers and two excavators. Perhaps this year the secret will be finally revealed.
Mikhail Gershtein