and coal in the northern part of Cape Breton Island.
Nova Scotia must also be considered as a mass of lakes, streams, and unusually short rivers — while the subterranean water courses may be larger and more extensive than is generally realized. The curiously named Lake Bras d’Or (Golden Arm Lake) on Cape Breton Island, for example, is saline.
The Nova Scotian climate is a strange mixture in that it is both continental and oceanic. The southwest coast in particular trends to be mild and wet, and its average temperature is roughly five degrees warmer than the average interior temperature (approximately 45 degrees Fahrenheit and 40 degrees Fahrenheit respectively). The upland temperatures can range from 95 degrees Fahrenheit in summer down to 35 degrees of frost in winter — a remarkably wide range of 125 degrees Fahrenheit. There’s an annual rainfall of between 40 and 55 inches, and fog can hide the southern coasts for as many as ninety days a year. There are upwards of 50,000 acres of tidal marshland in Nova Scotia, and it’s particularly interesting to note that it was the Acadians who began creating dikes around the turn of the seventeenth century.
With its fogs and sinister tidal marshes, the Nova Scotian coast was a haven for pirates, and Mahone Bay itself was notorious for its pirates, privateers and buccaneers right up until the early years of the eighteenth century. The scores of scattered islands there provided ideal screening and camouflage from both sea and land. Expert anthropological opinion suggests that the earliest inhabitants were the Amerindian tribes who were contemporaries of the old Chaldean civilizations, and pre-dated Stonehenge, the pyramids and the Sphinx. But these palaeolithic tribes — or even their mesolithic or neolithic descendants — were not characterized by their mining or constructional activities. Radio carbon dating of what are thought to be some of the ‘original’ Money Pit timbers produces a date not earlier than 1500 — although even the best radio carbon techniques can leave a few years’ margin of doubt. There may very well be much older remains on the site.
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
