The Oak Island Mystery

by Lionel

  - 13 -

  Religious Refugees

  The original and challenging hypothesis outlined in this chapter came from the authors’ good friend George Young, a very knowledgeable and experienced Nova Scotian surveyor, whose own excellent book on Oak Island is strongly recommended reading.[1] In addition to his valuable engineering and surveying background, George knew the world’s seas and ocean currents from long, adventurous years of first-hand experience as a naval officer.

  Born in Eastcote, Middlesex, England, in 1924, he added a couple of years to his age and joined the Royal Navy in 1940. Starting in a Naval Infantry Battalion, he transferred to destroyers, and was on loan to the Royal Canadian Navy for part of his active service career. He served aboard the Montgomery and Georgetown, then went to the frigate Hargood for the Normandy operations. After the war, he served as an officer in the Canadian Mercantile Marine on the West Indies and South American routes. During the Korean emergency, he again served as an officer in the Royal Canadian Navy.

  In essence, George based his ideas on his own special knowledge and experience of the sea and of the local Nova Scotian geology. He is also supported by Professor Barry Fell’s erudite translation of the mysterious stone found at, or near, the ninety-foot level by the Onslow team in 1803 and 1804.

  In the previous chapter, we considered the possibility that Celts or Vikings had created the Oak Island system, in the former case, perhaps, as a repository for Romano-Celtic gold from the Ogafau mine, and in the latter case as a subterranean mausoleum for their leader. George Young’s challenging theory directs our thoughts much farther to the south and east.

  Basing his arguments on the strong likelihood that by the year 400 B.C.E. the early Amerindians were involved in trans-Atlantic trading with Carthaginians from the Mediterranean coasts, George uses his maritime expertise to plot their probable routes. His navigational arguments are sound and convincing. Passing the Pillars of Hercules (Gibraltar), one route followed by the Phoenician[2] and Carthaginian traders took them north along the Iberian coastline, around the Bay of Biscay and westwards along the English Channel to within sight of Cornwall. Keeping Ireland on their starboard side, they would head for the land they knew as Ogygia (Iceland). A westerly course would then take them past the southern tip of Greenland and Cape Race in Newfoundland. A turn to the southwest would bring them to Nova Scotia, and down the American Atlantic coast as far as Florida.

  Their second feasible route would have taken them southwest of the Pillars of Hercules to the Canaries, where westerly-flowing currents would ease their journey to Cuba and thence to Florida and so on up the American coast.

  George Young with Lionel and Patricia Fanthorpe.

  If they had begun their homeward journey from the vicinity of Cape Hatteras (North Carolina), George argues, they would have been able to make good use of the currents sweeping east again towards the Iberian Peninsula and the Pillars of Hercules — after which they would have been back in what were tantamount to home waters.

  Another vital factor which lends considerable force to George’s arguments is the change in the effective tidal levels which has taken place over the centuries. His studies have revealed that in the area around Mahone Bay and Oak Island, the water in Carthaginian times was thirty-five feet lower than it is now as a result of the coastal land masses settling down onto the Earth’s crust at a rate of approximately eleven inches per century.

  George hypothesizes that a group of Mediterranean traders established a small permanent colony in Nova Scotia, in the neighbourhood of Martins Point, Western Shore, and Gold River with a campsite at Beech Hill.

  He surmises that they were a mixture of Phoenician and Greek stock, who would have written and spoken a version of Ptolemaic, a language indebted to both Greek and Arabic sources.

  These pioneers would have noticed many of the natural limestone shafts and caverns in the area, ideal for adaptation as homes, storage areas, and workshops. Tunnels could have been dug connecting cavern with cavern and ventilator shaft with ventilator shaft. One very large, deep shaft in particular (today’s Money Pit?) could have been dug to ventilate a gigantic cavern, far below the island.

  George envisages the trading that would have gone on between the Mediterranean colonists and the Amerindians: the indigenous hunters exchanging furs and fresh meat for Mediterranean artifacts, timber, and agricultural produce.

  The last trader to visit the colony brings news of the savage and bitter war now raging back home in the Mediterranean between Rome and Carthage: the First Punic War fought from 264–41 B.C.E. Hundreds of their fine ocean-going ships have gone to the bottom, taking thousands of adventurous merchants and brave seamen with them. Their vital link with the Mediterranean severed, the colonists become increasingly dependent upon their Amerindian in-laws, and are slowly but surely subsumed, adjusting to nomadic life and abandoning their Oak Island base to dereliction and decay.

  Old World causes frequently initiate New World consequences. It is now the fifth century C.E. The Roman Empire itself has finally gone the same way as the Carthaginian Empire which it had destroyed in 146 B.C.E. In Egypt, there was a religious conflict in the early church between the Greeks and the Copts. The latter were the descendants of the original ancient Egyptians, and their language, too, was directly derived from the original ancient Egyptian language. The theological causes of the quarrel are too complex to be dealt with in detail at this point, but, essentially, the Copts opposed the Council of Chalcedon in 450 C.E. while the Greeks supported it. Professional mainstream theologians termed the Coptic beliefs monophysite, and the real problem between them and the Greeks arose over their different understandings of the divine nature of Christ. Chalcedonians believed in the “two-natures” theory of Jesus — that He was both God and Man. Coptic monophysites preferred to think of Him as having only one inseparable divine nature.

  At this point, the Vandals poured in from the east, flooding over the wreckage of the Western Roman Empire and driving a wave of pitiful refugees was a party of singularly determined and courageous Coptic Christians.

  George Young pointing out the mysterious ancient campsite.

  Some residual knowledge of the ancient Carthaginian trans-Atlantic sea-routes must still have lingered among the fifth-century Mediterranean traders. They would have made optimum use of it in this emergency. The dangers of the open sea were infinitely preferable to certain death at the hands of the merciless Vandal conquerors.

  According to George Young’s intriguing theory, supported by professor Barry Fell’s translation of the inscription taken from the porphyry slab found in the Money Pit, a boatload of Copts reached Nova Scotia and established themselves there under the leadership of an arif, or “sub-priest.” When this revered Coptic leader died, those whom he had led safely ahead of the Vandals, across the Atlantic, and through the perilous pioneering days of establishing their settlement, would have wanted to show their respect and gratitude. No labour would have been too great to ensure that his precious remains rested in peace. These were men who had seen the pyramids and knew something of the intricate protective devices they contained to thwart grave-robbers. Would they have done less for their arif than the Pharaohs’ architects and artificers had done for their ancient god-kings?

  But how is George’s bold, avant-garde theory to be reconciled with various other Oak Island findings such as Nolan’s enigmatic markers, the puzzling core samples, the chests (or coffins?) which the drillers were so confident they had encountered at around ninety to 100 feet in 1849 (and which Blair’s team may have re-encountered between 150 and 170 feet nearly fifty years later)? And what about the apparent difficulties posed by Triton’s radiocarbon dating tests?

  It is possible to construct several strong bridges between George’s ideas and those previously established facts. A party of religious refugees escaping from Egypt would not necessarily have been averse to taking with them such treasures as were accessible. The Israelites set a classic precedent during t
he Exodus: they took a vast store of Egyptian treasure with them.[3] The engraved porphyry slab found between the eighty- and ninety-foot levels in 1803 and 1804 also gives a strong hint of Egyptian origins.

  There can be no certainty that all the complex workings below Oak Island were made by the same people at the same time. A pre-Christian colony of Carthaginian traders, followed by Coptic refugees who might have heard legends and old tales of what their predecessors had accomplished, could well account for a second elaborate subterranean structure being superimposed upon an earlier one. A difference in sea-level of over thirty feet would have made their task far easier than the daunting excavationary work confronting nineteenth- and twentieth-century explorers.

  Careful burial beneath oak platforms, clay seals, coconut fibre, and charcoal is reminiscent of the meticulous protective processes which guarded high-ranking Egyptian dead. Copts would have been familiar with all of this. Water tunnels and flood-traps to drown grave-robbers have much in common with the ancient Nile culture which jealously protected its dead by every means that human ruthlessness and ingenuity could devise.

  George has also made a highly significant breakthrough in a totally different field, a discovery which will provide a wealth of valuable research material for Oak Island and Rennes-le-Château investigators for many years to come. “Only connect,” as E.M. Forster said on the title page of Howard’s End. Having studied the Poussin paintings carefully because he shared our interest in the Rennes mystery, and having a detailed knowledge of the ancient Ogham alphabet, George suddenly noticed that many of the characters portrayed on Poussin’s canvases have their hands painted in what appear to be Ogham alphabet signs.

  George Young and Patricia Fanthorpe studying the Ogham letters on the Poussin canvases.

  The Ogham alphabet is the oldest form of Goidelic, a Celtic dialect. Like all truly great codes and cyphers, its power lies in its simplicity. A vertical or horizontal line has one, two, three, or more shorter lines branching out from it at right-angles to represent letters. These branches can be left or right of a vertical line, or above or below a horizontal line. They are, therefore, ideally suited for use as hand signals. In theory at least, two competent Ogham users could communicate in this sign language without a sound being uttered. Was it used, perhaps, by early Irish monks under vows of silence? Or by prisoners trying to pass secret messages which their jailers must not hear? If Nicholas Poussin (1593–1665) was the master of priceless coded secrets which many Rennes researchers believe him to have been, then his hitherto unsuspected trump card must surely have been his knowledge of the Ogham script, and his incredibly cunning use of it in the hand signals of his shepherds, the shepherdess, and other characters.

  There is an enigmatic inscription below a carving in the grounds of Shugborough Hall in Staffordshire, England. That carving depicts a reversed copy of Poussin’s Arcadian shepherds. The strange inscription (“O_U_O_S_V_A_V_V” with a “D_” and an “M_” immediately to the left and right of it on the line below) may have a very significant new interpretation when George Young’s discovery of the Ogham letters displayed by the shepherds’ stone hands are added to it.

  Shugborough Hall is significant, first because it was the ancestral home of the Anson family, whose founder, William Anson, was a successful lawyer, a contemporary of Sir Francis Bacon during the period of his political ascendancy. (Bacon’s possible connection with the Oak Island mystery is treated in detail in chapter 16.) The second connection is through Admiral George Anson (1697–1762), a descendant of William’s, who came home immensely rich from his round-the-world voyage in the Centurion, 1740–1744. Remembering the possible William Kidd connection with the China or Chene (Oak?) Sea, it is interesting to note that Admiral Anson’s Centurion was the first British warship to enter the China Sea when he sailed to Canton to sell the treasure he had taken from the Spaniards. Admiral Anson may have yet another connection with the Oak Island Money Pit, and it has to do with a possible political conspiracy at the very highest level.

  George III (1738–1820) struggled long and hard to regain many of the old, lost royal powers. He did not wish to be a puppet or figurehead at the mercy of various powerful ministers of the Crown. Charles I’s struggles against his parliament a century before had failed more for financial than for political or religious reasons. If Charles had had adequate funding, the British Civil War might well have gone the other way. George was determined not to repeat Charles’s error, but how could he become financially independent of his government? Suppose that a very small clique of trusted royalists including Anson had planned the raid on Havana in 1762 (the year of Anson’s death while still serving as a highly placed member of the Board of Admiralty). Suppose that there were not merely a few hundred thousand pounds — as officially reported taken from Havana — but many millions, which only George III’s clique knew anything about. Was this secret surplus intended to become George III’s private royal reserve? Was Anson in on the plot before his death and did the bulk of that “missing” Havana treasure find its way to the Oak Island labyrinth? It is yet another perfectly reasonable theory, and it provides one more strange link in the circuitous, circumstantial chain shackling Shugborough Hall to the ancient Arcadian Treasure, to Poussin’s paintings, and to the Ogham script. That Ogham script now leads back again to George Young in Nova Scotia.

  The famous, but controversial, Mount Hanley Stone, discovered by Edward Hare and examined by George Young in 1983, is about a metre long and covered with curious markings which look uncommonly like an ancient Ogham inscription. So where do all these curious discoveries point?

  Shugborough Hall in Staffordshire.

  The Shepherd’s Monument at Shugborough Hall.

  For the sake of argument, let’s assume that the ancient and mysterious Arcadian Treasure really exists — whatever form it may take. Some of its ancient guardians were familiar with both forms of the Ogham script — they could use it as a hand alphabet for secret, silent signalling, and they could also write, paint, or carve it. When written or carved, its very simplicity helped to keep it concealed: casual observers could so easily mistake it for accidental or natural markings. Only a searcher who knew what he or she was looking for would be able to locate and decipher it. Poussin hid Ogham letters and other strange clues in his paintings. Thousands of people studied those canvases for centuries before George Young’s perceptiveness and intuition revealed the Ogham letters. Another ancient secret-sharer hid clues at Glozel on the weird engraved clay tablets which Fradin found there in 1924. Shugborough Hall has indirect links via William Anson with Francis Bacon and his elder brother, Anthony, who was engaged on secret service activities in Europe. Shugborough’s grounds contain the Shepherd Monument, reflecting Poussin’s characters displaying their Ogham letters in stone.

  An even stranger parallel link in this weird chain is forged by those other masters of secret codes and cyphers: the indomitable Templars. How much did they know of the Arcadian Treasure and its possible journey to Oak Island?

  - 14 -

  The Indomitable Templars

  The Templars’ full Latin name was pauperes commilitones Christi templique Salomonici: the Poor Knights of Christ and of the Templar of Solomon. In 1119, Godfroi de St. Omer and Hugues de Payns of Burgundy went to Jerusalem with the stated intention of giving up worldly chivalry, living in poverty, chastity, and obedience, fighting for the true and supreme King (Christ), and guarding the public roads so that pilgrims could travel in safety. Six other knights joined them. Baldwin II, who was king of Jerusalem from 1118–31, gave the Templars part of his palace. This area was close to the al-Aksa Mosque, which was popularly referred to as Solomon’s Temple. From that location the order took its name.

  Graham Hancock, in The Sign and the Seal,[1] makes some very interesting and well-researched alternative historical suggestions about the earliest days of the Templars. In his view, the nine original founders (not eight!) went to the Temple site for a completely different purpose.
Hancock points out with a fair degree of logic that eight or nine knights would have been hopelessly inadequate defenders over the many miles of road that the pilgrims had to cover. The Order would need to grow significantly before it could function as an effective defence force.

  In Hancock’s opinion, the founders of the Order went to the supposed site of Solomon’s Temple to excavate beneath it for lost secrets and hidden treasures — much the same reason that Bérenger Saunière had for acquiring the living of Rennes-le-Château some seven centuries later.[2] Perhaps the original Templars suspected that the Ark of the Covenant had been concealed in a secret cave below Solomon’s Temple before the city fell. Perhaps it was the Holy Grail they hoped to retrieve.

  It may well have been that they were searching for something even older and more mysterious — something which might also have been called the Grail, the Greal, or the Gral, but it was not the traditional Cup which Christ used at the Last Supper. Was it something which had left Egypt at the time of the Exodus and been carefully preserved by Solomon the Wise, one of the very few illuminati who recognized it for what it really was and who understood at least part of its proper use and its potentially immense powers?

  During their earliest period, the Templars wore no special uniform, habit, or dress, and they seemed genuinely poor. They were also very much an evangelical and redemptive order. Part of their function was to look for former knights who had fallen from grace and failed to live up to the high standards expected of them. For these excommunicated men they sought absolution, and then welcomed them into their Order as fellow Templars.

  Bernard of Clairvaux (1090–1153), like Hugues de Payns, was a member of the Burgundian nobility. He was a curiously shy and timid boy, even during his education by the Canons of St. Vorles at Chatillon, although he gained there the reputation of being a young literary genius.