What Are We Learning From Cable Shows? -- I

It's hard to tell which cable shows are highest rated, but amomg those is certainly The Curse of Oak Island, in which a bunch of white guys, under the guise of searching for hidden treasure, are actually starting to sponsor legitimate historical research in an area that's had little serious study. Nobody at this point, including the Lagina family, seems focused primarily on what treasure, if any, remains buried under the island. The question is increasingly what the heck went on there over a period of possibly 200+ years, because it's becoming plain that something did, and we know absolutely nothing about what it was.

The 2020-21 season, shortened and handicapped by COVID restrictions, had the serendipitous effect of redirecting the searchers to what might be found on the surface in a shorter period and without heavy equipment. The result was to discover a heavily engineered road, probably reflecting military use, extending over some area of the island. Other naval and military artifacts appeared in conjunction with the road. This had been buried under several feet of overburden and had been invisible up to the decision, from necessity, to excavate in that area rather than in the more fully explored parts of the island.

As the show has become more successful, it's had the resources either to hire full time academics to assist in the excavations or to bring in PhD specialists as consultants. Their opinions of artifacts, as well as carbon dating of organic material from the excavations, suggests there was intense activity on the island, completely undocumented up to now, between potentially the 1500s and the mid 1700s. One team of archaeologists suggests that in fact, given the relative paucity of artifacts vis-a-vis what might be expected on an equivalent site, considerable effort must have been taken to conceal evidence of the activity after it ceased.

Even the current historical record gives little reason to think there would have been much activity in that part of Nova Scotia in colonial times. There was a series of almost constant colonial wars between England and France in greater Acadia, but the key events took place near Halifax and farther north and along the Bay of Fundy, not on Oak Island. Oak Island may have been used as a refuge by Scottish colonists in the area following the French reconquest of Acadia in 1632, but what we're also beginning to see is evidence of much more extensive British military-style activity through at least the 1760s, so far completely undocumented and unrelated to known military maneuvers in the wars against the French. Other artifacts suggest activity in the 1500s or earlier.

The Lagina brothers appear to come from a middle-class background in northern Michigan. Marty, Rick's younger brother, appears to have made a fortune as a canny businessman and has undertaken more upper-class style sidelines like winemaking, but he has invested a considerable fortune in exploring Oak Island, in some part to indulge his brother Rick, a retired postal worker. Marty has clearly been skeptical of Oak Island speculation until very recent discoveries like the heavily engineered road.

The peculiar thing about the project and the media empire that's grown up around it is that it springs from entirely plebeian culture. The brothers became interested in the island due to a Reader's Digest story. Other than Franklin Roosevelt, who visited the island in the early 1900s with associated investors, the project has attracted largely working-class entrepreneurs through much of its history. The current investment seems to be essentially mad money from a middle-class businessman who became very prosperous through hard work and canny foresight, supplemented by equally canny TV producers who recognized the project's potential mass appeal.

At this stage, the project has potential for extending our knowledge of North American colonial settlement in ways that still can't be predicted, but could even influence key historical narratives. But the impetus hasn't come from the academy or philanthropic foundations. It's come from the plebs, and its interest is from the plebs as well. This is an important cultural development.