Oak Island Gold

Jane M. Wilson is a Toronto-based chartered financial analyst in the
investment business.

What do the Vikings, the Incas, the Knights Templar, the early Acadians,
and the British royal family have in common? All at one time or another
have been implicated in one of the world’s greatest unsolved
mysteries. The scale and complexity of the presumably human-constructed
labyrinth of tunnels, shafts, and other structures on Nova Scotia’s
Oak Island (off the south shore) are widely accepted as indicating a
secret cache of enormous value. For 200 years the area has been dug,
drilled, drained, and detonated by a succession of fortuneseekers drawn
by the irresistible lure of buried treasure.

Crooker enlivens the tale by skilfully blending his chronicle of these
often tragicomic explorations with accounts of the earlier historic
events that fostered the many theories on the origin of the elaborate
workings. The detail of artifacts and evidence discovered to date, and
Crooker’s examination of alternative theories, will permit serious
investigators and historians to make their own judgment.

Business readers will also be pleased at the attention given to the
attendant financial and legal activity. In 1992, 14 years after
Crooker’s earlier book, The Oak Island Quest, startling new
discoveries were made. Crooker now believes he has solved the mystery.
Nevertheless, this book presents Oak Island through the professional eye
of an engineer and land surveyor, and his own preferred theory, far from
obtruding on the book’s objectivity, provides an astonishing climax.