Oak Island Archaeology Update: An actual, accurate translation of the letter from the commander of the Castor and the Aurore

Seasons 9 and 10 of the Curse of Oak Island (COOI) make a big deal of the Duc d’Anville’s fairly disastrous 1746 naval expedition to Nova Scotia.  The COOI team speculate that the expedition might have been a cover for sending a great treasure to Oak Island and burying it in what became the Money Pit.

I will have more to say about the expedition and the stories that surround it in a future post. In the meantime, the Fairview Historical Society has a pretty comprehensive and informative post on the expedition and all the legends it spawned, including buried treasure (but not on Oak Island, and not the Ark of the Covenant).

In S10E03, the team presents the new possibility that an advance task force of two ships, the Aurore and the Castor (Dawn and Beaver) under the led by Commander Duvigneau would have been sent ahead of the main fleet to find Oak Island, prepare it, and perhaps even to bury the treasure itself.

Du Vignan’s letter

In support of this contention, the COOI team present a passage from a report Duvigneau submitted to the French Admiralty which they claim says: “I will not speak to anyone about this place. I am obliged to… …send my journal of navigation.”

This secret place about which Du Vignan will speak to no one, of course, is supposed to be Oak Island and the money pit.

Now, let’s look at what the letter actually says.

Including the partially cut off sentence at the top of the screen in one of the shots, the whole passage reads:

“…who ask for nothing better than to fall under French dominion.

I will not speak to anyone about this fact [or place, see below], but I have to warn you that it will be difficult to hide it from a great many people who know it. I send my navigation log. The frigate is beyond my expectations (or my hopes), she steers and goes well, especially at the closest [to the wind?], and if I had the advantage of commanding her, I find she carries sail well enough to take on canons of eight rather than six… ”

So how the COOI team get from this that there is a secret place and that Du Vignan is compelled (obliged) to sent his log, but that he is keeping secrets from the Admiralty?

The minor problem

Initially, I thought that they had misread the word “fais” (fact), but thanks to this redditor for pointing out that it is most likely “pais” (country, or region). Pais doesn’t fit the sentence quite as well, but looking at other p characters in the letter, especially in “parleray point”, it looks like a p.

If the word is fais, or fact, it refers to the previous paragraph’s statement that some unknown groups, persons, or settlements, would like to fall under French dominion. This could refer to any number of groups, European or Indigenous.

If the word is pais, or region, it could refer to the places where people want to switch allegiance, or to the place where the ships of the expedition are to assemble. All of this information, regardless of which word it is, would be important strategic information during a time of war, and none of it needs to involve Oak Island. Without seeing the whole letter, it is unfortunately difficult to interpret this.

The major problem

Unfortunately, it is difficult to find a charitable explanation for the second part of their “error.” The COOI team takes the first part of one sentence (highlighted red on the show), which ends with “I have to”, or “I am compelled to” (je suis obligé de), they skip the part to which this refers, and go straight to the beginning of the next sentence, which reads “I send my log”, and which has nothing to do with the compelling.

If you put the two highlighted sentence fragments together, they don’t even make grammatical sense. The compelling clearly refers to having to warn the admiralty of the information about groups seeking to change their political alignment or their alliances.

That’s very difficult to do by accident, and I would love to hear an explanation from the COOI team. I would also love to see the full letter, so I can get a better sense of the context.

I always like to give people the benefit of the doubt, but this one is difficult to ignore. I must say, if an undergrad brought me a translation and textual reconstruction like that, I would not be amused. Taking fragments isolated from each other in the text and putting them together into a new sentence that has nothing to do with the writer’s intent is not the way to do it.