Ducks on Oak Island

Wilmer Rivers rivers at seismo.CSS.GOV
Sun Mar 12 22:15:45 CET 1995


Don Rosa writes:
> Yes, I have been familiar with the Oak Island Treasure for decades;
> Barks made me a treasure buff when I was a tad, and I used to buy
> treasure-hunter magazines back in the 60s (do they still publish those?).
Ah, "Argosy" magazine!  What would a USA barber shop of the early 1960s
have been without a rack full of them?  (Along with "Field and Stream"
and "Guns and Ammo", of course.)

> But knowing someone has written such a story, I don't think I'd want
> to step on toes by presuming to beat them to publication with my own version.
Well, it's not exactly as if you were trying to win a race; as you point
out, the other story has been sitting on the shelf for a LONG time, and
(given the licensing situation) it's likely to stay there unread for-
ever.  [Remember the final, "warehouse", scene of "Raiders of the Lost
Ark"?  Appropriate, since of course that movie started out with a Barks-
inspired treasure hunt, complete with the same rolling-boulder booby
traps.]

> I can't picture 17th-18th century pirates having the ability to
> sink deep mine shafts in loose sand and then drill these horizontal
> water-channels out into the sea. [...]
> All I know is that the story has so little actual bearing in recorded
> fact that one would need to create a whole phony history in order to
> do a story about it
Which is the prototypical treatment of such a tale in Disney comics.
Simply going to Oak Island and digging up real buried treasure would be
much too mundane.  A Disney comics treatment would have to contain some
fanciful elements about what's there, e.g.:

(1) Scrooge finds out about Oak Island (you can bet HE subscribed to
"Argosy"!); (2) he hires Gyro to build him a super pumping apparatus to
get around the flooded tunnels; (3) he makes Donald and HD&L be his
crew to go to Oak Island and excavate the pit; (4) on-site, studying the
layout of the tunnels, the geology of the rocks and sand, the time of
day of the floods versus the tides, the known history of Oak Island, and
Junior Woodchuck Guidebook accounts of how 17th century pirates did
their engineering, HD&L reach the same conclusions that you do about
there being some other explanation for the pit; (5) with the help of
Gyro's pump to get around the floods, and HD&L's resourcefulness to get
around a host of hitherto unknown booby traps activated by Donald, the
ducks finally reach the bottom of the pit, where they find...

Scenario # 1: the hideout of the Phantom Blot [no, wrong comic book]
# 2: duck mermaids and mermen of Atlantis [no, it's been done]
# 3: a lost tribe of Peeweegah Indians [not any more, they won't!]
# 4: (variant of #3) a whole civilization of tiny pirates, descended
     from the smallest members of the original crew, who due to their
     size were left inside the pit to guard the treasure, and who now
     have multiplied (requiring the digging of more numerous and elabo-
     rate tunnel systems) and learned modern drilling and hydrology
     technology (from raiding parties' stealing books from libraries
     at night) but who still speak 17th Century buckaneer-type English
     [are these the "Munchkins" in the unpublished story?]
# 5: the crew of an alien spaceship (whose fuselage forms the shaft of
     the pit), wrecked on earth for centuries, who are using the tides
     in the tunnels to turn the generators needed for them to store up
     enough enery to return to their home planet [nah; too predictable]
# 6: an underground passage to Nova Scotia's Bay of Fundy (where the
     steep channel has the world's strongest tides), inhabited by Terry-
     Fermi-type "tide creatures" who use the Oak Island pit as an atmos-
     pheric pressure valve on the machine that they use to pump the
     world's oceanic currents, which they filter for gold to store in
     Davy Jones' locker [hmmm....]
# 7: you name it [and given 5 minutes or less, I'm sure you can]

Anyway, you get the idea.  The whole basis of a good Duck adventure is
to take a basic premise of real history, such as the destruction of the
Library of Alexandria, or a familiar legend, such as the Labyrinth of
Crete, and build a whole new history or legend (or both) on top of it.
So why not give Oak Island the same treatment?

Wilmer Rivers



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