The Oak Island Enigma
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A History and Inquiry Into The Origin of The Money Pit.
Copyright 1953 by Penn Leary
Hand typeset, printed on a 6" x 9" press,
and published by the author. Preface
This is a story of treasure on a deserted island.
The historical account of Oak Island, Nova Scotia, given here is true; that is, as true as any history of events covering more than 150 years. It is a disappointing story, since it has no ending or real beginning.
Most tales of this sort are founded on an ancient map or legend which point to some part of the world as the hiding place of great riches. Usually the man who buried the treasure, and the date of its internment, are well known, but the exact location of the cache is obscure.
Yet the reverse is true of Oak Island. The particular spot where its treasure was buried has been fixed, within a few yards, since the late Eighteenth Century. No scrap of concrete evidence exists to connect it with any person or any age, and the character of the treasure is equally uncertain. We can only depend on a knowledge of human nature to be sure that it is something of enormous value.
No satisfactory explanation of the origin of the earthworks has ever been given. The Mahone Bay area, in which Oak is located, was well settled by the Acadians before 1700. We must necessarily select some date prior to that as the date of its burial, since the labor connected with the excavation could have been kept secret only when the Bay was uninhabited.
The explanation given here is, admittedly, a theory founded on another theory which is not commonly accepted. The skeptical and those who believe only what they were taught in grammar school will reject it immediately. The more imaginative may take it much as they take the story of Atlantis, impossible to prove or disprove, but worth knowing about anyway. To the few who have troubled themselves to study the Baconian question the subject may be of particular interest.
At all events, a fortune lies buried on Oak Island, whether it is gold, diamonds or moldy parchment. This book is written simply in the hope that someone with the wherewithal to accomplish the job will go there, dig it up, and satisfy the author's curiosity.
Penn Leary, June, 1953.
Open the Gates, 'tis Gloster that calls
One autumn day in 1795 the soul of some long dead spirit stirred, and perhaps laughed at the tricks that it, and fate, were to play on three country boys from Nova Scotia. The three boys were the crew of a rowboat on Mahone Bay, fifty miles south-west of Halifax. The restless spirit was, of course, guarding the treasure it had buried on one of the islands in the Bay. There is an island for every day in the year in these waters, and pure chance was steering the boat toward Oak Island. The spirit's task of guarding was an easy one, for it had labored long and mightily in its lifetime to place its curse on these and other treasure hunters to fellow.
Fifteen or twenty years earlier, I. F. W. Des Barres had sailed through the Bay (then known as Mecklenburgh) and had drawn the firs detailed chart of its coastline. Des Barres drew beautiful charts and affixed ponderous names to the little rocky islands. Frog Island, as it is now known, was Adolphus Isle; Great Tancook was Royal George Island; Round Island he called Augustus Isle. Oak Island is shown as Gloucester Isle, though to the local inhabitants it has for many years been known only as Oak.
We can assume the three boys sailed around Frog Island from Chester and approached Oak from the east. The first natural landing place they struck was a sandy beach near the west end of the island, now known as Smith's Cove. Jack Smith was one of the young sailors and his companions were Daniel McInnis (or McGinnis) and Anthony Vaughan.
In 1795 the island was covered with a thick stand of trees, very similar to Red Oaks in bark and foliage. The origin of the Oaks has been the subject of much conjecture; they tower to 80 or 90 feet and sometimes live more than 250 years. The trunk flares out at the top into a swaying umbrella shape, unlike the other Oaks on the mainland. A few stand today, like symbols of the mystery that shadows the ground on which they grew.
Well-recorded tradition has it that the three boys followed what seemed to be an ancient trail up a hill southwest of the cove. Near the crest of the hill stood one of the Oaks. About 16 feet up from the bottom of its trunk a heavy branch had been sawed off. This sign of human tampering interested Mclnnis and his two friends boosted him up to where he could examine it more closely. The bark was scarred and cut on top of the limb. Looking down, he saw a slight depression in the ground under the tree; it was circular and about 13 feet in diameter. All signs seemed to indicate that someone had dug a pit beneath the tree and, using the branch as a support, had lowered something into the ground.
Pirate treasure! In 1795 there were still live pirates and the tales of their buried loot were told in every coastal town. Legend held Mahone Bay to be an old rendezvous for the buccaneers, and it was named for a French word describing a swift, low-lying pirate craft. Queer stories were told in the villages along the shore about Oak Island; one old woman, whose family were early settlers, told Mclnnis it was under an evil curse. The more superstitious swore that Satan had chosen it for his local headquarters and held hellish orgies under the tall Oaks.
The trio returned to the mainland and loaded their boat with picks and shovels. The earth flew thick next day, and they found the dirt in the shallow depression much softer than the packed ground around it. They saw what they believed to be old tool marks on the sides of the pit as the loose earth crumbled away from it
At the ten foot level the shovels struck solid wood. After the dirt had been cleared away, they found themselves standing on a platform of oak planks three inches thick. There was some difficulty in tearing up these planks, for they were not simply laid into the soft dirt in the pit but solidly embedded in its sides. Underneath was nothing but more clay. A block and tackle was rigged to the old scarred limb to hoist out the soil and the digging went on to the twenty foot level. Here was another oak platform and more dirt under it. At the thirty foot level, and a third oak platform, the boys reached the limit of their engineering ability and could do nothing more without help. The long Nova Scotia winter began and deep snows covered the site.
Nothing could be done until the ground thawed in the spring and McInnis and his friends spent most of their time trying to get assistance from the people living along the coast. But superstitious dread was too much for them. Next summer the three built a cabin on Oak and did their best to attract to the island anyone who might help with the work.
Seven years dragged by, and nothing more was done in what had become known as the "Money Pit". Smith and McInnis married and built homes on the island, forever dreaming of the fortune that might be theirs. When Smith's wife was to have her first baby she was taken to Truro, N. S., to the home of a young doctor, John Lynds. Lynds learned the story of their vigil over the Money Pit and became greatly interested. He persuaded a few of his friends to help him and organized the first Oak Island treasure company.
Meantime, Smith had made another find on the beach. A hand-forged iron ring-bolt, visible only at low tide, was discovered embedded in a boulder at Smith's Cove. Apparently this natural harbor had been a mooring place for ships.
Lynds company began in earnest and sank the shaft to ninety-five feet. Every ten feet was another layer of oak planks supporting the earth above it At the eighty foot point they uncovered a deep layer of charcoal! Beneath it was something stranger still--- a thick bed of vegetable fibre had been stuffed into the hole. This fibre proved to be from the outer rind of the coconut, a material that will remain undecayed indefinitely when covered from the air. At the ninety foot level was found a layer which was either ship's putty or a sticky, light-colored clay.
Just below the "putty" the company unearthed a thin, flat stone, darkly green with a kind of oily composition. It was three feet long, sixteen inches wide and covered with illegible carvings. The stone is now lost but it was once built into the fireplace of Smith's house as an ornament. Many years later it was removed and taken to Halifax where it was kept in Creighton's book store as a curiosity. It was last heard of in 1928 when it served as a doorstop on the premises of a construction company in Halifax.
The excitement of those working on the island can only be imagined. They were sure they were almost on top of the treasure, buried at an unheard-of depth. On a Saturday night, with the pit excavated to ninety-five feet, soundings were taken by driving an iron rod into the bottom of the hole. The rod struck more planks below. The writing on the stone, though never deciphered, may well have been a warning of disaster; for on Sunday, while the workmen were resting on the mainland, tons of water burst through the bottom of the pit. By Monday morning when the party returned there was sixty feet of water in the hole.
Wherever the water came from, it flowed into the pit much faster than it could be bailed out. The group decided to sink another shaft near the first and try to tunnel across under the bottom of the old shaft to where they believed the treasure lay. This may have seemed like a good idea to the amateur engineers conducting the work, but the result was inevitable. Barely had the new tunnel reached the bottom of the old shaft when the water broke through and flooded it to the same level. The first Oak Island treasure company quit.
Years passed and Smith and McInnis continued to live on the island. They did not live to see their work continued, but in 1849 when a new treasure company was formed, Vaughan was still able to make the trip to the hilly island and point out the spot where the original shaft had been found.
Old Doctor Lynds had a stake in this venture, and the first excavation reached eighty-six feet before the water rushed in again. There was no pump or source of power in that time to exhaust the liquid as fast as it poured into the hole. For lack of any other way of solving the problem the company hired a coal prospector who had a "pod augur", a simple muscle-powered bit on the end of a free shaft. It was mounted on a platform at the thirty-five foot level, just above the water. One James Pitbaldo directed the drilling and each time the bit was removed it was examined carefully; every scrap of material adhering to it was dried and sorted under a magnifying glass.
The drill struck the known platform at one hundred feet and bored through. Chips found on the bit proved to be spruce, five inches thick. Then the bit dropped another twelve inches as if passing through an empty place, and chopped through four inches of oak. At this point the drill operator hit a layer of loose material which he believed to be metal. Previously when the bit was withdrawn, chips of wood or other particles were found clinging to it. When nothing was found on the bit he guessed it had been scoured off in a stratum of gold coins.
Again it was lowered into the pit and carefully removed. The story has it that when Dr. Lynds cleaned the point he found three links of a thin gold chain.
During the excitement of this discovery Pitbaldo lowered the drill once more. When it was brought up John Gammell saw him remove something caught on the bit, examine it closely and slip it in his pocket. When Gammell demanded to see what he had found, Pitbaldo refused, saying he would show it to all the shareholders the following day.
That night Pitbaldo disappeared and was not heard of until several months later when he and a companion turned up in Cape Breton Island. They made some efforts to question the Treasure Company's title to Oak and threatened to return that spring and oust them from the site. But Pitbaldo was killed in a mine accident during the winter, taking with him what might have been a valuable clue to the character of the treasure.
It is worth noting that this work was done with a "free" drill, a loose flexible shaft which descended into the ground in a more or less vertical direction but which might have drifted many feet off a plumb line from the center of the pit.
After more probing with the drill the first layer of loose material was found to be twenty-two inches thick. Eight more inches of oak lay below; then another twenty-two inches of unknown substance and four more inches of oak. The drillers concluded that this indicated two oaken chests made of four inch timbers, one on top of another. Just below the chests the bit struck six inches of spruce, as if they were resting on another platform, and below it more clay.
The operators set the drill up a few feet to one side and began again. It hit the platform, dropped eighteen inches and commenced to wobble and jerk. It seemed to have struck the edge of something, cutting into wood on one side and nothing on the other. Splinters of wood were brought up on the drill such as might be chipped off barrel staves.
During the summer of 1850 the company sank a second shaft to one hundred and nine feet, ten feet away from the Money Pit. From the bottom of this hole they started a horizontal tunnel in the direction of the treasure. Again the water burst through and flooded the new shaft as deep as the old. There were a few fresh-water springs on the island and it had never occurred to the diggers that the water had any connection with the ocean. But careful measurements proved that its level varied about an inch for every foot of change in the tide. When one of the laborers fell into the pit and tasted salt-water the truth was confirmed.
An improvised bailing machine, rigged to two horses for power, failed to lower the water to any extent. Dr. Lynds had noticed many years before that the beach on Smith's Cove seemed to have been leveled off unnaturally. Searching for the source of the sea water the company stripped off the sand and gravel on this beach for a distance of 145 feet. Rounded boulders were found under the surface, and beneath them a two foot layer of eel-grass extending from the high to low tide marks.
And under the eel-grass was more of the coconut fibre, tons and tons of it. More excavation located the entrances to five channels descending and converging toward a point back of the beach; these were filled with loose stones. This antique plumbing served to carry the water into one main tunnel which led in the direction of the Money Pit. Specimens of this coconut fibre can still be found on the island. The purpose of the builder of this system of drains can only be fathomed by considering the effect of his work. He was not so foolish as to dig a straight hole from the ocean to the treasure pit. The rush of water through it at high tide might cause it to be choked with sand or collapse. He wanted a steady, even flow of filtered water from the sea which would drown out trespassers digging in the Money Pit. At high tide the water is absorbed by the coconut fibre like a huge blotter. If the bottom of the drain in the Money Pit is uncovered the coconut fibre discharges its store of liquid into the hole until the pressure is equalized. Twice a day the "blotter" is replenished by the tide. The flow of water has been calculated to be as much as eight hundred gallons a minute.
Years later one of the Smith descendants who was plowing behind two oxen narrowly escaped falling into a fifteen foot hole which collapsed beneath him. This was located in almost a direct line between the beach and the Money Pit, and was filled with water. It undoubtedly has some connection with the water tunnel but all attempts to intercept it and seal off the flow have been without success.
The 1849 treasure company threw up a clay cofferdam around the excavated area on Smith's Cove in an effort to stop the water. The tide soon cut through it but its stone foundation can still be seen today.
The company dug one more shaft twenty feet south of the Money Pit, and when the sea water broke through again the job was abandoned.
In 1863 A. A. Tupper, who had been a foreman with the '49 group, raised enough money for another try. He freighted in a water pump powered by a primitive steam engine which succeeded in keeping the ocean below the hundred foot level. Tupper's new shaft suffered from repeated collapses in the soggy ground, and he reluctantly gave it up as unsafe to work in.
In 1870 a stranger appeared in the Mahone Bay area. Dark complected and speaking with an accent, he bought a sloop for $2500.00 and hired two local fishermen to sail it.
He took the boat thirty miles out to sea to a point south of Halifax. There he took a sight on the sun and set a northwest course back to the mainland. As the sloop approached the shore he took out an ancient chart and studied it intently. This he kept mostly concealed from the fishermen but they reported the writing on it was something like Yiddish or Script German. The course he set brought him not into Mahone but to St. Margaret's Bay a few miles northeast. He kept this up almost every day until fall and returned to repeat the performance the following spring. Apparently he never found what he was looking for because he disappeared soon afterward. It may be worth mentioning that modern hydrographic charts show that it is possible to sail a due northwest course into Mahone Bay and make a landing on Oak without touching any of the hundreds of other islands.
Some years later the Halifax Treasure Company resumed the work with more capital than any of the previous operators. Numerous shafts were dug to intercept the water influx from the ocean and pump it out before it could reach the pit, but it could never be located. Work stopped until 1893 when a new company was organized by Frederick L. Blair.
Blair, an insurance salesman, first heard of Oak when he was seventeen and was continuously involved in the work until his death in 1950. Investing his inheritance and all his savings, he started digging in 1895. A grandson of one of the original discoverers, James McInnis still farmed on the island and passed on to Blair all he knew about the previous work.
Blair dug a shaft on the site of the Sink Hole and struck salt-water at fifty-five feet, thus verifying its connection with the water tunnel. Next summer the Money Pit, which by this time had collapsed, was re-excavated to thirty-five feet where a jumble of debris blocked further progress. Another shaft and a lateral tunnel were dug beside it and the Pit was opened to a depth of a hundred and eleven feet. For the first time the lower end of the water passage was found. It was two and a half feet square and filled with loose stones. Still the flow of water could not be shut off.
Blair's company bored five inch holes haphazardly near the beach in an attempt to block the tunnel. Dynamite was lowered into each hole and set off. When a heavy charge was exploded at a hundred and eight feet the water in the treasure pit was roiled by the force of the blast, but there seemed no hope of stopping the water at such a depth.
Drilling was again tried at the Money Pit through a two and a half inch pipe. At a hundred and twenty-six feet the bit struck oak and then iron. Twenty-seven feet deeper the drillers cut through a layer of what seemed to be stone. Some of this material was sent to A. Boake Roberts & Co., analytical chemists in London, and no previous information was given them of its source. The analysis proved the substance was artificial and had the same chemical properties as hardened cement. The drill located a cement roof, walls and floor of a chamber. Its size was estimated to be five feet square and seven feet deep.
Whenever the bit was removed from the ground anything adhering to it was carefully set aside. This debris was taken to Truro where, at a meeting of the directors of the company, it was placed in an open container which was then filled with water. The wood chips and lighter material floated to the top of the vessel.
Idly, one of the directors picked a bit of flotsam from the surface of the liquid and rolled it between his fingers. Examining it more closely, he placed the little ball on the table and unrolled it.
This fragment was a torn piece of parchment, about a half inch long and a quarter inch wide. On it were written with a quill pen the script characters "v" and "I." Had a message been left behind with the treasure?
Blair tired of boring holes into the chamber and began sinking more shafts around it. He seemed to have a theory that if enough holes were dug the water would finally drain out of the pit and leave the treasure high and dry. Of course, the Atlantic Ocean filled each hole as soon as it was dug, and the water remained at the same level in all the others. Blair was the first to suspect the existence of another water tunnel leading from the beach south of the pit. He found that dye placed in the Money Pit did not appear in Smith's Cove but made traces in the ocean on the south side of the island. When the company's money ran out he obtained title to the land and in 1905 secured a grant of Treasure Trove from the Canadian Parliament.
In 1909 no less a personality than Franklin D. Roosevelt became interested in the treasure. His mother had a summer home on Campobello Island, New Brunswick, and tales of the Money Pit had spread all over Canada. His group raised $5000.00 and Roosevelt, Duncan G. Harris, Frederick Childs and Albert Gallatin sailed from New York on August 18. Their expedition included diving suits (which proved impractical) and test drillings at one hundred and fifty feet found the same cement-like material. Samples of it submitted to Columbia University were reported to be man-made. Roosevelt's work on the island was brief but his interest continued for many years. In August, 1939, while he was visiting Halifax he privately devised a plan to anchor his battleship off Mahone Bay and see the work then being conducted by Erwin T. Hamilton. Hamilton was informed of the secret scheme and had a sedan chair ready to carry the President up the hill to the site of the shaft. News of the imminent outbreak of war in Europe reached Roosevelt before he left Halifax and he was obliged to return immediately to New York.
In 1913 a Wisconsin college professor and a Captain John Welling tried to open the Money Pit with a power dredge and had no better luck. Some years later another group tried sinking a long steel caisson which was kept under air pressure to prevent the water from entering it at the bottom. The tube was lowered by firing a charge of dynamite from its base to break up the soil. But the man who set the fuse had to exit so hurriedly that he contracted the "bends" from the sudden release of pressure. Blair returned to the island in 1922 with J. B. Cameron, a New York contractor. With heavy machinery and a large crew of men they sunk several more shafts, but were unable to conquer the water.
More years passed while the Money Pit was abandoned. Melvin Chappell, of Sydney, N. S. did considerable digging in the early 1930's with the usual lack of success.
In 1928 a New York newspaper printed a Sunday feature type of story about the strange history of the island. Gilbert D. Hedden, operator of a steel fabricating concern, saw the article and was fascinated by the engineering problems to be overcome in recovering the treasure. Hedden collected a library of books and articles on the island and made six trips there. His attorneys made an investigation of the characters of those living who had been associated with previous treasure companies and made favorable reports. Convinced that the story was no hoax, Hedden and a few friends organized a new venture. He took in Blair, whose grant of Treasure Trove did not expire until 1944, and bought the southeast end of the island.
Hedden did not start to dig until the summer of 1935. The pit was excavated to a hundred and fifty-five feet and strongly timbered, but no chests or cement chamber were to be found. Hedden was digging in the spot indicated by Blair as the original where the drill had found the chamber, but the ground had shifted so badly from the collapse of other pits that he believed the treasure might have slipped many feet horizontally and sunk deeper into the wet clay.
Electricity was brought to the island for the first time and pumps installed with a capacity of 1000 gallons per minute, twice the expected flow of water. The water tunnel entrance was exposed at a hundred and four feet, and this flow was transferred to another old shaft where the pumps took care of it easily.
More strange things remained to be discovered on the island. In August, 1938 Hedden found a boulder near the pit with a rough hole drilled in it, two inches deep and an inch and a quarter wide. Blair remembered seeing a similar hole in a rock east of the pit near Smith's Cove, and relocated it under some trash and underbrush.
While collecting data on the Oak Island mystery, Hedden had run across a book published in 1937 by Harold T. Wilkins entitled Captain Kidd and His Skeleton Island. In it was reproduced a map dated 1669, without latitude or longitude, supposed to have been drawn by the convicted pirate William Kidd. Hedden was struck by its resemblance to Oak. The shape of the island has changed considerably in 300 years with the pounding of the tides, but Oak's outline had more than a superficial similarity. When compared with it he found 16 points of likeness. A careful survey showed sunken rocks were located where reefs were marked on the Kidd map. References to elevations checked with the Oak Island topography. A pond had existed where it appeared on the old chart. And soundings showed areas of deep or shallow water around the island just as given on the printed map.
The map was suitably embellished with a cryptic legend:
18 W. and by 7 E. on Rock.
30 SW. 14 N. Tree
7 By 8 By 4.
Hedden hired a surveyor and ran a straight line between the two rocks with the curious holes. It proved to be 25 rods long. From a point 18 rods east of one rock and 7 rods west of the other he set a stake. The surveyor then ran another line directly southwest 30 rods, as the Kidd map suggested. The terminal point was in a tangle of underbrush near the south shore. It was uncovered carefully and a number of glacial boulders were found, half buried in the sand. They formed a triangle, roughly ten feet on each side and ten feet across the base. Pointing due north was a bisecting line 14 feet long. There was an arc of boulders laid at the base of the triangle like a rocker under it.
The arrowhead formed by the apex of the triangle and the bisecting line pointed toward the Money Pit almost exactly 14 rods north. The first two lines of the legend on the Kidd chart had directed the treasure hunters to a new landmark which had never before been noticed. The "7 By 8 By 4" was roughly the size of the triangle constructed around the shaft, as shown on the accompanying drawing.
Hedden went to Europe that winter on business and he located Wilkins, publisher of the Kidd map, in England. Expecting to be welcomed with the news of his discovery, Hedden detailed the evidence that his island had been found in Nova Scotia. Wilkins was at first reticent, then seemed confused. Once he told him the map was a complete fabrication; later he confided he had drawn it from memory. He had been permitted to see the original, and had been told the story of its discovery, by Herbert Palmer of Eastbourne, England. Palmer, a collector of such articles, had four charts of the same island and a tale to tell connecting them with Kidd. He would not allow Wilkins to copy them.
Hedden found Palmer and asked his price for the four maps. A figure of $525,000.00 was mentioned which seemed too much to Hedden. He finally persuaded Palmer to show him the maps, which was done with consummate secrecy; the bearings given on them (if there were any) were covered over with a coin.
The maps Palmer had were of a shallow crescent shaped island. They bore not the slightest resemblance to the chart Wilkins had published. None of them contained the incredible legend, though one indicated a triangle as a guide. Palmer assured him the island was in the China Seas, thousands of miles from Oak. If Palmer had the published map he wasn't showing it to Hedden.
Hedden went back and tried to get Wilkins to explain. Wilkins suggested, in a somewhat befuddled manner, that perhaps, during his long years of research in the British Museum, he had seen the map and sub- consciously retained its outline and the legend. Either that, he thought, or he was in psychic communication with Kidd's ghost! It is difficult to imagine that Wilkins' memory had preserved so many details, and yet he could not recall the most important particular--- where was the map?'
Thoroughly dissatisfied, Hedden returned to Oak and resumed digging. He had planned to bore out laterally from the 150 foot level in a radial pattern in order to probe the area completely. However it was necessary to timber the hole so closely at the bottom that there was no room to operate a drill, and the dampness caused frequent electrical breakdowns.
In 1934, before he began excavating, Hedden met a young man who had been working on the island for a month with a churn drill. Baker, as he was known, had made several deep holes near the Money Pit and told Hedden he had had no luck. But he had run across one peculiar thing. Once when the drill was pulled up he noticed specks of a silvery substance mixed with the clay on the point. It was free mercury. (Mercury is almost never found in its metallic form in nature.)
Lack of funds prevented Hedden from continuing the search and in 1939 Erwin T. Hamilton took over the work for three years.
Hamilton was a professor of mechanical engineering at New York University. He sank a smaller shaft from the bottom of Hedden's to a hundred and seventy-one feet and hit heavy gravel. Another water tunnel, entering from the general direction of the south shore, was found at a hundred and sixty-five feet. He drilled twenty feet more into the gravel without striking anything.
Hamilton completely explored the tunnels dug by the 1849 company and found the salt water had perfectly preserved the timbering. He followed one passage that led directly under the old Sink Hole; for some unknown reason it there doubled in height and width and then ended suddenly. Tools and partially erected beams had been dropped and left behind. Apparently water had burst into this tunnel because another one had been started further up which avoided the area entirely. But Hamilton found only one other thing of interest. While digging at ninety feet near Smith's Cove, in what seemed to be ground undisturbed by previous treasure-hunters, one of his workmen sent up something tied to a line. It was a single leaf of tobacco, and was tightly rolled.
In July of 1952 my wife and I made a visit to Oak Island. The local people know little of this history and are inclined to discount the possibility of any treasure. Rumors were heard that someone was planning to bulldoze the whole east end of the island into the sea; however this would accomplish little since the treasure seems to be now more than a hundred feet below sea level. The island has been almost a major industry for the natives and succeeding generations of many families have toiled on the various projects. Ten years ago a tea-room operated successfully on the island from the business of tourists visiting the works.
We found a boy with an ancient inboard on the western shore of the bay. He was in the tourist ferrying business, which was poor since we were his first customers of the season. We landed on the remains of Hedden's dock, partly destroyed by a hurricane in 1944. Most of the grim oaks were bare and dead, victims of the black ants and a new crop of spruce growing thick around them. Out of curiosity I cut one down. It had seen some strange sights, for the tree-rings showed it was born in 1793.
We climbed the hill jutting up from Smith's Cove. This end of the island had been a hayfield as late as 1942; now there was only a narrow path through a thick stand of Christmas Trees. Most of our attention was occupied by beating off the black flies and mosquitos that swarmed out of the woods. At the top of the hill I slipped part way into a hole ten inches wide and thirty feet deep. The landscape was pocked with these potholes, test drillings by some recent hopeful.
The view of Mahone Bay was beautiful, dotted with fuzzy islands, but the sight of the treasure pit was depressing. Old pictures of the workings had shown several large buildings and machine sheds around it. Now the ground was stripped and only the top of that heartbreaking hole appeared. The level of the earth near it had sunk fifteen or twenty feet from the col- lapse of previous shafts. What we could see of the timbering was in fair shape. Near the pit we found the drilled stone, the west end of the base line on the Kidd chart. The eastern stone we learned had been covered over by Hamilton's work on the beach.
We climbed down to the shore opposite Smith's Cove and stumbled over the boulders looking for the stone triangle. The beach there is receding from the pounding of the tide; it has been estimated that the island has lost sixty feet on that side in the last two hundred years. In a small clearing, just on the edge of solid ground, we found the triangle. Following a compass north we pushed through the thick brush, up the hill again, headed straight for the Money Pit.
Northwest of the shaft was Hedden's bunkhouse, boarded up and deserted. Near the front porch lay four old pieces of broken rock; later we learned the history of these relics. On the beach several hundred yards northwest of Smith's Cove had been one huge rock. It had carvings, old and new, on one flat vertical surface. In the 1920's someone had dynamited it and dug underneath in a vain hope of disinterring some clue to the treasure. The scattered fragments were collected and brought up to the cabin. Many of the pieces were probably missing but we photographed the ones remaining. Some of the carvings were obviously recent and in English, yet one stone was inscribed with peculiar symbols. This is generally explained as the work of some prankster, but the figures are deeply cut and very weathered.
On our way home we met Gilbert Hedden in New York City. Over dinner and drinks he told us much of the story of his era on the island. He completely believes in something buried there, and would try again if the opportunity to do so came. He spent only his own money on the work and considerably diminished his own fortunes to attest his faith. Although he thinks gold coins might have been planted on the island to encourage investors in the treasure companies, the parchment is much too unlikely to have been the result of a similar scheme. Finding the treasure now is even more complicated because it has been penetrated by drills several times, undermined once and collapsed. had tons of debris dropped on it and has been constantly stirred by the action of the tides and pumps.
So much we know about Oak Island. During the summer an occasional sailboat comes alongside the battered dock and a few tourists stroll up the hill for a look at the Money Pit. Otherwise it is just another island in the Bay. Almost everyone is dead who dug and cursed, sweated and dreamed of gold. The tourists joke and throw pebbles into the pit, but those that view the stone triangle are silent and thoughtful . . . because it is there!
II.
Or I shall live your Epitaph to make
Or you survive when I in earth am rotten,
From hence your memory death cannot take,
Although in me each part will be forgotten.
Your name from hence immortall life shall have
Though I (once gone) to all the world must dye
The earth can yeeld me but a common grave
When you intombed in mens eyes shall lye
Your monument shall be my gentle verse
Which eyes not yet created shall ore-read
And toungs to be, your beeing shall rehearse,
When all the breathers of this world are dead,
You still shall live (such vertue hath my Pen)
Where breath most breaths, even in the mouths of men.
Shakespeare's Sonnet 81
Who dug the Money Pit? Not one thing has been found to connect it directly with any definite time or person. Although Kidd voyaged on the east coast of America in the vicinity of Boston, and is believed to have made one trip in the general direction of Nova Scotia, no real link has been verified.
Some explanation has been given that the treasure might be the French Crown Jewels which disappeared during the revolution in 1789. But it could not have been buried at that late date without arousing a clamor on the mainland. Another story is that of the French fortress at Louisburg, 240 miles north of Mahone Bay. This fort was the center of French power in the New World and was captured by the British in 1745. A fortune, being the payroll of the army, vanished and was never recovered by the British. Later several millions in gold was sent from France to rebuild the fort, but the money was never spent or accounted for. However there seems to be no factual connection between these events and Oak Island.
Although not credited with the discovery of America, John Cabot landed on the North American mainland before Columbus in 1497. He reported the latitude of his landfall as 45 degrees north. He explored the coast and probably passed Oak Island at 44 degrees 30 minutes. Thus Nova Scotia has been known as long as any part of the New World.
Hedden believes that the original shaft must have been sunk about the middle of the Seventeenth Century. The engineering work, although entirely possible with the equipment of those times, would have taken at least a whole summer. Such extensive operations would have attracted attention if done after that time, and some local legend would have survived.
The planning and preparation for the work seems fantastic considering how long ago it was done. The shaft was dug to something over a hundred feet and wooden platforms erected every ten feet as stages by which to lift the dirt out. These were left in the hole, partly because it was easier and perhaps to prevent the earth from sinking in after it had been filled. Digging the two water tunnels and packing them with boulders would be no mean accomplishment today, to say nothing of the complete excavation of the beach.
There is one thing about Oak Island that chills your bones. The people who buried the treasure could not possibly have recovered it. They sailed away and didn't come back. They never intended to!
The water drowned out even the well-organized efforts of the 1849 company. It was not until 1863 that a steam pump had any effect on it. Water was a problem even until 1935 when electricity and two modern pumps finally got control of it. Even with these pumps the ground was like oatmeal, and the strongest timbering and bracing was needed to get anywhere.
These earthworks on Oak Island suggest an entire expeditionary force, organized in some highly civilized country, equipped with the finest tools and engineers their age could command. It was well financed and set sail from some old-world port prepared to spend many months on this project. The ship probably carried only ballast and took a long detour to the tropics where some time was taken to load a cargo of coconut fiber.
The weather in Nova Scotia prevents any outdoor work of the kind they expected to do except for three or four months during the year. When the shaft was finished, the water tunnels routed into the pit and the treasure buried, the ship sailed away. The crew must have realized the importance of what they were doing - - what happened to them? Yet none of them betrayed the secret and nobody ever came back.
Was this project carried out with such expense, effort and privacy in order to bury a treasure of gold and jewels? Only insanity could explain such a course. We cannot forget that it was impossible for these people, or any others living in their age, to dig it up again.
Was it their purpose to conceal some object forever? Why didn't they simply dump it overboard into some deep place in the ocean ?
There seems to be only one reasonable answer to this paradox. Some superior intelligence aboard was directing the burial of something which could not safely be seen or known in that time. It must be hidden in a way that would defeat the most persistent attempts at recovery. Yet it must be preserved at all costs in order that its contents be known to future generations.
The ancients are known to have protected their treasure-vaults by flooding them with water and concealing the valve which would drain them again. There is no drain and no valve on Oak Island. Pumps were known to that age, but no pump existed which would handle the hundreds of gallons of water the tunnels carried into the pit every minute. Would such pumps ever be invented, or the power to run them be discovered? Perhaps someone had faith they would be.
Though a solution to this riddle must be based largely on speculation, the writer has his own suspicions. Proof must wait for the treasure to be unearthed, but some exterior evidence exists which should not be overlooked. This writer believes that the curious earthworks on Oak Island may have some connection with the lost manuscripts of Sir Francis Bacon.
The object of this work is not to prove to anyone that Bacon wrote the Shakespeare plays. That conviction can only be earned by reading some of the hundreds of volumes that have been written on the subject. The cumulative weight of the documentary verification that Shakespeare did not, and Bacon did, write the plays is so enormous that any discussion here must be completely unsatisfactory. The gist of the Baconian case is that Bacon wrote them, and numerous other works, under various noms de plume . The names he used were those of actual persons who were well paid for the privilege. Bacon's purpose was to collect and organize all knowledge, scientific, historical, philosophical and otherwise, and to free the world from ignorance and superstition. Anonymity was an obsession with Bacon; he was trying to gain high public office while writing for the stage. The Theater and all who were connected with it were scorned and legally classified as vagabonds. Bacon could not afford to have his name besmirched with such an association.
No trace of the manuscripts of the plays has ever been found; neither has anything in the handwriting of Shakespeare except a few cramped signatures.
If Bacon did write them he certainly would have preserved the manuscripts as proof of his authorship. He did not care to acknowledge them in his own lifetime, and for various reasons intended the secret to be kept for some time after his death. In his Will he says:
For my name and memory, I leave it to men's charitable speeches, and to foreign nations, and the next ages.
The problem of the Baconian "heretics" has always been to produce the manuscripts or some equally indisputable evidence. A Dr. Orville Owen claimed to have found, in cipher, directions to dig under the River Wye in Gloucester, England. These directions told him to make a triangle of 123 feet and 33 paces, guided by certain landmarks, and he would find "boxes like eels in the mud, boxes swathed in camlet and covered with tar ." Dr. Owen dug at the place indicated and, though the work was greatly impeded by the tidal bore of the Severn River, he found a stone foundation of about the same size as the expected crypt, but the chamber and whatever it had contained had been removed. The explanation given for their absence is that after the parchments were buried Bacon was gnawed by fear of their discovery while he was still alive, and he later removed them to a safer place.
The following passage fromSylva Sylvarum , page 7, 1628 edition, reveals an interesting parallel with some conditions on Oak Island:
. . . It was reported by a Sober Man, that an Artificiall Spring may be made thus: Find out a hanging Ground, where there is a good quicke Fall of Rain-water. Lay a Half-Trough of Stone, of a good length, three or foure foot deep within the same Ground; with one end vpon the high Ground and the other vpon the low. Couer the Trough with Brakes a good thicknesse, and cast Sand vpon the Top of the Brakes: You shall see (saith hee) that after some showers are past, the lower End of the Trough will runne like a Spring of Water : which is no maruell, if it hold, while the Raine-water lasteth; But he said it would continue long after the Raine is past: As if the water did multiply it selfe vpon the Aire, by the helpe of the Coldnesse and Condensation of the Earth, and the Consort of the first Water.
Here if we substitute coconut fiber for "Brakes", water tunnel for "Trough" and tide for "Raine", and set the whole thing down on some lonely beach we have a pretty good description of the remarkable system of waterworks on Oak Island.
Bacon was likewise preoccupied with the preservation of parchments. He returns and returns to the subject; witness these quotations from the same volume:
And herein is contained also a great Secret of Preseruation of Bodies from Change; For if you can prohibit, that they neither turne into Aire , because no Aire commeth to them; Nor goe into the Bodies Adiacent . . . We see how Flies and Spiders , and the like, get a Sepulcher in Amber more Durable, than the Monument , and Embalming of the Body of any King . And I conceiue the like will be of Bodies put into Quick-Siluer . But then they must be but thin; As a leafe, or a peece of Paper, or Parchment; For if they haue a greater Crassitude, they will alter in their owne Body.
And on p. 99 (Exp. 376):
Bvrialls in Earth serue for Preseruation . . . if you intend Preseruation of Bodies . . . then you must doe one of these two: Either you must put them in Cases , whereby they may not touch the Earth ; Or else you must vault the Earth , whereby it may hang ouer them, and not touch them. (Exp. 379):. . . whosoeuer will make Experiments of Cold , let him be prouided of three Things; A Conseruatory of Snow ; A good large Vault , twenty foot at least vnder the Ground; And a Deep Well
Continuing on p. 193 (Exp. 771):
. . . Bodies , in Shining amber ; In Quick-Siluer ; . . . in Conseruatories of Snow ; &c. are preserued very long. . . the Body adiacent and Ambient (should) be not Commateriall, but meerely Heterogeneall . . . For if Nothing can be receiued by the One, Nothing can issue from the Other; Such are Quick-Siluer , and White-Amber , to Herbs and Flies . . . Livy doth relate, that there were found, at a time, two Coffins of Lead , in a Tombe ; Whereof the one contained the Body of King Numa ; It being some foure hundred yeares after his Death: And the other, his Bookes of Sacred Rites and Ceremonies , and the Discipline of the Pontises ; And that in the Coffin that had the Bodie , there was Nothing (at all) to be seene; but a little light Cinders about the Sides ; But in the Coffin that had the Bookes , they were found as fresh, as if they had beene but newly Written; being written in Parchment , and couered ouer with Watch Candles of Wax , three or foure fold.
Many pages of Sylva Sylvarum are similarly devoted to the preservation of various materials. In the New Atlantis we find:
We haue large and deepe Caues of seuerall Depths: The deepest are sunke 600. Fathome. . . These Caues we call the Lower Region; and wee vse them for all . . . Conseruations of Bodies.
Bacon must have been well acquainted with Nova Scotia; in the early Seventeenth Century a colony was granted to him and his associates "from 46 degrees North to 52 degrees North Latitude, together with the seas and islands lying within ten leagues of the coast. . . ." Latitude and Longitude were rough measurements in that time, and Bacon's colony in Newfoundland may well have included Oak Island.
Has the stone triangle any significance as a Baconian symbol? The "rocker" beneath it is an ancient astronomical sign for furthest north , the direction of the Money Pit. Bacon, an intense student of Plutarch, had certainly read his interpretation of the triangle, found in On the Cessation of Oracles :
The area within this triangle is the common hearth of them all, and is named the Plain of Truth, in which Reason, the forms and pattern of all things that have been, and that shall be, are stored up, not to be disturbed; and, as eternity dwells around them, from thence Time, like a stream from a fountain, flows down upon the Worlds.
Thus the clues fall into place, one by one, yet leaving nothing on which one can put a finger and say, this explains it all, this is proof . Where does Wilkins and his map fit into this picture of fantastic "coincidence ?" The quicksilver provokes the imagination, the symbol stone baffles the decipherer. But the parchment, still owned by Melvin Chappell of Sydney, N. S., cannot be denied. The existence of the wooden platforms every ten feet proves the presence of some buried object. The water tunnels, carrying their streams of salt water down into the depths of the island, frustrate the most determined treasure-seekers. And the most challenging conclusion of all remains -- those men who dug so deep, so many years ago, could not themselves have recovered the treasure!
One more story, although without much foundation, should be reported. While Hedden was working on the island he was approached by a local character who told him he had found a mysterious inscribed stone. He described it as being a picture of the Sun, with flaming rays, surrounded by some strange letters he could not read. He wanted several hundred dollars to reveal its location; Hedden refused and it was never found. Another legend persists in Mahone Bay that the Oaks are the real guardians of the treasure. The natives say it will not be unearthed until the last Oak is dead.
There are two left.
The End
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