Robert the Bruce earned his excommunication by stabbing his rival to death on the altar of the Greyfriars Chapel. He gathered two important bishops and several nobles and had himself declared king on the Stone of Scone. After Robert the Bruce declared himself king of Scotland, he had ironically become an outlaw. He spent years living in caves, losing one family member after another to the English, only to emerge victorious at the Battle of Bannockburn. While history records many wars and battles where the English army was the better-trained and better-armed force and went to battle against Scots who were reduced to throwing spears and rocks, Bannockburn was different. The Scot forces at first seemed to be retreating, only to pull the English army in. Then a fresh force of knights emerged. The surprise to the English was devastating; they had expected an easy rout of their enemy only to find themselves fleeing for their lives. Scotland won its most critical battle in the war for independence. And the day was June 24, sacred in Templar tradition as St. John's Feast Day.
Robert Bruce was from a Norman family that had been part of the 1066 invasion. So were the Sinclairs of Rosslyn. The Sinclairs and their French relatives the St. Clairs were instrumental in creating the Knights Templar. In a time where families were often as powerful as nominal kings, both French and Scottish St. Clairs wielded great power. The Scotland branch would soon command a navy as great as any in fourteenth-century Europe and their ancestral home became Templar headquarters in hiding.

In 1398, almost a century before Columbus, Henry Sinclair of Rosslyn would lead an expedition to lands in eastern Canada and New England that had been visited by the Norse for centuries. His pilot was Antonio Zeno who kept detailed records and maps of the voyage. Landing in Nova Scotia on the second day of June in 1398, Sinclair sent a small army to explore. He would send his Italian navigator home and he would remain for at least one winter. From a base in Canada, Sinclair led a small army south. In Westford, Massachusetts, a skirmish with the native residents culminated in the death of Sir James Gunn. The Scottish force would leave a detailed carving in stone with the Clan Gunn coat of arms, which is still visible today. Another knight, unidentified, died or was killed on the route south, his skeleton and suit of armor to be discovered in Fall River in colonial times. The most remarkable monument to their expedition was the construction of an octagonal Templar chapel in Newport, Rhode Island. Modeled after the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, Templars would erect such structures in various places in Europe. The only other such temple in Scotland was in Orkney where the Sinclair family ruled. The "Newport Tower" would later become a matter of great debate, although the earliest European explorer to view the Rhode Island coast was Verrazano who recorded it on his map. Evidence of the pre-Columbian expedition would be brought home as well.
Starting in 1436 the Sinclair family planned the construction of a remarkably complex chapel in Rosslyn with carvings of pagan heads, and items allegedly unknown in Europe until after Columbus, like cornhusks and aloe. The brought construction workers, masons, from all over to build the chapel and to construct a massive hiding place in rock that could hold a treasure as well as an army. While the masons arrived in 1436, actual work in Scotland did not begin until 1441. It would make little sense to employ workers for five years without putting them to the task.
More likely, they were at work. The Sinclair fleet had brought their army of masons to the soon-to-be-discovered New World. There they would construct the booby-trapped Money Pit. Using engineering skills known both to the Templars and St. Bernard's Cistercians, the deep shaft, the long water tunnels, the false beach and concealed drains were all put in place.
For a century the Templar treasure would rest safe in Rosslyn. The descendants of the Templar knights would become organized as "free masons" and employed and protected by the Sinclair family. When James II became king he decreed the Sinclair family to be the hereditary guardians of the Freemasons. This connection has not been severed in Scotland.
The affairs of state and religion, however, would soon bring the Clan Sinclair to war again. Protestant mobs inspired by Calvin would sweep through Scotland. The target would be icons in Catholic Churches and the Sinclair family, ardent Catholics, gathered up the gold chalices and other goods of churches they supported. The English Crown, now in Protestant hands, rose against the families that controlled Scotland. In 1542, the Battle of Solway saw defeat for Scotland and the loss of Oliver Sinclair, the right hand of James V's reign, to English capture. The king predicted at the birth of his daughter Mary that his family dynasty would end. He placed Mary, later known as Mary, Queen of Scots in the care of the Sinclair family. Oliver, furloughed from English prison for a short visit to his home in 1545 disappeared from Scotland and history.
The premise of my book Lost Treasure of the Knights Templar, is that at this time the treasure was brought to Oak Island and sealed away. The remaining head of the Clan Sinclair, William would share the existence of the secret with Mary of Guise, the most powerful woman in France, and part of the extended Norman family. She proclaimed a "bond of obligation" to William. His "secret shown to us, we shall keep secret". The existence of a vault would be known to the Guise family, but the location would be a secret passed only within the family Sinclair. Subsequent wars and religious strife took a serious toll on the family. Along the way, Sinclairs would die suddenly, in war, in prison, and possibly of natural causes. At some point the secret location was not passed down to the next generation.

Today the most modern assault on the Money Pit will start anew. David Tobias, the current owner, first heard of Oak Island and the treasure search when he was a pilot training in Nova Scotia during World War II. He came back to Oak Island and the search for its treasure, first as an investor, soon as the owner of half of the island. He has not only brought millions of his own money to the table; he has brought the treasure search up to modern standards. Under his direction, the search has employed and consulted with corporations and with talent from the National Museum of Modern Science at Ottawa and the prestigious Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute. Last December his group was granted a new treasure license, extending for five years. Once recent legal hurdles are overcome, Tobias and his group known as Triton Alliance will again challenge the capabilities of the guardians of the Templar treasure.
Steven Sora is the author of The Lost Treasure of the Knights Templar: Solving the Oak Island Mystery (Destiny Books 1999).
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