The Oak Island Mystery (4 page)

The earliest existing deed showing a change of land ownership on Oak Island indicates that Timothy Lynch bought plot nineteen from Edward Smith on March 8, 1768. Both men lived in Chester, and the plot was sold for five pounds sterling.

It seems likely that it was Edward Smith who sold his land to Timothy Lynch, and gave his name to Smith's Cove. The two Smiths don't seem to have been related, as early records suggest that the John Smith who later bought the eastern end of Oak Island had originally come from Boston and had been in Nova Scotia only since 1790.

With stakes to mark the place, brushwood over the top of the pit and John Smith in legal possession of the plot which contained it, the first attempt to get at the treasure ended. No one else, it seemed, was willing to put time or money into helping the three young adventurers who had made their great discovery in 1795. It was not only pressure of work which discouraged the local settlers from getting involved with Oak Island. The place had a sinister reputation. Oak Island was, in many local minds a place of ill omen.

It was by no means unusual for pirates to bury a watchman with their treasure, so that his aggrieved and restless spirit would act as a vengeful, supernatural guardian of their hidden wealth. There are also curious legends of a great black dog having been seen on the island from time to time.

This links up with various legends of hell hounds from many ages and many lands. Most of those legends can be traced back to Ce
rberus, the three-headed dog of Roman mythology who was believed to guard the entrance to the underworld. Hercules succeeded in dragging the monster up to earth, and then let him go again. Orpheus lulled him to sleep by playing his lyre. The Sibyl who conducted Aeneas through the underworld put Cerberus to sleep with a cake made from poppies and honey. Brewer's famous
Dictionary of Phrase and Fable
suggests that the Cerberus myth arose from the ancient Egyptian custom of using fierce dogs to guard graves from would-be thieves and desecrators.

In our own native Norfolk in England, we are familiar with very persistent legends of the Black Shuck, a ghostly dog who is said to haunt the north Norfolk coast, travelling between the graves of two brothers who once owned him but were drowned at sea. Their bodies were washed ashore and buried in different village churchyards; the faithful hound spends one night on each grave in turn. A far less sentimental East Anglican legend is the story of the Black Dog of Bungay — described as the size of a pony and with eyes like live coals. This monster was said to have broken into Bungay Church one night and savaged many of the worshippers. Another explanation for these supernatural hound stories is the legend of the Wild Hunt.

There is an ancient German version of this legend concerning the Black Forest, and a French version involving the woods at Fountainebleau. The English tale concerns Herne the Hunter who is associated with Herne's Oak and Windsor Forest. All these wild spectral huntsmen were accompanied by their hounds.

If, as Michael Bradley thoughtfully suggests, there is strong evidence that the Oak Island treasure has a medieval European connection, then it is not beyond the bounds of possibility that the Oak Island Hound story is connected with one of the wild hunt legends. Herne, it must also be remembered, was strongly associated with oak trees, as were the ancient Druids. If a medieval Wild Hunt legend filtered across to Oak Island, was it carried there by medieval voyagers?

The search for the treasure was in abeyance for a year or two, and then John Smith had a momentous meeting with Simeon Lynds.

The Work of the
Onslow Company in 1803

T
he
next adventurer to take up the challenge of Oak Island was Simeon Lynds, although there is some confusion about how he came to be involved. One version relates that he was a doctor from Truro, Nova Scotia, who attended the birth of Mrs. Smith's first child in 1802. According to this account, while they were waiting for the baby to arrive, John told Dr. Lynds about the Money Pit, and the unsuccessful attempts which he, Daniel and Anthony had made seven or eight years previously. Records appear to indicate, however, that the Smiths' first child had already been baptized in 1798.

Another more widely known and more likely version makes Simeon Lynds a local businessman from either Truro or nearby Onslow, who was a friend, or relative, of Anthony Vaughan's or John Smith's father — possibly of both men. On a visit to Vaughan or Smith, senior, Lynds heard about the boys' adventures in 1795, went over to the island with them to look around and came away convinced. The third version places Lynds as a business visitor to Chester who met Anthony Vaughan there and heard the Money Pit story from him. An article from
The Colonist
dated January 2, 1864, refers to “the late Simeon Lynds” as a relative of Vaughan's father, who was let into the Money Pit secret because of his family ties with the Vaughans. This
Colonist
source also suggests that it was Simeon's father, Thomas Lynds, who had the money and the right social connections to get the Onslow Company launched.

Relative, doctor, family friend, or travelling businessman, Simeon Lynds was intrigued by the account he had heard. He, or his father, certainly organized an effective consortium of business and professional men in and around Onslow, which became known as the Onslow Company. One member was Sheriff Tom Harris, another was Colonel Archibald, a town clerk and justice of the peace. He may well have been the father, or grandfather, of the other Archibald who was involved some fifty years later in the Pitblado episode.

The Onslow men dug away steadily, unearthing platforms of oak logs at regular ten-foot intervals as they cleared out more and more of the pit, but they encountered other curious layers as well. There are minor discrepancies and divergences in the accounts of what precisely was discovered at which level, but as the digging continued layers of putty, charcoal, and coconut fibre were pulled out.

There was so much putty spread over one layer of oak logs, according to one account, that it was used to glaze the windows of more than twenty local houses.

Hiram Walker was a ship's carpenter who lived in Chester at the time, and worked on the Money Pit. Years later he told his granddaughter, Mrs. Cottnam Smith, that he had seen “bushels of coconut fibre” being lifted out of the shaft as the work progressed.

These points about the quantities of putty and coconut fibre are significant ones. Those earlier investigators who have tried to suggest that the Money Pit was merely a natural sink-hole in the limestone, and that the tunnels connecting it to Smith's Cove and the southern shore were just fortuitous faults in the rock, have argued that the oak logs, fibre, putty, and charcoal had either slid into the shaft over many years, or been carried in up the tunnels gradually by the tides of centuries.

The actual descriptions of the pit and the accounts of how the work proceeded tell very different stories. A little coconut fibre might have drifted in, a few kilograms of putty might have been washed ashore from a wreck, a chunk or two of charcoal from a campfire, or a burnt-out vessel might have got down a natural shaft. The imagination can even stretch to a few oak branches blowing down in a gale and sliding together like a “platform” down the natural sinkhole.

One “oak platform”? One or two nuggets of marine putty? A handful of charcoal? A few yards' drift of sparsely distributed coconut fibre? That much might just have got down there naturally. But there were at least ten oak platforms, at regular intervals, all wedged firmly into the hard clay of the shaft's walls. There was a full, flat, regular layer of charcoal, and a similar one of putty. There was enough coconut fibre to fill several bushel baskets. But the most damning pieces of contradictory evidence were the original diggers' pick marks clearly visible in the hard clay walls in 1795.

Another very intriguing find for the Onslow Company was the large, flat stone encountered just above the ninety-foot level.

The diggers tried to decipher the coded message but without success, wondering whether it was a vital clue to the whereabouts of the treasure, or to the identity of the original miners.

Almost as great a mystery as the strange inscription is the curious riddle of what subsequently happened to the stone itself. John Smith was halfway through building a fireplace in his Oak Island farmhouse: he incorporated the stone into that — partly to keep it safe, and partly to provide a conversation piece.

In 1865 the stone was taken from the Smith homestead and placed on display in the window of the bookbindery belonging to A. and H. Creighton in Halifax. A.O. Creighton was at that time treasurer of one of the Oak Island treasure hunting syndicates, and it was hoped that the displayed stone would encourage new shareholders to participate in the search. A witness named Jefferson MacDonald is reported to have said that he had seen the stone at close quarters, had helped to move it in fact, and that there was no doubt at all that there was a coded inscription on it which no one had been able to solve.

A.O. Creighton left the business in 1879 and a new firm was started by Herbert Creighton and Edward Marshall. Edward's son Harry was with the firm from 1890 onwards, and he made a statement about the stone in 1935 to treasure hunter Frederick Blair and his lawyer Reginald Harris. The gist of Harry Marshall's evidence was that he remembered the stone well, but had never seen the inscription on it because it had been worn away by years of use as a bookbinder's beating stone. He said that the stone was two feet long, just over a foot wide, and about ten inches thick. He guessed its weight in the region of 175 pounds.
[1]
Both surfaces were smooth, but the sides were rough. Harry added that it was a very hard, finely grained stone with an olive tinge. He thought it might have been porphyry or granite. He also commented that it was totally unlike any stone he had ever seen in Nova Scotia.

If Harry Marshall was correct in his guess that the strange stone was porphyry, then a link with ancient Egypt may be established. In the days of Pliny (first century A.D.) mottled red or purple rocks were called porphorytes from the Greek word meaning “red.” Much of this early stone was volcanic, but the first Italian sculptors thought it was a variety of marble. The best red porphyry, known as
porfido rosso antico
, from which many ancient Egyptian monuments were carved, came from substantial deposits along the west coast of the Red Sea. The secret of its whereabouts was lost for many years, but the quarry was rediscovered at Jebel Dhokan.

Edward R. Snow mentions the stone in
True Tales of Buried Treasure
(New York: Dodd, Mead, and Co., 1962) and relates that the Reverend A.T. Kempton of Cambridge, Massachusetts, said that an old Irish teacher had translated it to read: “Forty feet below two million pounds are buried.” Our own cryptographer, computer engineer Paul V.S. Townsend, M.Sc., reached the same conclusion independently in under ten minutes. The decipherment is shown in the illustration on the diagram, along with the key to the symbols used. The second character is assumed to be a second point-down triangle (F) drawn in error and crossed out — this character is ignored in the decoding.

All very well, but everything depends upon whether the inscription as recorded is the original one which actually appeared on the stone when it was first unearthed from the Money Pit in 1803. The suspicion lingers that someone anxious to raise funds in 1865 put an entirely spurious message on the stone using a simple substitution cipher that was easy to crack. Conan Doyle's short story “The Dancing Men” provides a similar riddle for Holmes to solve. What if that easy hoax code overlaid a genuine ancient inscription of similar appearance, to which the hoaxer had only to make a few additions and alterations? In that case we are dealing with a stone palimpsest, something from which the original writing has been erased or covered to make way for further writing. Historically, the process was usually applied to parchments and monumental brasses which were turned and re-engraved on the reverse side. The original Greek words
palin
and
psao
from which “palimpsest” is derived mean literally “again” and “to rub smooth.”

George Young drew our attention to a decipherment of the stone made by Professor Barry Fell from a copy of the inscription provided for him by Phyllis Donohue. Fell, an internationally acclaimed epigrapher, produced a religious text translation of the Money Pit stone from an early Libyan Arabic dialect used by a branch of the North African Coptic Church centuries ago.

Coptic is best understood as the linguistic descendant of the ancient Egyptian language. The oldest documents in the Coptic date back to the second and third centuries of the Christian era and are translations of the Christian scriptures. The writers tended to use Greek with seven demotic symbols added, rather than to use their own demotic script.

Coptic is known to exist in six forms: Bashmuric and Bohairic from Lower Egypt; Fayumic, Asyutic, Akhmimic, and Sahidic from Upper Egypt. There may be others.

What is of particular interest about a probable Coptic inscription on the Money Pit stone, and its relevance to the final solution of the Oak Island mystery, is that two very early Coptic manuscripts, the
Pistis Sophia
in the British Museum and the
Bruce Codex
in the Bodleian Library, both relate to an obscure Gnostic sect operating in Egypt in the third century A.D. Ancient Gnostic secrets are inextricably interwoven into the mystery of Rennes-le-Château, and the Rennes clues in turn throw light on the Oak Island problem.

If George Young's thought-provoking hypothesis and Professor Fell's scholarly interpretation are the correct ones — and there is some real likelihood that they are — then they provide an intriguing link between ancient Egypt and Oak Island.

James McNutt, who was working on Oak Island in the 1860s, refers to the inscribed slab as a piece of “freestone” and said that it was unlike any other stone on the Nova Scotian coast. Towards the close of the nineteenth century, Judge Des Brisays wrote an authoritative account of the Oak Island events up to and including his own time. He refers to the stone and says that the finders were unable to make sense of it “… either because it was too badly cut, or did not appear to be in their own vernacular.…”

So the Onslow team has removed the curiously coded slab and resumed excavations. We can picture them now at the ninety-foot level. The daylight is fading as they remove the oak platform which lay just below the stone slab. One after another the men begin to notice that water is leaking into the Money Pit — and in substantial quantities. By this time they are taking out one load of water for every two loads of clay.

Convinced that the mysterious stone meant something, and that they must now be very close to whatever precious object was buried in the shaft, they began probing the soggy base of the pit with long iron rods. At the ninety-eight-foot level those probes struck something impenetrably hard which extended from one side of the Money Pit to the other. Water and darkness were now posing such serious problems that the Onslow men decided to resume their search at first light: it turned out to be a life-saving decision.

First light brought a grim disappointment: the Money Pit was over sixty feet deep in water. One account relates that as they gathered round the opening, an unlucky member of the expedition slipped into the flooded shaft, only to sputter to the surface shouting that the water tasted of salt. “Salt!” he repeated, as his companions lowered a rope and hauled him to safety. The implication was that in some inexplicable way the Atlantic had found its way through the hitherto impenetrable clay. It did not dawn on the Onslow men at that stage that the ocean might have had some help from the original architect of the Money Pit and its bewildering labyrinth.