The Oak Island Mystery (5 page)

The Truro Company's Attempt in 1849

D
aniel
McGinnis was already in his grave and Smith and Vaughan were both in their seventies before the next attack on the Money Pit was launched. This was undertaken by the Truro Company in 1849. The mysterious treasure which John and Anthony had been trying to locate since they were teenagers remained as tantalizing and as elusive as ever.

Some accounts list the members of the Truro Syndicate as including a Dr. David Barnes Lynds, who may have been Simeon's son or grandson. Other accounts relate that it was Simeon himself, now a very old man, who was the Lynds involved with the Truro Syndicate of 1849. It is not beyond the bounds of possibility. Captain Anthony Vaughan, either the son or grandson of the Anthony Vaughan, who made the original discovery, died in New York in 1948 at the age of 100. This same Captain Vaughan remembered how as a very young boy he had been present when a major discovery — a set of fan-shaped drains — had been made at Smith's Cove. It was the Truro Syndicate who found both these breach drains and at least one of the flood tunnels which linked them to the Money Pit. In addition to whichever Lynds it was, plus Smith and Vaughan, the aging survivors of the 1795 discovery, the Truro group, which was formally inaugurated in 1845, consisted of John (or James) Pitblado (or Pitbladdo), John Gamell, Robert Creelman, Adam Tupper, and Jotham McCully. McCully was their site manager in charge of all operations. Pitblado was responsible for drilling and ancillary activities. Their work on the island began in earnest in 1849. The invaluable continuity provided by the presence of earlier searchers like Smith and Vaughan gave the Truro team a flying start.

Forty years had gone by since the Onslow men's heroic failure, and during those four decades the original Money Pit, along with the drainage shafts which had been dug nearby, had collapsed. Old Anthony Vaughan was still able to identify the site of the original Money Pit with perfect accuracy and the Truro workers began re-excavating there. Just a few feet down they found the remains of a broken pump which the Onslow men had abandoned when their work was overwhelmed by flood water.

Hoping that the inundation which had beaten the Onslow syndicate so long ago had now subsided, the Truro team continued excavating ever deeper. They were well over eighty feet down after some two weeks' digging and their luck was still holding as far as the water was concerned.

It was a Saturday night. Sunday was an important holy day to pious nineteenth-century Nova Scotians — even if they did believe that a fabulous treasure lay scarcely ten feet farther down the shaft they were re-excavating. The pit looked dry and safe: all the signs were favourable as the Truro men went off to worship in Chester that Sunday morning.

When they returned to Oak Island after lunch the Money Pit was sixty feet deep in water — exactly as it had been when it bested the Onslow men in 1805. They bailed as vigorously as their Onslow predecessors had done, but it had no perceptible effect on the water level. One eyewitness said that it was like trying to eat soup with a fork!

Jotham McCully believed in the prudent old military maxim: “Time spent in reconnaissance is never wasted.” He decided to explore the depths of the shaft with a pod auger. This was a piece of prospecting equipment mainly used in the mid-nineteenth century by mining speculators looking for coal. The key to its operation was a vital component known as a “valve sludger.” This was a sturdy tube for raising the core samples: it worked on the principle of a one way valve which would pick up material, as it cut its way downwards. The Truro men's tragedy was their need to economize on equipment: they had only one valve sludger and they lost it about 110 feet down while drilling their first exploratory hole. A pod auger has a strong, sharp tip (rather like a chisel) and spiral grooves similar to those in a rifle barrel for retrieving the core samples.

The only replacement for the valve sludger available to them was of very inferior design: it had a simple ball and retaining pin instead of a proper valve. The pin not only prevented the ball from dropping out: it prevented most small, loose objects such as coins or jewels from being retrieved. Soil, clay, rock splinters, wood, or fibre fragments could circumnavigate the pin — pieces of treasure could not. This small, but vitally important, difference in the augers was the cause of the Truro syndicate's subsequent frustration and disappointment. Their pod auger went right through two buried casks or boxes of loose metal without being able to bring any of the contents to the surface.

To try to maximize the effectiveness of their drill, the Truro team constructed a sturdy working platform thirty feet down the Money Pit just above the flood water. From this vantage point they made their first hole slightly west of centre. It was this hole which cost them their valve sludger. The remaining holes were in a line which moved east from the initial boring. The first two sets of samples produced only mud, clay, soil, gravel, and a few insignificant stones which were small enough to negotiate the retaining pin below the ball. The next three holes provided important evidence.

At the ninety-eight-foot level — precisely the depth where the Onslow men had hit with their iron probing rods forty years earlier — the pod auger went through a spruce platform nearly six inches thick. There was then a space of a foot or so through which the bit dropped effortlessly. Below this small, empty zone, the auger bit through four inches of oak and then encountered nearly two feet of tantalizing loose metal which it could not retrieve. Next came a further four inches of oak, which was immediately repeated. The auger then threaded its way awkwardly and reluctantly through another two feet or so of the irretrievable loose metal. After that it chopped through another four inches of oak with six inches of spruce below that. Under this spruce layer the auger detected seven or eight feet of backfilled clay, which had evidently been disturbed at some time in the past. Below this previously-worked material the drill encountered only natural virgin clay as far as McCully and his men could ascertain.

Subsequent drillings again hit the ninety-eight-foot platform and the side of a chest, cask, or sarcophagus. Small splinters of wood came up from it, and McCully noted with commendable precision and attention to detail that the drill behaved oddly and erratically as though the revolving chisel tip was struck repeatedly against a wooden obstruction parallel to one side of the descending drill. Coconut fibre also came up, and, very significantly, three or four links of gold chain, perhaps from a necklace or bracelet; perhaps from the epaulette of an officer's uniform, or from the ornately decorated robes of a long dead religious leader. McCully himself wondered if it was part of an old-fashioned watch chain.

The continuity and interconnection of the various teams who worked on the Money Pit are significant. Two of the original Onslow men in 1803 had been Colonel Robert Archibald and Captain David Archibald. In 1849, Pitblado certainly knew Charles Dickson Archibald of the Acadian Iron Works. This was located in Londonderry, Nova Scotia. James (or John?) Pitblado may have been a somewhat dubious character, or, at the most charitable interpretation, an unscrupulous opportunist. He had been instructed by the Truro team to bring every fragment raised by the drill for microscopic examination. John Gammell, a major shareholder, claimed that he had seen Pitblado take something from the drill, examine it very closely, and slip it into this pocket surreptitiously when he thought he was unobserved. Gammell challenged Pitblado and asked to see what had been retrieved. Pitblado refused, saying he would show it to all the shareholders together at their next meeting. He never did.

Leaving the island that day with the mystery object, Pitblado contacted Charles Archibald, who applied for a government licence to search for treasure on Oak Island. All he got were the rights to hunt on empty land, or land which had not been granted to anyone. Not satisfied with that — it excluded him and Pitblado from the vital Money Pit area — he attempted to buy the east end of Oak Island. He failed. Not long afterwards he left Nova Scotia and settled in England. Pitblado vanished into obscurity amid contradictory hearsay. Some reports made him the first victim of the legendary Oak Island nemesis. One account says he was killed in a mining accident; another relates that it happened during railroad construction. Whatever the precise circumstances of his death, word went round that Pitblado had died shortly after pocketing that unknown fragment of treasure which he had found in the pod auger. What might that mysterious object have been? The first suggestion is that it was a small piece of gold, or a jewel. It might also have been a scrap of parchment, a precursor of the tiny piece which was retrieved by T.P. Putnam and examined by Dr. Andrew Porter on September 6, 1897. Another intriguing possibility is that Pitblado found not merely a precious jewel or gemstone, but one which bore a carefully inscribed mason's mark. Suppose that the inscription on the strange stone unearthed by the Onslow men had contained masons' marks and that these had been regarded as an unknown alphabet by the men who had puzzled over them in 1803.

Pitblado's action has yet another parallel with the curious story of Rennes-le-Château: according to one account, during the restoration work on the church, in the course of which the “Knight's Tombstone” was discovered, one of the builders thought he saw something glinting underneath. Saunière abruptly brought the day's work to a halt on the grounds that they could not leave a hole in the floor on the Sunday following. By the time work resumed on Monday, somebody had disturbed the stone which had been left covering the hole, and the “glinting object” had disappeared.

Back to the Truro team on Oak Island! The explorers next made a discovery that diverted their attention from Pitblado's disloyalty. They noticed that the water in the flooded shafts rose and fell a foot or two as the tides came and went around the island. The question that McCully and his team asked themselves repeatedly was: “Why was there no water in any of the additional shafts until those shafts were connected to the Money Pit?” The clay was very hard, practically impermeable. Few men knew better than those rugged old Truro diggers just how hard the going really was. They argued that if a natural waterway or underground stream ran from deep in the Money Pit to the Atlantic Ocean, it would have prevented the original workers from completing their design. In addition, the impermeable clay through which the shaft had been sunk made such a natural watercourse very improbable.

Observations at Smith's Cove at low tide had revealed water trickling down the beach towards the sea. Putting their observations and deductions together, the Truro men began to wonder whether the unknown miners who had sunk the Money Pit with its many elaborate layers of oak, putty, fibre, and charcoal, had somehow connected it to the ocean.

The Truro team began to dig up the beach at Smith's Cove. The first thing they found was a massive sheet of coconut fibre which covered the shoreline for about 150 feet. The fibre layer was between two and three inches deep and below it lay several more inches of tough, old, salt-resistant eel grass, which was, however, now showing signs of decay. It had evidently been there a long time. This double blanket of eel grass and coconut fibre covered the shore between high and low tide levels. It would seem to have served two purposes: to retain and transmit water like an enormous sponge; and to prevent sand and clay from passing through to clog whatever lay beneath.

Simplicity is the hallmark of genius. Standing on the shoulders of the intellectual giants who pioneered the path, the average man and woman can see their way forward to new discoveries. Armed with high-powered computers linked to I.T. databases, third year high school students can solve in minutes problems that would have delayed Archimedes, Newton, or Einstein for several weeks. To construct an underground defence system using twentieth century technology, high-powered excavators, and bulldozers is no more than an average task: to construct it with very simple and limited resources is an outstanding achievement.

Under the eel grass and coconut fibre filter-blanket, the unknown engineer laid a mass of stones and boulders completely free from sand and clay. It seemed to bear a remarkable similarity to a Roman road, as if its builder had been familiar with their road-building technique.