The Oak Island Mystery (6 page)

The Drain and Tunnel System

J
otham
B. McCully and his Truro men had discovered the amazing drainage system and the artificial beach at Smith's Cove. It partly answered the question of how water was reaching the Money Pit below the ninety-foot level, but it raised many more questions than it answered.

Looked at as a problem in basic logistics, there is: the construction of the coffer dam; the removal of the natural sand and clay from that area; the location, transportation, and embedding of the stones and boulders; the planning and laying of the five fan-shaped drains; the digging of at least one — possibly two or three — flood tunnels; and the accurate connection of the tunnel, or tunnels, to the Money Pit at depths greater than ninety feet. By calculating the size of the coffer dam; the are
a and depth of the artificial beach; the amount of clay which would have had to be removed from the tunnel and dumped elsewhere … and various other factors, a broad idea of the number of man-hours could be estimated.

Some types of work are totally flexible in their homogeneity and their consequent man-hour implications. For example, some jobs can be done equally well by one man taking eighty hours, by ten men taking eight hours or by 160 men taking half an hour. Other tasks have specific requirements which make team work more effective than individual work. Some work theatres' physical and spatial limitations make large teams impractical.

Only one or two men at a time can cut away at the same narrow seam face in certain mines, for example. Other occupations need forty or fifty powerful workers operating simultaneously to raise a heavy mast, or to haul a ship up a beach to be careened. A work-study expert could devise an optimum number of workers for each of the various sub-tasks involved in creating the Money Pit and its ancillary drainage and tunnels systems. Experts might reach marginally different conclusions, but they would be in broad agreement about the size of the work force required to complete the whole job in a reasonable time. Unless we are prepared to consider a project that would stretch into years rather than months, we must envisage a work force of at least thirty people, with the necessary picks, shovels, ropes, pulleys, trolleys, sledges, barrels, and carts to make the job possible.

At the back of all this physical effort there has to be inspired planning: careful, accurate designing and effective administration and organization. The Oak Island engineers and miners needed food, drink, clothing, and shelter — not just for basic humanitarian reasons, but simply to keep them functioning effectively. The least caring slave exploiter provided the minimal conditions necessary to keep his slaves working. It was enlightened self-interest.

To try to understand the Oak Island Money Pit mystery, the investigator must attempt to answer these questions in connection with the artificial beach, the drains, the filters and the flood tunnels:

(a) Who had the engineering and administrative skills to plan and organize all of this?

(b) Who had the necessary work force available: voluntary, coerced, enslaved, or otherwise?

(c) Who had the time to keep that workforce on site for several months while the huge task was completed?

(d) Who had the essential resources and equipment available to feed and supply that substantial work force for the duration of the original Money Pit construction work?

(e) Who had the necessary motivation to initiate the whole amazing project in the first place, and the stamina to see it through to a satisfactory conclusion?

(f) Who believed that the contents of the Money Pit, the mysterious “x” which the pit and its flood system was built to protect, was really worth all that time, effort, planning, and organization?

Taking point (a) first, the possessor of the necessary engineering and administrative skills could have been a naval or military officer, especially one whose specialty was attacking or defending fortified positions, and, most appropriate of all, an engineering officer. Someone with tin, gold, or silver mining experience, perhaps in the old flood-prone tin mines of Cornwall, would be another likely candidate. A character from one of the famous Poldark historical romances springs to mind. Lower down the list, but by no means out of the running, might well be a Master Mason with Templar connections, a Viking boat builder, a Celtic sea-rover with experience of Welsh gold-mining, a Coptic religious refugee with experience of Egyptian building and tunnelling techniques, or a Mayan or Aztec architect.

Which of these candidates would have been most likely to have had factor (b), a large and well-disciplined work force, available? A detachment of sailors or marines, perhaps? Drake's dedicated Devonshire men, reinforced by a handful of Cornish tin miners, would readily have exchanged the hazards of the Spanish Main for the perils of the deep shafts and galleries ashore.

Discipline and order were the very essence of masonic life and the strict Rule of the Knights Templar. Masons and Templars would have worked unquestioningly and uncomplainingly at their Master's bidding to construct the Oak Island system. The Mores, with their proud and ruthless Viking Norman ancestry, eventually became the noble Sinclairs, the followers of the “Holy Light,” the Sanctus Clarus. Never lacking in courage, nor in building skills, a party of loyal Norsemen could have worked solidly together to construct the Money Pit and its defences. Celtic sea-rovers from Wales or Ireland would have had that fierce loyalty to their tribal chief which would have inspired them to sink the great shaft on Oak Island at his command — or to protect his corpse.

Or was George Young right in following Professor Fell's erudite translation of the words on that mysterious porphyry tablet discovered in 1803? Were the original builders a group of Coptic Christian refugees from Egypt who had made a semi-miraculous journey through the Pillars of Hercules and across the Atlantic in their resilient papyrus boats? Men schooled in ancient skills and traditions of the pyramid builders would have had little trouble in digging out the shafts and tunnels of Oak Island.

An ardently religious fellowship would have provided an ideally dedicated and devoted labour force to carry out the work. The Mayan and Aztec socio-political systems would also have provided bands of disciplined workers able and willing to undertake whatever arduous tasks their priests and kings laid upon them. The Oak Island structures would not have been beyond the competence of those old South American architects and their docile labourers.

Possible leaders and suitable work forces abound, but who would have had the (c) factor — time? Although best equipped, an eighteenth century military or naval group under tactical or strategic pressure might have had least time in which to complete the huge undertaking. The same strictures would have applied to Drake's Devonshire men two centuries before. Time was of the essence for Elizabethan maritime adventurers: an undertaking that could have been accomplished much faster than the Oak Island structure would have had more appeal for Drake and his men.

Master Masons and Templars, however, would not have been in a hurry. Turning their broad backs on an ungrateful Europe following the treachery of the odious Philip IV in 1307, the remnants of the Templars were nurtured and protected by the valiant Scottish Sinclairs. With that Sinclair help, a Templar expedition might well have reached Nova Scotia and set up an elaborate headquarters and secret treasure store on Oak Island long before Columbus sailed.

Refugees do not lack time. The patient strength which fashioned the great Templar fortresses of the Middle East could well have been applied to the long, slow process of securing their priceless treasures in the depths of the Money Pit and guarding it with a prodigious system of beach drains and flood tunnels.

Viking and Celtic sea raiders were often characterized by the speed with which they attacked and sailed away again. The laboriously slow Money Pit work is not really their style, but there are exceptions. To honour a dead leader, Vikings have been known to bury their hero and his ship together: the Money Pit would scarcely be more time-consuming than a ship burial. If, as George Young suspected, there are coffins rather than treasure chests down there, then a Viking origin is not entirely impossible.

Mayans or Aztecs retreating with their treasures from insatiable Spanish Conquistadors would have arrived as refugees with all the time in the world to bury and protect their precious hoard.

Point (d), the resources and supplies issue, poses entirely different questions, however. It is a case of swings and roundabouts. The possible builders with most time at their disposal were not necessarily those who would have been likely to be well-supplied. Naval or military engineers would have been properly provided with regulation rations — Spartan but adequate. Drake's men, suffering the horrendous privations of most Elizabethan seafarers, would not have been as well-provisioned as a naval or military group in the eighteenth century.

Templars and their accompanying Master Masons on a late fourteenth- or early fifteenth-century expedition would have been less well-provisioned than Drake's men: not through any failure of Sinclair generosity, but simply because the ability to store and ship the necessities for a long journey were not there to the same degree that was developed in later Tudor times when maritime activity expanded dramatically.

Vikings and Welsh sea raiders would have been likely to travel light as far as stores and provisions were concerned. They lacked preservatives and facilities for long campaigns. What Mayan and Aztec refugees might have carried is largely speculative. Ample quantities of thoroughly dried maize carried in large earthenware containers are certainly feasible, and one alternative interpretation of the inscription on the mysterious stone is that it is a message explaining how to cut off the water by dripping large quantities of corn or millet into the beach drains. Scientifically this might well have worked. As the grain expanded, it would have blocked the drain and temporarily cut off the water. Once the grain had rotted, the water would flow again and the deadly trap would be more or less reset. So Mayan or Aztec refugees might have had not only time and ample food supplies, but an ingenious way of circumventing and re-springing the water trap.

The fifth consideration — (e) the motivation — is probably the most important of all. Human beings climb mountains, canoe over rapids, and try to fathom challenging mysteries like the Oak Island Money Pit just because they are there. Given the necessary motivation, men and women can perform feats of daring courage or dogged persistence over long, hard years. What then was so important to the original miners that the deep shaft, the artificial beach, the connecting tunnels and all the back-breaking toil that went into creating them were readily acceptable? Human motivation is hard to understand. We do not always recognize our own reasons for doing or wanting things. Why does an enthusiastic philatelist mortgage his house and sell his car to acquire one more small, grubby, paper rectangle to place in the album in his safe? Why does a rock climber risk life and limb to scale a precipitous overhang when there's a grass path on the other side up which he could stroll to the summit with his dog and his grandmother on a warm summer afternoon?

There seem to be three major possibilities:

(i) Something was considered to be so uniquely valuable that only a depository as secure as the Money Pit was adequate. The motive was to preserve that immensely precious thing and to keep it safe.

(ii) Something was considered to be so sacred and holy that it must not be profaned or disturbed. The motive was to guard that holy thing, or that holy person's body, in the most effective way.

(iii) Something was considered to be so potentially dangerous (infinitely worse than plutonium or the anthrax bacillus) that it had to be made totally secure.

Every previous investigation into the Money Pit mystery has been concerned with the fundamental concept of keeping intruders out. What if all those elaborate defences, the platforms of oak logs, the putty, the fibre, and the charcoal were designed to keep something in? Look at a top security prison: its prime function is to keep people in — yet a visitor from another world might be forgiven for thinking that it had been designed to keep people out.

It is just barely feasible that the Oak Island motive was to prevent something from escaping from the depths of the pit?

Point (f), the final consideration of who was personally responsible for the whole scheme must wait for a later chapter.

All those extensive and elaborate drains and tunnels which Jotham B. McCully and his Truro excavators found in the mid-nineteenth century had to be there for a reason, one of overriding importance to the engineering genius who constructed them.

Whatever else they failed to accomplish, McCully's men found that amazing water trap and tunnel system and laid their findings out clearly for every subsequent investigator to puzzle over.