The Oak Island Mystery (7 page)

The Secret of the Ancient Timbers

D
espite
the expensive failures of 1849 and 1850, there was great enthusiasm to have another go at the Money Pit. Many veterans of the Truro Company wanted to try again, and news of the amazing artificial beach and flood tunnels encouraged fresh investors to join them.

A new organization, the Oak Island Association, also headquartered in Truro, was inaugurated in April 1861. Adams Tupper and Jefferson MacDonald were veterans of the 1849 and 1850 expeditions, as was Jotham McCully. The leader, Samuel Retti, and James McNutt, the secretary, treasurer, and official log keeper, were new to Oak Island work. John Smith, the last of the three original explorers, had conveyed his Oak Island land to his sons, Thomas and Joseph, before he died. The boys sold it to Henry Stevens and he in turn sold it to Anthony Graves — who consequently became the major landowner on Oak Island. He made an advantageous deal with Retti's organization which entitled him to a third of any treasure they salvaged.

The Oak Island Association began its work with two clear objectives in mind. Based on the discoveries and disappointments of 1849 and 1850, they were determined to block off the flood tunnel from the artificial beach at Smith's Cove and then pump out the Money Pit. They were convinced that a sufficiently large work force would be able to accomplish both tasks with comparative ease and simplicity.

George Mitchell was the Association's foreman of works, and with the support of over sixty labourers and half as many horses he soon had the Money Pit cleared out and re-cribbed with timber well down below the eighty-foot level. At this juncture the heavy clay soil, which had slid into the shaft during the decade since work had last ceased (when the Truro team had failed) seemed to be blocking the flood tunnel quite effectively. Mitchell gave orders to stop digging at that point and shift operations to the flood tunnel.

Down through the bone-dry, brick-hard clay they cut a shaft nearly thirty feet east of the Money Pit. At 120 feet they gave up: their interceptor shaft had missed the elusive flood tunnel. This is not altogether surprising when due consideration is given to the problems which the original miners would have encountered. Various natural obstacles, principally boulders, must have lain between Smith's Cove and the lower levels of the Money Pit. Did the original builders follow the line of least resistance, going round a boulder here, following a seam of looser sand there? Intercepting the flood tunnel would have been like trying to locate a hidden corkscrew in total darkness using a long, thin knitting needle.

Frustrated and anxious to get results, Mitchell decided to repeat the now almost monotonously familiar technique which had invariably failed in the past: he cut yet another parallel shaft just a few feet west of the Money Pit. A horizontal tunnel a yard wide and four feet high was then driven from the base of this new shaft towards the Money Pit. Inevitably, water burst through and flooded this lateral tunnel as well as the vertical shaft. Mitchell's men retreated rapidly as it poured in.

For three days, horses and men tried unsuccessfully to bail it out, but with no success at all. Worse still, water was now rising in the Money Pit as well. Almost unbelievably, Mitchell now turned his attention to the 120-foot shaft again. This was the one he had first dug in the hope of intercepting the elusive flood tunnel. Once more his men began tunnelling sideways into the Money Pit and — sure enough — the water burst through again.

The only thing Mitchell could think of now was more bailing, so he rigged an arrangement of seventy-gallon casks over all three flooded shafts and allocated his full work force of horses and men to do the job. They worked non-stop in shifts for almost three days and this time there were visible results: the water was at last getting significantly lower. They seemed to be on the verge of success when soft clay soil plugged the tunnel between the Money Pit and the 120-foot shaft. Mitchell sent two men down to clear it out so that the vital bailing work could continue as before. These two men were actually nine or ten feet into the blocked tunnel when they heard a crash above them that sounded like an earthquake, or a bomb going off. The mud surged towards them like toothpaste from a tube which has been dropped on the bathroom floor and inadvertently trodden on by a sumo wrestler. They were fortunate to get out alive.

The horrendous destruction continued like something from a violent nightmare. Thousands of feet of timber — the cribbing protecting the interior walls of the Money Pit — was shaken down into the maelstrom below and disappeared. The water boiled and foamed like a gigantic witch's cauldron. One eyewitness said it looked volcanic. The lower levels of the Money Pit were now a cataclysmic ruin: the mysterious treasure chamber and its precious contents had fallen into a chaotic abyss.

Fragments of very ancient timber were retrieved by the escaping workmen. One of these “black with age” could not possibly have been part of the new cribbing which had just collapsed. Other fragments of much earlier work showed tool marks and bore holes which would have confirmed the exploratory drillings made by the Truro team in 1849 and 1850.

It would appear that the treasure chamber had been resting on some sort of thick supporting beams, or a platform, and that the work of 1803, 1849, and 1850 had weakened these when the explorers attempted to reach the treasure from below. The constant flooding, bailing, and pumping would have washed away significant quantities of the clay in which the thick supports had once been embedded. The final straw had been the Mitchell shafts and tunnels of 1861. The stubborn old supports finally gave way and the whole structure collapsed into the unknown depths below the Money Pit.

Faced with this major setback, the Oak Island Association fought on determinedly. They raised more funds and acquired a large cast iron pump and steam engine in Halifax. Tragically, the boiler burst, killing one man and seriously injuring several others. The Oak Island curse had claimed the first of the seven victims whom the legend said must die before the Money Pit would surrender its tenaciously guarded secret.

In 1862, Mitchell and his men were busy digging a pumping shaft close to the Money Pit. Their plan this time was to get below the 100-foot mark and drain the water into their new pumping shaft. Then, with the Money Pit effectively drained, they would again cut across horizontally and extricate the treasure from under the collapsed cribbing and other wreckage.

This time, despite the recent fatal accident caused by the exploding boiler, they were putting all their faith in a new steam pump. Their purposely dug pumping shaft went down to the 107-foot level and their pumping went comparatively well to begin with. They had got the Money Pit drained and cleared of wreckage down to at least 100 feet when the insidious old enemy reappeared. The intruding water soon exceeded the capacity of their pump. The mysterious unknown engineering genius of so long ago had once again proved that he was more than a match for the latest nineteenth-century steam technology.

Not really knowing what to do for the best and caught unenviably between the Association's shareholders and the deep blue sea, Mitchell went back to Smith's Cove in a forlorn attempt to cut off the flood tunnel somewhere near the artificial beach. Just a few yards inland, they dug with increasing desperation: at fifty feet they thought that once again they had missed the elusive tunnel.

Mitchell tried another approach. If he couldn't find the beach end, he'd find the tunnel end instead. Operations were resumed from the lowest point in the Money Pit which the pumps could keep dry for them. This time Mitchell decided to strike out horizontally. He evidently believed in the grapeshot technique: fire off enough pellets in enough directions and you'll eventually hit your target. Mitchell's problem was that he had too many directions and too many levels for the grapeshot at his disposal.

Having tried several horizontal tunnels branching out from below the 100-foot level, Mitchell decided that they were too deep to intercept the flood tunnel. His diggers tried again nearer the surface, and then once more higher still. None of these attempts reached the flood tunnel. These repeated failures drove the Mitchell team back to the beach. Time and money were both running short. There were not enough resources left to build yet another coffer dam.

An interesting interpolation at this point is to consider briefly the significance of the series of coffer dams which various treasure hunters have erected unsuccessfully over the course of nearly two centuries. None lasted. None withstood the Atlantic tides. Yet the unknown genius who built the Money Pit, the artificial beach, and the flood tunnels in the first place must have constructed a perfectly effective and durable coffer dam in order to do so. Even allowing that the original work was done so long ago that the tidal levels were far lower, the coffer dam phenomenon points to an original builder with a very high degree of engineering skill significantly ahead of anything yet brought out to challenge it.

Failing a dam, Mitchell's men uncovered nearly fifty feet of box drains close to the shore and wedged clay into them. It did not even withstand the first tide, but it did find its way into the Money Pit. With clay in the beach drains, the water in the shaft became very muddy looking and discoloured. If there had been the slightest residual doubt in Mitchell's mind about the connecting tunnel, this discolouration was final, incontrovertible proof of the tunnel's existence.

Intercepting had failed; drain blocking had failed; pumping and bailing had failed. What next? Like a weary sentry patrolling back and forth along a besieged castle wall, Mitchell left the beach and dug yet another superfluous shaft southeast of the Money Pit and about thirty yards away. From its base he cut another futile horizontal tunnel to try to intercept the flood tunnel linking the Money Pit to Smith's Cove. Once more, the flood tunnel played tauntingly hard to get. When that attempt failed, Mitchell's men drove another horizontal tunnel towards the Money Pit itself. They hit it marginally above the water level, which the pump was now holding at approximately 110 feet.

The expedition's carpenters cribbed the pit a few feet lower for extra security and then the diggers began horizontal explorations in all directions. There was neither sight nor sign of the missing boxes, or casks, of treasure which the pod auger had located in 1849, but in 1864 these laborious probings finally encountered the flood tunnel.

Sam Fraser, who had had a supervisory role in the work during the Association's 1864 activities, wrote a graphic account of this discovery in a letter to his friend A.S. Lowden some thirty years after the event. He recalled that the flood tunnel had entered the Money Pit at the 110-foot level and that when the diggers had cut into the intersection, the force of the water had hurled around boulders twice the size of the human head. So much water had come in so fast that it had driven the diggers out until the pumps had mastered it again nine or ten hours later. Sam recalled showing the tunnel to a colleague named Hill, an engineer. Fraser also recorded that they had explored the area close to the flood tunnel junction together for any trace of treasure indicated by the 1849 drillings but had found absolutely nothing.

At that point the Oak Island Association ran out of money and ceased functioning.

The Eldorado Adventure

D
iscounting
the short-lived and abortive attempt of the Oak Island Contract Company, which failed to get off the ground in March 1865, the next venture was the Oak Island Eldorado Company, founded in May 1866. One prominent organizer was A.O. Creighton, who ran a book bindery in Halifax. He arranged for the mysterious slab of inscribed porphyry (found by the Onslow team in 1803) to be brought from the fire surround in what had once been John Smith's home on Oak Island and displayed in the book bindery window to attract investors.

There is a strong possibility that some ancient, genuine inscription in an obscure Middle Eastern Demotic, or some other ancient alphabet, was modified or overlaid at this time to provide the simplistic letter cypher in surprisingly modern English which can readily be decoded by a competent cryptographer to read: “
forty feet below two million pounds are buried
.” That would have been likely to tempt a few new investors.

Learning from the failures of earlier expeditions, the Eldorado team, more widely referred to as the Halifax Company, planned to concentrate on cutting off the flood water from Smith's Cove once and for all. Their efforts, said their prospectus, were to be directed primarily to constructing a really effective coffer dam — nearly 400 feet long and twelve feet high — all around the artificial beach and drainage tunnels at Smith's Cove. The dam was built as specified and the water duly cleared from inside it. Work was about to start on emptying the Money Pit when an Atlantic storm and an unexpectedly high tide devastated the Eldorado dam. Once again, the old builders had demonstrated that their nineteenth-century challenges could not match them.

With their dam destroyed, the Halifax Eldorado team began working on viable alternatives. Remembering what the pod auger had revealed in former drillings, they began exploring the lower levels with a more sophisticated encased drill. They set up a working platform above the water level and started probing. The 110-foot level yielded samples of spruce. This they thought was encouraging. The earliest findings had suggested that the treasure boxes rested on a stout spruce platform. Was that what they had now rediscovered? Encouraged by the spruce, they drilled deeper.

Just short of the 130-foot level they found charcoal, coconut fibre, and wooden fragments. Four or five feet further down they found more coconut fibre together with oak, spruce, and poplar. They continued their extensive drilling program in various directions and at ever-increasing depths. They found fine sand in some places and soft clay in others. James McNutt, who was keeping a careful log of what the drill retrieved, recorded strata of blue mud, clay, and gravel. Layers of water were encountered at 140 feet and again at 150 feet. Nothing else of any significance was found. The primary question is: what did those drillings mean?

The first consideration is the location. From the earliest Onslow adventures, in fact, from the earliest adventure of all in 1795, there had been a remarkable continuity. Like an old-established, nineteenth-century, traditional family business, the Money Pit explorers had passed down information from one working group to another. Two of the original finders had still been available to help and advise Jotham McCully's team in 1849 and 1850. McCully had been there to ensure continuity of information in the 1861 operations and later. The Eldorado/Halifax team had strong links with the Association workers who had been forced to give up in 1864 when their finances ran out. The question must inevitably be asked: “Were the Eldorado drillers working in the right shaft?”

Continuity replies with a strong affirmative. Admittedly, the eastern end of Oak Island had become a mass of water-logged shafts, tunnels, and bore holes by 1866, but there can be little serious doubt that the Halifax group was drilling down into that same shaft which had once held boxes on a thick platform in 1849, those same boxes which had fallen into mysterious depths when their supports collapsed in 1861.

Was that crash merely the result of the constant undermining flow of flood water, and the repeated weakening effect of the many fruitless attempts to drive tunnels under the treasure? Or was there more to it than that? Had the unknown genius at the back of the whole Oak Island system done more to protect the mysterious treasure than guard it with an artificial beach and a flood tunnel? Suppose the unknown genius, like some grand master of the chess board, had made yet more contingency plans in the improbable event of the flood tunnels being overcome. What might those additional contingency plans have been? Assuming that an intruder had overcome the flood tunnels, how could that intruder be stopped?

Some ancient tombs and mausoleums, cunningly designed to keep out grave robbers, were provided with trap doors which would open unexpectedly to plunge intruders on to sharp spikes, impale them on protruding hooks, or simply allow them to plummet down to a stone floor sixty feet below. Did those who knew about such technologies build the Oak Island Money Pit? What if, in the event of a flood tunnel failure, the whole platform on which the treasure (or the sarcophagi) rested could be triggered to collapse into the shafts?

Assuming this to be correct, it presupposes that the unknown genius knew a great deal about what lay below the platform on which the boxes were lying. How could such knowledge have been made available? Either that original builder had dug the Money Pit far deeper than any of the nineteenth-century explorers had guessed, or like them, he or she, had explored the lower depths with a pod auger, or sampling drill.

To speculate in a less orthodox way, what if that unknown genius had had access to unconventional means of ascertaining what lay below Oak Island? Although highly controversial in some circles, dowsing has many supporters. Canon J.N.T. Boston, M.A., Vicar of Dereham in Norfolk, England, for many years, was an accomplished dowser whose uncannily accurate work the authors have witnessed for themselves. Terry Edward Ross of Pennsylvania currently enjoys a well-deserved international reputation in this field, and has expressed fascinating views about the Oak Island mystery which are covered in detail later in the volume. Terry has suggested that the group behind the Money Pit's defences carried out the work a great deal further back in time than is generally thought possible, and that they came from a culture very different from those of Canada, Western Europe, or North America. If that suggestion is true, or even partially true — and Terry has remarkable gifts — then dowsing (or something akin to it) could have been an integral part of that mysterious old culture.

If we put ourselves in the place of the unknown genius who constructed those vital Oak Island defences and then imagine that he, or she, had the means to know what lay deeper down than the platform on which the mysterious boxes rested, then we are in a position to speculate about possible contingency plans.

Like the chess expert mentally playing several moves ahead, we imagine the flood tunnel failing. The boxes on their platform are now dangerously vulnerable, so drop them to a deeper level. The “predators” will probe lower to find them, so send them sideways, lower them at an angle out of reach of the vertical probing. This can be done easily enough if we have sufficiently accurate knowledge — via dowsing or other means — of what lies below the platform.

The Oak Island area is characterized by numerous sinkholes, caverns, and cavities in the rock. Suppose that our mysterious original builder decided to arrange his spruce platform so that it would tilt its boxes down a shaft into just such a hole. It need not, of course, have been natural and fortuitous. It could equally well have been modified, or even totally artificial.

To increase the likelihood of these slide defences working, the boxes might well have been constructed above simple rollers, or had skids or primitive casters incorporated into their bases. It is purely speculative, but it does not exceed the technology of the original builders; it does explain why the boxes were not immediately found lower down; it also explains why coconut fibre and wood were discovered at a deeper level in the shaft.

If the collapsing platform, having shot its boxes off at an angle, then tore itself loose and crashed vertically down the Money Pit, parts of it — along with any coconut fibre which had once been deposited on it as padding and protection for the precious boxes — would have been encountered by vertical drilling.

As later explorations have shown, marvellous as the Money Pit, the artificial beach, and the flood tunnel from Smith's Cove undoubtedly were, they were not, apparently, the only wonders — or even the greatest wonders — on Oak Island. Subsequent explorations have indicated a whole labyrinth of tunnels below the island, and at a far greater depth than the spruce platform where the boxes once lay. The details of those explorations and their results will be given in chronological order in due course, but some brief reference needs to be made to them here in an attempt to clarify the apparently contradictory findings of the Eldorado drillers.

In the 1849 and 1850 pod auger work, boxes were revealed resting on a platform between ninety and 100 feet down the Money Pit. In the 1861 and 1862 undermining work, something heavy crashed down from the same level. Subsequent attempts to locate and recover the former 100-foot platform and its contents were fruitless. Scraps of what might once have been the platform were located: but of the precious boxes there was no trace.

Either they slid sideways into a previously prepared reserve chamber, or they crashed very much farther down the shaft, or a combination of those two possibilities occurred. Were they deliberately deflected by some sort of slide mechanism so that they fell at an angle away from the original shaft? Later discoveries indicated an almost impenetrable iron barrier lower down: could that have been part of such a deflection mechanism? Did the mysterious boxes and their previous contents then descend to some vastly greater depth in the strange labyrinth far below?