The Oak Island Mystery. Lionel and Patricia Fanthorpe
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.
Doggedly, they began trying to empty the pit by bailing it like a leaking ship, but this had no effect whatsoever — they were merely redistributing the Atlantic Ocean!
It was now time to attend to harvest and other duties back home, so work ended for 1803, but the following year the Onslow Company was back as determined as ever. This time they planned to dig a parallel shaft fifteen feet southeast of the Money Pit itself and then tunnel across to reach the treasure. Their parallel shaft reached 115 feet without encountering any water problems at all. Optimistically, the tunnellers began to cut horizontally through the stubborn clay towards the Money Pit itself. They accomplished the first twelve or thirteen feet without any serious problems: less than three feet now separated the excited miners from the spot where they believed the treasure lay.
Water started seeping through again, slowly at first, then in small streams. The clay between their tunnel end and the Money Pit collapsed: they were very lucky to escape without loss of life. In just over an hour the second shaft was over sixty feet deep in salt water. Remembering all too well how hopeless bailing had been last time, they made a brief, half-hearted attempt to empty their new shaft, but again their buckets had not the slightest effect on the flood water. They were strong, determined men, but they recognized that this project was totally beyond their resources. Harvests had to be gathered; land had to be tilled; fish had to be caught and timber had to be felled if the colonists and their families were to live. The Onslow Company gave up and the men returned to their farms, their stores and their fishing boats.
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The Truro Company’s Attempt in 1849
Daniel 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