The Curse of Oak Island. Randall Sullivan
walls as they descended, employing the same rope-and-bucket method McGinnis, Smith, and Vaughan had used years before to empty the pit, only with more rope, several buckets, and the best block-and-tackle system money could buy.
After removing the log platform that had stopped McGinnis and his two friends at 20 feet, the Onslow Company crew continued digging. At 30 feet, their shovels clanged against wood. Just like the three young men who had struck the tier of oak logs at 20 feet years before them, the workmen were certain that they had hit the top of a treasure chest. But it was another platform of oak logs, their rotting ends embedded in the sides of the shaft just as the tiers of logs at 10 feet and 20 feet had been. The Onslow Company crew members showed one another the pick marks in the hard clay walls of the surrounding shaft and were certain these had been made by the men who first dug it out. The workmen and their employers asked one another what could compel men to dig deeper than 30 feet to bury a treasure. Only a cache of incredible riches could possibly explain it.
They were asking the same question after they struck another log platform at 40 feet, this one covered with a thick layer of charcoal. The Onslow Company’s investors agreed that the only reasonable explanation for the charcoal was that there had been a smithy set up on this platform to sharpen the tools of the men who had opened the Pit originally.
There was another platform at 50 feet. According to the McNutt manuscript, this tier of logs was covered with a layer of smooth beach stones with “figures and letters” cut into them. At 60 feet, according to McNutt, the platform of logs was spread with a mat of manila grass and “the rind of coconut.” Well aware that coconut fiber had been commonly used as dunnage to protect cargo that had originated in the Caribbean, this find fed the idea that what had been hidden so deep underground must be a fantastic treasure of Spanish gold captured by pirates in the seventeenth century. There was yet another platform of logs at 70 feet, this one covered with a blue-tinted clay “putty” (later used to seal the windows of twenty buildings on the mainland).
According to the McNutt manuscript, what became known as the “inscribed stone” was found at 80 feet. Adams A. Tupper, a mining engineer who had joined the treasure hunt more than a decade before McNutt did, said that the stone had been found at 90 feet. (It should be mentioned that there are also accounts that suggest the log platforms were not so exactly spaced, which is to say they were only more or less, not exactly, 10 feet apart.)
What McNutt and Tupper agreed on was that the slab was unmarked on its upper side when the Onslow crew first uncovered it. Only when they flipped the stone over did the workers discover that some sort of message had been etched into it.
Descriptions of those carvings (which may have been more like scratchings) and of the stone itself have varied in a number of respects. “Three feet long and one-foot square, with figures and letters cut into it,” was how McNutt described the slab, “and being freestone, being different than any on that coast.” However, in his Transcript article (reprinted in the Halifax Sun and Advisor), McCully had described “a stone cut square, two feet long and about a foot thick, with several characters cut on it.”
Judge DesBrisay’s account has to be given weight because it was based mainly on what he was told by the daughter of the man who took possession of the stone and kept it on display in his home for more than forty years. What the Onslow crew had found (“farther down” than the charcoal and putty, in DesBrisay’s telling) was “a flagstone about two feet long and one wide, with a number of rudely cut letters and figures upon it,” according to the judge’s History of the County of Lunenburg. “They were in hope that this inscription would throw some valuable light on their search, but unfortunately they could not decipher it, as it was too badly cut, or did not appear in their own vernacular.”
Anthony Vaughan, who told Creelman the stone was found at 90 feet, said it was 3 feet long and 16 inches wide. There were no letters carved into the stone, the way Vaughan told it, just strange “figures.”
One eyewitness described the stone as yellow-tinged Swedish granite. Another thought it was porphyry and said it was olive colored.
What all accounts agree on is that after the stone was lifted from its place and removed from the Pit, a slow seep of water began to soften the dirt beneath the workmen’s feet. This quickly became a problem. According to the Colonist article: “At 93 feet [the water seepage] increased and they had to take out one tub of water for two of earth. Still they had no idea that anything was wrong.” It was dusk by then and, as they did each evening, the men finished their workday by probing the bottom of the Pit with a long crowbar. This time, according to the Colonist account, “they struck a hard impenetrable substance bound by the sides of the pit. Some supposed it was wood, and others called it a chest. They left for the night to resume operations in the morning, when they fully expected to solve the mystery.”
What the men found when they reported for work the next day was that the Pit had filled with water to the 65-foot level. According to all of the early accounts, the Onslow crew bailed that entire day and into the night, but could not lower the water level by more than a few inches. Frustrated and baffled, they sat among the heaps of dirt and debris that surrounded the rim of the shaft, wondering what to do next. The farmers among the workmen told Colonel Archibald that haying season was upon them and that they would have to leave the island to return home in time to cut, dry, and store their grass. Archibald ordered a temporary suspension of work while he and the other investors came up with a new plan of attack.
In October, the Onslow Company sent “a committee” to Hants County to meet with a “Mr. Mosher” who was reputed to be the best authority in the entire province on how to remove water from a shaft. Mosher was paid the princely sum of £80 to rig a special pump that was transported to Oak Island and lowered into the Money Pit. There, in a preview of things to come, the pump promptly burst. By then, the weather was growing wet and cold with the approach of winter. Colonel Archibald decreed that they should adjourn the expedition until the following spring, in hope that a better plan might be arrived at before then.
The Onslow Company did return to Oak Island in the spring of 1805 with a new strategy, developed by Colonel Archibald, for emptying the water from the Money Pit. Fourteen feet southeast of the Pit, they sank a shaft to a depth of 110 feet, planning to tunnel under the bottom of the original shaft and approach the treasure from below. When the diggers got within 2 feet of the original Pit, though, water began to ooze through the end of the tunnel. The bank of clay suddenly collapsed in front of them and water surged through. The men in the tunnel barely made it out alive, and within two hours the new shaft was also filled with water to the 65-foot level.
One more attempt was made at bailing, but the crew could not lower the water in the new shaft either. By then, the Onslow Company’s investors had spent themselves nearly into bankruptcy and surrendered their effort on Oak Island.
NEARLY HALF A CENTURY WOULD PASS before another serious effort was made to bring up whatever was at the bottom of the Money Pit. By then, the Onslow Company’s two most significant members were dead: Colonel Robert Archibald died in 1812 and Captain David Archibald went two years after that. McGinnis, Smith, and Vaughan lived on for some time after.
McGinnis built his family home on the opposite end of the island from the Money Pit, where generations of his descendants lived. Daniel’s grandson John McGinnis, for instance, was born on Oak Island in 1865 and remained there all his life. Smith, who took possession of the mysterious stone that the Onslow Company crew had pulled from deep in the Money Pit, built it into the backing of his fireplace, “strange characters outermost, so that visitors might see and admire it,” as Charles Driscoll wrote. Hundreds of people trooped through the modest Smith home to examine the curiosity over the next few decades. Vaughan returned to the mainland to work with his increasingly prosperous family.
The first of the three to die was the Money Pit’s original discoverer, who passed sometime in early 1827. The only exact dates known are the ones on which Daniel McGinnis’s will was dated, January 4, 1827, and the date it was probated, February 27, 1827. Anthony Vaughan was one of two executors and John Smith was a witness. So was a man whose role in the early discoveries made on Oak Island remains a mystery, one Samuel Ball.
I was startled to learn during my return