by Lee Lamb
The Albatross
Nothing in the visit by the Albatross foretold the tragedy that would occur just nine months later. As the ship was on her way to Florida on May 2, 1961, she was suddenly struck by a “white squall” — an unpredictably sudden, very strong windstorm. The ship keeled over and sank almost immediately, taking with her the ship’s doctor, the cook, and four young students.
On August 14, the brigantine Albatross moored out in the cove. She was an American ship, serving as a floating classroom for students taking preparatory college courses and sail-training. That day, along with their captain, a group of the students rowed out to the island to take a tour of the site and observe the work that was going on.
That evening some of the students returned to the island. This time they ferried my mother and father to the Albatross for a shipboard dinner, returning them to the island just before nightfall. My mother said it was a charming evening. The next day, the Albatross and her crew were on their way south.
When my mother and Ricky had arrived on the island near the end of June, the A-frame over the Money Pit was almost finished and the parts for the pump had arrived on the island. But it was July 18 before the pump was assembled and ready for a test run. A sigh of relief was heard as the massive pump rumbled into action and slowly emptied the Money Pit.
On July 25, Dad wrote to Fred Sparham to let him know that the big pump had proved it was capable of removing water from the Money Pit faster than it came in, but that it had taken three days of pumping and six barrels of gas to empty it. Starting and stopping the pump would be inefficient and costly, but keeping the pump running night and day was no better. Working in the Money Pit was going to be very expensive.
Around the same time, my mother wrote to me. She mentioned that it was fine to leave the tunnels and shafts full of sea water, as they had been for years, because water in the shafts kept a constant pressure on the old timbers. If the water was pumped out, that old wood might not be strong enough to withstand a collapse. It sounded terrifying to me.
If only Dad and Bobby could find the sea water inlet tunnel down on the beach, they would not have the ruinous expense of running the pump night and day, they would not have the rush of water in and out eroding the earth underground, and they could take whatever time they needed for careful inspections and repairs to shafts and tunnels before beginning their own underground work.
They had to find the sea water inlet.
All summer, whenever they could not work in the Money Pit, they went back to work on the beach. Again and again they uncovered evidence of the pirates’ work.
Mildred Restall washing off stones dug out of the “reservoir.”
In October, they were certain they had located the edges and the centre of the pirates’ work on the beach. The work covered far more ground than anyone had previously thought. The reservoir lay in the centre of the beach work and occupied about one-third of the total area. At the very centre of the reservoir they found sand lying in varying layers of coarseness. In time they would come to realize that the reservoir acted not only as a sponge to hold water, but also as a filter to keep sand out of the sea water inlet tunnel. As it was filtered out, the sand formed layers.
Around the reservoir was a ring of stones that seemed to act as a seal. One of the stones in the ring had the date 1704 carved in it.
Various types of stone formations were found in other parts of the beach work. As an example, Bobby noted in his journal that when he was putting cribbing into the new hole, he came across a number of rocks: “Nearly all the rocks were placed in with the long way down or on end and tightly packed in.” In other words, it seemed as if someone had carefully placed the stones there in a specific way.
For Bobby and my dad, these discoveries confirmed that they were on the right track and helped guide them as they moved ahead with the project.
Let’s talk about the 1704 stone. As I mentioned before, by using the dump bucket system, Dad and Bobby deposited the soil and stones taken from all their diggings on the beach into the waters of Smith’s Cove, where they would be washed away by the tides. Even today, Rick clearly recalls that day on the beach. It was November 6, and the men were digging to expose part of the reservoir while
Ricky holding the 1704 stone found in reservoir section of the pirates’ beach work. Photo by Louis Jaques.
he and Mom were taking one of their usual strolls around the island. During their explorations, they decided to walk over and take a closer look at the pile of stones that had recently been deposited by the dump bucket. When Mom thought she saw some kind of marking on one of the discarded stones, she sent Ricky to get Bobby and his dad.
At first a bit grumpy to be called away from their “real” work, the men reluctantly followed Ricky over, took a look, and agreed that it appeared there was something written on the stone. They were not sure what it was, but decided to carry it up to the shack for closer inspection. There it sat for months; but as the stone dried out, little by little the carving became more and more legible, until at last it could clearly be seen that this small, heavy, olive-coloured stone was deeply carved with the numbers 1-7-0-4.
Chapter Ten
1704? What Does It Mean?
The 1704 stone had come from a ring of stones near the edge of the “reservoir” in the middle of the beach at Smith’s Cove, some three feet underground. This stone fit tightly between stones of a similar size and shape that formed the ring. My father concluded that the ring of stones acted as a seal to keep water inside the central part of the reservoir, providing a “sponge” effect.
Let’s pause and think about all the work that would have been going on at the time the treasure was hidden. We are assuming that some unknown persons had a valuable treasure that they wanted to hide on Oak Island. We believe that the Money Pit, Smith Cove’s beach work, and a tunnel through the island connecting the two were part of an elaborate plan to safeguard the treasure. How could that have been done?
One scenario is that the men were divided into three work crews. One crew would have stayed up on the clearing to dig out the Money Pit. Down, down, down they dug through the hard clay of the island. When the pit was deep enough, they placed a thick iron plate across the bottom of it. On top of this plate they constructed a cement vault that contained the treasure, including the piece of parchment. Above that they installed the spruce platform. On the platform they placed the three oak casks and two boxes of treasure (where the jewel that reportedly came up on the auger once lay). Above that, another platform of spruce was installed. And then, working their way up and out of the shaft, the crew installed a log platform, putty, coconut fibre, charcoal, and earth, layer after layer. When they were nearly at the surface, they finished with a layer of flat stones covered by a final thin layer of earth.
Like miners boring through a mountain, tracking a vein of gold, a second work crew would have tunnelled through the island to connect the beach at Smith’s Cove to the opening, deep down in the Money Pit, so that sea water could flood in and booby-trap the pit.
Down in Smith’s Cove, a third crew would have built the cofferdam to hold back the sea, and then would have carefully constructed the five finger drains, the single sea water inlet drain (“wrist”), and then the layers of stones, coconut fibre, and eel grass that lie under the beach sand, including the intricately-layered reservoir that occupies the centre of the beach work.
It’s possible that someone on the beach crew carved the date on the stone and set it in place. This carving could not have been done quickly; the stone is very hard, and the cuts are deep.
But why carve a date into a stone? We will never know the answer to that question, but if the carving refers to the year that the treasure was hidden, the date 1704 is quite significant.
Who Put the Treasure on Oak Island?
There are many theories as to who buried the treasure on Oak Island.
From the time the site was first discovered by the three boys — Daniel McInnis, John
Smith, and Anthony Vaughan — the theory that pirates were responsible has been the most popular.
Some pirates — the privateers, for example — were educated, skilled men who carried out their piracy on behalf of king, country, or groups of well-connected citizens. But circumstances can be altered; power can change hands. Sometimes privateers found the legal protection under which they sailed had suddenly been revoked and that they were “wanted” men. So they continued their acts of piracy, but now they were working for themselves. My father believed that the men in charge of pirate ships were often intelligent, educated men, quite capable of the elaborate constructions on Oak Island.
If Oak Island’s treasure is pirate treasure, the name most often mentioned is Captain William Kidd. But if the 1704 stone represents the year in which the work was done on the island, then Captain Kidd is unlikely to have been part of it, because he was hanged in 1701.
Still, there are many other pirates who might have done this work. Port Royal, Jamaica, a known haven for the vilest of pirates, had suffered a crippling earthquake in 1692, and countless hoards of treasure needed to be relocated to a safer place. Could crews from a number of pirate ships working together have moved the Port Royal treasure to Oak Island?
Sir William Phips, a sea captain from Maine, has lately emerged as a possible suspect. It is thought that while retrieving an enormous treasure in silver from the wreck of the Spanish galleon Concepcion, under the sponsorship of the king of England, Phips may have diverted the more valuable part of its cargo to Oak Island. You can read this lively and persuasive argument in Oak Island and Its Lost Treasure by Graham Harris and Les MacPhie. However, Phips died in 1695. So this theory is not helped by the 1704 stone either.
Some argue that Marie Antoinette’s jewels could be the source of Oak Island’s treasure. It is reported that during the French Revolution, Marie Antionette instructed her lady-in-waiting to escape with the jewels. After the Revolution, the lady-in-waiting was sighted in Nova Scotia. According to this theory, the French navy would have been responsible for the underground work on Oak Island. The bulk of Marie Antoinette’s jewels have never been found.
Over the years, both Mexico and Spain have issued statements, informally, declaring that the Oak Island treasure is, without question, theirs.
A few people have argued that Oak Island’s treasure consists of manuscripts authored by Sir Francis Bacon or William Shakespeare. Others think that the elaborate workings on the island were constructed by the Knights Templar and they believe that Oak Island could be the resting place for the Holy Grail or the Ark of the Covenant.
And it has even been suggested that Oak Island was visited by beings from outer space. According to this theory, the underground work on Oak Island has nothing to do with treasure; it was constructed to provide access to a subterranean control centre in the caverns under the bedrock of Oak Island. It was created by and for the extraterrestials who, in their giant spaceships, roam our ocean beds at their leisure.
Perhaps this would be a good time to discuss treasure maps. Through the years, numerous maps have been linked to Oak Island, but I think one in particular is remarkable.
Gilbert Hedden was searching for treasure on Oak Island in 1937 when a book written by Harold T. Wilkins, Captain Kidd and His Skeleton Island, was published in England. It contained a map that supposedly had belonged to Captain Kidd. The map depicted an island that looked suspiciously like Oak Island. When the map and Oak Island were compared, they were found to have some 14 points in common; for example, the general outline of the island was the same, as was the place on the shoreline where boats would have harboured.
The map bore this legend:
18 W and by 7 E on Rock
30 SW. 14 N Tree
7 by 8 by 4
On Oak Island, two hand-drilled white granite stones had been discovered. One had been found by Blair near the Money Pit, and years later another had been found by Hedden near the shore at Smith’s Cove. It was believed that they were part of the pirates’ original work.
The hand-drilled, white granite stone at Smith’s Cove. It had a twin near the Money Pit.
Hedden applied the legend to Oak Island, and when he drew a line between the two granite rocks, they were exactly on an east–west line. When he measured 18 rods west of one rock and 7 rods east of the other rock, he came to the Cave-In Pit. (A rod is an old English country measurement. One rod = 5.0292 metres.) When he drew a line southwest from the Cave-In Pit, and measured 30 rods, he arrived at the stone triangle. From the baseline of the triangle, he measured 14 rods to the north, and found himself at the Money Pit. The measurements on Oak Island fit the legend precisely!
Although no one could figure out what the last line of the legend — “7 by 8 by 4” —corresponded to, the map and its legend caused quite a stir.
When Gilbert Hedden went to England to see this original map and to try to purchase it, he got an unhappy surprise. The author of the book told Hedden that there was no original map. He had drawn the map himself by blending details from several maps he had seen of an island in the China Sea. He said that the map’s legend and measurements had come entirely from his imagination.
Incredible!
While my family was on Oak Island, they located the two granite hand-drilled stones. Dad and Bobby verified for themselves the accuracy of the measurements between the granite stones, the Cave-In Pit, the stone triangle, and the Money Pit, and used the measurements again and again as their base as they tried to determine the logical location for the sea water inlet tunnel or the “walk-in tunnel,” which earlier searchers had imagined existed to allow the pirates to retrieve their treasure without triggering their own booby traps.
Through the years there have been countless maps that supposedly had a connection to Oak Island, but none of them proved more helpful than the map that was, from what we’ve been told, a total fake.
Chapter Eleven
Meanwhile, Back at the Beach
By the end of that summer in 1960, both Mom and Rick had come to love Oak Island. They wanted to be nowhere else and decided that a winter on the island would be fun. What Ricky was going to do about school was a problem, though. Recently, I asked him to tell me about his school experience while on the island, and this is what he wrote:
Leaving the island every day to attend school was a practical impossibility. Luckily the government had a program for children in remote places, called Correspondence Courses. These were regular courses, modified so that a teacher wouldn’t be required, just an adult to help guide the pupil.
After my first summer on the island, having schoolwork appear suddenly in September was a horrible shock. I rebelled as much as I could, by dithering over the work, doodling in the margins, or looking out the window. This rebellion was noted by my mother, and dealt with. “Take all day if you want,” she said cheerily, “the lesson will be done before you can go out to play.” Play? With whom? I was the only kid on the entire island! However, it was a vast and unexplored island, with many mysteries I was itching to uncover. There was no way that I could avoid the lessons, or trick Mom into doing them for me — so I buckled down and finished the schoolwork as soon as I could, in an average of three hours per day for grade 4. And Mom did help me as much as she was allowed by educational rules.
Lessons arrived in the monthly package. The lessons for the week were carefully removed and the package resealed, at least in the early years, because there were books in the package intended for my school supervisor (Mom) that helped her to guide my reading, writing, and arithmetic … [they] might give away some answers that I was supposed to arrive at by myself. Once I completed the week’s lesson, they were mailed back to the Education Department for marking.
As the years progressed, my schooldays got longer, five or six hours per day by the 8th grade, depending on the weather. If it was nice, I tried to get through as fast as possible. And if it was heavy rain or snow, I dawdled my way through the lessons and then retired to B
obby’s cabin, where I read paperbacks like Tarzan and other adventure literature. And by the 8th grade, Mom could only help me with English or History. She had little knowledge of science, geography, or math because she had been forced to leave school at an early age.
“Bobby's Cabin"
Bobby’s cabin was the beach shack. Bobby and Ricky used it as their bunkhouse, and although their meals and evening social times were spent in the main shack with my parents, they slept in the beach shack.
Rick with his new pup.
Despite his schoolwork, Ricky continued to enjoy seeking out the wildlife on the island and collecting tiny sea creatures; but soon it was decided that he was ready for something more. He should have a dog.
So in mid-October, when Dad had to go to Halifax on business, Mom and Rick went along to do some “dog-shopping.” Apparently, Dad’s business matters took much longer than expected, leaving enough time to visit only one place, where they found only one dog.
They had hoped for a dog that would take guarding responsibilities seriously — perhaps a German shepherd — but instead they came back with a black puppy that they were told was a six-week-old Belgian shepherd, but who, as she matured, looked suspiciously like a black lab or a flat-coated retriever. The breeder assured them she would become a great watchdog, but this did not turn out to be the case. Instead, she was everybody’s friend. The breeder said she would mature into a medium-sized dog who would eat almost nothing. Really? She ate and she grew. She ate and she grew. Her appetite was alarming.