At that point, the labors of the Truro men were interrupted by a fierce storm that rose up on Mahone Bay, creating an unusually high tide that poured over the top of the cofferdam and gradually washed it away, leaving the exposed box drains covered with sand. The company retreated to high ground, where it was agreed the fan of box drains must be the starting point of the tunnel that was flooding the Money Pit, which meant the only possible way forward was to find a way to block the tunnel or locate and close the gate that had to be somewhere within it. A plan was formed to sink a new shaft between the shore and the Money Pit, on the line between the box drains and the Pit. A spot 140 feet from the Pit was selected.
The Truro men had estimated that the flood tunnel would be about 25 feet deep, but they dug to a depth of 75 feet without locating either a tunnel or a flow of water. They moved 12 feet south and dug to a depth of 35 feet before encountering a large boulder. As they worked to pry the boulder loose, a rush of water poured into their shaft, within minutes filling it to the tide level with saltwater. They labored for days driving heavy timbers, called spiles, into the shaft, but this failed to stop the flow of water.
CONFLICTING ACCOUNTS of what took place after the Truro Company’s failure to block the flood system have created some confusion about who and what was responsible for the most cataclysmic event in the history of the Oak Island treasure hunt up to that point: the collapse of the Money Pit. R. V. Harris, long considered the most authoritative chronicler of the early work on the island, attributed this disaster to the Truro Company and placed its occurrence in 1850. A majority of subsequent investigators—and I stand rather tentatively among them—believe it took place eleven years later in 1861, under the auspices of the newly formed Oak Island Association. I should caution the reader that this conclusion is based almost entirely on an article published in the September 30, 1861, edition of the Novascotian newspaper that relied on the eyewitness account of a man identified only as “the digger Patrick.”
What we know with relative certainty is that the Truro Company dug one more shaft close to the Money Pit, down to a depth of 112 feet before the workmen drove a tunnel east toward the Pit and, one more time, had to flee for their lives when water and debris burst through the area where they were digging. At this point, funds exhausted and spirits broken, the men of the Truro Company packed up their gear and went home.
CHAPTER FIVE
In the years between 1850 and 1865, probably the most interesting development in the chronicle of Oak Island was the way word began to spread after the discovery of the artificial beach and the drain system. The story reached first across Nova Scotia, of course, then throughout the rest of Eastern Canada, and eventually across the national border into New England and New York.
The first mention of the treasure hunt on the island to appear in print was not actually in any of the newspaper articles or books mentioned earlier but in an 1857 report to the provincial government of Nova Scotia written by one of its geologists, Henry S. Poole, who was principally interested in the structural formation of Oak Island:
I crossed to Oak Island and observed shale all the way along the main shore, but I could not see any rock in situ on the Island. I went to the spot where people had been engaged for so many years searching for the supposed hidden treasure of Captain Kidd. I found that the original shaft had caved in, and two others had been sunk alongside. One was open and said to be 120 feet deep, and in all that depth no rock had been struck. The excavated matter alongside was composed of sand and boulder rocks and though the pit was some two hundred yards from the shore, the water in the shaft (which I measured to be within thirty-eight feet of the top) rose and fell with the tide, showing a free communication between the sea and the shaft.
We know from Anthony Spedon, whose Rambles among the Blue-Noses was published in 1863, that there was another attempt at excavating the Money Pit about a year after Poole’s visit. “Up to the present moment,” Spedon wrote, “the work [on Oak Island] has been resumed and relinquished a dozen times. Companies have been formed again and again, numerous experiments tried, and no less than fifteen different pits have been dug, at a cost of many thousands of dollars; and yet the mysterious box appears not to have been found.” Given that there were nowhere near fifteen shafts on Oak Island at the time, Spedon’s account has to be considered with some suspicion. He had at first regarded the story of the treasure hunt on Oak Island as “only a fictitious tale, or a chimerical infatuation,” Spedon informed his readers, but then he met with Jothan McCully, who persuaded him to visit the island in the summer of 1862. During that visit, he had confirmed that “the operations [on the island] have been immense,” Spedon reported. “The great obstruction and difficulty has been the inexhaustible quantity of water in the Pit. It appears to come from the sea, but no experiment as yet has been enabled to remove it, or stem the current.” During the summer of 1859, Spedon wrote, a new iteration of the Truro Company “had no less than thirty horses employed at the pumps, but all efforts have proved abortive…. In the fall of 1861, at great expense, pumps were erected to be driven by steam power, but scarcely had the works been commenced when the boiler burst, causing operations to be suspended until another season.”
Spedon’s is the only description extant of the 1859 operations on the island and his description of the burst boiler in 1861 was also the first. Strangely, though, Spedon did not mention the most significant thing about that particular catastrophe, which was that it cost the life of the first man to die during the Oak Island treasure hunt. On the Oak Island Memorial that has greeted visitors to the island since 1995, he is listed simply as “Unknown.” The first mention of his death did not come until seven years after it happened, in an account written by E. H. Owen of Lunenburg:
The boiler of one company burst, whereby one man was scalded to death and others injured. The water was pumped out by a large barrel-shaped tube made of thin materials, and reaching to some distance into the Pit. The stream of water was conducted from this into the sea by means of a long wooden trough, which extended down to the shore.
Owen also was the first to suggest an idea that I would find persuasive during my return visit to Oak Island in 2016, almost a century and a half after his account was written: “It appears that in digging the Pit in which [Captain Kidd] deposited his gold, he connected with it a subterraneous passage, leading towards the shore, by which means he might be enabled to recover his gold, without having to excavate the Pit, which he had filled up with such substance as would render it almost impenetrable to the enemy, if discovered.” That there must be what R. V. Harris called a walk-in tunnel somewhere on the island seems certain to me, but as Marty Lagina’s brother, Rick, pointed out to me during one of our conversations, “People have been looking for that tunnel a long time, and no one’s ever found it.” I still think it’s there.
A handful of Oak Island investigators have speculated that the walk-in tunnel was found long ago by someone who took full advantage of this hidden entrance to the treasure chamber, then eradicated all trace of it. The name mentioned most often in this regard is Anthony Graves, who assumed ownership of most of Oak Island in 1857. In 1853, John Smith, in the name of what he called “natural love and affection,” had conveyed all the property he owned to his two sons, Thomas E. and Joseph Smith. Shortly after their father’s death four years later, the Smith brothers sold the property to one Henry Stevens, who promptly sold it to Graves. The new owner appeared to have little interest in the treasure hunt. He built his home and barns on the north side of Oak Island, above the shoreline along Joudrey’s Cove (where pieces of the house’s foundation can still be seen) more than 1,500 feet from the Money Pit and lived there until his death in 1887.
Stories that Graves regularly paid for his supplies in Mahone Bay with old Spanish coins are the basis of the claim that he found at least part of the Oak Island treasure, and these have been buttressed by the discoveries of such coins near the spot where Graves’s house once stood, incl
uding one coin dated 1598. What undercuts the claims about Graves is that his two daughters clearly did not inherit any significant wealth from their father beyond his land. One of them, whose married name was Sophia Sellers, worked the ground on Oak Island with her husband as farmers who struggled to support their family.
The only involvement Anthony Graves seems to have had with the treasure hunt on the island was the deal he made with a new group from Truro that called itself the Oak Island Association. Graves was to receive one-third of any treasure recovered in exchange for permitting the new company to make yet another attempt to get to the bottom of the Money Pit, but he was due no cash payment.
A number of those who had been part of the Truro Company were members of the Oak Island Association, most notably Jothan McCully and James McNutt. McNutt kept a diary of the Association’s efforts. The new company’s proposal to investors was that with the right equipment and a sufficient workforce it would be able to drain the Money Pit and bring up the treasure. That this was essentially the same claim that had been made by the Truro Company did not dissuade the one hundred people who purchased the first $20 shares of the Oak Island Association that were offered to the public.
Money in hand, the Association in the spring of 1861 barged sixty-three workmen (being paid the then-considerable wage of $18 per month), thirty-three horses, four 70-gallon bailing casks and the most powerful pump to be found in all of Nova Scotia onto Oak Island. The workmen first cleared out the Money Pit and recribbed it to a depth of 88 feet before going to work on a new shaft about 25 feet to the east of the Pit. This shaft (now known as no. 6) was excavated to a depth of 118 feet, before yet another tunnel was driven toward the bottom of the Money Pit, the plan being pretty much the same as the one that had failed for the Truro Company back in 1850: divert the water in the original Pit into a new shaft.
According to a letter written by McCully one year later, the new tunnel “entered the old Money Pit a little below the lower platform, where [we] found the soft clay spoken of in the [1849] boring. The tunnel was unwisely driven through the old pit until it nearly reached the east pipe, when the water started, apparently coming from above the east side.”
The man whom McCully was implicitly accusing of this unwise decision was the Oak Island Association’s superintendent of works, George Mitchell. And while Mitchell’s story does seem to be one of escalating desperation combined with increasingly poor decisions, the man has to be given credit for his relentless effort. What Mitchell ordered his men to do after the 118-foot shaft flooded was set up the big pump next to it while the men and the horses went to work around the clock with the bailing casks, not only attempting to lower the water level in no. 6 but also in the shaft on the west side of the Money Pit (no. 3) and in the original Pit itself. By McCully’s account, the crew and the horses worked nonstop from two o’clock in the morning on Tuesday until late in the afternoon on Thursday and were able to lower the water level to a depth of 82 feet. At that point, the tunnel between shaft no. 3 and the Money Pit became clogged with soft clay that caused the water to begin rising. According to the accounts of McCully and McNutt, the Association crew worked to clear the tunnel until seven o’clock Friday morning, when another massive flow of soft clay out of the Money Pit replaced what they had just spent more than twelve hours hauling to the surface. As they worked to remove this new mudflow, the men recovered a number of curious items. In the Novascotian article, “digger Patrick” reported that these included pieces of wood, blackened with age, that had been “cut, hewn, chamfered, sawn and bored, according to the purpose for which it was needed.” He and the others also pulled out “part of the bottom of a keg,” Patrick recounted. McNutt, writing in 1867, described a “piece of juniper with bark on, cut at each end with an edge tool” and “a spruce slab with a mining auger hole in it” that were removed from the mudflow out of the Money Pit. McCully wrote that there were also oak chips, manila grass, and coconut fiber found in the mud, along with two large stones that he believed had been brought down from the surface of the island.
The Oak Island Association’s work in the tunnel between shaft no. 6 and the Money Pit continued until five o’clock Saturday afternoon, when yet another rush of clay surged into the tunnel. The men working nearest to the Pit (among them Adams A. Tupper) reported that the bottom of the shaft had sunk by several feet and that the cribbing inside had shifted. Tupper can’t have been the only one who recognized that sinking yet another shaft in the vicinity of the Money Pit—which made a total of six deep, broad holes and at least as many tunnels within a circle 50 feet wide—might have destabilized the Pit to a point of collapse. Perhaps there was some discussion about it when the men took a break for supper that Saturday evening. All we know for certain is that the men had just begun to eat when they heard a “tremendous crash” as McCully described it and hurried back to the Money Pit only to discover that water in it was “boiling like a volcano.” The bottom had literally fallen out of the Pit, pulling down with it all of the cribbing and tools in the original shaft, along with tons of mud that flowed into the new tunnel.
In a letter written June 15, 1895, Samuel C. Fraser, who had worked as the foreman of operations for the Truro Company and had returned to the island as part of the Association, laid the blame on Mitchell:
He finished the sinking of the 118 foot shaft through which the water was [to be] taken away, while the Money Pit was to be cleared out to the treasure…. I was sent down to clean out the Money Pit, but before going into it I examined the 118 foot pit and tunnel, which was then nearly finished. At the end of the tunnel I saw every sign of the cataclysm that was about to take place and I refused to go down [again] into the Money Pit … When the pit fell down I was there, and I, with George Mitchell, threw a line down as far as it was open from the top when the subsidence ended: it was open 113 feet from the top…. There went down 10,000 feet of lumber, board measure, the cribbing of the old Money Pit.
This would prove to be the greatest disaster in the history of Oak Island not involving the loss of life, leaving the Money Pit an all but impenetrable jumble of mud, lumber, and equipment. The treasure, if there was one, was believed to have fallen either into a tunnel or deeper into the Pit.
The former Truro Company foreman Samuel Fraser believed the latter:
The pirates sank the shaft at first 155 feet deep, put part of the treasure there with a branch drain into it. Then working upon the older superstition that “treasure runs away from the seekers” … put another portion at 100 feet, with a drain into it.
This meant, Fraser wrote to his friend in 1895, that whatever was buried in the Money Pit had dropped into an open space that was, he estimated, 155 feet deep. On what basis Fraser supposed this he never stated in the letter.
Those who believed the treasure had slid into the tunnel seemed to have based much of this opinion on the fact that J. W. Publicover, the last man out of the 188-foot shaft no. 6 and its adjoining tunnel, had come to the surface with a yellow-painted wooden disk about the size of a barrelhead that had landed at his feet in the tunnel when the Money Pit collapsed. The men who examined it agreed that it must be part of an old keg or cask that had dropped out of the Money Pit’s treasure chamber as the bottom fell out.
Whatever was true about that, the collapse of the Money Pit ended the efforts of the Oak Island Association in the summer of 1861. Yet, remarkably, most of the same men were back on the island in the spring of 1862. George Mitchell had been replaced by one J. B. Leedham as director of operations, but what Leedham did was little more than a duplication of all that had failed during the previous sixty years. He began by ordering the men to sink yet another shaft (no. 7) just west of the Money Pit. At 90 feet, the workmen found tools left behind by the Truro Company and at 100 feet tools that had been abandoned by the Onslow Company, evidence that they were digging through sections of the collapsed Money Pit.
When the new shaft reached a depth of 107 feet and no sign of the flood tunnel had been
found, Mitchell ordered his men to dig a new shaft (no. 8) right next to the no. 6 shaft, then dig laterally until they struck the flood tunnel. When this effort, too, failed, Leedham sent his crew to Smith’s Cove, ordering them to seal the “filter bed” beneath the man-made beach with packed clay. That didn’t succeed either, of course. Leedham, whose frantic determination seems to have been a match for Mitchell’s, then ordered the men to dig yet another shaft (no. 9) about 100 feet east of the Money Pit and 20 feet south of where the flood tunnel would be if it was dug on a straight line. When shaft no. 9 had been excavated to a depth of 120 feet, Leedham instructed his men to dig a series of exploratory tunnels to try to locate the flood channel. Given how unstable the ground around the Money Pit must have been by that point, it’s a wonder Leedham found men willing to do such work, but apparently he did.
One of the exploratory tunnels was driven all the way to the Money Pit, which it entered at a depth of 108 feet. According to the Oak Island Association’s records, the workmen were successful in draining the Money Pit to the level of the tunnel. Leedham descended to make an inspection, and in his notes he reported that while the walls on one side of the Pit were rock hard, they were so soft in other places that he could plunge a crowbar into them with relatively little effort.
The Association’s records show that yet another tunnel was dug between the Money Pit and shaft no. 2, the one dug by the Onslow Company in 1805, but that the men found no sign of either the flood tunnel or the treasure chests they were looking for. At that point, operations were suspended while the Association’s members returned to Truro to raise more money. They apparently succeeded, because on August 24, 1863, the Novascotian published a report that the Oak Island Association had resumed operations on the island and that “men and machines are now at work pumping the water from the pits previously sunk, and it is said that they are sanguine that before the lapse of the month they will strike the treasure.”
The Curse of Oak Island Page 7