Fortune and Glory

by David McIntee

  On 1 April, Kidd actually found a pirate, Robert Culliford of the Mocha Frigate. At this point, Kidd either was simply friendly to a fellow pirate, or was wary of engaging a warship which he didn’t know had only 20 crewmen, depending on who you want to believe. It’s worth remembering, though, that Culliford had hijacked one of Kidd’s ships a dozen years before. Most of Kidd’s crew joined Culliford, leaving Kidd with only 13 men. He had Adventure Galley scuttled, and sailed Adventure Prize back to the Caribbean, where he discovered that Britain was really not happy with him.

  On his way to negotiate with his backer, Lord Bellomont, Kidd buried treasure in a ravine in Cherry Tree Field, between Bostwick’s Point and the manor house, on Gardiner’s Island, in June 1699. The spot isn’t hard to find, as a plaque marks it today. He had permission from John Gardiner to bury a sea chest, a box of gold intended for Lord Bellomont, and two boxes of silver. He also gave Mrs Gardiner a bolt of gold cloth, part of which still exists in the East Hampton Library, and a sack of sugar, which at the time was hugely valuable.

  Kidd was extremely polite, according to Gardiner’s testimony at Kidd’s trial in Boston. Since Bellomont would be an accessory to piracy (and not just him, but the other lords and even the king!) if Kidd didn’t hang, he reminded Gardiner of how letting Kidd use his land for loot-storage could be construed as conspiracy to commit piracy, and this had spurred Gardiner to turn over the items, which were impounded as evidence against Kidd. The impounded treasure consisted of gold dust, silver ingots, Spanish dollars, rubies, diamonds, candlesticks and porringers.

  Not all of this made it to the trial: Bellomont kept a finder’s fee, and even Gardiner gave one of the diamonds to his daughter.

  Lured by a promise of clemency from Bellomont, Kidd was arrested, tried for both piracy and the murder of William Moore, and hanged in 1701. The French passes, which Kidd had given to Bellomont to prove that the Quedagh Merchant was a legitimate target, mysteriously disappeared before his trial and turned up 200 years later.

  But what of the rest of the loot? There’s never been any proof that he had any – his crew would have stuck around if he had. For all that people have searched various islands, nobody has turned up any treasure belonging to Kidd.

  Searchers for Skeleton Island have always been on a hunt for nothing. Firstly, the Palmers’ maps were fakes, as the earliest copies have them dated with the year 1668 – decades before Kidd’s alleged piracy. That later copies now say 1699 implies that someone spotted the error in the maps’ creation and corrected it.

  Wilkins always said that the map in his book was a combination of what he remembered from a look at the Palmers’ maps, and some features of Mahe, the largest island in the Seychelles. In fact, when Wilkins originally delivered his manuscript, the map of Skeleton Island had no markings on it. The coded clues were added overnight at the request of Wilkins’s publisher, who thought they’d make it more treasure-map-ish.

  The Japanese island of Takarajima is also out as far as Kidd is concerned – the story of the raid by a British ship is actually true, but it happened in August 1824, a century and a quarter after Kidd’s execution.

  The Treasure of Lima is one of the biggest hoards still missing, yet no search has found it. Various fake, or at least unreliable, documents exist in different museums to confuse the issue – some are about Benito Bonito, or other, earlier, pirates.

  Benito Bonito’s most famous exploits involved raiding a mule train at Acapulco, en route from Mexico City in 1819. Despite this, there’s an Australian legend that he sealed his loot in a cave in Queenscliff, in Victoria, rather than on Cocos Island. Nobody has ever found anything there either, though.

  Veins of natural gold, mixed in with quartz, were found in a survey of Cocos Island in 1933. Nowadays people are more interested in that gold.

  WHERE IS IT NOW?

  Captain Kidd’s treasure was returned to the local economy of the time. His plunder was sold and the proceeds that weren’t spent in trying to clear his name were used in evidence against him.

  The Treasure of Lima is still somewhere in the environs of Cocos Island, but given how many expeditions have failed to find any significant amounts of it, it may well be that the majority of it is now underwater, either due to landscape changes, or in a shipwreck.

  THE OPPOSITION IN YOUR WAY

  The Costa Rican authorities want to discourage treasure hunting on Cocos Island, so permits do require the searchers to bring some other value, such as by conducting geological surveys, or environmental work, as well as hunting for treasure. The permissions also include conditions that if any part of a treasure hoard is actually discovered, the searchers must immediately cease operations and notify the authorities.

  There are plenty of insect species on Cocos, but no predatory animals. In fact all the mammals on the island have been introduced by man, and are considered a threat to the original ecosystem: deer, goats, pigs, cats and rats.

  There are indeed plenty of sharks around – notably whitetip reef sharks and hammerheads – and giant mantas, which can give a very nasty sting.

  The biggest natural threat to visitors, however, is the mix of natural caves and man-made tunnels, which have turned parts of the island into Swiss cheese, and are in great danger of collapse.

  Other than that, the main problem is the island’s physical remoteness from the rest of the world.

  THE OAK ISLAND MONEY PIT

  WHAT IS IT?

  It’s a shaft last excavated to a depth of over 180ft on Oak Island, an island covered in oak trees (hence the name), in Mahone Bay, Nova Scotia. It’s only 200 yards off the shore of Lunenburg County, on the southern coast of the province, and is connected to the mainland by a causeway.

  Nobody knows for sure what treasure is supposed to be buried down there, but lots of people are convinced that something valuable is buried there. Popular theories include pirate treasure (Blackbeard and Captain Kidd are popular suspects, as is Henry Avery), Templar treasure, evidence that Francis Bacon wrote Shakespeare’s plays, Marie Antoinette’s jewels, the Ark of the Covenant, Masonic regalia and many other things.

  HOW MUCH IS IT WORTH TO YOU?

  Since nobody even knows what the treasure is, it’s impossible to put a likely value on it.

  THE STORY

  The pit was first discovered by a young man called Daniel McGinnis in 1795. He had seen lights on the island from shore, and the next day he found a round depression in a clearing at the southern side of the island, with block and tackle suspended from the trees over it.

  It was clear that someone had been trying to move heavy objects in the clearing, so McGinnis and some friends – John Smith and Tony Vaughan – decided to dig into the depression. They found that there were already well-defined walls to the pit, on which they could see pickaxe marks. Only a couple of feet under the surface turf, they found some flagstones, covering an area about 13ft across. They removed the flagstones and kept digging, finding a floor of logs about 10ft down. They dug the logs up and kept going, only to find another log floor at 20ft down, and a third at 30ft. Winter interrupted their digging, but the next June, they came back and got another 15ft down before giving up for good.

  The story had started to spread across Nova Scotia, and people came to the conclusion that someone had gone to a lot of trouble to put something in the pit – and that nobody went to that much trouble unless it was for something really valuable. A treasure hunt was born.

  The hunt has long been hampered, however, by the flooding of the pit, which various excavators have attributed to a deliberate engineering project to prevent anything being brought up out of the shaft. Five tunnels run from the sea through Smith’s Cove, with an elaborate series of gates and valves placed there by some unknown creator.

  Over time, excavators have announced finding fragments of chests, coin-sized metallic pieces, and have even taken pictures of skeletons and chests.

  PREVIOUS SEARCHES IN FACT AND FICTION

  John Smith,
being the oldest of the three original treasure hunters, bought the land on which the pit lay. Then, in 1804, the Onslow Company from Truro in Nova Scotia, hundreds of miles away, came to use professional measures to recover the treasure. This company was composed of four men: Simeon Lynds (a cousin of Tony Vaughan), Robert and David Archibald, and a local sheriff, Thomas Harris. Ten feet down from McGinnis’s last attempt, they found another log floor and a layer of charcoal. Logs and putty were found 10ft below that, and logs and coconut matting 10ft below that.

  The company took all these finds to be good signs, as coconut matting was used at the time to protect ships’ cargo. Finally, 30ft below the coconut matting, at a total of 90ft down, the quartet found a stone bearing an inscription in a simple symbolic substitution cipher. Supposedly the cipher translated as ‘Forty feet below, two million pounds lie buried.’

  Onslow redoubled their efforts and tunnelled for another 10ft, at which point the pit flooded with sea-water all the way back up to the 30ft level. Bailing the water out with buckets didn’t work, and, since they didn’t have the equipment to dig 60ft underwater, they paused. In the autumn, Onslow returned with a mechanical water pump which emptied the shaft, but broke down, so the pit flooded again. They tried again the next year, this time opening a new shaft 15ft south-east of the pit, to a point below the suspected water trap, intending to tunnel across. Unfortunately this shaft flooded when they reached a depth of 12ft.

  The inhabitants of Truro launched another attempt in 1849. The aging Vaughan teamed up with Lynds’s brother and several other men for a new expedition under the name The Truro Company. Either Onslow or nature had filled in the pit over the previous half century, as they had to dig again, rather than swim. When they reached 86ft, the pit flooded (while the workers were in church!), up to the 30ft mark.

  It occurred to some bright spark to drill with a device called a pod auger, from a platform above the water. This way they could drill into the bottom of the pit without draining the water, and bring up samples of whatever was down there. They hit spruce at a depth of 98ft, under which was – in order – a foot of empty space, 2ft of what felt like metal fragments (and were said to be small links of gold chain, though other reports say whatever it was dropped out of the auger and was not recovered), 8in of oak, another 2ft of what felt like metal pieces, 4in of oak, a layer of spruce, and then enough clay to convince the company that there was nothing else below.

  At the same time, one member of the team, James Pitblado, was said to have pocketed something from the auger. Pitblado then left the company and tried to get a separate licence to excavate the pit, but was only granted permission to dig elsewhere. Since this was useless to him, he soon disappeared.

  They also tried digging in sideways from a different location, but with the same result: flooding. This alerted them to a new discovery on a part of the coastline called Smith’s Cove: five tunnels, subsequently named the finger drains, along with coconut matting. They also noticed that the new flooding rose and fell with the tide, and thought that blocking these shafts would prevent the shafts from flooding. They were baffled when the water didn’t recede after this, and gave up.

  Next up were the Oak Island Association in 1861, who had terrible luck. Things seemed to be going well as they dug two shafts parallel to the original pit, down to 112ft, and tunnelled across. They flooded mere inches from the Money Pit. Worse, the steam-powered water pump failed, and the bottom of the pit collapsed into a presumed booby trap, taking much of the wooden shoring with it. Later, their boiler exploded, killing a worker. They ran out of funding, and willingness, in 1864.

  In 1890, a one-and-a-half ounce copper coin was found. Inspired by this, Frederick Blair and S. C. Fraser formed the Oak Island Treasure Company in 1893, with the rights to everything discovered for three years. They couldn’t afford a pump, were digging in the wrong shaft and only made it to 55ft before it flooded.

  In 1895, the Attorney General said that, despite the lease agreement, any treasure acquired belonged to Queen Victoria. In 1896, the Oak Island Treasure Company got a water pump and tried again, but the pump failed, and when a worker being lifted out of the shaft fell in and was killed, the other workers decided the place was jinxed. They kept drilling, however, and hit solid iron at 153ft. A few inches to one side, the drill passed through wood, and what felt like pieces of loose metal, but only coconut matting, wood and pebbles came up in the auger – along with a piece of parchment bearing the letters ‘vi’, with no indication of what the rest of the word or message was.

  In 1898, dye was poured into the pit in the hope that following the colouration in the water would reveal the flood tunnel exits. Surprisingly, not only did the dye appear from points all around the island, but did not appear from the finger drains in Smith’s Cove. Nothing the company did, including blasting with dynamite, prevented flooding.

  Future US President Franklin Delano Roosevelt got involved with the Old Gold Salvage and Wrecking Company’s – a new name for the Oak Island Treasure Company – unsuccessful dig of 1909. He spent that summer in the area, remained fascinated by the pit throughout his life, and wrote in a letter in 1939 that he hoped to return to the island to search again. The outbreak of World War II put paid to that plan, however.

  Things took a more determined turn in 1928, when New York steelmaker and engineer Gilbert Hedden saw a newspaper article about the Money Pit and got intrigued by the engineering involved. Hedden researched all that he could and came to believe that the pit contained treasure buried by Captain Kidd, having decided that a map in the book Captain Kidd and His Skeleton Island referred to Oak Island. When his company was bought out in 1931, the money he made funded his investigations.

  After years of research, Hedden bought the Money Pit site, and started his own dig in 1936. He used an electric turbine pump to remove the floodwater. In 1937 his men found old mining equipment, including unexploded dynamite at 65ft. One hundred and fourteen feet down one shaft, Hedden found a horizontal tunnel large enough for a man to walk along. In the end, however, even he ran out of money.

  In the 1940s, Errol Flynn became interested in the legend and hoped to mount an expedition, but the rights were held at the time by a company owned by, believe it or not, John Wayne, who refused him permission.

  In the 1950s, the Treasure Trove law in Canada set out that 10 per cent of any findings would belong to the government, but it would be a decade before there was another notable expedition. That expedition would spawn a local legend that the treasure would only be found after seven deaths.

  Robert and Mildred Westall had run a Globe of Death motorbike stunt show since the 1930s, before settling down in Ontario with their sons and daughter. Robert soon heard of the Money Pit, and determined to find the treasure, which he believed was pirate loot. In 1959, the land was owned by William Chappell’s son Mel, who agreed to let them dig in return for a half share of anything found. The Westalls moved to Oak Island, and lived there for five years, in cabins with no running water. On 17 August 1965, Westall was overcome by fumes and fell into a flooded shaft. His son Bobbie, and two other workers, Karl Graeser and Cyril Hilt, tried to help but shared his fate.

  Geologist Robert Dunfield brought in bulldozers and modern cranes, and built a causeway to the mainland. He spread clay over Smith’s Cove in a failed attempt to jam up any flood tunnels. His team dug a 140ft-deep, 100ft-wide crater, but all they found were pieces of porcelain, and heavy rains kept causing the crater sides to collapse.

  In a move guaranteed to make archaeologists facepalm themselves into concussion, Dunfield decided to drill for core samples after re-filling the crater. He made four bores down to 190ft, finding a wooden platform at 140ft, 40ft of void, then bedrock. Worse, another property owner on the island, Fred Nolan, now bought the mainland end of the causeway, and neither man would allow the other access to their end of it. Dunfield gave up and returned home to California.

  In 1967, Daniel Blankenship and David Tobias decided to buy most
of Oak Island for excavation. They negotiated separately with Dunfield and Nolan, to get their experience, and access to both ends of the causeway. They started drilling around 60 boreholes in the vicinity of the Money Pit, confirming that the island’s bedrock was around 170ft below the surface, but that there was also a wooden layer 40ft above that in some areas. They also found porcelain, wood, clay, charcoal and a piece of brass.

  In 1969, the pair formed Triton Alliance Limited and started exploring outside the Money Pit vicinity. Starting 180ft north-east of the main shaft, they found some samples of metal at 160ft. More metal fragments were found north of the pit over the following year, and a dig at Smith’s Cove found a set of logs carved with Roman numerals, which they thought may have been the remains of a coffer dam used to control water during construction of the pit. They also confirmed that the pebble beach at Smith’s Cove had been artificially constructed. Additionally they found wrought-iron scissors, a wooden sled, an iron ruler and iron nails and spikes – all of which were dated to before 1790. This was the first evidence of digging before the boys saw those lights in 1795.

  The most promising shaft was named ‘10X’, and had a modern casing fitted all the way down to 165ft. Inside were found broken concrete and pieces of wire and chain. A Canadian Broadcasting Company news crew lowered a video camera in, which some people at the time claimed recorded skeletal hands and treasure chests. None of the divers that followed saw any such thing, however.

  Fred Nolan found a cross-shaped arrangement of carved boulders around his property, which he believes to have some significance. In time, the various factions began to argue and sue each other, which brought a halt to excavations. The Canadian laws on Treasure Troves were also tightened further in 1989, making it harder to get a licence to explore the Money Pit.