The Oak Island Mystery

by Lionel

  Back to the Truro team on Oak Island! The explorers next made a discovery that diverted their attention from Pitblado’s disloyalty. They noticed that the water in the flooded shafts rose and fell a foot or two as the tides came and went around the island. The question that McCully and his team asked themselves repeatedly was: “Why was there no water in any of the additional shafts until those shafts were connected to the Money Pit?” The clay was very hard, practically impermeable. Few men knew better than those rugged old Truro diggers just how hard the going really was. They argued that if a natural waterway or underground stream ran from deep in the Money Pit to the Atlantic Ocean, it would have prevented the original workers from completing their design. In addition, the impermeable clay through which the shaft had been sunk made such a natural watercourse very improbable.

  Observations at Smith’s Cove at low tide had revealed water trickling down the beach towards the sea. Putting their observations and deductions together, the Truro men began to wonder whether the unknown miners who had sunk the Money Pit with its many elaborate layers of oak, putty, fibre, and charcoal, had somehow connected it to the ocean.

  The Truro team began to dig up the beach at Smith’s Cove. The first thing they found was a massive sheet of coconut fibre which covered the shoreline for about 150 feet. The fibre layer was between two and three inches deep and below it lay several more inches of tough, old, salt-resistant eel grass, which was, however, now showing signs of decay. It had evidently been there a long time. This double blanket of eel grass and coconut fibre covered the shore between high and low tide levels. It would seem to have served two purposes: to retain and transmit water like an enormous sponge; and to prevent sand and clay from passing through to clog whatever lay beneath.

  Simplicity is the hallmark of genius. Standing on the shoulders of the intellectual giants who pioneered the path, the average man and woman can see their way forward to new discoveries. Armed with high-powered computers linked to I.T. databases, third year high school students can solve in minutes problems that would have delayed Archimedes, Newton, or Einstein for several weeks. To construct an underground defence system using twentieth century technology, high-powered excavators, and bulldozers is no more than an average task: to construct it with very simple and limited resources is an outstanding achievement.

  Under the eel grass and coconut fibre filter-blanket, the unknown engineer laid a mass of stones and boulders completely free from sand and clay. It seemed to bear a remarkable similarity to a Roman road, as if its builder had been familiar with their road-building technique.

  Jotham McCully’s keen eyes noted the remains of an old coffer dam surrounding these amazing beach workings. If that was how the original builders had done it, his men could do it too. Accordingly, the Truro team built their own coffer dam around the zone they were investigating.

  With the seawater out of the way, they dug down below the stones and discovered a set of five fan-shaped box drains relentlessly conducting the Atlantic into the lower levels of the Money Pit.

  With their quickly erected and non-too-sturdy coffer dam in place, the Truro men began to trace the drainage system back up the beach as it converged on the main flood tunnel leading to the Money Pit. About fifteen or twenty yards along, they were having to dig down four or five feet to locate the drains.

  Disaster struck in the form of an abnormally high tide which overflowed their temporary coffer dam. It was constructed to take pressure from the Atlantic side, but not from a weight of inshore water trying to flow back down the beach: it broke and was washed away. The Truro team was beginning to suffer from two of the major frustrations experienced by almost all Oak Island teams sooner or later: insufficient time and insufficient funds.

  On balance, McCully and the shareholders decided that trying to rebuild the dam would not be cost-effective. What they had already been able to study of the artificial beach with its drainage system and filter-blankets had given them a fair idea of where the flood tunnel would run.

  They decided to try to intercept and block that main tunnel itself rather than attempt any further work on the artificial beach at Smith’s Cove. Drawing a line from the point where the beach drains seemed to converge back to the Money Pit itself, they selected a likely looking point on that line and began to dig. The expected course of events was as shown in the upper diagram: the interceptor shaft would meet the flood tunnel at a depth considerably less than the presumed junction with the Money Pit at 110 feet after which the lower course of the flood tunnel could be blocked.

  Thirty, forty, fifty feet: the interceptor shaft cut deeper and deeper. Just short of eighty feet, they gave up: it couldn’t be this deep and still connect with the ninety-five-foot level, or could it?

  It did not seem to have occurred to the Truro team that the cunning artificer against whom they were pitting their wits might just have decided to take his flood tunnel deeper than anyone would dig to intercept it, and then allow the natural hydraulic forces to push the water up again to the critical ninety-foot level in the Money Pit, as shown in the lower diagram.

  Rightly or wrongly, the Truro man began digging a second interceptor tunnel ten or twelve feet south of their seventy-five-foot failure. Between thirty and forty feet down in this new shaft they hit a substantial boulder. Prizing it out with considerable difficulty, they were deluged with water: they had found at least one of the flood tunnels, or, perhaps, an upper branch of a flood tunnel. As the diggers scrambled out of their newly dug interceptor shaft, salt water welled up rapidly until it reached sea level. Whatever passageway that boulder had been covering, it undoubtedly connected with the Atlantic.

  Working with considerable difficulty, they did what they could to staunch the flow by driving heavy wooden stakes down into the base of their shaft and attempting to block the tunnel with clay. It was only a partial success. When they began trying to bail out the Money Pit again they lowered the level a little, but nowhere near enough to make further excavation possible.

  Not really knowing what to try next, they resorted to the old formula of a parallel shaft either to drain the Money Pit or to make it possible to tunnel across to remove the treasure horizontally. Predictably, this re-run of previous failures led to yet another ignominious retreat up yet another flooded shaft.

  This was the ironic end of the Truro’s team’s endeavours: no more capital could be raised just when the explorers were more convinced than ever that a vast treasure lay in the depths of the Money Pit: inaccessible — yet tantalizingly close.

  - 5 -

  The Drain and Tunnel System

  Jotham B. McCully and his Truro men had discovered the amazing drainage system and the artificial beach at Smith’s Cove. It partly answered the question of how water was reaching the Money Pit below the ninety-foot level, but it raised many more questions than it answered.

  Looked at as a problem in basic logistics, there is: the construction of the coffer dam; the removal of the natural sand and clay from that area; the location, transportation, and embedding of the stones and boulders; the planning and laying of the five fan-shaped drains; the digging of at least one — possibly two or three — flood tunnels; and the accurate connection of the tunnel, or tunnels, to the Money Pit at depths greater than ninety feet. By calculating the size of the coffer dam; the area and depth of the artificial beach; the amount of clay which would have had to be removed from the tunnel and dumped elsewhere … and various other factors, a broad idea of the number of man-hours could be estimated.

  Some types of work are totally flexible in their homogeneity and their consequent man-hour implications. For example, some jobs can be done equally well by one man taking eighty hours, by ten men taking eight hours or by 160 men taking half an hour. Other tasks have specific requirements which make team work more effective than individual work. Some work theatres’ physical and spatial limitations make large teams impractical.

  Only one or two men at a time can cut away at the same narrow seam face
in certain mines, for example. Other occupations need forty or fifty powerful workers operating simultaneously to raise a heavy mast, or to haul a ship up a beach to be careened. A work-study expert could devise an optimum number of workers for each of the various sub-tasks involved in creating the Money Pit and its ancillary drainage and tunnels systems. Experts might reach marginally different conclusions, but they would be in broad agreement about the size of the work force required to complete the whole job in a reasonable time. Unless we are prepared to consider a project that would stretch into years rather than months, we must envisage a work force of at least thirty people, with the necessary picks, shovels, ropes, pulleys, trolleys, sledges, barrels, and carts to make the job possible.

  At the back of all this physical effort there has to be inspired planning: careful, accurate designing and effective administration and organization. The Oak Island engineers and miners needed food, drink, clothing, and shelter — not just for basic humanitarian reasons, but simply to keep them functioning effectively. The least caring slave exploiter provided the minimal conditions necessary to keep his slaves working. It was enlightened self-interest.

  To try to understand the Oak Island Money Pit mystery, the investigator must attempt to answer these questions in connection with the artificial beach, the drains, the filters and the flood tunnels:

  (a) Who had the engineering and administrative skills to plan and organize all of this?

  (b) Who had the necessary work force available: voluntary, coerced, enslaved, or otherwise?

  (c) Who had the time to keep that workforce on site for several months while the huge task was completed?

  (d) Who had the essential resources and equipment available to feed and supply that substantial work force for the duration of the original Money Pit construction work?

  (e) Who had the necessary motivation to initiate the whole amazing project in the first place, and the stamina to see it through to a satisfactory conclusion?

  (f) Who believed that the contents of the Money Pit, the mysterious “x” which the pit and its flood system was built to protect, was really worth all that time, effort, planning, and organization?

  Taking point (a) first, the possessor of the necessary engineering and administrative skills could have been a naval or military officer, especially one whose specialty was attacking or defending fortified positions, and, most appropriate of all, an engineering officer. Someone with tin, gold, or silver mining experience, perhaps in the old flood-prone tin mines of Cornwall, would be another likely candidate. A character from one of the famous Poldark historical romances springs to mind. Lower down the list, but by no means out of the running, might well be a Master Mason with Templar connections, a Viking boat builder, a Celtic sea-rover with experience of Welsh gold-mining, a Coptic religious refugee with experience of Egyptian building and tunnelling techniques, or a Mayan or Aztec architect.

  Which of these candidates would have been most likely to have had factor (b), a large and well-disciplined work force, available? A detachment of sailors or marines, perhaps? Drake’s dedicated Devonshire men, reinforced by a handful of Cornish tin miners, would readily have exchanged the hazards of the Spanish Main for the perils of the deep shafts and galleries ashore.

  Discipline and order were the very essence of masonic life and the strict Rule of the Knights Templar. Masons and Templars would have worked unquestioningly and uncomplainingly at their Master’s bidding to construct the Oak Island system. The Mores, with their proud and ruthless Viking Norman ancestry, eventually became the noble Sinclairs, the followers of the “Holy Light,” the Sanctus Clarus. Never lacking in courage, nor in building skills, a party of loyal Norsemen could have worked solidly together to construct the Money Pit and its defences. Celtic sea-rovers from Wales or Ireland would have had that fierce loyalty to their tribal chief which would have inspired them to sink the great shaft on Oak Island at his command — or to protect his corpse.

  Or was George Young right in following Professor Fell’s erudite translation of the words on that mysterious porphyry tablet discovered in 1803? Were the original builders a group of Coptic Christian refugees from Egypt who had made a semi-miraculous journey through the Pillars of Hercules and across the Atlantic in their resilient papyrus boats? Men schooled in ancient skills and traditions of the pyramid builders would have had little trouble in digging out the shafts and tunnels of Oak Island.

  An ardently religious fellowship would have provided an ideally dedicated and devoted labour force to carry out the work. The Mayan and Aztec socio-political systems would also have provided bands of disciplined workers able and willing to undertake whatever arduous tasks their priests and kings laid upon them. The Oak Island structures would not have been beyond the competence of those old South American architects and their docile labourers.

  Possible leaders and suitable work forces abound, but who would have had the (c) factor — time? Although best equipped, an eighteenth century military or naval group under tactical or strategic pressure might have had least time in which to complete the huge undertaking. The same strictures would have applied to Drake’s Devonshire men two centuries before. Time was of the essence for Elizabethan maritime adventurers: an undertaking that could have been accomplished much faster than the Oak Island structure would have had more appeal for Drake and his men.

  Master Masons and Templars, however, would not have been in a hurry. Turning their broad backs on an ungrateful Europe following the treachery of the odious Philip IV in 1307, the remnants of the Templars were nurtured and protected by the valiant Scottish Sinclairs. With that Sinclair help, a Templar expedition might well have reached Nova Scotia and set up an elaborate headquarters and secret treasure store on Oak Island long before Columbus sailed.

  Refugees do not lack time. The patient strength which fashioned the great Templar fortresses of the Middle East could well have been applied to the long, slow process of securing their priceless treasures in the depths of the Money Pit and guarding it with a prodigious system of beach drains and flood tunnels.

  Viking and Celtic sea raiders were often characterized by the speed with which they attacked and sailed away again. The laboriously slow Money Pit work is not really their style, but there are exceptions. To honour a dead leader, Vikings have been known to bury their hero and his ship together: the Money Pit would scarcely be more time-consuming than a ship burial. If, as George Young suspected, there are coffins rather than treasure chests down there, then a Viking origin is not entirely impossible.

  Mayans or Aztecs retreating with their treasures from insatiable Spanish Conquistadors would have arrived as refugees with all the time in the world to bury and protect their precious hoard.

  Point (d), the resources and supplies issue, poses entirely different questions, however. It is a case of swings and roundabouts. The possible builders with most time at their disposal were not necessarily those who would have been likely to be well-supplied. Naval or military engineers would have been properly provided with regulation rations — Spartan but adequate. Drake’s men, suffering the horrendous privations of most Elizabethan seafarers, would not have been as well-provisioned as a naval or military group in the eighteenth century.

  Templars and their accompanying Master Masons on a late fourteenth- or early fifteenth-century expedition would have been less well-provisioned than Drake’s men: not through any failure of Sinclair generosity, but simply because the ability to store and ship the necessities for a long journey were not there to the same degree that was developed in later Tudor times when maritime activity expanded dramatically.

  Vikings and Welsh sea raiders would have been likely to travel light as far as stores and provisions were concerned. They lacked preservatives and facilities for long campaigns. What Mayan and Aztec refugees might have carried is largely speculative. Ample quantities of thoroughly dried maize carried in large earthenware containers are certainly feasible, and one alternative interpretation of the inscription on the m
ysterious stone is that it is a message explaining how to cut off the water by dripping large quantities of corn or millet into the beach drains. Scientifically this might well have worked. As the grain expanded, it would have blocked the drain and temporarily cut off the water. Once the grain had rotted, the water would flow again and the deadly trap would be more or less reset. So Mayan or Aztec refugees might have had not only time and ample food supplies, but an ingenious way of circumventing and re-springing the water trap.

  The fifth consideration — (e) the motivation — is probably the most important of all. Human beings climb mountains, canoe over rapids, and try to fathom challenging mysteries like the Oak Island Money Pit just because they are there. Given the necessary motivation, men and women can perform feats of daring courage or dogged persistence over long, hard years. What then was so important to the original miners that the deep shaft, the artificial beach, the connecting tunnels and all the back-breaking toil that went into creating them were readily acceptable? Human motivation is hard to understand. We do not always recognize our own reasons for doing or wanting things. Why does an enthusiastic philatelist mortgage his house and sell his car to acquire one more small, grubby, paper rectangle to place in the album in his safe? Why does a rock climber risk life and limb to scale a precipitous overhang when there’s a grass path on the other side up which he could stroll to the summit with his dog and his grandmother on a warm summer afternoon?

  There seem to be three major possibilities:

  (i) Something was considered to be so uniquely valuable that only a depository as secure as the Money Pit was adequate. The motive was to preserve that immensely precious thing and to keep it safe.