The Oak Island Mystery

by Lionel

  Phil Irwin of Atlantic Divers Ltd., with headquarters in Brooklyn, Nova Scotia, went down well below the 180-foot mark, where the quarter-inch steel lining of 10-X ended. The force of the subterranean current at that depth almost tore the helmet from his head, and the masses of suspended particles brought visibility down to zero. Muddy water in Smith’s Cove showed where the fierce current was originating. It looks as if 10-X had penetrated at least one of the unknown genius’s ancient flood tunnels, and diverted the flow downwards into the labyrinth far below.

  Blankenship’s team bulldozed tons of clay over the entrance in Smith’s Cove, and another dive was made. The terrifying pressure of the racing water had stopped, but visibility was still close to zero. The divers dared not stray far from the foot of 10-X; their lights revealed almost nothing, and feeling around on the floor of the mysterious cavern revealed only small stones.

  After that, Dan himself made several dives, but again the problems of hopeless visibility and the danger of moving more than a few feet from the base of the shaft were too great — it was impossible to locate the salt-preserved body, the chests, or any of the other strange objects the camera had revealed.

  The pumping was also causing rapid erosion of the anhydrite, so that the original cavity was becoming bell-shaped, and too dangerous for a diver to enter.

  The inventive Bill Parkin — with as much flair as the legendary “Q” in Ian Fleming’s James Bond novels — made several major contributions to the available technology. One piece of equipment he provided made it possible to measure salinity in the flood tunnels, which revealed that not all the water was coming from the Atlantic. A liberal supply of fresh water from somewhere was moving around under Oak Island.

  In November 1976, Dan was nearly 150 feet down in 10-X cutting an observation window into the shaft’s steel lining while his son, David, operated the winch above. There was a strange, ominous rumble, and the sound of something massive hitting the steel above Dan’s head.

  Sensing danger, Dan used his telephone link to signal to David to haul him up immediately. With the Restall tragedy of 1965 uppermost in his mind, David ran the winch at full speed. Dan could hear more threatening noises above him. They were louder and closer: the steel tubing was about to collapse inwards upon itself — and him — at any second! Sixty feet higher than when he had first heard the warning thuds against the steel cylinder, Dan looked down. The shaft just below him was now crushed in like a rusty old car body shell caught in a junk metal dealer’s fifty-ton press. He had escaped with barely seconds to spare.

  And there — more or less — is where the physical exploration still stands today. Like every other attempt to solve the mystery of the Money Pit, money is the main problem. Triton Alliance (despite its massive financial resources) does not yet have the estimated $10 million plus expert engineering consultants believe would be necessary to dry out the labyrinth below Oak Island and find the answer that has eluded searchers for two centuries. Meanwhile, Blankenship and his men go on drilling. Nolan goes on surveying and drawing lines between his marker stones.

  Lionel and Patricia Fanthorpe with Dan Blankenship and a section of the crushed steel tubing which collapsed in November 1976 while Dan was still 150 feet down the shaft.

  There is, however, a third and very important line of attack — historical investigation, research, and theoretical speculation. Resolving the problem of what is hidden in the labyrinth, and who put it there, by deduction, may be the single most important step towards recovering it.

  The boys who started this great treasure hunt in 1795 were convinced that pirates or privateers, were responsible. How much support does history give their theory?

  Lionel Fanthorpe and Dan Blakenship beside the machinery at the head of Borehole 10-X.

  View down Borehole 10-X.

  - 11 -

  Pirates and Privateers

  Although Robert Louis Stevenson’s world famous Treasure Island did not appear until 1881, its realistic portrayal of pirate atmosphere is timeless. Flint, Black Dog, Blind Pew, and Long John Silver were not destined to reach the bookshops until nearly a century after Smith, Vaughan, and McGinnis reached Oak Island and made their pioneering discovery — but lurid tales of Henry Morgan, William Kidd, Woodes Rogers, Edward Teach, and other infamous pirates were widely known and frequently retold in eighteenth century Nova Scotia.

  A long tradition has associated the Oak Island Money Pit with William Kidd, but how likely is it to have any basis in historical fact? Popular accounts suggest that Kidd was born in 1645, the son of the Reverend John Kidd, the Calvinist Minister of Greenrock in Scotland, but there is little or no reliable evidence for these assertions. Paul Lorrain, Prison Chaplain at Newgate when Kidd was hanged in 1701, says that the pirate was then in his mid-fifties, which gives some validity to the approximate birth year.

  Almost nothing is known of Kidd’s early life, but from 1689 to 1691 there are records of his successful work as a privateer captain against the French in the West Indies. Kidd married the twice-widowed Sarah Bradley Oort on May 16, 1691. She was only fifteen when she married her first husband, William Cox, who had been a wealthy New York alderman. He died when she was eighteen. Her second husband, John Oort, had been a prosperous shipmaster and merchant. He had been dead for just over a week when she and Kidd took out their marriage licence! William and Sarah owned what must now rate as some of the most valuable property in the world: 86–90 Pearl Street, 52–56 Water Street, 56 Wall Street, and other premises.[1]

  Sarah’s connection by marriage with the Oort family is a strange coincidence, and may turn out to have more significance than appears on the surface. Ort, Orth, and Oort (Latin ursus, French ours) are variations of a word meaning “the bear.” The semi-legendary Arthur of Britain, Celtic king and/or Romano-British warlord of the West, was closely associated with the bear in folklore and mythology. The Rennes-le-Château mystery has a strong link to the Habsburgs, particularly to Johann, a descendant of the Tuscany branch, who denounced his title, took the surname of Orth, became a sea captain and allegedly went down with his ship, the Saint Margaret, in 1890, somewhere off Cape Horn.

  This Saint Margaret tragedy was, of course, a full two centuries after Kidd’s involvement with John Oort’s widow, but that New York Oort family may well have had Habsburg connections, and John’s mercantile marine activities would certainly have involved trade with Europe and Asia. Might some important Oort information that Kidd heard from his new wife have provided the spur that sent him on what was ostensibly a privateering voyage to the Indian Ocean?

  In the days before the Suez Canal was cut, Indian and Asian goods, silk, spices, jewels, and tea, had to be sailed laboriously around the Cape of Good Hope. This brought the precious cargoes perilously close to Madagascar and the small islands nearby — notorious pirate strongholds. The East India Company — wealthy and influential at the court of William and Mary during the last decade of the seventeenth century — put massive pressure on the British Government to provide warships to deal with the pirates who were destroying their trade.

  New York and the American North Atlantic ports (forbidden officially to undertake manufacturing or to trade other than via British ports and British ships under the terms of the Navigation Acts) were not all averse to taking part in the illicit Madagascar trade. A privateering commission could be bought very cheaply in New York at that time, and everyone benefited from the goods the privateers brought back.

  One version of Kidd’s enlistment, as commander of the privateer that the East India Company had demanded, was that he was more or less coerced into the job through fear of being thought disloyal or unenthusiastic. It was rumoured that Kidd’s greatest ambition was to captain a Royal Navy man-o’-war, and that failure to accept the East India privateering commission would permanently bar him from achieving his own quarter-deck to strut on!

  Whatever his true motives — and it seems more probable that Kidd had some special private and personal task in the India
n Ocean (or beyond) rather than that he was merely allowing the British Government to pressure him — he set out as captain of the Adventure Galley. She was a 287-tonner carrying only thirty-four guns — hardly a match for the formidable pirate vessels she was meant to pursue. He signed seventy rather dubious crewmen to start with, and almost immediately ran into his first problem. While his vessel was anchored impudently beside HMS Duchess of Queensborough, as though claiming the prestige and privilege of another Royal Navy vessel, Kidd was visited by a press gang who “recruited” the best twenty of his crew. He complained bitterly to Admiral Lord Russell that he now had scarcely enough hands left to sail the Adventure Galley without attempting to take on the extra burden of fighting well-manned, well-armed, and well-equipped corsairs. Eventually, he got twenty men back — but they were very inferior to the men that he had lost to the Duchess.

  Having captured an almost worthless French fishing boat and used most of what it fetched to buy provisions in New York, Kidd took his time about sailing for the Indian Ocean, a delay which irritated his powerful British backers. Eventually, with an even less reliable crew than he had started with, Kidd sailed for Madagascar. Was that delay really caused by Kidd’s need to consult further with Sarah and her brother who sailed with him about some vital information they had obtained from the late John Oort?

  He sullied his reputation again by insulting British Naval Commodore Warren, whose squadron he encountered off the Cape of Good Hope. Then fifty of Kidd’s crew died of disease in Mehila in the Comoros. In July of 1697 he laid in wait for the Mocha merchant fleet, but ran into the fearless, efficient, and well-armed Captain Edward Barlow, master of the Sceptre, who was guarding the convoy with more guns than Kidd had. In the face of Barlow’s spirited action, Kidd and the Adventure Galley retreated ignominiously. His subsequent kidnapping of an English captain and his Portuguese mate from a Moorish vessel did little to enhance Kidd’s rapidly deteriorating reputation. He quarrelled with Moore, one of his gunners, and then gave him a fatal blow with an iron-bound wooden bucket. One of the charges which cost Kidd his life in 1701 was Moore’s murder.

  Some time later he captured the only worthwhile prize he ever took, the 500-ton Quedah Merchant. It was Kidd’s fatal misfortune that she had an English captain named Wright and was the lawful property of Armenian merchants against whom Kidd had no warrant.

  Kidd and his captive “fleet” reached Madagascar on April 1, 1698, and sailed into the notorious pirate harbour on St. Mary’s Island. Here he encountered his old enemy Robert Culliford, now a successful pirate captain. Kidd ordered his untrustworthy men to attack Culliford’s frigate, the Mocha, but they disobeyed him derisively, deserted to join Culliford, and ransacked Kidd’s ships. He was lucky to escape with his life, and a proportion of his non-too-plentiful spoils.

  There is now a period of some uncertainty in Kidd’s life during which he might just have had time to reach Oak Island and bury his treasure — if he had still had anything worthwhile left to hide, which is highly doubtful. Abandoning the conspicuous and slow-moving Quedah Merchant under guard in the Higuey River in Hispaniola, Kidd acquired the anonymous-looking sloop Antonio and reached Long Island in her. Sarah and their two daughters joined him, but, from there onwards, Kidd’s life was all downhill: betrayal, desertion, imprisonment in horrendous conditions, sickness, condemnation, death by hanging, and finally rotting on a gibbet for years at Tilbury Point.

  Three years later, while the pathetic remnants of his tarred body still hung there, Sarah remarried and lived comfortably for another forty-odd years in New Jersey.

  The chance that Kidd had anything of value to bury at Oak Island, or that he had ever possessed the men, the money, or the engineering skill to construct even one-fiftieth part of the incredible workings there, must produce odds of hundreds to one against — and yet a tiny lingering doubt remains.

  There is the odd business of Sarah’s second husband, John Oort. Could he have been one of the “bear clan” associated with the ancient and powerful House of Habsburg? As such, did he know anything about the secret Arcadian Treasure, part of which may have been concealed at Rennes-le-Château? Did Oort perhaps leave papers or a map in a strong-box which the beautiful but illiterate Sarah asked Kidd, her third husband, to read and explain to her? Was there something in those papers which tempted Kidd to find an excuse — even a dangerous and unwelcome privateering excuse — to get to the Indian Ocean (or beyond it to the South China Sea) to try to retrieve something of immense value connected with that mysterious Arcadian Treasure? The chances are very slight indeed, yet they do not recede to zero: it is only possible to say that Kidd’s involvement in Oak Island is very unlikely.

  In this strange Money Pit investigation, however, nothing is entirely impossible, and there is still the disturbingly coincidental “evidence” of the Wilkins Map to be considered.

  What purported to be a map of the location of Kidd’s treasure cache turned up in a book by Harold T. Wilkins published in London in 1935: Captain Kidd and his Skeleton Island. This composite, which Wilkins admitted hat he had largely drawn from memory fertilized by imagination, was based on several so-called Kidd charts which had been “discovered” by Hubert Palmer, an English antiques dealer who specialized in pirate relics. Palmer had allowed Wilkins to see the “original” maps at a distance, but not to copy any of the bearings or other directions which they contained. Nevertheless, when Wilkins’s book appeared, there were cryptic directions on the composite sketch map he had drawn!

  Gilbert Hedden’s lawyer, R.V. Harris, came across Wilkins’s book and was intrigued by the superficial similarity of the Wilkins version of Skeleton Island to Oak Island. He drew these similarities to Hedden’s attention. Book in hand, Hedden tried to interpret and follow the directions. They led him to a drilled boulder north of the Money Pit.

  When he excitedly told Blair about it, Fred remembered seeing a similar drilled boulder forty years previously. The two of them relocated it and began pacing out distances: as a result they called in Charles Roper, the provincial land surveyor with his assistant, George Bates. Roper’s and Bates’s work led to the stone triangle, and a site line from the triangle’s pointer indicated the Money Pit! It all seemed far too accurate to be a coincidence. Hedden flew to England to interview Wilkins.

  Drilled boulder observed and photographed by the Fanthorpe team in 1988.

  Here he was grimly disappointed. Wilkins insisted that his map, which was in any case partly imaginative and partly a composite, referred to an island in the China Sea and had nothing whatever to do with Nova Scotia or the North Atlantic. Hedden pressed him about the directions shown below it, but Wilkins said he might have seen them on one or more of the thousands of maps and charts he had studied in the course of writing his various books about piracy and buried treasure. When Hedden finally succeeded in convincing Wilkins that markers (the drilled boulders) had actually been found very close to the places indicated on the semi-imaginary map, Wilkins was amazed. According to Hedden’s later account, Wilkins then began trying to convince himself that he was a reincarnation of Captain Kidd and had somehow produced the map and its accompanying instructions from some deep subconscious memory!

  There is one more incongruous data-fly struggling around in this speculative ointment: French was widely spoken by the Acadians (Arcadians?) in the area in the early settlement days, and chene is French for “oak.” Was the China Sea marked on what purported to be the treasure map a slight misrendering of the French Chene, or Oak, Sea — meaning the sea around Oak Island: in other words, Mahone Bay?

  Putting it all together, a wildly improbable — but just barely possible — Kidd scenario begins to emerge. A map, chart, or other curious document relating to the Arcadian Treasure is discovered by William and Sarah among the late John Oort’s papers. The main feature of this information is a reference to the China Sea. William and Sarah discuss the safest and most legitimate way to get there. In pursuit of an excuse to visit the pirate-inf
ested South China Sea in an adequately armed vessel, Kidd goes to London on board his own sloop the Antegoa, where he meets the wily Colonel Livingstone and the potentially untrustworthy Bellamont, the newly appointed governor of New York. Secretly backed by four influential and unscrupulous British government peers (who insisted on anonymity), Kidd sets off on his ill-fated voyage in the Adventure Galley. His reluctance to tackle real pirates, or well-armed enemy vessels, now becomes much more understandable: he is trying to cross the Indian Ocean in one piece and then negotiate the Straits of Malacca to reach the South China Sea.

  His reluctance to assuage his mutinous crew’s thirst for piracy also becomes more understandable: he does not wish to risk bringing a British war fleet down on the Adventure Galley because his piratical activities have been reported by survivors. Out of favour with his sponsors and with his crew, the hapless Kidd fails miserably to reach the South China Seas because his men desert him and flock over to join his old enemy, the pirate Culliford. The irony of Kidd’s tragedy is that he had only to sail a few miles up the much less hazardous Atlantic coast to find Oak Island in its Chene Sea. The question then arises of what happened to the Oort map, or, perhaps, a copy of it which Kidd made and initialled? Did William manage to pass it to Sarah before the end, and did it eventually get from one of Sarah’s descendants to the mysterious Captain Allen, who cruised enigmatically around the Oak Island area with it for two summers, but apparently found nothing?

  Captain Allen — if that was his real name, which is doubtful — was a wealthy southerner who turned up in Chester, on the shore of Mahone Bay, a few years after the end of the American Civil War (1861–1865). Allen had a mysterious map (the Oort-Kidd Arcadian document?) which he consulted daily, but allowed no one else to see. He bought a small ship from Shad Bay fisherman named Ganter and spent day after day sailing from a location about thirty miles out on a course that should have brought him to Oak Island — but never did.