by Lionel
Historians with an interest in psychology might well wonder whether Sir Nicholas had learned to play several roles successfully, and whether Sir Francis had subsequently acquired that trick from him. In 1564, Sir Nicholas had either written or sponsored a pamphlet which appeared under the name of John Hales, in which the royal claims of the House of Suffolk were supported. Needless to say, this was not well received by Elizabeth, and Sir Nicholas was under a cloud for some time. This experience taught him the perils of political authorship: a lesson he must have impressed firmly on young Francis after the boy’s striking literary abilities became apparent.
Was Bacon the author of the plays and poems attributed to William Shakespeare (1564–1616), and possibly those attributed to Christopher Marlow (1564–1593) as well? Undoubtedly he had more than enough talent, education, and experience to have written them, and his own essays prove him capable of writing in a wide variety of styles.[1]
One curious clue exists in act five, scene one, of Love’s Labour Lost: the polysyllabic monstrosity “honorificabilitudinitatibus.” Baconian cryptographers have claimed that this can be re-worked into a Latin cypher meaning: “These plays, F. Bacon’s offspring, are preserved for the world.”[2] If that interpretation is correct, it lends considerable support to the theory that Bacon’s original manuscripts of the works attributed to Shakespeare and Marlowe lie under the protective mercury among the other priceless treasures deep in the Oak Island labyrinth. Bacon was as much a man of science as a man of letters, and one of his theories in Sylva Sylvarum involved the preservation of manuscripts in mercury. Add to this the finding on Oak Island of ancient flasks with traces of mercury in them[3] and the theory becomes tenable. There is also the evidence of Mrs. Gallup’s discovery of the Biliteral Cipher among Bacon’s works.[4] On December 3, 1948, Dr. Burrell F. Ruth told a group of students at Iowa State College that in his opinion Bacon had hidden his original manuscripts somewhere very secure in the hope that they would one day be recovered by better citizens living in a better world.
Dr. Orville Ward Owen followed what he understood to be Baconian cyphers and found a mysterious underground room beneath the bed of the River Wye in the west of Britain. It was empty, but Dr. Owen found further Baconian cyphers cut into its walls. In Owen’s opinion, Bacon had originally intended to conceal his priceless manuscripts below the Wye, in much the same way that the ancient Visigoths had dammed and diverted rivers, constructed burial chambers beneath them, and then allowed the waters to flow back over the last resting place of their dead leader and his treasure. This was certainly done for Alaric, the Visigothic conqueror of Rome. Owen concluded that Bacon had had second thoughts and had decided that the chamber near the mouth of the Wye was not secure enough. Had he then chosen a much safer hiding place farther afield? In 1610, King James I granted Bacon land in Newfoundland, giving him a close connection with the early history of Canada.
Francis and his elder brother Anthony had attended Cambridge University together in 1573 and studied under that same Dr. Whitgift, who became Archbishop of Canterbury. As a young man in 1576, Bacon was in France with the ambassador, Sir Amias Paulet, and remained there until 1579. It may have been Paulet (or some other English aristocrat who was party to the secret) who during this time informed Francis of his “real” parentage. Anthony spent a much longer period in Europe, not returning to England until 1591.
Both the brothers had met influential Huguenots during their time abroad, and the Huguenots were reputed to have had links with the Cathars.
How does all of this connect Bacon with the Arcadian Treasure, the Emerald Tablets and the Oak Island Money Pit? Firstly, Bacon’s legal background links him with Anson of Shugborough and the Shepherd Monument, which in turn is connected with Poussin, who was a contemporary of Bacon’s, as Anson was.
Secondly, Bacon was in the ascendant in 1613, having just been appointed attorney general. In 1614 the key document of Rosicrucianism, Fama Fraternatis, appeared. According to this strange book, Christian Rosencreutz had been buried in 1484 in a mysterious hidden tomb engraved with the words: “I shall open after 120 years.” The authors of Fama Fraternatis claimed that they had found this heptagonal crypt in 1604 (after the expiry of Rosencreutz’s 120 years — and the same year in which Bacon was appointed King’s Counsel) and that it was lit by some inexplicable source. They also claimed to have examined Rosencreutz’s perfectly preserved body beneath an altar surrounded by magic mirrors.[5] They said they had seen an arcane manuscript simply referred to as The Book T, one possible implication being that the “T” stood for Thoth (alias Melchizedek, or Hermes Trismegistus). If there was an ancient secret Order that had been guarding the Arcadian Treasure since its earliest days, then some influential members of that Order may well have worn Cathar robes, Templar armour, and later Rosicrucian and Masonic insignia.
Francis Bacon was well-known for his interest in codes and cyphers, as well as in ancient mysteries and allegories. In his preface to The Wisdom of the Ancients, he wrote: “… under some of the ancient fictions lay couched certain mysteries … even from their first invention …”[6] It was his friend, Ben Jonson, who wrote of Bacon on his sixtieth birthday:
Hail! happy genius of this ancient Pile!
How comes it all things so about thee smile?
The fire! the wine! the men! and in the midst
Thou stands as if some mystery thou didst …
(January 22, 1621)
It was also Ben Jonson who said of him: “… he seemed to me … one of the greatest men … that had been in many ages …”[7]
Thirdly, if Bacon was the author of some of the great plays and poems attributed to Marlowe and Shakespeare — perhaps even a few of the works which were attributed to Edmund Spenser (1552–99) and Sir Philip Sidney (1554–86) as well — then he would have had a powerful motive for announcing his authorship to posterity.
Spenser and Sidney were good friends: Spenser, in fact, never ceased to grieve over Sidney’s early death as the result of a wound inflicted in battle. Spenser’s most famous work, The Faerie Queene, was intended to run to twelve books, but only six were completed.[8] The first book is concerned with the adventures of the Red Cross Knight of Holiness, regarded by most critics as an emblem of the Anglican Church, but which might equally well have stood for the Templars, whose symbol was undeniably a red cross. If Spenser is linked to the Templars, Sidney is linked to Arcadia. He is also linked to Sir William Cecil, Lord Burghley, brother-in-law to Ann Bacon, wife of Nicholas, and, ostensibly, mother of Francis. Sidney travelled a great deal. He knew France and Austria well. Although he died before Poussin was born, Sidney knew Tintoretto and Paolo Veronese, the great painters, whom he met in Venice. There was a strong cohesion and continuity among artists of that era, amounting almost to a guild or fraternity, in which secrets could easily be passed from one generation of painters to the next.
Tintoretto and Paolo may well have known something of what Poussin was later to communicate to Fouquet and to conceal in his Arcadian Shepherd canvases, with subjects’ hands formed into Ogham letters. It was to Sir Philip Sidney that Spenser dedicated his famous Shepheards Calender, and Sidney himself wrote Arcadia, a series of romantic adventures set in the idyllic land of the same name. Knowing his death was imminent, Sidney tried to recall all copies of this work: why? Did it contain some clue to the Arcadian Treasure, which the dying adventurer felt pointed rather too clearly to its true nature and whereabouts?
Fourthly, Bacon had special scientific knowledge of document preservation, together with an interest in Canadian land.
Fifthly, there is the scrap of parchment brought up on the drill which penetrated one of the “treasure vaults” below the Money Pit, the scrap of paper which Doctor Porter examined so carefully and so publicly. Was that tiny fragment bearing the letters “ui” or “vi” torn from one of Bacon’s original manuscripts?
The most fascinating data, however, are the Baconian Watermark Codes, which Mrs. Henry Pott resear
ched with great persistence and thoroughness prior to the publication of her uniquely informative book in 1891. (The authors are fortunate in possessing the actual signed copy which Mrs. Pott gave to Lord Beauchamp in February, 1892.)
Mrs. Pott produced a mass of detailed evidence from which she concluded that Bacon had been a prominent member of a very knowledgeable secret society (Masons? Rosicrucians? Vestigial successors to the Templars?) and that that society was still active and powerful in her own day. The intriguing watermark codes which she collected and reproduced included:
1. Watermark showing elongated grapes from Sir Philip Sidney’s Arcadia, edition dated 1662.
2. Watermark showing circular grapes surmounted by a diamond, or a dagger blade, also from Sir Philip Sidney’s Arcadia, edition dated 1662.
3. Watermark showing rounded grapes with curious leaf, or figure emerging from water, above them, taken from the 1638 edition of Sir Francis Bacon’s Sylva Sylvarum (the book which contains the details of storing documents in mercury to preserve them).
4. Watermark from the same source as 3 above, showing a diamond pattern of circular grapes surmounted by a hook, or crescent.
5. This is a particularly interesting pattern, resembling a stylized picture of a tree in a tub ready to be replanted (as per Michael Bradley’s fascinating theory that trees were deliberately planted on Oak Island to identify it for later parties of trans-Atlantic refugees.) It is from the 1669 edition of Sir Francis Bacon’s The New Atlantis.
6. Watermark from a letter dated 1580 from H. Maynard to Anthony Bacon, now in the Tennison MSS collection, showing a tall wine-jug with an ornate lid surmounted by five crosses supporting a crown. Do these Templar symbols indicate the Order’s support of Baldwin, King of Jerusalem? Or its support for “Prester John” alias Lalibela of Ethiopia?
7. & 8. Similar wine-jug watermarks from the same source as 6, but their details differ markedly.
8. Another wine-jug watermark, of distinct pattern, found on a letter from Sir Francis Bacon to W. Doylie, dated 1580, Tennison MSS.
10. Wine jug watermark surmounted by Fleur-de-lis emblem found on a letter from Sir Amyas Powlett [sic] to Anthony Bacon, dated 1580, Cotton MSS.
Cathars, Templars, Rosicrucians, and the Tudor men of mystery like Francis and Anthony Bacon have created riddles enough, yet there is still much more to be said about the Oak Island enigma. Bacon may quite possibly have arranged for the burial of his priceless manuscripts in a preservative mercury bath somewhere in the labyrinth below the Money Pit, but, if he did, in locating Oak Island at all he was probably making use of much older, stranger knowledge and ancient arcane secrets that had been handed down to him.
- 17 -
Something Older
and Stranger
When Smith, Vaughan, and McGinnis re-opened the mystery of the Money Pit in 1795, the general theory among their friends and acquaintances in the Chester and Mahone Bay area was that pirates — and most probably William Kidd’s men — were responsible. Hadn’t mysterious lights been seen on that sinister island a few years previously, and hadn’t the men who had rowed out to investigate never returned? Wasn’t that a strong enough indication that they’d been murdered by pirates who’d wanted to guard the secret of their treasure?
The Onslow Company’s work in 1803 and 1804 cast the first shadowy finger of doubt over the simple pirates’ buried treasure theory. What did all these layers of oak logs, of putty, of coconut fibre, and of charcoal really signify? Was this the way that lazy, brutal, alcoholic, and notoriously undisciplined buccaneers normally did things? Wasn’t a ten-foot hole in the sand a few yards above high watermark more their style? Measure so many paces from a rock landmark and an unusual tree? Scrawl a few compass bearings and the latitude and longitude on a crudely inaccurate sketch-map?
Doubt was also cast on the pirate theory by the discovery of the lettered stone which no one could decipher: that very unusual slab of smooth, flat, red-tinted Egyptian porphyry. What was it doing ninety feet down a pirates’ hole off the coast of Nova Scotia? There was also the problem of the insuperable water: if the pit was liable to flood at that depth, how had the pirates succeeded in digging it and burying their treasure there in the first place?
By the time that the Truro Company made its attempts in the mid-nineteenth century, Jotham B. McCully’s findings via the pod-auger, and Pitblado’s theft of what might have been a gemstone (or something stranger and more valuable?), serious doubts were pushing the pirates’ treasure theory towards the sidelines. The discovery of the long and elaborate flood tunnels, the drainage network on the beach and the treasure chamber (or burial chamber?) drastically reduced the likelihood that traditional pirates, or privateers, were responsible. What a well-equipped and well-organized labour force could not retrieve must have been concealed and defended by an even larger and better organized construction team. Who then? British Army Engineers at the time of the War of Independence? Spanish Conquistadors, or Inca refugees trying to escape from them? Drake’s hardy Devonshire lads augmented by expert Cornish tin-miners? Or was it Glooscap-Sinclair with the Zeno brothers and their Templar refugees?
Go back earlier still: were they Viking sea-warriors, Romano-Celts from the old Welsh Ogafau goldmine, or George Young’s Coptic refugees from Egypt?
Consider the mystery of the massive ancient timbers, submerged below Smith’s Cove, still bearing their challenging Roman numerals. Part of a sixteenth-century Basque fishing station? One of their ship repair yards? An early whaling or cod-salting depot? Or the remains of something as old as the proud empire whose distinctive numerals the ancient timbers carry?
The deeper the mystery is plumbed, the stranger the discoveries that are made. There is the further riddle of the inexplicable Cave-in Pit; the labyrinth below Borehole-10X; the boxes of “loose metal” that Fred Blair drilled into in 1897; the amazing television pictures that Blankenship’s team studied; the strategically placed drilled boulders and the stone triangle pointing to something of great importance.
When a mystery is as complex as this, the solution must match it in complexity.
There is no swift, simple solution to the mystery of the Oak Island Money Pit because the phenomena being investigated do not have one simple, isolated cause.
In the oldest of the buildings in the mysterious French village of Rennes-les-Bains, Roman stonework overlays Celtic foundations, Visigothic walls hide Roman architecture, Merovingian houses have replaced Visigothic cottages and medieval masons have modified the work of their Merovingian predecessors. Archaeologists can find traces of layer upon layer of occupation and alteration there. So it is with Oak Island. The facts appear to contradict one another simply because there is so much overlapping data. Exactly the same problem arose at Glozel. What appeared to be very ancient remains — things from Palaeolithic or Mesolithic times — were found alongside artifacts from the first century of the Christian era, and other pieces from the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries A.D. It didn’t make sense, said the tradition-bound French archaeologists of the Twenties. They dismissed it all as a hoax. Thermo-luminescent dating in Scottish and Scandinavian universities in the 1970s, however, proved conclusively that the artifacts at Glozel were genuinely old. There was no possible way that they could have been faked by the Fradin family in 1924. The apparent contradiction was absolute: a compromise theory had to be found.
What if the so-called medieval “glass factory” at Glozel had also been the lair of “witch” or “wizard”? Someone who had collected the ancient artifacts because he, or she, believed that they possessed “magical” qualities? That would have accounted both for the archaeological incompatibility of the excavated objects, and for their genuine antiquity.
Where and when did the Oak Island Money pit mystery really begin? What forms the first detectable layer of this intricately laminated puzzle?
It began a long way from Nova Scotia, and a long time before 1795. The legends of the ancient, anthropomorphic “gods” and �
��goddesses” (beings credited with great longevity and superior powers to those of normal humanity) must have had some foundation other than wishful thinking and a strong desire to emulate their advantages. Just as palaeontology and anthropology record the differences between Ramapithecus, Australopithecus, Homo habilis of the Olduvai Gorge, Heidelberg, Peking, Cro-Magnon, and Neanderthal humanity, so there may well have existed other species and sub-species, families and genuses differing as much from us as from one another, or from the Yeti and the Sasquatch. What was J.R.R. Tolkien really hinting at when he situated his super-human Númenoreans in a western kingdom known as Atalantë in the Quenya language?[1]
The very knowledgeable C.S. Lewis (a close friend of Tolkien) hinted in That Hideous Strength that Merlin the Magician, famed in the Arthurian legends, was one of the last survivors of this ancient and immensely powerful Númenorean race.[2]
Von Däniken, by contrast, would argue that such beings came originally from a strange, faraway planet. Atlantis, Lemuria, or the Belt of Orion — whether they eventually turn out to be terrestrial humanity’s closest, or most distant, cousins — their origin is shrouded in prehistoric myth and mystery. One name stands out boldly from that vast ancient plurality of gods and goddesses, nature spirits and demons, djinns and elementals, demi-gods and magicians: that name is Thoth, teacher and scribe of the Egyptian gods; Thoth, who is otherwise known as Hermes Trismegistus, and very probably as Melchizedek; Thoth who is always on the side of light, of wisdom, of truth and of goodness. It is Thoth, the great lore-master, who dares to challenge and thwart the dark designs of Set, the sinister, evil entity of Egyptian mythology.
