Part of him still knew there had to be something down there. After all, someone had dug a hole—it was the only explanation for the wood planks being found every ten feet. But how far down could the hole possibly go? And did pirates or the Queen or whoever had put the treasure down there ever expect to get it back? What was the point of hoarding vast amounts of gold and precious stones if they were just going to be buried so far underground that the owner, or anyone else for that matter, would never be able to recover them?
Although he didn’t wish misfortune on anyone, he was glad the latest crowd of treasure seekers hadn’t found anything. Even if there was only a little bit of gold to be found, not the hundreds of pounds as he liked to guess there was, if someone else started digging where Daniel and his friends had left off and then found something only a few feet further down, Daniel wouldn’t have been able to live with himself. He was certain the treasure would eventually be found, but with the pit now ninety feet into the earth—an impossible depth for any four boys—he could take comfort in the knowledge that recovering it would have truly been a task beyond his abilities.
Looking around, the hole still appeared pretty much the way it had when he, Anthony, John, and Samuel last left it. Although the latest group of men hadn’t used it, the original block and tackle was still attached to the tree limb above the hole. The flagstone that Daniel and the other boys had found was still pushed to the side in the exact spot they had left it. The only real difference was that the giant mounds of dirt they had made were now three times bigger.
Walking around the dirt mountains, he saw the wood planks stacked in neat piles. Those damned wood planks. They should have revealed a great treasure. They should have been the final barrier before Daniel and his friends discovered more riches than they could ever comprehend.
Daniel was now only a few years younger than his father had been when Daniel first took the canoe across to this island. His father must have known a treasure wouldn’t be found. Although Daniel would have disagreed at the time, it wasn’t his father’s pessimism that would have made him feel that way; it would have simply been the reality of the world that poor men didn’t magically become rich overnight. Now that Daniel worked the land each day, now that he had children of his own, he understood the realism his father had always carried with him. People like him—farmers, men who worked from sunup to sundown—simply didn’t have their destinies changed by something as miraculous as buried treasure. Their lives could change. Drought. Locusts. Disease. These were things that could alter the course of Daniel’s future. Not something as simple as a chest full of gold or gems.
At the hole’s edge, he closed his eyes one last time, imagined how it had felt to dig those first few feet of earth and stone away, the feeling of exhilaration and excitement. Then he opened his eyes, looked down at his calloused and tanned hands, the hands of someone who spent every hour working in the fields and would continue to do just that. And then he walked back to the canoe, never to set eyes on the pit again.
9 – Permission To Dig
Year: Unknown
“I would like your permission for something,” Anderson said.
Benio, the elder Anderson most often spoke with, nodded, not thinking anything of the request. Every villager did the same thing when they wanted something, whether it was expanding the size of their farm, arranging a marriage for one of their daughters, or any other such societal dealings. The elders never denied the people permission for these things and Anderson came to realize that making the request was a sign of respect, a way of informing the village’s leadership what families intended to do rather than actually seeking their approval to do it.
He had a feeling his request would be different, though.
The Mi’kmaq buried their relatives, as well as their pets, but like many Native American tribes, they buried their dead above ground, leaving a mound of earth on top of the dead body, rather than digging a hole and putting the deceased six feet underground. Doing so would put their loved ones closer to evil spirits. This way, the dead could still be encased in the power of the mother spirit, but they were also closer to the heavens than they were to the demon lands.
Anderson wasn’t burying a body, but he also wasn’t planning to limit his digging to a depth suitable for a body. After seeing the cave filled with rubies, he knew he would require a hole much, much further underground.
“I need to dig into the earth.” And then, “Far.”
Benio chuckled, thinking the request was a joke. When Anderson offered the most genuine smile he could muster, the elder realized his friend’s request was serious and frowned at the possibility of disturbing the earth.
“I won’t do it here,” Anderson said. “I’ll go to one of the islands and dig there. And I won’t let anyone else from the tribe partake in the digging. If there is any misfortune caused by what I do, it will be limited to me.”
He expected Benio to refuse the request, no matter how far away from the Mi’kmaq village Anderson planned to dig. He expected the elder to say that it didn’t matter if other members of the tribe joined in the digging, that merely being associated with someone who was going to disturb the earth was reason enough not to take a chance on angering the gods.
Instead, Benio nodded and said, “Okay,” and the only reason Anderson could think of that he was allowed to undertake the project was that the elders still thought he might have special powers, might even be a god pretending to be a man even though Anderson had denied this more times than he could count.
“Thank you,” Anderson said, rising from the ground where he and the elder had been sitting. “I promise I won’t disturb the land anywhere near you.”
”Borrow tools?” Benio said.
The village had an assortment of tools at their disposal, ranging from an assortment of shovels that resembled the modern version closely enough that even Anderson was impressed, a series of axes that were good for chopping wood and dividing pieces of large animals that the hunters brought back, a handsaw, and even a set of primitive-looking hammers.
Even so, Anderson knew he was going to have to make his own tools as well. There was no way even the nicest set of shovels would be enough for what he had in mind. It might take months just to build everything he thought he might need. It didn’t help that the closest he could come to drawing out schematics for the rope and pulley system and everything else he had in mind would be limited to vague sketches on leaves. Anything more detailed might give the tribe technological advances they weren’t yet ready to learn about and change the Theta Timeline in ways he couldn’t imagine.
“Thank you. What should I say if someone volunteers to help me?”
“You might need help?”
“No. But I know how friendly everyone here is, and I don’t want to take a chance on them bringing bad fortune upon themselves if they dig with me.”
The truth was that as much as Anderson could use the help to dig a hole as deep as the one he had in mind, he didn’t want the tribe to know the extent of what he was doing or what he planned on leaving deep under the earth.
Benio smiled. “Tell them they need elder approval.”
And while it was a friendly gesture, one to show Anderson he was a friend, the time traveler couldn’t help but feel his heart sink a little bit at the minor infraction Benio was willing to incur on his behalf. The elders wouldn’t allow anyone else to dig a hole deep into the earth but they were letting him. In the grand scheme of things it was nothing, a trivial display of affection. But Anderson knew how that could set a precedent for the same thing to happen again. And then again. And then, not only again, but a greater abuse of power, greater corruption. It was how the Tyranny had crept up on the people and turned the land they knew into a monster.
“How far you going to dig?” The elder said.
For a moment, Anderson thought of lying. Benio would never know if he was telling the truth or not, and giving the real answer would only risk having the elder rescind his appr
oval to carry out the project.
“See how tall that tree is?” Anderson said, pointing to one of the hemlocks that towered over them.
The elder whistled and shook his head.
But Anderson put his hand out and said, “Not that far. Much further.”
The elder did not burst out laughing and say Anderson was foolish. He did not yell, “No, no, no,” and walk away before anything else could be said. He merely stared at Anderson as if there must have been a miscommunication in the language.
Benio was frozen with confusion. As Anderson watched, the old man’s eyebrows moved up, paused there, then fell back down again. A moment later, they were up, as the man tried to make sense of what he had been told.
Finally, Benio said, in a grumble, “Earth is earth.”
“I know. I promise I won’t disturb anything more than I need to. And I won’t bring bad luck.”
As if to emphasize his point, he looked off in the distance at the islands that were invisible behind a layer of fog, hoping Benio would realize that if the island couldn’t even been seen in the distance, there was no reason to fret about how far Anderson might dig.
The elder took a deep breath, then let out an extremely long and loud sigh. When Anderson didn’t say anything, he repeated the display. Anderson expected the tribal leader to ask why he planned to dig such a hole, but he didn’t.
Maybe, Anderson thought, he’s not asking because he thinks that just by asking the question and hearing the answer, he will bring bad fortune upon himself.
What would Anderson say in that case, that he wanted to dig a hole so deep that no one would be able to recover what was hidden down there for hundreds of years? That would just make Benio more suspicious.
“You bury evil spirit?”
Anderson couldn’t help but laugh. “No,” he said, “nothing evil.”
“You appear from flash of light in sky. You speak different language. You say you not a god but you fall from sky. Now you want to dig hole deeper than tree?”
Anderson smiled. “That about sums it up.”
The elder did not return the smile. Instead, he too stood and turned to walk away from Anderson. But before he departed, he looked at the time traveler and said, “Do what you feel you need to. That is all any of us can do. But question why you want to do such a thing. Think if any bad can come of it.”
“Any good,” Anderson said, thinking that was what the elder meant to say.
But the elder only shook his head and walked away.
10 – The Rich Get Richer?
Date: 1805
After Reginald Owen’s failed attempt, the ninety-foot pit at Oak Island remained quiet for another two years. People visited the hole in the ground, but after the previous group of men had dug an additional sixty feet and still not found anything, the visitors were content with looking at the hole and imagining the riches buried down there. It was easier to look and dream than it was to take up a shovel, descend ninety feet, and begin trying to find it themselves.
Even during the quiet years, though, the years when no workers gathered to try and penetrate further into the earth, stories and rumors of what could be on Oak Island continued to spread throughout the world. In Boston, fishermen hoped their next assignment took them north so they might have a chance to climb down the hole, dig a few inches of dirt away, and find their fortune. In New York City, the wealthiest men didn’t talk about what was happening across the ocean in Europe. They spoke about the mysterious hole up north in Nova Scotia that might contain all of Marie Antoinette’s jewelry, a collection of gold, rubies, sapphires, and emeralds greater than any other member of royalty had ever accrued. In Ireland, men wanted to bring their families across the water to the New World not only so they could make a fresh start for themselves, but so they could go see Oak Island, uncover the treasure, and become richer than King George III. And in England, where King George III was beginning to slip into madness, the people whispered that maybe their ruler had lost his mind and buried all of the royal treasures on the other side of the globe.
Day after day, talk of the pit and the treasure it contained passed the ears of Julius Candenborn. While Candenborn had become filthy rich in the fur trade, he was quick to use that wealth to pursue other business interests. The truth was that there was little satisfaction to be gained from being a successful fur trader; anyone could have done the same if they were so inclined. The money was there for the taking.
Such an abundance of cute animals waiting to have their necks broken and their skin ripped off so men and women could have the comfort of fur coats and boots. Little did the morons know (the buyers, not the animals) that the fur they were buying was not only more expensive than traditional coats, it also provided poorer insulation from the cold. People were making him a rich man by paying more money for an inferior product. People’s stupidity never ceased to amaze him, but it had made him rich so he wasn’t going to complain.
But while anyone could accrue wealth from that trade, it took someone with a true acumen for business to turn that money into a fortune. While other fur traders tried to outdo one another, Candenborn saw that the real money was in owning land and lending money for interest. Having watched the fur traders undercut and fight with each other, he was happy to get out and move on to a different industry. He didn’t need to be the best at any one thing; he was happy to be great at many things.
Now, he had more money than he could ever need. To show this, there were days when he gave everyone he passed on the street a silver dollar, just because he could. He had dined with John Adams and Thomas Jefferson. He owned enough territory on the east coast that if it was all put into one parcel of land, it would be bigger that the state of Massachusetts.
Although he didn’t need more than he had, he liked knowing he could have more if he wanted it. That was why, when the whispers about Oak Island didn’t die down, the way they had about the rumored sunken treasure off the coast of North Carolina or the bandit’s buried gold in Virginia, he made up his mind to find out once and for all what was there.
With the amount of money he could throw at the project, it wouldn’t matter if the men continued digging down a thousand more feet underground. Candenborn even told one of his close associates, “Hell, I don’t care if they keep finding those wood planks until they dig straight through to China.” People knew he wasn’t just bragging; he really would spend whatever amount of money it took to find the jackpot.
The team he sent to Oak Island consisted of twelve men. Ten men to perform the manual labor, one to oversee the project, and one to cook and maintain the camp for everyone else. He would have been willing to pay to have a thousand men sent there to dig the hole, but being practical, knowing that would mean ten men were actively working while the other nine hundred and ninety were sitting around making jokes, he opted for the much smaller team.
Candenborn, unlike some of the other wealthy men who sent expeditions to Oak Island, even went there with the crew to see the hole for himself. This way, when they found the treasure, he could give his firsthand account of what the island had been like.
But Candenborn, unlike his predecessors, didn’t have to wait long before his men found something of note. He had only planned to stay at the island for three days before heading back to New York City. But after the first day, his men found something after only digging an additional ten feet.
When his men, one hundred feet underground, called up to him, he told them he would descend the long ladder to see what it was for himself. As he descended into the dank, mosquito-ridden hole, he fully expected to find that his men had uncovered yet another set of the wood planks that the other searchers had found every ten feet.
Even so, he wanted to look at them personally before they were disturbed. He knew better than anyone that success came by paying attention to the details that other men would overlook. Stories had spread about charcoal markings next to some of the planks, yet no one had taken time to record if they had been words
, numbers, or symbols, and so they were lost to time. The same mistake wouldn’t happen on his watch. He hadn’t become a millionaire, an obscene level of wealth in those days, by ignoring subtle signs that other men didn’t even realize were there.
Maybe the earlier crews, in their haste to become filthy rich, had missed an important message when they tore up the wood planks rather than taking the time to figure out why the person who put them there had written on some of them. These were the things that only a man who already had obscene wealth would slow down and look for. After all, although he was excited to find a genuine chest of pirate booty, he was already one of the five richest men in the country. What was more wealth going to do for him besides put his name in the papers more often?
He still had no idea why someone would go to the trouble of burying their riches so far underground, but even he was sure there had to be something down there. No one, not even the sickest, most disturbed bastard of all time, would go to the trouble of digging such a deep hole for the fun of it.
“What do we have?” he said to the three sweat-covered men who were squeezed shoulder-to-shoulder in the circular hole.
“You told us to yell when we found anything at all,” one of the men said without excitement. Obviously, all of the men had heard the same stories that Candenborn had, that there were wood planks every ten feet, and that was what they expected to find now.
“Found some wood, have you?” he said.
The men nodded. Each of them was so covered in dirt that Candenborn couldn’t tell what color their hair had been before it became the color of mud. Each of them wiped a continuous stream of dirty brown perspiration out of their eyes, only to have more pour in.
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