“HID UNDER WYE” was the first message he had decoded with his cipher wheel, as Owen explained to the Times. The next sentences he found read: “Buried boxes found under famed Roman Ford” and “Bed or braced beams under Roman Ford,” then “At point off Wasphill.” He even found sentences that described the exact dimensions of the vault, Owen told the Times. The ensuing expedition that was the subject of the Times article sounded so incredible that I was amazed the newspaper’s correspondent (who was not identified by name, despite the fact that the article was enormously long) could report it in such a straightforward manner. The story made me gasp exactly once, when Owen told the Times correspondent that the cipher wheel had identified a “blue clay” in which the vault containing the Bacon manuscripts was surrounded. By then I had read literally dozens of descriptions of the belt of “strange blue clay” that had been found in the Money Pit and in which the Oak Island treasure was presumed to be embedded. Could this possibly be a coincidence?
After months of negotiations with the British government to get permission to explore the River Wye, Owen had also been required to make an arrangement with the Duke of Beaufort, who held certain rights to “flotsam and jetsam” recovered from that section of the river’s banks, and as well to obtain the cooperation of Henry Clay, the eighty-seven-year-old Squire of Chepstow. Finally, on October 5, 1909, Owen was permitted to begin his excavation. The photographs accompanying the Times article depicted an extensive operation involving steam engines, pumps, massive wooden platforms, and more than a dozen workmen. Owen and his crew bored thirteen holes along the east bank of the Wye without finding anything before they reached bedrock, the Times correspondent reported, but the fourteenth hole had gone deeper than any of the others and Owens was ecstatic when his drill brought up blue clay. Two days later, the crew uncovered a “strange oaken structure, hectagonal in shape,” according to the Times correspondent, who, based on his firsthand observations, described it in detail: 41 feet long by 10 feet wide, with a triangle at each end “pointed like the bows of a boat.” There were five bars of oak across the width of the structure from side to side “and the space between these bars is filled up with rock and a peculiar blue clay” [italics mine].
Owen was convinced he had found what he was looking for. The Times correspondent noted that others doubted this claim, among them a “local historian” who said it was perfectly obvious that what Owen had found was the remains of the landing stage of an old bridge. Whatever it was, the structure did not contain even one box of manuscripts, let alone sixty-six. What he had been afraid of, Owen told the Times, was that Bacon had moved the manuscripts to another location.
There are numerous accounts that describe Owen as having uncovered a Baconian vault exactly where he was looking for it, only to find it empty. In other accounts, all Owen found was the remains of a Roman bridge and a medieval cistern. What he did not find, in any account, was Shakespearean manuscripts. At the end of his life, Owen was described in an article published in London’s Times Literary Supplement as a “bedridden, almost penniless invalid” who was filled with regret over the years he had given to the “Baconian controversy” and warned others not to follow in his footsteps.
Burrell Ruth had ignored that advice and in the summer of 2016 so would I. But that part of the story comes later.
CHAPTER TWELVE
In the last years before World War II, and in the early stages of the global conflict, operations on Oak Island were directed by Edwin H. Hamilton, a professor of engineering at New York University. Hamilton had approached Gilbert Hedden in the spring of 1938 with an offer to take over the treasure hunt on Oak Island and to bear all the costs of the expedition. Frederick Blair had been glad to hear it at first, but he began to back off when Hedden suggested an even three-way split of any recovery. Every previous deal Blair made had guaranteed him half of whatever valuables were brought up from belowground, and he expected the same again. The subsequent negotiation consumed more than two months, but by the end of June the three men had agreed that Hedden and Hamilton would each receive 30 percent of the take, with the remaining 40 percent going to Blair.
Hamilton moved forward immediately, beginning in mid-July 1938, when he arrived on the island with a drilling crew from the same company Hedden had used, Sprague and Henwood. For the professor, step one was to locate the original shaft and to define it as precisely as possible. He and his crew began in the Chappell shaft (no. 21), where two sections of the cribbing were beginning to buckle. The crew spent five weeks working downward to reinforce the timbers between depths of 145 feet and 170 feet, then upward between 90 feet and 62 feet. Once that was done, they used a diamond bit to bore fifty-eight holes in the Pit down to the bedrock, which they struck at depths of between 168 and 171 feet. The lateral drilling began in August, and within a day or two the drill bit brought back splinters of what was described as “very old oak.” Hedden believed they were from the remains of the timbers installed in 1850 that had sunk toward the bottom of the Money Pit during the 1861 collapse. Blair concurred, and both men felt certain that they were either in or right next to the original Pit.
In late August, Hamilton moved his crew to the northeast corner of the Hedden shaft (no. 22), where the drill went down to 117 feet but struck nothing of real interest. So the professor moved the crew to the shaft nearest to the shore of Smith’s Cove, where their excavation unearthed a horizontal tunnel at a depth of 35 feet that was filled with broken timbers, running straight for a distance of about 15 feet toward the Cave-in Pit, then gradually curving around and coming to an end just below it. Deeper, at 45 feet, Hamilton’s crew found another tunnel running south from the shaft for about 25 feet. It was filled with beach gravel and cribbing made of hemlock timbers that had been cut with an up-and-down handsaw and were badly deteriorated. This tunnel led to a sand streak (a bleed of fine aggregate) about 3.5 feet wide. Two posts were still in place in this part of the tunnel, just a few feet from where it extended for about 5 feet into hard blue clay. Hamilton made careful measurements in both of these tunnels showing that the sand streaks in them were in a perfect line between the Money Pit, the Cave-in Pit, and the stakes at the south shore marking what was believed to be the beginning of the water course.
Convinced he had found connections to the flood tunnel system, Hamilton ordered a new shaft sunk from the floor of the lowest tunnel to a farther depth of 11 feet, where the men were met with sand, beach gravel, small stones, and blue clay but no evidence of water. About 6 feet down in this shaft, they recovered a large flat stone that was “not native to this level,” as R. V. Harris described it, lying next to several pieces of “chewing tobacco of the old fashioned type, in good condition.” The tobacco—and the stone, too, most likely—had been left by earlier searchers, Hamilton decided, rather than by those who did the original work on the island.
The crew returned to the Hedden shaft, where at the 82-foot level they discovered a trench that had been dug downward to flood the Money Pit and made Hamilton even more certain of where the original shaft was located.
Amos Nauss, who was working for Hamilton now, recalled that “when we were down there [in the Hedden shaft], there was always saltwater coming in. But we couldn’t find where it was coming from. We never saw the flood tunnels.”
Hamilton decided to conduct his own dye test, similar to the one Blair had done in 1898, to try to trace the source of the flooding. As Nauss recalled it, the dye was dropped into both the Hedden and Chappell shafts “and it came out on the southeast side of the island, about one hundred yards out from the high tide. We took my boat out to it, and we could see the dye coming up from the bottom of the sea. So we knew there was a connection there with a waterway going through the Money Pit area.” They also knew that the starting point of that connection was now completely underwater, even at low tide, due to the rising ocean and the eroding shore.
On November 4, 1938, Hamilton sent a summary of the work his crews had done that summer and what t
hey had found to President Roosevelt. FDR seemed especially interested in Hamilton’s report that he had measured water pouring into the Hedden shaft at the rate of “approximately 800 gallons per minute,” indicating that it could not possibly be from the sort of “percolation” that Roosevelt’s old boss Captain Bowdoin had described. The president, now in the middle of his second term, made plans to visit Oak Island the summer of 1939 during the Halifax stopover of his US Navy cruiser. Hamilton was so excited that he ordered the construction of a custom sedan chair to carry the polio-disabled president from the dock at Smith’s Cove directly to the Money Pit area. The professor was crushed when at the last minute Roosevelt sent word through a friend that the imminent war in Europe “made it impossible.”
The outbreak of World War II—which Canada entered alongside England when Germany invaded Poland in September 1939—made it difficult for Professor Hamilton to find workers in Nova Scotia. Eventually, by offering the exorbitant pay of forty cents per hour, Hamilton assembled a crew of eleven in the summer of 1940. During this same period, Hamilton also had to fend off a move on his flank by the film star Errol Flynn, who was attempting to assemble his own team of treasure hunters.
Flynn was considerably more than some celluloid swashbuckler. He was in fact an adventurer of remarkable nerve and determination, which he exhibited in spectacular fashion back in the autumn of 1927, when he sailed into Salamaua, a village on the northeast coast of New Guinea, then hiked the Black Cat Track to the fabled gold-mining village of Wau. This was one of the most treacherous treks on the planet, through a tropical forest infested with typhoid and blackwater fever, leeches and killer snakes, razorback boars and cassowaries—not to mention native tribes who were headhunters and cannibals. Most of the white men who attempted it never came back. Eleven years later, in 1938, Flynn sailed to Jamaica, where he attempted to recover the treasures lost when Port Royal fell into the sea, using deep-sea diving equipment that was absurdly primitive by today’s standards. The movie star could never get deep enough to reach the pirate booty at the bottom of the ocean, but he did bring back various museum-quality architectural items. He seems to have been quite serious about his wish two years later to take over the Oak Island treasure hunt but found himself stymied by an inability to break through the agreement Hamilton had made with Hedden and Blair, and he eventually withdrew.
So in June 1940 it was Hamilton who directed the crew that tunneled from the Hedden shaft around the Chappell shaft in a search for the Halifax Company tunnel, which the men found just to the southeast of the Hedden shaft. The crew followed it to the top of the east-end drumlin, found a tunnel running toward the Cave-in Pit that divided just before it reached the (presumed) air shaft, then traveled around it on both sides. Original wooden tracks for the carts that had been used in its excavation were found on the bottom of this tunnel and convinced Hamilton absolutely that this was part of the Halifax tunnel, which he knew had terminated in the center of the Money Pit.
The net takeaway of this extended search, for Hamilton, was to confirm that the Money Pit and the Chappell shaft were close enough to be connected, but that the center of the Money Pit was at least a few feet—perhaps as many as five—to the south, in the direction of the Hedden shaft. In other words, the professor was fairly certain he had recovered the location of the original shaft. Buoyed, Hamilton returned to Oak Island in the summer of 1941 determined to explore the bottom of the Money Pit itself, but labor was now even scarcer. Once he finally had a few men, Hamilton was stopped by the failure of electricity on the island. His pump stopped, and so did his effort to drain the Hedden shaft. Despite this, Hamilton was back on Oak Island in the summer of 1942 and managed to sink a shaft 8 feet square between the Hedden and Chappell shafts, using the remains of two earlier tunnels to connect the two shafts at a depth of 155 feet. His crew’s lateral drilling, though, produced no results.
During this work, the crew did intercept a watercourse 8 inches high by 10 inches wide that was cut through limestone. Hamilton sent a sample of the water running through this apparently man-made tunnel for analysis and was puzzled by a report that it had a slightly higher specific gravity than the water drawn from Smith’s Cove, suggesting that it might contain minerals that gave it greater density.
Hamilton separated from his two partners when he asserted that the so-called coconut fiber that had been found both in the Money Pit and along the shore of Smith’s Cove was really hemlock bark. Blair and Hedden found that ridiculous. The two pointed out that hemlock bark deteriorates far more rapidly than coconut fiber and would have been nothing more than goo had it been buried for years beneath the artificial beach at the cove. They noted the interview just five years earlier in which Captain Anthony Vaughan II (who was almost ninety-nine at the time) recalled being present as a boy of ten on the beach at Smith’s Cove when the five finger drains were discovered after an enormous amount of what was clearly coconut fiber was removed from on top of them. A sample of this fiber had been submitted in 1916 to the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC, whose scientists reported: “The specimen of fibre submitted is undoubtedly from the fibrous husks surrounding a coconut. This fibre is especially resistant to the effects of seawater and under the conditions in which it was found may have been there for several hundred years.”
A 1937 analysis by the Bureau of Plant Industry in Washington, DC, had confirmed the Smithsonian Institution report, but that same year a scientist at the Botanical Museum of Harvard University had reported that the fiber submitted to him was “readily distinguishable as manilla hemp.” But while some small measure of uncertainty about the fiber existed, no scientist had ever said it was hemlock bark.
Whether the dispute among the partners about the composition of the fiber was a cause of Hamilton’s decision to discontinue his operations on Oak Island is not clear from the record, but the timing certainly suggests this. At the same time, it’s clear that the ongoing war was making it more and more difficult to continue. Furthermore, by the summer of 1943 Hamilton had sunk USD $60,000 (equivalent to slightly more than $1 million in 2018 value) into the Oak Island treasure hunt; he was quite possibly tapped out. Whatever the case, he concluded his work on the island in admirable fashion, constructing two stout platforms just above the waterline in both the Chappell and Hedden shafts, decked with heavy timbers that sealed them more effectively than had ever been done before on Oak Island. Another year passed before Hamilton admitted he had given up the search, but by then Mahone Bay had captured him for good. The professor retired from NYU to settle in Chester, where he and Amos Nauss became partners and founded a boatbuilding business—keeping front-row seats from which to observe the continuing drama on Oak Island.
In the mind of Frederick Blair, and therefore in the annals of the island, Edwin Hamilton’s principal accomplishment had been to prove that neither the Hedden nor the Chappell shafts were directly over the Money Pit, but rather that the Pit was somewhere between them. The professor had come very close to pinpointing the exact location of the original shaft.
The other main thing Hamilton had proved was what a mess a century and a half of treasure hunting had made of Oak Island. Reading through the records of the professor’s operations between 1938 and 1943, I could visualize more clearly than ever before the underground chaos created by the dozens of shafts and tunnels that had been driven into and under the ground on the east end of Oak Island. Each effort to reach the Money Pit—or to drain or divert or block the water flowing into it—had resulted in some form of contact with a flood system that still wasn’t well understood, and as a result nearly all of the shafts and most of the tunnels were now filled with seawater that was endlessly replenished by the Atlantic Ocean. There was now enough water down there to fill a hundred Olympic-size swimming pools, I estimated. Its constant churning was steadily eroding the walls of the shafts and the floors and ceilings of the tunnels. The entire subterranean structure of the island was in danger of slowly collapsing into a kind of under
ground sea filled with detritus of human folly. The original engineering problem had been perplexing enough, but what existed now was a quandary of staggering proportions. Even if there was a treasure down there, the likelihood of getting to it had diminished year by year. Yet no matter how many tried and failed, there always seemed to be someone who believed that a bolder plan or some new and improved technology would deliver the success that had eluded all those who came before.
So the Oak Island treasure hunt would go on.
IN THE SPRING OF 1944, Frederick Blair renewed his treasure trove license with the Nova Scotia provincial government. At almost the same time, Gilbert Hedden moved to protect his property on the island from IRS seizure by transferring it to a trust managed by his attorney. Together, the two men began searching for someone to replace Edwin Hamilton. They swiftly entered into negotiations with a Toronto engineer named Anthony Belfiglio, who claimed to have backers willing to put up $50,000 to continue the treasure hunt. Offers and counteroffers went back and forth all through 1945 and into 1946; at one point Belfiglio offered to buy Hedden’s Oak Island properties for $15,000, but no deal was ever consummated.
In late 1946, the Broadway stage singer Edward Reichert approached Hedden with an offer to lease the east end of Oak Island. Reichert claimed to have more than $150,000 from unnamed “backers” to finance his search. Hedden made a tentative agreement with the singer, and Reichert came to Nova Scotia in May 1947 to meet with Blair. In a foreshadowing of what was to come during later decades, Reichert explained that his plan was to use steam shovels to dig a hole 80 feet in diameter and more than 200 feet deep in the Money Pit area. He had made arrangements in Halifax to lease the necessary equipment for $4,500 a month and had budgeted the work to last ten months. During the next few weeks the singer gave numerous newspaper interviews that stirred public interest, then simply disappeared. Hedden spent several months searching for the man, before writing him off as “just another crackpot.”
The Curse of Oak Island Page 17
