So, the landowners turned to tourism. At first Triton ran the sole Oak Island Exploration Company, but in the 1990s, a public group called the Oak Island Tourism Society tried to get the government to sell the island to them. Instead, it was sold in 2006 to two Michigan brothers, Marty and Rick Lagina, who promptly allied with Blankenship to create Oak Island Tourism Inc. In 2010, the Canadian government changed the Treasure Trove Act again, this time making a specific Oak Island Treasure Act, which states that ‘Anyone who wants to search for and recover in Oak Island Nova Scotia precious stones or metals in a state other than their natural state, and to keep them,’ would be hit with a lot more red tape, a lot more hoops to jump through, and be heavily taxed on any discovery. That ended excavations at the Money Pit, until reality TV took notice.
In 2014, The History Channel began The Curse of Oak Island, in which the Laginas revisit the various excavations with more modern technology, and the aid of Blankenship and his son. So far they have (allegedly) found a single Spanish coin from the 17th century, and this meant the show has been renewed.
Various documentary series about world mysteries and Fortean subjects have featured it, starting with In Search of…, hosted by Leonard Nimoy of Star Trek fame, which brought the story to a far wider public in 1979. Canadian shows Northern Mysteries and The Conspiracy Show have both covered the Money Pit, as have more high-profile shows such as Unsolved Mysteries and, inevitably, Ancient Aliens (guess who they suggest buried stuff there).
The first season of forensic thriller Bones included an episode based on a similar money pit, The Man with the Bone, and you can take a trip to Oak Island in the videogame Assassin’s Creed III, in which Captain Kidd has hidden an ancient artefact there.
Books and magazines have also featured the Money Pit, but 1935’s Captain Kidd and His Skeleton Island, by Harold T. Wilkins, is not one of them, regardless of Gilbert Hedden’s conviction that it was. (In fact, Hedden visited Wilkins in England to ask him about his knowledge of Oak Island, only to find Wilkins surprised that an island he thought he’d made up bore such supposed similarities to a real place.)
In 1948, True Tales of Buried Treasure, by Edward Rowe Snow, introduced the world to the stone with the cipher on it, which he claimed had been translated by an Irish professor friend – usually presumed to be James Leitchi, Professor of Languages at Dalhousie University – or the Rev A. T. Kempton, of Boston, Massachusetts. In the 1970s children’s novel, The Hand of Robin Squires, the title character finds that his uncle is a pirate and inventor who was involved with creating the Money Pit.
The 1998 novel Riptide, by Lincoln Child and Doug Preston, is openly acknowledged by the authors in the afterword as about a fictionalized version of the Money Pit, though here it’s called the Water Pit on Ragged Island in Maine. In the book, the treasure is pirate treasure, including a well-nigh supernatural sword. John Carter’s novel Last Judgement has the inscription on the tablet lead to a vial of Christ’s blood hidden by the Templars.
The closest Clive Cussler has come to the Money Pit is a Chinese-dug pit in The Silent Sea, co-written with Jack Du Brul, which does have some similarities to the Oak Island pit, despite having a totally different background. Cussler himself is an experienced undersea explorer and diver, who had led several successful searches for historical wrecks, most famously succeeding in raising the American Civil War submarine, Hunley, and has applied for licences to search Oak Island twice in the 1990s, but was refused both times.
THE TRUTH IS OUT THERE
That the famous pit is a mystery worthy of digging into isn’t in doubt, but a lot of treasure-hunting history has obscured the facts, and the site. The Money Pit story is shrouded in confusion, vagueness and outright nonsense, all the way back to the original story of the teenage boys deciding to dig where they had seen a light.
McGinnis and Vaughan were actually both landowners in their mid-30s in 1795, and there’s no mention of their treasure hunting recorded anywhere until a newspaper story in 1846. This means the Onslow and Truro companies’ stories of responding to a discovery in 1795 are also basically undocumented and therefore unverifiable in a lot of detail. The 1846 version of the tale only mentions a few logs near the surface, with pick-marks and the like at intervals below. Later writers changed this into regular layers of logs every 10ft or so.
The Onslow Company did exist, and the first mention of the inscribed stone with the message about £2 million being buried 40ft below is in its records. This tablet reputedly disappeared sometime in the 1930s, or at least was noticed to not be around, even in photographs. There’s no evidence that it ever existed; all illustrations of its symbols derive from drawings published in Snow’s True Tales of Buried Treasure. Snow never said how Kempton came to be in possession of the tablet’s symbols.
According to letters uncovered afterwards, Kempton and Frederick Blair wrote to each other in 1949, after Snow’s book came out, as Blair thought that the story in the book was pretty different from what he personally knew. Kempton then described how he got the supposed translation: He had wanted to write a book about the treasure in 1909, and wrote to a minister (religious or government is unclear) to ask if he knew someone who could tell him about the island. The minister found an Irish teacher to write an account for Kempton, which Kempton paid for. He was open in an April 1949 letter that ‘The teacher who wrote my MSS. did not give me any proofs of his statements.’ When Kempton went to Mahone Bay later to meet the ‘very bright Irish teacher’, he found that the man had died some years before.
Kempton had also heard that the stone was now in a museum in Halifax, but never found it. There are stories about it having been in collections, and even used in fireplaces, but Kempton never saw it, and eventually forgot about it, until he showed the teacher’s manuscript to Snow, and Snow put the symbols in his book.
Nobody ever reported a first-hand experience of seeing the stone, there are no photos of it, and the translation – which has influenced later searchers to focus on the 130ft-level – was produced by either Kempton himself, or an anonymous teacher having a laugh. It’s also highly suspect that the first mention of the stone in Onslow’s records comes just as their funding was running out. Suddenly, with the report of an inscription, their investors were back on board.
People have tried to put other interpretations on the inscription. For example, a zoology professor called Barry Fell came to believe in the 1960s that the inscription means ‘The people shall not forget the lord, to offset the hardships of winter, and the onset of plague the Ark, he shall pray to the lord,’ and that this means that Coptic Christians from the 1st century AD hid the Ark of the Covenant there. In 2007, a researcher named Keith Ranville claimed that the inscription revealed that the treasure is actually buried on Birch Island, nearby.
The links of gold chain supposedly found in 1849 were originally described as being ‘as if torn from an epaulette,’ but this description has changed over time.
Things like iron objects or the occasional copper coin have been found, but the site has been so churned and mangled by years of expeditions that there’s no way to tell when any of them were actually deposited there. Carbon-dating can only tell when an object originated, not when it was placed somewhere. People have been working on the site for 200 years, and equipment from previous digs keeps turning up in newer ones.
As for the video shot by the CBC news crew, that footage is very blurry, and the water filled with floating sediment which obscures almost everything, but there’s nothing that really looks like a skeletal hand, or treasure chest, as people thought at the time. There is an object that convincingly resembles a miner’s pick, but that’s exactly what you’d expect to see in a shaft that has been dug and re-dug for decades. More recent footage in the Laginas’ History Channel TV show, using modern HD cameras, shows no such objects.
One important thing that has been established is that the five ‘finger drains’ at Smith’s Cove do not connect up to the Money Pit. They were actuall
y part of an 18th-century salt works, filtering salt from seawater and drying it out for commercial and industrial use. In fact, nobody has ever definitely found any flood tunnels leading water into the pit, and the reason for that was established by the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute in 1995. These foremost scientists on the subject of seawater discovered, by means of pouring dye into the pit, and observing its behaviour, that the flooding is caused by tidal pressures on the island’s porous limestone geology.
Oak Island is mostly limestone and anhydrite, which is notably porous, and dissolves quite easily. Salt water infiltrates the porous rock, reacts with both the anhydrites and the oxygen that gets in when the water recedes with the tides, and dissolves the limestone. It then subsides, trees around the edge fall into it and storms bring in other pieces of debris. In 1878, a woman fell 12ft into a sinkhole about 40 yards from the Money Pit, landing in a small limestone cavern. In the 1950s, some men digging a well hit flagstone at 2ft, and then layers of spruce and oak logs. At first people thought it was another Money Pit, but it turned out to be a sinkhole.
What of the coconut fibres, you may ask. Coconuts are not native to Newfoundland, and opinions vary on how far they might drift before they rot away. Some of the fibres were carbon-dated in 1975 to around AD 1200, and suddenly that Templar treasure idea looked more promising – but only for about 20 years, until it was established that the seawater throws carbon dating off by about 450 years, planting those coconut fibres firmly in the 17th to 18th centuries. That’s still pirate prime-time, however, and the matting was used as a sort of naval bubble-wrap for cargo at the time, so it could well have been brought by ship and buried deliberately.
WHERE IS IT NOW?
Nobody’s managed to move the island since its discovery, seeing as the Dharma Initiative have yet to get involved, so Oak Island is still in Mahone Bay on the southern coast of Nova Scotia.
The real question is ‘was there any treasure at all, and if so, what is it?’ After more than 200 years of excavations, you’d think if there was a hoard down there, it would have been found long ago.
It’s a lot easier to say what the treasure definitely isn’t. It’s certainly not the hoard of either Blackbeard or Captain Kidd. Blackbeard never operated so far north, and Captain Kidd’s treasure is accounted for.
It’s also not going to be any of the really loopy suggestions, such as the Ark of the Covenant, or proof that Francis Bacon wrote Shakespeare’s plays. Incomprehensibly, some people think that the parchment with ‘vi’ on it constitutes such proof. Nobody can convincingly explain how the idea works, beyond the fact that letters on parchment are writing, Shakespeare and Bacon were writers, and Bacon described a self-flooding water trap in a work he wrote.
Another far-fetched idea is that the treasure is Marie Antoinette’s missing jewels, somehow smuggled to a remote island by a maid, who then hired the French Navy to bury it, for no readily apparent reason.
So what is any potential treasure likely to be? There are two main possibilities that still hold up. Three, if you count ‘bugger all’ as a possibility.
The first option is that the treasure is simply whatever bits and bobs were left behind, or traded, by visiting ships. The area was always relatively busy, with ships stopping off to and from Europe, and there have been settlements on the island in the past. If this is the case, there could be any random mix of coinage from roughly the 16th century onwards, which ordinary, non-famous sailors may have hidden or lost at various times over centuries.
The second possibility is that military payroll was hidden there during the Seven Years’ War in the 1750s, or the American War of Independence. Opinions vary on whether it would be British or French payroll, though the Royal Navy is the more popular suspect. The idea is that either the French slipped out of the siege of Fort Louisburg in 1758, and buried the fort’s treasure on Oak Island, or that the Royal Navy’s engineers buried payroll for the British troops in the War of Independence. The latter theory, however, usually presumes that the navy buried it in the autumn, but then returned and retrieved it in the following spring.
There is some possible evidence for this inasmuch as there was a Royal Navy base close by at Hamilton, and some of the old mining equipment found during expeditions has turned out to be Cornish mining gear, which was issued to Royal Navy engineers in the 18th century. However, it was also considered the best in general, and so was not exclusively used by the navy. Another strike against the theory is that there’s no documentation of such a payroll burial.
The third possibility, of course, is that there is no treasure, and that the so-called Money Pit is just a natural sinkhole.
THE OPPOSITION IN YOUR WAY
This is Canada, so there aren’t hostile militaries to worry about, and the island is free of dangerous wildlife – you’re unlikely to run into any grizzly bears.
The artificial obstructions start with the history of the site itself. The site is ludicrously contaminated by previous digs to the extent that, not only does equipment from those earlier digs keep turning up, but there is still doubt over exactly which shaft is the original Money Pit. Modern technology such as groundpenetrating radar, or electrical resistance geophysics gear, won’t be much help, because it will only show that there are plenty of anomalies on the island – which there are, because of all those previous digs.
The other problem is the legal disputes. Actually getting a licence to excavate for the treasure is difficult enough, and then you’ll be faced with a legal minefield of various different people – such as the Laginas, Nolan, etc. – who have different ownerships and rights over different parts of the island. They’re all reluctant to let freelance treasure-seekers dig all over the place. It’s perfectly possible to trespass on the island without notice, but not to bring in the sort of equipment you’d need to excavate the shafts.
It’s also a ridiculously expensive business. So many people and companies have gone bankrupt searching for the treasure that the Money Pit gave its very name to any project that requires an unreasonable influx of cash to keep running without effect. Usually it refers to DIY – there’s even a Tom Hanks movie entitled The Money Pit about such a house – but it also echoes Mark Twain’s epigram defining a gold mine as ‘a hole with an idiot at the bottom’.
Basically you’ll need to be filthy rich, and on good terms with high-powered business and contracts lawyers.
The island isn’t hard to get to and isn’t in an extreme climate, but it is, geologically, made of dissolved limestone caves and tunnels, like the bubbles in an Aero bar, between the surface and the bedrock 180ft down. This means that the shafts are prone to flooding, sinkholes, landslides and similar dangers to anyone trying to dig down.
The obvious modern solution would be to pump cement down the shafts until it sets, then drill down the centre to get at whatever is thus encased, but that would risk damaging any artefacts, and also be an appallingly brutal practice. The various authorities and licence holders would never give permission for it.
GEOPHYSICS
Everybody with even the slightest interest in digging up treasures from the past, whether by beachcombing themselves, or simply from watching TV history shows such as Time Team, will have noticed the use of what’s called geophysical surveying equipment, whether it be in the form of hand-held metal detectors on the beach, electrical resistance meters used in fields, or even ground-penetrating radar.
Most of these technologies were originally developed as military equipment, and later adapted by first the utilities and construction industries, and then by archaeologists and treasure hunters. Since their use has been modified from their original intentions, their efficacy varies according to the use to which they are put.
The very first metal detectors came about in the late 19th and early 20th century almost by accident. Engineers working on mechanisms for radio direction-finding found that their results were skewed by interference from iron-ore deposits and soon began working on systems to detect ore-b
earing deposits on purpose. The way they work is basically something like this: an alternating current is passed through a metal coil producing an alternating magnetic field. Any conductive metal close enough to this coil will have eddy currents induced in it, producing a corresponding magnetic field. A second coil, a magnetometer, will then detect the alteration in this magnetic field, proving that a metal object is there.
The first practical uses for these metal detectors were, obviously, in looking for pipes underground where people wanted to dig foundations and for detecting mines either buried in the soil or floating at sea.
The second major type of technology used for detecting buried valuables is electrical resistance tomography. This technique involves passing electrical current between electrodes that are jabbed into the ground. Different materials have different electrical resistances, which will show up on a graph or printout as different densities or different colours.
This does have the advantage of showing more than just metallic objects, as any disturbance to the earth will have a different electrical resistivity. This means that walls, wood, pathways, even the sites of fires, can all be detected. That said, it needs a trained and experienced interpreter to make sense of the results.
The third form of technology for seeing what’s hidden underground is ground-penetrating radar. As the name implies, this relies simply on transmitting radar pulses into the ground, and seeing what they reflect back from. As with the electrical resistance imagery, every material will absorb a different amount of the transmitted waves and so reflect back a different amount.
Again, the results will vary according to local conditions. GPR will go hundreds of feet through ice in Antarctica, up to about 50ft through solid dry rock or concrete, but only a few feet at best through moist soil like loam or peat.
THE BEALE TREASURE
Fortune and Glory Page 10
