Читать книгу The Curse of Oak Island - Randall Sullivan - Страница 13

CHAPTER FIVE

In the years between 1850 and 1865, probably the most interesting development in the chronicle of Oak Island was the way word began to spread after the discovery of the artificial beach and the drain system. The story reached first across Nova Scotia, of course, then throughout the rest of Eastern Canada, and eventually across the national border into New England and New York.

The first mention of the treasure hunt on the island to appear in print was not actually in any of the newspaper articles or books mentioned earlier but in an 1857 report to the provincial government of Nova Scotia written by one of its geologists, Henry S. Poole, who was principally interested in the structural formation of Oak Island:

I crossed to Oak Island and observed shale all the way along the main shore, but I could not see any rock in situ on the Island. I went to the spot where people had been engaged for so many years searching for the supposed hidden treasure of Captain Kidd. I found that the original shaft had caved in, and two others had been sunk alongside. One was open and said to be 120 feet deep, and in all that depth no rock had been struck. The excavated matter alongside was composed of sand and boulder rocks and though the pit was some two hundred yards from the shore, the water in the shaft (which I measured to be within thirty-eight feet of the top) rose and fell with the tide, showing a free communication between the sea and the shaft.

We know from Anthony Spedon, whose Rambles among the Blue-Noses was published in 1863, that there was another attempt at excavating the Money Pit about a year after Poole’s visit. “Up to the present moment,” Spedon wrote, “the work [on Oak Island] has been resumed and relinquished a dozen times. Companies have been formed again and again, numerous experiments tried, and no less than fifteen different pits have been dug, at a cost of many thousands of dollars; and yet the mysterious box appears not to have been found.” Given that there were nowhere near fifteen shafts on Oak Island at the time, Spedon’s account has to be considered with some suspicion. He had at first regarded the story of the treasure hunt on Oak Island as “only a fictitious tale, or a chimerical infatuation,” Spedon informed his readers, but then he met with Jothan McCully, who persuaded him to visit the island in the summer of 1862. During that visit, he had confirmed that “the operations [on the island] have been immense,” Spedon reported. “The great obstruction and difficulty has been the inexhaustible quantity of water in the Pit. It appears to come from the sea, but no experiment as yet has been enabled to remove it, or stem the current.” During the summer of 1859, Spedon wrote, a new iteration of the Truro Company “had no less than thirty horses employed at the pumps, but all efforts have proved abortive. . . . In the fall of 1861, at great expense, pumps were erected to be driven by steam power, but scarcely had the works been commenced when the boiler burst, causing operations to be suspended until another season.”

Spedon’s is the only description extant of the 1859 operations on the island and his description of the burst boiler in 1861 was also the first. Strangely, though, Spedon did not mention the most significant thing about that particular catastrophe, which was that it cost the life of the first man to die during the Oak Island treasure hunt. On the Oak Island Memorial that has greeted visitors to the island since 1995, he is listed simply as “Unknown.” The first mention of his death did not come until seven years after it happened, in an account written by E. H. Owen of Lunenburg:

The boiler of one company burst, whereby one man was scalded to death and others injured. The water was pumped out by a large barrel-shaped tube made of thin materials, and reaching to some distance into the Pit. The stream of water was conducted from this into the sea by means of a long wooden trough, which extended down to the shore.

Owen also was the first to suggest an idea that I would find persuasive during my return visit to Oak Island in 2016, almost a century and a half after his account was written: “It appears that in digging the Pit in which [Captain Kidd] deposited his gold, he connected with it a subterraneous passage, leading towards the shore, by which means he might be enabled to recover his gold, without having to excavate the Pit, which he had filled up with such substance as would render it almost impenetrable to the enemy, if discovered.” That there must be what R. V. Harris called a walk-in tunnel somewhere on the island seems certain to me, but as Marty Lagina’s brother, Rick, pointed out to me during one of our conversations, “People have been looking for that tunnel a long time, and no one’s ever found it.” I still think it’s there.

A handful of Oak Island investigators have speculated that the walk-in tunnel was found long ago by someone who took full advantage of this hidden entrance to the treasure chamber, then eradicated all trace of it. The name mentioned most often in this regard is Anthony Graves, who assumed ownership of most of Oak Island in 1857. In 1853, John Smith, in the name of what he called “natural love and affection,” had conveyed all the property he owned to his two sons, Thomas E. and Joseph Smith. Shortly after their father’s death four years later, the Smith brothers sold the property to one Henry Stevens, who promptly sold it to Graves. The new owner appeared to have little interest in the treasure hunt. He built his home and barns on the north side of Oak Island, above the shoreline along Joudrey’s Cove (where pieces of the house’s foundation can still be seen) more than 1,500 feet from the Money Pit and lived there until his death in 1887.

Stories that Graves regularly paid for his supplies in Mahone Bay with old Spanish coins are the basis of the claim that he found at least part of the Oak Island treasure, and these have been buttressed by the discoveries of such coins near the spot where Graves’s house once stood, including one coin dated 1598. What undercuts the claims about Graves is that his two daughters clearly did not inherit any significant wealth from their father beyond his land. One of them, whose married name was Sophia Sellers, worked the ground on Oak Island with her husband as farmers who struggled to support their family.

The only involvement Anthony Graves seems to have had with the treasure hunt on the island was the deal he made with a new group from Truro that called itself the Oak Island Association. Graves was to receive one-third of any treasure recovered in exchange for permitting the new company to make yet another attempt to get to the bottom of the Money Pit, but he was due no cash payment.

A number of those who had been part of the Truro Company were members of the Oak Island Association, most notably Jothan McCully and James McNutt. McNutt kept a diary of the Association’s efforts. The new company’s proposal to investors was that with the right equipment and a sufficient workforce it would be able to drain the Money Pit and bring up the treasure. That this was essentially the same claim that had been made by the Truro Company did not dissuade the one hundred people who purchased the first $20 shares of the Oak Island Association that were offered to the public.

Money in hand, the Association in the spring of 1861 barged sixty-three workmen (being paid the then-considerable wage of $18 per month), thirty-three horses, four 70-gallon bailing casks and the most powerful pump to be found in all of Nova Scotia onto Oak Island. The workmen first cleared out the Money Pit and recribbed it to a depth of 88 feet before going to work on a new shaft about 25 feet to the east of the Pit. This shaft (now known as no. 6) was excavated to a depth of 118 feet, before yet another tunnel was driven toward the bottom of the Money Pit, the plan being pretty much the same as the one that had failed for the Truro Company back in 1850: divert the water in the original Pit into a new shaft.

According to a letter written by McCully one year later, the new tunnel “entered the old Money Pit a little below the lower platform, where [we] found the soft clay spoken of in the [1849] boring. The tunnel was unwisely driven through the old pit until it nearly reached the east pipe, when the water started, apparently coming from above the east side.”

The man whom McCully was implicitly accusing of this unwise decision was the Oak Island Association’s superintendent of works, George Mitchell. And while Mitchell’s story does seem to be one of escalating desperation combined with increasingly poor decisions, the man has to be given credit for his relentless effort. What Mitchell ordered his men to do after the 118-foot shaft flooded was set up the big pump next to it while the men and the horses went to work around the clock with the bailing casks, not only attempting to lower the water level in no. 6 but also in the shaft on the west side of the Money Pit (no. 3) and in the original Pit itself. By McCully’s account, the crew and the horses worked nonstop from two o’clock in the morning on Tuesday until late in the afternoon on Thursday and were able to lower the water level to a depth of 82 feet. At that point, the tunnel between shaft no. 3 and the Money Pit became clogged with soft clay that caused the water to begin rising. According to the accounts of McCully and McNutt, the Association crew worked to clear the tunnel until seven o’clock Friday morning, when another massive flow of soft clay out of the Money Pit replaced what they had just spent more than twelve hours hauling to the surface. As they worked to remove this new mudflow, the men recovered a number of curious items. In the Novascotian article, “digger Patrick” reported that these included pieces of wood, blackened with age, that had been “cut, hewn, chamfered, sawn and bored, according to the purpose for which it was needed.” He and the others also pulled out “part of the bottom of a keg,” Patrick recounted. McNutt, writing in 1867, described a “piece of juniper with bark on, cut at each end with an edge tool” and “a spruce slab with a mining auger hole in it” that were removed from the mudflow out of the Money Pit. McCully wrote that there were also oak chips, manila grass, and coconut fiber found in the mud, along with two large stones that he believed had been brought down from the surface of the island.

The Oak Island Association’s work in the tunnel between shaft no. 6 and the Money Pit continued until five o’clock Saturday afternoon, when yet another rush of clay surged into the tunnel. The men working nearest to the Pit (among them Adams A. Tupper) reported that the bottom of the shaft had sunk by several feet and that the cribbing inside had shifted. Tupper can’t have been the only one who recognized that sinking yet another shaft in the vicinity of the Money Pit—which made a total of six deep, broad holes and at least as many tunnels within a circle 50 feet wide—might have destabilized the Pit to a point of collapse. Perhaps there was some discussion about it when the men took a break for supper that Saturday evening. All we know for certain is that the men had just begun to eat when they heard a “tremendous crash” as McCully described it and hurried back to the Money Pit only to discover that water in it was “boiling like a volcano.” The bottom had literally fallen out of the Pit, pulling down with it all of the cribbing and tools in the original shaft, along with tons of mud that flowed into the new tunnel.

In a letter written June 15, 1895, Samuel C. Fraser, who had worked as the foreman of operations for the Truro Company and had returned to the island as part of the Association, laid the blame on Mitchell:

He finished the sinking of the 118 foot shaft through which the water was [to be] taken away, while the Money Pit was to be cleared out to the treasure. . . . I was sent down to clean out the Money Pit, but before going into it I examined the 118 foot pit and tunnel, which was then nearly finished. At the end of the tunnel I saw every sign of the cataclysm that was about to take place and I refused to go down [again] into the Money Pit . . . When the pit fell down I was there, and I, with George Mitchell, threw a line down as far as it was open from the top when the subsidence ended: it was open 113 feet from the top. . . . There went down 10,000 feet of lumber, board measure, the cribbing of the old Money Pit.

This would prove to be the greatest disaster in the history of Oak Island not involving the loss of life, leaving the Money Pit an all but impenetrable jumble of mud, lumber, and equipment. The treasure, if there was one, was believed to have fallen either into a tunnel or deeper into the Pit.

The former Truro Company foreman Samuel Fraser believed the latter:

The pirates sank the shaft at first 155 feet deep, put part of the treasure there with a branch drain into it. Then working upon the older superstition that “treasure runs away from the seekers” . . . put another portion at 100 feet, with a drain into it.

This meant, Fraser wrote to his friend in 1895, that whatever was buried in the Money Pit had dropped into an open space that was, he estimated, 155 feet deep. On what basis Fraser supposed this he never stated in the letter.

Those who believed the treasure had slid into the tunnel seemed to have based much of this opinion on the fact that J. W. Publicover, the last man out of the 188-foot shaft no. 6 and its adjoining tunnel, had come to the surface with a yellow-painted wooden disk about the size of a barrelhead that had landed at his feet in the tunnel when the Money Pit collapsed. The men who examined it agreed that it must be part of an old keg or cask that had dropped out of the Money Pit’s treasure chamber as the bottom fell out.

Whatever was true about that, the collapse of the Money Pit ended the efforts of the Oak Island Association in the summer of 1861. Yet, remarkably, most of the same men were back on the island in the spring of 1862. George Mitchell had been replaced by one J. B. Leedham as director of operations, but what Leedham did was little more than a duplication of all that had failed during the previous sixty years. He began by ordering the men to sink yet another shaft (no. 7) just west of the Money Pit. At 90 feet, the workmen found tools left behind by the Truro Company and at 100 feet tools that had been abandoned by the Onslow Company, evidence that they were digging through sections of the collapsed Money Pit.

When the new shaft reached a depth of 107 feet and no sign of the flood tunnel had been found, Mitchell ordered his men to dig a new shaft (no. 8) right next to the no. 6 shaft, then dig laterally until they struck the flood tunnel. When this effort, too, failed, Leedham sent his crew to Smith’s Cove, ordering them to seal the “filter bed” beneath the man-made beach with packed clay. That didn’t succeed either, of course. Leedham, whose frantic determination seems to have been a match for Mitchell’s, then ordered the men to dig yet another shaft (no. 9) about 100 feet east of the Money Pit and 20 feet south of where the flood tunnel would be if it was dug on a straight line. When shaft no. 9 had been excavated to a depth of 120 feet, Leedham instructed his men to dig a series of exploratory tunnels to try to locate the flood channel. Given how unstable the ground around the Money Pit must have been by that point, it’s a wonder Leedham found men willing to do such work, but apparently he did.

One of the exploratory tunnels was driven all the way to the Money Pit, which it entered at a depth of 108 feet. According to the Oak Island Association’s records, the workmen were successful in draining the Money Pit to the level of the tunnel. Leedham descended to make an inspection, and in his notes he reported that while the walls on one side of the Pit were rock hard, they were so soft in other places that he could plunge a crowbar into them with relatively little effort.

The Association’s records show that yet another tunnel was dug between the Money Pit and shaft no. 2, the one dug by the Onslow Company in 1805, but that the men found no sign of either the flood tunnel or the treasure chests they were looking for. At that point, operations were suspended while the Association’s members returned to Truro to raise more money. They apparently succeeded, because on August 24, 1863, the Novascotian published a report that the Oak Island Association had resumed operations on the island and that “men and machines are now at work pumping the water from the pits previously sunk, and it is said that they are sanguine that before the lapse of the month they will strike the treasure.”

Sanguinity aside, the Association did perform an astounding series of digs that summer, the most remarkable being a circular tunnel at a depth of 95 feet that went around the entire circumference of the Money Pit. They encountered two of the previous shafts that had been sunk in the vicinity but no sign of the flood system, and yet each time they dug down to a depth below 110 feet, their tunnels filled with seawater.

IN THE SUMMER OF 1864, at a depth of 110 feet, the Oak Island Association finally did find the flood tunnel, according to Samuel ­Fraser, who described this event in his 1895 letter to friend A. S. Lowden: “As we entered the old place of the treasure we cut off the mouth of the tunnel. As we opened it, water hurled around rocks about twice the size of a man’s head with many smaller, and drove the men back for protection. . . . The [flood] tunnel was found near the top of our tunnel.”

The Association’s crew confirmed that they had in fact found the fabled flood tunnel by dumping cartloads of clay on the man-made beach in and around the box drains; when the water in the Money Pit was muddied just a short time later, the Association’s investors were certain that they had indeed located the tunnel that men had been searching for since the early nineteenth century. Their sense of accomplishment was short-lived, however; every attempt they made at shutting off the flow of water failed, and they could not find the gate that they were certain must be somewhere inside the tunnel.

By the late summer of 1864, its funds exhausted and its investors discouraged, the Oak Island Association was winding down. The constant churn of seawater in the Money Pit was softening the walls of the shaft to the point that more and more of the workmen were refusing to enter it. To reassure their crew, the Association’s members voted to hire a mining engineer to inspect the Pit. When the engineer declared the original shaft “unsafe” and advised that it be condemned, however, the Association accepted defeat and withdrew from the treasure hunt.

At least a couple of the Association’s members insisted that the discovery of the flood tunnel was a victory they could build on, and they refused to give up. The evidence that men had gone to extraordinary—even incredible—lengths to bury something on Oak Island was now simply too overwhelming to doubt. A new treasure-hunting company would be formed, these diehards declared, and this one would find its way to the treasure.

THE DISASTERS WROUGHT by the Oak Island Association ensured that any future treasure hunters would be working on two fronts, not only wrestling with the puzzle of the original engineering project on the island, but also working through the jumble of failed efforts left behind by the searchers who had gone before them. The existence of nine or ten shafts and several dozen tunnels dug all around the Money Pit, combined with the collapse of the Pit in 1861, made further work in that location not only dangerous but also probably futile. In terms of the larger investigation of what had taken place on Oak Island, though, there was at least one positive result: prospective treasure hunters were forced to back up and look at the big picture beyond the drumlin on the east end of the island where the original Pit had been dug.

In March 1866, with the consent of Anthony Graves, the directors of the Oak Island Association assigned their rights on the island to a new company that was being formed in Halifax. It initially called itself the Oak Island Eldorado Company, but eventually became better known as the Halifax Company. Proposing to raise $4,000 in capital to begin operations, the Halifax Company incorporated in May 1866 by offering two hundred shares at $20 apiece. By June, these had been sold on the basis of a “Plan of Operations” that would begin in Smith Cove with the construction of “a substantial wood and clay dam seaward to extend out and beyond the rock work, so as to encompass the whole [cove] within the dam [and] pump out all the water within the area, and so block up the inlet from the sea.” The cost of this work would be no more than £400 (about $2,000 in US currency at the time), promised the new company’s directors, who added that “there cannot be any doubt but this mode of operation must succeed and will lead to the development of the hidden treasure, so long sought for.”

Nearly all of what we know about the operations of the Halifax Company comes from James McNutt, who continued the search with the third enterprise that had employed him on Oak Island during the past sixteen years, and Samuel Fraser, who worked as a foreman for the Halifax consortium. It is from Fraser that we have a description of the cofferdam the company constructed, 12 feet high by 375 feet long off the shoreline of Smith’s Cove, 110 feet below the high-water mark. Fraser does not describe the labor that went into this project, but it had to have been tremendous; nor does he remark on what must have been the company’s devastation when the dam not only failed to stop the flow of water into the Money Pit, but also was fairly rapidly broken apart by tidal surges.

What the Halifax Company did next was both sad and predictable: they returned to the Money Pit. One more time, the Pit was cleared out, this time to a depth of 108 feet, 10 feet below the oak platform that had been struck by the Onslow Company in 1805. That platform, though, was gone, having fallen in the 1861 collapse. There were various speculations about where the platform—and the supposed treasure that had rested on it—were now. It was generally agreed that the Money Pit contained a cavity that went to a depth of perhaps 155 feet (Fraser insisted that this was how deep the original excavation had gone) and that the treasure could have dropped all the way to the bottom or into one of the tunnels to the Pit dug by various search groups. Believing that the treasure would have fallen in the direction of the tunnel that caused the Pit’s collapse, the Halifax group dug into the south side of the Money Pit. Once again, though, the water in the Pit stopped their progress. In a letter written in 1898 by a man from Pictou, Nova Scotia, there is a description from the worker (“Mr. Robinson”) who was at the front of the tunnel:

After going a few feet he felt the earth give under his feet a little; he told the men to give him a pick and he drove it down and through and the water came up. He took a crowbar and put it down and his arm to the shoulder with it and says that he could swing the bar around in the Pit [below him] but the water was coming so fast he had to give it up.

The Halifax Company’s crew then built a platform at the 90-foot level in the Pit, from which they would carry on what they called “boring operations.” The day-to-day journal of the work kept by McNutt tells us that a drill inside a pipe was sent in various directions between November 26, 1866, and January 7, 1867. At a depth of 110 feet the drill went through spruce wood, then coarse gravel, then soft clay and blue mud to an additional depth of 20 feet, when water began to flow up through the tube, carrying with it wood chips, coconut fiber, and charcoal. At a depth of 134 feet from the surface the drill brought up oak borings, then some chips of either spruce or poplar from a plank it seemed to be running alongside of. Between 155 feet and 158 feet, the drill brought up a material that was dry and reddish brown. In other words, they found nothing new.

The company at that point decided on a radical departure, this being a move to solid ground 175 feet south of the original works to sink a new shaft (now no. 10) on a line between Smith’s Cove and the Money Pit. They went down 175 feet, the deepest penetration of the island since the treasure hunt had begun, then used the shaft to drive tunnels laterally at depths of between 95 and 110 feet, the hope being that they would find the flood tunnel and divert it into the new shaft. The utter failure of this effort not only bankrupted the Halifax Company, but it also stopped the treasure hunt on Oak Island for more than a quarter century.

Still, stories of what had been discovered continued to spread, told and retold by men who had been part of the Truro Company, the Oak Island Association, and the Halifax Company. Among those who heard these stories, none seem to have been so thrilled by them as a boy named Frederick Leander Blair, born a year after the Halifax Company abandoned its efforts. Blair would not only revive the treasure hunt on Oak Island and sustain it for more than fifty years, but he would also become the best student of the island’s history there has ever been.