Читать книгу The Curse of Oak Island - Randall Sullivan - Страница 15

CHAPTER SEVEN

Frederick Blair was living and working in Massachusetts, but he had grown up in Nova Scotia: born in Thomson Station and reared in Amherst. He was a young child when he first heard stories of Oak Island, told by his uncle Isaac Blair, who had been part of the Oak Island Association and Halifax Company crews that had worked on the island during the 1860s. As Isaac Blair summed up his position in a letter to his nephew written in 1896: “I saw enough to convince me that there was treasure buried there and enough to convince me that they will never get it.” Frederick Blair agreed with his uncle that the treasure was there, but for more than a half century refused to accept that it could not be gotten.

What distinguished Blair right from the beginning was his commitment to research. He began by interviewing his uncle Isaac and Isaac’s friend Jefferson McDonald, from whom he had also heard tales of the treasure hunt on Oak Island as a boy. From those two, Blair moved on to the other men who had worked on Oak Island with the Truro Company and the Oak Island Association, focusing on those he considered most authoritative, among them James McNutt, Jothan McCully, Samuel Fraser, and Robert Creelman. Still working out of his office on Boston’s Liberty Square, Blair collected every available document, including the journals and letters that chronicled the labor, the discoveries, and the failures of those who had gone before him. Many if not most of those documents would have been lost if not for the fact that Blair maintained them in his personal archives. He sought out everyone still living who had heard firsthand the stories of the three discoverers, McGinnis, Smith, Vaughan, and of the Onslow Company’s leader, Dr. Lynds, and he made extensive notes of those interviews. Blair not only interviewed Adams A. Tupper, the former mining engineer for the Truro Company, but he also recruited him as a partner in his new Oak Island Treasure Company. Tupper, drawing extensively on his conversations with Anthony Vaughan during the middle of the nineteenth century, assisted Blair in writing the prospectus of the Oak Island Treasure Company, which began with a detailed account of the discovery and the attempted excavations of the Money Pit. Tupper also attached an affidavit in which he declared that he was “familiar with the various reports and traditions concerning the work done there before my own personal knowledge” and that his account of what he had been told was “to the best of my knowledge and belief, absolutely true.”

Blair also spoke to Anthony Graves’s daughter, Sophia Sellers, whose accidental discovery of what became known as the Cave-in Pit had been the biggest event on Oak Island in the years since the collapse of the Halifax Company. In the spring of 1878 she had been plowing with oxen about 350 feet from the Money Pit, Sellers told Blair, near what she knew was the supposed line of the famous flood tunnel. Suddenly one of the oxen disappeared into a “well-like” hole about 6 to 8 feet in diameter that had caved in under the animal’s weight. She and her husband, Henry, had needed help to pull the animal out of the hole, and after that they had simply filled it in with boulders and worked around the area. Blair, though, decided that investigating this new discovery should be among his new company’s first tasks.

“It is perfectly evident,” he explained in his prospectus, “that the great mistake thus far has been in attempting to ‘bail out’ the ocean through the various pits. The present company intends to use the best modern appliances for cutting off the flow of water through the tunnel at some point near the shore, before attempting to pump out the water.” This had been tried before, by both the Oak Island Association and the Halifax Company, as Blair certainly knew, but he apparently believed his “modern appliances” would make the difference. With them, he wrote, “there can be no trouble in pumping out the Money Pit as dry as when the treasure was first placed there.”

In late 1893, one thousand shares in the Oak Island Treasure Company were offered at $5 apiece to undertake the work. Blair indirectly but skillfully exploited the widespread publicity that had attended the reported treasure finds at New Glasgow and St. Martins and the even greater sensation that had been created when a boatswain’s whistle made of ivory or bone and said to be of “an ancient and peculiar design” was found on Oak Island at Smith’s Cove. In a second edition of the Oak Island Treasure Company prospectus he published in early 1894, Blair proclaimed, “We are happy to state that the stock is selling quite rapidly and only a few hundred shares remain to be sold, of the one thousand shares sufficient to complete the work.” It was “worthy of note,” Blair added in this edition of the prospectus, “that with very few exceptions every man whom we have met that has ever worked on Oak Island has expressed his intention of taking stock in this Company.”

It was true that Robert Creelman, Samuel Fraser, and Jefferson McDonald had already joined the company. What Blair didn’t mention in the new prospectus was that a majority of the Nova Scotia shareholders were demanding that the planned work on Oak Island be overseen by a local committee, not by directors sitting in Boston offices. They organized a meeting in Truro on April 4, 1894, at which Creelman, McDonald, and Jothan McCully were among those who spoke. McDonald was unanimously elected to represent the Nova Scotia shareholders, and five other men were named to the committee that would be in charge of the operations on Oak Island. One of them, a lumberman from Amherst named William Chappell, would become almost as important in the story of the island as Blair himself. Adams A. Tupper was appointed by the committee to perform the hands-on supervision of the work, beginning in June 1894.

We know virtually every move the Oak Island Treasure Company made because Frederick Blair was just as scrupulous about recording the new company’s activities as he had been about researching the past work on the island. The Treasure Company crew began with an exploration of the Cave-in Pit. When the boulders were removed to a depth of 18 feet, the new company’s workmen found themselves standing in a shaft almost 8 feet in diameter that was nearly perfectly circular, with well-defined walls that convinced them they were looking at a piece of the original work on Oak Island. The miners among them agreed that the Cave-in Pit was an air shaft, essential for ventilation in a tunnel more than 500 feet long. They did not even need to use picks to clear the shaft, it was reported back to Boston, because while the earth inside was soft, the walls containing it were smooth and solid, made of clay so hard it was nearly impossible to sink a spike into them anyway; the labor of the men who had dug this shaft was unimaginable.

Blair would declare that he believed the Cave-in Pit might be the key to solving the entire problem of Oak Island. Eventually the stones and the loose soil inside the shaft were removed to a depth of 52 feet, and box cribbing was built that stretched from the bottom to several feet above the surface. An auger bored another 16 feet deeper into the Cave-in Pit without encountering any resistance. The next morning, though, water broke into the Cave-in Pit from shaft no. 4, dug by the Truro Company more than forty years earlier. When the cribbing grew unstable, it was agreed that working in the Cave-in Pit had become unsafe for the men.

Blair, Tupper, McDonald, and the committee overseeing the work agreed they would sink yet another shaft (no. 12), this one right next to the “pirate tunnel” (as the members of the company referred to the original tunnel that flooded the Money Pit), going deep enough to undermine the old tunnel from below, then destroy it with dynamite, thereby, they hoped, cutting off the flow of water to the Money Pit. The excavation of shaft no. 12 reached a depth of only 43 feet, though, before water from shaft no. 4 burst into it. They bailed this out, but then a seep of stagnant water, almost black, began to fill the new shaft. This was from the Money Pit, the men agreed, and they bailed that out also. Eventually they were able to dig to a depth of 55 feet, then strike a tunnel from the bottom of no. 12 toward the surface, in hopes of finding the flood tunnel. When they were just 25 feet from the surface, though, the tunnel had not been found.

James McGinnis, the grandson of Daniel McGinnis, claimed that one of the last things the Halifax Company had done was to build a stout platform in the Money Pit, just above the high-water mark, then fill the Pit in with loose soil from the platform to the surface. Henry Sellers also insisted there was such a platform. When the Treasure Company excavated what they believed to be the Money Pit to look for this platform, however, it could not be found. James McGinnis insisted they had looked in the wrong place. Winter was coming on, though, so the Treasure Company adjourned until the following spring.

As I studied the notes of the Treasure Company’s attempt to re-form itself in 1895, the familiar vows of previous searchers recurred yet again in a way that was both poignant and absurd. One A. S. Lowden had been named by the directors in Boston to serve as the new general manager of the company, and after a meeting of the stockholders on April 2, 1895, Lowden laid out a two-part plan that was long on effusion but short on originality in every respect:

ONE: “To make another effort to cut the tunnel off at or near the scene of last year’s operations.” There had to be a gate in the flood tunnel, Lowden wrote, repeating the conclusions of men who had preceded him by almost half a century. He proposed to locate it by tunneling from shaft no. 12 at the 49-foot level toward shaft no. 5.

TWO: “To attack the Money Pit direct, nothing having been done there last year, the exact conditions are not known.”

Not surprisingly, Lowden’s efforts to raise the money to purchase a larger and more expensive pump through a new stock issue failed utterly. The Nova Scotia stockholders met again in Truro on November 26, 1895, and appointed a new board of management that included William Chappell, with Frederick Blair to serve as treasurer. Blair, who had moved his insurance office from Boston to Amherst, Nova Scotia, to be closer to Oak Island, helped prepare a new version of the Treasure Company’s prospectus that helped raise the $2,000 needed to purchase a top-of-the-line steam pump and boiler. This took almost a year, but in the late autumn of 1896 Blair’s Amherst friend Captain John Welling was chosen to mount yet another new effort to get to the bottom of the Money Pit.

Blair received daily reports that tracked the work on Oak Island during the winter of 1896 to 1897. Shaft no. 2 had been doubled in width, while shaft no. 12, now 123 feet deep, was used to collect the water pumped out of no. 2. The failure of this effort is implied in reports to Blair during the spring of 1897 that the work had moved to the excavation of a new shaft (no. 13) 25 feet north of the Cave-in Pit. At a depth of 82 feet, the workmen began to tunnel toward the Cave-in Pit. They got within 4 feet before being driven out by water pouring through the tunnel’s leading wall. Within a couple of weeks, the diggers struck what they at first believed was the Pirate Tunnel. It was 4 feet wide by 6 feet tall, well timbered, and connected to the Cave-in Pit. What they had found, however, turned out to be a tunnel dug by the Halifax Company crew in 1866. After considerable discussion, it was agreed that the Pirate Tunnel was likely not more than 5 feet below and they began to search for it.

This effort ended on March 26, 1897, when a workman named Maynard Kaiser was sent into one of the shafts (probably no. 13) to retrieve a cask that had fallen in. Rather than bring up the empty barrel, Kaiser for some reason chose to fill it with water, then ride atop the bucket as it was raised to the surface. The weight of the water and the man was more than the hoist could bear, and when the rope slipped off the gear both the cask and Kaiser plunged to the bottom of the shaft. He was dead by the time a crew of rescuers found him. Immediately, nearly the entire Treasure Company crew refused to continue working underground. As the April 13, 1897, edition of a Halifax newspaper reported it: “Captain Welling who is in charge of the work of excavating for the Oak Island treasure reports that all his men have quit the job. They became suspicious after the death of poor Kaiser last week and will not continue to dig. One of the men had a dream in which the spirit of Captain Kidd appeared and warned him they would all be dead if they continued the search.”

Welling must have had some force of personality, because within a week he had assembled a new crew that on April 22 discovered yet another tunnel leading into the Money Pit. It was 9 feet square and solidly cribbed, with saltwater percolating into it from beneath. They excavated upward into the Money Pit from there, and at the 30-foot level found the platform built by the Halifax Company, exactly as James McGinnis had described it. After correcting the misalignment of the cribbing (with planks they attached as a skid), the crew began to once again probe deeper into the Pit. At 111 feet they found what they thought must be the flood tunnel. It was a sharply cut rectangular channel 2.5 feet wide that was floored with a layer of beach stones, gravel, and sand, in that order from the bottom up. Saltwater was flowing with great force through the tunnel. The horizontal ceiling was clear evidence this tunnel was man-made.

Yet another celebration was cut short, though, when the valve stem of the Treasure Company’s prized steam pump broke. Within an hour the Money Pit was filled with seawater to tide level, leaving the flood tunnel under almost 50 feet of water.

After calculating the expense of repairing the pump and the cost of keeping it going, the Treasure Company’s directors determined that yet another effort must be made to intercept the Pirate Tunnel near the shore of Smith’s Cove and cut it off. To locate the flood channel, the crew began a series of boreholes about 50 feet from the high tide mark at the cove, following a perpendicular line across the approximate path the Pirate Tunnel must follow. They drilled five such holes, each 5 inches in diameter at varying depths between 80 and 95 feet. Sticks of dynamite were lowered into each of these holes, then ignited. The only apparent results of the subsequent explosions were the spumes of seawater that rose 100 feet and more into the air. An enormous charge of dynamite—more than 160 pounds—was then placed into the center borehole and detonated. There was no gush of water from the hole this time, but the water in both the Money Pit and in the Cave-in Pit boiled and foamed for almost a minute. The men agreed that they were in or next to a tunnel carrying water from the shore to the Money Pit.

There was contention among the crew, though, about what it meant that no saltwater had been found in this middle hole before a depth of 80 feet. Those who insisted the flood channel must now be blocked won the day and they agreed to return to the Money Pit and continue the boring operations there. The results of this decision would include what is arguably the most remarkable discovery in the history of the treasure hunt on Oak Island.

EARLY INTO MY WORK on The Curse of Oak Island I began to be convinced by what I knew about human nature that it was not a treasure of gold and silver that had been buried on the island. What had been done on Oak Island could only have been done by a large workforce, and there was no way I believed a group of even half a dozen people could or would have kept it a secret that a fortune in precious metals was concealed on an island off the coast of Nova Scotia.

There were answers to that, of course. One, obviously, was that whoever had buried the treasure on the island had already returned to retrieve it. That wasn’t a possibility anyone who had hunted for treasure on Oak Island wanted to embrace and, as mentioned earlier, there was a standard response to this suggestion. The fact that we still don’t know who hid whatever is hidden there, more than 250 years (at least) after it was likely buried, might also be explained in other ways. If the people who had done the actual labor were slaves, as many supposed, they might have been silenced by a mass execution immediately after their work was done. Or, if the work was done by soldiers or a ship’s crew, they might have all gone down on the return voyage to wherever they were from, taking their secret with them to the bottom of the ocean.

I conceded these points, then said that what I really believed was that it would be impossible to motivate men to do what had been done on Oak Island simply to hide a treasure of gold, no matter how great it might be. More than that would be required in my opinion. What had been concealed on the island had to be something of incalculable value, something that meant more than money ever could. I think Marty Lagina thought that was more than a little naïve. His brother, Rick, though, was inclined to agree with me.

Only a single piece of tangible evidence has ever been brought up from belowground to support my side of this argument, however, and it is not only of unknown origin, but preposterously tiny to boot. Infinitesimal some might say. It was found right around the first of September in 1897 during the boring operations of the Oak Island Treasure Company in the Money Pit.

A sketch drawn by Frederick Blair in February 1898 shows where the boreholes were drilled in a circular pattern around the rim of the Pit. The water had been pumped out to the 100-foot level, where a new platform was built and the drill mounted. William Chappell was one of those who operated the drill; he would describe in a sworn statement what the bit and the pipe that surrounded it brought back up to the platform. The first hole was bored to a depth of 122 feet before a piece of oak wood was penetrated. At 126 feet, the drill was stopped when it struck iron. A second hole was bored a foot away, and again the drill struck iron and was stopped. Chappell and the others decided to try a smaller drill, just 1.5 inches in diameter. This drill deflected off the iron and went around it, passing first through “puddled clay” then striking “soft stone or cement” at a depth of 153 feet, 8 inches. The drill worked its way through the “soft stone” and then went through 5 inches of solid oak, which proved to the men on the platform that they had not yet reached bedrock.

The drill was raised slowly and carefully. T. Perley Putnam, who was on the platform with Chappell and Captain Welling, had been placed in charge of removing, collecting, cataloguing, and preserving the borings from the drill’s auger bit. He panned out the dirt from the auger in direct sunlight, then meticulously gathered everything that floated in the water. There were oak chips and coconut husks, Putnam reported, plus a small piece of—well, he was not sure what it was, he admitted. On instructions from Welling, Putnam several days later carried the borings he had collected in envelopes to the offices of Dr. A. E. Porter, a physician who was then practicing in Amherst. They had chosen Porter as a consultant, Frederick Blair would explain later, because the doctor owned the most powerful microscope to be found in Nova Scotia at that time.

On September 6, 1897, Porter examined the borings from the Money Pit in the presence of between thirty-five and forty men, including Putnam and Blair. Almost immediately his attention was attracted to the ball of “strange fiber” that Putnam had not been able to identify. It was only about the size of a grain of rice, as Porter would describe it, with some sort of fuzz or short hair on its surface. Using his medical instruments under the magnifier, Porter worked at this ball of fiber for several minutes, until it slowly began to unfold. After another few minutes, the doctor had it flattened out, whereupon he described it as being, to all appearances, a tiny piece of parchment paper with a fragment of writing in black ink that appeared to be parts of either the letters ui or vi or wi.

Blair insisted on an examination by experts in Boston associated with Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. They reported back that the item most certainly was a piece of parchment that had been written on with a quill pen and India ink.

THE DISCOVERY OF THE PARCHMENT FRAGMENT was the real beginning of consideration of the possibility that what was buried on Oak Island might not be chests of gold buried by pirates but rather something of real—perhaps even profound—historical value. In a 1930 interview with the Toronto Telegram, Blair declared that the day the Oak Island Treasure Company found the piece of parchment had provided “more convincing evidence of buried treasure than a few doubloons would be. I am satisfied that either a treasure of immense value or priceless historical documents are in a chest at the bottom of the Pit.”

The 1897 borings in the Money Pit produced a great deal of evidence beyond the parchment. At 171 feet into one borehole, the chisel point that had replaced the auger bit struck solidly against iron. The drillers said they knew it from the sound. They continued to push the drill against this barrier for more than forty minutes and could make no deeper penetration than a quarter-inch. Chappell, Putnam, and Welling then withdrew the drill, pumped the loose material from the hole, and ran a magnet through it, collecting about a thimbleful of fine iron cuttings. What was regarded as an even more exciting discovery was made in a borehole where a tremendous spout of water rose out of the pipe when the drill was at 126 feet. They measured the flow with their pumps and determined it to be 400 gallons a minute. This had to mean there was a second flood tunnel, also coming from the south shore of the island, most likely from a location closer to the Money Pit than Smith’s Cove.

The oak splinters, charcoal, and coconut fiber that came out of the boreholes were also saved for examination, but the greatest interest was in the soft stone struck by the drill at 153 feet, eight inches. The drillers believed this might be a kind of early cement and sent it for analysis to A. Boake, Roberts and Company in London. The report back from the London chemists was that this material did indeed seem to be a primitive sort of cement, composed of lime, carbonate, silica, iron, alumina, and magnesium. “From the analysis it is impossible to state definitively, but from the appearance and nature of the samples, we are of the opinion that it is a cement which has been worked by man.”

The jubilation of the Treasure Company’s principals soon gave way to a debate about whether they should issue new stock for sale in order to expand the operations on Oak Island. In the end, the stockholders voted unanimously that there would be no “outside” sale of shares in the company and that the current shareholders should finance any future work and split the proceeds only among themselves when the treasure was finally retrieved.

A new round of work began in October 1897. The plan this time was to sink one more shaft (no. 14) to a depth of between 175 and 200 feet, then drive a tunnel to the Money Pit, in hopes of draining it into the new shaft, which would be octagonal in shape, 13 feet across and 40 feet from the original Pit. Why the Treasure Company imagined they would produce a different result than had been found in previous attempts to do pretty much the same thing is not clear, but what happened was quite predictable: at 112 feet into the new shaft it began to fill with seawater at a rate that made continuing impossible. The company’s response was to attempt yet another shaft (no. 15) about 35 feet southwest of no. 14. The diggers were encouraged when at 105 feet they came to an abandoned tunnel that had been dug by the Halifax Company and found it dry. At 160 feet, though, water began to pour into no. 15 from the Money Pit, where the water level briefly dropped by 14 feet, then rose again, until both it and the new pit were filled to sea level. Pumping was attempted until the plunger rod broke. Water quickly poured into the new shaft from the Money Pit and within a few hours both the tunnel and no. 15 were destroyed.

“Nothing daunted,” as Frederick Blair’s man R. W. Harris would put it, the Treasure Company sank four more shafts (nos. 16, 17, 18, and 19) to depths of between 95 and 144 feet. Each was abandoned when the diggers encountered quicksand, impenetrable boulders, or an overwhelming surge of water.

In the spring of 1898, however, the Treasure Company did perform a series of tests that gave them new and deeply unsettling news about what they were up against. First, they pumped shaft no. 18 full of water to well above tide level in the hope that they would force the muddy water in the new shaft out onto the beach at Smith’s Cove. The muddy water did soon appear on the south shore of the island but not at Smith’s Cove. Three different sections of the shore of the south beach showed evidence of the muddy water escaping from no. 18. To make certain of what this suggested, Welling and Chappell agreed that they should pump the Money Pit full of water above sea level, then drop red dye into it, hoping the dye would drain through the flood tunnel as it receded. As they hoped, the dye began to seep into the bay a short time later; again this was not at Smith’s Cove but rather on the south end of the island in the same places where the muddy water had been seen earlier.

What it meant, almost certainly, was that there was at least one flood tunnel that ran toward the Money Pit from the south shore but not from Smith’s Cove and that there could be as many as three such tunnels. Finding a way to drain the Money Pit had become an exponentially more complex problem. Yet what the Treasure Company chose to do next was return to the Pit itself.

For reasons that were not explained in the journal kept by Blair, the company’s crew spent months on work that essentially doubled the size of the Money Pit. This was done by sinking a new shaft (no. 20) right next to the original Pit. A double wall of cribbing was constructed to divide the two halves of what was otherwise now a shaft measuring 10 feet by 8 feet. The excavation of the new shaft became increasingly difficult as the crew descended into rock-hard clay and was stopped at 113 feet by a surge of seawater that poured in with more force than the pumps could handle. The work continued, though. On April 2 the crew’s foreman, a man named Burrows, told Blair that his men were 3 feet below the flood tunnel from Smith’s Cove and that they were confident they could reach a depth of 126 feet within a couple of weeks and would there locate the tunnel from the south shore. Only a few days later, though, Burrows reported that most of his men had left the island to join fishing crews and that they were running out of coal to run the pumps and the boiler.

Creditors were literally standing at the Treasure Company’s door. The county sheriff showed up on the island in May 1898 with a court order obtained by a Halifax machinery firm that forced the sale of every bit of equipment that could be carried off. Captain Welling had invested $4,000 of his own money and was at risk of losing his home. Putnam was in far worse shape, having put in $20,000; within a few months he had no choice but to declare a bankruptcy from which he never recovered. Blair proposed a new stock issue, based on the discoveries of the Treasure Company, but the other directors and shareholders, many of whom had already borrowed money to make their investments, turned him down. In December 1900, Blair used his own money to buy out all of the other shareholders and took complete control of the Treasure Company, vowing to continue the work on his own.

Blair summarized his position in a draft prospectus:

When we went to work at the Island two years ago, we knew comparatively nothing about the conditions as they existed. We supposed at that time that the Money Pit was not over 120 feet deep and that the treasure was not over 110 feet down. Our work has since proved that the Pit is not less than 180 feet deep, that there are two tunnels instead of one, and that one of them is not less than 160 feet down, and that there is treasure at different points in the Pit, from 126 feet down to 170 feet, without a doubt. We have also found out that the work done by the Halifax Company is a greater hindrance to the procuring of the treasure than is the original work.

We now claim that there is nothing that can prevent us getting the treasure.

All that was really certain was that the treasure hunt on Oak Island that had begun in the eighteenth century would continue into the twentieth.