The Oak Island Mystery Read online
LIONEL AND PATRICIA FANTHORPE
SECOND EDITION
This book is dedicated to our special friends
Dr. Bob and Zoh Hieronimus,
their daughter Anna,
and Laura Cortner,
in appreciation of their kindness and admiration
for their professional work.
Contents
Foreword by Canon Stanley H. Mogford
Acknowledgements
Introduction
1 Oak Island and Its Background
2 Smith, Vaughan, and McGinnis in 1795
3 The Work of the Onslow Company in 1803
4 The Truro Company’s Attempt in 1849
5 The Drain and Tunnel System
6 The Secret of the Ancient Timbers
7 The Eldorado Adventure
8 The Oak Island Treasure Company’s Great Discovery
9 Into the Twentieth Century
10 Triton Alliance Takes Over
11 Pirates and Privateers
12 Celts and Vikings
13 Religious Refugees
14 The Indomitable Templars
15 The French Connection: Rennes and Glozel
16 Francis Bacon’s Secret Cypher
17 Something Older and Stranger
18 Still Unsolved: Twenty-First Century Developments
Appendix I: Terry Ross Investigates
Appendix II: George Young, Glozel, and the Yarmouth Stone
Notes
Bibliography and Links
Foreword
The coming of television has no doubt made a difference, but at one time card parties were for many years a feature of family life. Not many households were without packs of cards, fifty-two in each pack divided equally between clubs, diamonds, hearts, and spades. The choice of such symbols was perhaps purely arbitrary on the part of the original designers, but in themselves they represent some of the basic impulses by which human nature has been consistently driven. Whether intended or not, they represent very real motives for living.
Some love power. They rise to the top. They struggle for authority. Woe betide any lesser mortals who dare to get in their way. The club is their natural symbol. Others accumulate money as their life’s ambition. Diamonds may be a girl’s best friend, but getting rich attracts ambitious people of both sexes and all ages. For others the only conceivable inspiration for life is love, the kind which is gentle, compassionate, and self-sacrificing. St. Francis of Assisi became one of them and Mother Teresa of Calcutta is another. There are others like them, always have been, and always will be. Their symbol is the heart. For another grouping work is the mainspring of their lives. They know nothing else; they value nothing else. It could be said of one, “He was born a man; he died a grocer.” All else is subordinated to work: good name, health, family, all, in their turn, sacrificed to it. For this group the natural symbol is the spade.
By such motives, in lesser or greater degrees, our people are driven. But these are not the only driving forces that take control of us. There are others just as all-consuming and one such is curiosity. A cat is said to have nine lives, but curiosity is the thing most likely to kill it. Dangerous for the cats of this world it may be, but without its driving force many of our advances in life and much of our knowledge would have been far slower in arriving.
It was our curiosity, the desire to know, that led Christopher Columbus over unknown seas to the New World, and curiosity that compelled him to continue in spite of having to use ships inadequate for such long voyages and rough seas, and discontented, frightened sailors to man them. He was driven ever onwards to discover what lay beyond the horizon.
It was the desire to know that led Lord Carnarvon and Howard Carter through years of frustration and failure until one day they discovered in the Valley of the Kings the tomb of Tutankhamen, and, within it, the most complete collection of funeral trappings and properties in the whole history of Egyptology.
It was the desire to know at all costs that led to the search for electric power, immunization against disease, and success, finally, in landing men on the surface of the moon. Curiosity has been one of the greatest impulses of life, driving people into uncharted territory, over unknown seas, and all with no thought of surrender, whatever the odds.
Curiosity on its own then is one of the great driving forces of life. When allied to certain other motives, some good some bad, it becomes even more formidable. Greed and perseverance can often be found associated with it, and no more so than in the long struggle to penetrate the mystery of Oak Island and the so-called Money Pit.
In the early years the searching of Oak Island appears to have been dominated mostly by curiosity, the simple and uncomplicated desire to know what was to be found there. The young men who first found the Pit, all of them under twenty years of age, were initially simply intrigued by what they saw. They found, in a forest clearing, a sunken indentation wide enough to resemble the head of a large well, and above it the remains of a ship’s tackle block, suspended from the branch of a large oak tree cut to support it. As they began to dig and found first a slab of stone and later several wooden platforms, the desire to know what lay beneath them grew ever greater. At this stage there seems no desire to grow rich from what they hoped to find.
The fortune hunters followed in later years, earning the area the name of the Money Pit, though as far as is known, no money as yet has ever been found in it. For over two hundred years, vastly more money has been poured into it than anything of value ever secured from it.
To curiosity and greed a third great impulse has clearly been at work on Oak Island. It is the human gift of perseverance. Without that gift some of our greatest achievements and discoveries would never have happened as soon as they did. Perseverance enabled Columbus to reach the New World. It led Livingstone through parts of Africa never yet explored. It brought the 1953 party to the summit of Everest where others before them had lost their lives in the struggle. Perseverance tends to pay off in the end, but not on Oak Island, not with the Money Pit. For two hundred years now groups have been trying to penetrate its secrets, using ever more advanced techniques in mining engineering with ever greatly increased financial backing and with the experience of so many failed attempts to work on, and yet nothing tangible has been found for all their efforts. Families down several generations have been drawn to it and ruined by it. There has been a battle of wits between the unknown master engineers, who it seems buried something and then devised a scheme which would thwart all attempts to reach it. Curiosity, greed and perseverance, have all hammered against it, from the simple pick and shovel, to the sophisticated pump, even to dynamite. But he who designed the defences has foiled them all. So intense has been the struggle, so insistent the effort, even the exact area of the Money Pit is now difficult to identify.
The Reverend Lionel Fanthorpe and his wife, Patricia, the authors of this study, have come to it soon after their struggles to unravel the mystery of the sudden unexplained wealth of the once impoverished priest of Rennes-le-Château, Bérenger Saunière. Their researches in Rennes were deep, widespread, and continued over many years. Nothing was left untested and every theory examined with care and scholarship. In the end, however, those of us who enjoyed the book[1] and marvelled at the scholarship were bound to say that the last word still lay with the old priest. He found riches somewhere and in abundance, beyond even our wildest dreams, but he took the secret of this wealth with him into the grave.
The true scholar spares little thought for treasure. He doesn’t expect to be rich but he is desperate to find the truth. The authors of this book have laid bare the facts. Something of value was brought to Oak Island and was protected by someone at some
time. Whoever he was, he used the waters of the sea as his protective shield. What was it he buried? Is it still there to be found? If so how can his ingenious mechanism be diverted? Have the waters, so to speak, now been so muddied, the ground around so devastated, as to render discovery impossible?
You will enjoy reading this book as I have. What or whom will you admire most? The ghostly engineer whose skill has so far outwitted everyone? The fortune hunters whose persistence engulfed years of their lives and drew most of their money down into the shaft only to surrender all of it to the waters? Or shall we rather admire those who, for no financial gain whatsoever, have been proud to devote their time, their energy, their cleverness to a study of the chase and the frustrations of all those who took part in it? The builders of the Pit, the treasure seekers, the research historians, are all heroes in this work. There is a record here of ingenuity at its most baffling. Perhaps in the preface, as with the island, the last word should be allowed to the engineer-inventor of long ago. He may be saying to himself somewhere in another life, “They have had the Pit all these years. They have had all those resources to use. They had so many failures to learn from,” and then with a smile, if smiles still feature in life eternal, he may add, “but none of them has ever got to the treasure and they never will.”
— Canon Stanley H. Mogford[2], M.A., Cardiff, Wales, U.K,. 1994
Acknowledgements
We are very grateful indeed to Dan Blankenship and family for all their hospitality, expert help and advice, and to their friend and colleague Dan Henskee, during our site research on Oak Island.
Many thanks to Jim Sedgewick of Skyshots Aerial Photography, 4073 #3 Highway, P.O. Box 2000, Chester, Nova Scotia, B0J 1J0, for his friendly and wholehearted co-operation and brilliant photographic professionalism.
We owe a great deal to our late friend George Young’s enthusiastic support, his vast experience in so many relevant fields and his exciting new ideas, and to his wife, Janette, for her unfailing hospitality during our visits to their lovely home in Nova Scotia.
Much gratitude to our other hosts in Nova Scotia, Jeanne and Ned Nash, who did so much to help us, and whose very comfortable and welcoming Stoney Brook Guest House, in Chester, was always a pleasure to visit.
Many thanks to our friend, Canon Stanley Mogford, M.A., for writing the foreword. Canon Mogford is very well-known and greatly respected throughout the Church in Wales for his wit, wisdom, wealth of academic experience, and scholarly prowess. We’re also deeply grateful to our publishers, Kirk Howard and Tony Hawke, for their interest in our ideas, their valuable suggestions, their confidence, their encouragement, and their generous hospitality while we were in Toronto.
Last, but by no means least, we are greatly indebted to our friend Paul V.S. Townsend, M.Sc., unsurpassable computer “wizard,” cryptographer, problem-solver, meticulous typesetter, eagle-eyed proofreader, and ingenious compiler of footnotes and other improvements to our text.
— Lionel and Patricia Fanthorpe, Cardiff, Wales, U.K., 1994
Introduction
The mystery of the Oak Island Money Pit is equalled only by the riddle of whatever it was that Father Bérenger Saunière and Marie Dénarnaud found at Rennes-le-Château a century ago, and by Monsieur Fradin’s amazing discoveries at Glozel near Vichy in 1924.
In some ways all three stories are remarkably similar: in one vital respect they are very different. Whatever else may be in doubt about the Rennes mystery, Saunière had access to vast wealth — and for over thirty years he was a singularly conspicuous consumer. With the possible exception of John Pitblado (Pitbladdo in some accounts) no one has yet found — let alone spent — any of the Oak Island treasure; and the mysterious Glozel inscriptions have yet to be deciphered.
The heart of the Nova Scotian enigma is a very deep shaft sunk into Oak Island, which lies just off the coast of Chester, in Mahone Bay, in Lunenburg County. Roughly thirty-three metres below the surface are what appear to be two cunningly designed flood tunnels which link the shaft to the Atlantic Ocean. Augmented by a subterranean river, these flood tunnels have so far defeated every attempt to recover whatever may lie buried at the foot of the mysterious old shaft, and those attempts have now been going on for almost two hundred years.
The modern part of the story begins in 1795. One summer afternoon Daniel McGinnis, who was then a teenaged farm boy, rowed out to explore uninhabited Oak Island. He came across a small clearing in which was a saucer shaped depression about four metres across. Beside it stood an oak with one sturdy branch lopped off to correspond with the centre of the hollow. An old ship’s block and tackle hung from this lopped branch. Daniel fetched two friends in his own age group, John Smith and Anthony Vaughan. The lads began to dig. They soon realized that they were re-excavating a circular shaft. The tough clay walls clearly bore the pick marks of whoever had originally dug the shaft. Within a metre of the surface the boys discovered a layer of stone slabs. The rock from which the slabs were cut was from Gold River, about three kilometres up the mainland coast.
As if the Gold River slabs and pick marks in the clay were not evidence enough of the shaft’s importance, three metres down the boys struck a platform of transverse oak logs embedded firmly in the clay walls of the shaft. The outer surfaces were decaying; the oak platform had evidently been there a long time. The boys prised it out and discovered that the soil below it had settled to leave a vertical gap of about half a metre. Encouraged by the thought that such elaborate and laborious work probably concealed a very considerable treasure, they dug on with renewed enthusiasm. Between the six-and-seven metre levels they encountered another transverse oak platform, and between nine and ten metres down they found another platform.
Realizing that an excavation on this scale was more than they could handle, the lads decided to call on adult relatives and friends to help.
That small beginning was almost two centuries ago. During the intervening years many ingenious and courageous mining engineers — often equipped with the latest technology and pumping equipment — have attempted to solve the mystery. So far all have failed. Like Rennes-le-Château and Glozel, Oak Island refuses to give up its secret.
Our site investigations on Oak Island itself, and on neighbouring Frog Island — where there appears to be a similar shaft which may well be linked to Oak Island — led us to consider seven major possibilities:
(a) that the Money Pit was constructed to hold several substantial British Army pay chests (dating from the American War of Independence) to keep them safe from the Americans and their French allies;
(b) that it was the work of Sir Francis Drake’s men in the sixteenth century and was built to hold captured Spanish gold;
(c) that it was dug by William Kidd, or some other privateer or pirate, during the seventeenth century;
(d) that it was constructed as the tomb of an Arif, or Holy Man, who had led a party of religious refugees over the Atlantic to Nova Scotia — this is George Young’s fascinating hypothesis;
(e) that it was built four centuries ago to house precious original manuscripts, possibly even the controversial works of Francis Bacon;
(f) that it was constructed by Norsemen, or early Welsh sea rovers, perhaps as a royal burial place;
(g) that it was constructed to conceal part of the mysterious Rennes-le-Château “Arcadian Treasure” possibly brought from Europe by Verrazano in the 1530s, and that the strange coded stone of Oak Island is also linked with the weird alphabet at Glozel and the Rennes cyphers.
This raises the question of what the core of that Arcadian Treasure really was. Could it have been a mysterious artifact from ancient Egypt that travelled through one treasure house after another until the Templars gained possession of it? Did they, rather than Verrazano, carry it across the Atlantic with the help of Prince Henry Sinclair?
The quest begins with two basic facts and two basic questions. There is a deep shaft on Oak Island which was either man-made, or man-adapted long ago. There are at least
two flood tunnels connecting the lower parts of this shaft to the Atlantic. These, too, were either man-made or man-adapted.
The first question is: who created, or modified, the shaft and its flood tunnels? The second question is: why?
As with the mysteries of Rennes-le-Château and Glozel, there are no quick, simple, or certain answers — only a range of greater or lesser possibilities. It is the authors’ intention to lay those possibilities and speculations before our readers, together with such relevant evidence as exists, and such arguments and deductions as may reasonably be based on that evidence. It is also the authors’ intention to indicate which hypothesis they themselves think is the most probable and to give reasons for their choice.
— Lionel and Patricia Fanthorpe, Cardiff, Wales, U.K., 1994
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Oak Island
and its Background
If you spent just one day on each island in Mahone Bay, it would take a year to explore them all. Oak Island is not short of neighbours.
A mile long and slightly less than half that width, it narrows in the centre where the swamp lies. Viewed from the east, the island is reminiscent of the curiously shaped puff of smoke that emerges from Aladdin’s Lamp in the cartoons and then turns into a genie. The Oak Island genie (if he is still there!) has remained stubbornly concealed at the bottom of his flooded Money Pit.
The current name, Oak Island, seems to be based on the presence of the red oaks with their characteristic umbrella-shaped domes. At one time they were far more numerous than they are today. A chart drawn by a British cartographer named Des Barres in the last quarter of the eighteenth century calls the island Glouster Isle and names today’s Mahone Bay as Mecklenburgh Bay. In spite of Des Barres’s nomenclature, however, some legal documents which are older than his chart refer to the island as Oak Island.