The Oak Island Mystery Read online

  A.O. Creighton left the business in 1879 and a new firm was started by Herbert Creighton and Edward Marshall. Edward’s son Harry was with the firm from 1890 onwards, and he made a statement about the stone in 1935 to treasure hunter Frederick Blair and his lawyer Reginald Harris. The gist of Harry Marshall’s evidence was that he remembered the stone well, but had never seen the inscription on it because it had been worn away by years of use as a bookbinder’s beating stone. He said that the stone was two feet long, just over a foot wide, and about ten inches thick. He guessed its weight in the region of 175 pounds.[1] Both surfaces were smooth, but the sides were rough. Harry added that it was a very hard, finely grained stone with an olive tinge. He thought it might have been porphyry or granite. He also commented that it was totally unlike any stone he had ever seen in Nova Scotia.

  If Harry Marshall was correct in his guess that the strange stone was porphyry, then a link with ancient Egypt may be established. In the days of Pliny (first century A.D.) mottled red or purple rocks were called porphorytes from the Greek word meaning “red.” Much of this early stone was volcanic, but the first Italian sculptors thought it was a variety of marble. The best red porphyry, known as porfido rosso antico, from which many ancient Egyptian monuments were carved, came from substantial deposits along the west coast of the Red Sea. The secret of its whereabouts was lost for many years, but the quarry was rediscovered at Jebel Dhokan.

  Edward R. Snow mentions the stone in True Tales of Buried Treasure (New York: Dodd, Mead, and Co., 1962) and relates that the Reverend A.T. Kempton of Cambridge, Massachusetts, said that an old Irish teacher had translated it to read: “Forty feet below two million pounds are buried.” Our own cryptographer, computer engineer Paul V.S. Townsend, M.Sc., reached the same conclusion independently in under ten minutes. The decipherment is shown in the illustration on the diagram, along with the key to the symbols used. The second character is assumed to be a second point-down triangle (F) drawn in error and crossed out — this character is ignored in the decoding.

  All very well, but everything depends upon whether the inscription as recorded is the original one which actually appeared on the stone when it was first unearthed from the Money Pit in 1803. The suspicion lingers that someone anxious to raise funds in 1865 put an entirely spurious message on the stone using a simple substitution cipher that was easy to crack. Conan Doyle’s short story “The Dancing Men” provides a similar riddle for Holmes to solve. What if that easy hoax code overlaid a genuine ancient inscription of similar appearance, to which the hoaxer had only to make a few additions and alterations? In that case we are dealing with a stone palimpsest, something from which the original writing has been erased or covered to make way for further writing. Historically, the process was usually applied to parchments and monumental brasses which were turned and re-engraved on the reverse side. The original Greek words palin and psao from which “palimpsest” is derived mean literally “again” and “to rub smooth.”

  George Young drew our attention to a decipherment of the stone made by Professor Barry Fell from a copy of the inscription provided for him by Phyllis Donohue. Fell, an internationally acclaimed epigrapher, produced a religious text translation of the Money Pit stone from an early Libyan Arabic dialect used by a branch of the North African Coptic Church centuries ago.

  Coptic is best understood as the linguistic descendant of the ancient Egyptian language. The oldest documents in the Coptic date back to the second and third centuries of the Christian era and are translations of the Christian scriptures. The writers tended to use Greek with seven demotic symbols added, rather than to use their own demotic script.

  Coptic is known to exist in six forms: Bashmuric and Bohairic from Lower Egypt; Fayumic, Asyutic, Akhmimic, and Sahidic from Upper Egypt. There may be others.

  What is of particular interest about a probable Coptic inscription on the Money Pit stone, and its relevance to the final solution of the Oak Island mystery, is that two very early Coptic manuscripts, the Pistis Sophia in the British Museum and the Bruce Codex in the Bodleian Library, both relate to an obscure Gnostic sect operating in Egypt in the third century A.D. Ancient Gnostic secrets are inextricably interwoven into the mystery of Rennes-le-Château, and the Rennes clues in turn throw light on the Oak Island problem.

  If George Young’s thought-provoking hypothesis and Professor Fell’s scholarly interpretation are the correct ones — and there is some real likelihood that they are — then they provide an intriguing link between ancient Egypt and Oak Island.

  James McNutt, who was working on Oak Island in the 1860s, refers to the inscribed slab as a piece of “freestone” and said that it was unlike any other stone on the Nova Scotian coast. Towards the close of the nineteenth century, Judge Des Brisays wrote an authoritative account of the Oak Island events up to and including his own time. He refers to the stone and says that the finders were unable to make sense of it “… either because it was too badly cut, or did not appear to be in their own vernacular.…”

  So the Onslow team has removed the curiously coded slab and resumed excavations. We can picture them now at the ninety-foot level. The daylight is fading as they remove the oak platform which lay just below the stone slab. One after another the men begin to notice that water is leaking into the Money Pit — and in substantial quantities. By this time they are taking out one load of water for every two loads of clay.

  Convinced that the mysterious stone meant something, and that they must now be very close to whatever precious object was buried in the shaft, they began probing the soggy base of the pit with long iron rods. At the ninety-eight-foot level those probes struck something impenetrably hard which extended from one side of the Money Pit to the other. Water and darkness were now posing such serious problems that the Onslow men decided to resume their search at first light: it turned out to be a life-saving decision.

  First light brought a grim disappointment: the Money Pit was over sixty feet deep in water. One account relates that as they gathered round the opening, an unlucky member of the expedition slipped into the flooded shaft, only to sputter to the surface shouting that the water tasted of salt. “Salt!” he repeated, as his companions lowered a rope and hauled him to safety. The implication was that in some inexplicable way the Atlantic had found its way through the hitherto impenetrable clay. It did not dawn on the Onslow men at that stage that the ocean might have had some help from the original architect of the Money Pit and its bewildering labyrinth.

  Doggedly, they began trying to empty the pit by bailing it like a leaking ship, but this had no effect whatsoever — they were merely redistributing the Atlantic Ocean!

  It was now time to attend to harvest and other duties back home, so work ended for 1803, but the following year the Onslow Company was back as determined as ever. This time they planned to dig a parallel shaft fifteen feet southeast of the Money Pit itself and then tunnel across to reach the treasure. Their parallel shaft reached 115 feet without encountering any water problems at all. Optimistically, the tunnellers began to cut horizontally through the stubborn clay towards the Money Pit itself. They accomplished the first twelve or thirteen feet without any serious problems: less than three feet now separated the excited miners from the spot where they believed the treasure lay.

  Water started seeping through again, slowly at first, then in small streams. The clay between their tunnel end and the Money Pit collapsed: they were very lucky to escape without loss of life. In just over an hour the second shaft was over sixty feet deep in salt water. Remembering all too well how hopeless bailing had been last time, they made a brief, half-hearted attempt to empty their new shaft, but again their buckets had not the slightest effect on the flood water. They were strong, determined men, but they recognized that this project was totally beyond their resources. Harvests had to be gathered; land had to be tilled; fish had to be caught and timber had to be felled if the colonists and their families were to live. The Onslow Company gave up and the men returned to
their farms, their stores and their fishing boats.

  - 4 -

  The Truro Company’s Attempt in 1849

  Daniel McGinnis was already in his grave and Smith and Vaughan were both in their seventies before the next attack on the Money Pit was launched. This was undertaken by the Truro Company in 1849. The mysterious treasure which John and Anthony had been trying to locate since they were teenagers remained as tantalizing and as elusive as ever.

  Some accounts list the members of the Truro Syndicate as including a Dr. David Barnes Lynds, who may have been Simeon’s son or grandson. Other accounts relate that it was Simeon himself, now a very old man, who was the Lynds involved with the Truro Syndicate of 1849. It is not beyond the bounds of possibility. Captain Anthony Vaughan, either the son or grandson of the Anthony Vaughan, who made the original discovery, died in New York in 1948 at the age of 100. This same Captain Vaughan remembered how as a very young boy he had been present when a major discovery — a set of fan-shaped drains — had been made at Smith’s Cove. It was the Truro Syndicate who found both these breach drains and at least one of the flood tunnels which linked them to the Money Pit. In addition to whichever Lynds it was, plus Smith and Vaughan, the aging survivors of the 1795 discovery, the Truro group, which was formally inaugurated in 1845, consisted of John (or James) Pitblado (or Pitbladdo), John Gamell, Robert Creelman, Adam Tupper, and Jotham McCully. McCully was their site manager in charge of all operations. Pitblado was responsible for drilling and ancillary activities. Their work on the island began in earnest in 1849. The invaluable continuity provided by the presence of earlier searchers like Smith and Vaughan gave the Truro team a flying start.

  Forty years had gone by since the Onslow men’s heroic failure, and during those four decades the original Money Pit, along with the drainage shafts which had been dug nearby, had collapsed. Old Anthony Vaughan was still able to identify the site of the original Money Pit with perfect accuracy and the Truro workers began re-excavating there. Just a few feet down they found the remains of a broken pump which the Onslow men had abandoned when their work was overwhelmed by flood water.

  Hoping that the inundation which had beaten the Onslow syndicate so long ago had now subsided, the Truro team continued excavating ever deeper. They were well over eighty feet down after some two weeks’ digging and their luck was still holding as far as the water was concerned.

  It was a Saturday night. Sunday was an important holy day to pious nineteenth-century Nova Scotians — even if they did believe that a fabulous treasure lay scarcely ten feet farther down the shaft they were re-excavating. The pit looked dry and safe: all the signs were favourable as the Truro men went off to worship in Chester that Sunday morning.

  When they returned to Oak Island after lunch the Money Pit was sixty feet deep in water — exactly as it had been when it bested the Onslow men in 1805. They bailed as vigorously as their Onslow predecessors had done, but it had no perceptible effect on the water level. One eyewitness said that it was like trying to eat soup with a fork!

  Jotham McCully believed in the prudent old military maxim: “Time spent in reconnaissance is never wasted.” He decided to explore the depths of the shaft with a pod auger. This was a piece of prospecting equipment mainly used in the mid-nineteenth century by mining speculators looking for coal. The key to its operation was a vital component known as a “valve sludger.” This was a sturdy tube for raising the core samples: it worked on the principle of a one way valve which would pick up material, as it cut its way downwards. The Truro men’s tragedy was their need to economize on equipment: they had only one valve sludger and they lost it about 110 feet down while drilling their first exploratory hole. A pod auger has a strong, sharp tip (rather like a chisel) and spiral grooves similar to those in a rifle barrel for retrieving the core samples.

  The only replacement for the valve sludger available to them was of very inferior design: it had a simple ball and retaining pin instead of a proper valve. The pin not only prevented the ball from dropping out: it prevented most small, loose objects such as coins or jewels from being retrieved. Soil, clay, rock splinters, wood, or fibre fragments could circumnavigate the pin — pieces of treasure could not. This small, but vitally important, difference in the augers was the cause of the Truro syndicate’s subsequent frustration and disappointment. Their pod auger went right through two buried casks or boxes of loose metal without being able to bring any of the contents to the surface.

  To try to maximize the effectiveness of their drill, the Truro team constructed a sturdy working platform thirty feet down the Money Pit just above the flood water. From this vantage point they made their first hole slightly west of centre. It was this hole which cost them their valve sludger. The remaining holes were in a line which moved east from the initial boring. The first two sets of samples produced only mud, clay, soil, gravel, and a few insignificant stones which were small enough to negotiate the retaining pin below the ball. The next three holes provided important evidence.

  At the ninety-eight-foot level — precisely the depth where the Onslow men had hit with their iron probing rods forty years earlier — the pod auger went through a spruce platform nearly six inches thick. There was then a space of a foot or so through which the bit dropped effortlessly. Below this small, empty zone, the auger bit through four inches of oak and then encountered nearly two feet of tantalizing loose metal which it could not retrieve. Next came a further four inches of oak, which was immediately repeated. The auger then threaded its way awkwardly and reluctantly through another two feet or so of the irretrievable loose metal. After that it chopped through another four inches of oak with six inches of spruce below that. Under this spruce layer the auger detected seven or eight feet of backfilled clay, which had evidently been disturbed at some time in the past. Below this previously-worked material the drill encountered only natural virgin clay as far as McCully and his men could ascertain.

  Subsequent drillings again hit the ninety-eight-foot platform and the side of a chest, cask, or sarcophagus. Small splinters of wood came up from it, and McCully noted with commendable precision and attention to detail that the drill behaved oddly and erratically as though the revolving chisel tip was struck repeatedly against a wooden obstruction parallel to one side of the descending drill. Coconut fibre also came up, and, very significantly, three or four links of gold chain, perhaps from a necklace or bracelet; perhaps from the epaulette of an officer’s uniform, or from the ornately decorated robes of a long dead religious leader. McCully himself wondered if it was part of an old-fashioned watch chain.

  The continuity and interconnection of the various teams who worked on the Money Pit are significant. Two of the original Onslow men in 1803 had been Colonel Robert Archibald and Captain David Archibald. In 1849, Pitblado certainly knew Charles Dickson Archibald of the Acadian Iron Works. This was located in Londonderry, Nova Scotia. James (or John?) Pitblado may have been a somewhat dubious character, or, at the most charitable interpretation, an unscrupulous opportunist. He had been instructed by the Truro team to bring every fragment raised by the drill for microscopic examination. John Gammell, a major shareholder, claimed that he had seen Pitblado take something from the drill, examine it very closely, and slip it into this pocket surreptitiously when he thought he was unobserved. Gammell challenged Pitblado and asked to see what had been retrieved. Pitblado refused, saying he would show it to all the shareholders together at their next meeting. He never did.

  Leaving the island that day with the mystery object, Pitblado contacted Charles Archibald, who applied for a government licence to search for treasure on Oak Island. All he got were the rights to hunt on empty land, or land which had not been granted to anyone. Not satisfied with that — it excluded him and Pitblado from the vital Money Pit area — he attempted to buy the east end of Oak Island. He failed. Not long afterwards he left Nova Scotia and settled in England. Pitblado vanished into obscurity amid contradictory hearsay. Some reports made him the first victim of the
legendary Oak Island nemesis. One account says he was killed in a mining accident; another relates that it happened during railroad construction. Whatever the precise circumstances of his death, word went round that Pitblado had died shortly after pocketing that unknown fragment of treasure which he had found in the pod auger. What might that mysterious object have been? The first suggestion is that it was a small piece of gold, or a jewel. It might also have been a scrap of parchment, a precursor of the tiny piece which was retrieved by T.P. Putnam and examined by Dr. Andrew Porter on September 6, 1897. Another intriguing possibility is that Pitblado found not merely a precious jewel or gemstone, but one which bore a carefully inscribed mason’s mark. Suppose that the inscription on the strange stone unearthed by the Onslow men had contained masons’ marks and that these had been regarded as an unknown alphabet by the men who had puzzled over them in 1803.

  Pitblado’s action has yet another parallel with the curious story of Rennes-le-Château: according to one account, during the restoration work on the church, in the course of which the “Knight’s Tombstone” was discovered, one of the builders thought he saw something glinting underneath. Saunière abruptly brought the day’s work to a halt on the grounds that they could not leave a hole in the floor on the Sunday following. By the time work resumed on Monday, somebody had disturbed the stone which had been left covering the hole, and the “glinting object” had disappeared.