The Lost Treasure of the Knights Templar (5 page)

This theory, not unlike Oak Island itself, has a few holes in it. The first is that most reasonable estimates of the time required to construct the Money Pit say it took more than a year as well as an immense amount of labor. Since the Bay of Fundy is within close sailing range of Mahone Bay, and this bay may have the greatest difference in sea level between high tide and low tide of any location in North America, there existed a much simpler method of what is called “careening” a ship. A ship can be beached and repaired at low tide and carried back out to sea at high tide. No elaborate structure would be necessary. Another hole in the theory is that no such complicated structure similar to the Oak Island Money Pit exists anywhere else in the world. No precedent for such a complex ship-cleaning device exists, and the area would be a very unlikely place to invent one.

There are also claims that the pit was a natural occurrence—a sinkhole that sucked in logs or one in which stones and logs were simply thrown in to close the hole. Michael Bradley, an author discussed in Fanthorpe’s
Secrets of Rennos-le-Chateau,
proposed the theory of a “limestone blowhole” created by nature. These theories ignore the fact that the flagstones were brought from the mainland, that the oaken platforms were evenly spaced, that cove drains with foreign fibers were put in place, that a false beach was built, and that stones were inscribed. The theory also overlooks the fact that the island was uninhabited before the earliest digging started and that the need to fill in a sinkhole on an uninhabited island would be minimal at best. The Money Pit was clearly man-made.

In this light, it is necessary to compile a list of candidates who could be responsible for burying the treasure and to more closely examine the time frame. While official and state-sponsored voyages of exploration are often a starting point, there are also unofficial and unsponsored journeys. Our first suspects then are the Vikings.

The Vikings

The Norse travelers can be considered suspects because they are one group that we now can say with certainty crossed the Atlantic before Columbus. Evidence in favor of the Vikings must start with their reputation as marauders of the sea. As such, it is no stretch of the imagination to believe that they might have had treasure to bury. While it was once a matter of debate, we now know that the Vikings had reached North America by
A.D.
1001 at the latest. That this date is no longer in question is testament to the persistent effort of the respected team of Helge Ingstad (a former governor of East Greenland and Spitsbergen) and Anne Stine Ingstad, an archeologist.
¹⁴
Basing their belief on an Icelandic map dated to 1590 and directions in the Norse sagas, they decided to explore Newfoundland. There they uncovered Norse ruins on that province’s northern coast. After lengthy excavations at L’Anse aux Meadows, the Ingstads proved that a farming community had existed there, able to sustain one to three hundred hardy souls.

The remains of the five- to six-room sod houses, a smithy, a kiln, a bathhouse, and several boat sheds have been excavated. Numerous artifacts, including iron nails and rivets, a soapstone spinning wheel, an oil lamp, and bronze cloak pins, were also recovered. The excavation, begun in the 1960s, firmly established that the Vikings had at least one settlement in the New World five hundred years before Columbus. L’Anse aux Meadows has been reconstructed to show what life was like for the Norse settlers, and the area is now a Canadian historic park. The discovery of other Norse artifacts in New England, farther north and west in Canada, and as far west as Minnesota in the United States (the authenticity of these artifacts remains questionable) do not merit the acceptance that the Newfoundland farm does, although there is little doubt that the Viking ships could have reached Nova Scotia.

The Vikings, however, lacked the means and motivation to construct the Money Pit. Those who reached the New World, by island-hopping through the North Atlantic, were not plunderers, but farmers.
¹⁵
Unlike their Norse cousins—the invaders who traveled and raided the Mediterranean, the Black Sea, the navigable rivers of Europe, and the coasts of nearby Ireland—these Vikings were poor even by European standards of their time. They did not have any treasure to hide, nor did they have the ability to construct such complicated facilities and complex hydraulic systems.

Native North Americans

Another theory is that native North Americans may have been responsible for the Money Pit. Certainly they were capable of much more than the Europeans have given them credit for. They had complex governments, established trade, and advanced scientific knowledge that went beyond the ability of early explorers to comprehend. Only now are we able to understand the rock structures that served as solar and lunar calendars, found in the Southwest and northern Mexico. Similar structures, with grander designs, have been discovered in New England but are still dismissed since they do not fit into our understanding of the native peoples who populated most of North America before Columbus.
¹⁶
While we now accept the idea that trade took place between native tribes from Florida and those of New England and that southeastern tribes traded as far away as the Rockies, stone calendars as sophisticated as Stonehenge are dismissed because many historians are afraid of the implications. Still, there is no record of native North Americans having prized a monetary treasure enough to commit to such a great amount of labor to constructing a hiding place for their prize. Indeed, nomadic peoples would often find hoarding an inconvenience. The opposite extreme, their custom of potlatch, exhibits the belief in giving rather than receiving.
¹⁷
Despite the complicated calendars and mounds found across North America, none have shown evidence of a knowledge of advanced hydraulics. With a lack of motive and means, Native Americans can be eliminated from our list.

Spanish Marauders and Incan Defenders

The Spanish may have been the first settlers in America to amass a great deal of wealth for their efforts. Spanish treasure ships laden with gold and silver would often fall victim to shipwrecks and pirates that sought the treasure for themselves. The excavators of the Money Pit left few stones unturned in their search for answers. In their desperation they went to any lengths to further their knowledge. Psychics and dowsers were consulted along with scientists and engineers. In one of their less
conventional attempts, Frederick Blair and Mel Chappell hired a psychic known as an “automatic writer,” a medium who allows the dead to communicate with the living. According to this medium, the treasure hidden deep in the Money Pit was Incan gold.

The story told was that about 1524, the Spanish conquistador Francisco Pizarro reached the Incan city of Tumbes in Peru.
¹⁸
He did not yet have the authority to loot their treasure, so he left two men to guard the city. Four years later, after finally receiving authorization from King Charles V of Spain, Pizarro returned to find the city empty and in ruins. It had fallen victim to a civil war between King Atahualpa and his half-brother, Huáscar, the pretender to the throne. In the course of Huáscar’s bid for victory the city had been plundered. Through the medium, John Wicks, the spirit of a priest who had been one of the men left behind by Pizarro at Tumbes told Frederick Blair and Mel Chappell that the treasure had been carried overland to Panama and put on Incan-built ships. These ships were battered by storms on their voyage north and came ashore on Nova Scotia, where the specially constructed hiding place was built.

Most would call the story preposterous; it is in fact complete fiction. History records the fact that it was Atahualpa who emerged victorious from the civil war, and he kept all of his gold and silver at Tumbes. This treasure he later turned over to Pizarro, filling a room once with gold and twice with silver in an attempt to buy his freedom. The Spaniards had him strangled. Spanish gold has always captured the romantic imagination of treasure hunters. It is possible that of all the ships that were supposed to have crossed the Atlantic with bulging holds of booty, one may have been diverted to a secret stash of some colonial governor, never to be found by its owners or by later historians. If so, it would more likely have been buried by Spanish conquistadors, rather than Incan sailors, in the cold North Atlantic. Spanish ships did sail with the currents on their return trip and would often go far north, within four hundred miles of Nova Scotia.

The ships that were lost during the Spanish conquest of Mexico and South America number in the hundreds, and not all of them went down off the coast of Florida or in the Caribbean. In fact, the North Atlantic
has more than its share of individual wrecks. In Nova Scotia, tiny Sable Island has claim to 250 such shipwrecks. The odds are high that Spanish ships, blown off course, are among those that lie wrecked in the treacherous waters of Nova Scotia. Could one or more have landed on tiny Oak Island and, unable to return home, buried its treasure under such a massive structure? The Spanish did employ miners for operations in South America, and it would not have been uncommon to have a mining engineer on board.

In
The Big Dig,
D’Arcy O’Connor proposed that such an event may have happened.
¹⁹
A battered ship is forced to land for repairs and is unburdened of its weighty cargo. The agent of the king who had the responsibility of safekeeping the king’s treasure orders a vault be constructed. Here the treasure will be stored until a better ship can be sent back. Once the work is done, the wounded ship, repaired as well as possible under the circumstances, sails off again, only to sink at sea. Thus there are no witnesses and no evidence—only a truly secret treasure. The idea of gold and silver looted by the Spanish conquistadors is intriguing. If the Spanish themselves did not build the elaborate Money Pit, there is the possibility that one of the many pirates and privateers who raided the Spanish Main was responsible. One of history’s most well-known privateers was Sir Francis Drake.

Sir Francis Drake

In 1990 I spoke with David Tobias, the current owner of most of Oak Island and the force behind much of the excavation since 1970. His theory is that Sir Francis Drake had the pit constructed to hide a portion of his privateering spoils. Drake made his name raiding the Pacific coast of Spain’s territory in the New World, where the Spanish assumed the English would not tread. That he was never hung as a pirate is testimony to his relationship with the Crown. He started his career young, capturing small ships in American waters. In 1572 he was ready for the big time and joined forces with William Le Testu, a French pirate who was later hung for his joint efforts with Drake. Drake not only survived but returned home a wealthy man.

In 1576 Drake had a private meeting with Queen Elizabeth I, presenting a secret plan within a secret plan, according to James A. Williamson, his biographer.
²⁰
His cover story was that he was going to sail into the Pacific to discover lands to claim for his queen. This secret could safely be leaked, since it caused no embarrassment to the queen. The real secret may have been an arrangement to split the rewards of piracy with the Crown. On Drake’s voyage, his ship, the
Golden Hind,
circumnavigated the globe after taking on twenty-six tons of Spanish gold. Because Spain and England were not at war at the time, his acts could not openly be sponsored by Queen Elizabeth. We know, however, that he returned home as a hero, allowed to lead an openly wealthy lifestyle. He purchased the home of a rival and spent his own funds improving the water supply of his hometown, Plymouth, England.
²¹

After a few years of enjoying the good life, he returned to sea with the blessing of the queen. England was by then at war. During 1585 he raided ports and looted ships from the Caribbean to the Azores. Ten years later he set out for what became his last raid, he died of dysentery in Panama less than a year after setting sail. Tobias claims that after one of Drake’s raids he employed a boatload of Cornish miners to construct the secret treasure depository on Oak Island. The idea is certainly plausible in that Drake had the ability to mount such an expedition, which would have been too costly for most other individual pirates. He also could employ the technology, which an ordinary pirate could not. I considered the theory and at first rejected it—ironically, because it fit too well. It appeared to be just another “Captain Kidd” theory, which gave this short-lived pirate credit for half of the treasure stories of the Atlantic coast. Looking further, the theory seemed more believable but still appeared to lack a motive. Drake had no reason to hide his wealth; in fact, the act of buying his rival’s home was characteristic of Drake’s flaunting of his wealth. He publicly spent his funds, and even though his acts of piracy were never officially condoned, they were officially rewarded. In 1580 he was even knighted by the queen.

It was wise to have friends in high places in the sixteenth century. The Inquisition had blazed across Europe starting in 1558, and Queen Elizabeth I of England had no room for its persecution of those who
did not adhere to the Catholic doctrine, until she, too, was excommunicated. One reason for her expulsion from the Church was her belief that kings and queens could heal with their touch. She had even consulted her astrologer, John Dee, to fix the date for her coronation. Dee later wrote a book entitled
The Perfect Art of Navigation,
which convinced Drake of the possibility of circumnavigating the globe. While she lived her intellectual life through magicians and alchemists like Dr. Dee and Dr. Philip Sidney, Elizabeth lived a life of adventure through her privateers Sir Francis Drake and Sir Walter Raleigh. Raleigh, however, fell out of the queen’s favor and was banished from her court.