The Oak Island Mystery (8 page)

The Oak Island Treasure Company's Great Discovery

T
he
Eldorado/Halifax team gave up in 1867. In terms of Oak Island history, that was a momentous year: Fred Blair was born, and he was destined to work on the mystery from 1893 until his death in 1951.

Basically, there were no serious attempts to get at the treasure between 1867 and 1893, an interregnum of over a quarter of a century, but during those quiet years there was a very interesting and significant accident on the island.

Anthony Graves had acquired what had once been John Smith's holding at the eastern end. In 1878, Grave's daughter, Sophia Sellers, was ploughing with oxen just over 100 yards from the Money Pit. Suddenly the earth opened up under the terrified animals. They crashed down into a ten-foot hole, almost bringing Sophia down on top of them as the plough handles were torn from her hands. With a great deal of struggling, her husband, Henry, and several more brawny Nova Scotians, finally got the oxen out of the hole. At the first convenient opportunity, Henry filled it with boulders as a safety measure. No one took any further notice of it until Fred Blair came on the scene in 1893.

He was the nephew of Isaac Blair, who had worked on the island in the 1860s, and had told young Fred as much as he knew of the Money Pit mystery: yet another example of the continuity linking one generation of Oak Island researchers to the next.

Fred came originally from Amherst, Nova Scotia, and in 1893 was working as an insurance salesman. Perhaps this professional background and its concomitant necessity for checking and re-checking clients' details gave him the careful, almost scholastic attitude to the Oak Island mystery which characterized his long years of investigation.

Fred's first line of attack was to amass all the written material he could find pertaining to earlier work on the island, and to interview all the personnel he could locate who had been involved in those earlier investigations. He spoke with such veterans as Creelman, Fraser, McCully, McDonald, McNutt, and Tupper, collating and studying not only their own direct experiences but recording their recollections of information they had received from the very earliest explorers: McGinnis, Vaughan, Smith, and Simeon Lynds, who had led the Onslow group.

In 1893, Blair and his associates inaugurated the Oak Island Treasure Company. In their prospectus they said that a shaft thirteen feet across and 100 feet deep had been sunk on Oak Island “before the memory of any now living.” This vertical shaft was connected to the sea by a tunnel several hundred feet long and at the shaft's base lay large wooden boxes of jewels and precious metals. Many previous attempts had failed, but modern technology now made it possible to succeed. The prospectus then pointed out that the treasure must be large, because so much work would never have been done to conceal and protect a small amount.

The plan was to concentrate on cutting off the water from the flood tunnel “at some point near the shore,” after which it was assumed that there would be no difficulty in pumping out the Money Pit itself.

Blair's new company received such encouraging financial backing that it was able to begin work in 1894. The first thing they examined in detail was the pit which had collapsed under Sophia Sellers' oxen sixteen years before. The first part of this work consisted of removing the boulders her husband had placed there to prevent further accidents. Once the boulders were out, Blair's team had their first real opportunity to examine the cavity — now dubbed the “Cave-in Pit.”

It soon became evident that whatever the shaft's purpose, it was contemporary with the original work: the well-defined circular sides were so hard that the picks would scarcely touch them. The internal soil, by contrast, was loosely packed and easy to remove. The crew dug down about fifty feet and then drilled an experimental bore hole for almost another twenty feet. They encountered nothing — not even water.

The following day, however, the ubiquitous Oak Island subterranean water was there with a vengeance. Where had it come from?

The sides of the Cave-in Pit were practically impenetrable. They had given every appearance of defiant impermeability during the re-excavation work. It seemed very improbable that water to tidal level could have forced its way in through the small bore hole in the floor of the workings — yet there was the water, filling the Cave-in Pit and rising and falling rhythmically with the tide.

Blair's team decided that the water had gotten there via one of the many flooded drainage shafts in the area — the legacy of every failed attempt from 1803 onwards. Not really expecting to achieve anything significant, they, nevertheless, tried to bail the Cave-in Pit.

Their efforts had no perceptible effect on the level of the water. Trying to reason their way through the assortment of riddles posed by the behaviour of the Cave-in Pit, Blair's associates calculated that if it had been built directly over the flood tunnel from Smith's Cove, its collapse under Sophie's oxen and plough in 1878 ought to have affected the flow of water to the Money Pit. That hadn't happened; so Blair and his colleagues concluded that the mysterious original builders of the Oak Island system had deliberately sited the Cave-in Pit a little to the side of their flood tunnel and not directly above it. Yet, wondered Blair, why had they built it at all? What purpose could it have served? Where did it fit into their intricate overall design?

One idea which seemed reasonable at first was that it was a ventilation shaft. The popular, received knowledge about getting air into tunnels of that length (approximately 500 feet) in those days included cutting at least one vertical ventilation shaft over the tunnel. A better method, however, had already been used by miners since the mid-eighteenth century or earlier. This was an ingenious technique called a water bellows.

It worked like this. A large, sturdy tree near the mouth of the mine, or tunnel, would be hollowed out to form a rough cylinder. A wide funnel would be constructed above this so that water could be fed into it vigorously from a cascade above, trapping large quantities of fresh air as it fell into the hollow tree. Pipes from the base of the tree conducted this air and water mixture into the farthest reaches of the mine or tunnel. James Brindley gave a detailed account of this method of ventilation for subterranean workings in St. James Chronicle, dated “30/9/1763,” and actually used it during the construction of one tunnel a mile long at Worsley, Manchester, England, in 1765.

Brindley's remarkable life is worth a brief glance in connection with the Money Pit mystery. Born at Thornsett near Buxton, Derbyshire, England, in 1716, he became a millwright. Buxton was at one time a famous health spa at the heart of the Derbyshire Peak District with its famous limestone crags, potholes, caves, and labyrinthine underground passageways. The limestone below Oak Island has many similar features.

In 1752, Brindley designed and installed an ingenious engine to drain flooded coal workings at Clifton in Lancashire. In 1759 he worked for the Duke of Bridgewater as an adviser on canal construction. He also designed miles of underground workings for coal mines. Perhaps the most unusual thing about Brindley was his apparent ability to work without writing down any calculations or making design drawings or plans. He died on September 30, 1772, at Turnhurst in Staffordshire at the age of fifty-six.

From all the evidence he, or she, has left at Oak Island, the unknown genius who built the amazing structure there was of an even higher calibre than the great James Brindley. Whatever else it may, or may not, have been, the Cave-in Pit was not a simple ventilation shaft: the most convincing argument against the air hole theory must be that the Cave-in Pit did not actually connect with the original flood tunnel.

Blair's team now decided that cutting off the flood water, although still an excellent idea in theory, was not going to be the straightforward task they had originally hoped. They dug yet another useless shaft about ten yards east of the Money Pit and three yards north of where they hoped the flood tunnel might have been. The Halifax group, twenty-five years before them, had already turned the eastern end of Oak Island into a Gordian Knot of shafts, tunnels, and flooded subterranean waterways. Barely forty feet down, Blair's diggers struck one of these old Halifax workings, and water promptly poured in. They left that shaft unfinished and decided to do what so many previous teams had tried already with such conspicuous lack of success: they would attempt to re-excavate the Money Pit itself.

Unfortunately for Blair's Oak Island Treasure Company, it was no longer an easy matter to decide which of the numerous filled-in shafts amidst the scarred, overgrown earth at the eastern end of the island was the original Money Pit. Blair had made many careful notes, and he still had several of the old treasure hunters to consult. As far as they knew they were working in the same shaft which McGinnis, Vaughan, and Smith had dug into so enthusiastically 100 years before. Right shaft or wrong, they had not quite reached its sixty-foot level when — predictably — the flood water broke through and put an end to their work there for the time being.

Blair's backers in the Oak Island Treasure Company were partly from Boston and partly from Nova Scotia. So far the Company had got off to a very disappointing start, and a quarrel now arose between the Nova Scotians and the Bostonians. The Nova Scotians won and reorganized the management team: Blair became treasurer; Perley Putnam and Bill Chappell had significant roles; and Captain John Welling was appointed site manager on Oak Island.

Under the new team the Company met with markedly more success. Work continued throughout 1896 and on into the opening weeks of 1897. The steam pumps of the 1890s were much more effective than those available to earlier expeditions. By working in two interconnected shafts simultaneously, Blair's team was able to get the water level down very close to the 100-foot mark. Then tragedy struck: the supposed Oak Island “curse” took a second life.

Maynard Kaiser, a workman who lived near the local Gold River, was being hauled up the shaft on March 26, 1897, when the rope on which he was ascending slid off its pulley. There was apparently insufficient safety lip on the pulley mechanism to prevent the accident, and according to some accounts it was also overloaded: Kaiser crashed to his death 100 feet below.

The effect on the other workers was paralytic. No one was prepared to go down the shaft after the accident. There was dark talk of some mysterious and vindictive supernatural “guardian” of the elusive Oak Island treasure. It took Blair and the other managers a full week to persuade their men to resume work.

They reached depth of 110 feet within a month of Kaiser's death and then hit one of the lateral connecting tunnels which the Eldorado Halifax group had dug in frustrated desperation a quarter of a century earlier. Blair's men reported that the water flowing into their shaft and causing so much work for the pumps appeared to be coming from this old Eldorado/Halifax connecting tunnel. Sickening doubts began to trouble Blair, Putnam, Welling, and Chappell: were they in the original Money Pit after all?

The diggers went through this old Halifax Eldorado tunnel and found another one intersecting it. They followed that one and came to a wide, dark shaft, stretching up into mysterious darkness. They looked at one another aghast in the dim light from their helmet lamps: they had only now entered the base of the real Money Pit. All their previous effort had been wasted re-excavating the wrong shaft.

Blair inspected the new shaft into which his men had just broken. Water was bubbling up fiercely from its base. All their previous work — and the tragic death of Maynard Kaiser — had taken place in an old, parallel shaft for which Adam Tupper had been responsible in 1850. According to Blair's carefully garnered records, this Tupper shaft had been driven down to approximately 110 feet and had been situated three or four yards northwest of the original Money Pit. Working on the assumption that it was this 1850 Tupper shaft on which so much time and labour had been wasted, Blair's team compensated for their earlier error by restarting their work three yards to the southeast. A few hours' digging made it clear that they were now undoubtedly in the original Money Pit. Their efforts here were rewarded by the discovery of a strange tunnel at a depth of approximately 110 feet. It boasted of no crib-work and was about a metre and a half high. Water was coming from it at a speed the pumps could not contend with: the diggers had to withdraw.

Blair's group convened a special management meeting to try to plan their next move. They eventually decided to try using dynamite to try to solve the problem of the pestilential flood tunnel once and for all. Having worked out a fairly accurate estimate of where it left Smith's Cove on its way to the Money Pit, Blair's men drilled a line of five holes across what they thought was its path and placed explosives in each. The third, central hole, hit the jackpot. This one went right into the elusive flood tunnel and rapidly filled with salt water up to sea level. They placed an enormous dynamite charge in it: well in excess of 150 pounds! Any tunnel that survived would be there until Judgment Day! When the dynamite exploded, the water in the Money Pit and the Cave-in Pit foamed and bubbled insanely. Oil from the dynamite was observed on the water's surface at both sites. At least they had connected, but had they destroyed the tunnel completely and cut off the water?

One thing that puzzled the explorers considerably was the depth at which the elusive flood tunnel had been cut. Their huge dynamite charge had been detonated at a depth of approximately eighty feet, yet they were still very close to the artificial beach at Smith's Cove. It seemed to Blair and his associates that some sort of subterranean reservoir, or catchment chamber, had been built into the flooding system so that water collected on the artificial beach would drop into a vertical cylinder, or cistern.