The Oak Island Mystery. Lionel and Patricia Fanthorpe

beach with its drainage system and filter-blankets had given them a fair idea of where the flood tunnel would run.

      They decided to try to intercept and block that main tunnel itself rather than attempt any further work on the artificial beach at Smith’s Cove. Drawing a line from the point where the beach drains seemed to converge back to the Money Pit itself, they selected a likely looking point on that line and began to dig. The expected course of events was as shown in the upper diagram: the interceptor shaft would meet the flood tunnel at a depth considerably less than the presumed junction with the Money Pit at 110 feet after which the lower course of the flood tunnel could be blocked.

      Thirty, forty, fifty feet: the interceptor shaft cut deeper and deeper. Just short of eighty feet, they gave up: it couldn’t be this deep and still connect with the ninety-five-foot level, or could it?

      It did not seem to have occurred to the Truro team that the cunning artificer against whom they were pitting their wits might just have decided to take his flood tunnel deeper than anyone would dig to intercept it, and then allow the natural hydraulic forces to push the water up again to the critical ninety-foot level in the Money Pit, as shown in the lower diagram.

      Rightly or wrongly, the Truro man began digging a second interceptor tunnel ten or twelve feet south of their seventy-five-foot failure. Between thirty and forty feet down in this new shaft they hit a substantial boulder. Prizing it out with considerable difficulty, they were deluged with water: they had found at least one of the flood tunnels, or, perhaps, an upper branch of a flood tunnel. As the diggers scrambled out of their newly dug interceptor shaft, salt water welled up rapidly until it reached sea level. Whatever passageway that boulder had been covering, it undoubtedly connected with the Atlantic.

      Working with considerable difficulty, they did what they could to staunch the flow by driving heavy wooden stakes down into the base of their shaft and attempting to block the tunnel with clay. It was only a partial success. When they began trying to bail out the Money Pit again they lowered the level a little, but nowhere near enough to make further excavation possible.

      Not really knowing what to try next, they resorted to the old formula of a parallel shaft either to drain the Money Pit or to make it possible to tunnel across to remove the treasure horizontally. Predictably, this re-run of previous failures led to yet another ignominious retreat up yet another flooded shaft.

      This was the ironic end of the Truro’s team’s endeavours: no more capital could be raised just when the explorers were more convinced than ever that a vast treasure lay in the depths of the Money Pit: inaccessible — yet tantalizingly close.

      - 5 -

      The Drain and Tunnel System

      Jotham B. McCully and his Truro men had discovered the amazing drainage system and the artificial beach at Smith’s Cove. It partly answered the question of how water was reaching the Money Pit below the ninety-foot level, but it raised many more questions than it answered.

      Looked at as a problem in basic logistics, there is: the construction of the coffer dam; the removal of the natural sand and clay from that area; the location, transportation, and embedding of the stones and boulders; the planning and laying of the five fan-shaped drains; the digging of at least one — possibly two or three — flood tunnels; and the accurate connection of the tunnel, or tunnels, to the Money Pit at depths greater than ninety feet. By calculating the size of the coffer dam; the area and depth of the artificial beach; the amount of clay which would have had to be removed from the tunnel and dumped elsewhere … and various other factors, a broad idea of the number of man-hours could be estimated.

      Some types of work are totally flexible in their homogeneity and their consequent man-hour implications. For example, some jobs can be done equally well by one man taking eighty hours, by ten men taking eight hours or by 160 men taking half an hour. Other tasks have specific requirements which make team work more effective than individual work. Some work theatres’ physical and spatial limitations make large teams impractical.

      Only one or two men at a time can cut away at the same narrow seam face in certain mines, for example. Other occupations need forty or fifty powerful workers operating simultaneously to raise a heavy mast, or to haul a ship up a beach to be careened. A work-study expert could devise an optimum number of workers for each of the various sub-tasks involved in creating the Money Pit and its ancillary drainage and tunnels systems. Experts might reach marginally different conclusions, but they would be in broad agreement about the size of the work force required to complete the whole job in a reasonable time. Unless we are prepared to consider a project that would stretch into years rather than months, we must envisage a work force of at least thirty people, with the necessary picks, shovels, ropes, pulleys, trolleys, sledges, barrels, and carts to make the job possible.

      At the back of all this physical effort there has to be inspired planning: careful, accurate designing and effective administration and organization. The Oak Island engineers and miners needed food, drink, clothing, and shelter — not just for basic humanitarian reasons, but simply to keep them functioning effectively. The least caring slave exploiter provided the minimal conditions necessary to keep his slaves working. It was enlightened self-interest.

      To try to understand the Oak Island Money Pit mystery, the investigator must attempt to answer these questions in connection with the artificial beach, the drains, the filters and the flood tunnels:

      (a) Who had the engineering and administrative skills to plan and organize all of this?

      (b) Who had the necessary work force available: voluntary, coerced, enslaved, or otherwise?

      (c) Who had the time to keep that workforce on site for several months while the huge task was completed?

      (d) Who had the essential resources and equipment available to feed and supply that substantial work force for the duration of the original Money Pit construction work?

      (e) Who had the necessary motivation to initiate the whole amazing project in the first place, and the stamina to see it through to a satisfactory conclusion?

      (f) Who believed that the contents of the Money Pit, the mysterious “x” which the pit and its flood system was built to protect, was really worth all that time, effort, planning, and organization?