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