As the Colonist article described it:
In investigating the drains, they found that they connected with one of larger dimensions, the stones forming which had been prepared with a hammer, and were mechanically laid in such a way that the drain could not collapse. There were a number of tiers of stones strengthening the higher part of the drain, on the top of which was also found a coating of the same sort of grass as that already noticed. Over it came a layer of blue sand, such as before had not been seen on the Island, and over the sand was spread the gravel indigenous to the coast.
Having laid bare the large drain for a short distance into the bank, they found it had been so well made and protected that no earth had sifted through the arch to obstruct water passing through it.
The Truro men attempted to follow the drain into the island, but the surrounding soil became so soft and saturated with water that continuing was “impracticable,” as the Colonist article put it. In the alternative, the men excavated half of the shoreline where the sponge of coconut fiber and eelgrass had been torn away, then calculated that whoever had done this work had removed the original beach to a depth of 5 feet. According to Robert Creelman, who was there with the Truro men, the only significant discovery made during this dig was “a partially burned piece of oak wood,” the purpose of which no one could imagine.
At that point, the labors of the Truro men were interrupted by a fierce storm that rose up on Mahone Bay, creating an unusually high tide that poured over the top of the cofferdam and gradually washed it away, leaving the exposed box drains covered with sand. The company retreated to high ground, where it was agreed the fan of box drains must be the starting point of the tunnel that was flooding the Money Pit, which meant the only possible way forward was to find a way to block the tunnel or locate and close the gate that had to be somewhere within it. A plan was formed to sink a new shaft between the shore and the Money Pit, on the line between the box drains and the Pit. A spot 140 feet from the Pit was selected.
The Truro men had estimated that the flood tunnel would be about 25 feet deep, but they dug to a depth of 75 feet without locating either a tunnel or a flow of water. They moved 12 feet south and dug to a depth of 35 feet before encountering a large boulder. As they worked to pry the boulder loose, a rush of water poured into their shaft, within minutes filling it to the tide level with saltwater. They labored for days driving heavy timbers, called spiles, into the shaft, but this failed to stop the flow of water.
CONFLICTING ACCOUNTS of what took place after the Truro Company’s failure to block the flood system have created some confusion about who and what was responsible for the most cataclysmic event in the history of the Oak Island treasure hunt up to that point: the collapse of the Money Pit. R. V. Harris, long considered the most authoritative chronicler of the early work on the island, attributed this disaster to the Truro Company and placed its occurrence in 1850. A majority of subsequent investigators—and I stand rather tentatively among them—believe it took place eleven years later in 1861, under the auspices of the newly formed Oak Island Association. I should caution the reader that this conclusion is based almost entirely on an article published in the September 30, 1861, edition of the Novascotian newspaper that relied on the eyewitness account of a man identified only as “the digger Patrick.”
What we know with relative certainty is that the Truro Company dug one more shaft close to the Money Pit, down to a depth of 112 feet before the workmen drove a tunnel east toward the Pit and, one more time, had to flee for their lives when water and debris burst through the area where they were digging. At this point, funds exhausted and spirits broken, the men of the Truro Company packed up their gear and went home.
CHAPTER FIVE
In the years between 1850 and 1865, probably the most interesting development in the chronicle of Oak Island was the way word began to spread after the discovery of the artificial beach and the drain system. The story reached first across Nova Scotia, of course, then throughout the rest of Eastern Canada, and eventually across the national border into New England and New York.
The first mention of the treasure hunt on the island to appear in print was not actually in any of the newspaper articles or books mentioned earlier but in an 1857 report to the provincial government of Nova Scotia written by one of its geologists, Henry S. Poole, who was principally interested in the structural formation of Oak Island:
I crossed to Oak Island and observed shale all the way along the main shore, but I could not see any rock in situ on the Island. I went to the spot where people had been engaged for so many years searching for the supposed hidden treasure of Captain Kidd. I found that the original shaft had caved in, and two others had been sunk alongside. One was open and said to be 120 feet deep, and in all that depth no rock had been struck. The excavated matter alongside was composed of sand and boulder rocks and though the pit was some two hundred yards from the shore, the water in the shaft (which I measured to be within thirty-eight feet of the top) rose and fell with the tide, showing a free communication between the sea and the shaft.
We know from Anthony Spedon, whose Rambles among the Blue-Noses was published in 1863, that there was another attempt at excavating the Money Pit about a year after Poole’s visit. “Up to the present moment,” Spedon wrote, “the work [on Oak Island] has been resumed and relinquished a dozen times. Companies have been formed again and again, numerous experiments tried, and no less than fifteen different pits have been dug, at a cost of many thousands of dollars; and yet the mysterious box appears not to have been found.” Given that there were nowhere near fifteen shafts on Oak Island at the time, Spedon’s account has to be considered with some suspicion. He had at first regarded the story of the treasure hunt on Oak Island as “only a fictitious tale, or a chimerical infatuation,” Spedon informed his readers, but then he met with Jothan McCully, who persuaded him to visit the island in the summer of 1862. During that visit, he had confirmed that “the operations [on the island] have been immense,” Spedon reported. “The great obstruction and difficulty has been the inexhaustible quantity of water in the Pit. It appears to come from the sea, but no experiment as yet has been enabled to remove it, or stem the current.” During the summer of 1859, Spedon wrote, a new iteration of the Truro Company “had no less than thirty horses employed at the pumps, but all efforts have proved abortive. . . . In the fall of 1861, at great expense, pumps were erected to be driven by steam power, but scarcely had the works been commenced when the boiler burst, causing operations to be suspended until another season.”
Spedon’s is the only description extant of the 1859 operations on the island and his description of the burst boiler in 1861 was also the first. Strangely, though, Spedon did not mention the most significant thing about that particular catastrophe, which was that it cost the life of the first man to die during the Oak Island treasure hunt. On the Oak Island Memorial that has greeted visitors to the island since 1995, he is listed simply as “Unknown.” The first mention of his death did not come until seven years after it happened, in an account written by E. H. Owen of Lunenburg:
The boiler of one company burst, whereby one man was scalded to death and others injured. The water was pumped out by a large barrel-shaped tube made of thin materials, and reaching to some distance into the Pit. The stream of water was conducted from this into the sea by means of a long wooden trough, which extended down to the shore.
Owen also was the first to suggest an idea that I would find persuasive during my return visit to Oak Island in 2016, almost a century and a half after his account was written: “It appears that in digging the Pit in which [Captain Kidd] deposited his gold, he connected with it a subterraneous passage, leading towards the shore, by which means he might be enabled to recover his gold, without having to excavate the Pit, which he had filled up with such substance as would render it almost impenetrable to the enemy, if discovered.” That there must be what R. V. Harris called a walk-in tunnel somewhere on the island