Whatever was true about that, the collapse of the Money Pit ended the efforts of the Oak Island Association in the summer of 1861. Yet, remarkably, most of the same men were back on the island in the spring of 1862. George Mitchell had been replaced by one J. B. Leedham as director of operations, but what Leedham did was little more than a duplication of all that had failed during the previous sixty years. He began by ordering the men to sink yet another shaft (no. 7) just west of the Money Pit. At 90 feet, the workmen found tools left behind by the Truro Company and at 100 feet tools that had been abandoned by the Onslow Company, evidence that they were digging through sections of the collapsed Money Pit.
When the new shaft reached a depth of 107 feet and no sign of the flood tunnel had been found, Mitchell ordered his men to dig a new shaft (no. 8) right next to the no. 6 shaft, then dig laterally until they struck the flood tunnel. When this effort, too, failed, Leedham sent his crew to Smith’s Cove, ordering them to seal the “filter bed” beneath the man-made beach with packed clay. That didn’t succeed either, of course. Leedham, whose frantic determination seems to have been a match for Mitchell’s, then ordered the men to dig yet another shaft (no. 9) about 100 feet east of the Money Pit and 20 feet south of where the flood tunnel would be if it was dug on a straight line. When shaft no. 9 had been excavated to a depth of 120 feet, Leedham instructed his men to dig a series of exploratory tunnels to try to locate the flood channel. Given how unstable the ground around the Money Pit must have been by that point, it’s a wonder Leedham found men willing to do such work, but apparently he did.
One of the exploratory tunnels was driven all the way to the Money Pit, which it entered at a depth of 108 feet. According to the Oak Island Association’s records, the workmen were successful in draining the Money Pit to the level of the tunnel. Leedham descended to make an inspection, and in his notes he reported that while the walls on one side of the Pit were rock hard, they were so soft in other places that he could plunge a crowbar into them with relatively little effort.
The Association’s records show that yet another tunnel was dug between the Money Pit and shaft no. 2, the one dug by the Onslow Company in 1805, but that the men found no sign of either the flood tunnel or the treasure chests they were looking for. At that point, operations were suspended while the Association’s members returned to Truro to raise more money. They apparently succeeded, because on August 24, 1863, the Novascotian published a report that the Oak Island Association had resumed operations on the island and that “men and machines are now at work pumping the water from the pits previously sunk, and it is said that they are sanguine that before the lapse of the month they will strike the treasure.”
Sanguinity aside, the Association did perform an astounding series of digs that summer, the most remarkable being a circular tunnel at a depth of 95 feet that went around the entire circumference of the Money Pit. They encountered two of the previous shafts that had been sunk in the vicinity but no sign of the flood system, and yet each time they dug down to a depth below 110 feet, their tunnels filled with seawater.
IN THE SUMMER OF 1864, at a depth of 110 feet, the Oak Island Association finally did find the flood tunnel, according to Samuel Fraser, who described this event in his 1895 letter to friend A. S. Lowden: “As we entered the old place of the treasure we cut off the mouth of the tunnel. As we opened it, water hurled around rocks about twice the size of a man’s head with many smaller, and drove the men back for protection. . . . The [flood] tunnel was found near the top of our tunnel.”
The Association’s crew confirmed that they had in fact found the fabled flood tunnel by dumping cartloads of clay on the man-made beach in and around the box drains; when the water in the Money Pit was muddied just a short time later, the Association’s investors were certain that they had indeed located the tunnel that men had been searching for since the early nineteenth century. Their sense of accomplishment was short-lived, however; every attempt they made at shutting off the flow of water failed, and they could not find the gate that they were certain must be somewhere inside the tunnel.
By the late summer of 1864, its funds exhausted and its investors discouraged, the Oak Island Association was winding down. The constant churn of seawater in the Money Pit was softening the walls of the shaft to the point that more and more of the workmen were refusing to enter it. To reassure their crew, the Association’s members voted to hire a mining engineer to inspect the Pit. When the engineer declared the original shaft “unsafe” and advised that it be condemned, however, the Association accepted defeat and withdrew from the treasure hunt.
At least a couple of the Association’s members insisted that the discovery of the flood tunnel was a victory they could build on, and they refused to give up. The evidence that men had gone to extraordinary—even incredible—lengths to bury something on Oak Island was now simply too overwhelming to doubt. A new treasure-hunting company would be formed, these diehards declared, and this one would find its way to the treasure.
THE DISASTERS WROUGHT by the Oak Island Association ensured that any future treasure hunters would be working on two fronts, not only wrestling with the puzzle of the original engineering project on the island, but also working through the jumble of failed efforts left behind by the searchers who had gone before them. The existence of nine or ten shafts and several dozen tunnels dug all around the Money Pit, combined with the collapse of the Pit in 1861, made further work in that location not only dangerous but also probably futile. In terms of the larger investigation of what had taken place on Oak Island, though, there was at least one positive result: prospective treasure hunters were forced to back up and look at the big picture beyond the drumlin on the east end of the island where the original Pit had been dug.
In March 1866, with the consent of Anthony Graves, the directors of the Oak Island Association assigned their rights on the island to a new company that was being formed in Halifax. It initially called itself the Oak Island Eldorado Company, but eventually became better known as the Halifax Company. Proposing to raise $4,000 in capital to begin operations, the Halifax Company incorporated in May 1866 by offering two hundred shares at $20 apiece. By June, these had been sold on the basis of a “Plan of Operations” that would begin in Smith Cove with the construction of “a substantial wood and clay dam seaward to extend out and beyond the rock work, so as to encompass the whole [cove] within the dam [and] pump out all the water within the area, and so block up the inlet from the sea.” The cost of this work would be no more than £400 (about $2,000 in US currency at the time), promised the new company’s directors, who added that “there cannot be any doubt but this mode of operation must succeed and will lead to the development of the hidden treasure, so long sought for.”
Nearly all of what we know about the operations of the Halifax Company comes from James McNutt, who continued the search with the third enterprise that had employed him on Oak Island during the past sixteen years, and Samuel Fraser, who worked as a foreman for the Halifax consortium. It is from Fraser that we have a description of the cofferdam the company constructed, 12 feet high by 375 feet long off the shoreline of Smith’s Cove, 110 feet below the high-water mark. Fraser does not describe the labor that went into this project, but it had to have been tremendous; nor does he remark on what must have been the company’s devastation when the dam not only failed to stop the flow of water into the Money Pit, but also was fairly rapidly broken apart by tidal surges.
What the Halifax Company did next was both sad and predictable: they returned to the Money Pit. One more time, the Pit was cleared out, this time to a depth of 108 feet, 10 feet below the oak platform that had been struck by the Onslow Company in 1805. That platform, though, was gone, having fallen in the 1861 collapse. There were various speculations about where the platform—and the supposed treasure that had rested on it—were now. It was generally agreed that the Money Pit contained a cavity that went to a depth of perhaps 155 feet (Fraser insisted that this was how deep the original excavation had gone) and that the treasure could have dropped all the way to the bottom or into one of the tunnels to the Pit dug by various search groups. Believing that the treasure would have fallen in the direction of the tunnel that caused the Pit’s collapse, the Halifax group dug into the south side of the Money Pit. Once again, though, the water in the Pit stopped their progress. In a letter written in 1898 by a man from Pictou, Nova Scotia, there is a description from the worker (“Mr. Robinson”) who was at