on several occasions. It took all of Dad’s ingenuity to keep it going to their destination.
When they neared Oakland, California, where they were to first appear, they were met by a squadron of motorcycle police. They were so late that Pollack Brothers Circus had arranged for a police escort. With sirens blazing, lights flashing, and the roar of heavy-duty motorcycle engines engulfing them, they sped through the city, straight to the circus grounds, making an entrance worthy of their star status.
Mom told me that although she truly hated the harrowing drive to California and the trek between cities, she revelled in circus life. She easily made friends with other performers and enjoyed many good times with them. But it was a different story for Dad. He had no interest in developing friendships, and he soon tired of the laborious grind of setting up the Globe of Death, doing the shows, tearing down, then driving to the next spot. On the carnival show train he could rest as the train wound its way to the next town. With the circus there was no respite. At the end of their contract, they sent the Globe of Death into retirement.
Circus life must have been fantastic in the days when performers and equipment travelled together on long show trains, but my parents were a few years too late for that. The Globe was a monster to move. Lugging their own equipment around from city to city in their own vehicles took all the romance from it.
And it was at this moment that Oak Island came into their lives.
Enter Oak Island
CHAPTER 3
When Dad, Mom, and the boys returned from travelling with the circus, my husband and I expected Dad to go right back to work for Stelco, but he amazed us with the news that he was going to dig for treasure on Oak Island, and that Mom and the boys were going with him. It sounded utterly fantastic to me.
In 1959 I had never heard of Canada’s famous “Treasure Island.” For more than two hundred years, treasure hunters have come to the island, fortunes have been spent mounting recovery operations, and men have died, all for the belief that deep within Oak Island is locked a treasure so vast that it cannot be calculated. Some claim the treasure consists of gold, silver, and jewels; others believe that sacred documents or religious artifacts lie buried there.
Those beliefs are not inspired by the booty that has made its way to the surface during the years of searching, for no treasure has been recovered from Oak Island except for a few links of gold chain and a scrap of parchment bearing the letters “vi.” What fires the imagination and spurs search after search is undeniable evidence that beneath the surface of Oak Island lies a subterranean network of shafts, pits, tunnels, and caverns that are man-made. When searchers dug into the first shaft in 1804, they found indications that it held a treasure. Ever since, that shaft has been referred to as the Money Pit. Each time anyone digs in or near the Money Pit, sea water surges in with such overwhelming force that it destroys the recovery work, thereby safeguarding the treasure of Oak Island. The elaborate underground system that creates this flood must have taken many men many years to construct. Its existence makes no sense at all unless it was designed to secure something of tremendous value. This incredible engineering feat, designed hundreds of years ago, remains unsurpassed and undefeated. That is what draws an endless procession of treasure hunters to Oak Island despite the lack of treasure found so far. Which of us will be the first to finally break through to that fantastic motherlode?
The discoveries made by each group of searchers act as a lure to the next. And that next group, armed now with even more tantalizing information, sets out confident that they will be the ones to at last unlock the treasure of Oak Island. And so it has gone for more than two centuries. During that time, much knowledge has been gained, but all at tremendous cost.
What kind of discoveries are so compelling that they act as the motivation for search after search when there is no material reward, not even any substantial proof of treasure? That is easier to understand if I take you on an imaginary walking tour of Oak Island. Throughout more than two hundred years of searching, each team of treasure hunters has made well-documented discoveries; as a result, we now have the benefit of considerable hindsight. Using information gained by those searchers, let’s try to imagine Oak Island as it must have been in 1750, after the treasure was in the ground but before any treasure hunters disturbed it.
Oak Island is less than one mile long by half a mile wide and lies only three hundred feet from the small town of Western Shore on the east coast of Nova Scotia. Almost all of the work in searching for treasure has occurred at the south end of the island, furthest away from the mainland.
Imagine that we sail in from the Atlantic Ocean through Mahone Bay and land on the beautiful beach of Smith’s Cove on the eastern coastline of Oak Island, almost at its southern tip. Walking inland on the sandy beach of Smith’s Cove, we find that beyond the beach the land rises fairly steeply ahead of us from sea level up to a height of thirty-two feet. At that height there is a plateau about three hundred feet across. When we walk to the other side of the plateau, we see that the land drops sharply down to sea level in a cove on the western coastline of the island. This is South Shore Cove. By traversing the south end of the island from Smith’s Cove up, across the plateau, and down to South Shore Cove, we have covered all the parts of Oak Island that have fascinated treasure hunters since 1795.
If we stand in the centre of the plateau we see a tree with a block and tackle hanging from a lower limb, and under that a depression in the earth. Digging down, we uncover previously dug earth to a depth of ten feet. Under that we find planking made of tightly fitted logs. Surely treasure chests lie below. But no, under the logs we dig through ten more feet of earth, only to find beneath it another layer of logs. Again and again we uncover ten feet of previously dug earth, then a layer of logs. At ninety feet down we find a large inscribed stone that tells of a fortune buried below.
We realize that we have been digging in a man-made hole or shaft (the Money Pit) and that the layers of logs and earth must have been placed there to prevent settling of the earth so that no signs of excavation would be evident on the surface.
If we were able to remove the inscribed stone and to set a drilling rig on the earth beneath it, our drill might pass through oak chests filled with gold at a depth of 104 feet, we might feel the drill pass through a cavity in the earth that must surely be the entrance to a tunnel at 154 feet, and at a depth of 170 feet we might come to an iron plate that stops us from going further. Measuring from the surface of the plateau, we realize that our Money Pit is at least 170 feet deep, and all but the top 32 feet of it is below sea level.
But we will not be able to remove the inscribed stone and make those discoveries beneath it, for the Money Pit contains an ingenious booby trap. Once we have cleared the pit of earth and logs down to a depth of ninety feet, sea water floods in with a mighty force and fills the pit where we were digging up to sea level. This is because those who were responsible for burying the treasure protected it by constructing a tunnel system that causes water from Smith’s Cove with many pounds of pressure behind it to burst in and obliterate any interference with the Money Pit. If we were to pump out the Money Pit, we would find that sea water continues to rush in at 450 gallons per minute.
To fully understand the magnitude of the sea water inlet tunnel, we need to go back to Smith’s Cove, where we landed. Hidden under the water in the sandy bottom of the cove are five box-style drains. Those five drains are protected by layers of first tightly packed stones, then eel grass, then coconut fibre, then two feet, six inches of beach sand. The drains make their way inland under the beach and eventually converge into a single drain constructed in keystone formation. This travels 525 feet inland from Smith’s Cove through the hard clay of the island, sloping downwards until it connects with the Money Pit at a depth of roughly 110 feet. Along its way, it changes from a single keystone drain to a tunnel four feet in diameter that is kept from collapsing by boulders placed within it. The drains and tunnel ensure
