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 seems certain to me, but as Marty Lagina’s brother, Rick, pointed out to me during one of our conversations, “People have been looking for that tunnel a long time, and no one’s ever found it.” I still think it’s there.
A handful of Oak Island investigators have speculated that the walk-in tunnel was found long ago by someone who took full advantage of this hidden entrance to the treasure chamber, then eradicated all trace of it. The name mentioned most often in this regard is Anthony Graves, who assumed ownership of most of Oak Island in 1857. In 1853, John Smith, in the name of what he called “natural love and affection,” had conveyed all the property he owned to his two sons, Thomas E. and Joseph Smith. Shortly after their father’s death four years later, the Smith brothers sold the property to one Henry Stevens, who promptly sold it to Graves. The new owner appeared to have little interest in the treasure hunt. He built his home and barns on the north side of Oak Island, above the shoreline along Joudrey’s Cove (where pieces of the house’s foundation can still be seen) more than 1,500 feet from the Money Pit and lived there until his death in 1887.
Stories that Graves regularly paid for his supplies in Mahone Bay with old Spanish coins are the basis of the claim that he found at least part of the Oak Island treasure, and these have been buttressed by the discoveries of such coins near the spot where Graves’s house once stood, including one coin dated 1598. What undercuts the claims about Graves is that his two daughters clearly did not inherit any significant wealth from their father beyond his land. One of them, whose married name was Sophia Sellers, worked the ground on Oak Island with her husband as farmers who struggled to support their family.
The only involvement Anthony Graves seems to have had with the treasure hunt on the island was the deal he made with a new group from Truro that called itself the Oak Island Association. Graves was to receive one-third of any treasure recovered in exchange for permitting the new company to make yet another attempt to get to the bottom of the Money Pit, but he was due no cash payment.
A number of those who had been part of the Truro Company were members of the Oak Island Association, most notably Jothan McCully and James McNutt. McNutt kept a diary of the Association’s efforts. The new company’s proposal to investors was that with the right equipment and a sufficient workforce it would be able to drain the Money Pit and bring up the treasure. That this was essentially the same claim that had been made by the Truro Company did not dissuade the one hundred people who purchased the first $20 shares of the Oak Island Association that were offered to the public.
Money in hand, the Association in the spring of 1861 barged sixty-three workmen (being paid the then-considerable wage of $18 per month), thirty-three horses, four 70-gallon bailing casks and the most powerful pump to be found in all of Nova Scotia onto Oak Island. The workmen first cleared out the Money Pit and recribbed it to a depth of 88 feet before going to work on a new shaft about 25 feet to the east of the Pit. This shaft (now known as no. 6) was excavated to a depth of 118 feet, before yet another tunnel was driven toward the bottom of the Money Pit, the plan being pretty much the same as the one that had failed for the Truro Company back in 1850: divert the water in the original Pit into a new shaft.
According to a letter written by McCully one year later, the new tunnel “entered the old Money Pit a little below the lower platform, where [we] found the soft clay spoken of in the [1849] boring. The tunnel was unwisely driven through the old pit until it nearly reached the east pipe, when the water started, apparently coming from above the east side.”
The man whom McCully was implicitly accusing of this unwise decision was the Oak Island Association’s superintendent of works, George Mitchell. And while Mitchell’s story does seem to be one of escalating desperation combined with increasingly poor decisions, the man has to be given credit for his relentless effort. What Mitchell ordered his men to do after the 118-foot shaft flooded was set up the big pump next to it while the men and the horses went to work around the clock with the bailing casks, not only attempting to lower the water level in no. 6 but also in the shaft on the west side of the Money Pit (no. 3) and in the original Pit itself. By McCully’s account, the crew and the horses worked nonstop from two o’clock in the morning on Tuesday until late in the afternoon on Thursday and were able to lower the water level to a depth of 82 feet. At that point, the tunnel between shaft no. 3 and the Money Pit became clogged with soft clay that caused the water to begin rising. According to the accounts of McCully and McNutt, the Association crew worked to clear the tunnel until seven o’clock Friday morning, when another massive flow of soft clay out of the Money Pit replaced what they had just spent more than twelve hours hauling to the surface.
