With them, he wrote, “there can be no trouble in pumping out the Money Pit as dry as when the treasure was first placed there.”
In late 1893, one thousand shares in the Oak Island Treasure Company were offered at $5 apiece to undertake the work. Blair indirectly but skillfully exploited the widespread publicity that had attended the reported treasure finds at New Glasgow and St. Martins and the even greater sensation that had been created when a boatswain’s whistle made of ivory or bone and said to be of “an ancient and peculiar design” was found on Oak Island at Smith’s Cove. In a second edition of the Oak Island Treasure Company prospectus he published in early 1894, Blair proclaimed, “We are happy to state that the stock is selling quite rapidly and only a few hundred shares remain to be sold, of the one thousand shares sufficient to complete the work.” It was “worthy of note,” Blair added in this edition of the prospectus, “that with very few exceptions every man whom we have met that has ever worked on Oak Island has expressed his intention of taking stock in this Company.”
It was true that Robert Creelman, Samuel Fraser, and Jefferson McDonald had already joined the company. What Blair didn’t mention in the new prospectus was that a majority of the Nova Scotia shareholders were demanding that the planned work on Oak Island be overseen by a local committee, not by directors sitting in Boston offices. They organized a meeting in Truro on April 4, 1894, at which Creelman, McDonald, and Jothan McCully were among those who spoke. McDonald was unanimously elected to represent the Nova Scotia shareholders, and five other men were named to the committee that would be in charge of the operations on Oak Island. One of them, a lumberman from Amherst named William Chappell, would become almost as important in the story of the island as Blair himself. Adams A. Tupper was appointed by the committee to perform the hands-on supervision of the work, beginning in June 1894.
We know virtually every move the Oak Island Treasure Company made because Frederick Blair was just as scrupulous about recording the new company’s activities as he had been about researching the past work on the island. The Treasure Company crew began with an exploration of the Cave-in Pit. When the boulders were removed to a depth of 18 feet, the new company’s workmen found themselves standing in a shaft almost 8 feet in diameter that was nearly perfectly circular, with well-defined walls that convinced them they were looking at a piece of the original work on Oak Island. The miners among them agreed that the Cave-in Pit was an air shaft, essential for ventilation in a tunnel more than 500 feet long. They did not even need to use picks to clear the shaft, it was reported back to Boston, because while the earth inside was soft, the walls containing it were smooth and solid, made of clay so hard it was nearly impossible to sink a spike into them anyway; the labor of the men who had dug this shaft was unimaginable.
Blair would declare that he believed the Cave-in Pit might be the key to solving the entire problem of Oak Island. Eventually the stones and the loose soil inside the shaft were removed to a depth of 52 feet, and box cribbing was built that stretched from the bottom to several feet above the surface. An auger bored another 16 feet deeper into the Cave-in Pit without encountering any resistance. The next morning, though, water broke into the Cave-in Pit from shaft no. 4, dug by the Truro Company more than forty years earlier. When the cribbing grew unstable, it was agreed that working in the Cave-in Pit had become unsafe for the men.
Blair, Tupper, McDonald, and the committee overseeing the work agreed they would sink yet another shaft (no. 12), this one right next to the “pirate tunnel” (as the members of the company referred to the original tunnel that flooded the Money Pit), going deep enough to undermine the old tunnel from below, then destroy it with dynamite, thereby, they hoped, cutting off the flow of water to the Money Pit. The excavation of shaft no. 12 reached a depth of only 43 feet, though, before water from shaft no. 4 burst into it. They bailed this out, but then a seep of stagnant water, almost black, began to fill the new shaft. This was from the Money Pit, the men agreed, and they bailed that out also. Eventually they were able to dig to a depth of 55 feet, then strike a tunnel from the bottom of no. 12 toward the surface, in hopes of finding the flood tunnel. When they were just 25 feet from the surface, though, the tunnel had not been found.
James McGinnis, the grandson of Daniel McGinnis, claimed that one of the last things the Halifax Company had done was to build a stout platform in the Money Pit, just above the high-water mark, then fill the Pit in with loose soil from the platform to the surface. Henry Sellers also insisted there was such a platform. When the Treasure Company excavated what they believed to be the Money Pit to look for this platform, however, it could not be found. James McGinnis insisted they had looked in the wrong place. Winter was coming on, though, so the Treasure Company adjourned until the following spring.
As I studied the notes of the Treasure Company’s attempt to re-form itself in 1895, the familiar vows of previous searchers recurred yet again in a way that was both poignant and absurd. One A. S. Lowden had been named by the directors in Boston to serve as the new general manager of the company, and after a meeting of the stockholders on April 2, 1895, Lowden laid out a two-part plan that was long on effusion but short on originality in every respect:
ONE: “To make another effort to cut the tunnel off at or near the scene of last year’s operations.” There had to be a gate in the flood tunnel, Lowden wrote, repeating the conclusions of men who had preceded him by almost half a century. He proposed to locate it by tunneling from shaft no. 12 at the 49-foot level toward shaft no. 5.
TWO: “To attack the Money Pit direct, nothing having been done there last year, the exact conditions are not known.”
Not surprisingly, Lowden’s efforts to raise the money to purchase a larger and more expensive pump through a new stock issue failed utterly. The Nova Scotia stockholders met again in Truro on November 26, 1895, and appointed a new board of management that included William Chappell, with Frederick Blair to serve as treasurer. Blair, who had moved his insurance office from Boston to Amherst, Nova Scotia, to be closer to Oak Island, helped prepare a new version of the Treasure Company’s prospectus that helped raise the $2,000 needed to purchase a top-of-the-line steam pump and boiler. This took almost a year, but in the late autumn of 1896 Blair’s Amherst friend Captain John Welling was chosen to mount yet another new effort to get to the bottom of the Money Pit.
Blair received daily reports that tracked the work on Oak Island during the winter of 1896 to 1897. Shaft no. 2 had been doubled in width, while shaft no. 12, now 123 feet deep, was used to collect the water pumped out of no. 2. The failure of this effort is implied in reports to Blair during the spring of 1897 that the work had moved to the excavation of a new shaft (no. 13) 25 feet north of the Cave-in Pit. At a depth of 82 feet, the workmen began to tunnel toward the Cave-in Pit. They got within 4 feet before being driven out by water pouring through the tunnel’s leading wall. Within a couple of weeks, the diggers struck what they at first believed was the Pirate Tunnel. It was 4 feet wide by 6 feet tall, well timbered, and connected to the Cave-in Pit. What they had found, however, turned out to be a tunnel dug by the Halifax Company crew in 1866. After considerable discussion, it was agreed that the Pirate Tunnel was likely not more than 5 feet below and they began to search for it.
This effort ended on March 26, 1897, when a workman named Maynard Kaiser was sent into one of the shafts (probably no. 13) to retrieve a cask that had fallen in. Rather than bring up the empty barrel, Kaiser for some reason chose to fill it with water, then ride atop the bucket as it was raised to the surface. The weight of the water and the man was more than the hoist could bear, and when the rope slipped off the gear both the cask and Kaiser plunged to the bottom of the shaft. He was dead by the time a crew of rescuers found him. Immediately, nearly the entire Treasure Company crew refused to continue working underground. As the April 13, 1897, edition of a Halifax newspaper reported it: “Captain Welling who is in charge of the work of excavating for the Oak Island treasure reports that all his men have quit the job. They became suspicious after the death of poor Kaiser last week and will not continue to dig. One of the men had a dream in which the spirit of Captain Kidd appeared and warned him they would all be dead if they continued the search.”
Welling
