of personality, because within a week he had assembled a new crew that on April 22 discovered yet another tunnel leading into the Money Pit. It was 9 feet square and solidly cribbed, with saltwater percolating into it from beneath. They excavated upward into the Money Pit from there, and at the 30-foot level found the platform built by the Halifax Company, exactly as James McGinnis had described it. After correcting the misalignment of the cribbing (with planks they attached as a skid), the crew began to once again probe deeper into the Pit. At 111 feet they found what they thought must be the flood tunnel. It was a sharply cut rectangular channel 2.5 feet wide that was floored with a layer of beach stones, gravel, and sand, in that order from the bottom up. Saltwater was flowing with great force through the tunnel. The horizontal ceiling was clear evidence this tunnel was man-made.
Yet another celebration was cut short, though, when the valve stem of the Treasure Company’s prized steam pump broke. Within an hour the Money Pit was filled with seawater to tide level, leaving the flood tunnel under almost 50 feet of water.
After calculating the expense of repairing the pump and the cost of keeping it going, the Treasure Company’s directors determined that yet another effort must be made to intercept the Pirate Tunnel near the shore of Smith’s Cove and cut it off. To locate the flood channel, the crew began a series of boreholes about 50 feet from the high tide mark at the cove, following a perpendicular line across the approximate path the Pirate Tunnel must follow. They drilled five such holes, each 5 inches in diameter at varying depths between 80 and 95 feet. Sticks of dynamite were lowered into each of these holes, then ignited. The only apparent results of the subsequent explosions were the spumes of seawater that rose 100 feet and more into the air. An enormous charge of dynamite—more than 160 pounds—was then placed into the center borehole and detonated. There was no gush of water from the hole this time, but the water in both the Money Pit and in the Cave-in Pit boiled and foamed for almost a minute. The men agreed that they were in or next to a tunnel carrying water from the shore to the Money Pit.
There was contention among the crew, though, about what it meant that no saltwater had been found in this middle hole before a depth of 80 feet. Those who insisted the flood channel must now be blocked won the day and they agreed to return to the Money Pit and continue the boring operations there. The results of this decision would include what is arguably the most remarkable discovery in the history of the treasure hunt on Oak Island.
EARLY INTO MY WORK on The Curse of Oak Island I began to be convinced by what I knew about human nature that it was not a treasure of gold and silver that had been buried on the island. What had been done on Oak Island could only have been done by a large workforce, and there was no way I believed a group of even half a dozen people could or would have kept it a secret that a fortune in precious metals was concealed on an island off the coast of Nova Scotia.
There were answers to that, of course. One, obviously, was that whoever had buried the treasure on the island had already returned to retrieve it. That wasn’t a possibility anyone who had hunted for treasure on Oak Island wanted to embrace and, as mentioned earlier, there was a standard response to this suggestion. The fact that we still don’t know who hid whatever is hidden there, more than 250 years (at least) after it was likely buried, might also be explained in other ways. If the people who had done the actual labor were slaves, as many supposed, they might have been silenced by a mass execution immediately after their work was done. Or, if the work was done by soldiers or a ship’s crew, they might have all gone down on the return voyage to wherever they were from, taking their secret with them to the bottom of the ocean.
I conceded these points, then said that what I really believed was that it would be impossible to motivate men to do what had been done on Oak Island simply to hide a treasure of gold, no matter how great it might be. More than that would be required in my opinion. What had been concealed on the island had to be something of incalculable value, something that meant more than money ever could. I think Marty Lagina thought that was more than a little naïve. His brother, Rick, though, was inclined to agree with me.
Only a single piece of tangible evidence has ever been brought up from belowground to support my side of this argument, however, and it is not only of unknown origin, but preposterously tiny to boot. Infinitesimal some might say. It was found right around the first of September in 1897 during the boring operations of the Oak Island Treasure Company in the Money Pit.
A sketch drawn by Frederick Blair in February 1898 shows where the boreholes were drilled in a circular pattern around the rim of the Pit. The water had been pumped out to the 100-foot level, where a new platform was built and the drill mounted. William Chappell was one of those who operated the drill; he would describe in a sworn statement what the bit and the pipe that surrounded it brought back up to the platform. The first hole was bored to a depth of 122 feet before a piece of oak wood was penetrated. At 126 feet, the drill was stopped when it struck iron. A second hole was bored a foot away, and again the drill struck iron and was stopped. Chappell and the others decided to try a smaller drill, just 1.5 inches in diameter. This drill deflected off the iron and went around it, passing first through “puddled clay” then striking “soft stone or cement” at a depth of 153 feet, 8 inches. The drill worked its way through the “soft stone” and then went through 5 inches of solid oak, which proved to the men on the platform that they had not yet reached bedrock.
The drill was raised slowly and carefully. T. Perley Putnam, who was on the platform with Chappell and Captain Welling, had been placed in charge of removing, collecting, cataloguing, and preserving the borings from the drill’s auger bit. He panned out the dirt from the auger in direct sunlight, then meticulously gathered everything that floated in the water. There were oak chips and coconut husks, Putnam reported, plus a small piece of—well, he was not sure what it was, he admitted. On instructions from Welling, Putnam several days later carried the borings he had collected in envelopes to the offices of Dr. A. E. Porter, a physician who was then practicing in Amherst. They had chosen Porter as a consultant, Frederick Blair would explain later, because the doctor owned the most powerful microscope to be found in Nova Scotia at that time.
On September 6, 1897, Porter examined the borings from the Money Pit in the presence of between thirty-five and forty men, including Putnam and Blair. Almost immediately his attention was attracted to the ball of “strange fiber” that Putnam had not been able to identify. It was only about the size of a grain of rice, as Porter would describe it, with some sort of fuzz or short hair on its surface. Using his medical instruments under the magnifier, Porter worked at this ball of fiber for several minutes, until it slowly began to unfold. After another few minutes, the doctor had it flattened out, whereupon he described it as being, to all appearances, a tiny piece of parchment paper with a fragment of writing in black ink that appeared to be parts of either the letters ui or vi or wi.
Blair insisted on an examination by experts in Boston associated with Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. They reported back that the item most certainly was a piece of parchment that had been written on with a quill pen and India ink.
THE DISCOVERY OF THE PARCHMENT FRAGMENT was the real beginning of consideration of the possibility that what was buried on Oak Island might not be chests of gold buried by pirates but rather something of real—perhaps even profound—historical value. In a 1930 interview with the Toronto Telegram, Blair declared that the day the Oak Island Treasure Company found the piece of parchment had provided “more convincing evidence of buried treasure than a few doubloons would be. I am satisfied that either a treasure of immense value or priceless historical documents are in a chest at the bottom of the Pit.”
The 1897 borings in the Money Pit produced a great deal of evidence beyond the parchment. At 171 feet into one borehole, the chisel point that had replaced the auger bit struck solidly against iron. The drillers said they knew it from the sound. They continued to push the drill against this barrier for more than forty minutes and could make no deeper penetration than a quarter-inch. Chappell, Putnam, and Welling then withdrew the drill, pumped the loose material from the hole, and ran a magnet through it, collecting about a thimbleful
