also coming from the south shore of the island, most likely from a location closer to the Money Pit than Smith’s Cove.
The oak splinters, charcoal, and coconut fiber that came out of the boreholes were also saved for examination, but the greatest interest was in the soft stone struck by the drill at 153 feet, eight inches. The drillers believed this might be a kind of early cement and sent it for analysis to A. Boake, Roberts and Company in London. The report back from the London chemists was that this material did indeed seem to be a primitive sort of cement, composed of lime, carbonate, silica, iron, alumina, and magnesium. “From the analysis it is impossible to state definitively, but from the appearance and nature of the samples, we are of the opinion that it is a cement which has been worked by man.”
The jubilation of the Treasure Company’s principals soon gave way to a debate about whether they should issue new stock for sale in order to expand the operations on Oak Island. In the end, the stockholders voted unanimously that there would be no “outside” sale of shares in the company and that the current shareholders should finance any future work and split the proceeds only among themselves when the treasure was finally retrieved.
A new round of work began in October 1897. The plan this time was to sink one more shaft (no. 14) to a depth of between 175 and 200 feet, then drive a tunnel to the Money Pit, in hopes of draining it into the new shaft, which would be octagonal in shape, 13 feet across and 40 feet from the original Pit. Why the Treasure Company imagined they would produce a different result than had been found in previous attempts to do pretty much the same thing is not clear, but what happened was quite predictable: at 112 feet into the new shaft it began to fill with seawater at a rate that made continuing impossible. The company’s response was to attempt yet another shaft (no. 15) about 35 feet southwest of no. 14. The diggers were encouraged when at 105 feet they came to an abandoned tunnel that had been dug by the Halifax Company and found it dry. At 160 feet, though, water began to pour into no. 15 from the Money Pit, where the water level briefly dropped by 14 feet, then rose again, until both it and the new pit were filled to sea level. Pumping was attempted until the plunger rod broke. Water quickly poured into the new shaft from the Money Pit and within a few hours both the tunnel and no. 15 were destroyed.
“Nothing daunted,” as Frederick Blair’s man R. W. Harris would put it, the Treasure Company sank four more shafts (nos. 16, 17, 18, and 19) to depths of between 95 and 144 feet. Each was abandoned when the diggers encountered quicksand, impenetrable boulders, or an overwhelming surge of water.
In the spring of 1898, however, the Treasure Company did perform a series of tests that gave them new and deeply unsettling news about what they were up against. First, they pumped shaft no. 18 full of water to well above tide level in the hope that they would force the muddy water in the new shaft out onto the beach at Smith’s Cove. The muddy water did soon appear on the south shore of the island but not at Smith’s Cove. Three different sections of the shore of the south beach showed evidence of the muddy water escaping from no. 18. To make certain of what this suggested, Welling and Chappell agreed that they should pump the Money Pit full of water above sea level, then drop red dye into it, hoping the dye would drain through the flood tunnel as it receded. As they hoped, the dye began to seep into the bay a short time later; again this was not at Smith’s Cove but rather on the south end of the island in the same places where the muddy water had been seen earlier.
What it meant, almost certainly, was that there was at least one flood tunnel that ran toward the Money Pit from the south shore but not from Smith’s Cove and that there could be as many as three such tunnels. Finding a way to drain the Money Pit had become an exponentially more complex problem. Yet what the Treasure Company chose to do next was return to the Pit itself.
For reasons that were not explained in the journal kept by Blair, the company’s crew spent months on work that essentially doubled the size of the Money Pit. This was done by sinking a new shaft (no. 20) right next to the original Pit. A double wall of cribbing was constructed to divide the two halves of what was otherwise now a shaft measuring 10 feet by 8 feet. The excavation of the new shaft became increasingly difficult as the crew descended into rock-hard clay and was stopped at 113 feet by a surge of seawater that poured in with more force than the pumps could handle. The work continued, though. On April 2 the crew’s foreman, a man named Burrows, told Blair that his men were 3 feet below the flood tunnel from Smith’s Cove and that they were confident they could reach a depth of 126 feet within a couple of weeks and would there locate the tunnel from the south shore. Only a few days later, though, Burrows reported that most of his men had left the island to join fishing crews and that they were running out of coal to run the pumps and the boiler.
Creditors were literally standing at the Treasure Company’s door. The county sheriff showed up on the island in May 1898 with a court order obtained by a Halifax machinery firm that forced the sale of every bit of equipment that could be carried off. Captain Welling had invested $4,000 of his own money and was at risk of losing his home. Putnam was in far worse shape, having put in $20,000; within a few months he had no choice but to declare a bankruptcy from which he never recovered. Blair proposed a new stock issue, based on the discoveries of the Treasure Company, but the other directors and shareholders, many of whom had already borrowed money to make their investments, turned him down. In December 1900, Blair used his own money to buy out all of the other shareholders and took complete control of the Treasure Company, vowing to continue the work on his own.
Blair summarized his position in a draft prospectus:
When we went to work at the Island two years ago, we knew comparatively nothing about the conditions as they existed. We supposed at that time that the Money Pit was not over 120 feet deep and that the treasure was not over 110 feet down. Our work has since proved that the Pit is not less than 180 feet deep, that there are two tunnels instead of one, and that one of them is not less than 160 feet down, and that there is treasure at different points in the Pit, from 126 feet down to 170 feet, without a doubt. We have also found out that the work done by the Halifax Company is a greater hindrance to the procuring of the treasure than is the original work.
We now claim that there is nothing that can prevent us getting the treasure.
All that was really certain was that the treasure hunt on Oak Island that had begun in the eighteenth century would continue into the twentieth.
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