government surveyor who had first laid out the township of Onslow in 1780 and now served as the justice of the peace and town clerk there. Once Archibald had agreed to accept a position as director of operations for what was now being called the Onslow Company, he recruited his nephew Captain David Archibald, whose brother was about to become the speaker of the assembly in Nova Scotia and later would serve as attorney general of the province. Also added to the roster of investors was Thomas Harris, the sheriff of Pictou County. That men of such standing in their communities were willing to invest their time, their money, and their reputations in the Onslow Company says something about how convinced they were that a treasure of enormous value had been buried on Oak Island. And what had convinced them, clearly, was what they saw when the Money Pit was reopened. What they found when they dug deeper, though, is truly extraordinary, so extraordinary that it has driven men to follow after them for more than two centuries so far.
IN JUNE 1804, the company’s investors set sail from Onslow aboard a sloop loaded with tools and provisions, following a southwesterly course along the twisting shoreline that took them past the mouth of the Bay of Fundy. A passage of some 350 miles ended when the sloop anchored off Oak Island in what was then known as Smuggler’s Cove (today it is called Smith’s Cove). They were met onshore by McGinnis, Smith, and Vaughan, along with a crew of local workmen who were mostly farmers looking to earn wages and hoping for a small piece of the Oak Island treasure, if there was one. After unloading their cargo and setting up a camp, the entire group went to inspect the Money Pit. They found that the Pit had caved in on top and formed “the shape of a sugar loaf resting on its apex,” as R. V. Harris paraphrased one early account, and that an enormous pile of mud had settled to the level of the log platform 20 feet deep. After their crew had cleared away the debris and mud, Lynds and his partners were delighted, according to the early accounts based on interviews with the members of the Onslow Company, to find that the sticks McGinnis, Smith, and Vaughan had driven into the ground around the Money Pit back in 1795 (if that was the actual year) were still in place, meaning that no one had disturbed the spot. Thus encouraged, the men began to work the ground with picks, shovels, and crowbars, building a wooden box cribbing that protected them from a collapse by reinforcing the surrounding walls as they descended, employing the same rope-and-bucket method McGinnis, Smith, and Vaughan had used years before to empty the pit, only with more rope, several buckets, and the best block-and-tackle system money could buy.
After removing the log platform that had stopped McGinnis and his two friends at 20 feet, the Onslow Company crew continued digging. At 30 feet, their shovels clanged against wood. Just like the three young men who had struck the tier of oak logs at 20 feet years before them, the workmen were certain that they had hit the top of a treasure chest. But it was another platform of oak logs, their rotting ends embedded in the sides of the shaft just as the tiers of logs at 10 feet and 20 feet had been. The Onslow Company crew members showed one another the pick marks in the hard clay walls of the surrounding shaft and were certain these had been made by the men who first dug it out. The workmen and their employers asked one another what could compel men to dig deeper than 30 feet to bury a treasure. Only a cache of incredible riches could possibly explain it.
They were asking the same question after they struck another log platform at 40 feet, this one covered with a thick layer of charcoal. The Onslow Company’s investors agreed that the only reasonable explanation for the charcoal was that there had been a smithy set up on this platform to sharpen the tools of the men who had opened the Pit originally.
There was another platform at 50 feet. According to the McNutt manuscript, this tier of logs was covered with a layer of smooth beach stones with “figures and letters” cut into them. At 60 feet, according to McNutt, the platform of logs was spread with a mat of manila grass and “the rind of coconut.” Well aware that coconut fiber had been commonly used as dunnage to protect cargo that had originated in the Caribbean, this find fed the idea that what had been hidden so deep underground must be a fantastic treasure of Spanish gold captured by pirates in the seventeenth century. There was yet another platform of logs at 70 feet, this one covered with a blue-tinted clay “putty” (later used to seal the windows of twenty buildings on the mainland).
According to the McNutt manuscript, what became known as the “inscribed stone” was found at 80 feet. Adams A. Tupper, a mining engineer who had joined the treasure hunt more than a decade before McNutt did, said that the stone had been found at 90 feet. (It should be mentioned that there are also accounts that suggest the log platforms were not so exactly spaced, which is to say they were only more or less, not exactly, 10 feet apart.)
What McNutt and Tupper agreed on was that the slab was unmarked on its upper side when the Onslow crew first uncovered it. Only when they flipped the stone over did the workers discover that some sort of message had been etched into it.
Descriptions of those carvings (which may have been more like scratchings) and of the stone itself have varied in a number of respects. “Three feet long and one-foot square, with figures and letters cut into it,” was how McNutt described the slab, “and being freestone, being different than any on that coast.” However, in his Transcript article (reprinted in the Halifax Sun and Advisor), McCully had described “a stone cut square, two feet long and about a foot thick, with several characters cut on it.”
Judge DesBrisay’s account has to be given weight because it was based mainly on what he was told by the daughter of the man who took possession of the stone and kept it on display in his home for more than forty years. What the Onslow crew had found (“farther down” than the charcoal and putty, in DesBrisay’s telling) was “a flagstone about two feet long and one wide, with a number of rudely cut letters and figures upon it,” according to the judge’s History of the County of Lunenburg. “They were in hope that this inscription would throw some valuable light on their search, but unfortunately they could not decipher it, as it was too badly cut, or did not appear in their own vernacular.”
Anthony Vaughan, who told Creelman the stone was found at 90 feet, said it was 3 feet long and 16 inches wide. There were no letters carved into the stone, the way Vaughan told it, just strange “figures.”
One eyewitness described the stone as yellow-tinged Swedish granite. Another thought it was porphyry and said it was olive colored.
What all accounts agree on is that after the stone was lifted from its place and removed from the Pit, a slow seep of water began to soften the dirt beneath the workmen’s feet. This quickly became a problem. According to the Colonist article: “At 93 feet [the water seepage] increased and they had to take out one tub of water for two of earth. Still they had no idea that anything was wrong.” It was dusk by then and, as they did each evening, the men finished their workday by probing the bottom of the Pit with a long crowbar. This time, according to the Colonist account, “they struck a hard impenetrable substance bound by the sides of the pit. Some supposed it was wood, and others called it a chest. They left for the night to resume operations in the morning, when they fully expected to solve the mystery.”
What the men found when they reported for work the next day was that the Pit had filled with water to the 65-foot level. According to all of the early accounts, the Onslow crew bailed that entire day and into the night, but could not lower the water level by more than a few inches. Frustrated and baffled, they sat among the heaps of dirt and debris that surrounded the rim of the shaft, wondering what to do next. The farmers among the workmen told Colonel Archibald that haying season was upon them and that they would have to leave the island to return home in time to cut, dry, and store their grass. Archibald ordered a temporary suspension of work while he and the other investors came up with a new plan of attack.
In October, the Onslow Company sent “a committee” to Hants County to meet with a “Mr. Mosher” who was reputed to be the best authority in the entire province on how to remove water from a shaft. Mosher was paid the princely sum of £80 to rig a special pump that was transported to Oak Island and lowered into the Money Pit. There, in a preview of things to come, the pump promptly burst. By then, the weather was growing
