Oak Island, Nova Scotia is the site of one of the world's greatest archeological enigmas. For the past 200 years, its deadly secret has lured adventurers and explorers, among them Franklin D. Roosevelt, John Wayne, and even Errol Flynn. Long ago, someone came to this island and buried something. Exactly who they were and what they buried remain unknown to this day. Yet over two million dollars have been spent and six lives lost in the search for an answer. To those who have risked their lives exploring the underground tunnels and shafts beneath Oak Island, abundant evidence points to a vast treasure, crown jewels, even an Incan horde. Others say it must be a hoax, and have cynically named the diggings the Money Pit.

The mystery began one day in 1795 when a 16-year-old Nova Scotian lad named Daniel McGinnis rowed his boat out to the island to explore. As he entered a clearing in the forest, he noticed a large depression in the ground just below an old oak tree. It looked as if someone had dug a hole and filled it in again. Lacking tools, McGinnis returned home and enlisted the aid of two friends: John Smith, age 19 and Anthony Vaughan, age 16. The three boys hurried back to the island carrying picks and shovels and visions of pirate treasure. They began digging, and four feet down they found a layer of flagstones not native to the island. Then ten feet down they found a platform of oak logs which were closely set together and embedded in the walls of the shaft. The boys were excited, certain that they had stumbled upon a long-lost buccaneer's trove. But below the oak platform they found only more earth, although it had obviously been dug before, as it was loose compared to the hard clay walls of the pit. At a depth of 20 feet they encountered another oak platform, and yet another at 30 feet. By this time the pit was so deep that the boys could not easily remove the logs. Discouraged by weeks of fruitless digging, the young treasure hunters abandoned the project. But they did not forget.

In 1803 the boys returned to the island with Simeon Lynds, a wealthy business man from the mainland who had secured enough capital from investors to launch a full scale excavation of the pit. The syndicate dug past 30 feet and found more oak platforms, one at every ten feet. Some of the platforms were sealed with putty and coconut fiber. Traces of charcoal were also present. At 90 feet they found a large flat stone with a message engraved upon it, apparently in a cipher. Years later it was translated to mean “Forty feet below two million pounds are buried.”

The workers removed the rock and platform and kept digging. But at this point, the soil in the pit which had been dry for weeks slowly became waterlogged. The workers had to raise one bucket of water for every two buckets of earth. At 98 feet the diggers struck what sounded like another wooden platform. But because the sun was setting, the men decided to quit work for the day and go home.

When the workers returned the next morning, they were profoundly stunned. The pit was completely filled with water. They tried to bail out the water with buckets but it had no effect. The water stayed at the same level. Lynds' group then tried a new approach. They sank a pit 14 feet away from the original Money Pit to a depth of 110 feet and then attempted tunnel toward the treasure. When workers were only two feet from their goal, water burst through the clay walls of the access tunnel. Soon the new pit was filled to the same level as the original. The treasure hunters were heartbroken. They could think of no way to drain the pit and resume excavation. Discouraged, they packed up and left. Never again would searchers on Oak Island be so close to unravelling the mystery.

In 1849 a new syndicate formed to discover what was at the bottom of the pit. They used a pod auger, a horse powered mining drill, to bring core samples to the surface. At 98 feet the auger struck a spruce platform five inches thick, followed by 12 inches of open space. Next followed four inches of oak, and then 22 inches of loose metal in pieces. Then the auger struck eight inches of oak, another 22 inches of metal pieces, another four inches of oak, five inches of spruce, and then seven feet of clay.

When the auger was brought to the surface, it contained three small linked pieces of metal, described by a person present as “resembling an ancient watch chain.” These results were promising, for they seemed to indicate two chests, one atop the other, filled with coins or other loose metal.

While searching through the bore samples, one of the workers saw the foreman, John Pitblado, carefully examine an object and then put it into his pocket. When challenged on the matter, Pitblado refused to reveal what he had found, saying that he would only show the object to all investors at the next board meeting. But he never appeared. Instead he spent several years trying to purchase the east end of Oak Island. Not surprisingly, the owners refused to sell. No one seems to have discovered exactly what Pitblado retrieved from the auger that day in 1849, but it surely must have convinced him that treasure lay deep beneath the island.

The problem of how to get to the chests remained. The syndicate dug another shaft and made another attempt to tunnel toward the treasure. As before, water burst in and filled the shaft to sea level. Frustrated and soaked, the workers finally began to question exactly where all the water was coming from. They noticed that at low tide, water was bubbling up from the sand on the shore at Smith's Cove on the southeastern part of the island. They excavated the beach and at three feet down they made a startling discovery. Beneath the beach was a series of five drains, carefully lined with stone and covered with coconut fiber and eel grass, which acted as a filter to prevent the channels from filling with sand. This ingenious system of drains fed water from the sea into a funnel-shaped sump near the shore which in turn led to a 500 foot long tunnel which entered the Money Pit and filled it at a rate of 600 gallons per minute.

The Pit was an elaborately built trap. The original oak platforms, sealed with putty and coconut fiber, acted like a giant cork and held back the water. Anyone who dug below 90 feet broke the hydraulic seal, causing water to fill the pit. Bailing never worked because the pit was connected directly to the ocean. The design was a masterwork of engineering. To this day no one has been able to stop the flow of water into the pit.

In 1861 a new organization came to the island and began an ambitious bailing project to drain the pit. A total of 63 men and 33 horses worked in shifts to operate the bailing mechanism, which lowered the water to 88 feet. Then another attempt was made to reach the chests by horizontal digging, but the excavation and erosion caused by the constant bailing seriously weakened the as-yet unreached oak platform at 110 feet and it collapsed, carrying the chests farther down into the pit. Apparently there was a large empty space just below the 120 foot level, and the platform above it may have been intentionally rigged to collapse. Steam pumps were then installed to drain the pit more effectively.But as soon as work began, the boiler of one pump burst and scalded a workman to death. People began to suspect that the Money Pit was protected by a long-dead pirate's curse.

In 1864 workers finally located the flood tunnel from Smith's Cove. It entered the Money Pit just below the 110 foot level. The walls were four feet high, two and a half feet wide, and carefully lined with beach stone. But there was still no way to stop the water.

In 1897 new pumps were installed which lowered the water level to 90 feet. A new drilling rig was set up and several core samples were taken in an attempt to locate the treasure. The first drill struck puddled clay (an artificial substance made from sand, clay, and water, similar to putty) and wood at 126 feet. Immediately below this, the drill was stopped by an iron object. A smaller bit was installed, and it pushed past the obstruction, which may have been the remains of the chests which had fallen during the 1861 collapse. At 154 feet the drill struck cement, followed by five inches of oak, two inches of empty space, then what felt to the drillers like four inches of soft metal, possible bars or ingots. It took two hours to force the drill past this layer of metal bars. Next was 32 inches of metal in pieces, similar to the “coins” struck during the 1849 borings, which sifted back into place when the drill was raised. Below this, the drill bit became stuck in a soft metal surface. When raised, the drill bit carried a torn piece of parchment with the letters "v" and "i."

These results indicated a cement vault at 154 feet, containing an oak box, which contained metal bars, coins, and parchment. A second boring passed through cement from 154 to 161 feet, but only scratched the side of the wooden object. Below the cement vault, the drill passed through puddled clay and finally struck an iron plate at 171 feet. The frustration was maddening. Even though the workers knew exactly where the objects were, they were prevented from getting to them by the water. Like so many others had done before them, they gave up work on the pit.

The first half of the twentieth century saw many more attempts to retrieve the treasure, including an expedition by Franklin Roosevelt. Almost all of these focused on solving the problem by digging in the immediate vicinity of the Money Pit. Every group failed, probably because by this time the original location of the Money Pit had become confused and because much of the ground beneath the eastern end of Oak Island was a honeycomb of water-filled tunnels.

In 1955 George Greene, representing a group of oil men from Texas, arrived on the island. He planned to locate the treasure vault by drilling. He sank four holes into the area thought to be the Money Pit. He encountered limestone at 140 feet, then the drill dropped through 40 feet of empty space before striking bedrock at 180 feet. This large empty space was a new discovery. Greene pumped 100,000 gallons of water into the cavern, but the water quickly drained out and he never discovered where it went.

The Money Pit claimed four lives on August 17, 1965. Robert Restall, a stunt driver from Toronto who had worked on the island for six years, his son Bobbie, and two workers were overcome by carbon dioxide fumes which had accumulated in a nearby access pit. They fell into the water and drowned before rescuers could get them out. Restall's remaining family left the island.

In the fall of 1965 American geologist Bob Dunfield tried the brute force approach to conquering the Money Pit. He built a causeway from the mainland to transport a 70-ton crane with a clam bucket on the end of a 90 foot boom. He eventually dug a hole 140 deep and 100 feet wide. He found nothing but the timbers of earlier searchers' shafts, but his digging method was crude in the extreme and he may have destroyed buried artifacts. Dunfield later ran out of money and went home.

In 1970 a new investment group named the Triton Alliance comissioned a complete geological study of the island from Golder Associates of Toronto, a leading geological engineering firm. They spent an entire summer testing soil and bringing up core samples from deep underground. Their report, rumored to have cost over $100,000, contained a detailed a analysis of the geological structure of the island, complete with cross-sectional maps the underground features. The contents of the Golder report have never been made public, but the results have encouraged the Triton group to continue their excavations. They have unearthed many artifacts which date from the time of the original project, such as shoes, scissors, an iron rule, and evidence of an old coffer dam and slipway.

Perhaps the most dramatic discovery occured in 1971 in Borehole 10-X, a shaft sunk north of the original pit. After core samples from below 200 feet brought up fragments of brass, china, and wood cribbing, the hole was enlarged and a television camera was lowered into a cavern which opened up at 212 feet. The camera's searchlight barely cut through the dark, silty water. Dan Blankenship was watching the television monitor when suddenly saw saw what looked like a "human hand, cut off at the wrist" floating in the water. Other workers also witnessed the image. Photographs taken of the monitor seem to show a hand and two or three chests. Before the cavern could be completely explored by divers, Borehole 10-X collapsed inward, crushing the metal cribbing and almost killing Blankenship, who scrambled out of the hole seconds before it imploded.

Today Triton is petitioning the Canadian government for a $12 million loan to continue their excavations. They are building a large concrete-lined shaft 70 feet in diameter and 180 feet deep. Perhaps they will finally unlock the 200 year-old secret of Oak Island.

"It doesn't matter what others believe," says Blankenship, "I'm convinced, and that's enough for me to carry on."

copyright 1997 by William Fuller

Oak Island Links

.Return to Eye of the Zombie