the west and the east of the Money Pit’s center. Mud and stone was all the pot auger brought up from the first two holes.
McCully’s account in the Transcript described what happened when the drill was sent down a third time:
The platform was struck at 98 feet, just as the old diggers [of the Onslow Company] had found it, when sounding with the iron bar. After going through the platform, which was five inches thick, and proved to be spruce, the auger dropped 12 inches, and then went through four inches of oak; then it went through 22 inches of metal in pieces; but the auger failed to bring up anything in the nature of treasure, except three links resembling the links of an ancient watch chain. It then went through eight inches of oak, which was thought to be the bottom of the first box and the top of the next; then 22 inches of metal, the same as before; then four inches of oak and six inches of spruce, then into clay seven feet without striking anything.
Those “links” have become gold in subsequent tellings, and they may have been, but McCully did not describe them so in his 1862 article. It was “the metal in pieces” that interested the Truro Company’s investors, several of whom were present, including Dr. Lynds and the company’s largest shareholder, John Gammel.
McCully and Pitblado moved the auger a few feet away to bore a fourth hole. The drill again struck the spruce platform at 98 feet, and as McCully told it:
Passing through this, the auger fell about 18 inches and came in contact with (as supposed) the side of a cask. The flat chisel revolving close to the side of the cask gave it a jerky and irregular motion. On withdrawing the auger, several splinters of oak (believed to be from the bilge of a cask) such as might come from the side of an oak stave, a piece of a hoop made of birch and a small quantity of a brown fibrous substance, closely resembling the husk of a coconut, were brought up.
Pitblado had instructed the men operating the pot auger to remove whatever was brought up on the chisel as carefully as possible, so that it might be examined under a microscope. Pitblado and McCully then directed the men to drill a fifth and final hole a few feet from the fourth. When the auger was brought up that last time, according to Gammel, he saw Pitblado wait until he thought no one was watching him to quickly pinch something from the chisel, wash it clean, then examine it closely before putting it into his pants pocket. He asked Pitblado to show him what he had removed from the auger, but the man refused, Gammel said, insisting that he would show it to all of the investors at the next meeting of the company’s directors.
The only person Pitblado is known to have showed what he pulled from the auger that day, though, is one Charles Dickson Archibald, who was the manager of the Arcadian Iron Works in Londonderry, Nova Scotia. And all we really know is that Archibald then made a determined effort to purchase the eastern part of Oak Island from John Smith, offering considerably more than the property was worth and raising the offer when Smith refused. Smith would not sell, though. Archibald never made any known statement about what he had seen that had made him want so desperately to purchase the Smith properties on Oak Island, and he would be recalled by his company to England by the time McCully thought to seek him out and ask. Pitblado disappeared from the Mahone Bay area the same night he had pocketed whatever it was from the pot auger. According to that 1951 Nova Scotia Bureau of Information report, the “local legend” was that Pitblado had removed “a jewel” from the auger’s blade. All that can be said for certain is that Pitblado never returned to Oak Island after that day and that the speculation about what he took with him has been endless. But my reading of the record is that it has never been more than that, speculation.
THOUGH THEY COULDN’T HAVE KNOWN IT at the time, in the spring of 1850 the Truro Company established a pattern of failure that was to be repeated by one group after another over the next century and a half. Each new search team would prepare for success in the belief that a new strategy combined with more advanced machinery would solve the puzzle of Oak Island. And each time they were defeated, the mess they left behind complicated the problem for the next group of treasure hunters.
The equipment the Truro Company barged out to Oak Island in 1850 included a pair of “two-horse gins,” cast-iron engines powered by workhorses, which could be used for everything from milling grain to pumping water. It was the latter capacity that the treasure hunters of 1850 intended to employ. First, though, they sank a new shaft, the third on the drumlin where the Money Pit was located, digging through red clay so unyielding that at times it seemed they were trying to shovel through bricks. The density of that ground was in and of itself convincing evidence to the Truro Company that whatever channel was delivering water to the Money Pit had to be man-made; water was not going to find a natural course through clay that impenetrable.
The intent of this exhausting excavation was to create a new shaft (no. 3) they would fill with the water diverted from the Money Pit. They thought they could drain the Pit. Shaft no. 3 stayed dry down to a depth of 109 feet, at which point the Truro Company crew drove a tunnel toward the Money Pit. The result was the same as that achieved by the Onslow Company forty-six years earlier: as the diggers neared the Pit, the end of the tunnel collapsed under a surge of water that nearly drowned the men inside. The two-horse gins were put to work in both the new shaft and in the Money Pit, and the crew worked in bailing teams that kept at it twenty-fours a day for a solid week. The lowest water level they ever managed to attain in the Money Pit was 80 feet.
The Truro Company’s defeat, though, led them to discoveries that have become a significant part of the Oak Island story. The first of these came when the crew realized that both the Money Pit and the new shaft had filled with saltwater, indicating that it had come from the bay. This meant that the best hope for success was to interrupt the flow of water at its source—or at least somewhere between its source and its point of entry into the Pit. Another reason it couldn’t be a natural watercourse, the Truro Company’s principals reasoned, was that if the water were already flowing underground where the Money Pit had been dug, it would have been impossible to excavate the Pit in the first place. So they had to be dealing with an artificial channel created by drawing from an inlet on the shoreline of the island. And there had to be gates somewhere along its path to permit the original depositors to stop the water and retrieve their treasure.
For the Truro Company, this was a staggering realization. It meant that the works on Oak Island were not only more sophisticated than anything they had ever seen, but also more than anything they had ever heard about. Exploring what had been done on the island and then figuring out a way to solve the problems this work had created would be a fantastically complex engineering problem, and McCully was only one of a number who were excited about taking it on. The company began what it knew would be a mammoth project by leaving the Money Pit to investigate the south shore of the island, focusing first on Smith’s Cove, which seemed by its proximity the most likely place for an artificial channel of seawater to have been started.
They began with an examination of the Smith Cove’s beach, situated about 520 feet from the Money Pit, with obvious advantages for channeling water with a tunnel. The company noticed almost immediately that all of the large stones had been removed from a considerable expanse of the beach. Then, when high tide began to ebb, the men observed that this section of the beach “gulched forth water like a sponge being squeezed,” as McCully described it. The men stared at the water bubbling up through the surface and realized this couldn’t be happening naturally. They began to shovel away the sand and stones. At a depth of 3 feet the Truro crew found a 2-inch-thick layer of a brown stringy material they believed (correctly) to be coconut fiber. Below that was a thicker layer of decayed eelgrass or kelp (there was and still is some debate which). Tons of coconut fiber and (most likely) eelgrass were pulled away and piled in heaps all along the shoreline until the workers revealed a compact and remarkably clean mass of beach rocks, protected from the sand and gravel on the surface of the beach by the 6-inch-thick mat of coconut fiber and eelgrass. The men of the Truro Company could only guess how many tons of sand and clay had been removed from the surface of the beach to make room for both the filter and the rocks beneath, but it had to be a hundred thousand pounds at least. The work that had gone into this was stupefying to contemplate, because what had been created was a giant insulating sponge spread out for a length of 145 feet along the shoreline between the high and low tide marks.
When they recovered from their astonishment, the Truro