The Lost Treasure of the Knights Templar (2 page)

Just what is being protected? To be certain, it is massive wealth—in the form of gold and silver, sacred artifacts, and the crown jewels pledged to the first banking organization in Europe as collateral for loans. In addition, there are documents—some from ancient texts that hold secrets protected for more than a thousand years (genealogies of the family of Jesus—from David to Jesus to “heirs” of Jesus). These secrets were perceived both then, when they were concealed, and now as possibly threatening to the Catholic Church. What are these secrets and what implications do they have for us all? To find out we must head into uncharted territory.

The sea charts of ancient mariners often included small notes in the borders to indicate where the territory was unknown. Here the known truths had not been uncovered. No clues were offered to aid the explorer as to the possibility of lands lying ahead or a sheer drop off the edge of the Earth. Instead, there were depictions of sea serpents and mermaids and the dire warning
There Be Monsters Here.

Chapter 1

T
HE
M
YSTERY OF
O
AK
I
SLAND

N
ova Scotia in the late eighteenth century offered few diversions. One of them was hunting for buried treasure, since the island was a known haunt of buccaneers and privateers. On a summer afternoon in 1795, three young men decided to go digging for pirate treasure.
¹
One of them, Daniel McGinnis, had been wandering through the woods of Oak Island and noticed a spot that gave the appearance of having recently been cleared. Red clover and other plants foreign to the island were growing in the cleared area. There was also a ship’s tackle hanging from a sawed-off tree branch, fifteen feet above the ground. The tree itself had strange markings on it.

The real tip-off was a depression McGinnis saw in the ground. It appeared that someone might have buried something there. Sixteen-year-old Daniel had no trouble persuading two of his friends to return to the uninhabited island with him. This may not have been the first time the boys had hoped and labored to find a chest full of gold, but this particular day would end differently from the others. With shovels and pickaxes, Daniel McGinnis, teenager Anthony Vaughn, and John Smith, aged twenty, went to work. The excavation was started in the center of the depression, and they found the ground softer than they had expected.

Two feet down they reached a layer of carefully laid flagstones that were not indigenous to the island. (Later it was decided that they came from Golden River on the mainland of Nova Scotia, two miles away.) When they removed the stones they realized they were digging into a previously dug shaft. Ten feet down into the shaft they came upon a platform constructed of oak logs. The logs were rotted and therefore easy to remove. These fitted logs were embedded into the sides of the thirteen-foot-wide shaft, and their poor condition gave them the appearance of having been there for a long time. The clay walls of the shaft had preserved markings that indicated previous digging. The young men removed the logs and continued digging. At twenty feet a second platform of oak logs impeded their progress but fortified their belief that something very valuable was buried further down in the shaft.

After removing the second platform, they continued working, only to reach another platform at the thirty-foot level. At this point they realized additional help was needed, both in terms of manpower and machinery. Persuading hardworking farmers to abandon their chores was difficult, and little work was done on the shaft for years. Another obstacle to enlisting workers for the project was that few of them would come to the island in the first place. The 128-acre island was just one of 350 islands in Mahone Bay, but it had a reputation. Years before, strange lights had been seen on the island at night, and a few of the mainlanders had rowed out to investigate. It is said that they were never heard from again. The island was haunted.

Without the support they needed, the young treasure hunters temporarily gave up on further excavation. Before the year was over, John Smith bought property on the island, and when he married, he moved there to farm it. Daniel McGinnis also farmed part of the island. When John’s wife was pregnant with their first child, they went to the mainland to visit the family doctor. Smith told Dr. Simeon Lynds, a
relative of his fellow treasure hunter Anthony Vaughn, about the discovery, and Dr. Lynds became interested—so much so that he decided to invest money into excavating the shaft.

In 1801 Dr. Lynds formed the first syndicate that tried to conquer the Money Pit.
²
He raised the necessary capital from thirty other prominent Nova Scotians and went to work. Using ropes and pulleys, workers first removed the mud that had settled into the shaft after the teenagers’ aborted attempt, and then dug further. Again they encountered oak platforms at ten-foot intervals. The Onslow Syndicate, so named for Dr. Lynd’s hometown, also came upon layers of charcoal, putty, and a brown fibrous material, which was enough to keep everyone involved excited. Apparently someone had taken a lot of trouble to hide what must be a very important treasure.

At ninety feet, just over the expected oaken platform, they encountered another flagstone with an inscription. The flagstone’s symbols were not immediately deciphered. When they were shown to a professor of languages at a nearby Halifax college, he said that the inscription told of treasure buried another “forty feet below.”
³
The code was a very common one, also used by Edgar Allan Poe in his story “The Gold Bug,” in which a simple cipher is used in a search for buried treasure. It was cracked by substituting the most frequently used symbol for the most commonly used letter in the English language, an
E.
The inscribed stone was made into a part of John Smith’s fireplace and later found its way to a bookstore in Halifax, where another syndicate used it to raise money. It disappeared when the store closed.

Ninety-three feet below the surface, the treasure seekers discovered a new problem. After one more platform, they found that for every bucket of earth being raised, they had to bail out two buckets of water. Still their optimism held. It was late in the day, and they went home excited that the next day they surely would be breaking into the treasure trove. When they returned the next day they found that water had seeped in and flooded the shaft. Bailing took the place of digging, but water kept filling into the ninety-foot hole. Efforts were made to bail out the shaft with a pump, to no avail. The pump burst, and work was grudgingly discontinued. The flooding tunnel was a booby trap that would never
cease defeating the treasure seekers. Had the inscription been a ruse? The excavators found no treasure, and forty feet below might well have been forty miles below because of the flooding.

The next year the syndicate dug the second of the many shafts that would eventually be sunk. They reached one 110 feet and then started to tunnel over to the first shaft. But again, water flooded the new tunnel and, in turn, the new shaft. Patience and funds were quickly exhausted. Work would not resume again for forty years, although the “treasure” was not forgotten. In 1845 a new company was formed to reach the treasure in the pit. This second major venture included another Dr. Lynd, of Truro, Nova Scotia, and a mining engineer, James Pitbaldo. Anthony Vaughn and John Smith were nearing seventy years of age by the time the digging was started, but the pit had lost none of its appeal for them, and both assisted.

It took twelve days to reach sixty-eight feet again (both of the other pits had since caved in), and they dug until a Saturday. On Sunday, before church, the pit was inspected, there was no water. After church, however, they found that the pit was again flooded. The syndicate had prepared for this contingency, which had caused the previous expeditions to fail. A platform was erected, and a horse-driven drill put in place. At ninety-eight feet the drill went through a platform that was found to be made of five-inch-thick spruce. Another foot down was a platform of oak. Surely they had reached the treasure. Then, after going through twenty-two inches of metal, they discovered still another oak platform.

The drillers thought they had pierced a box and were into a second box. After another level of spruce, they reached clay. A second boring reached the oak “box,” which they now believed was the treasure trove, but the drill was bringing up only the brown fibrous material that had been encountered previously. The fiber later turned out to be coconut husks. Nothing besides the metal fragments that had already been brought up by the drill was found. According to Jotham McCully who was in charge of the drilling, these fragments resembled “links of watch chain,” and the drillers attempted to recover as much of the material as possible.
⁴
During this operation there was a disturbance among the
workers who were sorting through the salvaged material. One noticed the foreman, James Pitbaldo, pocket something he would not show the others. Although he said that he would not reveal it until the next meeting of the syndicate directors, he didn’t reveal it even then. He did try, through another businessman, Charles Archibald, of Acadia Iron Works, to buy the pit from the other directors, who refused to sell. The foreman was killed shortly after in another mining accident, taking his secret discovery to his grave.

In 1850 the syndicate drilled still another shaft to 109 feet and made another attempt to tunnel to the original shaft. This new tunnel led the drillers to a significant discovery. The tunnel was being flooded by seawater. In fact, by watching the water in the pit and the water offshore, they discovered that the water level in the pit was rising and falling with the tides of the bay. The only conclusion they could draw was that there was a natural channel from the nearby beach that was the cause of the flooding. The beach, Smith’s Cove as it is called, was searched for signs of such a channel, and a spot where water rushed out from the sand was discovered. Surrounding this channel was more of the brown fibrous material.
⁵
Under one layer was eelgrass, and under the eelgrass they found a mass of beach rock, free of sand. To the disbelief of all, the “natural” channel was confirmed to be artificial.

The syndicate then built a coffer dam to reduce the water that flowed into the cove, allowing further investigation. The effort proved that this was truly the channel that flowed into the pit. Weeks of work went into building the stone and clay dam, and the men found that a total of five drains had been constructed into what now appeared to be an artificial beach. Even today, this would be considered a complex undertaking. The builders had dug a five-hundred-foot tunnel that was capable of channeling six hundred gallons of ocean water per minute, complete with a filter system that prevented the basins from becoming clogged after years or centuries of operation. In addition, they further disguised their work with an artificial beach that would protect the workings of this elaborate flooding system. In 1850 the idea was nothing short of remarkable and served as further proof that something very important was concealed under Oak Island.

The men dismantled the five drains. Each of these five drains was spaced far apart from the others at their closest point to the ocean, but they converged closer to the shore. Each was constructed of twin rows of rock, eight inches apart, covered with stone slabs. Then more bad luck hit the expedition. An Atlantic storm destroyed the dam that had been built to hold back the waters. Because it was too late in the year to reconstruct it, the men decided to sink still another shaft between the shore and the pit, which would absorb any water from the destroyed drain system. After one shaft missed, a second was dug, which also became flooded. Just south of the original shaft, they dug out what would be the fourth shaft within fifty feet and were faced with another setback. The new shaft collapsed into a cave and then was flooded. Fortunately, it happened during a break in work, and no one was killed. The men refused to enter the shafts, however, and all work was suspended.

By 1859 the syndicate again had raised the funds needed to resume work. Sixty-three men were hired, more shafts were dug, manual pumps were replaced by steam pumps. Still the Money Pit held its own against then-modern technology. A boiler explosion killed one of the men, and the work stopped again. The land surrounding the Money Pit was owned by John Smith and several others, but after the failure of what came to be called the Truro Syndicate, most of Oak Island was sold to Anthony Graves. Graves was a local farmer who never took part in the excavations, although he leased the land to the treasure hunters. A new syndicate was formed to lease the land and try to drill again, but this syndicate failed to raise the necessary money.