The Lost Treasure of the Knights Templar (4 page)

Chapter 2

T
HEORIES AND
S
USPECTS:
W
HO
D
UG THE
M
ONEY
P
IT AND
W
HAT
L
IES
B
ELOW

T
he Money Pit has defied engineers and excavators for more than two hundred years, and so has the mystery of just who is responsible for its existence. A complete list of suspects might include any individual or group of people that are known to have inhabited the area. A people referred to by anthropologists as Paleo-Indians, or the Red-paint people, were in the Canadian Maritime Provinces from as early as 8500
B.C.
While little is known about them, it is safe to say that they were not aware of advanced hydraulics.

As early as
A.D.
700 and as late as
A.D.
1100, a more advanced culture inhabited the Atlantic coasts. They are generally referred to as the Micmac peoples, a name derived from their term
nikmaq,
meaning “my kin friends.”
¹
The Micmac were nomadic, dividing their year between wintering inland and summering along the Atlantic coast. They became skilled at fishing the coastal Atlantic and by the eighteenth century had developed a writing system.
²
Again, we can eliminate this group from the suspect
list because they lacked both the motive and the means to construct an underground vault as complex as the Money Pit.

Conventional histories of North America often start with the state-sponsored explorations of the New World. This would leave us with a narrow time frame that would begin in 1497, when the first European explorer reached Canada, and end sometime before 1795, when the area became populated and the pit was discovered. This first explorer was John Cabot, an Italian sailing under the English flag five years after Columbus reached the Caribbean. Cabot is given credit as the first European to have reached the Atlantic coast of Canada. He made landfall on June 24, 1497, which was Saint John the Baptist’s feast day. He established no colonies but may have opened up the coast of Newfoundland and Labrador for European fishermen. In all likelihood, they had been fishing the rich banks well before Columbus, although they knew the area as a fishing ground and not as a “New World” or the sought-after passage to Cathay for which Columbus had been searching.
³

Five years after Cabot’s venture, a Portuguese expedition to America took place. Pedro de Barcelos, a landowner from the Azores, led the expedition. On board was a friend and fellow Azorean, João Fernandes.
⁴
Because Fernandes’s time away from the sea was spent farming, his nickname was
lavrador,
meaning “farmer” in Portuguese. Although the exact landfall of this expedition is debated, the Canadian province of Labrador received its name from the nickname of João Fernandes, a farmer on expedition.

The Portuguese, too, were disappointed in finding only icy waters and no exotic trading ports of the Orient. Also sailing under the flag of Portugal was Gaspar Corte Real.
⁵
He may have reached Newfoundland, but records of his journey are sparse and inexact. Both the date and the length of time of his expedition are debated. On his second voyage his entire expedition was lost. A brother, Miguel, set sail to find him but was also lost. If the rich fishing banks off Newfoundland and Labrador had ever been a secret, they were no longer. Bretons, Basques, French, and English fishing ships did their own unrecorded exploration. Fishermen did not keep logs, but they did leave behind certain clues. Some historians claim the Portuguese were there much earlier than the accepted
dates and point to the native North American name for the Grand Banks—
baccaloes,
which is the Portuguese word meaning “cod fish.”
⁶

By the time another Italian, Giovanni Verrazano, sailing under the French flag, reached the New World, fishing fleets and fishing shacks could be seen along the rivers and bays the Europeans would “discover.” His expedition took place in 1524 and lasted for only a few short months. Verrazano received credit for giving Nova Scotia one of its earliest names, which he is said to have put on the maps as “Arcadia.”
⁷
This name will feature prominently in the tale of just how an ancient treasure reached the New World and the Money Pit. While its modern meaning holds little of interest to the uninitiated, for a certain few, the theme of Arcadia and the transmission of an underground stream of knowledge passed through generations is of paramount importance.

Giovanni Verrazano, too, might have been part of an elite group, as were several of the important world explorers. He lived in a world still dominated by the terrifying hold that the Inquisition exerted. New ideas, including the possibility of undiscovered lands, were suspect and could earn a man of science prison and torture as easily as a reward. Explorers, and men of science, had a need to attach themselves to the several societies (which we will meet later) that are known to have existed at this time and that allowed a certain degree of insurance against persecution. Verrazano’s family crest included a six-pointed star, which some believe indicated he was not the Christian he was purported to be. Religion played an important role during the Inquisition, and a non-Catholic would be disqualified from leading a mission of such importance. The religion of Columbus is still a matter of nagging debate.
⁸

Just where did Verrazano place the name Arcadia? Reports of the early explorers and mapmakers do not always agree. One mapmaker shows Arcadia as being north of the Hudson River. Others say it was the Outer Banks of North Carolina and correctly state that Verrazano derived the name from a very popular piece of literature by Jacobo Sannazaro, set in Greece.
⁹
Sannazaro’s
Arcadia
had been printed fifteen separate times before Verrazano reached America. Because Verrazano correctly noted the latitude, Morison for one believes Maine and the Canadian Maritimes are Arcadia.
¹⁰
Arcadia, as defined by Sannazaro, was the idyllic world, a Garden of Eden lost to the modern (medieval) world. It was life in a pure state, where thought and deed were free to wander away from the threat of official punishment by church and state. The English philosopher Sir Francis Bacon and others believed this world could exist only outside Europe and carried the theme further. They believed in the creation of a new country in which certain freedoms would be guaranteed and all religions would be tolerated. Bacon described this country in his
New Atlantis.
Interestingly enough, the French name for Nova Scotia was L’Acadie, a label they applied from the native Micmac word for the “land.” Mapmakers may have made the two names into one, and Nova Scotia was for a while called L’Acadie and Arcadia.

Verrazano’s trip to America in 1524 had been short compared to other such European voyages. He left the Madeira Islands off the coast of Africa on January 17th and was back in France by mid-June of the same year. The only place he had spent any time was in the area of what is now Rhode Island, where he described the natives as “the most civilized in customs” and “inclining more to whiteness”—a description that might indicate both previous contact and intermarriage with earlier European explorers.
¹¹
Verrazano was fond of Greek place-names and gave Rhode Island its name after his coastal visit, again taking the name from Sannazaro’s work.

The French navigator Jacques Cartier was next to sail to the New World, with a higher purpose than fishing in mind.
¹²
In 1534 Cartier’s fleet encountered a large French fishing vessel, which Cartier claimed was “lost,” obviously annoyed that he was not the first to reach the region. He explored the coasts of Newfoundland, Prince Edward Island, and the Gaspé Peninsula. In his travels he met up with two fleets of Micmacs, each consisting of forty to fifty vessels. They wanted to trade with the single French ship, but being outnumbered Cartier was cautious. Finally, he did permit a small convoy of nine large canoes to dock near enough to the French to exchange goods. The incident seems to give evidence of a native understanding of trade that was developed from past experience. As Cartier sailed farther up the Saint Lawrence River, he encountered another fleet of canoes, this time carrying Huron natives. He thought the Huron were like the Micmac, but in appearance
they seemed much poorer; he wrote that their only homes were overturned boats. It is more likely that he encountered a Huron fishing fleet far away from home and making temporary camp. Cartier’s trip back to Europe took only three weeks, demonstrating just how easy it is for experienced sailors to cross the North Atlantic.

In 1604 the French explorer Samuel de Champlain reached Nova Scotia and established a temporary settlement at La Have in Nova Scotia, fifteen miles away from Oak Island.
¹³
He later moved to another settlement on the Bay of Fundy, where he stayed for three years. Champlain’s settlements in Nova Scotia were for the most part short-lived, and little activity took place apart from fur trading with the native population. The relationship between France and England in Europe was hostile, and such hostility was carried to the New World. The ownership of the area was contested by the British and the French, but no major military operations took place apart from the building of a fort at Louisbourg on Cape Breton Island, far from the Oak Island area, in 1644. Engineers were imported for the construction of the fort, which gave rise to a theory that an “underground bank” might have been constructed on Oak Island. Military payrolls would often be in the form of gold and silver, and the threat of raids on land and piracy on the seas formed the basis for the need of such a repository. The theory is further based on the availability of labor. It can thus be said that the first suspect, the French military, had both a motive and a means to construct such a complex “bank” as the Money Pit. The theory has merit, but since there is no precedence for such construction, its merit is only that it simply cannot be ignored. The French who built Louisbourg were not in control of Oak Island and the Mahone Bay region for long, however, leaving it to the British in a later treaty.

Between 1606 and 1749 most of the southern half of Nova Scotia was uninhabited. On the northern coast along the Bay of Fundy and the Minas Basin, sixty French Acadian families settled. In 1632 several of these families crossed the southern part of the peninsula and settled at La Have; present day Lunenburg is not far from Oak Island. The continuing hostility between France and England led to the Treaty of Utrecht, which transferred Nova Scotia to England in 1715. It did not stop the
growth of the French settlements already in place. Nova Scotia became more rapidly populated by the English after Halifax was founded in 1749, forty miles from Mahone Bay. The British, however, were concerned that the Acadian population was possibly as high as ten thousand, so they induced British colonists to settle in the area. Many of these settlers came from American colonies in New England. Ten years later, in 1759, the Shoreham Grant gave land to these settlers from New England. At that time, Oak Island, one of 350 islands in Mahone Bay, was divided and deeded but not settled. By 1795, when the three adolescents went digging for treasure, it was still uninhabited. Interestingly enough, to those who believe pirates built the Money Pit, the name Mahone derives from the French word
mahonne,
meaning a low-lying pirate ship mostly used in Mediterranean waters.

In 1755 the hostilities between the English and French continued. The British concern about being outnumbered by the French caused them to forcibly remove six thousand French Acadians to points from Georgia to Louisiana. The poem entitled
Evangeline
by the American poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow immortalizes this forced exodus. Many stayed in the American South, where “Acadian” became corrupted to “Cajun.” Others found their way back to their Nova Scotia home. Along with the skirmishes between natives and colonists and the wars between the French and the English, there were pirates. With France and Britain almost always at war, privateering and piracy did not cease.

The list of possibilities of just who could be responsible for burying a treasure on Oak Island is not a short one. From the nineteenth century to the present, those who searched for the treasure during the summer would spend their winters rooting out leads to what they might eventually bring up from the depths of the Money Pit. Theories of who hid the treasure are as numerous as the islands in Mahone Bay: the crown jewels of the royalty of England and France, pirate banks, Viking hoards, the original manuscripts of William Shakespeare, and even the booty of a Mayan ship are said to be buried there. There are even theories that declare that the pit was not dug to hold a treasure trove at all but was used as an elaborate hydraulic lift to clean and repair ships. The tunnels and drains were employed simply to raise and lower the level of water.