The Lost Treasure of the Knights Templar (7 page)

In 1935 Gilbert Hedden read a book entitled
Captain Kidd and His Skeleton Island.
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The book included a map that appeared to Hedden to depict Oak Island. The author, however, claimed that the island was in the South China Sea. At great expense and after much time, Hedden finally caught up with the author in England only to be told that the map was the author’s creation. Despite the fact that pirate treasure rarely stayed buried for long and was usually placed in shallow locations, the theory of a pirate “bank” was advanced by Dunbar Hinrichs, the same man who had come up with the notion of the Huguenot banks. The Money Pit, it was said, had been built as an elaborate treasure trove where wandering pirates could deposit their stolen goods in a protected vault. The construction allowed protection not only from outsiders but also from other pirates. Although such banks were supposed to be
located in Haiti and Madagascar, they have never been found. After the execution of Kidd in England, treasure searching became the rage all over the world. There has never been any hard evidence that Kidd was ever in Oak Island, but that did not stop anyone from believing he had buried a treasure on the island.

Military Payrolls

The turbulent eighteenth century history of the New World provides us with a few more ideas about just what might be hidden in the Money Pit. The Louisbourg fort of the French had been the recipient of substantial funds from France to rebuild the fort and to pay France’s soldiers. The fort itself had cost millions to build, and the ongoing payment of soldiers, engineers, and common laborers required that the French have a more convenient local source of funds. In 1744 Louisbourg was lost to the English after a two-month seige, only to be handed back to the French again. It was clear that the fort was not invincible and was likely to be attacked in future hostilities. One theory has it that a secret repository was built away from the fort. While this theory provides motive and means, it remains untested and unproved.

The possibility of a lost payroll ship is another theory. Several ships sank in the Saint Lawrence Seaway and off the coast of the dangerous Sable Island. Other ships simply disappeared in storms, their location unrecorded. Still others were captured. No incident, however, points to the building of the Money Pit or to its use as a repository for funds. In 1746 a fleet of sixty-five ships was struck by a storm in the Atlantic. Many of the ships were lost, including several that went down off Nova Scotia’s Sable Island. Many of the survivors were killed by disease. A fortune in the form of coins must have been aboard one of the ships just to pay the three thousand soldiers who were being transported by the fleet. Speculation has it that the surviving payroll ship may have made it to Oak Island, where the pay of the French soldiers was buried to save it from English hands.

The same type of hypothesis later applied to the British in Halifax. It is said that in 1775 George Washington had discussed invading the
city. The British then allegedly constructed Oak Island to hide their payroll. In
The Money Pit
Rupert Furneaux says the Royal Corps of Engineers in Halifax could have constructed the shaft, but never buried the war chests of its army.
³⁴
The army and their pay presumably were both sent home. By that time, however, such a project would have led nearby residents of Mahone Bay to discover the construction that could have taken a year to complete. After 1775 there was little opportunity to construct the Money Pit in secrecy.

UFOs and Ancient Civilizations

If pirates and payroll ships, Huguenots and Acadians, Shakespeare and Spanish conquistadors are not enough, William Croocker, in
The Oak Island Quest,
brings us theories not found elsewhere. He ties together Easter Island, the Bermuda Triangle, ancient Egypt, and UFOs to come to the conclusion that the Money Pit is evidence of an ancient civilization.
³⁵
Looking at the idea logically, if aliens from another planet had spent the time to construct the pit, they would have been more imaginative in their choice of materials than spruce, oak, and flagstones.

The Secret of the Money Pit

To Mel Chappell’s credit, no theory, even those of the “off the wall” category, went uninvestigated. One such theory was outlined in a letter dated 1934 from Charles B. Thomas of Great Falls, Montana. Thomas, an eighty-year-old insurance salesman living at a YMCA, said the “treasure of far greater value” than a pirate treasure or payroll ship consisted of “gold and sacred things of the temple of Jerusalem.” It is unknown where Mr. Thomas had gained his supposed knowledge, but his revelation to Mr. Chappell may just end up being the closest to the truth.

Many of the extant theories are plausible, but the real story of the treasure that lies in the Money Pit could be even stranger. It starts in Jerusalem, where the treasures of King Solomon were stored in an underground complex. The temple was looted by the legions of Titus during Roman domination and the booty carried back to Rome, only to be
stolen again. The same treasures were then taken by the Visigoths (who raided Rome) to the south of France and again protected underground. In France a secret society was formed to guard the treasure, and when the king and Church threatened the group, the treasure was carried to Roslin, Scotland, where one family was named as permanent guardians. In Scotland an underground complex took years to build; when it was complete, the trove was threatened by the armies of the English king. The threat of an attack on newly independent Scotland required the treasure to be moved once more, this time to Nova Scotia. The Scottish guardian family supposedly built the Money Pit. Stranger still, both the secret society and the guardian family who purportedly constructed and hid the treasure within the Oak Island Money Pit still exist today. The evidence for their existence and their operation lies on both sides of the Atlantic, and their treasure is said to be still intact.

Chapter 3

P
RELUDE TO
E
XPEDITION

I
n June of 1398, ninety years before Cabot would reach America, a Scottish earl, Henry Sinclair, landed in Nova Scotia.
¹
The natives he came across were most likely reluctant to come forward at first, but during the time he spent exploring his new land, he inevitably spoke to some of them. “What do you call this land?” was the most natural question a European in a new place might ask. This very common question, posed in a strange language, often produced comical results. The conquistadors who landed on a certain peninsula of Mexico asked this question. The Mayan to whom they made the inquiry replied with another question, “What are you saying?” In Mayan, this response sounded like “Yucatan,” and thus the Spanish believed Yucatan to be the name of the peninsula of southern Mexico.

A Spanish explorer in Peru pointed to a strange animal he had never seen and said, “What is the name of that animal?” The Incan replied, “Llama?” he was repeating the Spanish word for “name” as he heard it. The misunderstanding gave the llama its name. In Alaska an early explorer posed the typical question, “What do you call this place?” The Eskimo replied, “I don’t know,” which in his language was “Ka-No-Me,” and so the soon-to-be city of Nome was named.

When the newly arrived Scotsman Sinclair asked the Micmac inhabitants of Nova Scotia where he was, they answered “Fertile Land.” In Micmac this was “Acadie.” To Europeans, “Arcadia” was nothing short of the equivalent of the “Promised Land.” While this name has little significance to us in the twentieth century, to a medieval European it meant an idyllic place, an unspoiled land, an Eden. To Henry Sinclair, the significance of a promised land of Arcadia was profound. In the chapters ahead, we will meet Henry and his family, the Sinclairs, which by the time of expedition were the hereditary guardians of a religious and monetary treasure. Henry and the Sinclairs ultimately made Nova Scotia their sanctuary and the place where they could protect the secrets entrusted to them.

In our own time we are slow to recognize the ability Europeans had to sail the Atlantic. In 1992 we celebrated the five-hundred-year anniversary of the voyage of Columbus. In 1997 a full-size replica of Cabot’s ship crossed the Atlantic, marking the quincentenary of his voyage to Nova Scotia.
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Other voyages made in earlier days by numerous fishermen of Breton, Portugal, and Bristol go largely unheralded for lack of proof. The question of the presence of Europeans in America before Columbus can no longer be debated, although acceptance of the notion outside Scandinavia was slow. The fact that the Norsemen reached the North American continent began to be accepted by many in 1837, when a Danish historian, Carl Rafyn, declared the Norse sagas to be history. The sagas are collectively the recordings of the Norse people who traveled outside their country. Many of these tales had been preserved in Iceland, but they had been considered fiction. Researching the sagas, Rafyn found that he was reading about real families in Norway, Iceland, and Greenland. Some were simply tedious listings of people and their goods. Others described Atlantic voyages, the natives encountered, and the harsh life endured by the Norsemen, who were not out to conquer and loot but simply to farm and trade.

The sagas became a source of enormous controversy for more than a century because they told a history of America discovered well before Columbus.
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To accept the ability of a Scottish earl to reach Nova Scotia in 1398, it serves to understand just how common transatlantic sailing was four hundred years earlier. The oldest of the sagas that record the journeys of the Norse to America was written in 1137 and is entitled
Islendinabok
.
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The book calls North America “Vinland the Good” and recalls the travels of Ari Thorgilsson. Thorgilsson is mentioned again in another saga, the
Landanamabok
, as having been driven off course to Hvitramannaland, meaning “Greater Ireland.”
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Irish monks had preceded the Vikings to America (as they had to leave Iceland),
⁶
driven west after Viking raids off the western isles of Ireland sent them packing. Their monasteries became more and more remote and one of the farthest from Ireland, on an island off Iceland, is called Papays, the Norse name for Catholics, which referred to their obedience to the Pope. From Iceland the Irish, too, had sailed farther west.

The story of the Norse and the Irish in Atlantic waters five hundred years before Columbus seems remarkable, but the source of this history was not meant to be sensational. The
Landanamabok
, for example, includes the names of three thousand individual Norse settlers as well as the location of their farms. It was not meant to be a mythical document. Another Norseman, Gudleif Gudlaugson, was also described as having sailed to a place in Greater Ireland, Eyrbyggja, and meeting people who spoke the Irish language.
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Gudlaugson was a trader, and Dublin was one of his ports of call, which is how he recognized the language. The most well-known Norseman, of course, is Leif Ericsson. In
A.D.
1001 he had heard the tales of another trader, Bjarni Herjolfson, who had been blown off course and who actually might have been the first Norseman in America.
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As a trader, Herjolfson regularly traveled the icy North Atlantic between Iceland and Scandinavia. One year he landed in Iceland, only to find that his father had moved to newer settlements farther west, in Greenland. On his way to Greenland a storm blew his ship farther west and south of his destination. Afraid to land, he sought only to return to Greenland to which he was traveling to see his father. For this perceived lack of adventurous spirit, Herjolfson later was rebuked by Leif Ericsson.

Ericsson was from one of the more colorful Norse families. His father, Eric (or Erik) the Red, had been exiled from his home in Iceland as a result of committing several murders. The sagas give us little detail about him, except that he settled in Greenland. Naming his new land Greenland appears to have been an advertising ploy, since it was, in fact, harsh land for farming. The name and Eric himself brought more Norse to settle there, and Greenland grew in population. While many of the Norse were farmers, those who could trade prospered and became prominent and wealthy. Both the Ericssons and the Herjolfsons were among those traders.

Ericsson decided to see the lands that Herjolfson had described. He bought Herjolfson’s ship and traveled to Labrador, which the Norse called Helluland, meaning “Flat Rock Land.” From there he went on to Nova Scotia, calling it Mark Land, or “Forest Land.” Finally turning south, he arrived at Vinland, which may have been as far south as Virginia but more likely modern-day Massachusetts. Leif's brother, Thorvald, also made a voyage to Vinland in
A.D.
1002 and most likely reached Massachusetts, where he named a cape Kiarlanes meaning “Keel-Cape” in the Old Norse language. Norse and American historians believe this to be the keel-shaped Cape Cod.
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At another promontory Thorvald and his crew were attacked by natives; eight natives were killed along with one Norseman, Thorvald himself. He was buried under a cross, and the crew dubbed the place Krossanes in his memory.