Axe

About This Artifact

The axe was recovered at approximately 123 feet below the surface during the 1931 Chappell expedition. It had a rusted head and a three-foot wooden handle, found at a depth distinct from the other two tools recovered during the same dig: the anchor fluke appeared at 116 feet and the miner's pick at 127 feet. Fanthorpe described it as "an Acadian axe of a slightly later pattern" than the anchor fluke, which he dated to the fourteenth or fifteenth century. The Acadian designation associates the tool with the French colonial settlers of Nova Scotia, active in the region from the early 1600s through their expulsion in 1755.

The Chappell expedition was led by William Chappell, who had operated the drill that struck the cement vault in 1897, together with his son Melbourne, his brother Renerick, and nephew Claude. Frederick Blair served as field manager. The team sank a twelve-by-fourteen-foot shaft (No. 21) to 163 feet, using an electric pump capable of shifting four to five hundred gallons per minute. They then drilled exploratory holes another fourteen feet deeper. Despite reaching greater depth than any previous team, they found no trace of the cement vault, the wooden boxes, or the iron barrier encountered during the 1897 drilling. Blair believed the Chappell shaft sat at least six feet away from the original Money Pit.

The axe, anchor, and pick were all found well below the deepest recorded working level of any nineteenth-century search expedition. Fanthorpe noted this discrepancy: the tools lay "as much as twenty feet lower than the recorded working depths of the nineteenth and early-twentieth-century shafts," and how they had sunk to that distance remained unexplained. Two possibilities have been discussed: either the tools belonged to the original builders and were left at working depth, or they fell from a collapsed upper shaft and settled through waterlogged soil over time. The depths recorded by the Chappells were precise and consistent across all three tools.