About This Artifact
A small instrument identified as a boatswain's whistle was found on the shore of Smith's Cove in 1885. Made of bone or ivory, it is consistent in form with the call whistles used by naval officers and ship's crew from the medieval period onward to issue commands aboard sailing vessels. The whistle came to the attention of Mary B. Steward, a New York financier who backed the 1932 Oak Island expedition, and she arranged for it to be examined by several institutions including the American Museum of Natural History in New York. The museum identified the whistle as most likely Scandinavian in origin and made from walrus tusk ivory. Walrus ivory was a primary trade commodity of the Norse North Atlantic world, actively traded from Greenland during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries when Norse settlements there were at their peak. If the identification is correct, the whistle would be one of the earliest artifacts on Oak Island and one of the few with a direct link to Norse activity in the region. The only verified Norse settlement in North America, L'Anse aux Meadows in Newfoundland, lies 625 miles northeast of Oak Island and was active around 1021 AD.
Some accounts give the year of discovery as 1885 or 1901. Graham Harris and Les MacPhie, in Oak Island and its Lost Treasure, record these as two separate finds: the bone or ivory whistle from the shore of Smith's Cove in 1885, and a second whistle found in 1901 that was said to have been in the shape of a violin. The 1901 whistle has its own entry in this catalogue. Harris and MacPhie add that neither whistle can be attributed to the construction of the Money Pit.
Doug Crowell and Emiliano Sacchetti presented the whistle's history to Rick and Marty Lagina during Season 12 as part of a broader discussion of Norse activity in North America. The team decided to bring the whistle and other artifacts with possible Scandinavian connections, including an arrowhead reportedly recovered by Robert Dunfield and a decorative lead piece, to L'Anse aux Meadows for comparison with the nearly eight hundred artifacts recovered at that site. The whistle remains one of several Oak Island finds that may predate both the Money Pit's discovery and the arrival of British settlers in the Mahone Bay area.
Gilbert Hedden, in a 1939 letter quoted by William S. Crooker, placed the whistle in a specific context: an old dump on the island containing the remains of thousands of broken pottery flasks, which Hedden called Edmund Spenser flasks. He wrote that the age of the dump was supported by the finding nearby of an old coin and an ivory boatswain's whistle, both of which experts told him dated to the Elizabethan period. The coin Hedden mentions has not been separately identified in any catalogue, and the dump site has not been relocated.
Historical Context
Historical finds; Season 12 revisited. Graham Harris and Les MacPhie, Oak Island and its Lost Treasure, third edition (Formac Publishing, Halifax, 2013), chapter 3, which records the 1885 whistle and a separate violin-shaped whistle found in 1901.
Where It Was Found
Found at Smith's Cove, on the shore. Location: the cove at the east end of Oak Island where the flood system's box drains were found in 1850.
