Cornish miner's pick

About This Tool

The Cornish miner's pick was found at approximately 127 feet during the 1931 Chappell expedition, alongside the remains of a miner's oil lamp at the same depth. The lamp still held oil, which was identified as seal oil; its top had rusted away but the base was fairly free of rust. The pick lay eleven feet below the anchor fluke and four feet below the axe recovered during the same dig. It was small, with one point oval and the other blunt and cross-hatched. The blunt end makes it what miners call a poll pick, a design with a pointed stem on one side of the eye and a short hammer face, or poll, on the other. Graham Harris and Les MacPhie, the geotechnical engineers who wrote Oak Island and its Lost Treasure, traced the form through the historical literature. Poll picks of similar shape appear in Agricola's De Re Metallica of 1556, and the design matches the pattern favored by Cornish tin miners as described in William Morgan's Mining Tools: a stem about twelve inches long from the eye, a stump of about three inches forming the poll, an eye about two and a half inches long, a head weighing about four pounds, and a handle of twenty-six to twenty-eight inches, the poll face steeled like a sledge so it could be struck. Harris and MacPhie superimposed Morgan's sketch on a surviving photograph of the pick held by Gilbert Hedden's brother-in-law and found a close correspondence. The pick itself, like the axe and anchor fluke, was in Frederick Blair's possession and has since been lost. Cornwall had been mined for tin and copper since the Bronze Age, and from the seventeenth century onward Cornish miners were employed across the British Empire and beyond wherever tunneling through difficult ground was required. Their presence in colonial Nova Scotia is well documented: Cornwall men worked in the gold mines of the province during the 1860s rush, and Cornish techniques were standard in the region's extractive industries. In the context of Oak Island, historian Paul Speed linked Cornish miners to Sir Francis Drake's operations, arguing that sixteenth-century Cornish workers possessed the coastal mining techniques needed to construct the island's tunnels and flood systems. Harris and MacPhie offer a later date. In their reconstruction the flood tunnel was dug between 1752 and 1754 by a team of Cornish miners under the military tunneling engineer William Bontein, who was ordered in June 1752 to travel to Annapolis by way of Camborne, the center of the Cornish tin district. Blair believed the pick and the axe belonged to earlier searchers and fell to their depths when the Money Pit collapsed in 1861. Harris and MacPhie note that both tools were found standing vertically and fully embedded in soft, disturbed ground, and that they would have had to drop thirty to forty feet below the deepest pre-1861 workings. They conclude the pick dates from work carried out before 1795. If it was left by the builders, it would indicate workers with professional hard-rock mining experience. If it came from a searcher shaft, the most likely owners would be the nineteenth-century crews, several of which employed experienced miners. The pairing with an oil lamp at the same depth suggests the two objects were associated, either as the working kit of one person or as equipment left together.