Cornish miner's pick

About This Artifact

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. Others record both the pick and the lamp at 127 feet (38.7 metres), eleven feet below the anchor fluke and four feet below the axe recovered during the same dig. The Cornish designation identifies a specific style of pick developed for the tin and copper mines of Cornwall, England, where hard-rock mining had been practised since the Bronze Age.

Cornish miners were among the most skilled underground workers in Europe, and from the seventeenth century onward they were exported across the British Empire and beyond wherever tunnelling 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 mining techniques were standard in the region's extractive industries. In the context of Oak Island, historian Paul Speed presented a theory linking 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.

Whether the pick belonged to the original builders or to a previous search team has not been determined. If it was deposited by the builders, its Cornish origin would indicate the involvement of workers with professional hard-rock mining experience, consistent with the scale and sophistication of the Money Pit's underground construction. If it fell from a collapsed searcher shaft, the most likely candidates would be the workers of the nineteenth-century expeditions, several of which employed experienced miners. The pick's grouping with an oil lamp at the same depth suggests the two objects were associated, either as the working kit of a single person or as equipment cached together.