Nicolas Poussin, Keeper of Secrets
Nicolas Poussin painted secret knowledge into his masterpieces. Two of his works, read together, ...
A Shaft Built for Drilling Sideways
Gilbert Hedden, a Chatham, New Jersey, steel fabricator, bought the east end of Oak Island in 1935 and signed with Frederick Blair, the Amherst insurance man who held the search license. He hired professionals, Sprague and Henwood of Scranton, whose 1936 season reopened the Chappell Shaft to 170 ft and found nothing. Crooker records the plan for 1937: a new shaft beside it, roomy enough to drill laterally at two-foot intervals, twenty feet out.
Shaft No. 22 began in May 1937, three feet from the Chappell Shaft. At 12 by 24 ft, with two hoistways, it was the largest shaft yet opened on the island. Finnan places it just east of the Chappell Shaft and Steele and Fader on the northeast side of the Money Pit; Golder Associates, who examined the ground in 1971, measured it at about 12 by 24 ft in eight six-foot bays to about 124 ft. The crew cut at once into an older cribbed shaft, and Sullivan lists what they met: old drill casings at 50 ft; at 65 ft a tin miner's lamp still holding whale oil and a stick of unexploded dynamite; at 93 ft a collapsed tunnel beside a band of clay like putty, which Hedden used on the windows of his shack; and at 106 ft (Clarke gives 104) a timber-lined tunnel 3 ft 10 in wide that curved through the ground in an arc. Hedden read it as the Halifax Company's 1860s work, which meant the Money Pit was close.
Oak Beneath the Floor
The shaft stopped at 124 ft 6 in by Crooker's account and 125 by Fanthorpe's; John Whitney Lewis's 1950 notes have the floor at 121 ft 6 in by August 1937. From it the crew bored fifteen vertical holes, each 42 ft deep. Crooker records oak from one inch to two and a half feet thick between 148 and 157 ft; Sullivan says five holes met wood. Blair found this the most convincing evidence yet, matching the oak of 1866 and 1897, and Hedden wrote to Blair's lawyer that chests lay between 160 and 175 ft, encrusted in blue clay. There the season ended. By November 1937 the United States tax authorities were suing Hedden, and in March 1938 he wrote that he could not continue.
Hamilton Goes Down the West Side
Erwin H. Hamilton, a New York University engineering professor (Edwin in Crooker and Sullivan), took over in July 1938 with the same drillers. Crooker records fifty-eight lateral holes that summer, producing very old oak from 119 ft that Hedden read as wreckage of the 1861 collapse. In 1939 and 1940 Hamilton sank a 6 by 6 ft section on the shaft's west side; the site record gives about 170 ft, Steele and Fader 155. The show reported in Season 9 that at 150 ft his crew struck a four-foot tunnel they took for a trap and left alone. Sullivan adds a 1942 shaft 8 ft square between the two big shafts, joined to both at 155 ft. Hamilton's result, as Blair saw it, was that neither sat over the Money Pit, which lay between them.
The One Shaft Still Standing
Robert Dunfield's 1965 excavation took the shaft in, and Golder reported its top had shifted about six feet west; in July 1970 Golder backfilled it with beach sand for a pumping test. Finnan calls it the one shaft in the pit area still visible; Crooker photographed its remains in 1976. The show dug for its corners in Season 3 to fix the Money Pit's position, ground through its timbers in Season 7, pulled up the iron shield from its base in Season 9, and in Season 12 Steve Guptill, the team's surveyor, placed the Money Pit over one corner.
What the Borings Do and Do Not Say
The record supports a precisely measured shaft, the island's largest, that stopped between 121 and 125 ft without reaching anything. What it contributed is the oak between 148 and 157 ft, which Blair and Hedden read as the fallen deposit, and which Hamilton, drilling the same ground, took for old cribbing. The timber is on record; whose it was is not.
Sources
- William S. Crooker, Oak Island Gold
- Randall Sullivan, The Curse of Oak Island: The Story of the World's Longest Treasure Hunt
- Lionel and Patricia Fanthorpe, The Oak Island Mystery
- Mark Finnan, Oak Island Secrets
- Scott Clarke, Oak Island Odyssey: A Masonic Quest
- Joy A. Steele and Gordon Fader, Oak Island Mystery Solved, 2nd ed. (2018)
- Golder Associates, Subsurface Investigation, The Oak Island Exploration (1971)
- Graham Harris and Les MacPhie, Oak Island and its Lost Treasure, 3rd ed. (2013), and J.W. Lewis, Notes on Hedden, Hamilton and other work (1950), as summarized in the site record
