Oak Island Theories: PIRATES
J. Smith Collins, author
The Money Pit is the Work of Pirates
This is a popular theory dating from the discovery of the Money Pit in 1795, and we’ll take a brief look at the possibility here. Believing the depression in the ground beneath ship’s tackle hanging from an oak tree was the work of pirates burying treasure was what led Daniel McGinnis and his friends, John Smith and Anthony Vaughan, to hunt for buried loot on the island. Some stories claim they had a map to a long-lost pirate treasure.
But does this theory make sense?
The Age of Piracy and Oak Island
McGinnis and friends had a valid reason to believe pirate plunder could be buried at the sunken area under the oak tree. The pirate era, known as the Golden Age of Piracy by writers romanticizing the time, roughly ran from 1650 to the 1730s. The men known as pirates during this time came predominately from three veins of piracy.
The earliest time of high piracy was the buccaneer span of 1650 to 1680 and was heaviest in Jamaica and Tortuga. Anglo-Saxon seamen in the waters surrounding these places set their sights on Spanish colonies and shipping routes in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific. One famous buccaneer of this time was Henry Morgan.
The middle years of piracy, the Pirate Round during the 1690s, utilized the trade routes of the East India Company. These were done by Anglo-American pirates making long-distance voyages to lift cargo from British and Muslim ships in the Indian Ocean and Red Sea. This Round began in Atlantic ports such as New York City, Nassau, Bermuda, and La Coruna and ran up the African coast, with stops at the Cape of Good Hope and Madagascar. Thomas Tew and Henry Every were high-profile pirates of this time. Piracy was so prevalent during this time that the East India Company pleaded with Parliament to do something about the attacks. Parliament did; Captain William Kidd was enlisted to privateer for the Crown. Kidd was a Scotsman in a French-English pirate crew.
The later years of piracy saw an influx of post Spanish wars seamen turning to pirate life running through the Caribbean, West Africa, the Indian Ocean, and the North American eastern seaboard (right in line for Oak Island in Mahone Bay, Nova Scotia). Now out of employment from the Spanish or British navies, seamen turned to piracy when they couldn’t find work. Like the Pirate Round routes, pirate ships often followed the Triangular Transatlantic Slave Trade running from Africa, the Caribbean, Europe, and even to the Americas. This was the time of “Black Sam” Bellamy, Edward “Blackbeard” Teach, and John “Calico Jack” Rackham (with female pirate companions Anne Bonny and Mary Read).
Pirate and privateer ships were a common sight in Mahone Bay. The word mahonne comes from the French language meaning barge in English, which was the preferred ship used by privateers. Pirate and privateer ships with English and French crews took refuge in the Bay’s waters dotted with over 350 islands. It would take little imagination to equate a sunken circle of ground on Oak Island with a ship’s tackle hanging from a nearby tree to think of pirate buried treasure. McGinnis and his companions naturally thought this first.
Could pirates have orchestrated a project as elaborate as the Money Pit?
Timing
Stories surround the beginning of the Knights Templar, which were originally known as the Poor Fellow-Soldiers of Christ and of the Temple of Solomon and the Order of Solomon's Temple. They are referred to here also as Knights and Templars, and as a whole, Order. This distinction is noted because of the later association with Freemasons and their titling hierarchy.
Most historians and enthusiasts place the beginnings of this originally religious Order around 1119, officially recognized by Pope Innocent II in 1139 (in the Catholic document papal bull Omne datum optimum). This is usually the widely recognized designated beginning of the Order (more later on how this date may be earlier to some historians and theorists). This Catholic military Order was comprised of wealthy and influential men of largely non-combative levels who were to use their talents to further the Catholic Church's reach. This was synonymous at that time with "Christendom"; Christian and the official government "church" during much of the medieval centuries varied, determined by the whims of the ruling kings and their relationships with the then-reigning pope.
The Templars were in power from their conception in the twelfth century until their attempted extinction in the years 1307-1314. They numbered up to 20,000 members by some estimations, of which perhaps ten percent were considered "Knights." Amid their duties of offering safe passage through the Holy Land and involvement in several Crusades, the Templars engaged in banking activities (noted as the first bankers, in some cases), developed a protective nature over any "holy" religious relics they encountered, and amassed a collective fortune that rivaled the treasuries of many royal Europeans and Muslim empires.
Templars certainly had access to some of the largest treasures in history, not only in jewels, gemstones, and precious metals, but also in religious artifacts, perhaps even the highest esteemed of the religious worlds: the Ark of the Covenant and the Holy Grail. Much of the speculation around Templars and the Ark of the Covenant predated books by Dan Brown and his contemporaries. Books like Ivanhoe (1819) and Foucault's Pendulum (1988) drew perhaps imaginary lines between religious treasures and the Templars, fed also in films like Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981) and Indiana Jones and Last Crusade (1989), both of which connected the Templars and the Ark of the Covenant and/or Holy Grail.
When the First Crusade saw the capture of Jerusalem in 1099 A.D., the Templars used the Al-Aqsa Mosque near the Dome of the Rock as their headquarters. This was important to the Order, as they saw the Dome of the Rock as the site of Solomon's Temple. This prompted the Knights to adopt the name Poor Knights of Christ and the Temple of Solomon, or Knights Templar. This put them in nearly direct contact with where they thought the Ark of the Covenant, Aaron's Staff, and perhaps the Holy Grail were hidden.
After their decline and the loss of the Holy Lands back into the hands of the Muslims in 1187, the Knights Templar fell back on their previous trades, when possible. Through their associations with Freemasons in the fifteenth century, including some of the higher Mason ranks being co-named, some Knights dissolved into a hybrid knight/mason, with elevated positions in shipping and trade (evidenced in the Kirkwall Teaching Scroll). This included engineering and military fields.
Personnel Involved
Pirate ships had large crews, sometimes numbering up to 200 men, and at times would form leagues, amassing greater collective crews. Pirate crews also had specialists, including a carpenter, and often a forge and blacksmith. These skills could create the manpower for an undertaking like the Money Pit. Sailors, legitimate and pirate alike, were accustomed to taking orders and hard work. The labor involved in a task like the Money Pit would have taken, by some researchers’ calculations, four months to over a year using 100 or more men working in shifts six to seven days a week—numbers possible with a pirate crew (not including any forced work, such as native slave labor).
Captain William Kidd
Kidd was a pirate turned legitimate. He was born in 1645, and apprenticed on a pirate ship in the mid-1680s. While in the Caribbean in 1689, Kidd’s pirate mates mutinied and renamed the French-English ship Blessed William. They sailed to the British colony Nevis, where Kidd was announced captain of Blessed William. Nevis’ governor enlisted Kidd and his crew to defend the colony against the French, and in lieu of payment, Kidd was allowed to take his pay from the French victim ships. This amounted to privateering (sanctioned piracy).
Kidd spent most of his seafaring years in the Caribbean, the West Indies, and America’s northeastern seaboard. Over the course of his privateering career, Kidd garnered loot in excess of 2,000 pounds Sterling (from the island Marie-Galante) and was awarded plunder from his duties for attacks during the War of the Grand Alliance (protecting the provinces of New York and Massachusetts). In a gallant gesture, Kidd also took part in building Trinity Church (New York).
So admired was Kidd that the governor of New York commissioned him to act as a pirate hunter. His duty was to dispose of scourges such as Thomas Tew, John Ireland, and Thomas Wake. During his hunt for pirates running the Pirate Round, Kidd found few pirates, and, to satisfy his antsy crew of Adventure Galley, picked ships like the English-owned merchant Quedagh Merchant carrying exotic East Indian goods. He then took the Merchant for himself, renamed her Adventure Prize, and found himself in mutiny with his crew. With a crew of only thirteen, Kidd hobbled along with the Prize (as the Galley was now unseaworthy and worm-ridden), and headed to the Caribbean before going to New York City.
During his return, politics had changed and in light of the sacking of the merchant ship, Kidd was now deemed a pirate, not merely a privateer. He was arrested in 1699 and secured in Newgate Prison. He was put on trial for piracy and murder, and executed in 1701. Kidd’s treasure to this point was not found on Adventure Prize, and highly unlikely left to burn in the maggot-infested Adventure Galley. A small amount of treasure was discovered buried by Kidd on Gardiner’s Island off New York. However, it was removed by Governor Bellomont and sent to England to be used as evidence against Kidd at his trial. Rumors of Kidd’s treasure also pinpointed nearby Block Island (1699).
Kidd did have a treasure that remained unaccounted for at the time of his trial. He did have access to plunder in amounts exceeding 2,000 pounds Sterling. He did frequent pirate areas as well as the American seaboard up to Nova Scotia. The maps known as the Kidd-Palmer treasure maps generally carry the date 1669, in line with Kidd’s travels, but most are associated with Gardiner’s Island, not OakIsland, although similarities do exist. Most of these maps are highly suspect (many appearing in the 1930s in Boston, one at an antique dealers’ shop, and most with “dying sailor” stories), often with later dated markings for the locations. One more validating theory of these is that Kidd didn’t make the map to mark the location of his buried treasure, but that he had possession of a map (such as these) to another pirate’s buried treasure and he was actually seeking it.
Edward “Blackbeard” Teach
Blackbeard was born around 1680 in Bristol, and went on to become probably the most infamous and highly feared pirate of the mid- and latter-pirate eras. He has been linked to the Money Pit on Oak Island despite having a short career in piracy. Blackbeard terrorized the West Indies and American east coast from 1716-1718. Teach commandeered a French ship he then named Queen Anne’s Revenge, a 40-gun ship.
Blackbeard’s region of operation ran along North America’s Atlantic seaboard, and he was known to align himself with other pirates to achieve a mission. Pirates Blackbeard joined with include Stede Bonnet and Benjamin Hornigold, and he was able to organize the successful blocking of the important port of Charleston, South Carolina.
It’s never been proven that Blackbeard buried any treasure, although he did brag of hiding treasure in a place where none but he and “Satan himself” could find it, perhaps in the North Carolina waters. His plunder was generally traded and the profits drank away. He did frequent the Atlantic along North America’s eastern coast and he presented the planning skills to undertake a massive cache burial, but there is no definite mention of him doing so.
Despite having the manpower, time, and means of burying his captured plunder in a communal bank with other pirates, there is little else to place Blackbeard on Oak Island. However, if Blackbeard was responsible, his chance of depositing anything on the island is the narrow sliver of time from 1716-1718.
One account does stand out against what is commonly known of Blackbeard and it does have a connection to Oak Island. This allegation, related in a story from 1899, has a dying sailor, male kin to a pirate, who bestowed upon McGinnis, Smith, and young Vaughan a map to Oak Island with claims of buried gold, silver, and emeralds. This account points at a “black-bearded, fierce-visaged” pirate hiding gold and precious stones. This may verify credence to the McGinnis story brought to light by the sister heirs.
Pirate Cooperation
Both Kidd and Blackbeard operated in the right waters to bury something on Oak Island at different points in their careers, and both had treasure enough to hide. Both also had access to victim ships carrying educated men who may have possessed the intelligence and skill to design the Money Pit (if unable to craft together the design themselves). One theory is that Kidd worked with Henry Every (also known as Evory or Avery and “Long Ben”), another English pirate who ransacked the Atlantic and Indian Oceans in the 1690s. Every was an exception to the rob-until-captured-or-killed mentality of most pirates; he actually retired from piracy with his stash of loot rather than being arrested and hung or killed in battle, earning him the title “King of Pirates.” Every disappeared in 1695.
While Every’s years on the water take any association with Blackbeard out of the picture, the timing is right for collusion with Kidd. With their combined manpower, knowledge, stolen loot, and opportunity, Kidd and Every could have engineered a construction like the Money Pit, especially with the aid of a captive British engineer. If the Money Pit was designed as a communal pirate bank with separate, offset tunnels to hold individual caches, retrieving the treasure would only be a matter of a map and shovel to dig down through uninterrupted soil to any particular cache. Kidd may not have come back to reclaim his part of such a buried treasure because he was executed in 1701. Every was never seen again after 1695.
Plausibility
Pirates typically spent their loot. If they buried it, it was for a short time, and usually in an easy to dig area. The depth—in hard clay—and complexity of the Money Pit are not indicative of pirate work.
However, there are always exceptions.
If a pirate crew or crafty pirate captain happened upon an especially interesting or special plunder, it would make sense to hide it in an equally extraordinary location. Cargo from merchant ships, such as was the normal plunder in Pirate Round looting, was best sold on a mainland that would overlook the delivery. This could be a country at war with the country the merchant ship was from or a port that usually did not have access to such cargo. Pirates and smugglers filled this unmet “trade” opening during wartime all over the world. A merchant ship’s cargo would not likely be hidden by a pirate crew; it would have been bartered or sold. This can nearly rule out a merchant cargo being buried by pirates on Oak Island in the Money Pit.
One exception, and even merchants did this, was if a ship was damaged and not seaworthy enough to get to a safe or welcoming port. In this case, the ship would be dry docked on an island, the cargo unloaded and buried, and after the repairs were made to the ship, the vessel and crew would leave with plans to return for the cargo later under safer conditions. This was mostly true for merchant ships with investors to keep happy. If a pirate crew was to do this, the crew would undoubtedly return to dig up the cargo and sell it when time and opportunity permitted.
With merchant cargo out of the question, what would prompt a pirate crew to bury something as deep and with such complexity as the Money Pit?
One scenario is the extraordinary plunder idea. A treasure like this would have to be more than mere merchant cargo, pricier than the local inhabitants could afford to buy or trade for, and therefore something that only a government or kingdom could afford. In other words, a treasure only few in the known world could purchase. If a pirate crew lifted such a treasure, they would want to sell it as soon as possible, but that would be risky to do in most countries. If they opted to bury it until they could find the right “buyer,” then hiding it in a place like the Money Pit was feasible.
Would pirates find such a treasure during one of their attacks? Perhaps.
Pirates found their way into every large body of water (and even rivers) and along nearly every coastline. They had their pick of merchant ships, treasure ships, naval supply ships, and royal vessels.
One notorious example of opportunity is the Treasure of Lima, which is reported to be worth 160 million pounds. A British trader, Captain William Thompson of Mary Dear, stole it in 1820, when he was hired to transport it to Mexico from Peru. The original inventory list for this Spanish treasure included over 100 gold religious statues, a life-size figure of the Virgin Mary, 200 chests of jewels, 273 swords with bejeweled hilts, solid gold crowns, 150 chalices, 1000 diamonds, and hundreds of gold and silver bars. Now, if a pirate looted a vessel like Mary Dear, it could likely exchange the plunder; but a more select treasure, such as crown jewels or a royal treasury, may be better held for ransom to the interested kingdom.
During all major eras of piracy, the Middle East had their own pirates, most notably the Barbary Coast pirates. If a pirate vessel plundered a treasure ship from one of these ancient countries, the crew may choose to hide the religious artifacts and treasures until the exact buyer could be contacted. Burying a religious treasure may bring a king’s ransom from the right country, but this would mean the pirate crew would have to recognize the treasure as religiously important and know the correct buyer. This would be reason enough to bury a treasure deep and with extensive booby-traps in a remote region.
One other strength of the Oak Island Money Pit being pirate treasure is more complex, but doable by an intelligent pirate or several pirate crews who would have a larger knowledge base. (Remember, many pirates in the Pirate Round era were former navy seamen, some with an education, who were left unemployed after the wars.) The Money Pit could be the work of a group of pirates digging the main shaft and then digging separate branches upward, above sea level, with offset tunnels to hold individual caches for later retrieval (by digging down through fresh soil). This is more complex, but pirates, during their raids, encountered a variety of travelers, including engineers, miners, and skilled and educated specialists.
This was a time of rampant sacking of new worlds and peoples. Cargo loads of gold and jewels were crossing the oceans from the Americas to Europe. A pirate ship could access Spanish-confiscated treasure from the Americas as well as precious oils from the Middle East. Coins from three or more continents could be in a pirate ship hold at the same time as textiles from both hemispheres.
With a cargo or plunder of unusual importance, pirates may forcibly enlist the aid of special, skilled victims they encountered, such as engineers knowing the workings of mining and construction. Forcing an educated victim from a target ship was how many pirate crews gained their ship surgeon or shanty man.
The flexibility of the pirate treasure theory makes it a favorite for many fans. It covers a span of centuries from medieval to the mid-1700s; it can include pirates from almost any country; and conceivable treasures vary widely, from documents and religious works to crown jewels, to raw gemstones and precious metals and any plundered treasures from new worlds, or a combination of several diverse treasures. A French pirate ship may have new world Spanish gold, a stolen British payroll, and loads of spices and silks from the Orient—all at once—in the hold.
This theory could account for the Spanish scissors found in the Smith’s Cove drains area in 1967, a style that experts claim was popular in Spain for over 500 years. It fits with the piece of parchment found in 1897 by William Chappell, which could be from a map. The parchment was brought up on a drill bit from a depth of 153 feet, and had the letters “ui”, “vi”, “wi” or “ri” inked on it. This parchment was examined by Dr. A. E. Porter in 1897, and sworn in an affidavit to be parchment. The coir (coconut fiber) found at Smith’s Cove was recently dated by the operation currently (2016) working the Money Pit (headed by Rick and Marty Lagina, Craig Tester, and Dan and David Blankenship) with a carbon-14 date of 1200-1400 AD. That puts the Money Pit and Smith’s Cove drains at an early date for pirates, before the busiest eras mentioned above, but well within pirating activity throughout the centuries.
Recently, a copper Spanish maravedi (piece of eight) dated 1652, an English copper coin from the 1700s, copper coins from the 1770s and 1600s, a British button likely from a Navy uniform from near the Samuel Ball Foundation, and a coin determined to be of Knights Templar issue have been recovered. These are definite dates, most, and possibly linked to pirate activity (even the Templar coin could have been part of other pirate-looted treasure, or unrelated). And, startlingly, during The History Channel’s The Curse of Oak Island season three finale, Joan (with sisters Jean and Joyce) McGinnis, of Daniel McGinnis 1795 fame, presented a gold cross of hammered styling passed down through her family, allegedly found in the Money Pit. This, too, fits with some pirate treasure theories. While this account claims three chests of treasure were found, and divided, by the original Money Pit discoverers, the hint of more treasure has persisted. Several treasure hunting companies have found bits of gold, gold dust, and yellow or gold metal clinging to their drill bits, and several links of gold chain (ornamental, such as jewelry or from an epaulet) were brought up from a depth of 98 feet in 1849 by The Truro Company.
The pirate treasure theory also fits with the McGinnis sisters’ account, as well as findings made by treasure hunter Fred Nolan in an undated interview. In this telling—and affidavits from workers for Nolan of the time—Nolan claims to have found three empty chests in the Oak Island swamp. The chests were found over a three-year span, buried between two and four feet down in the swamp, and two had brass hardware (one with hinges, some screws). The wood was black (aged oak), preserved by the swamp water. In 2015, Nolan finally admitted that his theory of the Oak Island treasure as being the work of the British.
Perhaps, we can wonder, of British pirates.
These are one fan’s thoughts and summation. It has no connection to any treasure hunting operation, podcast, worldview, or fan base.