The Oak Island Mystery by Lionel & Patricia Fanthorpe

softish natural stone or man-made cement. Samples were later sent to analytical chemists who said that it had the same composition as cement, which is not quite the same thing as saying unequivocally that it actually was manufactured cement. Nevertheless, their comments were very significant: if they did not absolutely confirm that it was man-made, neither did they dismiss it as a natural phenomenon. It was the famous old Scottish verdict of not proven .
    The drill went down another couple of feet and struck wood below the “cement.” Blair’s men withdrew the drill and down put an auger instead. The auger went through five inches of oak. Then it dropped a couple of inches and encountered something mysterious. None of the drillers was prepared at that stage to hazard a guess as to what it might be.
    Further work gave the impression that the auger was struggling to get past bars of soft, loose metal. A sworn statement made by William Chappell, who was present at the time, maintained that whenever the drill was lifted, ready to be dropped again in order to penetrate deeper, this tantalizing loose material immediately slid back into the hole. Because this made the standard drop-and-lift technique impossible, the rods had to be twisted and turned instead, while a constant downward pressure was maintained. This laborious method took the men nearly six hours to drill from the top of the loose metal to its base.

    The treasure hunters deduced that they had encountered ingots of gold or silver with coins below them, and that those coins in turn were resting on another layer of ingots.
    Their next plan, not surprisingly, was to try to get a pipe down where the one-and-a-half-inch drill had penetrated, and then to attempt to secure samples of whatever the drill had encountered. Either chance circumstances were against them, or the unknown genius had long ago anticipated this eventuality. The encircling pipe was deflected by the ancient but impenetrable iron obstruction, and went off somewhere at a tangent. It never reached the mysterious chests with their enigmatic loose metal contents. The drillers withdrew the pipe and tried the one-and-a-half-inch drill again inside the three-inch pipe. Predictably and frustratingly, it followed the diversionary hole cut by the first, deflected pipe. Blair’s team never drilled into the chests again. It was like being allowed to savour the fragrance of delicious tropical fruit ripening on a distant island which you could not reach because there was no boat: so near and yet so far!
    Like Gipsy Rose Lee, the Guardian of the Money Pit allowed provocative hints and glimpses — but nothing more tangible!
    At about 150 feet down they encountered wood on one side of the drill and the cement-like material below it. This “cement” continued down for seven or eight feet. It seemed to be the side, or wall, of the chamber which the one-and-a-half-inch drill had entered previously. They were now drilling through the inside edge of the wall where the boxes rested against it. At 170 feet the drill struck iron. Hours of work and careful bit tempering and sharpening penetrated this iron by less than half an inch. Magnetic testing of the recovered material produced scrapings of iron which the drill had chipped from the stubborn obstruction 170 feet below.
    Careful consideration must be given to what these reported drillings could indicate. Boake Roberts, a reputable and respected industrial chemical company, analyzed samples of the so-called “cement” and said, rather tentatively, that in their opinion it was more likely than not man-made. The most interesting and exciting possibility is that Blair’s team located a treasure vault, or repository, nearly 170 feet down. Was this the same vault that had once been supported by the platform that had collapsed years before? Is it reasonable to imagine that it sank — either suddenly or gradually — while at the same time