The Last Best Place by John Demont Read Free Book Online Page B

with trees and brush and quit, determined to return. They never did, unable to find anyone willing or able to help with the dig. The story lived on, though. A few years later some local businessmen dug down through the pit and discovered charcoal and coconut fibre and more log platforms at ten-foot intervals. Beyond ninety feet they found a stone inscribed with hieroglyphics that, according to one translation, said, “Forty feet below, two million pounds are buried.” At 98 feet, they hit something hard, perhaps a treasurechest. They came back in the morning to find the shaft full of sea water. When they tried to bail it out, the water kept coming in. Whoever had dug the shaft had also dug at least two tunnels that filled the pit with water when the inscribed capstone was removed.
    The treasure hunters packed it in. Other groups took a whack at it, their drills bringing up links from a gold watch and tiny pieces of parchment—each new tantalizing hint touching off more speculation about the treasure’s origins. I particularly like the latest one: that it all has to do with the travels of Prince Henry Sinclair of the Orkney Islands back in the final days of the fourteenth century. Legend has it that after hearing about a strange but magnificent land teeming with fish and cannibals, he and a crew set sail for Newfoundland and what became the Maritime provinces. Sinclair was a supporter of the Knights Templar movement in Europe, to the point where he provided refuge in the Orkneys for Templars being persecuted on the continent by the ruling princes of Europe jealous of their wealth (the Templars were supposed to have become the custodians of the Holy Grail). There are those who think that Sinclair and his Templar friends may have buried the Grail in Nova Scotia—on Oak Island—which they intended to use as some kind of new refuge, a new Jerusalem. But there are also those who think that buried at the bottom of that impenetrable pit lies Marie Antoinette’s jewels, the secret stash of Sir Francis Drake, the long-lost manuscripts of Francis Bacon, the booty of Blackbeard or Morgan the Pirate.
    Most Nova Scotians, on the other hand, still cling to the old theory that Capt. William Kidd buried his treasure there before the British hanged him in 1701.
    “That’s bullshit,” barks Dan Blakenship, striding angrily from the small museum at the back of the lot. “All of Kidd’s whereabouts were known. It’s a theory that doesn’t stand up to scrutiny.” Ruddy-faced, with wide shoulders and a big blackened blister on one of his cigar-like fingers, Blakenship is seventy-two but looks a decade younger. He knows a thing or two about theories. Thirty years before, he chucked a successful career as a general contractor in Florida after reading a
Reader’s Digest
article about the Oak Island hunt. If he harboured any doubts about his career change, they disappeared in 1971, when a television probe lowered down the shaft sent back pictures of what looked like a chest and tools. Watching the monitor of the closed-circuit camera, Blakenship believes he saw a severed human head float across the screen, as well as a preserved human body slumped on the chest. So he was already a believer when he became field manager for Triton Alliance, a consortium of Canadian and American investors fascinated with the Oak Island legend.
    Today he is in a foul mood as he stands with some young underlings in a clearing near the entrance to the mine shaft. Two days from now everything has to be just so for the hundreds of visitors expected for the special bicentennial celebration of the Big Dig. The highlight of the event: the unveiling of a five-foot-high concrete stone to honour the six men who have died so far in thehunt. But what really bothers him is the feeling that the whole thing—the twenty years and $140,000 of his own money spent pursuing his obsession—might be for nothing. We pile into a half-ton and make the short, bumpy drive back to