Show Notes
In a farmhouse room on a small island in Nova Scotia, somewhere in the eighteen-nineties, a county historian stood looking at paper silhouettes on a wall — the cut-out profiles people made of one another before photography. One of them was of a woman who had been a servant in the Treasurer's house at Halifax. The man who built that room had been born into slavery in South Carolina, got out during the Revolution, took his owner's surname because it was the name he had, and came north with the Loyalists. His name was Samuel Ball, and no likeness of him has ever existed.
He bought that island four acres at a time. At his death he held about thirty-six acres of it, which he had cleared himself, and no treasure hunter in the two hundred and thirty years since has ever owned as much of it as he did.
A few hundred yards from his door, people were digging.
The story everyone knows starts in a clearing at the island's east end: a saucer-shaped hollow in the ground, an old oak with a limb sawn off short, a ship's block and tackle hanging from the stub. Three men dig, and every ten feet they strike a platform of oak logs. At ninety feet a crowbar hits something flat and wide, and the light goes, so they come back in the morning — and find sixty feet of salt water they will never get out again. A flat dark stone with characters cut into it. Three links of gold on an auger. A beach that turns out to be a machine, with stone channels packed with coconut fiber running inland toward the pit.
That is the version the world carries, and it is told here at full strength before anything touches it.
Then the documents. A government surveyor in eighteen sixty-one who measured the water with his own hand and wrote down the flattest possible explanation. A stone that spent fifty years in a Halifax bookbindery being used as something to hit, and which nobody ever photographed, sketched, or traced. A man who held the right to dig for half a century and whose entire surviving voice is two sentences from one afternoon in Boston, where he handed a reporter a magnifying glass. A young Franklin Roosevelt with a pipe, standing beside a derrick in the summer of nineteen-oh-nine. A drill at two hundred feet in nineteen sixty-seven, a magnet lowered into a jar of settled water, and a sample lost at the top of the hole. And a family who lived on that island for six years in a cabin sixteen feet square.
Nothing of value has ever been recovered from the money pit.
A calm, unhurried telling of the record, for sleep, rest, or a long drive in the dark. Nobody in this hour is a fool. Where the evidence runs out, I say so.
More from Lantern and Ledger
In a parish office in Haggerston, in the first years of the reign, a registrar sat filling in a printed form about the streets where the dying was worst. He wrote down the drainage. He wrote down the water. Then he added a third line nobody had asked him for, standing up for his neighbours — that the people there were generally of cleanly habits, and that what was wrong with their streets was not their doing.
On a summer day in Hertfordshire in sixteen seventy-eight, a poor man who cut grass for a living ran after a farmer along a track beside three half-acres of ripe oats, to offer to do the work for less than he had asked a moment earlier. The farmer refused anyway, and said with a stern look and a hasty gesture that the Devil should mow it rather than he. That night, the pamphlet says, the field showed as if it were all of a flame, and in the morning the oats lay cut in a circle so neatly that no mortal man could do the like.
In the spring of nineteen hundred, sponge divers from the island of Symi sheltered from bad weather off a rock between Kythera and Crete, and one of them went down on a rope in canvas and lead and tinned copper, with his air coming down a hose from a hand pump on the deck. He had perhaps ten minutes. What he was standing on was the cargo of an ancient ship — bronze and marble statues, glass, gold, coins — and one corroded lump about the size of a thick book that nobody recognised for the better part of a year, while the beautiful things beside it were cleaned and admired and photographed.
In eighteen eighty-four, in Baltimore, two men sat at a table with a rebuilt post-office scale and a pack of shuffled playing cards, pressing weights too small to feel onto each other's fingertips. One of them marked almost every answer as a pure guess — and was right two times in three anyway.
On a Sunday afternoon in February of nineteen ninety, a car stopped a quarter of a mile short of a prison gate outside Paarl, and a white-haired man of seventy-one got out with his wife and walked the rest of the way, live on television around the world. Twenty years later, a great many of the people who watched it would say they had already seen his funeral.