Some Notes Re: Construction of the Money Pit

[GravelTeeth]

Log levels have always made sense.

Digging a shaft is begging for a rock to come out of the side of it and ruining your day. Cribbing or floors would prevent that, and floors take less material.

Not a bad initial thought, BUT take it just a bit further ... if they are mining the fill/clay itself, and they've cleared enough at any given depth to put down a floor, what's left to mine? The mining would have to go off into a side tunnel, which we agree they found no evidence of, or down, which they've now just blocked with the floor. As these platforms had no reported trap doors in them, we are rather stuck with the conclusion that they were constructed on the way back up.

My feeling is that, if they were ever real, they were for the express purpose of having a "filled" pit without the weight of all the back-fill crushing what was at the bottom, which is likely to have been the structure augered into by Truro.

I'm beginning to think the last level at ~90 feet, either with a log platform or without, was a waterproof layer on top of the final structure, which kept the flooded "chamber" below it from filling the Money Pit to tide level. Perhaps the structure below was always intended to be underwater unless and until the rightful owners came back and knew how to turn off the tap, so to speak. But I continue to gather data and opinions.

--GT

 

[Armchair detective]

Off to the library to try to research shaft digging techniques 1700's.
A beta deduction is that the first diggers were way back or complete amateurs - no side cribbing was EVER noted on any version of the legend/history.
Shaft digging was its own profession requiring training.

Don't know if this tidbit is relevant, but Fire Setting was a 1500 - 1600 mining technique.
You build a fire next to a rock face or floor and get out. The fire expands and weakens the rock, making it easier to work.

A tally of reasons to dig a shaft:
1. Water
2. Coal
3. Sulfur (for black powder)
4. Clay
5. Fool's gold
6. Salt...
7. ...Oh yeah, bury a treasure.

 

[Carl-NC]

Off to the library to try to research shaft digging techniques 1700's.

An excellent book on early mining techniques is De Re Metallica, published in 1556. It has tons of woodcut illustrations that, alone, are impressive. It was translated to English by a mining engineer named Herbert Hoover.