THE CURSE OF
OAK ISLAND
The Story of the World’s
Longest Treasure Hunt
RANDALL
SULLIVAN
Copyright © 2018 by Randall Sullivan
Cover artwork courtesy of A&E Television Networks, LLC.
The Curse of Oak Island, HISTORY, and the
“H” design mark are trademarks of A&E Television
Networks, LLC. All rights reserved.
The Curse of Oak Island, HISTORY, and the “H” design mark are trademarks of A&E Television Networks, LLC. All rights reserved.
Page 1: The Oak Island Mystery, Courtesy of the Estate of R. V. Harris. Randall Sullivan. Aerial map, Courtesy of OakIslandTreasure.co.uk; Page 2: William Kidd, Courtesy of the Library of Congress. Henry Morgan © Bridgeman Images; Page 3: William Phipps, State House Portrait Collection, Courtesy of the Maine State Museum. Samuel de Champlain, Samuel Ball © Bridgeman Images; Page 4: Collier’s Magazine excerpt, Public Domain/University of Michigan Library; Page 5: Collier’s Magazine excerpt, Public Domain/University of Michigan Library; Page 6: Frederick Blair, Courtesy of D’Arcy O’Connor. William Chappell, Courtesy of the Beaton Institute, Cape Breton University; Page 7: Melbourne Chappell, Courtesy of Beaton Institute, Cape Breton University © Prometheus Entertainment. Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Courtesy of the Nova Scotia Archives. Page 8: Excerpt from True Tales of Buried Treasure, Courtesy of the Estate of Edward Rowe Snow. Gilbert Hedden, Courtesy of D’Arcy O’Connor; Page 9: William Shakespeare, Public Domain. Title Page of Novum Organum Scientarum, Francis Bacon © Bridgeman Images; Page 10: David Tobias, Courtesy of Ovagim Arslanian. Robert Dunfield, Courtesy of the Estate of Robert Dunfield; Page 11: Fred Nolan, Courtesy of Ovagim Arslanian. Nolan’s cross © Prometheus Entertainment; Page 12: Both images of Dan Blankenship, Courtesy of D’Arcy O’Connor. “G Stone,” Courtesy of Charles Barkhouse; Page 13: Robert Restall top, Courtesy of The Chronical Herald Library © Prometheus Entertainment. Robert Restall, Courtesy of the Restall Collection © Prometheus Entertainment; Page 14: Reprinted newspaper, Courtesy of Delaware County Daily Times. Robert Restall and family, Courtesy of the Restall Collection © Prometheus Entertainment; Page 15: Dan Henskee, Courtesy of Dan Henskee. Marty Lagina, Rick Lagina, Courtesy of A&E Television Networks, LLC; Page 16: All images courtesy of A&E Television Networks, LLC.
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FIRST EDITION
Printed in Canada
Published simultaneously in Canada
First Grove Atlantic hardcover edition: December 2018
ISBN 978-0-8021-2693-1
eISBN 978-0-8021-8905-9
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data is available for this title.
Atlantic Monthly Press
an imprint of Grove Atlantic
154 West 14th Street
New York, NY 10011
Distributed by Publishers Group West
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18 19 20 21 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
To Gabriel and Grace,
whose searches, I hope, will all lead to discoveries.
Also by Randall Sullivan
The Price of Experience
Untouchable
LAbyrinth
The Miracle Detective
Table of Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Also by Randall Sullivan
Introduction
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Postscript
Afterword
Oak Island Time Line
Photo Insert
Back Cover
Introduction
Thirteen years ago, I began an article for Rolling Stone magazine with these lines:
Can what’s buried beneath the ground on Oak Island possibly be worth what the search for it has already cost? Six lives, scores of personal fortunes, piles of wrecked equipment, and tens of thousands of man-hours have been spent so far, and that’s not to mention the blown minds and broken spirits that lie in the wake of what is at once the world’s most famous and frustrating treasure hunt.
Still a pretty strong opening, I’d say, and the question remains a valid one. The article was published in the magazine’s January 22, 2004, edition, and every comment I heard about it was positive. I was not entirely satisfied with the piece, however, especially as time passed. I knew I’d left things out; magazine deadlines force one to work fast and the limited space in the pages of any periodical compels writers to make tough choices and sharp cuts—or to let editors make those choices and those cuts for them. It was the nagging thought that I’d accepted the semiofficial legend of Oak Island without sufficient examination, though, that truly bothered me.
In the summer of 2010, I was working as the host of a show being produced for the Oprah Winfrey Network. Early on, Joe Nickell of the Skeptical Inquirer, perhaps the best known naysayer in the country, was brought in to be my on-camera adversary. Nickell had written an article that attempted to debunk certain “myths” surrounding Oak Island, and when we spoke briefly about this off camera, I was acutely aware that I wasn’t confident enough in what I knew about the historical record to refute some of what he was saying. That troubled me.
It also troubled me that I might have given some preposterous theories about what had taken place on Oak Island more than their fair due, while dismissing as outlandish at least one hypothesis that I had come to believe deserved serious consideration.
Oak Island had long been a Rorschach test for dozens of historical loose ends and broken threads, most of the major conspiracy theories and a good many of the minor ones, and just about every tale of lost treasure out there. The island drew obsessive-compulsives, crackpots, and the sincerely curious to it like no place on Earth. None of this changed the fact, though, that Oak Island was a genuine enigma and quite arguably the most mysterious spot on the planet. I wanted another shot at the place.
I got one in the late spring of 2016 when I received a telephone call from the producers of the astonishingly successful cable television series The Curse of Oak Island, inviting me to spend a month or so on the isla
nd while the show was shooting its fourth season in Nova Scotia that summer.
It wasn’t getting back on television that I looked forward to as much as getting back on Oak Island. That tiny dot of land off the coast of Nova Scotia haunted my imagination like no other place I’ve been. That July I headed back there for the first time since the autumn of 2003. I didn’t delude myself into believing I was about to solve the mystery. All I aimed for was to tell the island’s story in a more comprehensive and entertaining way than any who had gone before me. But of course, I told myself, one never knew what one might find when one started looking.
CHAPTER ONE
Oak Island sits off the coast of Nova Scotia just north of the 45th parallel, the halfway point between the equator and the North Pole, about forty-five miles southwest of Halifax. It’s almost a mile long and not quite a half mile wide at its broadest point, narrowing to only a little more than a thousand feet at its sunken center, which is filled mostly with swamp and marsh. The island is commonly described as peanut shaped, but when I’ve looked at it from above I’ve always seen a baby elephant, mainly because of the curve of an incipient trunk that protrudes from its east end, wrapping around the southern shore of a compact, crescent-shaped bay that was once known as Smuggler’s Cove. Small hills of glacial drift, known geologically as drumlins, rise to about 35 feet above sea level on both ends of the island. The composition of the island’s two sides is very different: on the east layered with limestone, gypsum, and sandstone, on the west mainly quartzite and slate. Because the geologic structures of the island’s east and west ends are so dissimilar, and because the swamp divides them, some theorists think Oak Island was once two islands, very close together, that may or may not have been joined by the work of men.
While there are more than 350 other islands in the churning silver-gray waters of Mahone Bay, it’s not difficult to imagine why this one would have stood out to the mariners of the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries. It is larger than most of the other dots of land in those waters and very close to shore, barely two hundred yards from a protrusion of the mainland that’s been known for the past two and a half centuries as Crandall’s Point. What most impressed the first Europeans to live in the Mahone Bay area, though, was that the island was covered with a magnificent forest of mature oak trees, with deep roots and stout trunks that supported massive, spreading limbs, leaving most of the ground in the shadow of their canopy. It may have been the only island in Mahone Bay where oak trees grew, and certainly it was the only island covered with them. Those trees were what gave the island its eventual name, though it was designated simply as Island No. 28 by Charles Morris, the surveyor general of the province, who between 1762 and 1765 conducted the first survey of the island and divided it into thirty-two four-acre lots. In 1776, a British cartographer named Des Barres attempted to name it Glouster Isle, but he was overruled by the locals’ insistence on calling it Oak Island.
The island’s oaks, growing so close to the mainland, were an especially attractive feature to the settlers who in 1759 accepted pieces of the hundred-thousand-acre Shoreham Grant that brought hundreds of men and dozens of families to the south shore of Nova Scotia from New England. They were mostly English and Welsh, with names like Monro, Lynch, and Seacombe, and populated a village they called Chester Township. On the south end of the bay, a mostly German and Swiss population was in the process of creating the great seagoing and shipbuilding town of Lunenburg, famous for the Georgian mansions topped with five-sided dormers that were the homes of sea captains in that epoch of tall ships. The settlers in the Chester area, though, were mostly farmers, plus a few ambitious souls who prospered by building and operating lumber mills. Most of the trees on the other islands of Mahone Bay and on the mainland as well were evergreen softwoods—spruce and pine predominated—making the island a primary source of hardwood timber. That a single island among the dozens in Mahone Bay should be covered with oak trees was for a period of sixty years or so the principal mystery of the place. The first to describe the island in print and to remark on its impressive forest of oak trees was a French nobleman named Nicolas Denys, who had helped establish LaHave, the settlement at the entrance to Mahone Bay, in 1632. Denys could conceive of no explanation for how the oaks had gotten there.
AMONG THE POINTS DRIVEN HOME by a study of Oak Island is how much of what we call history is hearsay and supposition, conflation and apocrypha. Even revisionists go back to the earliest written sources, created by men who were putting to paper what they’d heard from people who were themselves often repeating stories they’d been told by someone else. Historians since the time of Herodotus and Thucydides have been deciding what version of events to include and what version to leave out; readers can only hope they’ve chosen wisely.
If one person is identified as the first to discover the works on the island, the name Daniel McGinnis is almost unanimously put forward. As the story is told, McGinnis was sixteen years old in the late spring of 1795 when he rowed to Oak Island one fine morning to explore it, all alone. It was still early in the day, the story goes, when the teenager stumbled upon an unusual saucer-shaped depression in the earth, about 13 feet in diameter, on the elevated ground of the island’s east drumlin. The forked limb of a giant oak extended over the clearing, cut off at a point where its two branches were still almost as thick as a man’s thigh. Attached to the limb, about 15 feet above the ground, was a weatherworn wooden tackle block that was held in place with a wooden peg or “treenail” of the type used in the construction of wooden ships. Taking all this in, young Mr. McGinnis surmised that he had happened upon the hiding place of a pirate treasure.
During the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, when buccaneers terrorized shipping lanes across the globe, Mahone Bay had been one of the world’s great pirate havens. Tales of buried treasure were endemic to the region, but the legends that surrounded Oak Island were particularly ominous. According to several of Nova Scotia’s numerous amateur historians, the citizens of nearby Chester Township had for years shared stories of “strange lights” that glowed on the island after dark. Author Edward Rowe Snow, who embraced this bit of apocrypha as historical fact, wrote that a number of fishermen claimed to have seen on the island human figures “silhouetted against bonfires,” as one local chronicler put it. Eventually, Snow had written, two men overcome with curiosity had ventured out to Oak Island to investigate. They never returned.
Daniel McGinnis did make it back to Chester, according to the story, where he recruited two young friends, also teenagers—John Smith and Anthony Vaughan—to help him dig for the treasure he was certain must have been buried at this mysterious spot on Oak Island. The first thing the three did was attempt to remove the tackle block hanging from the forked limb of the oak tree. But it slipped off the treenail and fell to the ground, where it shattered into powdery fragments, suggesting to the boys that it must be very old. They went to work on the ground then, armed with pickaxes and shovels. They had reached a depth of only 2 feet, though, when they hit a tier of carefully laid flagstones. (They would later decide after some investigation that the rocks were not from Oak Island but instead had been moved there from Gold River, about two miles north on the mainland.) Eagerly tossing the stones aside, McGinnis and his friends found themselves at the entrance to a large shaft. The sides were made of hard, packed clay, but the earth inside was loose and easy to shovel. Driven by the excitement of discovery, the three dug within a few days to a depth of 10 feet, where they struck solid wood. Assuming they had hit the top of a treasure chest, the teenagers shoveled feverishly, only to discover that what they had found was a level platform of oak logs, all about 6 to 8 inches in diameter, the ends of which had been embedded in the walls of the shaft. Removing these, the boys kept digging over the next few days, clearing out the loose soil with a pickaxe, two shovels, a rope, and a bucket. When they hit solid wood for a second time at 20 feet, the three again dug feverishly, convinced that his time they really ha
d found the top of the treasure chest. What they had struck with their shovels, though, was another tier of oak logs, with their rotting ends embedded in the sides of the shaft exactly as the logs at 10 feet had been. At that point, the three looked up at the walls of clay towering above them and realized that even a partial collapse would bury them alive. It was agreed that they needed to mount a much more substantial operation, involving both a far larger workforce and more expensive materials and equipment if they were to go deeper into the shaft.
The three youngsters bought land on Oak Island, as the story goes, where they supported themselves as farmers while making regular trips to nearby towns, seeking out men of means who might help them recover what they were calling Captain Kidd’s treasure.
I HAD RETURNED TO NOVA SCOTIA determined to test every major theory and to question all received wisdom about Oak Island. After four weeks of research, assisted by, among others, the Nova Scotia Archives, the South Shore Genealogical Society, and local historian Charles Barkhouse, I was convinced that the tale was mostly true. This is not to say entirely true. There were a number of details in the narrative that I either doubted or was convinced couldn’t be right, and several others that I believed might be embellishments added as the story was told and retold.
For the moment, I was leaving aside the deeper mystery of who was behind the works on Oak Island and concentrating instead on the story of how those works had been discovered. Even then, the best answers I could find to my questions about who, what, and when were so unclear that nebulousness may have been their most defining feature. At least I didn’t have much doubt that the first to find the massive hole in the ground, now world-famous as the Money Pit, had been the young man Daniel McGinnis. While McGinnis himself was dead by the time the treasure hunt on Oak Island hit high gear in the mid-nineteenth century, his former partners, Vaughan and Smith, had been alive to describe what took place on the island in the early days—dating back to the discovery of the Money Pit—to those who produced the earliest written accounts. Both said there was no question Daniel was the first to spot the features that had inspired the three of them to start digging. Who Daniel McGinnis had been, though, was still a puzzle with a lot of missing pieces to me.
The Curse of Oak Island Page 1