The Curse of Oak Island

by Randall Sullivan

  McGinnis was described as “an enigma” by R. V. Harris, the lawyer whose 1958 book The Oak Island Mystery had made the Money Pit story known outside Nova Scotia: “His age in 1795 is unknown. His origin and parentage is unknown.” So where had the story of the sixteen-year-old boy who discovered the Money Pit come from? From Anthony Vaughan, mostly, it seemed. Vaughan, an old man by the time his memories were recorded for posterity, had been a main source for the first published account of what had taken place on Oak Island, which appeared in the October 16, 1862, edition of the Liverpool Transcript, a now-defunct weekly newspaper that was distributed throughout southwestern Nova Scotia during the mid- and late nineteenth century. Vaughan had actually told his story at length more than twelve years earlier, in an 1849 interview with a devout Presbyterian named Robert Creelman, who was a member of a treasure-hunting group known as the Truro Company. The author who made use of the Creelman interview for the Transcript article was Jothan (sometimes called Jotham) B. McCully, who had been part of both the Truro Company and the Oak Island Association, separate treasure-hunting groups that had worked on Oak Island between 1849 and 1865. McCully may also have written the second and far more detailed published account of the discovery of the Money Pit, which appeared in three consecutive editions of a Halifax triweekly called the Colonist in January 1864, although the author was identified only as a “member” of a team that had searched for treasure on Oak Island in 1861. The Transcript and Colonist articles each had relied on interviews with John Smith (who died in 1857) as well as those Creelman had conducted with Anthony Vaughan, but Smith apparently had been more taciturn than his old friend. Not so Smith’s daughter, Mary, who worked as the housekeeper for Judge Mather Byles DesBrisay, the county magistrate and local eminence who authored History of the County of Lunenburg (originally published in 1870), which included a two-Page account of the discovery of the Money Pit that was the first to appear between hard covers. Mary Smith, apparently quite voluble, had told Judge DesBrisay the story from her family’s perspective on multiple occasions.

  Those three accounts, published sixty-seven, sixty-nine, and seventy-five years after the putative date of the Money Pit’s discovery, were the core versions of the Oak Island story before Harris’s book was published. There were of course various documents and records dating back to the early nineteenth century that related to the assorted treasure-hunting companies that had formed to attempt the recovery of whatever might be buried on Oak Island. And the scene at the Money Pit had been briefly described in an 1863 volume titled Rambles among the Blue-Noses, written by British author Andrew Learmont Spedon, whose aim was to amuse the people back home with tales from the provincial wilds of eastern Canada. There was also an account of the discovery of the Money Pit written in 1866 by one Israel Longworth, but his work, “History of the County of Colchester,” had never been published. And only a fragment remained of a manuscript written in 1863 by another early treasure hunter, James McNutt, that described the early search for treasure on Oak Island.

  So the early story of the treasure hunt on the island was based largely on the recollections of Anthony Vaughan and Mary Smith, along with various others who claimed to have heard it from Daniel McGinnis and John Smith. This paucity of sources and questions about their reliability have fueled rampant speculation about what really happened on Oak Island in those early days, everything from the allegation that the three young men cooked up a story to cover their tracks after finding a huge treasure trove on Oak Island to the claim that McGinnis, Smith, and Vaughan were the front men for a conspiracy of Yankee loyalists operating a smuggling operation out of Oak Island during the Revolutionary War. The evidence offered to back up these and the dozens of other alternative theories of what took place on Oak Island in the last years of the eighteenth century is of course even more meager than the evidence that supports what has become the more or less official version.

  R. V. Harris wrote in The Oak Island Mystery that most of what could be actually known about Daniel McGinnis’s background had to be derived from “the origins and lineages” of Vaughan and Smith, whose family histories were much easier to find in Nova Scotia’s early public records. In my opinion, no one was in a better position to make such an assertion than Harris, who had served as the attorney to the two men who drove the treasure hunt on Oak Island for seventy years between 1895 and 1965 and who had inherited and relied on the vast collection of records and documents that now made up the bulk of the huge Oak Island file at the Nova Scotia Archives in Halifax. So I took his advice.

  I began with Vaughan. Government and church records established that he was the son of an Anthony Vaughan Sr., who had come to Nova Scotia from Massachusetts in 1768 to claim his piece of the British Crown’s Shoreham Grant: two hundred acres on the mainland almost directly across from Oak Island. Anthony Vaughan Jr. was thirteen years old in 1795, which offered at least some tangential confirmation that his friend Daniel McGinnis probably had been a teenager also. Judge DesBrisay, in his book, described Vaughan and his family as living on the mainland in 1795 and that jibes with what other early writers up to and including R. V. Harris have maintained. But there was little question in my mind that the boy’s family owned land on Oak Island well before the discovery of the Money Pit. There are deeds that show Anthony Vaughan Sr. acquired lots 15 and 17 on Oak Island in 1765 (which wouldn’t seem possible if he had emigrated to Canada in 1768) and lot 14 in 1781. One of Vaughan Sr.’s brothers bought lot 13 in 1781. It is also clear that the Vaughans were operating a lumber mill on the mainland directly across from Oak Island. In 1788 they petitioned the Surveyor General of Woods in the province of Nova Scotia for permission to cut down “Sundry Pine Trees” on nine hundred acres of land for the purpose of farming the land and milling the trees. So there seems little doubt that by 1795 the Vaughan brothers were using or intended to use the trees on their Oak Island properties as timber for their mill and that Anthony Vaughan Jr. must have had some familiarity with the island.

  John Smith was almost certainly living on Oak Island in 1795. In fact, he may have been born there, but it appears more likely that he moved to the island in 1786 at the age of eleven. Born on August 20, 1775, he would have been nineteen years old in the spring of 1795 (more support, in my mind, that Daniel McGinnis really was sixteen years old or so at that time). Smith’s family, like Vaughan’s, had come to Mahone Bay as part of the Shoreham Grant immigration. An Edward Smith, who was most likely (though not certainly) an uncle of John Smith’s father, had acquired the title to Oak Island’s lot 19 on March 8, 1768. John Smith himself made a first appearance in the public record on September 28, 1790, when he married (at age fifteen!) one Sarah Floyd. He next publicly registered his existence on June 26, 1795, when he purchased lot 18 on Oak Island from a Chester merchant named Casper Wollenhaupt for £5. It was the plot of land where the Money Pit was located. That purchase seems to have been the main basis for the claim that the Money Pit had been discovered in the late spring of 1795, the assumption being that Smith had bought the property to secure access to the presumed treasure. Not unreasonable, but far from conclusive.

  But back to Daniel McGinnis. I was distracted briefly by the claims of a handful of amateur historians (and the subject of Oak Island is beset by literally thousands of amateur historians) who doubted that such a person as Daniel McGinnis had actually ever existed, their claim being that the Smith and Vaughan families had used this fictional character as a front to cover their own secretive activities on the island. Judge DesBrisay had described Daniel McGinnis as one of the earliest settlers on Oak Island, but there is no record of anyone named McGinnis owning property on the island prior to 1795. Some of the doubters pointed out that there was no Daniel McGinnis listed in the records of the poll tax imposed on Nova Scotians by the British Crown in 1791, but that merely suggested to me again that McGinnis probably had been a teenager, because only those over the age of twenty-one were required to pay the poll tax and therefore would be listed in th
e Crown records. Others who questioned whether McGinnis was a real person also pointed out that no grave marker with his name had ever been found in Lunenburg County. The early newspaper accounts, though, had described McGinnis as having been buried on Oak Island, and there is to this day a collection of rocks on the drumlin where the Money Pit is located that could very well mark his final resting place. A shard of broken stone from that pile was found to have letters and numbers that could have been consistent with the name, the date of birth, and the date of death of a Daniel McGinnis. On top of that, records existed of various McGinnises living on Oak Island throughout the 1800s. And on the southwest end of the island were the remains of the foundation for a home that had been described since the beginning of the twentieth century as the “McGinnis place.”

  Finally, I consulted a volume titled Families of Western Shore, recommended to me by the South Shore Genealogical Society as the most accurate source available. There was a lengthy section in the most recent edition of the book on the “McInnis-McGinnis” clan that began in the late eighteenth century and ended in the late twentieth, when the book was published. The first entry described the arrival in Nova Scotia of a Donald Daniel McInnes, a “Planter” of Welsh descent, who came to Chester from New England with, among others, “the Vaughan Brothers” in or around the year 1772. McInnes (whose family name became McGinnis at some point before the end of the eighteenth century) was described as having “settled on Oak Island.” The only confusing entry was one showing that McInnes had been awarded a Crown grant of one hundred acres near Chester in 1784, which suggested that was when he came to Nova Scotia, rather than with the Shoreham Grant immigrants who had arrived in 1772.

  My bearings were further shaken when Karlie Morash, who runs the museum on Oak Island, gave me a copy of a document that had been prepared by “the McGinnis family” that she said showed Daniel McGinnis had been thirty-six years old at the time of the Money Pit’s discovery. These family members had relied mainly on three documents: an “Application for Compensation for losses” suffered during the American Revolutionary War that was dated April 7, 1785; a related submission “To the Honourable Lord Commissioner of his Majesty’s Treasury” dated February 17, 1785; and the application for a memorial to Donald McInnes, “Captain of the North Carolina Militia.” On the basis of those, the family had created a time line for Donald Daniel MacInnes (yes, yet another spelling) that followed him from his birth in Scotland in 1759 through his immigration to America in 1770, his residence with his parents in North Carolina, his enlistment in the ranks of the loyalists in 1776 when the revolution broke out, his service under General Angus McDonald and then with Lord Charles Cornwallis, his command of a gunboat in Charleston, South Carolina, and his eventual relocation to Nova Scotia (in or around the year 1785). The final event listed on the time line was the man’s attendance of the baptism for his grandson Johan James MacInnes in Chester in 1795.

  I was flummoxed. When I went back to Families of the Western Shore, however, I found that the genealogy in that volume passed from Donald Daniel McInnes, to a “Daniel Jr.” who had “found ‘The Money Pit Site’ in 1795.” The only explanation I could come up with was that either Karlie or the McGinnis descendants had confused Daniel McGinnis, discoverer of the Money Pit, with his father. But what about the claim that family records showed “Donald MacInnes” attending the baptism of his grandchild in Chester in 1795? That might be accounted for by the other available eighteenth-century document relating to either Donald or Daniel McInnes in Nova Scotia (found in the archives of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints), a copy of the record of the marriage of Donald Daniel McGinnis to Maria Barbara Saller at St. James’ Anglican Church in Lunenburg on September 8, 1795. Daniel Jr. was supposed to have been sixteen when he found the Money Pit a few months before that date, but a marriage later that year hardly seemed out of the question, given that his friend John Smith had been only fifteen when he married. But what about the alleged baptism of the grandson of Donald MacInnes? I went back to Families of the Western Shore, where, with both a sense of relief and a conviction that I could be done chasing the ghost of Daniel McGinnis, I discovered a reference to a document recording the baptism of one James Johan McGinnis, son of Daniel and Maria Barbara, in Chester on July 26, 1797.

  I was satisfied that I had a working model of who Daniel McGinnis had been and where he had come from: the son of a Scottish or Welsh father who came to America as a boy, lived with his family in North Carolina, joined the loyalist side in the Revolutionary War and emigrated to Canada after the British surrender, accepting the grant of one hundred acres near Chester that he worked as a farmer. If Donald Daniel Sr. had been born in 1759, then it made sense that Donald Daniel Jr. might have been born twenty years later in 1779, which would have made him sixteen years old in 1795. The story held up, but only to a point.

  It seemed clear that the tale of young Daniel McGinnis rowing out to a mysterious uninhabited island where he was startled by the discovery of a weird depression in the ground was not exactly how things had really happened. In 1951, the Nova Scotia Bureau of Information (a government agency that no longer exists) published the first official account of the Oak Island story. The document’s concise summary of the Money Pit’s discovery reads as follows: “Anthony Vaughan, Jack Smith and Dan McInnes, on a shooting trip to Oak Island from the neighboring mainland, found an aged oak with a sawed short limb from which dangled a stout line and pulley. Under the tree was a depression in the ground, apparently man made.”

  Among the many problems with that account is that Oak Island was inhabited in 1795 by John Smith and his family among others. It was possible Smith already owned lot 18 on Oak Island when the Money Pit was discovered at some date after June 26, 1795. (One account of the Pit’s discovery placed the year as 1799.) Daniel McGinnis might have rowed out to the island—almost certainly had rowed out to the island, if he wasn’t already living there—but it could have been for the purpose of visiting his friend John or doing some work for John’s family. Or maybe he was tracking game; Frederick Blair, the dominant figure in the Oak Island treasure hunt from the late nineteenth century through the middle of the twentieth and the greatest researcher of the Oak Island story, wrote that McInnes had been “partridge hunting” when he found the Money Pit. Other accounts say that he was cutting trees for either Smith or Vaughan when he stumbled on the anomaly that would launch what has become the longest treasure hunt in human history.

  What exactly that anomaly had been was yet another question for which a variety of answers had been offered.

  The account of the discovery in Judge DesBrisay’s book read:

  McInnes one day discovered a spot that gave evidence of having been visited a good many years earlier. There had been cuttings away of the forest, and oak stumps were visible. One of the original oaks was standing, with a large forked branch extending over the old clearing. To the forked part of this branch, by means of a treenail connecting the fork in a small triangle, was attached an old tackle block. McInnes made known his find to his neighbors.

  No mention of a large circular depression. Also, DesBrisay’s account made it sound as if McGinnis was living on the island at the time, as were “his neighbors” Smith and Vaughan. Only when all three went back to the spot the next day did they notice that the ground beneath the tackle block had “settled and formed a hollow,” according to DesBrisay, who wrote that the three “cleared away the young trees, and removed the surface soil for about two feet” before finding the tier of flagstones and the entrance to a shaft.

  The first newspaper account written by McCully for the Liverpool Transcript also described McGinnis as initially being curious about the stumps of old oak trees crowned with thick mats of moss and then noticing that the trees growing among the stumps were younger than the other oaks in the forest. The descriptions of “oak stumps” and “young trees” seemed especially significant to me, because, if true, they almost certainly ruled out a number of the
theories of Oak Island that had been offered over the years, some of them dating back a thousand years or more. There was no way (and arborists hired by The Curse of Oak Island have confirmed this) that McGinnis would have noticed either the oak stumps or the young trees if the “cutting away of the forest” had occurred centuries earlier. To me, that almost certainly meant that whoever was responsible for the original excavation in that spot had done the work no earlier than the seventeenth century. This considerably shortened the long list of candidates who had been proposed by literally dozens of theorists.

  The Colonist articles of 1864, also possibly written by McCully, made less of the oak stumps than of three remaining oak trees that grew in an equilateral triangle around the Money Pit. The articles make it clear that those three trees were what marked the ground between them. The Colonist articles also state that after observing the triangle of trees, McGinnis noticed that the bark of each trunk had letters and symbols carved into it. This description appears in no other early account of the Money Pit’s discovery.

  Among the many questions raised by these early accounts is this: just what kinds of oak trees were growing on Oak Island back in 1795? The original trees are long gone, mostly killed off by an infestation of black ants during the nineteenth century. R. V. Harris had noted that a number of his sources “apparently with a view to adding more mystery to their stories, have stated that this species of oak does not grow elsewhere in Nova Scotia, that they are southern trees found no farther north than Louisiana.” Also, at least two historians who authored books on the subject of piracy and mentioned Oak Island in their works (one being Charles B. Driscoll, whose Doubloons is regarded in Canada as a classic work) had written that the trees on the island were the species known as live oak (Quercus virginiana), an evergreen oak found only in the southern United States. Harris, though, asserted that the trees on the island were “undoubtedly” red oaks, which do grow on the Nova Scotia mainland. He cited the autopsy of one of the last surviving old oaks on the island, a wounded tree that had been cut down in 1931 “and examined critically with a view to determining its age and the cause of the injury.” Embedded deep in the tree’s trunk, those who cut it open found the tip of a thick knife blade that had broken off inside it. When the rings of the tree were counted outward from the blade, it was determined that at least 183 years had passed since the wound was inflicted, which Harris claimed as support for his theory that “the ‘Pit’ was constructed between 1650 and 1750.” Some later investigators would point out that those who had identified the trees on the island not as red oaks but as live oaks “had the benefit of seeing them in person,” as one put it. The last account concerning the oaks written while some of them were still standing on the island was in the pamphlet published by the Nova Scotia Bureau of Information, whose anonymous author had visited the island by motorboat during the summer of 1951. “The bare branches of three large, dead oaks tower above the evergreens east of Pirate Cove, and there are a few standing large dead oaks around the corner on the southern side [of the island]. There are a few other oaks in leaf, but all much smaller.”