The Curse of Oak Island

by Randall Sullivan

  Those who insist the trees on Oak Island were brought north in wooden ships and planted there make much of the fact that the recovered fragment of the McNutt manuscript asserted that the first thing Daniel McGinnis had noticed that caused him to stop and consider the Money Pit location was a circle of red clover growing in the spot, a variety of clover that was not native to Nova Scotia. This claim about the red clover and other nonnative plants growing around the Money Pit was repeated in T. M. Longstreth’s To Nova Scotia, published in 1935.

  What most confused me about the nineteenth-century descriptions of the Money Pit’s discovery was the part about the tackle block. When I’d first heard the story of the old wooden pulley fixed to the oak tree branch that hung over the Money Pit, I’d reflexively dismissed it as apocrypha. If some group of people had gone to the massive effort of performing the extraordinary work on Oak Island for the purpose of concealing a treasure (for which, obviously, they planned to return at some later date), it did not make sense that they would have been so careless as to leave an obvious tell. And yet the story of the tackle block attached to the forked branch of the oak by a treenail had been repeated in every early account of the discovery of the Money Pit. I had a sense it must be true. But if it was true, this meant that whoever had dug the Money Pit in the first place had wanted it to be found. That seemed even more certain if one accepted as accurate an early account attributed to Anthony Vaughan that there were carved “marks and figures” on the trunk of the oak near its base.

  WHAT MCGINNIS, SMITH, AND VAUGHAN DID after they gave up digging in the Money Pit by themselves is easier to know than what happened earlier, because the three young men were by then intent on involving others in their treasure hunt. First, though, they took precautions to protect their find. Before they went in search of a partner or partners who would help them mount a more extensive excavation, the three teenagers marked the depth their dig had reached, loosely refilled the bottom of the pit with dirt, surrounded it with oak sticks driven into the mud, then covered those over with branches from young trees they had felled.

  They also searched the island. Their most significant find was what was left of an “old road” (which is Judge DesBrisay’s description; another writer called it a “rough path”) that led to the Money Pit site. In DesBrisay’s account, the three actually found the road before they started digging and that discovery seems to have been what convinced Smith and Vaughan that their friend McGinnis really had found something. Besides the road or path, the discovery that seems to have most excited the three was a large iron ringbolt they found at low tide on an eastern cove of the island, embedded in a rock. The three assumed it was where the ship had tied up while the pirates had buried their treasure. Though there is no clear record of when McGinnis purchased his property on Oak Island, it seems clear from the recollections of others that McGinnis, after marrying, built himself a house on the southwestern part of the island and farmed the land. Smith, already married and the owner of lot 18, built himself a house near the Money Pit and proceeded to acquire lots 16, 17, 19, and 20, giving him ownership of the entire twenty-four-acre eastern end of the island. Vaughan, by every account, lived on the mainland even after marrying. This is perhaps why, after an intervening period of seven or eight years, it was Vaughan who found the partner who would organize the first well-financed assault on the Money Pit.

  The early accounts offer multiple explanations of why it took so long. Only those willing to work twelve-hour days could make a life on Mahone Bay during that time, and neither the young men nor their neighbors had the time, the energy, or the money to reopen the Money Pit and try digging deeper into it. Others have argued that people were afraid of Oak Island. Word that McGinnis, Smith, and Vaughan claimed to have found a spot where pirate treasure was buried had produced an oft-repeated local legend that the buccaneers killed a black slave and left his ghost to guard their treasure. There were also stories that a witches’ coven met on the island and cast curses on anyone who dared to visit. But the simplest (and therefore most likely) explanation was that the three young friends kept their mouths closed about what they had found and waited for an encounter with a person of means they believed could help them find the treasure.

  In retrospect, what seems most remarkable is that McGinnis, Smith, and Vaughan never seem to have wavered in their belief about who had buried that treasure.

  CHAPTER TWO

  From the perspective of what we know about the world today, it might seem absurd that the belief it was Captain Kidd’s treasure buried on Oak Island should persist for more than a hundred years. Even when the second edition of his History of the County of Lunenburg was published in 1896, Judge DesBrisay referred to the Money Pit as the burial place of “the Kidd Treasure.” From the point of view of the people living in Mahone Bay in the late eighteenth century, however, this notion was perfectly reasonable.

  The coastlines of Nova Scotia and Newfoundland had been pirate havens all during the seventeenth century and well into the eighteenth. In Nova Scotia, there was hardly a bay, cove, or inlet that did not have some legend of pirate treasure associated with it. And no part of Nova Scotia was more steeped in such lore than Mahone Bay. According to R. V. Harris, “the name ‘Mahone’ itself is derived from the French word mahonne which in turn is derived from the Turkish word mahone, which means a low-lying craft, propelled by long oars, called sweeps, and much used by pirates in the earlier days of the Mediterranean.” There’s some question about whether the bay’s name actually is an allusion to pirate boats, though most believe so. “Mahone Bay” first appeared on a chart of the Nova Scotia seacoast drawn by a Captain Thomas Durell in 1736, but Durell left no indication of where he got the name. It is clear, though, that pirates had been making use of the bay for more than a hundred years by then, and the reasons why it was so attractive to them are obvious. Twenty miles long by twelve miles wide, surrounded by thickly forested hills and protected from view by the Tancook Islands, Mahone Bay provides an ideal location to scan what are today the main shipping lanes running along the southern coast of Nova Scotia. And Oak Island might be the most protected body of land in the entire bay, with outer islands blocking sight of it until one sails very close to the mainland. A ship anchored on the south shore of Oak Island is about as well hidden from the open sea as it is possible to be and remain afloat, in a spot where it would take five minutes to row a boat to a mainland, which back in the seventeenth century was heavily populated with white-tailed deer, black bear, and moose, along with plenty of pheasant and grouse. The bay was then and remains today the summer home of hundreds of thousands of ducks and geese, not to mention the haddock, mackerel, and scallops that also fill its waters. During the warm season, it’s difficult to imagine a better place for a ship’s crew to fatten up, lay in provisions, and make repairs.

  Henry Howard Brownell, in his 1861 work The English in America, observed not only that pirates had been “quite numerous all along the Atlantic coast of America” during the previous two centuries, but also that the freebooters made LaHave, at the entrance to Mahone Bay, “their depot.” In 1700, the French governor of Arcadia actually invited the pirates of Nova Scotia to make LaHave their base of operations, in order to keep the fort there out of British hands. The buccaneers happily obliged, mainly because the fort “was favorably situated for committing depredations on the trade with Massachusetts,” as Thomas Chandler Haliburton put it in volume 1 of his An Historical and Statistical Account of Nova Scotia, published in 1829.

  This sort of cozy relationship between pirates, government officials, and financial interests was common in the years between 1600 and 1750. Those who worked under the sponsorship of the British Crown were called privateers, and there were any number who alternated between collecting bounties for the ships they captured and simply seizing the loot and sailing off on the high seas. I found it remarkable that the greatest of all the privateers who turned pirate—the most successful and powerful buccaneer in history, in my e
stimation—is so little known. Perhaps this is because the career of Peter Easton (1570–1620) came so early in the history of English piracy. He was the scion of a family that was admired and respected for its service to the Crown, not only for having fought in the Crusades under Richard the Lionheart, but also for having distinguished themselves in the defeat of the Spanish Armada. Peter Easton himself was still a loyal servant of Queen Elizabeth in 1602, when she commissioned him as a privateer and gave him command of a convoy that was to protect the British fishing fleet in Newfoundland. His commission from the Queen gave Easton the legal right to press local fishermen into his service and to attack enemy ships and wharves with impunity; he was actually encouraged to capture any Spanish ship that he could. Aboard his flagship Happy Adventure, with what had once been the Crusader flag, the St. George’s Cross, at its masthead, Easton enjoyed immediate success. His career as a privateer was short-lived, however, because when Elizabeth died in March 1603 her successor, James I, promptly sued for peace with Spain. Easton’s continued attacks on Spanish ships turned him into the first notorious British pirate, a role he played with remarkable dash and vigor. For the next decade, he and his fleet captured Spanish ships from the West Indies to the Mediterranean, taking enormous wealth in gold, while at the same time extorting protection money from English ships throughout the Atlantic Ocean. In 1610, his convoy successfully blockaded Bristol Channel, which gave Easton control of all shipping that came and went from British ports in the west of England. Throughout this time, Easton maintained his headquarters in Newfoundland, where his home base was an island in Placentia Bay called Oderin. Horseshoe-shaped and composed mainly of high hills, Oderin’s sheltered harbor not only had room for all of Easton’s ships, but it also concealed them from virtually every approach. (Placentia Bay was also the protected body of water where Franklin D. Roosevelt and Winston Churchill met aboard a ship to draft the Atlantic Charter as they prepared to join forces in World War II.) In Newfoundland, Easton continued to fill his ranks with men from English fishing vessels. Many were pressed into service, but it was widely reported that most of the fifteen hundred fishermen who joined Easton’s crews did so voluntarily.

  The British captain Sir Richard Whitbourne, in his work Discourse and Discovery of Newfoundland, recalled that in late 1611 he had met “the famous pirate, Peter Easton, who then commanded ten stout ships.” Whitbourne’s encounter with Easton was more than a meeting. In fact, the pirate captured and plundered all of the thirty ships under Whitbourne’s command at St. John’s (today the largest city in Newfoundland) and took Whitbourne himself prisoner. The captain was not released until he pledged to obtain a pardon for Easton upon his return to England.

  Even after turning Whitbourne loose, though, Easton remained unrelenting. In June 1612, by Whitbourne’s account, Easton sailed into Harbour Grace, where he stole five ships, a hundred cannons, and “goods to the value of £10,400”—millions of dollars in today’s money. The pirate also “induced” an additional five hundred English fishermen to join his crews and robbed assorted French, Flemish, and Portuguese ships of their cargos and provisions. On the mainland, his crews robbed settlers, burned their forests, and murdered those who resisted.

  Easton’s behavior was not entirely malign, Whitbourne would point out when he submitted his request that the pirate be pardoned. Easton, then in near-total control of Canada’s Atlantic coast, had permitted the first man appointed by the Crown as proprietary governor of Newfoundland, John Guy, to form the island’s founding British colony at Cuper’s Cove. He would not allow Guy to form a second colony, however.

  By the time Easton’s pardon was granted by King James I, he was working the Barbary Coast, where he took a number of Spanish ships. From there he sailed to the Caribbean, where it was reported he had breached the purportedly unassailable fort at San Felipe del Morrow in Puerto Rico (which had previously withstood a siege by Sir Francis Drake). Whether that is true or not, Easton certainly captured the treasure-laden Spanish ship San Sebastian, which he hauled back to Newfoundland. On discovering that his pardon had been granted, Easton retired to Villefranche on the French Riviera with two million pounds of gold, wealth that permitted him to acquire the title marquis of Savoy and live out the remainder of his days in splendor.

  It’s difficult to think of another outlaw in history who made crime pay better than Peter Easton. Among his admirers is Marty Lagina, one of the two brothers who have driven the treasure hunt on Oak Island since 2007. It was Marty who first suggested to me that Easton might be the man behind the works on Oak Island: “This was a very smart guy, and he wouldn’t have just sailed off with all his wealth and risked losing it on the sea or on land. He would have kept something in reserve, hidden. Why not on Oak Island?”

  While Easton may have had motive and opportunity, there’s absolutely no evidence that connects him with Oak Island. Placentia Bay is more than a thousand miles from Mahone Bay. The idea that Easton was responsible for what took place on the island certainly can’t be dismissed, but that’s about the extent of the theory’s viability.

  Of course, the evidence is even thinner for the numerous other famous pirates who have been linked to Oak Island. Those who propose Edward “Blackbeard” Teach (1680–1718) as the man behind the Money Pit like to cite his famous boast that “I’ve buried my money where none but Satan and myself can find it, and the one that lives longest takes all,” but that’s about all they have. There’s nothing to indicate that Teach was ever anywhere near Nova Scotia. Henry Morgan (1635–1688) is another candidate who has been suggested. Those who back Morgan note that after sacking the city of Panama in August 1670, the famous pirate captain and his crew sailed away with spoils of gold, silver, and gemstones worth well over $100 million in today’s values. Just six months later, Morgan, suspecting a mutiny among his men, slipped away during the night. Aside from the fact that the treasure of Panama has never been found or accounted for, however, there’s nothing that connects Morgan to Nova Scotia, let alone to Oak Island.

  A slightly more plausible case might be made for Sir William Phipps (1650–1694). Phipps was a privateer who managed to remain in the good graces of the Crown, in large part because of a spectacular early success. In 1687 and 1688 Phipps led a pair of expeditions that recovered the Concepcion, an almiranta or “flagship galleon,” of the Spanish fleet that had foundered on a reef along Hispaniola’s Ambrosia Bank more than forty years earlier and was still loaded with a fantastic thirty-four-ton treasure of silver coins, silver bullion, gold doubloons, gemstones, and Chinese porcelain that was worth well over a $1 billion in today’s money. When Phipps hauled his prize back to London, he became a wealthy man and a national hero. He was knighted and made a Sheriff of New England, where he eventually rose to the position of Massachusetts governor. While most of the other famous pirates and privateers of his time sailed the waters of the Caribbean, Phipps was quite familiar with the North Atlantic, and in fact he was almost as celebrated for his sacking of the Acadian city of Port Royal on Nova Scotia’s Bay of Fundy as he was for the capture of the Concepcion. Phipps was proposed as the originator of the Money Pit in a book titled Oak Island and Its Lost Treasure, put out by Formac, a Halifax house that has created a significant-sized cottage industry devoted to publishing works that champion doggedly researched but often weakly supported theories of Oak Island. The suggestion that Phipps kept a huge part of the treasure recovered from the Concepcion and buried it on Oak Island is something that can’t be simply shrugged off, but that’s about as much as can be said for it.

  THE PEOPLE LIVING IN THE MAHONE BAY of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries had just one pirate in mind when they spoke of the Oak Island treasure, however, and that was William Kidd (1645–1701). This singular focus on Captain Kidd was, I believe, largely a function of time and place. His rise to prominence came three-quarters of a century later than Peter Easton’s and took place only after he had settled in New York City. The unquestionably political ci
rcumstances of Kidd’s trial and execution by the British Crown, though, were what made him a pirate legend.

  Kidd was “of obscure origin” according to the Encyclopedia Britannica, though the man himself testified before the High Court of Admiralty in London that he had been born in Greenock, Scotland, in 1645. His father may have been a ship’s captain who was lost at sea, but some historians have made the case that the famous pirate was sired by a Church of Scotland minister. Historians also have made claims that in his youth Kidd served as an apprentice on a pirate ship, that he commanded a privateer in the wars of William III and fought the French, and that he performed “brave service” for the Crown in the American colonies. It can be stated with a bit more confidence (but no real certainty) that by 1680 Kidd, then thirty-five, had prospered well enough from his life at sea that he was able to resign from the British navy and purchase his own ship. What we can be sure about is that in 1689, Kidd attempted to settle in New York and to establish himself there as a person of means. This early effort at making a life on land was cut short the same year, though, when Kidd was dispatched by British authorities to the Caribbean. There is yet more disagreement about whether he went there as the captain of a privateer or as a member of the French and English crew of a pirate ship that mutinied, renamed the ship Blessed William, and made Kidd their new captain. Either way, the Blessed William became part of the small British fleet that defended the island of Nevis from the French; Kidd and his crew were instructed that they could collect their pay from any French ships or towns they captured and looted.