The Curse of Oak Island

by Randall Sullivan

  After removing the log platform that had stopped McGinnis and his two friends at 20 feet, the Onslow Company crew continued digging. At 30 feet, their shovels clanged against wood. Just like the three young men who had struck the tier of oak logs at 20 feet years before them, the workmen were certain that they had hit the top of a treasure chest. But it was another platform of oak logs, their rotting ends embedded in the sides of the shaft just as the tiers of logs at 10 feet and 20 feet had been. The Onslow Company crew members showed one another the pick marks in the hard clay walls of the surrounding shaft and were certain these had been made by the men who first dug it out. The workmen and their employers asked one another what could compel men to dig deeper than 30 feet to bury a treasure. Only a cache of incredible riches could possibly explain it.

  They were asking the same question after they struck another log platform at 40 feet, this one covered with a thick layer of charcoal. The Onslow Company’s investors agreed that the only reasonable explanation for the charcoal was that there had been a smithy set up on this platform to sharpen the tools of the men who had opened the Pit originally.

  There was another platform at 50 feet. According to the McNutt manuscript, this tier of logs was covered with a layer of smooth beach stones with “figures and letters” cut into them. At 60 feet, according to McNutt, the platform of logs was spread with a mat of manila grass and “the rind of coconut.” Well aware that coconut fiber had been commonly used as dunnage to protect cargo that had originated in the Caribbean, this find fed the idea that what had been hidden so deep underground must be a fantastic treasure of Spanish gold captured by pirates in the seventeenth century. There was yet another platform of logs at 70 feet, this one covered with a blue-tinted clay “putty” (later used to seal the windows of twenty buildings on the mainland).

  According to the McNutt manuscript, what became known as the “inscribed stone” was found at 80 feet. Adams A. Tupper, a mining engineer who had joined the treasure hunt more than a decade before McNutt did, said that the stone had been found at 90 feet. (It should be mentioned that there are also accounts that suggest the log platforms were not so exactly spaced, which is to say they were only more or less, not exactly, 10 feet apart.)

  What McNutt and Tupper agreed on was that the slab was unmarked on its upper side when the Onslow crew first uncovered it. Only when they flipped the stone over did the workers discover that some sort of message had been etched into it.

  Descriptions of those carvings (which may have been more like scratchings) and of the stone itself have varied in a number of respects. “Three feet long and one-foot square, with figures and letters cut into it,” was how McNutt described the slab, “and being freestone, being different than any on that coast.” However, in his Transcript article (reprinted in the Halifax Sun and Advisor), McCully had described “a stone cut square, two feet long and about a foot thick, with several characters cut on it.”

  Judge DesBrisay’s account has to be given weight because it was based mainly on what he was told by the daughter of the man who took possession of the stone and kept it on display in his home for more than forty years. What the Onslow crew had found (“farther down” than the charcoal and putty, in DesBrisay’s telling) was “a flagstone about two feet long and one wide, with a number of rudely cut letters and figures upon it,” according to the judge’s History of the County of Lunenburg. “They were in hope that this inscription would throw some valuable light on their search, but unfortunately they could not decipher it, as it was too badly cut, or did not appear in their own vernacular.”

  Anthony Vaughan, who told Creelman the stone was found at 90 feet, said it was 3 feet long and 16 inches wide. There were no letters carved into the stone, the way Vaughan told it, just strange “figures.”

  One eyewitness described the stone as yellow-tinged Swedish granite. Another thought it was porphyry and said it was olive colored.

  What all accounts agree on is that after the stone was lifted from its place and removed from the Pit, a slow seep of water began to soften the dirt beneath the workmen’s feet. This quickly became a problem. According to the Colonist article: “At 93 feet [the water seepage] increased and they had to take out one tub of water for two of earth. Still they had no idea that anything was wrong.” It was dusk by then and, as they did each evening, the men finished their workday by probing the bottom of the Pit with a long crowbar. This time, according to the Colonist account, “they struck a hard impenetrable substance bound by the sides of the pit. Some supposed it was wood, and others called it a chest. They left for the night to resume operations in the morning, when they fully expected to solve the mystery.”

  What the men found when they reported for work the next day was that the Pit had filled with water to the 65-foot level. According to all of the early accounts, the Onslow crew bailed that entire day and into the night, but could not lower the water level by more than a few inches. Frustrated and baffled, they sat among the heaps of dirt and debris that surrounded the rim of the shaft, wondering what to do next. The farmers among the workmen told Colonel Archibald that haying season was upon them and that they would have to leave the island to return home in time to cut, dry, and store their grass. Archibald ordered a temporary suspension of work while he and the other investors came up with a new plan of attack.

  In October, the Onslow Company sent “a committee” to Hants County to meet with a “Mr. Mosher” who was reputed to be the best authority in the entire province on how to remove water from a shaft. Mosher was paid the princely sum of £80 to rig a special pump that was transported to Oak Island and lowered into the Money Pit. There, in a preview of things to come, the pump promptly burst. By then, the weather was growing wet and cold with the approach of winter. Colonel Archibald decreed that they should adjourn the expedition until the following spring, in hope that a better plan might be arrived at before then.

  The Onslow Company did return to Oak Island in the spring of 1805 with a new strategy, developed by Colonel Archibald, for emptying the water from the Money Pit. Fourteen feet southeast of the Pit, they sank a shaft to a depth of 110 feet, planning to tunnel under the bottom of the original shaft and approach the treasure from below. When the diggers got within 2 feet of the original Pit, though, water began to ooze through the end of the tunnel. The bank of clay suddenly collapsed in front of them and water surged through. The men in the tunnel barely made it out alive, and within two hours the new shaft was also filled with water to the 65-foot level.

  One more attempt was made at bailing, but the crew could not lower the water in the new shaft either. By then, the Onslow Company’s investors had spent themselves nearly into bankruptcy and surrendered their effort on Oak Island.

  NEARLY HALF A CENTURY WOULD PASS before another serious effort was made to bring up whatever was at the bottom of the Money Pit. By then, the Onslow Company’s two most significant members were dead: Colonel Robert Archibald died in 1812 and Captain David Archibald went two years after that. McGinnis, Smith, and Vaughan lived on for some time after.

  McGinnis built his family home on the opposite end of the island from the Money Pit, where generations of his descendants lived. Daniel’s grandson John McGinnis, for instance, was born on Oak Island in 1865 and remained there all his life. Smith, who took possession of the mysterious stone that the Onslow Company crew had pulled from deep in the Money Pit, built it into the backing of his fireplace, “strange characters outermost, so that visitors might see and admire it,” as Charles Driscoll wrote. Hundreds of people trooped through the modest Smith home to examine the curiosity over the next few decades. Vaughan returned to the mainland to work with his increasingly prosperous family.

  The first of the three to die was the Money Pit’s original discoverer, who passed sometime in early 1827. The only exact dates known are the ones on which Daniel McGinnis’s will was dated, January 4, 1827, and the date it was probated, February 27, 1827. Anthony Vaughan was one of two executors and John Smith
was a witness. So was a man whose role in the early discoveries made on Oak Island remains a mystery, one Samuel Ball.

  I was startled to learn during my return visit to Oak Island, thirteen years after going there to research the Rolling Stone article, that in the first edition of History of the County of Lunenburg, the one published in 1870, Judge DesBrisay had identified the three who discovered the Money Pit as Daniel McGinnis, John Smith, and Samuel Ball. Ball was not replaced by Vaughan until the second edition of DesBrisay’s book was published in 1896. There was no explanation for the change offered. Ball was still in the book, described as one of the “early residents” on Oak Island, “a coloured man, who came from South Carolina where he had been a slave to a master whose name he adopted.” DesBrisay added only that Ball was remembered as “a good man.”

  A bit more information than that was available. Samuel was born (probably in 1764) and grew up on a plantation in South Carolina. On November 14, 1775, fearing the revolutionary fever that was sweeping through the colonies, John Murray, 4th Earl of Dunmore and governor of Virginia, issued the Proclamation of Kemps Landing, in which he declared free men any black males who would join His Majesty’s forces in the battle against rebel forces. Based on this promise, Ball escaped the plantation shortly after the Revolutionary War broke out and joined the troops commanded by Lord Charles Cornwallis, but he was quickly transferred to the army marching on New York under the command of General Henry Clinton, then assigned to the command of a Major Ward and stationed at Bergen Point, New Jersey. At Bergen Point, Ball worked for the British army as “a woodcutter” until Cornwallis surrendered at Yorktown, then fled along with many of the other loyalist freemen to Canada.

  Records show that Ball arrived in Shelburne in 1783 and remained there three years before moving to Chester. Based on an 1809 petition (called a memorial in those times) that Ball submitted to a justice of the peace named Thomas Thompson in Chester, we know that Ball had by then been living on Oak Island for twenty-three years. In his petition, Ball requested the allotment of land promised to black slaves who had joined the loyalist cause. Thomas stated Ball’s case in writing:

  Your Memorialist Ball has no lands but, what he has purchased, never having got any from government, and there is a four-acre lott vacant, No. 32, on Oak Island, joining a lott purchased by your Memorialist. Your Memorialist therefore prays, Your Excellency well be pleased to grant, or otherwise order to have said Lott. Your Memorialist has but one son living. Chester, 9th September 1809.

  This day the above named Samuel Ball came before me and made oath on the Holy Evangelist, that what is stated in the above memorial is strictly true, which I verily believe to be so.

  I do hereby further certify that I have known said Samuel Ball, above twenty years, and I believe he is an honest, sober and industrious settler, worthy of encouragement.

  Thos. Thompson, Jus’Peace.

  The lot Ball requested was granted, and eventually he acquired others, gradually becoming the owner of nine four-acre lots on Oak Island, which made him for a time the landowner with the most real estate on the island. Ball had paid £8 for the first lot he purchased on Oak Island according to the deed dated September 22, 1787. This was a considerable sum at the time and evidence, as shown by the records in the Lunenburg County Book of Deeds, that acre for acre Oak Island was the most expensive land in Mahone Bay. How Ball was able to afford to purchase another seven lots in addition to the one he was awarded by the British Crown and also to acquire an additional hundred acres on the mainland and on Hook Island is something of a mystery. In various poll tax registries, Ball was listed as a farmer who raised cattle and sheep, also working as a logger and fisherman. Somehow, though, Ball and his wife, Catherine, were able to afford a servant named Isaac Butler who remained with them until Ball’s death on December 14, 1845, at the age of eighty-one. Ball’s will, probated on January 5, 1846, shows that his hundred acres on the mainland adjoined “lands owned by Daniel McGinnis.”

  For more than a century and a half, there have been accusations that the young men who discovered the Money Pit (along with Samuel Ball, who was not so young but may have been part of that original discovery) did in fact find a treasure there, which explained their apparently “sudden prosperity” in the early nineteenth century. The story that the young men found three chests of treasure about 20 feet deep in the Money Pit and took one each surfaced in 2007. That year, a local historian named Danny Hennigar spoke to a woman descended from McGinnis who showed him a heavy cross of braided gold that was clearly hammered and hand formed, claiming she had inherited it as part of the treasure passed down through the generations from Daniel McGinnis. The cross, the woman said, had been examined by experts who said it was six hundred years old. That same woman, Joyce McGinnis, also showed up on the island in 2015 with her two sisters and repeated the tale of the three chests—which made for a dramatic story for the season three finale of The Curse of Oak Island. According to her, this cross was the one part of his treasure that Daniel McGinnis had held on to, insisting that it be handed down through the generations from oldest son to oldest son. Her brother had received it from her father, Joyce McGinnis said, but when he was about to die without a male heir, he had given it to her, making her promise to “never let this out of your sight.” Joyce McGinnis said she’d taken it to several jewelers who had told her “it could be as old as five hundred years.” In the summer of 2016, the producers of The Curse of Oak Island arranged for the cross to be examined by Dr. Lori Verderame, a former professor of art history at Penn State who had built a business identifying ancient artifacts. She reported that the cross was rose gold, between twenty-two and twenty-four carats in weight, and was of Spanish colonial design and manufacture, probably cast in a mold in either Mexico or Peru sometime between 1550 and 1700. The tiny holes in the cross had originally held emeralds, she said.

  Others have focused their suspicion on John Smith, who not only fathered fourteen children and supported his brood comfortably, but also came to own 19 percent of Oak Island, all of nearby Frog Island, and pieces of several other islands. How had that been possible, this faction of amateur investigators has demanded. They point to John Smith’s grandson Murdock Smith, who in the late nineteenth century donated the funds for the construction of the library at Port Williams, Nova Scotia, suggesting that he was using a portion of the “treasure” he had inherited to relieve his familial guilt. In fact, Murdock Smith was a successful dentist in Massachusetts and might very well have been able to pay for the library out of his own savings. As for the real estate holdings of John Smith, those could have been amassed by a combination of hard work, thrift, and shrewd investment.

  The stories of the Vaughan family coming into “sudden wealth” around the end of the eighteenth century are both the most numerous and the most compelling. These stories seem to go back to two of Anthony Vaughan’s brothers, John and Daniel, who in the early 1800s became wealthy shipyard and mill owners in New Brunswick. The story that they got their start with a pile of gold coins received from their nephew Anthony Jr. might have something to do with the fact that, according to Families of the Western Shore, the Vaughans established their business in New Brunswick in 1796, within a year of the Money Pit’s putative discovery. Those tales of the Vaughans and the mysterious source of the family’s wealth have stayed alive for more than two centuries. In 1991, an eighty-one-year-old man named Carl Mosher who was living in the veterans’ unit of the Fishermen’s Memorial Hospital in Lunenburg, told one of those stories to a local reporter. Back in 1925, Mosher said, his grandmother Lucy Vaughan, a descendant of Anthony Vaughan, showed him “a wooden trunk containing about twenty-five white canvas bags of gold.” Not long after this, according to Mosher, Lucy’s brother Edward Vaughan “took the trunk and disappeared, leaving his property, business, wife and family.”

  In August 2016, I spoke to a woman named Anna Frittenburg, the great-great-granddaughter of Ennis Joudrey, for whom one of the two major inlets on Oak I
sland, Joudrey’s Cove, was named. Her grandfather (Ennis Joudrey’s grandson) Harris Joudrey, who was born on Oak Island in 1889, had spoken often of the Vaughans and his suspicions about their wealth, Frittenburg told me.

  He said there were four Vaughan brothers living in the area when he was growing up, and that they lived very well, even though they never seemed to work. They had this little schooner that they sailed to the States two or three times a year. My grandfather had been friends with one of the brothers when they were young. He said one time this boy got ill and my grandfather went to visit him. He said the boy was so happy to have a visitor that he sent him to a closet in his room and said, “Move that board.” When my grandfather did, behind the board, in between the wall studs, was a bag filled with gold coins. And the Vaughan boy told him, “You could take some.” My grandfather said he put the board back without taking any of the coins, but that he never forgot that day. He said that later when the Vaughan boy who had been his friend was grown up and was sailing off to Massachusetts or Rhode Island with his brother on their schooner, he became convinced they were making these trips in order to sell some of their gold.

  I rejected (although, I must admit, not categorically) the idea that McGinnis, Smith, and Vaughan had found the treasure back in 1795, for pretty much the same reasons I scorned the theory that the story the three had told of the Money Pit had been a clever fraud. The fraud hypothesis was mainly the product of one Richard Joltes, a colleague of Joe Nickell’s at the Skeptical Inquirer. Joltes’s assertion is that Smith and Vaughan and, possibly, McGinnis (if he actually existed) had cooked the whole thing up as a for-profit scam. The main thing wrong with this argument is fairly obvious, though Joltes seems not to have noticed it. There were only two ways that McGinnis, Smith, and Vaughan could have made money from a manufactured story about treasure buried on Oak Island. One would have been to sell the property on which the Money Pit was located, and Smith—the actual owner of lot 18—not only made no effort to do this, but also refused all offers that came his way and held on to all of his Oak Island property until the end of his life. The other way in which Smith and his two friends could have profited from a fraud would have been to demand payment from those who wanted to search for treasure on Oak Island. It’s clear, though, that the deal the three made with the Onslow Company was to permit the excavation of the Money Pit in exchange for a percentage of whatever treasure was found. There’s not even a slight basis for doubt that all three of the Money Pit’s discoverers believed there was a treasure buried on Oak Island. McGinnis was so convinced—and so convincing about it—that he inspired the succeeding generations of his family not only to hold on to their Oak Island properties, but also to continue the treasure hunt, as both Daniel’s son and grandson did after he was gone.