The Curse of Oak Island

by Randall Sullivan

  That McGinnis, Smith, and Vaughan believed there was a treasure buried in the Money Pit also mitigates strongly against the story that the three found the treasure back in the beginning. Why, if they had, would they have continued searching for the treasure years afterward? Joyce McGinnis would explain more than two hundred years later that her ancestor and his two friends had found only “a small treasure” and believed the greater treasure was deeper down in the Money Pit. This story had been told by others in previous decades, the claim being that those who originally dug the Money Pit used the three small chests of gold and silver found by McGinnis, Smith, and Vaughan as a distraction to prevent searchers from probing deeper into the Pit and finding the “real treasure.” Some added that the three chests were only there to stop the wrong searchers from going deeper, so that only those worthy of a treasure much greater than gold and silver would eventually find it.

  Curious notions both, I didn’t believe either. But I also wasn’t willing to completely dismiss them, because once I had confirmed to my satisfaction that the early descriptions of the Money Pit’s original discovery and of the Onslow Company’s search of the Pit were fundamentally accurate, I found myself convinced that the only explanation for such fantastic underground works on Oak Island was that something equally fantastic must have been buried down there.

  That was the essential mystery of the place. But there were other smaller mysteries that seemed to demand attempted solutions, and Samuel Ball’s role was one of them. The only way I could conceive of approaching that particular problem was to try locating Ball’s descendants to see if perhaps they, like the descendants of Daniel McGinnis, had passed down a story through the generations. It turned out there had been a descendant of Samuel Ball (eight generations removed) named Frank Stanley Boyd who had posted some biographical notes and commentaries on the blog of an organization called We Stand on Guard, which had dedicated itself to “the elimination of Racism in Canada.” Boyd had died in Halifax in October 2010, however. I found his obituary, which led me eventually to his son, John-David Boyd, a plumbing contractor in Quispamsis, New Brunswick.

  My first contact with John-David was promising. Two or three days after I left a message on the voice mail at his business, Boyd called me back and seemed intent on impressing me. He repeated at least twice that he was “the head of the family” and the only one in a position to speak for the descendants of Samuel Ball. John-David also told me that when his father was near death, Frank Stanley Boyd had summoned him to his bedside to tell “the rest of the story,” then had said, “don’t give it away.” I took this to mean John-David Boyd was looking to get paid for what he knew, if he knew anything. I could have been wrong about that, and I wasn’t going to pay a source anyway, so I asked Boyd for his email address, which he gave me. The next day I sent a description of my background and intentions, then received a brief but cordial reply from Boyd that he would look it over and get back to me. Days passed, so I sent a second email letting Boyd know that my time in Nova Scotia was growing short. He answered two days later that he was busy with “a project” and that my request was “not a priority” for him. When he did not reply to the email I sent a couple of weeks after returning home, I passed his contact information along to the producers at The Curse of Oak Island, who, unlike me, were prepared to pay Boyd for his time. They told me a month later that he had not replied to any of their emails or phone calls. I sent one more email myself and got no answer.

  If there was any light to be shed on Samuel Ball’s role in the discovery of the Money Pit and the early days of the treasure hunt on Oak Island, it wasn’t going to be shined by me. My frustration was one more reminder, as if I needed any at this point, that Oak Island has long produced more questions than answers.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  What the Onslow Company’s investors had told family and friends about their experiences on Oak Island mostly has to be inferred from who joined the next excavation of the Money Pit. The Truro Company was formed in 1845, although it would not begin operations on Oak Island until four years later. This time there really was a “Dr. Lynds” among the investors (most likely Dr. David Barns Lynds, who lived and worked on Queen Street in Truro). Sheriff Thomas Harris was the only holdover from the Onslow Company’s investors to acquire stock in the new venture, but Anthony Vaughan, now sixty-seven, joined the Truro Company also. The most significant contributions to the Oak Island legend, though, may have been made by four other men: Jothan McCully, who was appointed director of operations and wrote the first newspaper articles about the events on Oak Island; Robert Creelman, who interviewed Vaughan and John Smith and passed their recollections on for posterity; Adams A. Tupper, who would leave the most detailed account of the Truro Company’s operations; and James Pitblado, another mining engineer who was appointed foreman of the crew that reopened the Money Pit in the summer of 1849 and would become one of the most mysterious figures in the annals of Oak Island.

  John Smith had filled in both the Money Pit and the second hole dug 14 feet away by the Onslow Company, which has become known over the years as shaft no. 2. It was Anthony Vaughan, though, who helped the Truro team locate both shafts and then identified which was the Money Pit. The Truro crew had dug to a depth of only 6 feet in the Pit when they hit the top of the Mosher pump that had been abandoned by the Onslow Company back in 1804. Twelve days later, they had reached a depth of 86 feet, where some of the Onslow Company’s cribbing was intact.

  The Colonist article (probably McCully’s) described what happened next:

  When Saturday night arrived … all further work was postponed until Monday morning. Sabbath morning came and no sight of water, more than usual, appearing in the Pit, the men left for church at Chester village with lighter hearts…. At two o’clock they returned from church, and to their great surprise found water standing in the Pit to the depth of sixty feet….

  The next morning they set vigorously to work bailing, and had not been long engaged until the result appeared as unsatisfactory as taking soup with a fork.

  For reasons that were not explained in either the Colonist or Transcript articles, McCully and Pitblado decided that they should proceed by probing the pit with a primitive drill called a pot auger, commonly used to prospect for coal. Curiosity with a whiff of desperation, along with a vague hope that they might bring up clues from below on the drill’s tip seems to have motivated the decision, though that is inference and no more. Under the direction of McCully and Pitblado, five holes were bored to the maximum depth the pot auger could reach, 106 feet, on both the west and the east of the Money Pit’s center. Mud and stone was all the pot auger brought up from the first two holes.

  McCully’s account in the Transcript described what happened when the drill was sent down a third time:

  The platform was struck at 98 feet, just as the old diggers [of the Onslow Company] had found it, when sounding with the iron bar. After going through the platform, which was five inches thick, and proved to be spruce, the auger dropped 12 inches, and then went through four inches of oak; then it went through 22 inches of metal in pieces; but the auger failed to bring up anything in the nature of treasure, except three links resembling the links of an ancient watch chain. It then went through eight inches of oak, which was thought to be the bottom of the first box and the top of the next; then 22 inches of metal, the same as before; then four inches of oak and six inches of spruce, then into clay seven feet without striking anything.

  Those “links” have become gold in subsequent tellings, and they may have been, but McCully did not describe them so in his 1862 article. It was “the metal in pieces” that interested the Truro Company’s investors, several of whom were present, including Dr. Lynds and the company’s largest shareholder, John Gammel.

  McCully and Pitblado moved the auger a few feet away to bore a fourth hole. The drill again struck the spruce platform at 98 feet, and as McCully told it:

  Passing through this, the auger fell about 18 inches a
nd came in contact with (as supposed) the side of a cask. The flat chisel revolving close to the side of the cask gave it a jerky and irregular motion. On withdrawing the auger, several splinters of oak (believed to be from the bilge of a cask) such as might come from the side of an oak stave, a piece of a hoop made of birch and a small quantity of a brown fibrous substance, closely resembling the husk of a coconut, were brought up.

  Pitblado had instructed the men operating the pot auger to remove whatever was brought up on the chisel as carefully as possible, so that it might be examined under a microscope. Pitblado and McCully then directed the men to drill a fifth and final hole a few feet from the fourth. When the auger was brought up that last time, according to Gammel, he saw Pitblado wait until he thought no one was watching him to quickly pinch something from the chisel, wash it clean, then examine it closely before putting it into his pants pocket. He asked Pitblado to show him what he had removed from the auger, but the man refused, Gammel said, insisting that he would show it to all of the investors at the next meeting of the company’s directors.

  The only person Pitblado is known to have showed what he pulled from the auger that day, though, is one Charles Dickson Archibald, who was the manager of the Arcadian Iron Works in Londonderry, Nova Scotia. And all we really know is that Archibald then made a determined effort to purchase the eastern part of Oak Island from John Smith, offering considerably more than the property was worth and raising the offer when Smith refused. Smith would not sell, though. Archibald never made any known statement about what he had seen that had made him want so desperately to purchase the Smith properties on Oak Island, and he would be recalled by his company to England by the time McCully thought to seek him out and ask. Pitblado disappeared from the Mahone Bay area the same night he had pocketed whatever it was from the pot auger. According to that 1951 Nova Scotia Bureau of Information report, the “local legend” was that Pitblado had removed “a jewel” from the auger’s blade. All that can be said for certain is that Pitblado never returned to Oak Island after that day and that the speculation about what he took with him has been endless. But my reading of the record is that it has never been more than that, speculation.

  THOUGH THEY COULDN’T HAVE KNOWN IT at the time, in the spring of 1850 the Truro Company established a pattern of failure that was to be repeated by one group after another over the next century and a half. Each new search team would prepare for success in the belief that a new strategy combined with more advanced machinery would solve the puzzle of Oak Island. And each time they were defeated, the mess they left behind complicated the problem for the next group of treasure hunters.

  The equipment the Truro Company barged out to Oak Island in 1850 included a pair of “two-horse gins,” cast-iron engines powered by workhorses, which could be used for everything from milling grain to pumping water. It was the latter capacity that the treasure hunters of 1850 intended to employ. First, though, they sank a new shaft, the third on the drumlin where the Money Pit was located, digging through red clay so unyielding that at times it seemed they were trying to shovel through bricks. The density of that ground was in and of itself convincing evidence to the Truro Company that whatever channel was delivering water to the Money Pit had to be man-made; water was not going to find a natural course through clay that impenetrable.

  The intent of this exhausting excavation was to create a new shaft (no. 3) they would fill with the water diverted from the Money Pit. They thought they could drain the Pit. Shaft no. 3 stayed dry down to a depth of 109 feet, at which point the Truro Company crew drove a tunnel toward the Money Pit. The result was the same as that achieved by the Onslow Company forty-six years earlier: as the diggers neared the Pit, the end of the tunnel collapsed under a surge of water that nearly drowned the men inside. The two-horse gins were put to work in both the new shaft and in the Money Pit, and the crew worked in bailing teams that kept at it twenty-fours a day for a solid week. The lowest water level they ever managed to attain in the Money Pit was 80 feet.

  The Truro Company’s defeat, though, led them to discoveries that have become a significant part of the Oak Island story. The first of these came when the crew realized that both the Money Pit and the new shaft had filled with saltwater, indicating that it had come from the bay. This meant that the best hope for success was to interrupt the flow of water at its source—or at least somewhere between its source and its point of entry into the Pit. Another reason it couldn’t be a natural watercourse, the Truro Company’s principals reasoned, was that if the water were already flowing underground where the Money Pit had been dug, it would have been impossible to excavate the Pit in the first place. So they had to be dealing with an artificial channel created by drawing from an inlet on the shoreline of the island. And there had to be gates somewhere along its path to permit the original depositors to stop the water and retrieve their treasure.

  For the Truro Company, this was a staggering realization. It meant that the works on Oak Island were not only more sophisticated than anything they had ever seen, but also more than anything they had ever heard about. Exploring what had been done on the island and then figuring out a way to solve the problems this work had created would be a fantastically complex engineering problem, and McCully was only one of a number who were excited about taking it on. The company began what it knew would be a mammoth project by leaving the Money Pit to investigate the south shore of the island, focusing first on Smith’s Cove, which seemed by its proximity the most likely place for an artificial channel of seawater to have been started.

  They began with an examination of the Smith Cove’s beach, situated about 520 feet from the Money Pit, with obvious advantages for channeling water with a tunnel. The company noticed almost immediately that all of the large stones had been removed from a considerable expanse of the beach. Then, when high tide began to ebb, the men observed that this section of the beach “gulched forth water like a sponge being squeezed,” as McCully described it. The men stared at the water bubbling up through the surface and realized this couldn’t be happening naturally. They began to shovel away the sand and stones. At a depth of 3 feet the Truro crew found a 2-inch-thick layer of a brown stringy material they believed (correctly) to be coconut fiber. Below that was a thicker layer of decayed eelgrass or kelp (there was and still is some debate which). Tons of coconut fiber and (most likely) eelgrass were pulled away and piled in heaps all along the shoreline until the workers revealed a compact and remarkably clean mass of beach rocks, protected from the sand and gravel on the surface of the beach by the 6-inch-thick mat of coconut fiber and eelgrass. The men of the Truro Company could only guess how many tons of sand and clay had been removed from the surface of the beach to make room for both the filter and the rocks beneath, but it had to be a hundred thousand pounds at least. The work that had gone into this was stupefying to contemplate, because what had been created was a giant insulating sponge spread out for a length of 145 feet along the shoreline between the high and low tide marks.

  When they recovered from their astonishment, the Truro men agreed that this must be connected somehow to the tunnel that was flooding the Money Pit. To investigate more thoroughly, they decided to build a cofferdam to hold back the tide and enclose this portion of Smith’s Cove while they excavated further. When that had been done and the men removed the layer of beach rocks, they were more astounded still, because what lay beneath were five remarkably well-made box drains constructed from flat stones, each about 8 inches wide, that fanned out from the edge of the high-water mark like the fingers of an open hand.

  As the Colonist article described it:

  In investigating the drains, they found that they connected with one of larger dimensions, the stones forming which had been prepared with a hammer, and were mechanically laid in such a way that the drain could not collapse. There were a number of tiers of stones strengthening the higher part of the drain, on the top of which was also found a coating of the same sort of grass as that already noticed. Over
it came a layer of blue sand, such as before had not been seen on the Island, and over the sand was spread the gravel indigenous to the coast.

  Having laid bare the large drain for a short distance into the bank, they found it had been so well made and protected that no earth had sifted through the arch to obstruct water passing through it.

  The Truro men attempted to follow the drain into the island, but the surrounding soil became so soft and saturated with water that continuing was “impracticable,” as the Colonist article put it. In the alternative, the men excavated half of the shoreline where the sponge of coconut fiber and eelgrass had been torn away, then calculated that whoever had done this work had removed the original beach to a depth of 5 feet. According to Robert Creelman, who was there with the Truro men, the only significant discovery made during this dig was “a partially burned piece of oak wood,” the purpose of which no one could imagine.