The Curse of Oak Island

by Randall Sullivan

  Sanguinity aside, the Association did perform an astounding series of digs that summer, the most remarkable being a circular tunnel at a depth of 95 feet that went around the entire circumference of the Money Pit. They encountered two of the previous shafts that had been sunk in the vicinity but no sign of the flood system, and yet each time they dug down to a depth below 110 feet, their tunnels filled with seawater.

  IN THE SUMMER OF 1864, at a depth of 110 feet, the Oak Island Association finally did find the flood tunnel, according to Samuel Fraser, who described this event in his 1895 letter to friend A. S. Lowden: “As we entered the old place of the treasure we cut off the mouth of the tunnel. As we opened it, water hurled around rocks about twice the size of a man’s head with many smaller, and drove the men back for protection…. The [flood] tunnel was found near the top of our tunnel.”

  The Association’s crew confirmed that they had in fact found the fabled flood tunnel by dumping cartloads of clay on the man-made beach in and around the box drains; when the water in the Money Pit was muddied just a short time later, the Association’s investors were certain that they had indeed located the tunnel that men had been searching for since the early nineteenth century. Their sense of accomplishment was short-lived, however; every attempt they made at shutting off the flow of water failed, and they could not find the gate that they were certain must be somewhere inside the tunnel.

  By the late summer of 1864, its funds exhausted and its investors discouraged, the Oak Island Association was winding down. The constant churn of seawater in the Money Pit was softening the walls of the shaft to the point that more and more of the workmen were refusing to enter it. To reassure their crew, the Association’s members voted to hire a mining engineer to inspect the Pit. When the engineer declared the original shaft “unsafe” and advised that it be condemned, however, the Association accepted defeat and withdrew from the treasure hunt.

  At least a couple of the Association’s members insisted that the discovery of the flood tunnel was a victory they could build on, and they refused to give up. The evidence that men had gone to extraordinary—even incredible—lengths to bury something on Oak Island was now simply too overwhelming to doubt. A new treasure-hunting company would be formed, these diehards declared, and this one would find its way to the treasure.

  THE DISASTERS WROUGHT by the Oak Island Association ensured that any future treasure hunters would be working on two fronts, not only wrestling with the puzzle of the original engineering project on the island, but also working through the jumble of failed efforts left behind by the searchers who had gone before them. The existence of nine or ten shafts and several dozen tunnels dug all around the Money Pit, combined with the collapse of the Pit in 1861, made further work in that location not only dangerous but also probably futile. In terms of the larger investigation of what had taken place on Oak Island, though, there was at least one positive result: prospective treasure hunters were forced to back up and look at the big picture beyond the drumlin on the east end of the island where the original Pit had been dug.

  In March 1866, with the consent of Anthony Graves, the directors of the Oak Island Association assigned their rights on the island to a new company that was being formed in Halifax. It initially called itself the Oak Island Eldorado Company, but eventually became better known as the Halifax Company. Proposing to raise $4,000 in capital to begin operations, the Halifax Company incorporated in May 1866 by offering two hundred shares at $20 apiece. By June, these had been sold on the basis of a “Plan of Operations” that would begin in Smith Cove with the construction of “a substantial wood and clay dam seaward to extend out and beyond the rock work, so as to encompass the whole [cove] within the dam [and] pump out all the water within the area, and so block up the inlet from the sea.” The cost of this work would be no more than £400 (about $2,000 in US currency at the time), promised the new company’s directors, who added that “there cannot be any doubt but this mode of operation must succeed and will lead to the development of the hidden treasure, so long sought for.”

  Nearly all of what we know about the operations of the Halifax Company comes from James McNutt, who continued the search with the third enterprise that had employed him on Oak Island during the past sixteen years, and Samuel Fraser, who worked as a foreman for the Halifax consortium. It is from Fraser that we have a description of the cofferdam the company constructed, 12 feet high by 375 feet long off the shoreline of Smith’s Cove, 110 feet below the high-water mark. Fraser does not describe the labor that went into this project, but it had to have been tremendous; nor does he remark on what must have been the company’s devastation when the dam not only failed to stop the flow of water into the Money Pit, but also was fairly rapidly broken apart by tidal surges.

  What the Halifax Company did next was both sad and predictable: they returned to the Money Pit. One more time, the Pit was cleared out, this time to a depth of 108 feet, 10 feet below the oak platform that had been struck by the Onslow Company in 1805. That platform, though, was gone, having fallen in the 1861 collapse. There were various speculations about where the platform—and the supposed treasure that had rested on it—were now. It was generally agreed that the Money Pit contained a cavity that went to a depth of perhaps 155 feet (Fraser insisted that this was how deep the original excavation had gone) and that the treasure could have dropped all the way to the bottom or into one of the tunnels to the Pit dug by various search groups. Believing that the treasure would have fallen in the direction of the tunnel that caused the Pit’s collapse, the Halifax group dug into the south side of the Money Pit. Once again, though, the water in the Pit stopped their progress. In a letter written in 1898 by a man from Pictou, Nova Scotia, there is a description from the worker (“Mr. Robinson”) who was at the front of the tunnel:

  After going a few feet he felt the earth give under his feet a little; he told the men to give him a pick and he drove it down and through and the water came up. He took a crowbar and put it down and his arm to the shoulder with it and says that he could swing the bar around in the Pit [below him] but the water was coming so fast he had to give it up.

  The Halifax Company’s crew then built a platform at the 90-foot level in the Pit, from which they would carry on what they called “boring operations.” The day-to-day journal of the work kept by McNutt tells us that a drill inside a pipe was sent in various directions between November 26, 1866, and January 7, 1867. At a depth of 110 feet the drill went through spruce wood, then coarse gravel, then soft clay and blue mud to an additional depth of 20 feet, when water began to flow up through the tube, carrying with it wood chips, coconut fiber, and charcoal. At a depth of 134 feet from the surface the drill brought up oak borings, then some chips of either spruce or poplar from a plank it seemed to be running alongside of. Between 155 feet and 158 feet, the drill brought up a material that was dry and reddish brown. In other words, they found nothing new.

  The company at that point decided on a radical departure, this being a move to solid ground 175 feet south of the original works to sink a new shaft (now no. 10) on a line between Smith’s Cove and the Money Pit. They went down 175 feet, the deepest penetration of the island since the treasure hunt had begun, then used the shaft to drive tunnels laterally at depths of between 95 and 110 feet, the hope being that they would find the flood tunnel and divert it into the new shaft. The utter failure of this effort not only bankrupted the Halifax Company, but it also stopped the treasure hunt on Oak Island for more than a quarter century.

  Still, stories of what had been discovered continued to spread, told and retold by men who had been part of the Truro Company, the Oak Island Association, and the Halifax Company. Among those who heard these stories, none seem to have been so thrilled by them as a boy named Frederick Leander Blair, born a year after the Halifax Company abandoned its efforts. Blair would not only revive the treasure hunt on Oak Island and sustain it for more than fifty years, but he would also become the best student of the island’s hi
story there has ever been.

  CHAPTER SIX

  That the story of “pirate treasure” buried on Oak Island could endure so long—well into the late nineteenth century—was much easier for me to understand when I learned that buried caches of gold coins were regularly being discovered in Nova Scotia during those years. People all across the province were thrilled by tales of treasure finds being made in nearby towns and villages. In Pictou County, the largest public gathering of 1876 had been generated by a story that swept through the town of New Glasgow, where, as the Eastern Chronicle reported it, “throngs of people, not less than a thousand” had rushed to the southwest corner of the Riverside Cemetery after hearing that a “group of individuals” had been seen “lurking about during the night.” There, they discovered that “a spruce tree upwards of 40 feet had been uprooted, and a hole of considerable size dug,” the newspaper reported. “When first seen after the digging, the place alleged to have all the appearance of a box of some size, having been exhumed, hauled across the tracks with sleepers and planks and dragged down the steep bank to the East River, where it was supposed the box of treasure was placed in a boat and carried away.” Only a little more than a year later, the December 15, 1877, edition of the St. John Daily News splashed the discovery of more than sixty thousand “three spade guineas” that had washed out of a muddy bank at St. Martins on the Bay of Fundy. The estimated value at the time was more than $300,000, about $36 million in today’s U.S. dollars.

  It was not until the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that some in Nova Scotia began to suggest that what was buried on Oak Island might not be pirate booty after all. The alternative theories these people offered arose from the century-and-a-half-long conflict between the French and the British for control of Canada’s Atlantic coast.

  The English had first claimed the northern reaches of the New World in 1497, when John Cabot landed on Cape Breton Island, now part of Nova Scotia. The French soon followed, though, with an eye to the establishment of settlements that defied British rule. The fort and town that Samuel de Champlain constructed at Port Royal on the Bay of Fundy was the first solid foothold the French made in what would become Nova Scotia. The British answered with a warning that they owned the entire province, as well as Newfoundland and New Brunswick, from the moment that Cabot planted the English flag at Cape Breton. Resulting wars large and small for control of the disputed territories were waged between the French and the British until deep into the eighteenth century.

  The French, after losing what would be known as the War of the Spanish Succession and signing the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713, surrendered all of their holdings on the Canadian mainland, retaining just four islands along the Atlantic coast: Prince Edward, Cape Breton, St. Pierre, and Miquelon. King Louis XIV and the great-grandson who in 1715 succeeded him, Louis XV, moved vigorously to protect what France had been left with. On Cape Breton, government engineers, private contractors, craftsmen, and French soldiers would labor for more than a quarter century to construct the immense fortifications that enclosed the fifty-acre settlement at Louisbourg. The costs were enormous and what were known as “Louisbourg pay ships” regularly delivered a fortune in gold and silver coins from the French treasury to pay for men and materials. Two of those pay ships disappeared en route to Cape Breton. No survivors ever surfaced to explain what had happened and the ships themselves have never been found. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, it would begin to be whispered that to protect their wealth from an eventual British attack on Louisbourg, the French had hidden the gold and silver from those missing pay ships in an underground vault they had created in some remote part of Nova Scotia. Oak Island gradually became the favored location of those who spread this story.

  A rival but related theory involving Louisbourg also emerged during this period, the story in this case being that a high-ranking French official had colluded with a corrupt contractor to funnel much of the gold and silver bound for Louisbourg into a secret hiding place, which again became Oak Island.

  Neither theory was entirely implausible, but as I would find was the case with most of the possible answers to who was behind the works on Oak Island, the fact that they might possibly be true was the principal evidence that supported them. The same could be said of the third popular theory of who was responsible for works on Oak Island that began to spread in the late nineteenth century, this one involving the famous fleet of the Duc d’Anville. In 1746, a year after losing the fortress at Louisbourg to the British, France had assembled an armada of sixty-five ships carrying more than three thousand troops that set sail across the Atlantic to take back Louisbourg. The ocean crossing seemed damned from the beginning as storm after storm struck the fleet until the final and by far the most powerful tempest struck as the ships sailed past the “graveyard of the Atlantic,” Sable Island, about ten miles off the southern tip of the Nova Scotia mainland.

  Just twenty miles long, one mile wide, and made mostly of sand, Sable Island has been described as “the fastest moving island in the world” because of the shifting plates beneath it. Combined with the rough waters and thick fogs that surround it, this has created treacherous conditions for passing ships and also for planes that fly too close to the island. Four hundred seventy-five shipwrecks have been recorded around Sable Island since the seventeenth century, and it is believed the true number might be at least twice that. How many of these were from the d’Anville fleet is not possible to know precisely, but certainly more than half of the French armada at least was lost in the Sable Island storm, while the rest of the ships were scattered and separated. Most of the fleet that remained made it eventually to what would become Halifax Harbour (it was called Chebucto Harbour at that time), where d’Anville himself and many of his men died of the diseases that had broken out on their ships during the ocean crossing.

  The story that connected this doomed expedition to Oak Island was that one of the ships separated from the fleet off Sable Island was a pay ship that found its way into Mahone Bay, where the captain decided to create an underground vault to store his cargo of gold and silver until he was certain it could be transported safely. The pay ship then sailed off toward Chebucto Harbour, the story continued, but was wrecked by yet another storm along the way, and the treasure the crew had buried on Oak Island remained there. Again, the theory could not be entirely dismissed, but there was nothing truly evidentiary to support it. And when the records of the d’Anville fleet were reviewed, historians noted that there was no mention of any of the ships carrying a cargo of “specie or bullion.”

  In retrospect, it seems rather remarkable that there was little mention, even in the early twentieth century, of an explanation for Oak Island rooted in the history of Nova Scotia that was far more credible. This theory involves the removal of the Acadians.

  The Acadians had been French originally, back in 1605 when their first sixty families were settled by Champlain at Port Royal. Even as their numbers grew into the thousands, most of the Acadians remained on the Bay of Fundy, though a good number made their way to Mahone Bay, where they established small communities at LaHave and at what is today Lunenburg (called Merligueche back then). The Acadians gradually began separating from their French roots in an attempt to establish themselves as a unique population. This was a matter of sheer pragmatism, as it became increasingly clear that the Acadians’ best hope for survival lay in refusing to take sides in the long struggle between France and England for control of the land they called home. Theirs was an ethos of labor and thrift. The Acadians worked as farmers, tradesmen, artisans, and small business owners and thrived in Nova Scotia. They also controlled much of the smuggling trade in the province and were reputed to be the main suppliers of provisions to pirate ships.

  After the Treaty of Utrecht was signed, the English demanded that the Acadians swear an oath of loyalty to the British Crown that included a promise to bear arms against the French if called upon to do so. The Acadians resisted so successfull
y that the British eventually inserted a clause in the oath that permitted them to remain neutral during military conflicts. The Acadians’ independent stance became impossible, however, after Edward Cornwallis was appointed the first governor of Nova Scotia in 1749 and created the city of Halifax to serve as his provincial capital. Governor Cornwallis (the uncle of Charles Cornwallis, who led the British armies against the Americans in the Revolutionary War) insisted that the Acadians’ oath of loyalty be reconsidered in light of changing circumstances. The French had retaken Louisbourg and the rest of Cape Breton, and Cornwallis saw the ten thousand Acadians living in Nova Scotia as a potential threat to British control of the mainland. If he evicted them from the province, Cornwallis reasoned, the Acadians would almost certainly resettle on Cape Breton, substantially increasing the French presence on Canada’s Atlantic coast. First the governor insisted that the Acadians retake the loyalty oath, this time without the clause that permitted them to remain militarily neutral. When the Acadians again refused to sign the oath, tensions with the British rapidly escalated beyond their ability to manage them. Still, most of them were caught off guard when, in 1856, Cornwallis ordered that the Acadians be rounded up at gunpoint, stripped of their land and possessions, then loaded aboard ships that would drop them off at ports spread along the American coast between Maine and Georgia. There was a rush among the Acadians to conceal their assets; they liquidated as much of their property as possible, then buried the coins in safe places.