The Curse of Oak Island

by Randall Sullivan

  When the Treaty of Paris was signed in 1763, the edict expelling the Acadians from Nova Scotia was revoked and a good many of them returned to the province. (Most of those who did not made their way to the bayous of Louisiana, where they became the Cajuns.) Few of the Acadians were permitted to reclaim their former homes in Nova Scotia, however, which made it difficult if not impossible to gain access to the places where they had cached their fortunes before the expulsion of 1756. What resulted during the nineteenth century was story after story of some lucky plowman or merchant of British or German or Swiss origin discovering a stash of Acadian coins in a cellar, a well, or a farm field. In 1879, for example, just ten miles south of Oak Island, the discovery by a farmer named William Moser of more than two hundred French écus and Spanish escudos while digging up the floor of his barn had been front-Page news in the local newspaper.

  It was inevitable that someone would suggest, eventually, the underground vault on Oak Island was a kind of bank where the most prosperous of the Acadians had deposited their wealth before being rounded up by the British in 1756. It made a good deal of sense, except that there were very few if any truly wealthy Acadians.

  On the other hand, Nova Scotia had been home to many rich Huguenots in the eighteenth century. Most of the Huguenots (Protestants, as opposed to the mostly Catholic Acadians) who left France for the New World because of religious persecution in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries were upper class. Many were members of the French nobility and nearly all of the others were part of what historians have called an affluent artisan class.

  In 1685, when the Edict of Nantes (which since 1598 had protected French Protestants from persecution by the Catholics) was revoked by Louis XIV, fifty thousand Huguenot families fled the country. Nova Scotia was among their primary destinations.

  The theory that linked the Huguenots to Oak Island, though, seems to be most solidly founded in an early twentieth century report by the historian (and William Kidd biographer) Dunbar Henrichs. In 1928, Henrichs was living on Mahone Bay in the town of Chester. It was there that Henrichs was visited by a Frenchman who had come to Nova Scotia to investigate a family legend involving a group of wealthy Huguenots (including one of his ancestors) who had escaped from France aboard two ships immediately after the Edict of Nantes was revoked. The family story was that the ships had sailed together from La Rochelle across the Atlantic to the island of Saint-Domingue (in what is now Haiti), where the engineer accompanying them had supervised the construction of a complex of underground vaults protected by flood tunnels. Some but not all of the families had deposited their wealth in these vaults, then boarded one of the ships, which sailed off to New York. The second ship, carrying passengers who still held their wealth onboard, had sailed farther north to Nova Scotia, making its way eventually to Mahone Bay, where the leaders of this group selected an uninhabited island on which the same engineer supervised construction of a second system of vaults, also protected by flood tunnels. These vaults could be accessed either by a secret tunnel from the surface of the island or by closing a gate that had been installed in the flood tunnel system, as the Frenchman told the story, Henrich said.

  Henrich admitted he hadn’t taken the tale seriously until he heard that in 1947, nineteen years after his conversation with the mysterious Frenchman, a system of tunnels and vaults very similar to what had been described were found by an engineer named Albert Lochard in Haiti.

  The Huguenot theory became quite a compelling one in his mind after that, Henrich said. There was one major problem with it, however. The Huguenots had not arrived in Nova Scotia in any numbers until after the Acadians were expelled in 1756, by which time the Mahone Bay area was populated by a good many New Englanders and Germans who had moved there on the promise of free land from the British government. It is doubtful that the Huguenots or anyone else could have created the works on Oak Island at that late date without people noticing.

  The main objection to both the Acadian and the Huguenot theories of Oak Island, though, was the same one made in answer to those who suggested that whatever treasure had been buried in the Money Pit had long since been removed by the original depositors. If the people who placed the treasure there had returned for it, the reasoning went, they certainly wouldn’t have bothered to close the Money Pit up so neatly as it was found to be by McGinnis and the others back in 1795. “They would have just left the dirt piled up and hole open—why not?” as Marty Lagina put it to me in a conversation over our breakfasts one morning in August 2016. That the platforms inside the Pit were still intact and the massive hole in the ground still filled in with soil all the way to the surface, along with the fact that there was no obvious sign of any point of entry anywhere else on the island, proved in the minds of Oak Island’s treasure hunters that whatever had been buried down there remained. A young man who believed as much would incorporate the next company that conducted operations on Oak Island.

  Frederick Leander Blair was a twenty-six-year-old insurance salesman working out of an office in Boston, Massachusetts, when he formed the Oak Island Treasure Company in 1893. Over the next fifty-eight years, as his interest grew into an obsession, Blair would not only become the driving force in the search for the treasure on the island, but he would also become the most relentless seeker in the search for answers as to how it got there and why. It is largely because of him that we know as much as we do about what happened during the first century after the discovery of the Money Pit, as the fascination with Oak Island crossed out of Canada to spread worldwide.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Frederick Blair was living and working in Massachusetts, but he had grown up in Nova Scotia: born in Thomson Station and reared in Amherst. He was a young child when he first heard stories of Oak Island, told by his uncle Isaac Blair, who had been part of the Oak Island Association and Halifax Company crews that had worked on the island during the 1860s. As Isaac Blair summed up his position in a letter to his nephew written in 1896: “I saw enough to convince me that there was treasure buried there and enough to convince me that they will never get it.” Frederick Blair agreed with his uncle that the treasure was there, but for more than a half century refused to accept that it could not be gotten.

  What distinguished Blair right from the beginning was his commitment to research. He began by interviewing his uncle Isaac and Isaac’s friend Jefferson McDonald, from whom he had also heard tales of the treasure hunt on Oak Island as a boy. From those two, Blair moved on to the other men who had worked on Oak Island with the Truro Company and the Oak Island Association, focusing on those he considered most authoritative, among them James McNutt, Jothan McCully, Samuel Fraser, and Robert Creelman. Still working out of his office on Boston’s Liberty Square, Blair collected every available document, including the journals and letters that chronicled the labor, the discoveries, and the failures of those who had gone before him. Many if not most of those documents would have been lost if not for the fact that Blair maintained them in his personal archives. He sought out everyone still living who had heard firsthand the stories of the three discoverers, McGinnis, Smith, Vaughan, and of the Onslow Company’s leader, Dr. Lynds, and he made extensive notes of those interviews. Blair not only interviewed Adams A. Tupper, the former mining engineer for the Truro Company, but he also recruited him as a partner in his new Oak Island Treasure Company. Tupper, drawing extensively on his conversations with Anthony Vaughan during the middle of the nineteenth century, assisted Blair in writing the prospectus of the Oak Island Treasure Company, which began with a detailed account of the discovery and the attempted excavations of the Money Pit. Tupper also attached an affidavit in which he declared that he was “familiar with the various reports and traditions concerning the work done there before my own personal knowledge” and that his account of what he had been told was “to the best of my knowledge and belief, absolutely true.”

  Blair also spoke to Anthony Graves’s daughter, Sophia Sellers, whose accidental discovery of wh
at became known as the Cave-in Pit had been the biggest event on Oak Island in the years since the collapse of the Halifax Company. In the spring of 1878 she had been plowing with oxen about 350 feet from the Money Pit, Sellers told Blair, near what she knew was the supposed line of the famous flood tunnel. Suddenly one of the oxen disappeared into a “well-like” hole about 6 to 8 feet in diameter that had caved in under the animal’s weight. She and her husband, Henry, had needed help to pull the animal out of the hole, and after that they had simply filled it in with boulders and worked around the area. Blair, though, decided that investigating this new discovery should be among his new company’s first tasks.

  “It is perfectly evident,” he explained in his prospectus, “that the great mistake thus far has been in attempting to ‘bail out’ the ocean through the various pits. The present company intends to use the best modern appliances for cutting off the flow of water through the tunnel at some point near the shore, before attempting to pump out the water.” This had been tried before, by both the Oak Island Association and the Halifax Company, as Blair certainly knew, but he apparently believed his “modern appliances” would make the difference. With them, he wrote, “there can be no trouble in pumping out the Money Pit as dry as when the treasure was first placed there.”

  In late 1893, one thousand shares in the Oak Island Treasure Company were offered at $5 apiece to undertake the work. Blair indirectly but skillfully exploited the widespread publicity that had attended the reported treasure finds at New Glasgow and St. Martins and the even greater sensation that had been created when a boatswain’s whistle made of ivory or bone and said to be of “an ancient and peculiar design” was found on Oak Island at Smith’s Cove. In a second edition of the Oak Island Treasure Company prospectus he published in early 1894, Blair proclaimed, “We are happy to state that the stock is selling quite rapidly and only a few hundred shares remain to be sold, of the one thousand shares sufficient to complete the work.” It was “worthy of note,” Blair added in this edition of the prospectus, “that with very few exceptions every man whom we have met that has ever worked on Oak Island has expressed his intention of taking stock in this Company.”

  It was true that Robert Creelman, Samuel Fraser, and Jefferson McDonald had already joined the company. What Blair didn’t mention in the new prospectus was that a majority of the Nova Scotia shareholders were demanding that the planned work on Oak Island be overseen by a local committee, not by directors sitting in Boston offices. They organized a meeting in Truro on April 4, 1894, at which Creelman, McDonald, and Jothan McCully were among those who spoke. McDonald was unanimously elected to represent the Nova Scotia shareholders, and five other men were named to the committee that would be in charge of the operations on Oak Island. One of them, a lumberman from Amherst named William Chappell, would become almost as important in the story of the island as Blair himself. Adams A. Tupper was appointed by the committee to perform the hands-on supervision of the work, beginning in June 1894.

  We know virtually every move the Oak Island Treasure Company made because Frederick Blair was just as scrupulous about recording the new company’s activities as he had been about researching the past work on the island. The Treasure Company crew began with an exploration of the Cave-in Pit. When the boulders were removed to a depth of 18 feet, the new company’s workmen found themselves standing in a shaft almost 8 feet in diameter that was nearly perfectly circular, with well-defined walls that convinced them they were looking at a piece of the original work on Oak Island. The miners among them agreed that the Cave-in Pit was an air shaft, essential for ventilation in a tunnel more than 500 feet long. They did not even need to use picks to clear the shaft, it was reported back to Boston, because while the earth inside was soft, the walls containing it were smooth and solid, made of clay so hard it was nearly impossible to sink a spike into them anyway; the labor of the men who had dug this shaft was unimaginable.

  Blair would declare that he believed the Cave-in Pit might be the key to solving the entire problem of Oak Island. Eventually the stones and the loose soil inside the shaft were removed to a depth of 52 feet, and box cribbing was built that stretched from the bottom to several feet above the surface. An auger bored another 16 feet deeper into the Cave-in Pit without encountering any resistance. The next morning, though, water broke into the Cave-in Pit from shaft no. 4, dug by the Truro Company more than forty years earlier. When the cribbing grew unstable, it was agreed that working in the Cave-in Pit had become unsafe for the men.

  Blair, Tupper, McDonald, and the committee overseeing the work agreed they would sink yet another shaft (no. 12), this one right next to the “pirate tunnel” (as the members of the company referred to the original tunnel that flooded the Money Pit), going deep enough to undermine the old tunnel from below, then destroy it with dynamite, thereby, they hoped, cutting off the flow of water to the Money Pit. The excavation of shaft no. 12 reached a depth of only 43 feet, though, before water from shaft no. 4 burst into it. They bailed this out, but then a seep of stagnant water, almost black, began to fill the new shaft. This was from the Money Pit, the men agreed, and they bailed that out also. Eventually they were able to dig to a depth of 55 feet, then strike a tunnel from the bottom of no. 12 toward the surface, in hopes of finding the flood tunnel. When they were just 25 feet from the surface, though, the tunnel had not been found.

  James McGinnis, the grandson of Daniel McGinnis, claimed that one of the last things the Halifax Company had done was to build a stout platform in the Money Pit, just above the high-water mark, then fill the Pit in with loose soil from the platform to the surface. Henry Sellers also insisted there was such a platform. When the Treasure Company excavated what they believed to be the Money Pit to look for this platform, however, it could not be found. James McGinnis insisted they had looked in the wrong place. Winter was coming on, though, so the Treasure Company adjourned until the following spring.

  As I studied the notes of the Treasure Company’s attempt to reform itself in 1895, the familiar vows of previous searchers recurred yet again in a way that was both poignant and absurd. One A. S. Lowden had been named by the directors in Boston to serve as the new general manager of the company, and after a meeting of the stockholders on April 2, 1895, Lowden laid out a two-part plan that was long on effusion but short on originality in every respect:

  ONE: “To make another effort to cut the tunnel off at or near the scene of last year’s operations.” There had to be a gate in the flood tunnel, Lowden wrote, repeating the conclusions of men who had preceded him by almost half a century. He proposed to locate it by tunneling from shaft no. 12 at the 49-foot level toward shaft no. 5.

  TWO: “To attack the Money Pit direct, nothing having been done there last year, the exact conditions are not known.”

  Not surprisingly, Lowden’s efforts to raise the money to purchase a larger and more expensive pump through a new stock issue failed utterly. The Nova Scotia stockholders met again in Truro on November 26, 1895, and appointed a new board of management that included William Chappell, with Frederick Blair to serve as treasurer. Blair, who had moved his insurance office from Boston to Amherst, Nova Scotia, to be closer to Oak Island, helped prepare a new version of the Treasure Company’s prospectus that helped raise the $2,000 needed to purchase a top-of-the-line steam pump and boiler. This took almost a year, but in the late autumn of 1896 Blair’s Amherst friend Captain John Welling was chosen to mount yet another new effort to get to the bottom of the Money Pit.

  Blair received daily reports that tracked the work on Oak Island during the winter of 1896 to 1897. Shaft no. 2 had been doubled in width, while shaft no. 12, now 123 feet deep, was used to collect the water pumped out of no. 2. The failure of this effort is implied in reports to Blair during the spring of 1897 that the work had moved to the excavation of a new shaft (no. 13) 25 feet north of the Cave-in Pit. At a depth of 82 feet, the workmen began to tunnel toward the Cave-in Pit. They got within 4 feet before being driven out b
y water pouring through the tunnel’s leading wall. Within a couple of weeks, the diggers struck what they at first believed was the Pirate Tunnel. It was 4 feet wide by 6 feet tall, well timbered, and connected to the Cave-in Pit. What they had found, however, turned out to be a tunnel dug by the Halifax Company crew in 1866. After considerable discussion, it was agreed that the Pirate Tunnel was likely not more than 5 feet below and they began to search for it.

  This effort ended on March 26, 1897, when a workman named Maynard Kaiser was sent into one of the shafts (probably no. 13) to retrieve a cask that had fallen in. Rather than bring up the empty barrel, Kaiser for some reason chose to fill it with water, then ride atop the bucket as it was raised to the surface. The weight of the water and the man was more than the hoist could bear, and when the rope slipped off the gear both the cask and Kaiser plunged to the bottom of the shaft. He was dead by the time a crew of rescuers found him. Immediately, nearly the entire Treasure Company crew refused to continue working underground. As the April 13, 1897, edition of a Halifax newspaper reported it: “Captain Welling who is in charge of the work of excavating for the Oak Island treasure reports that all his men have quit the job. They became suspicious after the death of poor Kaiser last week and will not continue to dig. One of the men had a dream in which the spirit of Captain Kidd appeared and warned him they would all be dead if they continued the search.”

  Welling must have had some force of personality, because within a week he had assembled a new crew that on April 22 discovered yet another tunnel leading into the Money Pit. It was 9 feet square and solidly cribbed, with saltwater percolating into it from beneath. They excavated upward into the Money Pit from there, and at the 30-foot level found the platform built by the Halifax Company, exactly as James McGinnis had described it. After correcting the misalignment of the cribbing (with planks they attached as a skid), the crew began to once again probe deeper into the Pit. At 111 feet they found what they thought must be the flood tunnel. It was a sharply cut rectangular channel 2.5 feet wide that was floored with a layer of beach stones, gravel, and sand, in that order from the bottom up. Saltwater was flowing with great force through the tunnel. The horizontal ceiling was clear evidence this tunnel was man-made.