The Curse of Oak Island

by Randall Sullivan

  Yet another celebration was cut short, though, when the valve stem of the Treasure Company’s prized steam pump broke. Within an hour the Money Pit was filled with seawater to tide level, leaving the flood tunnel under almost 50 feet of water.

  After calculating the expense of repairing the pump and the cost of keeping it going, the Treasure Company’s directors determined that yet another effort must be made to intercept the Pirate Tunnel near the shore of Smith’s Cove and cut it off. To locate the flood channel, the crew began a series of boreholes about 50 feet from the high tide mark at the cove, following a perpendicular line across the approximate path the Pirate Tunnel must follow. They drilled five such holes, each 5 inches in diameter at varying depths between 80 and 95 feet. Sticks of dynamite were lowered into each of these holes, then ignited. The only apparent results of the subsequent explosions were the spumes of seawater that rose 100 feet and more into the air. An enormous charge of dynamite—more than 160 pounds—was then placed into the center borehole and detonated. There was no gush of water from the hole this time, but the water in both the Money Pit and in the Cave-in Pit boiled and foamed for almost a minute. The men agreed that they were in or next to a tunnel carrying water from the shore to the Money Pit.

  There was contention among the crew, though, about what it meant that no saltwater had been found in this middle hole before a depth of 80 feet. Those who insisted the flood channel must now be blocked won the day and they agreed to return to the Money Pit and continue the boring operations there. The results of this decision would include what is arguably the most remarkable discovery in the history of the treasure hunt on Oak Island.

  EARLY INTO MY WORK on The Curse of Oak Island I began to be convinced by what I knew about human nature that it was not a treasure of gold and silver that had been buried on the island. What had been done on Oak Island could only have been done by a large workforce, and there was no way I believed a group of even half a dozen people could or would have kept it a secret that a fortune in precious metals was concealed on an island off the coast of Nova Scotia.

  There were answers to that, of course. One, obviously, was that whoever had buried the treasure on the island had already returned to retrieve it. That wasn’t a possibility anyone who had hunted for treasure on Oak Island wanted to embrace and, as mentioned earlier, there was a standard response to this suggestion. The fact that we still don’t know who hid whatever is hidden there, more than 250 years (at least) after it was likely buried, might also be explained in other ways. If the people who had done the actual labor were slaves, as many supposed, they might have been silenced by a mass execution immediately after their work was done. Or, if the work was done by soldiers or a ship’s crew, they might have all gone down on the return voyage to wherever they were from, taking their secret with them to the bottom of the ocean.

  I conceded these points, then said that what I really believed was that it would be impossible to motivate men to do what had been done on Oak Island simply to hide a treasure of gold, no matter how great it might be. More than that would be required in my opinion. What had been concealed on the island had to be something of incalculable value, something that meant more than money ever could. I think Marty Lagina thought that was more than a little naïve. His brother, Rick, though, was inclined to agree with me.

  Only a single piece of tangible evidence has ever been brought up from belowground to support my side of this argument, however, and it is not only of unknown origin, but preposterously tiny to boot. Infinitesimal some might say. It was found right around the first of September in 1897 during the boring operations of the Oak Island Treasure Company in the Money Pit.

  A sketch drawn by Frederick Blair in February 1898 shows where the boreholes were drilled in a circular pattern around the rim of the Pit. The water had been pumped out to the 100-foot level, where a new platform was built and the drill mounted. William Chappell was one of those who operated the drill; he would describe in a sworn statement what the bit and the pipe that surrounded it brought back up to the platform. The first hole was bored to a depth of 122 feet before a piece of oak wood was penetrated. At 126 feet, the drill was stopped when it struck iron. A second hole was bored a foot away, and again the drill struck iron and was stopped. Chappell and the others decided to try a smaller drill, just 1.5 inches in diameter. This drill deflected off the iron and went around it, passing first through “puddled clay” then striking “soft stone or cement” at a depth of 153 feet, 8 inches. The drill worked its way through the “soft stone” and then went through 5 inches of solid oak, which proved to the men on the platform that they had not yet reached bedrock.

  The drill was raised slowly and carefully. T. Perley Putnam, who was on the platform with Chappell and Captain Welling, had been placed in charge of removing, collecting, cataloguing, and preserving the borings from the drill’s auger bit. He panned out the dirt from the auger in direct sunlight, then meticulously gathered everything that floated in the water. There were oak chips and coconut husks, Putnam reported, plus a small piece of—well, he was not sure what it was, he admitted. On instructions from Welling, Putnam several days later carried the borings he had collected in envelopes to the offices of Dr. A. E. Porter, a physician who was then practicing in Amherst. They had chosen Porter as a consultant, Frederick Blair would explain later, because the doctor owned the most powerful microscope to be found in Nova Scotia at that time.

  On September 6, 1897, Porter examined the borings from the Money Pit in the presence of between thirty-five and forty men, including Putnam and Blair. Almost immediately his attention was attracted to the ball of “strange fiber” that Putnam had not been able to identify. It was only about the size of a grain of rice, as Porter would describe it, with some sort of fuzz or short hair on its surface. Using his medical instruments under the magnifier, Porter worked at this ball of fiber for several minutes, until it slowly began to unfold. After another few minutes, the doctor had it flattened out, whereupon he described it as being, to all appearances, a tiny piece of parchment paper with a fragment of writing in black ink that appeared to be parts of either the letters ui or vi or wi.

  Blair insisted on an examination by experts in Boston associated with Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. They reported back that the item most certainly was a piece of parchment that had been written on with a quill pen and India ink.

  THE DISCOVERY OF THE PARCHMENT FRAGMENT was the real beginning of consideration of the possibility that what was buried on Oak Island might not be chests of gold buried by pirates but rather something of real—perhaps even profound—historical value. In a 1930 interview with the Toronto Telegram, Blair declared that the day the Oak Island Treasure Company found the piece of parchment had provided “more convincing evidence of buried treasure than a few doubloons would be. I am satisfied that either a treasure of immense value or priceless historical documents are in a chest at the bottom of the Pit.”

  The 1897 borings in the Money Pit produced a great deal of evidence beyond the parchment. At 171 feet into one borehole, the chisel point that had replaced the auger bit struck solidly against iron. The drillers said they knew it from the sound. They continued to push the drill against this barrier for more than forty minutes and could make no deeper penetration than a quarter-inch. Chappell, Putnam, and Welling then withdrew the drill, pumped the loose material from the hole, and ran a magnet through it, collecting about a thimbleful of fine iron cuttings. What was regarded as an even more exciting discovery was made in a borehole where a tremendous spout of water rose out of the pipe when the drill was at 126 feet. They measured the flow with their pumps and determined it to be 400 gallons a minute. This had to mean there was a second flood tunnel, also coming from the south shore of the island, most likely from a location closer to the Money Pit than Smith’s Cove.

  The oak splinters, charcoal, and coconut fiber that came out of the boreholes were also saved for examination, but the greatest interest was in th
e soft stone struck by the drill at 153 feet, eight inches. The drillers believed this might be a kind of early cement and sent it for analysis to A. Boake, Roberts and Company in London. The report back from the London chemists was that this material did indeed seem to be a primitive sort of cement, composed of lime, carbonate, silica, iron, alumina, and magnesium. “From the analysis it is impossible to state definitively, but from the appearance and nature of the samples, we are of the opinion that it is a cement which has been worked by man.”

  The jubilation of the Treasure Company’s principals soon gave way to a debate about whether they should issue new stock for sale in order to expand the operations on Oak Island. In the end, the stockholders voted unanimously that there would be no “outside” sale of shares in the company and that the current shareholders should finance any future work and split the proceeds only among themselves when the treasure was finally retrieved.

  A new round of work began in October 1897. The plan this time was to sink one more shaft (no. 14) to a depth of between 175 and 200 feet, then drive a tunnel to the Money Pit, in hopes of draining it into the new shaft, which would be octagonal in shape, 13 feet across and 40 feet from the original Pit. Why the Treasure Company imagined they would produce a different result than had been found in previous attempts to do pretty much the same thing is not clear, but what happened was quite predictable: at 112 feet into the new shaft it began to fill with seawater at a rate that made continuing impossible. The company’s response was to attempt yet another shaft (no. 15) about 35 feet southwest of no. 14. The diggers were encouraged when at 105 feet they came to an abandoned tunnel that had been dug by the Halifax Company and found it dry. At 160 feet, though, water began to pour into no. 15 from the Money Pit, where the water level briefly dropped by 14 feet, then rose again, until both it and the new pit were filled to sea level. Pumping was attempted until the plunger rod broke. Water quickly poured into the new shaft from the Money Pit and within a few hours both the tunnel and no. 15 were destroyed.

  “Nothing daunted,” as Frederick Blair’s man R. W. Harris would put it, the Treasure Company sank four more shafts (nos. 16, 17, 18, and 19) to depths of between 95 and 144 feet. Each was abandoned when the diggers encountered quicksand, impenetrable boulders, or an overwhelming surge of water.

  In the spring of 1898, however, the Treasure Company did perform a series of tests that gave them new and deeply unsettling news about what they were up against. First, they pumped shaft no. 18 full of water to well above tide level in the hope that they would force the muddy water in the new shaft out onto the beach at Smith’s Cove. The muddy water did soon appear on the south shore of the island but not at Smith’s Cove. Three different sections of the shore of the south beach showed evidence of the muddy water escaping from no. 18. To make certain of what this suggested, Welling and Chappell agreed that they should pump the Money Pit full of water above sea level, then drop red dye into it, hoping the dye would drain through the flood tunnel as it receded. As they hoped, the dye began to seep into the bay a short time later; again this was not at Smith’s Cove but rather on the south end of the island in the same places where the muddy water had been seen earlier.

  What it meant, almost certainly, was that there was at least one flood tunnel that ran toward the Money Pit from the south shore but not from Smith’s Cove and that there could be as many as three such tunnels. Finding a way to drain the Money Pit had become an exponentially more complex problem. Yet what the Treasure Company chose to do next was return to the Pit itself.

  For reasons that were not explained in the journal kept by Blair, the company’s crew spent months on work that essentially doubled the size of the Money Pit. This was done by sinking a new shaft (no. 20) right next to the original Pit. A double wall of cribbing was constructed to divide the two halves of what was otherwise now a shaft measuring 10 feet by 8 feet. The excavation of the new shaft became increasingly difficult as the crew descended into rock-hard clay and was stopped at 113 feet by a surge of seawater that poured in with more force than the pumps could handle. The work continued, though. On April 2 the crew’s foreman, a man named Burrows, told Blair that his men were 3 feet below the flood tunnel from Smith’s Cove and that they were confident they could reach a depth of 126 feet within a couple of weeks and would there locate the tunnel from the south shore. Only a few days later, though, Burrows reported that most of his men had left the island to join fishing crews and that they were running out of coal to run the pumps and the boiler.

  Creditors were literally standing at the Treasure Company’s door. The county sheriff showed up on the island in May 1898 with a court order obtained by a Halifax machinery firm that forced the sale of every bit of equipment that could be carried off. Captain Welling had invested $4,000 of his own money and was at risk of losing his home. Putnam was in far worse shape, having put in $20,000; within a few months he had no choice but to declare a bankruptcy from which he never recovered. Blair proposed a new stock issue, based on the discoveries of the Treasure Company, but the other directors and shareholders, many of whom had already borrowed money to make their investments, turned him down. In December 1900, Blair used his own money to buy out all of the other shareholders and took complete control of the Treasure Company, vowing to continue the work on his own.

  Blair summarized his position in a draft prospectus:

  When we went to work at the Island two years ago, we knew comparatively nothing about the conditions as they existed. We supposed at that time that the Money Pit was not over 120 feet deep and that the treasure was not over 110 feet down. Our work has since proved that the Pit is not less than 180 feet deep, that there are two tunnels instead of one, and that one of them is not less than 160 feet down, and that there is treasure at different points in the Pit, from 126 feet down to 170 feet, without a doubt. We have also found out that the work done by the Halifax Company is a greater hindrance to the procuring of the treasure than is the original work.

  We now claim that there is nothing that can prevent us getting the treasure.

  All that was really certain was that the treasure hunt on Oak Island that had begun in the eighteenth century would continue into the twentieth.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Nothing proved the depth of Frederick Blair’s commitment to Oak Island better than the years he spent negotiating his way through the thicket of government bureaucracy that was threatening to strangle the treasure hunt during the first part of the twentieth century. The root of the problem Blair had to wrangle with went all the way back to the year 1276, when England, under the reign of Edward I, had enacted the Law of the Treasure Trove. This statute required that “treasures found hidden or concealed without any known owner belong to the King.” The royal prerogative had passed to the provincial governments in Canada, and J. W. Longley, the attorney general of Nova Scotia, declared in September 1895 that “any treasure discovered at Oak Island will, as far as I am concerned, belong to Her Majesty as represented by the Government of Nova Scotia.”

  Blair moved to protect himself by applying for a lease under Nova Scotia’s recently passed Mines Act that would permit him to search for and claim gold and silver on Oak Island within an area that was 450 feet by 500 feet and contained not only the Money Pit but all the other shafts that had been sunk on the east end of the island. After a decade-long campaign that involved hiring various agents to buffer him from the bureaucrats in Halifax, Blair acquired the Mines Act lease in late 1905. This document had a life span of forty years, but it only protected the precious metals Blair might find on Oak Island. Convinced at this point that the island’s treasure might be something quite different than chests of coins, Blair (through his agent) negotiated a deal with the province that gave him the exclusive right to search for an undefined “trove” on Oak Island, as long as he agreed to pay the government 2 percent of the value of whatever he found. That agreement was not signed until 1909. To secure his position more firmly, Blair also signed an agreement with
Henry Sellers that allowed him to conduct operations that included “digging or excavating” on the east end of Oak Island for a fee of $100 a year.

  Finally in a position to proceed with the treasure hunt, what Blair needed now was a partner with the means to mount another onslaught against the Money Pit. Within just a few weeks, he teamed up with a man who appeared to fit the bill in every way.

  Captain Henry Bowdoin certainly did not lack a flair for self-promotion. The news that the famous adventurer had joined the Oak Island treasure hunt was announced in the March 18, 1909, edition of the New York Herald. Bowdoin, at that time living at 44 Broadway in Manhattan, was described in the preface to his Herald interview as “a mining, mechanical and marine engineer, a Master and Pilot [with] a license as a submarine driver. He has dredged harbours and built bridges for the government and for corporations and says that modern machinery and engineering science will solve in a jiffy the difficulties Captain Kidd made to guard his treasure.”

  He had reached an agreement with Frederick Blair “for the apportionment of [the] ten million dollars” he estimated the Oak Island treasure would be worth, Bowdoin told the Herald, “and has ordered such machinery as he will need.” He would start with a crew of six handpicked men who would leave for Nova Scotia by rail on May 1, Bowdoin said, after sending his machinery ahead by schooner. The cost of the operation he estimated at $15,000.