The Curse of Oak Island

by Randall Sullivan

  “Any competent engineer could clear up that affair in no time,” Bowdoin told the newspaper. “And I don’t want more than two weeks for the work, after I get my machinery and crew on the ground. It will be a vacation, and about all I stand to lose is the wages of the men and my own time, for the machinery will be valuable in my business afterward.”

  In another, shorter interview published the same day in the New York Times, Bowdoin admitted that “he had not yet decided how he will get at the treasure,” but he did not think he would have much difficulty in choosing the right approach after an up-close look at the situation. “He says he may sink a caisson down around the place where the treasure is supposed to be,” the Times reported, “or may build another jetty [cofferdam?]. He may even send a diver down in one of the holes, equipped with a pick-axe. He has never been on Oak Island, so he will have to decide on that when he gets there.” A bold fellow indeed.

  The biggest news in the Times piece, though, was Captain Bowdoin’s claim that what was buried on Oak Island was not the Captain Kidd treasure at all, but rather the crown jewels of France.

  The crown jewels were almost certainly the most fantastic collection ever kept by a single family (the Bourbons) in human history. The regalia—the assortment of ceremonial accoutrements that were used during the coronations of French kings—was alone of unimaginable value. Along with the sword, scepter, chalice, and robe brooch, the regalia included as many as eight crowns, among them the one worn by Louis XV, in which the 141-carat Regent diamond (valued today at more than $100 million) was set in the lower part of the fleur-de-lis at the front of the crown, with the magnificent 56-carat Sancy diamond seated in the upper petal above, surrounded by eight of the famous Mazarin diamonds set between double rows of pearls and smaller diamonds. During the nineteenth century, newspapers in Europe and the Americas had carried many articles that catalogued not only the regalia, but also the many other pieces of the crown jewels, including the 136-carat Ruspoli sapphire, the 28-carat Topaze, and the 17-carat Great Emerald of Louis XIV.

  The disappearance of the crown jewels during the French Revolution had spawned dozens of stories and legends that captivated and diverted the reading public. One commonly repeated version (which has appeared in any number of books about Oak Island, including R. V. Harris’s otherwise reliable The Oak Island Mystery) was that in June 1791 Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette had fled the revolutionary mob in Paris, headed for Austria with crown jewels loaded in their luggage. Yet when the two were captured in Varennes, this account goes, the jewels were no longer with them and apparently had been spirited out of the country by an accomplice.

  In fact, the crown jewels were being kept the whole time at the Royal Storehouse, where they remained until September 11, 1792, when they were stolen during looting at the height of the revolution’s chaos. Nearly the entire collection was recovered a short time later when the thieves were captured, and eventually it became the property of Napoleon Bonaparte. Two extraordinary items, however, were not found with the thieves. One was the Sancy diamond, a huge pale-yellow stone that had been cut in the shape of two back-to-back crowns. The Sancy, which had been removed from the king’s crown, would resurface in 1828, when it became part of the collection of Count Anatoly Nikolaievich Demidov, whose family eventually sold it to an Indian prince. The prince permitted its public display in Paris at the Exposition Universelle of 1867, offered at a price of one million francs.

  The other and more significant missing item from the crown jewels was the French Blue, also known as the King’s Jewel, a legendary gem that has become the most storied stone in human history. The French Blue was never seen again after it was taken from the Royal Storehouse in 1792.

  The Blue was believed to have been mined in India’s Golconda kingdom sometime during the sixteenth century. All anyone can say for certain is that the crudely cut stone, approximately 115 carats in size, had come into the possession of a French gem dealer named Jean-Baptiste Tavernier in the middle of the seventeenth century and that Tavernier sold it to Louis XIV around 1668. The king had the diamond recut into a 67.125-carat stone that was fabled for its strange luminescence, the way the gem reflected bluish-gray light on the one hand yet appeared to pulse with a brilliant red phosphorescence when a room was darkened. This effect may have been the beginning of the claim that the diamond was cursed. The king wore it on a ribbon around his neck during ceremonies and made it the centerpiece of a subcollection within the crown jewels called the Order of the Golden Fleece.

  It was believed that the French Blue had been smuggled out of France to London sometime between being taken from the Royal Storehouse and Louis XVI’s beheading on January 21, 1793. A story spread that the Blue had been broken into two pieces. The larger of the two, it was said, had been recut into a 42.52-carat stone the size and shape of a pear-shaped pigeon egg and would become known as the Hope Diamond. This was at the very least a disputed claim and there were many stories that the French Blue, along with other pieces of the crown jewels, were held in secret somewhere outside Europe. So back in 1909 there was a place in the popular imagination for the idea that this clandestine location where the Blue was hidden might be Oak Island. Not until 2005 did the claim that the Hope Diamond had been cut from the fractured Blue become more or less official. That was the year scientists at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of Natural History announced that they had used computer modeling that involved both the original Tavernier stone, the French Blue, and the Hope Diamond to determine that “the evidence very much supports the theory” that the Hope had been cut from the Blue. Even today, though, there are those who doubt it.

  THERE’S NO KNOWN BASIS beyond his say-so for Captain Bowdoin’s announcement that the French crown jewels were hidden on Oak Island, but the claim certainly captured public attention. Bowdoin moved quickly to take advantage. Less than two months after the articles in the Herald and the Times, Bowdoin used the New York Sun to announce that “he had decided that it’s too big a job to tackle without selling a little stock first.” To that end, he had formed a corporation in the Arizona Territory that he called Old Gold Salvage and Wrecking Company. Bowdoin himself wrote the new company’s elaborate prospectus.

  “Over one hundred years ago a treasure, estimated to be over ten million dollars, was buried on Oak Island, in Mahone Bay, Nova Scotia, supposedly by pirates, who took such pains to safeguard it that, although numerous attempts have been made to recover it, it lies undisturbed to this day,” the prospectus began. “These failures were due to lack of modern machinery and ignorance; each expedition being stopped by water and lack of funds.” Technological advances would make the recovery of the treasure on Oak Island “easy, ridiculously easy,” wrote Bowdoin, who explained that he would first locate the treasure in the Money Pit with a newly invented drill that was capable of bringing to the surface a core 2 inches in diameter. Once he and his team knew exactly where the treasure was, they would use the same drill to locate the flood tunnel from Smith’s Cove and seal the tunnel off with sheet piling. Then, “a centrifugal turbine pump, capable of lifting 1,000 gallons per minute—one hundred and fifty feet vertically—will be lowered into the pit from a derrick and the water pumped out. If the tunnel plugs have done their work, the pump will clear out the water; the treasure be easily recovered, and all underground workings explored.”

  There was a small possibility that “the tunnel not be located; the pump not be able to keep out the water, and the bucket not bring up all of the treasure,” the prospectus conceded, and if that should be the case, the company would respond by placing one of “Bowdoin’s Air Lock Caissons” into the Money Pit. These watertight chambers were already being used to sink foundations through water and earth all over the planet, Bowdoin explained in his prospectus, and could clearly be applied to the problem of the Money Pit: “Compressed air keeps out all water and allows men to work at the bottom and send any articles up and out through the air lock…. THE TREASURE CAN POSITIVELY B
E RECOVERED BY ITS USE.”

  Captain Bowdoin offered 250,000 shares of Old Gold Salvage and Wrecking Company stock in lots of ten shares at $1 a share. Promising a dividend of “4,000 percent,” Bowdoin wrote that “operations would begin in May or June and be completed in three or four weeks,” meaning investors would receive their returns before the end of summer.

  Even with all the free advertising provided by New York’s daily newspapers, Bowdoin was able to sell only five thousand shares (2 percent) of the Old Gold stock offering during the next three months. Among those who did invest in the company, though, was the most illustrious treasure hunter in the history of Oak Island, Franklin Delano Roosevelt. The future four-term US president was then a twenty-seven-year-old graduate of Harvard Law School working as a clerk at the Wall Street firm of Carter, Ledyard and Milburn. He had grown up hearing tales of Nova Scotia’s buried treasures during the summers he spent with his family at their summer home on Campobello Island in the Bay of Fundy. In 1896, when he was fourteen, Roosevelt and a classmate from the Groton School had sailed from Campobello to nearby Grand Manan Island, where they spent four days digging for a chest said to have been buried there by Captain Kidd. All the two found was a plank in which some joker had carved “W. K.” Roosevelt was nevertheless captivated by the stories of Oak Island’s Money Pit, and when he read about Captain Bowdoin’s planned expedition to Mahone Bay, he not only purchased ten shares of Old Gold Salvage and Wrecking Company stock, but he also persuaded three friends to do the same. The four young men made a pact that they would join the dig on Oak Island that summer for as long as they could get away from their jobs in New York.

  Though vastly undercapitalized, Captain Bowdoin sailed with his men for Nova Scotia on August 19, 1909. It is only from the records kept by Frederick Blair (Old Gold’s vice president) that we know Bowdoin made almost no effort to keep the promise to his investors about locating and blocking the flood tunnel to the Money Pit. The story that the crown jewels of France were hidden in the Money Pit also was abandoned. Almost immediately after arriving on Oak Island, Bowdoin had moved his men and his machinery to the east-end drumlin, where they set up what they called Camp Kidd. What confronted Bowdoin were two open pits side by side. One, assumed to be the Money Pit, measured 5 feet by 7 feet and was heavily cribbed to a depth of 110 feet, most of this being underwater. Right next to this Pit was the shaft dug by the Oak Island Treasure Company in 1899. According to Blair’s notes, the presumed Money Pit was “floored over” at a depth of 30 feet, just above the water that filled it to tide level. Bowdoin’s crew set immediately to opening the Pit by dropping charges of dynamite down the shaft, then used a steam-powered “orange peel” bucket to drag the shattered timbers to the surface. Once the Pit was cleared out down to the waterline, the crew began to rebuild the cribbing as they descended. At a depth of 107 feet, the captain sent a diver down to examine the bottom of the Pit. When the diver returned to the surface, he reported that the cribbing down below was badly damaged and that various planks and timbers were sticking up in all directions from the bottom of the Pit—perhaps a result of the 1861 collapse combined with the dynamite charges Bowdoin had exploded in the shaft.

  The captain then commanded that the core drill be put to work. The first borehole went through 17 feet of sand and gravel, then 16 feet of blue clay before striking cement at 149 feet, exactly as Blair had predicted in a letter sent to Bowdoin the previous spring. After passing through 6 inches of cement, the Old Gold crew anticipated that they were about to drill into a treasure chest. Instead, the drill passed through 18 feet of yellow clay before reaching a bedrock composed of gypsum and quartz at 167 feet. Bowdoin and his crew would drive more than two dozen boreholes into the area around the Money Pit, going as deep as 171 feet, but encountered nothing more interesting than layers of cement that ranged between six and ten inches in thickness. (Twenty-two years later, in 1931, one witness to the Bowdoin borings, a man named J. B. Thomson, would claim that he had seen a thin, bright metal disk embedded in one of the core samples, but there’s no mention of it in Blair’s journal of the Old Gold operations.)

  By November 1909, Bowdoin had exhausted Old Gold’s scant finances and informed Blair that he could not continue the work. He made an agreement with Blair to resume operations on Oak Island the following summer, but then just a few months later he wrote from England that his business there would make it impossible for him to get back to Nova Scotia before the end of 1911.

  If Bowdoin had simply abandoned the project at that point, his attempt would have been merely another failed expedition to Oak Island, memorable mainly for the captain’s grand but empty boasts and because a future US president had made several brief trips to Oak Island during the late summer of 1909 to join the Old Gold crew. However, he was not satisfied “to quit without another try,” Bowdoin wrote to Blair, “and knowing now the exact condition, would get to the bottom and clean things up next time.”

  Blair, who was far from impressed by what he had seen of the Old Gold Salvage and Wrecking Company, wrote back that he would be willing to consider a revised proposal from Bowdoin, but only if the captain could demonstrate “that he had sufficient funds on hand, or at his disposal, to complete the work in a proper manner.”

  Blair was startled by Bowdoin’s reply:

  I believe you had better see us if you come to New York this winter. Advise me ahead. If, however, we cannot get together on the time extension, it will be necessary for me to go to Oak Island and sell the machinery, etc., and when finished, the Company will want a full report which one of our people, a newspaper man, will want to publish. The report that I would have to give them would not help in getting further investments in Oak Island.

  Blair, furious, wrote back:

  Your letter almost conveys a threat that if we do not permit you to make further tests at Oak Island you will publish such information as would probably prevent the possibility of raising funds for exploration there in the future. Let me say that anything that can be said against Oak Island has already been written, and the publication of any article you might be able to bring forth would not in the least jar those of us who own the lease.

  Blair was jarred, though, by what Bowdoin did next. No matter how abjectly Bowdoin might have failed in his probe of the Money Pit, the captain would make a powerful demonstration in the summer of 1911 of how effectively vindictive a man could be when he commanded good connections in the press. Bowdoin’s article “Solving the Mystery of Oak Island” was published in the August 18 edition of Collier’s magazine, one of the most widely read publications in North America. The piece began with the assertion that there had never been any treasure in the Money Pit or on Oak Island, then followed by ridiculing the notion that a 600-foot flood tunnel had been dug from Smith’s Cove to the Pit, when it would have been so much easier to dig a 150-foot tunnel from other parts of the island’s south shore. The water in the Money Pit was not arriving via a tunnel, Bowdoin asserted, but by “percolating” through the soil from the south shore. The captain disputed the story that a ringbolt had been in a boulder on the beach at Smith’s Cove, pointing out that it would have been much easier to tie a line to an oak tree than to drill a hole in rock. Bowdoin also dismissed the claim (made by more than a dozen men who had witnessed it) that links of a chain or anything else of value had been brought up by the pot auger in 1849, because none of it would have stuck to a chisel being raised through 120 feet of water. For good measure, Bowdoin added that he did not believe there were any characters on the stone that had been found in the Money Pit by the Onslow Company in 1805.

  Frederick Blair did not have access to a publication as widely read as Collier’s. He replied at length to Bowdoin’s article with one of his own, however, published in the February 23, 1912, edition of Nova Scotia’s Amherst Daily News. Blair first pointed out that Bowdoin had refused to avail himself of the advice offered by any number of men who had been part of previous expeditions to Oak Island and had done al
most no exploration before he began to blindly throw dynamite into the Money Pit, destroying most of the cribbing and leaving the rest of the timbers even more out of alignment than they had been when the Old Gold crew arrived. Bowdoin’s pipes and rods had reached into only a small area of the bottom of the Pit, Blair asserted, and most of his borings had been into areas outside the Pit, where of course he had encountered natural formations. In his Collier’s article, Captain Bowdoin had not only failed to explain the work done on the beach at Smith’s Cove, in particular the five man-made drains, but he had also failed to mention their existence at all, Blair pointed out. Bowdoin also had not mentioned the various tests ranging from dynamite blasts to dye drops that had clearly established a man-made connection between the Pit and the south shore or the existence of the air shaft that Sophia Sellers’s oxen had stumbled into back in 1878. Blair noted that on multiple occasions and in the presence of dozens of witnesses it had been shown that water did not “percolate” into the Money Pit, but rather it poured in at the rate of 500 gallons per minute (a hundred more than had been previously measured) and that the water level in the Pit rose and fell with the tides. He wasn’t present—or for that matter even alive—back in 1849 when the links of chain and oak borings had been brought to the surface by the pot auger, Blair admitted, so he could offer only the testimony of those who had been there as evidence. Based on his personal experiences, though, he found the story entirely plausible, because he had seen personally the slivers of oak wood and other items that had come up out of the Money Pit, stuck to the clay on various drill bits. Bowdoin had also failed to mention the copious amounts of coconut fiber and charcoal that came out of the Money Pit and did not even try to explain the log platforms that had been found at 10-foot intervals in the Pit when it was first excavated. Blair seemed especially incensed by Bowdoin’s suggestion that the Money Pit had been “salted” with that famous scrap of parchment. If he or anyone else had wanted to plant evidence of treasure in the Pit, they would have chosen gold or silver, Blair wrote. And it was ridiculous of Bowdoin to suggest that the Treasure Company’s largest investor, Mr. Putnam, had spent himself into bankruptcy in a pointless hunt for a treasure he knew was not there.