Blair was particularly incensed that Bowdoin’s article had relied heavily on a report by three professors associated with Columbia University that described the “so-called cement” as “natural limestone pitted by the action of the water.” Captain Bowdoin was well aware that A. Boake, Roberts and Company, arguably the finest analytical firm in Great Britain, had examined the cement taken out of the Money Pit and produced a report stating that it was almost certainly “man-made,” yet Bowdoin had not mentioned this fact anywhere in his article. That article, Blair closed, had been nothing more than the sour grapes of a man who wanted to continue his exploration of the Money Pit and had been denied by Blair and the other leaseholders.
In spite of Blair’s reply, Bowdoin’s “report,” as he had threatened, indeed made it difficult to obtain “further investments in Oak Island.” Exactly how much negative impact the captain’s Collier’s article made is debatable, but we know for certain that the effort by a Wisconsin professor named S. A. Williams to raise money for a company he called the Oak Island Salvage Company in the summer of 1912 failed miserably. Professor Williams had proposed to solve the problem of the Money Pit by using what was known as the Poetsch method. He would sink a circle of thirty-five holes, each 5 inches in diameter and 3 feet apart, to a depth of 160 feet, Williams wrote in his prospectus. The holes would be lined with metal casings and sealed at the bottom with cement, then pumped dry. He would then drop pipes filled with a solution of calcium chloride chilled to a temperature of 35 degrees below zero (Fahrenheit) into each of the casings and in this way create a ring of ice around the Money Pit that would prevent the flood tunnels from reaching the shaft. It had worked at Anzin, France, and would work on Oak Island, the professor asserted, promising that neither he nor any other officers of the company would accept a salary and that every cent raised by the Oak Island Salvage Company’s stock issue would be spent on machinery, labor, and supplies until a “satisfactory sample” of the treasure had been obtained. The prospectus was met by resounding indifference, and Williams was unable to raise enough money to arrange even a visit Oak Island.
THOUGH HIS MOTIVES WERE DESPICABLE and his argument dishonest, Captain Bowdoin had pioneered what would become the main line of attack on the Oak Island “legend.” Eighty-eight years after its publication, Joe Nickell would cite the Collier’s article as a primary source in his own “investigation” of Oak Island. “In 1911 an engineer, Captain Henry Bowdoin, who had done extensive borings on the island, concluded that the treasure was imaginary,” Nickell wrote in his article for the March/April 2000 issue of the Skeptical Inquirer. “He questioned the authenticity of various alleged findings [such as the cipher stone and piece of gold chain], and attributed the rest to natural phenomena.”
Nickell made many of the same factual omissions that Bowdoin had, failing to account for the work on the beach at Smith’s Cove, including the five man-made finger drains. The one solid piece of scientific evidence upon which Nickell relied was a 1911 geological report commissioned by Bowdoin that noted the “numerous” sinkholes on the mainland opposite Oak Island, which Nickell cited as “strong evidence” to indicate that the supposed man-made works on the island were “really but natural sinkholes and cavities.” Nickell cherry-picked the work of various Nova Scotia investigators (every one of whom had concluded that the evidence overwhelmingly supported the story of the Money Pit that had been passed down since the eighteenth century) to support his argument that the Pit was a natural formation. Nickell had been less than straightforward, to say the least, in the ways he attempted to obviate the accounts of those who had been present when the Money Pit was excavated during the early nineteenth century. Those log platforms found in the Pit? Some of the accounts suggested the platforms had been found at “irregular” intervals, rather than at every 10 feet, Nickell noted, then leapt from this to the assertion that “fallen trees could have sunk into the pit with its collapse, or ‘blowdowns’ could periodically have washed into the depression, later giving the appearance of ‘platforms’ of rotten logs.” Nickell simply ignored the accounts of those who were there when the Money Pit was opened and who had found the platforms to be perfectly level and obviously man-made. He similarly dismissed their descriptions of the pick marks on the walls of the shaft. Most far-fetched was Nickell’s contention that the enormous quantity of coconut fiber pulled from the Money Pit could be accounted for by the “sinkhole theory,” which would explain how the fiber might have worked its way into the deep caverns under the island.
Nickell’s explanation for how the coconut fiber had made its way into the Pit was essentially a regurgitation of the contention at the core of the most detailed argument for the sinkhole theory, an article published in the Atlantic Advocate magazine’s October 1965 issue. “Over many thousands of years debris, washed in by high tides and heavy seas, could have accumulated in this fault,” wrote the author, Betty O’Hanlon. She added that “the tropical fiber could have come from the Gulf Stream which passes very near Nova Scotia. Strong gales could have blown the fiber onto the shore, where it would have become trapped in the fissure.”
The main problem with this theory is that the Gulf Stream runs east more than three hundred miles south of Oak Island. And neither Nickell nor O’Hanlon had offered any sort of explanation for how Oak Island, out of more than three hundred other islands in Mahone Bay, along with the hundreds of miles of coastline on Nova Scotia’s south shore, had become the spot where this aberration of nature had taken place. Perhaps the most striking quality of both the Nickell and O’Hanlon articles was that a pair of writers who had attempted to debunk the “will to believe” among Oak Island’s treasure hunters appeared oblivious to the will not to believe that distorted their own work. Their articles and others that have followed are evidence of how thoroughly Captain Henry Bowdoin’s malice infected the Oak Island narrative.
Bowdoin’s attempt to debunk Oak Island apparently made little impact on his investor Franklin Delano Roosevelt, whose fascination with the place continued throughout his life, even during the years when, as US president, he was consumed with lifting the United States out of the Great Depression and preparing for the country’s entry into World War II. Roosevelt maintained contact with those who had been and were still part of the treasure hunt on Oak Island for more than thirty years and seemingly savored every bit of new information about the island that was produced during that period. On August 31, 1938, during his second presidential term, Roosevelt would reply (on White House stationery) to a letter from Gilbert Hedden, who was leading the current expedition on Oak Island, thusly:
Your note came while I was on my cruise in the Pacific. I wish much I could have gone up the Coast this summer and visited Oak Island and seen the work you are doing—for I shall always be interested in that romantic spot. I hope that you will let me know how you have been getting on with modern methods—ours were, I fear, somewhat antiquated when we were there more than a quarter of a century ago.
Very sincerely yours,
Franklin D. Roosevelt
FDR’s interest notwithstanding, the two decades after Captain Bowdoin’s Collier’s article were marked by one aborted attempt after another to mount a new expedition to Oak Island. The situation was complicated when Frederick Blair was compelled to move his insurance business to Calgary. Even at a remove of three thousand miles, though, Blair maintained his hold on the Money Pit, negotiating a new eight-year lease with Sophia Sellers that lasted until 1921, when Blair signed a revised agreement that gave him control of the Pit and the area around it until 1931.
In 1915, Blair made a new partnership agreement with a syndicate based in Rochester, New York, headed by an engineer named William S. Lozier. The Rochester Group, as it was known, conducted a series of drilling operations at the Money Pit and three other locations during the summer of 1916, but surrendered the effort upon “failing to make any new discoveries,” as Blair’s notes had it. After the Rochester Group left the island, the Money Pit fe
ll into a state of neglect. In November 1920, Blair informed a prospective partner that “the Pit caved in and more or less filled up with the cribbing, the timbers being in every imaginable shape. The ground surrounding the Pit has also caved in more or less and the spaces in and around the Pit are full of water.”
Impenetrable as the Pit had become, there were still those who proposed to make a run at it. In August 1921, Blair signed an agreement with another engineer, Edward Brown of Newark, New Jersey. His plan was to sink a shaft 6 feet by 6 feet about 15 feet from the Money Pit, Brown told Blair. The new shaft would be strongly cribbed and an air lock installed at the top. Brown had concluded based on the available records that there were three treasure boxes in the Money Pit, and he intended to locate them by “sounding with an iron rod,” then tunneling directly to the locations. Brown and his crew went to work on July 4, 1922, but their operations were a comedy of equipment failures and other minor catastrophes. When Blair paid a visit and found that Brown’s drill had never gone deeper than 7 feet, he stopped the work and terminated their agreement.
The detailed record of his ideas and activities that Frederick Blair left behind leaves no doubt that he never stopped believing something of exceptional value had been buried on Oak Island. His fervency was nearly religious and his dealings consistently honorable. During the decade after the Captain Bowdoin fiasco, however, Blair’s behavior suggests at least a whiff of desperation and even, perhaps, a slight degree of hucksterism. Exhibit A in this regard is the advertisement Blair placed in the Boston Journal of Commerce on December 7, 1922, under the heading “Buried Treasure”:
Speculative venture, partly proven, requires $50,000 for half interest. If Successful will produce millions within one year; otherwise possible eighty per cent loss. Satisfactory credentials, proofs partially successful efforts [sic], will prove good sporting effort for party financially able to take chance. Full frank details at interview. 228 F. Journal of Commerce.
The advertisement was straightforward, typical of Blair. The accompanying article, though, written with Blair’s help, was quite a departure. CAN BURIED TREASURE LURE WALL STREET? read the headline above the text:
Two hundred years ago the Welsh buccaneer, Sir Edward [Henry] Morgan, descended on the town of Panama and relieved its inhabitants of as much of their wealth as he could take away. Some years later, when he died Governor of Jamaica, a rich and respected gentleman, the treasure he took from the Spanish Main had disappeared.
The rest of the world apparently has forgotten about this, but there is a man in New York who now says he is certain that this or some other treasure is buried 150 feet deep at a certain spot on Oak Island, near Nova Scotia. Oak Island is one of the 365 islands in the neighborhood, which are not inhabited regularly. This man, a native of Nova Scotia, is here to ‘find men with imagination enough’ to risk some funds in a venture based upon records he possesses, which he believes will conclusively prove that treasure exists at a spot of which he has secured control from the Canadian government.
The story goes back to 1795, when three partridge hunters on Oak Island discovered in the solitary wilderness a place which showed the work of man. To this spot there have come successive parties of treasure hunters, who have dug deeply and have worked out a well-defined pit. After over one hundred years of digging, there has been brought out of this pit cement, timber, salt water, metal, and a piece of parchment about half a square inch in area. However the individual interested, whose announcement appears in this paper, declares he now knows just where the suspected treasure is situated and thinks he can prove he does to any individual interested.
While Blair certainly attracted some attention with this rather overblown pitch, it was not until 1931 that he found the sort of partner he was looking for, who also turned out to be a person he already knew. William Chappell not only had been a member of the Oak Island Treasure Company during its operations on Oak Island in the last years of the nineteenth century, but he was also the man operating the drill that brought the scrap of parchment out of the Money Pit in 1897. In the years since, Chappell and his brothers had prospered as the owners and operators of a string of lumber and sawmills across Nova Scotia. He had never tired, however, of recalling the summers he spent on Oak Island, and over the years he infected his son Melbourne Chappell with what these days is called Oak Island fever. Mel was a member of the Engineering Institute of Canada, William Chappell informed Blair, and he had consulted with the finest mining engineers in the country about how best to recover the cement chamber they had struck with the drill back in 1897. He was advised that a strongly cribbed shaft sunk down to the chamber in which a 450-gallon-per-minute electric pump was employed to keep the work dry should do the trick, and he was prepared to provide financial backing for his son’s plan.
“A man of sterling qualities and character” was how R. V. Harris would describe William Chappell, who like Frederick Blair was “religiously inclined” and fastidious in his habits. Blair was so impressed by the knowledge, ability, and determination of Chappell and son that he closed his insurance office for the summer of 1931 and took up full-time residence on Oak Island to be involved in the day-to-day operations.
William Chappell was quick to identify the crib work in the Money Pit that he said he had helped build back in 1897. Blair disagreed, insisting the Pit lay some distance away. The problem for both men was that the exact location of the Money Pit had become lost during the previous decade, as both it and several of the surrounding shafts had collapsed. After considerable discussion, Blair and William Chappell agreed to sink their new shaft (no. 21) just southwest of the Money Pit and to make it the broadest hole dug on Oak Island to date—12 feet by 14 feet—and to drive it deeper than any previous shaft had gone.
The excavation unearthed a fascinating variety of articles, beginning with an anchor fluke found at 116 feet. (Blair kept this item in his home for the next twenty years, until it disappeared after his death in 1951.) A few feet below the anchor fluke, they discovered an axe head that closely resembled one he had seen on an Acadian axe at the museum in Annapolis Royal, said Blair, who estimated it was 250 years old. A pick was found at 127 feet, as were parts of a miner’s seal-oil lamp. According to Blair’s notes:
From 116 feet 6 inches to 155 feet, the earth in over half of the shaft was much disturbed. How these articles reached a depth of from ten to seventeen feet lower than any searcher ever reached is a question that must be answered. These tools, I believe, belonged to the searchers who worked there many years ago, and had fallen from a much higher level to where found.
Blair wrote that this was evidence to him of an open space beneath what previously had been thought to be the bottom of the Money Pit and into which he believed the treasure chests had fallen. At a depth of about 150 feet, in the softer part of the new shaft, “we commenced to uncover broken up pieces of stone,” Blair went on, that had “the appearance of the so-called cement.” These appeared to have been “dropped or dumped from a higher point,” further convincing him that the treasure had plunged somewhere deeper into the earth when the Money Pit collapsed in 1861.
The question now is, where is the wood and treasure—metal in pieces—which dropped from 100 feet, the iron struck at 126 feet by drillers, the cement and wood drilled into between 153 and 157 feet, and the iron at 171 feet? It appears as if we had gone past them. They certainly must be somewhere in the near vicinity of our Pit.
The Chappell crew believed they might have made a major discovery at 155 feet below the surface, when, as William Chappell’s nephew Claude Chappell recalled it, “we came to a short seam of shale rock and more water started coming in. It was coming in from three or four feet on one side; it wasn’t just coming in from one little hole. It was a round, clearly defined tunnel.” Several of the diggers said this must be the flood tunnel from the south shore.
At a depth of 163 feet, 6 inches, the company began to send tunnels in all directions, “but without locating foreign materia
l,” as Blair put it. “Although the conditions did not appear natural.”
As the summer faded into autumn and the weather worsened, the Chappell expedition started to be bedeviled by a series of near catastrophes. The electrical system running the pump was damaged repeatedly by storms, and the pump’s subsequent failures almost cost men their lives. The nearest miss involved Chappell’s foreman, George Stevenson, who was in the tunnel at the 157-foot level when suddenly rising water caused the earth to soften and the walls of the tunnel to collapse. Stevenson was nearly entombed before his men pulled him out—covered head to toe in mud and gasping for breath—by the rope attached to his waist. Subsequent accidents over the next few days resulted in two other men suffering broken ribs. Finally, on October 29, 1931, bowing to the weather, the Chappell crew suspended work. Blair was “more convinced than ever—if that be possible—that there is treasure there,” he wrote in his journal two days later. He and the Chappells agreed that work would resume in the spring of 1932. William Chappell’s brothers, though, were unhappy that he had spent $40,000 without anything tangible to show for it other than some old artifacts. The Great Depression was finally hitting home even in Nova Scotia, and their receipts were dwindling, the Chappell brothers said. They could not agree to support further efforts on Oak Island.
William Chappell’s counterargument became moot when Sophia Sellers died that year and Blair was unable to persuade her heirs to let him renew his lease on the Money Pit. Early in 1932, a New York engineer named John Talbot showed up in Nova Scotia and said he was representing a “financial interest” headed by the wealthy heiress Mary B. Stewart. Talbot apparently offered the heirs enough to gain their permission to spend seven weeks on Oak Island drilling in and around the Money Pit. He found nothing of note and abandoned the effort when his drill broke at a depth of about 50 feet just northwest of what had become known as the Chappell shaft. In the end, the most notable result of the New York concern’s foray on Oak Island was the disappearance of the famous ivory boatswain’s whistle that had been found in 1885. It was delivered to Mary B. Stewart in Manhattan in August 1932 and has never been seen since.
The Curse of Oak Island Page 12