The Curse of Oak Island

by Randall Sullivan

  “If we had that whistle, and could date it, we might know who did the original work on Oak Island,” Rick Lagina would tell me sorrowfully in August 2016.

  “Might” and “know,” I found myself thinking, could be the two most fraught words in the history of Oak Island.

  CHAPTER NINE

  It was the year 1933 that the erstwhile treasure hunter Franklin Delano Roosevelt became the thirty-second president of the United States, and also about when Oak Island historians began to turn decisively away from the Captain Kidd theory.

  Thomas Nixon of Victoria, British Columbia, was the man running the operations on Oak Island during the early part of Roosevelt’s first term in office. Nixon’s place in the chronicle of the island would be just one more chapter consisting of grand announcements, elaborate plans, and less elaborate implementation, ending in an abysmal but familiar failure, except for the theory he brought to the treasure hunt and the method by which he had arrived at it. If Nixon proved anything, it was that the Oak Island story could and would get stranger.

  Like Captain Bowdoin, Nixon would use the New York newspapers to announce his bold and thrilling claim about what it was that had been buried on Oak Island. His Canadian Oak Island Treasure Company was “equipped with the latest engineering apparatus,” according to the story Nixon planted in the October 15, 1933, edition of the New York Herald Tribune. This redundant boast would likely have attracted little attention if not for the claim that the works on Oak Island had been completed by “a tribe of Incas” who had fled their homes hundreds of years earlier “carrying jewels and precious metals,” as the Herald Tribune article put it. “The legend says the Indians landed on Oak Island and buried their riches in a deep tunnel running from the Atlantic Ocean to the centre of the island, and then vanished.”

  What the article didn’t say was that this “legend” was the product of what at the time was known as “spirit rapping.” This was a method of alleged communication with the souls of the dead that involved messages tapped out, most commonly on a tabletop. It had become a kind of craze in the United States during the years immediately before and after the Civil War, owing in large part to the public fascination with a pair of young teen sisters from New York State named Maggie and Kate Fox, whose supporters included Horace Greeley and Arthur Conan Doyle.

  In the context of the era, it was perhaps understandable that Frederick Blair might form a partnership with a man who claimed to have learned during a séance that it was Inca treasure buried on Oak Island. And it couldn’t have hurt that Nixon’s psychic was referencing perhaps the richest lost treasure ever known to have existed.

  Certain elements of the story of the so-called treasure of Tumbes are foggy conflations, but many others are as solid and certain as anything we call history can be. This story begins in the early sixteenth century, when an aspiring conquistador named Francisco Pizarro joined a colonization expedition to the New World. Pizarro, seeking to become as wealthy and famous as his distant cousin Hernán Cortés, the conqueror of the Aztec empire, distinguished himself in several battles with native tribes and by the year 1526 had risen to the position of second in command of the Spanish army in the region of Darien, in what we now know as Peru and Ecuador. In 1527 and 1528, Pizarro and his troops twice visited the city of Tumbes, where the people we today call the Incas lived (actually “Inca” was a term that could only be used by their king), and each time were stunned by the wealth and splendor of a place where even weapons and tools were made of silver and gold, and heaps of enormous emeralds filled vases and jars surrounding statues made entirely of precious metals.

  Lacking the force to challenge the natives, Pizarro retreated all the way back to Spain, where he entreated King Charles to finance a military expedition that would claim the fabulous treasures of Tumbes. Charles agreed and even stipulated that Pizarro would be governor of any lands he conquered.

  Pizarro and his troops marched back into Tumbes in the autumn of 1532, but found the city in ruins and its treasures gone. There is a claim based on some historical evidence that the two priests Pizarro had left behind to minister to the natives instead warned the Incas of Pizarro’s intentions and helped them move and conceal the treasure of Tumbes. Whether that is so, it is a certifiable fact that from Tumbes, Pizarro marched his men to the Inca city of Cajamarca, home of the newly crowned Inca king Atahualpa. With a force of just 160 men (but also several cannons that they used to devastating effect), the Spaniards routed an Inca honor guard of some six thousand and captured Atahualpa. The king quickly promised Pizarro that he would fill a room 24 feet long by 18 feet wide by 8 feet tall with gold and give him twice that amount of silver if his life was spared. Pizarro agreed and during the next two months the Inca began to deliver the promised precious metals. The gold and silver came slowly, though, and Pizarro and his men began to believe that the natives were using the time to assemble their eighty thousand men into an enormous army to rescue Atahualpa and destroy the Spanish. Pizarro’s response was to announce in August 1533 that Atahualpa would be burned at the stake for his supposed crimes against humanity. The Inca king converted to Christianity to spare himself such a fate, but Pizarro then ordered that Atahualpa be garroted, and he was. The general of the Inca army responded by ordering that the 750 tons of gold he was bringing to secure his king’s release now be hidden from the Spanish. The hiding place is most often said to be a cave in the Llanganates, a remote and misty mountain range between the Andes and the Amazon, in what is now central Ecuador.

  Other stories and legends about what happened to the fabulous Inca treasure began to emerge even before the beginning of the seventeenth century. One often-repeated story was that the priests Pizarro left behind had aided the Incas in moving the treasure to the Isthmus of Darien (today the Isthmus of Panama), where the priests helped the Inca either obtain or build the ships they would use to transport the treasure to one of the Windward Islands (stretching from Dominica to Trinidad and Tobago). Eventually, the story became that the boats carrying the Inca treasure had been swept up and away by a series of enormous tropical storms and hurricanes that struck the Caribbean (the historical record suggests that the tempests that struck the region in the year 1530 were of astounding and terrifying force) and were swept north to some distant location, where the treasure of Tumbes was cached. Not until the advent of Thomas Nixon, though, was that location identified as Oak Island.

  It was perhaps because he had no other offers at the moment that Blair reached an agreement with Nixon that would allow the British Columbia man to work on Oak Island between April and November 1934 on the condition that half of any treasure he found would go to Blair. His plan, Nixon had told both Blair and his backers, was to drive interlocking pilings around the Money Pit until he created a steel circle with a diameter of between 50 and 75 feet. He would then excavate the entire contents of this enormous enclosure as deep as he needed to go to recover the treasure. Instead, Nixon and his crew arrived on Oak Island in June 1934 and did no digging at all. What Nixon did do was bore fourteen holes that went as deep as 170 feet in the vicinity of the Money Pit. The most interesting things he brought up were bits of old oak timbers and fragments of gold-and-blue china. On November 1, 1934, Blair refused Nixon’s request for an extension and terminated their relationship. Nixon threatened legal action, but in the end simply withdrew and disappeared from the Oak Island story.

  The theory that it was Inca treasure buried on Oak Island, though, did not vanish with him. It would be revived by at least one self-appointed investigator in every decade that followed. So in his fleeting way, Thomas Nixon might be said to have pioneered the proliferation of theories about who or what was responsible for the work on Oak Island. Thus it might also be fitting that Nixon was about to be succeeded by the man who was the first to recognize that the answers to his questions might be written in the very topography of the island.

  CHAPTER TEN

  By the time Gilbert Hedden joined the Oak Island treasure hunt i
n 1935, he was as apparently well set financially as anyone who had preceded him. After graduating from the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in 1919, Hedden had become, at age twenty-two, the vice president and general manager of his family’s business, Hedden Iron Construction Company of Hillside, New Jersey, fabricators and erectors of structural steel. He pocketed a tidy sum as his share of the company’s sale to Bethlehem Steel in 1931 and earned a significant annual salary as plant manager of what Bethlehem was now calling its Hedden Works division. There was an independent spirit in the young man that chafed against corporate constraints, though, so in 1932 he walked away from Hedden Works to try the auto industry. By 1934, he was the owner of a thriving dealership in Morristown, New Jersey. In nearby Chatham, where he lived, Hedden was elected mayor that same year.

  The dreamer in Hedden was not satisfied with this sort of conventional prosperity, however. That part of him had responded powerfully to an article about Oak Island that was published in the May 28, 1928, edition of the New York Times Magazine, an article that he carried with him and read repeatedly. The engineering challenge was what fascinated him, Hedden would say initially. In early 1934 he made a trip to Nova Scotia to take a look at the Money Pit area of Oak Island and make a close inspection of the problem it posed. Like Frederick Blair, Hedden was methodical, collecting all the available data that went back to 1795, studying every expedition to the island in the years since. He was all about separating fact from fiction, Hedden told Blair and his lawyer, R. V. Harris. He interviewed William Chappell and at least a dozen other men who had been part of previous treasure-hunting companies and began to assemble his own journal, one that rivaled Blair’s in length and detail. “Investigation of the Legend of Buried Treasure at Oak Island, Nova Scotia,” Hedden titled his thirty-one-Page monograph, to which he attached an assortment of old surveys, charts, and aerial photographs of the island. Blair, effectively Hedden’s partner by virtue of his continued hold on the treasure trove license, shared all of his records, letters, and plans. Only after completing a thorough study of those as well was Hedden prepared to state with conviction that he believed something extraordinary had taken place on Oak Island, something singular in the history of the world. He might not have known it yet, but Hedden was hooked for life.

  Blair was pleased to hear Hedden’s opinion, but he wanted to know what the man proposed to do about it. Blair might have lost his lease on the Money Pit area after failing to reach a deal with Sophia Sellers’s heirs, who were demanding far too “fancy” a price for their property as he wrote Harris, but he still held the treasure trove license, which made him indispensable to any further Oak Island operations. On March 1, 1935, Blair and Hedden signed a deal that guaranteed each of them a share of any treasure recovered on the island, with Blair to lend his experience and expertise and Hedden to finance the work.

  There was an immediate threat of complication when the province political leadership proposed that the Nova Scotia Mines Act should be amended to give the Minister of Mines the same authority over treasure troves that the office had over ores and minerals. The bill was explicitly targeted at Oak Island, and this stirred much controversy. The Mines Act amendment was ultimately killed in committee, but the heirs of Sophia Sellers had had their inflated sense of the value of the land affirmed and refused to sell for even two or three times what it was worth. Hedden was so determined to acquire the Sellers’s Oak Island lots that he eventually agreed to pay the heirs $5,000, close to ten times the land’s appraised value. He and the Sellers heirs signed their deed of sale in July 1935.

  Hedden immediately impressed Blair with his seriousness by bringing electricity to the island by an underwater cable, building a wharf at Smith’s Cove, having the island surveyed, and building himself a cabin not far north of the Money Pit. Blair was not happy, though, when Hedden announced that he had hired Sprague and Henwood, the Scranton, Pennsylvania, company that had previously worked on Oak Island for the Rochester Group in 1916, to “de-water” and excavate the Money Pit and most of the other shafts surrounding it, then to drill laterally at depths between 125 and 160 feet. “There does not appear to be anything very decisive about the work outlined,” Blair groused in a letter to Harris, “it being more along the lines of previous operations and open to failure without definite results.”

  Hedden had money to spend, however. The man he selected to lead his operation was Frederick Krupp, an engineer who had headed major drilling operations on Africa’s Gold Coast and in Persia. Blair had to admit some satisfaction in seeing men who knew what they were doing, equipped with the finest machinery that had ever been brought to Oak Island, including turbine pumps fed by a 7,500-watt hydroelectric power line that would empty the Money Pit and the other shafts at a rate of 1,000 gallons per minute.

  Based on what he had learned from William Chappell, Hedden instructed his crew to open and drain the Chappell shaft (no. 21), strengthen the cribbing on its walls, then send drills in all directions. The work began in June 1936 and before the end of the month the men were working on a platform 90 feet deep in the shaft. When their drills brought up oak splinters from a depth of 150 feet, both Blair and Hedden agreed the wood must have come from either a box of some kind or the platform that had fallen during the 1861 collapse. Below 165 feet, the drills struck granite boulders that had to be dragged to the surface one at a time. The shaft was then retimbered to a depth of 170 feet, the deepest the cribbing had ever gone on Oak Island. At the bottom, they found the earth “much disturbed,” as Blair put it, but no sign of treasure chests.

  After adjourning for the winter, the Hedden crew was back on Oak Island in May 1937, when the men began work on the shaft that would become no. 22, determined to make it twice the size of the Money Pit, 12 feet by 24 feet. They dug into an old shaft cribbed with double pieces of 3-inch planking that was in fair shape and believed they had encompassed the Money Pit. By the end of June, the workmen were at a depth of 50 feet, where they found nearly a dozen 2-inch drill casings and several 6-inch casings. At 65 feet they found an old tin miner’s lamp partially filled with whale oil and a piece of unexploded dynamite that Hedden decided had been left behind by the Oak Island Association in 1867. At 93 feet, they found what they were certain must be one of the original flood tunnels, mostly collapsed. Close by, the men discovered what appeared to be primitive putty. Hedden matched this against the putty that had been used to seal the windows of an old shack left by the Onslow Company and decided it was the same stuff.

  At 106 feet, the Hedden crew found a tunnel 3 feet, 10 inches wide by 6 feet, 4 inches high, lined with 5- and 6-inch planks of hemlock timber. Following the timbering of the tunnel, the men reported that it passed through the Money Pit in an arc, as if part of a circle. They had found part of the Fraser tunnel from the 1860s, Hedden decided, which meant they were very close to the original shaft. At 124 feet, the crew stopped digging down and began to bore lateral 42-foot-long holes from the floor of the shaft. When oak fragments were brought up from five of the holes, Hedden and his men were jubilant, believing they must have hit the treasure. Winter was coming on hard by then, however, so Hedden ordered his men to seal things up tight so they could resume work in the spring of 1938.

  This decision was “a grievous disappointment” to Frederick Blair, as his attorney, Harris, put it. The discoveries made by Hedden’s people convinced Blair that they had confirmed the location of the Money Pit and he was tremendously excited. The drill casings, the unexploded dynamite and, especially, the old lamp filled with whale oil were all solid evidence they were in the original shaft, but what he found most convincing, Blair said, were the oak borings brought up from below 125 feet, just as they had been by the pot auger back in 1866 and again in 1897.

  Hedden concurred, writing to Blair’s lawyer, Harris, that he was convinced an unknown number of treasure chests were buried on Oak Island at a depth of between 160 and 175 feet and that they were encrusted with hardened blue clay. He believed the original chests had r
otted and the treasure itself was embedded in that belt of blue clay. It must be a fantastic treasure, Hedden added, given the precautions that had been taken to protect it.

  What neither Blair nor Hedden knew at that moment, however, was that Hedden was done digging on Oak Island. By November 1937, the New Jersey man had sunk more than $51,000 into the Oak Island search and from a financial standpoint his timing couldn’t have been worse. The US Internal Revenue Service had filed a civil lawsuit against him that month, claiming back taxes related to the sale of his father’s steel business in 1931. Years of litigation and attachments would follow. Suddenly desperate for cash, Hedden decided on a rapid expansion of his auto dealership back in New Jersey.

  In March 1938, Hedden wrote to Blair’s attorney, Harris, that because of the demands of his business, “I shall have to postpone my activities on the Oak Island adventure rather indefinitely.” He asked the lawyer “to correspond with Blair and inform him of the present condition and of the fact that I will be unable to proceed any further this summer and possibly next.”

  Blair, unaware of Hedden’s financial circumstances, was crestfallen and bitter. He was seventy-one years old, convinced that his last best chance to bring the Oak Island treasure up from below was evaporating before his eyes. Hedden’s withdrawal was “nothing more or less than a downright betrayal,” Blair wrote to Harris.