The Curse of Oak Island

by Randall Sullivan

  Those who followed after him, though, would eventually credit Gilbert Hedden as perhaps the most visionary treasure hunter ever to set foot on Oak Island, and as a man who made some of the most significant findings in the entire history of the endeavor. During the summer of 1936, while Frederick Krupp directed the work in the Money Pit area, Hedden had spent most of his time exploring the rest of Oak Island. In July 1936, he had been combing the beach at Joudrey’s Cove when a granite rock about the size of two fists caught his attention. He dug it out and discovered the Roman numeral II carved into one of the rock’s flat surfaces and below that the letters GIN, which looked to be a fragment of a word. The name McGinnis came to mind immediately. Locals who had worked on the island in previous decades told Hedden that the rock was part of a much larger boulder that had been blasted apart with dynamite back in the 1920s so that the crew could dig beneath it. Nothing was found, and afterward a number of men had carried away pieces of the boulder as souvenirs. That particular boulder had been of some interest, the former workmen told Hedden, because of the inscriptions etched into it. Some appeared to have been made during the nineteenth century, but there were other “strange symbols” that seemed much older.

  To the exasperation of Blair and the amusement of the men on his crew, Hedden pulled them out of the Money Pit to spend two days searching the shoreline at Joudrey’s Cove. Two more large inscribed rocks were discovered by the men, one etched with the letter W and another reading “S.S. Ross 1864,” marks made, Hedden assumed, by a man who had worked with the Oak Island Association. But then a fourth and much larger inscribed rock was found, and the symbols carved into this one appeared to be much more weathered—and therefore much older than those on the other rocks—and were utterly indecipherable to Hedden and his crewmen. Hedden had the four slabs of rock rafted around the island to his dock at Smith’s Cove, then hauled by a team of horses to his cabin near the Money Pit. When he attempted to fit the pieces together, though, nothing matched, which to Hedden meant he was missing many pieces of the original boulder that must indeed have been taken by the men who had blasted it apart back in the 1920s. Convinced that at least the most weathered of the inscriptions on the largest rock predated the discovery of the Money Pit, Hedden began to consider the possibility that the solution to the mystery of the island might have been left behind on the ground by the men who first dug the Pit and did the rest of the original work on Oak Island.

  Hedden also studied the south shore during the summer of 1936, and in the process became convinced (as would later be proven accurate) that the shoreline there was eroding at the rate of 2 feet every forty years, which meant that much of the land trod upon by those who did the original work on Oak Island was now underwater. This made him curious about what might be found at low tide on Smith’s Cove, and Hedden was soon rewarded with the discovery of two large timbers protruding from the rocks well inside the cofferdam that had been constructed by the Oak Island Association back in 1863. Hedden at first believed he was looking at a skidway built during the construction of the cofferdam, but he realized this was not so when he studied the two timbers more closely. They were each about 15 inches in diameter at the base and notched for a quarter of their circumference every 4 feet, where they had been fitted with cross members that had been attached with wooden pins. Suddenly Hedden realized that he was looking at the remnants of a much older structure, something that had been built back in a time when wooden pins were easier to make than iron bolts or champs, something, that is, that predated the early eighteenth century.

  It would be almost forty years before anyone realized the full significance of what Hedden had discovered at Smith’s Cove, but there is no question that the man himself understood the importance of the features he found during the following summer in 1937. Foremost among these was what has become known as the stone triangle. The process by which Hedden rediscovered the triangle (first spotted by Captain Welling in 1897), though, may have been as significant as the discovery itself, and it is certainly more captivating.

  In June 1937, shortly after Hedden returned to Nova Scotia to spend his second summer on Oak Island, R. V. Harris, who had become Hedden’s attorney as well as Blair’s, showed him a recently published book titled Captain Kidd and His Skeleton Island, written by the English author Harold T. Wilkins. There was a map of an island used as an illustration in the book that bore remarkable similarities to Oak Island. Hedden was immediately fascinated, noting that the configurations of the shoreline of the mapped island in Wilkins’s book, along with its offshore water depths and shoals were indeed similar to those of Oak Island. Even more striking, though, was that the island depicted on the map featured two mountains on its east and west ends, along with a sunken lagoon between them, correlating closely to the two drumlins and the swamp on Oak Island. On the Wilkins’s map, there was also an X to mark the spot that was situated almost exactly where the Money Pit stood on Oak Island.

  The Wilkins map bore a legend that read “W.K. 1669” and below that a handwritten list of distances and bearings:

  The island in the Wilkins book was not named and there was no latitude or longitude marked. The water surrounding the island was identified only by the words “Mar Del.”

  Wilkins claimed that the map and three similar to it had been in the secret compartments of a desk that had belonged to William Kidd. Such maps, Hedden would learn, really did exist, and the story of how they had come to the attention of Harold Wilkins enchanted him.

  The principal players in this drama were a pair of “bachelor brothers” (as they were described in the British newspapers at the time) named Guy and Hubert Palmer. The Palmers were the curators of a well-regarded private museum of pirate and nautical history. Hubert Palmer was considered to be perhaps the planet’s leading authority on the epoch of high seas piracy, and he maintained a particular interest in anything associated with the life and times of Captain William Kidd. In the better publications of his period, Hubert Palmer was regularly described as remarkably discerning, known to subject any items offered to him to the best available experts for authentication.

  In the early 1930s, Hubert had acquired a desk he believed had been used by Captain Kidd aboard the Adventure Galley. During his inspection of the desk, Hubert found four hidden compartments, two made by false bottoms in drawers, one behind a mirror and the other—and presumably most significant—in a small hole that had been drilled in a side runner of the desk and fitted with a small brass cylinder. Each of the compartments contained a hand-drawn map.

  These maps would become known as Captain Kidd’s treasure charts after Hubert Palmer submitted them to the British Museum for authentication. The work was performed by a team under the supervision of R. A. Skelton, the superintendent of the museum’s Map Room. In his report, Skelton wrote that the maps were so old and fragile they might be destroyed by “direct photographic reproduction,” so he made hand-drawn copies of the originals with notes of what he could make out of the writing and markings on the maps.

  Harold Wilkins had seen the treasure charts during a visit to the British Museum, where R. A. Skelton had permitted the author to examine but not to touch them. Apparently, Wilkins had used what he had seen as the basis for the maps that illustrated his book. Wilkins was an odd fellow to say the least, Hedden had been told. Once a Cambridge-educated journalist, he had become perhaps the most infamous “pseudohistorian” of his time, one who had first attracted attention with his claims about the Mary Celeste, an American merchant brigantine that on December 5, 1872, had been discovered deserted and adrift in the Atlantic Ocean near the Azores Islands. The mystery of what had happened to the captain and his crew was one that would fascinate the public for decades afterward, and Wilkins had fed that appetite with a largely unsupported claim that the men of the Mary Celeste had been lured aboard another ship and slaughtered. He also produced works that claimed a vanished white race had once populated South America, that the survivors of Atlantis were living deep undergr
ound in immense caverns, and that planet Earth was being watched by hostile aliens. In spite of all that, Hedden was riveted by what he found to be undeniable similarities between Wilkins’s Mar Del map and Oak Island.

  When Hedden wrote to Wilkins in the summer of 1937, however, pointing out those similarities and requesting additional information about how he had obtained his map, the author wrote back that there could be no connection to Oak Island because he knew the latitude and longitude of the island on the Mar Del map and it was in the Eastern Hemisphere. Furthermore, Wilkins added that William Kidd had never been anywhere near Nova Scotia, and he urged Hedden not to waste his time pursuing such a notion.

  In spite of that, Hedden persisted. He was so convinced that there was a connection between Wilkins’s map and Oak Island that in August 1937 he ordered his men to discontinue their excavation work in the Money Pit area and join him in a search of the island based on the distances and bearings from the Mar Del map.

  Blair was not pleased, but he consulted with Hedden anyway, and for the first time informed his partner of some features that had been discovered by Captain John Welling back in 1897. One of these, Blair said, was a white granite boulder about 50 feet north of the Money Pit with a 1.25-inch hole through its center that had clearly been drilled by human hands. The other feature Blair described was the stone triangle, lost during the forty years since Welling first observed it.

  On August 15, the curious Hedden ordered his crew to search for the triangle of stones Blair had described. A workman named Amos Nauss was “clawing around” with a hoe in the underbrush above Smith’s Cove when, as he described it years later to the Canadian journalist D’Arcy O’Connor, “Suddenly I hit one rock, then another and another, all in line with each other.”

  When the rest of the crew helped Nauss clear away the underbrush, they found an equilateral triangle made out of round beach stones set in the grass just above the high-water mark on the south shore. Each side of the triangle was 10 feet in length. After further examination, Hedden noticed that from a point on the baseline 4 feet from the west corner of the triangle and 6 feet from the east corner, there was a medial line, also composed of round beach stones, which connected the base of the triangle with its apex. The triangle also featured a curved line of beach stones 3 feet below the base that connected both corners of the base, giving the entire design the outline of an enormous sextant.

  What truly excited Hedden, though, was that when he followed the sight line from the stone triangle to the white granite boulder and then beyond, he discovered—just a bit more than 400 feet away—a second granite boulder that had also been drilled through and in exactly the same way as the other: with its hole in alignment with the hole in the first boulder. Hedden was at this point so convinced of the significance of his discoveries that he engaged the services of a land surveyor from Halifax named Charles Roper, who was boated to the island the next day, August 16, 1937, and immediately began making measurements between the drilled boulders and the stone triangle.

  The distance between the drilled boulders was almost exactly 25 rods (about 415 feet) Roper reported to Hedden. Using the top numbers from the list of distances and bearings on the Mar Del map, Hedden instructed Roper to establish a point on the line between the drill holes that was 18 rods east of the drilled boulder near Smith’s Cove and 7 rods west of the boulder nearer to the Money Pit. Roper did as instructed and found himself standing right next to the Cave-in Pit. Hedden was impressed enough to tell Roper he should lay in a course directly from this point toward the south shore. At a distance of 30 rods from the point next to the Cave-in Pit, Roper struck the medial line of the stone triangle just below the triangle’s east-west base. It was then that Roper realized—stumbled on the realization, really—that the medial line of the stone triangle was pointing perfectly due north, directly at the polestar. He and Hedden then followed that line toward the drumlin on the east end of the island and found that it led directly to the center of the Money Pit.

  Hedden was flabbergasted and ecstatic. What convinced him he had made a monumental discovery, though, was when Roper determined that the sight lines of the drilled boulders not only ran through the medial line of the stone triangle, but also into the center of the Money Pit. There could be no doubt, Hedden told Blair, that the designer or designers of the original works on Oak Island had placed the drilled stones and created the stone triangle so the location of the Pit would never be lost to them.

  Hedden was so excited that he dashed off a letter to President Roosevelt on September 1, 1937, detailing the discoveries he had made that summer. Hedden wrote that he had reached several solid conclusions:

  First, that a large amount of complicated and difficult engineering was done on the site for some purpose a long time ago, probably as early as 1640.

  Second, that Kidd [based on the Mar Del map, Hedden was at that point sticking with the story of the famous pirate’s involvement] knew of the site and of the work and probably who did it, but was not aware of its exact location.

  Third, that the early legends of the discovery of the shaft, the tunnels, the peculiar fiber, the mysterious stone with the inscription … are to a large part true and can be, in large part, substantiated today.

  FDR replied with a letter in which he thanked Hedden for the news, then added: “It vividly recalls to my mind our semi-serious, semi-pleasure efforts at Oak Island nearly thirty years ago. I can visualize the theories on which you are working. As I remember it, we also talked of sinking a new shaft on our main run out.”

  That autumn, Hedden decided he had to speak in person to Harold Wilkins. On November 10, 1937, not yet aware that the IRS was about to initiate the actions that would ruin him, Hedden boarded the Cunard ocean liner Aquitania, bound for London. Upon arrival, he found Wilkins, but the meeting was not nearly so fulfilling as he had hoped. All we know of what transpired between the two men is in the letter Hedden wrote the next day to R. V. Harris: “Wilkins is a very peculiar character,” Hedden told the attorney. “And it is difficult to describe him adequately. I would say that in appearance and manner of speech he is every bit as crazy as his book would seem to make him.”

  Wilkins had almost immediately admitted that the Mar Del map in his book was “a figment of his imagination,” Hedden went on, “and apologized sincerely for not being able to tell me before that it was.” To his astonishment, Wilkins had found himself under siege after the publication of Captain Kidd and His Skeleton Island and on the receiving end of letters from all over the world written by men who believed they knew exactly where the island on the Mar Del map was. And yet, Hedden wrote, “He admitted my claims to identify far surpass any others he had received and agreed that his drawing was according to the evidence undoubtedly of Oak Island.” He had concocted the map for no other reason than that his publisher had demanded one for the frontispiece of the book, and “therefore drew the chart as shown, using symbols and marks shown on contemporary charts on file in the British Museum. Somehow, he had “unconsciously” drawn what he had seen when he looked at Hubert Palmer’s Captain Kidd treasure charts.

  Hedden was baffled. There was no satisfying or even entirely rational way to explain the similarities between Wilkins’s Mar Del map and Oak Island, and the fact that Hedden’s attempt to follow the measurements and bearings on the Mar Del map had led him to connections between the stone triangle, the drilled stones, and the Money Pit was perplexing to say the least.

  Hedden returned home to New Jersey just in time to learn that the IRS was suing him. The court battles that ensued would bankrupt him, yet Hedden refused for another dozen years to surrender his ownership of the lots in Nova Scotia that included the Money Pit to pay off his debts. When the IRS attempted to put his Oak Island property up for sale, Hedden fought them off fiercely. And while he may not have done further exploration on the island, his search for answers about what had happened there continued to be a driving force in an unfolding narrative.

  THE FIRST TI
ME I WAS ASKED publicly what I thought of the pirate treasure theory of Oak Island, I scoffed. It was difficult to imagine a band of pirates burying treasure in a hole more than 10 feet deep and the idea that buccaneers would create a complexly engineered shaft that went down more than 100 feet into the earth was ridiculous. Oak Island historian Charles Barkhouse readily agreed with me, which was something of a balm to my embarrassment when I learned months later about what pirates had done on the islands of Tortuga and Jamaica.

  The labyrinths of tunnels and underground chambers on both Caribbean islands, created both to store booty and as avenues of escape, rivaled in complexity what had been done on Oak Island and surpassed it in scope. And it was pirates who had designed and dug the underground works on Tortuga and at Jamaica’s famous pirate haven Port Royal. So there had been pirate engineers after all, and there were pirates either willing to do the hard labor of excavation on a tremendous scale or to make slaves do it. And they had done it mainly for the purpose of protecting their booty, I realized, a fact that disagreed with my belief that Oak Island must be about something more than gold or silver.

  I learned of what had been done on the two Caribbean islands while preparing (I imagined) to skewer yet another of the alternative theories of Oak Island that had proliferated in recent years. This one involved the idea that what had been created on Oak Island was a sort of “pirate bank” where buccaneers from different bands could keep their loot in a secure repository. I found the idea absurd. Not only was the notion that pirates would have joined together in such an organized and trusting fashion far-fetched, but it was also incomprehensible to me that they would have left their booty untouched. And if they had come back for their gold and silver, they would certainly not have sealed things up so neatly before departing. After learning about the works that had been created on Tortuga and at Port Royal, however, I wasn’t prepared to be quite so absolute in my opinion. This was what Oak Island did to people: gradually, it became impossible to completely dismiss any theory of what the works on the island were about.