The Curse of Oak Island

by Randall Sullivan

  I had been talking this over with the Lagina brothers and the producers of The Curse of Oak Island when one of them (I honestly don’t remember who) brought up Harold Wilkins’s Mar Del map, which had been featured on an earlier episode of the show. This led me to the discovery of the story of Hubert Palmer’s Captain Kidd treasure charts, a subject with which the producers and the Laginas weren’t familiar. The producers became interested, urging me to see if I could locate Palmer’s original charts. Kevin Burns, who had created the show, seemed particularly excited. I learned that Hubert Palmer had held on to the charts up to the time of his death in 1949 at the age of eighty-five. Palmer had never suggested any connection between the charts and Oak Island, and in fact before taking ill had devoted more than a decade to attempts to organize an expedition to the South China Sea, where he believed Captain Kidd had buried his treasure on a deserted island. In his will, Palmer had specified that the charts and all of his other pirate artifacts should go Mrs. Elizabeth Dick, the “nurse-companion” who had cared for him during the last eleven years of his life and who had shared his belief that the Captain Kidd treasure charts were the genuine article. Mrs. Dick had lived on until 1965, when she died at the age of seventy-seven, but by then the woman had sold the treasure charts for what at the time was the considerable sum of $50,000. The auction house that brokered the sale in 1957 had identified the purchaser only as the agent of “a North American/Canadian syndicate.” The charts were never seen again and I could obtain no more information about who had purchased them, I told the producers, unless I was sent to Eastbourne, England, where Hubert Palmer had maintained his home and where the maps had been sold.

  Excited as they were about the maps, the producers weren’t willing to spend what it would cost to send me (with a camera crew, of course) to England, especially after Rick and Marty Lagina insisted they would be coming along if the trip happened. “Find out what you can about the copies of the maps that were made,” one of the producers suggested. “Maybe we can get a look at those.”

  I assumed the copies of the charts that R. A. Skelton had made back in the 1930s were still somewhere in the archives of the British Museum, but I got absolutely no help at all from the museum in locating them. Eventually, I was able to obtain copies of the copies that Skelton had made. When they arrived in Nova Scotia, I was terribly disappointed.

  The famous treasure charts were four crudely hand-drawn maps of what appeared to be the same vaguely boomerang-shaped island. The island wrapped around what was marked as “Lagoon” on three of the four maps, with a simple directional chart that was identical on all four of them. There were some variations; an area on the opposite side of the island from the lagoon was marked “Sand and Coral” on two of the maps, but it had a notation that read “Wood—20 Turtles” above markings for twin “Reefs” on another. One map did note two hills on the island, but they were right next to one another rather than at opposite ends of the island. The most detailed map identified the body of water beyond the lagoon as “China Sea.” There were a list of directions and bearings on two of the treasure charts, but they were quite different from those on Harold Wilkins’s Mar Del map.

  Chagrined, I took some comfort from the discovery that many before me had been led into some fruitless pursuit by stories of an Oak Island map. Back in 1894, Frederick Blair had been excited by a story that was published the day after Christmas in the Boston Traveller about some unnamed individual who nearly fifty years earlier had found a “plan” of an island on Nova Scotia’s southeast coast that had once been a pirate rendezvous. A large ship’s block hung from a branch of a large oak tree on the island where the block and its tackle had been used in the sinking of a deep shaft, the story went on, a shaft that was filled with seawater by a tunnel deep underground. For reasons unknown to the writer and his anonymous source, however, the pirate treasure had never been placed in the shaft, but instead it was buried only 20 feet belowground at a certain distance from the oak tree. The shaft was merely a “blind” intended to distract those who might stumble on the spot. Blair spent months trying to obtain a copy of the “plan” mentioned in the Traveller article, but was unsuccessful and eventually decided that the story had been invented by some joker who had read the prospectus of the Oak Island Treasure Company.

  Blair was also captivated for a time by another story of an Oak Island map that had originated in Boston. This one repeated the story of pirates who had spent months excavating a deep pit and digging tunnels that would fill the shaft with seawater. In this iteration, the pirates and their ship were captured by two British frigates whose officers hanged the pirate leaders and sent most of the rest of the crew to an English prison. One slow-witted fellow, though, was spared punishment and made his way to Bristol, England, where he sketched a chart of the spot where the treasure pit had been dug and gave it to a young sailor who was about to set sail on his first voyage. When his ship docked in Nova Scotia, the sailor gave the chart to a Halifax harbor pilot who held on to it until he was an elderly retiree and showed it to his grandson. It was the grandson who realized that the chart was of Oak Island. He made his way from his home in Roxbury, Massachusetts, to Nova Scotia, only to learn that an insurance man living back in Boston by the name of Frederick Blair held the legal rights to search for treasure on Oak Island. When Blair heard this story, he assigned R. V. Harris to interview the grandson and his father and to obtain signed affidavits from each man. The affidavit of the younger man, one James H. Smith, read:

  When I was a boy living at home in Greenfield, Colchester County, Nova Scotia, I frequently heard my father, John J. Smith, speak of a chart, then in possession of his father, Amos Smith, who lived in Shaw’s Cove, County of Halifax, Nova Scotia.

  According to my father, John J. Smith, the chart had reference to the burial of a quantity of gold on an island in Chester Basin, Nova Scotia, and that my grandfather, Amos Smith, who had been a pilot working in and out of Halifax Harbour, claimed that the longitude and latitude given him of the said chart was in the vicinity to the entrance to Chester Bay and that this island was Oak Island.

  His grandfather had described an island “about one mile in length and about one-half mile in width, shaped like a bottle, two coves at the northeast end forming the bottleneck; and the island was wooded with oak trees.” According to Amos Smith, pirates had dug a pit “to a depth of 165 feet, near a large oak tree, from a limb of which they hung a block and tackle, and that a vault was constructed at the bottom of the pit, and the vault was lined with granite stone, eighteen inches thick and that the inside was lined with gold bars, each four feet long and four inches square, and it was then covered with granite slabs. Two tunnels were dug forty-five feet below sea-level, at low tide, leading from the pit to the shore, in opposite directions, and there was placed in each tunnel an iron gate arranged so as to stop the flow of water, but these gates were left open to permit the water to flow through.”

  Blair was tremendously excited until he discovered that Amos Smith had never been a pilot for Halifax Harbour, but rather for St. Margaret’s Bay, the next major inlet to the west. Blair and Harris eventually concluded that Amos Smith had made up the entire story based on things he had heard about the searches conducted on Oak Island between 1804 and 1864.

  A character known as Captain Allen actually did have an old chart with him when he showed up in Chester during the summer of 1885. The man had been careful about the questions he asked, the local people told Harris, but suspicions arose anyway, because Captain Allen was not the usual sort of fellow one met in these parts. He was a handsome man with an accent suggestive of the American South who dressed in expensive clothes and wore the same white broad-brimmed hat day after day. The man also had a reputation for spending his money rather freely, especially after paying the exorbitant price of US $1,200 for the little sloop he bought from a fisherman named Ganter at Shad Bay. Captain Allen then hired a pair of brothers named Zinck to work as his crew, paying them well to mind their busine
ss and do what they were told. The Zincks talked anyway, when they had a few drinks in them, and claimed that Captain Allen had no interest in fishing and instead spent all of his time aboard studying an old chart with writing on it in a foreign language that one brother said was Swedish and the other said was Spanish. Early every morning, according to the brothers, Captain Allen would have them sail out of Mahone Bay to a position thirty miles offshore where he took the altitude of the sun, then began to consult his chart, directing them back toward shore on a northwest compass bearing that would have taken him to Oak Island if he had continued on the same course, but for some reason he never did. Two full summers Captain Allen did this, then disappeared from Mahone Bay and was never seen again. The fellow who bought his sloop, though, a man from Halifax named Pickels, began doing pretty much the same thing Captain Allen had with the boat, the locals said. Pickels was less careful about what he said than Allen, and he confided to several local people that the captain had provided him with the latitude and longitude of his starting point and the compass directions he should follow. The captain said he had been searching for an island where there was “a huge cache of treasure, so huge that it was beyond imagination.” Allen had said he was a wealthy man and didn’t need the money, Pickels claimed, but he wanted to recover the treasure for the benefit of mankind. Pickels lasted three summers aboard the sloop, then gave up the search and went back to Halifax, leaving the mystery of Captain Allen’s chart behind him.

  In his 1899 book A Search for Pirate Gold, James Clarence Hyde claimed that Daniel McGinnis had been in possession of a “treasure map” at some point either immediately before or after the discovery of the Money Pit. Strangely, it seemed to me, there was no further published mention of this map until the early twenty-first century, when a descendant named George McInnes told a local investigator that his grandfather, who was born in 1886, had been in possession of this fabled map as a young man, but that it had been lost in a house fire in the 1920s or 1930s. What lent the claims of George McInnes some credibility, at least in my mind, was that he made no attempt to profit from any knowledge of the map that might have been handed down by his family, explaining that because “everything changed” on the island over the years and most of the landmarks on the map had disappeared, it would likely be useless even if it still existed.

  Perhaps the most famous story of an Oak Island map appeared in a booklet titled The Lure of Pirate Gold written in 1917 by author Josephine Freda for the Chester Board of Trade. A dozen years earlier, in 1905, Freda had written an article for Collier’s that was considerably more enthusiastic than the piece by Colonel Bowdoin the same magazine would publish in 1912. During the intervening years, she wrote, she had learned of at least one compelling new development in the Oak Island story that suggested the fabled pirate treasure really had been deposited by some among that “horde of lawless and adventurous spirits … sailing under the black flag”:

  The last will and testament of one of these men has recently been discovered by a gentleman prominent in English literary circles. This gentleman, whose name I am not at liberty to disclose, recently purchased an old manor-house located near a certain seaport in England. Rambling over his new property he one day visited a long-unused room, where the dust lay thick on floor and furniture. His attention was attracted to an old oaken chest covered with quaint carvings. This he opened and discovered within clothing, nautical instruments and a casket containing a considerable sum of money, several old maps or charts and other documents, as well as the last will and testament of their owner.

  The will left all the testator’s possessions to his only son, but the young man had been killed in action aboard a British naval ship in 1780, the first year of the Fourth Anglo-Dutch War, Freda went on. After “careful and exhaustive inquiry,” she wrote, “the present owner came to the conclusion that the information [contained in the maps, charts, and documents] was of great value and was about to embark on a search for the hidden property when he chanced to read the story of Oak Island [written by Freda] in Collier’s magazine. He was immediately struck by its remarkable similarity to a certain island indicated on the chart in his possession.”

  The documents found with the chart “showed that a removal and subsequent deposit of seven separate packages took place on certain dates” after the treasure vault was first created on this “certain island,” Freda explained further, “each package bearing separate symbols and initials.”

  The gentleman currently in possession of both the chart and the documents had been forced to suspend his planned search because of the outbreak of World War I, Freda explained, and she had sworn to protect his identity. But she could reveal that in the casket within the chest in the unused room in his seacoast manor house in England, he had found “a diagram of the Cove on Oak Island … which has not been easy to decipher”:

  Members of different companies engaged in excavation work on Oak Island always believed that documents were in existence which would make plain the mystery of the Island, and the discovery of the old sea-chest shows that their opinion was correct.

  I am not at liberty to go more fully into a description of these documents, for reasons which must be at once apparent to you, but when peace has at last been concluded and men once more take up the prosaic routine of daily life, some adventurous spirit will no doubt resume the search on Oak Island and finally solve for us its fascinating mystery.

  Frederick Blair was among those who beseeched Freda to reveal more about the “gentleman” who had found the Oak Island chart, but she adamantly refused, and Blair would admit he could never be sure whether Freda had made the story up or actually interviewed this individual. In any event, the chart itself never surfaced, nor did the man who claimed to possess it.

  In 1934, Blair had been offered what became known as the Doyle map. A Saskatchewan man named W. J. Doyle had written to Blair that December after reading an article about Oak Island in Canada’s most widely circulated magazine, MacLean’s, that purported to be a full account of the findings of the Oak Island Treasure Company’s Captain John Welling. He had immediately recognized a map that was included in the article as an illustration, Doyle wrote:

  It was about fifty years ago, I was a small boy just starting to school. My father was a teamster and he hired a very old man by the name of Jim Thompson. He worked for my father for a long time and he took a great liking to me, and when he got sick I used to do all his little errands and before he died he gave my father a map of a buried treasure and told him it was for me.

  He was in his midtwenties before he came into possession of the map and received the description of the treasure on Oak Island and how to recover it that had been given to his father by Jim Thompson, Doyle wrote: “I used to often take it out and study it, but I knew it would take more money than I had to recover it … then, about twenty-nine years ago, I had my place of business burned and I lost the map.”

  Only when he read the MacLean’s article did he realize that the “Oak Island” that loomed so large in his imagination was real. Doyle went on:

  Just as soon as I saw the map [in the magazine] I recognized it, but the map I had was drawn with pen and ink; it was very clear; it showed how the water got in, how to shut it off and a few more details which I can still remember.

  With the knowledge I have, and if it can be applied, the water can be shut off inside of two or three days and maybe not that length of time. If it cannot be used, I know of another way that might take two or three weeks, or maybe a little longer.

  Despite having been burned before by claims of a lost and/or recovered Oak Island treasure map, Blair corresponded at length with Doyle and in 1935 invited him to Amherst for a visit. He naturally grew suspicious when Doyle, in his retelling of his story, now described Jim Thompson as “an old sailor” who had given his father the map sometime between 1884 and 1888. Nevertheless, Blair wrote a voluminous memorandum on his interview with Doyle for his attorney, Harris, and was particularly descriptive
of the diagram the man had prepared for him: “The plan was marked ‘Oak Island’ and showed three pits, one at the shore about 80 or 90 feet deep, one on the hill about 470 or 480 feet distant and 176 feet deep, the third between the first two mentioned and about 270 to 280 feet from the shore and 125 feet deep.”

  Blair went on to describe just as meticulously the various tunnels and the other works that Doyle described. He seemed particularly captivated by the description of the “clapper” gate in the main flood tunnel that Doyle had offered: “It was arranged with two hooks, an iron bar, links of chain and a ball, or weight, so that when dropped by the pull of the chain, the hooks would catch under the bar of iron and keep the gate closed.”

  Only at the end of a memo that went on for pages did Blair write: “I put little credence in the story. Note how well the known facts compare with his map, and then consider his details after a space of thirty years, without seeing the map. It is simply too much for me to believe without better evidence.”

  Harris had no doubt Doyle was a fraud after interviewing the man himself and hearing that the map was “dated 1821,” that it had “just come into his possession,” and that it “had belonged to his grandfather, who received it from his brother, a sailor.”

  “Those who have pirate maps to sell should be careful to tell the same story on all occasions!” Harris observed, advising Blair to have nothing more to do with this W. J. Doyle.