In spite of this exasperation, Hedden listened attentively when he was approached by Colonel H. A. Gardener, a retired US Army officer from Arlington, Virginia. Colonel Gardener had made a survey of Oak Island on his own during the summer of 1947, Hedden explained later, before bringing him a proposal unlike any he had heard before. He believed he could locate the treasure, Gardener said, with a portable radar scanner that had been developed by the army during WWII. He would place the device in various shafts that had been dug by searchers on the island and use it to locate the original tunnels and chambers on the island’s east end. Hedden was so impressed by Gardener’s description of the process that he agreed to lease the land and to take only 10 percent of whatever Gardener found. The colonel’s enthusiasm began to wane, however, when he learned that he’d also have to make a deal with Blair, who could be a much tougher customer and was almost certain to demand half of whatever was recovered on Oak Island.
In late 1947 Hedden wrote to a friend: “The present status seems to be a stalemate situation. I own property rights and Blair owns the treasure trove rights. Neither can proceed without the other, and Blair sticks to his 50 percent [demand], thereby scaring away all ventures of any kind.”
Blair, though, continued to maintain at age seventy-nine that the Oak Island puzzle could and would be solved within his lifetime, if the effort to do so were properly funded. “Scientific engineering and modern equipment will do the work if properly financed,” he wrote. “Previous failures, and there have been many, were due to lack of knowledge of conditions. In other words they knew nothing of the original work and in addition they lacked engineering skill and were short on the financial end. Today, it is the financial backing we need, not a method of recovery. The latter will come with the former.”
Blair seemed not to recognize that the financial backing Hedden needed at this point was for his survival. In early 1948, Hedden agreed to sell his Oak Island property to Gardener for a small down payment, with the balance to be paid over ten years. The colonel arrived on the island in July of that year with the radar scanner he had obtained from the army, but after several weeks of belowground tests decided his equipment wasn’t working as it should. He returned to Virginia to adjust it, promising to come back the next summer. Blair was furious when he discovered that Hedden had allowed someone to conduct a search in the Money Pit area without his permission. He contacted Gardener directly and became even angrier when the colonel told him that he had a deal to purchase Hedden’s Oak Island lots. Blair threatened litigation, but what appeared to be an explosive situation fizzled into nothing when Gardener died suddenly in January 1949 and his widow canceled the agreement to purchase Hedden’s land.
In late 1949, Hedden was approached by yet another potential buyer, a New York mining and petroleum engineer named John Whitney Lewis. Hedden, increasingly desperate for cash, agreed to sell all of his Oak Island lots to Lewis for just $6,000, plus a small percentage of any treasure recovered. The deal was concluded on May 12, 1950, and Lewis immediately flew to Nova Scotia to prepare for a summer of operations in the Money Pit area. Only upon arrival did Lewis learn that Blair intended to block him. Lewis accused Hedden of deceiving him with the claim that Blair’s treasure trove license had expired on June 30, 1949, but Hedden had told the truth. What Hedden didn’t know was that Blair, with the assistance of R. V. Harris, had surreptitiously renewed the license for another five years.
Harris, acting as Blair’s attorney, delivered the bad news to Lewis on May 27, 1950, exactly two weeks after the New York man had completed his purchase of Hedden’s Oak Island lots. Mr. Blair, Harris explained, had made a deal with William Chappell’s now sixty-three-year-old son, Melbourne, to resume the treasure hunt in the Money Pit area. It appeared there was a new stalemate, one in which Lewis was blocked by Blair’s deal with Chappell and Chappell was blocked by Hedden’s sale to Lewis. What Lewis didn’t know, however, was that Blair and R. V. Harris had been lobbying the Nova Scotia legislature for months to rewrite the Treasure Trove Act so that treasure hunters had the same rights that mineral prospectors had under the Mines Act.
Lewis appealed to the provincial secretary, claiming “misrepresentations” by Blair and Harris. What really infuriated the New York man, though, was his dawning realization that he was being stymied by an old boys’ network, all of them Freemasons and most of whom belonged to the Grand Lodge of Nova Scotia. Blair was a high-ranking Mason and his attorney, Harris, had actually risen to the top Masonic position in Nova Scotia, provincial grand master, a position that was later held by Melbourne Chappell. Gilbert Hedden was among the most prominent Freemasons in New Jersey, and Edwin Hamilton had served as grand master of the Grand Lodge of Massachusetts. Many—some said most—of high office holders in Nova Scotia’s provincial government were also Masons.
THE MASONIC CONNECTIONS to Oak Island had always struck me as curious but not really an interesting avenue of investigation. At least a dozen Canadian writers, bloggers, and amateur historians had explored and tortured the subject, and more than a few of those had both explored and tortured it. Sure, there’d been a lot of Freemasons involved in the treasure hunt over the years (along with a lot of treasure hunters who weren’t Masons), but that seemed to have to do with the fact that Masonic membership was so widespread, especially in Nova Scotia. Though it has antecedents that some claim predate the time of Christ, Freemasonry formally came into existence in 1717 with the establishment of the Grand Lodge of London and began to establish itself in North America around 1730. The Grand Lodge of Nova Scotia was established in Halifax in 1766, less than twenty years after the city’s founding, and put down deep roots in the province. While Freemasonry appeared to be dwindling in the United States, it continued to thrive internationally, with as many as 6 million members worldwide, and it was particularly strong on the south shore of Nova Scotia. Within a week of arriving in Canada to work on The Curse of Oak Island I’d been told by two of the regular cast members, historian Charles Barkhouse and Tony Sampson, a diver whose company I had enjoyed over breakfast, that they were Masons and that membership was widespread among the men of the local community.
Charles and Tony both readily agreed that what could be regarded as Masonic symbols had cropped up again and again as the Oak Island story unfolded, and that this was probably significant. “The triangles, obviously,” Charles said. The triangle was not just the Masonic symbol for the sacred number three but was also understood as a geometric representation of God.
“The stone triangle, the triangle of oak trees outlining the Money Pit that were described in McCully’s Colonist article,” I prompted.
“The triangular swamp,” Charles added. I wasn’t entirely comfortable with the inclusion of the swamp in the list of Oak Island triangles. Admittedly, one could see the outline of an equilateral triangle if one looked at the swamp from the air, but that involved filling in sections of the three sides with the mind’s eye. I had been told that there were triangular swamps along the shorelines of other islands in Mahone Bay, and my impression was that these had been created gradually by the combination of erosion and rising water that surged forward to a point. Maybe the Oak Island Swamp was man-made, as many believed, but I needed more evidence. I filed the subject away as something to consider in the future.
Still, there was a case to be made for Masonic fingerprints being all over Oak Island. Interestingly, the most exhaustive claims of Masonic involvement were made by those skeptical of the treasure story. Joe Nickell had observed that “secret vault symbolism” was central in a number of Masonic rituals, and he described certain inscribed stones on the island as “explicitly Masonic.” Nickell pointed in particular to a stone discovered by Gilbert Hedden at Joudrey’s Cove in 1936 that featured a cross next to the letter H, which he described as “a modification of the Hebraic letter for Jehovah,” and another carving of the Masonic symbol known as the point within a circle that represented mankind within the compass of God’s creation. It was an intr
iguing possibility, though this carving hadn’t been dated, and it could have been made by people involved in the treasure hunt rather than by those who had dug the Money Pit and made the flood tunnels.
Nickell had stretched his argument further than that, however. His list of Masons “associated” with the treasure hunt on Oak Island included not only Franklin Roosevelt but also the polar explorer Richard Byrd and the actor John Wayne. Wayne’s closest connection to the treasure had been some correspondence between a mining company in which he was an investor and an Oak Island search company about renting a piece of equipment. Admiral Byrd was a passive investor in a company that proposed an expedition to Oak Island and had some conversations with FDR about what might be buried there, but he was never directly involved in any of the operations on the island. Nickell went further out on a limb when he attempted to make something of an “old metal set-square” that had been found at Smith’s Cove. “Indeed, the square is one of the major symbols of Freemasonry,” Nickell had observed. It’s also a common tool that’s used by virtually everyone involved in mechanical engineering and technical drawing and was almost certainly left on Oak Island by a member of one of the early search companies.
At the end of his Skeptical Inquirer article, Nickell had equivocated, conceding that he couldn’t be sure “whether the Masonic elements were opportunistically added to an existing treasure quest or whether the entire affair was a Masonic creation from the outset.” Still, he insisted the mystery of Oak Island had been “solved.”
A far more thorough and compelling exploration of the Masonic symbolism on Oak Island—along with a more definitive conclusion—was provided by another skeptic, Dennis King, who had authored an Internet article entitled “The Oak Island Legend: The Masonic Angle.” Though I found the arguments King made to be even weaker than Nickell’s, the research on which he based those claims was admirably detailed and quite fascinating. I was especially impressed by the connections King (a Freemason himself) had made between the works on Oak Island and a pair of Masonic rituals practiced in the eighteenth century by those who attained the Thirteenth Degree in Freemasonry’s so-called Scottish Rite:
Prior to the flood, the biblical patriarch Enoch constructed an underground temple consisting of nine chambers descending vertically into the earth, and in the ninth or lowest chamber he deposited a treasure which included the secret name of God engraved on a triangular plate of gold. The temple was inundated by Noah’s flood and was lost, until it was accidentally rediscovered by three searchers (“Grand Master Architects” in the Masonic description) during the building of King Solomon’s Temple, with the three searchers recovering the treasure and the secret name of God from the lowest or ninth chamber.
The parallels to the Money Pit, with its nine tiers of log platforms and the flood system that had rendered it impenetrable for the past 220 years, were obvious.
King had taken his material mainly from an exposé of Masonry published in the 1850s by William Morgan under the title “The Mysteries of Freemasonry,” but focused his attention mainly on the 1864 Colonist articles (which he definitely attributed to Jothan McCully, a Mason, according to King), noting a number of claims made in it about the discovery and exploration of the Money Pit that corresponded to elements of Masonic rituals. In addition to the nine levels in the Pit and the flood system, the triangle of oak trees that surrounded the Money Pit in McCully’s telling could conceivably be linked to the triangular plate of gold on which the secret name of God was engraved according to the Masonic rituals described in Morgan’s book. It was possible also, I conceded, that the inscribed stone found at either 80 or 90 feet in the Money Pit was analogous to the “cubic stone” with an iron ring handle that covered the entrance to Enoch’s temple, according to Morgan’s description of the ritual of the Knights of the Ninth Arch, even though the cubic stone was on the surface in the Masonic ritual and the inscribed stone was buried deep belowground in the Money Pit. King contended that the letters and symbols McCully had said were carved into the trunks of the three oak trees could be compared to the inscription on the cubic stone, according to Morgan’s account of the Masonic rituals. He began to lose me, though, when he suggested that the story of how McGinnis, Smith, and Vaughan had discovered the Money Pit was an invention meant to echo the legend of the three grand master architects in the Enochean ritual. McGinnis, Smith, and Vaughan were real people and the story of the Money Pit’s discovery had come from them and those close to them, not from McCully.
I had to be impressed by how thoroughly King had researched the early accounts of the three small chain links that had been brought to the surface by the auger boring of 1849. In the three Colonist articles published in January 1864, there was no mention at all of any chain links or gold links being brought to the surface by the auger. They had been mentioned, though, in an article published eleven months earlier, in the Yarmouth Herald’s February 19, 1863, edition, which described “three links of a chain, of a copper colour, which, however, upon being tested proved to be gold.” Yet the same newspaper on March 12 of that year had referred to “gold wire” rather than chain links as being what the auger brought to the surface. But in his 1867 diary, King noted, James McNutt had referred not to chain links brought up by the auger, but to three pieces of copper wire. And two articles published in September 1866 in the New York Herald and the Scotsman that were otherwise fairly complete accounts of the Oak Island treasure hunt so far made no mention of either chain links or wire being brought to the surface by the pot auger borings of 1849. That was all pretty interesting, though I found it difficult to draw any conclusions. For King, though, these variances were evidence of an attempt to introduce another Masonic element into the Oak Island story. “The aprons and other regalia worn by Freemasons are often adorned with metal epaulettes,” he noted, “comprising chains of small links, and which were and still are frequently of gold or a metal resembling gold.”
Again, King brought this back to McCully, drawing this time on a biographical sketch of the man that had been produced by Oak Island researcher Paul Wroclawski. McCully had lived most of his life in Truro, Nova Scotia, and had fathered ten children who were raised there. He had worked as an engineer, which was why he had been appointed manager of operations for the Truro Company in 1845. I wasn’t sure about that; there were records that said he’d worked in a train station. Whatever his regular job, McCully had remained active in the treasure hunt on Oak Island for more than twenty years, working, among other things, as the secretary of the Oak Island Association and as a director of the Halifax Company.
“What Were McCully’s Motives?” read the concluding section of King’s article.
There were two possibilities, he wrote. First, “the more speculative and sinister possibility,” was that “the Oak Island Treasure Hunt in the 19th century was a deliberate fraud, and McCully inserted the Masonic elements as a coded warning to his fellow Scottish Rite Masons that Oak Island was fraudulent and they shouldn’t waste their money by investigating it.” King did not explain why McCully would choose not to simply announce that the treasure hunt was a fraud or why he would invest the next several years of his life and a considerable portion of his fortune in that treasure hunt. At least King had been judicious enough to describe it as “speculative.”
The second, and “more likely” motive for McCully’s account of the treasure hunt, King went on, was that he had been “perpetrating a Masonic prank, or a kind of in-joke with his fellow Masons.” At a cost of tens of thousands of hours and a commensurate amount of dollars over a period of almost a century, McCully and his mates must have been dedicated comedians.
I was beginning to think that the problem with the Oak Island skeptics—apart from the highly selective manner in which they sorted the evidence—was that they inevitably proposed explanations for the treasure hunt that were far more fantastic than what they called the Oak Island legend.
Still, there was something to this whole claim of a Masonic connectio
n to Oak Island. I didn’t think it had to do with who the treasure hunters had been, though I didn’t rule that out completely. What interested me was the possibility of a Masonic connection to the original work on Oak Island. That didn’t mean that Freemasons, per se, had done that work, but their precursors went back deep into history. It has been often claimed that the traditions underlying the creation of Freemasonry go back at least as far as the ancient Greek mathematician and philosopher Pythagoras (570–495 BC), who learned geometry from the Egyptians, arithmetic from the Phoenicians, astronomy from the Chaldeans, and philosophy and theology in Babylon. He’s best remembered today for the theorem that bears his name, stating that the square of the hypotenuse of a right triangle is equal to the sum of the squares of the other two sides. What’s not as well-known is the cult of devotion that grew up around Pythagoras after he moved to the Italian city of Crotone and began preaching his religious and ascetic doctrines, urging his followers to abandon materialism to pursue spiritual development. This movement came to a climax when its adherents were attacked by a mob that set their meeting place on fire. The organized brotherhood of Pythagoreans disappeared from the face of the Earth, but a remnant carried on as a sect and it is claimed that they formed the earliest European mystery school.
The Curse of Oak Island Page 18