The Curse of Oak Island

by Randall Sullivan

  Many of the mystery schools—associations that offered esoteric instruction—that arose on the Continent, though, declared as their founder not Pythagoras, but a master who had preceded him, known as Hermes Trismegistus. Hermes “Thrice-Great” was said to have manifested at three different times in three different places, first in Egypt where he was equated with the god Thoth, who had introduced civilizing knowledge to men by carving the first teaching of sacred science in hieroglyphs (the American mystic Edgar Cayce claimed in his “trance readings” that Hermes/Thoth was an engineer from the sunken city of Atlantis who had designed and directed the construction of the Pyramids). Hermes’s second incarnation was as the teacher of Pythagoras in Babylon, according to this tradition, and his third was as the first teacher of alchemy on the European continent, the one who introduced the rituals that eventually became Freemasonry.

  There is another claim, either competing or complementary, depending on who is making it, that Freemasonry arose from the surviving traditions of the Knights Templar, the order of monk-warriors that arose during the Crusades and grew to become perhaps the wealthiest and most powerful organization on Earth before it was destroyed by a jealous French king in the early fourteenth century. According to this version of Masonry’s origins, the knights who survived went underground in Europe until the eighteenth century, when they reemerged as the modern Freemasons.

  It was true, Charles Barkhouse told me, that there was a Masonic order known as the Knights Templar, but that group didn’t claim any direct descent from the original knights. That said, there were many Freemasons who believed that the origins of the group went back to the time of the Crusades. That claim had been extant since 1737, when Chevalier Ramsay, the famous Scottish Jacobite, declared that European Freemasonry had been born of a marriage between the Templars and another order of crusader knights, the Order of St. John, also known as the Knights Hospitaller.

  There was also, of course, a claim that invoked Francis Bacon as the interface between the ancient mystery schools out of Egypt and Asia and European-based alchemy, and as the foundational figure in the rise of Freemasonry. What’s certain is that Bacon did regularly assemble the leading men of Elizabethan England at Gray’s Inn to discuss politics, science, philosophy, literature, and religion. Whatever the truth is about Bacon’s centrality in the founding of Freemasonry, it is known that Bacon’s sixtieth birthday was celebrated in the year 1622 with what was called a Masonic banquet at which the poet Ben Jonson read a “Masonic ode.”

  What all that meant, I had no idea, but I was resigned to the fact that I would be required to investigate further. There was some kind of connection between Oak Island and what became Freemasonry, I tentatively believed. It was tempting to try to weave the loose threads into a whole cloth.

  I wasn’t buying the idea that Oak Island was an inside joke—or even an inside job—among the Freemasons of Nova Scotia, however. The leaders of the various expeditions to Oak Island who had been identified as Masonic bigwigs—Blair, Hedden, Hamilton, among others—all had dedicated a huge portion of their lives and fortunes to the treasure hunt on the island. They had been believers in a big way, every one of them. And the mystery of the place had been a large part of what captivated them.

  Blair alone offered an overwhelming refutation of the “Masonic prank” theory. The man had invested more than half a century—nearly three-quarters of his life—along with the bulk of his fortune and a huge part of his energies in the Oak Island treasure hunt. His commitment had been as close to absolute as seemed humanly possible, and in early 1951, as the twentieth century rolled into its second half, he was approaching the end of his life still holding on tightly to the treasure trove license to the Money Pit. He might have grown cantankerous in the eyes of some, and he was certainly stubborn, but it was impossible not to admire the man for his perseverance in the face of failure after failure.

  Blair’s death in March 1951 at the age of eighty-three marked the end of an epoch and the breaking of the last living link between the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries on Oak Island. The legacy he left behind included not only the vast collection of documents, letters, and records that still serve as the foundation of any attempt to tell the Oak Island story, but also any number of enduring quotes from various newspaper interviews he gave, including the one that among archeological accomplishments, arriving at the solution to Oak Island would be “equaled only by the discovery of King Tutankhamun’s tomb.”

  R. V. Harris, who had been Blair’s attorney, friend, and colleague for almost a quarter century, offered this posthumous tribute to the man:

  Mr. Blair was a good community man and actively interested in the First Baptist Church, Alexandra Masonic Lodge No. 87 and other organizations, and his excellent memory made him an interesting conversationalist. His tall spare figure was very familiar to many citizens of Amherst…. Mr. Blair had, in the course of sixty-five years, gathered a vast amount of information respecting the efforts to find the Oak Island Treasure; he believed implicitly in its existence and in its ultimate recovery…. Mr. Blair received thousands of letters from eccentric as well as sane people who had suggestions to make for the sure and certain recovery of the treasure. In answering them, he was invariably courteous as well as lucid.

  Though he died before I was born, researching this book made me feel compelled to pay my own respects to Frederick Blair, and that included a consideration of the theory of Oak Island on which he had become fixated in his last years. As did a number of others, this theory originated in seventeenth-century England. The execution of King Charles I had been the climax of a nearly a decade of upheaval, a good deal of it owing to the monarch’s refusal to submit to the British Parliament’s demands for a constitutional monarchy. Under a claim of divine right, Charles levied enormous taxes and spent as he saw fit. This included amassing what was arguably the finest personal collection of art that has ever existed, an estimated 1,760 paintings by, among many others, Rembrandt, Raphael, Rubens, Titian, Correggio, Brueghel, Velázquez, Caravaggio, and Da Vinci. Charles’s gold and silver alone, most of it in the form of royal and church plate, was worth what would be billions in today’s dollars. And that’s what disappeared, along with a trove of historical artifacts, after the king was beheaded in 1649 under the protectorate of Oliver Cromwell. Although he was never very specific—at least in his journals and letters—about who precisely was responsible, Blair became convinced that the missing treasure of Charles I had been transported around 1650 to Nova Scotia, where “very probably it now lies buried on Oak Island.”

  I could find no particular reason to believe this was so, but as was the case with several dozen other Oak Island theories, it hadn’t been disproved. If nothing else, there was a thrill in learning that yet another great treasure had gone missing and remained unaccounted for. Among the most seductive aspects of Oak Island was the way the place nourished one’s sense of possibility.

  Frederick Blair had never achieved what he set out to do, but what he had gotten done was enough to inspire new generations to follow in his footsteps. The difference between those who thought he should be praised for that and those who believed he ought to be blamed was for me as close to the crux of the Oak Island mystery as any test that could be devised.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Shortly after Frederick Blair’s death, Mel Chappell, who had bought out the fed-up John Whitney Lewis, acquired Blair’s treasure trove license. This meant that for the first time ever, both the license and the land belonged to a single person. Chappell would hold on to both and maintain control of the treasure hunt for nearly thirty years.

  Towering, long-jawed, and bespectacled, Chappell had been present as a boy on Oak Island in 1897 when his father, William, brought up that fabled scrap of parchment from the Money Pit, and he had followed events on the island closely since his young adulthood. He was a former grand master Mason of all Nova Scotia whose engineering background and proclivity for technical language made him seem
to some the epitome of pragmatism. Even Chappell, though—a man who had looked askance as Gilbert Hedden indulged the inventors of the gold finder and the money-finding camera—would demonstrate how tempting the difficulties of the Oak Island problem made it to take a flier on the wackiest proposals. Months before Blair’s passing, in late 1950, Chappell had become intrigued by reports of successful metal detection being achieved by the photographic technology of the Parker Contract Company based in Belleville, Ontario. In December 1950, Chappell invited the inventor Parker to bring his Mineral Wave Ray machine to Oak Island. The fellow showed up with a black box about 2 feet long that was filled with radio tubes, wires, batteries, and resistors, with a lens attached to the front of it. A sample of the treasure being sought after (a gold coin, in this case) was placed inside the box, then the lens was scanned across much of the east end of the island. About 150 feet from the Money Pit, Parker declared he had located a deposit of gold that lay 20 feet below the surface. Chappell was so excited that he barged a steam shovel out to the island that dug a hole 30 feet wide and 50 feet deep. Nothing was found. Still, Chappell drilled in four locations located by the Mineral Wave Ray, but found no sign of treasure in any of them. By that point he had invested $35,000, a loss that seems to have injured him far more deeply than the humiliation.

  As a result, Chappell decided that moving forward he would invest only other people’s money in the Oak Island treasure hunt, which would require partners. Chappell’s refusal to personally finance any operations on the island seems to have been the main basis for his refusal to consider teaming up with perhaps the best-known treasure hunter in the Western Hemisphere, Edward Rowe Snow.

  Snow was a Harvard College graduate who had served with the air force’s XII Bomber Command during World War II, then returned to Massachusetts to work as a columnist for the Quincy Patriot Ledger. While holding down his newspaper job, Snow wrote dozens of books and articles about New England maritime history, with a special emphasis on the age of piracy. He also began to host a radio show for youth called Six Bells that each week chronicled the adventures of some buccaneer and was perhaps best known as the “Flying Santa” each year at Christmastime, hiring a small plane to drop wrapped gifts for each of the lighthouse keepers along the New England Coast.

  Snow’s 1951 book True Tales of Buried Treasure had spread the legend of Oak Island across the United States. He had first visited the island two years before that, and immediately afterward issued a pronouncement that startled many, given his reputation as a chronicler of buccaneers: “Although there have been many theories and explanations regarding the Oak Island treasure, I personally like to think that it is an immense hoard brought to Oak Island from a South American country at the time the Spaniards threatened that part of the world. The average pirate or freebooter had neither the inclination, the patience, nor the engineering ability to bury a treasure by such elaborate methods.”

  Though neither Blair nor Chappell seemed ready to welcome Snow to join their efforts on Oak Island, the man had made big news in Nova Scotia and beyond in the summer of 1952, when he announced that based on a map he had obtained in 1947—one that he believed had belonged to the pirate Edward Low—he intended to search for a cache of buried treasure on Isle Haute, just off the mainland in the Bay of Fundy. Snow had already garnered headlines as a treasure hunter, beginning in 1945, when, based on documents containing “secret codes,” he recovered a copper chest in Chatham, Massachusetts, filled with gold and silver coins that had been minted in eight different countries between 1694 and 1854. As a result, his trip to Isle Haute “armed with a metal detector and a mysterious old map” as one reporter put it, was considered newsworthy—especially after Snow unearthed not only a stash of eighteenth-century Spanish and Portuguese doubloons, but also a skeleton that was “clutching the coins” as one breathless newspaper account had it.

  In spite of Snow’s renown, though, Mel Chappell was not interested in going into business with him—unless Snow was ready to sink his own money into the enterprise. Another three years would pass before Chappell finally found a partner who was well funded enough to be considered “suitable.” That man was George Greene of Corpus Christi, Texas, a petroleum engineer who claimed the backing of five large oil companies willing to spend “any amount of money,” as Greene put it, to solve the mystery of Oak Island.

  Greene came on like a caricature of Texan bravado, invariably described in contemporaneous accounts as a blustering, burly, cigar-chomping character perpetually outfitted in a wide-brimmed Stetson hat and hand-tooled cowboy boots. He’d made international headlines a few years earlier when, conducting a geological survey in Turkey, he claimed to have photographed the remnants of Noah’s Ark during a flyover of Mount Ararat. It was enough to launch an expedition to the site, but nothing was found and some who had joined the effort later accused Greene of hoaxing them.

  Loud and flamboyant as he may have been, the Texan’s personal interest in Oak Island actually could be traced back to that paragon of northeastern gentility, Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Greene’s uncle, John Shields, had worked with FDR on Oak Island in the summer of 1909, and as a boy Greene had marveled at his uncle John’s stories of that great adventure.

  “My principals have sent me up here to prove or disprove the legend, and if there’s anything there we are going to find it,” Greene told the first Nova Scotia newspaper reporter who interviewed him. His plan, basically, was to apply oil-finding methods to the search for gold by doing core drilling all over the Money Pit site. “If we don’t hit a concrete vault with this drilling, we’ll pack up and I’ll head for South America.” Even if his operation failed, Greene added, he believed he could recoup his investors’ money by selling the movie rights.

  Chappell and Greene signed their agreement in September 1955, under which Greene would receive a free lease on Chappell’s Oak Island properties in exchange for the promise to pay for all operations out of his own pocket and to split the take equally. The two began with a review of drilling records on the island that went back to 1897, in an attempt to locate the Money Pit. Greene and his crew then used a 4-inch core drill to bore four holes on a line 2, 6, 10, and 14 feet on the north side of the Chappell Shaft. In the first three holes, layers of oak timber were struck at 10-foot intervals, and voids were encountered below that. In the fourth hole, oak timber 8 inches thick was struck at 100 feet. Below was a void 10 feet deep. The drill then bored through another 8 inches of oak before entering a large cavity that was 45 feet deep, after which it reentered clay at 190 feet. Greene and his men poured 100,000 gallons of water into the void the fourth borehole had passed through, but it all ran out through a tunnel Greene could never locate.

  Greene told Chappell he needed bigger equipment and would return in the spring of 1956 with 30-inch drills. In early 1956, though, Greene wrote that he had important business elsewhere and his return to Oak Island would be delayed. He never made it back to the island and was murdered during a 1962 expedition in the jungles of British Guiana not far from where cult leader Jim Jones would set up the Jonestown colony a few years later. Nevertheless, the Texan did enter the annals of Oak Island as the first to prove conclusively that there was a cavern beneath the Money Pit.

  After Greene’s departure, Canada’s national engineering journal ran an editorial in which it described the failure to solve the problem of Oak Island as “a national embarrassment.” It’s unclear whether this assessment spurred two Ontario brothers, William and Victor Harman, to join the fray, but in April 1958 the Harmans entered into a one-year agreement with Mel Chappell to fund a new round of operations on Oak Island and to split what they believed to be $200 million in Spanish gold that was buried at the bottom of the Money Pit.

  The Harman brothers hired professional drillers who in May 1958 began a probe of the Money Pit area that brought up fragments of oak and spruce, along with bits of coconut fiber and ships’ caulking from depths below 150 feet. Within two months, though, their private fund
s were exhausted. The Harmans attempted to raise more money by forming Oak Island Exploration Co. Ltd. and offering 1 million shares at twenty-five cents apiece. The Ontario Securities Commission refused to license their company, however, before the brothers had secured a five-year lease on Oak Island. Unconvinced that they would be able to raise the capital needed, Chappell refused to renew the Harmans’ lease and, like so many before them, the brothers quit the island without having produced anything more than those tantalizing but minor discoveries.

  MY FAVORITE OF ALBERT EINSTEIN’S MANY APHORISMS is the one about how there are really only two ways of looking at existence: either everything’s a coincidence or nothing is. I like to think of myself as standing on the “nothing is” side of that argument, but even if it was merely a fortuitous coincidence, my encounter with Lee Lamb and Rick Restall during my first visit to Oak Island in 2003 was the most moving part of that trip. It was probably the most memorable, too, even if I was at moments tempted to try to forget about it.

  Lee and Rick were the oldest and youngest children of Robert and Mildred Restall, the couple who had been the leading players in Oak Island’s great tragedy, a calamity that seems to haunt the island even now, more than fifty years later. It certainly haunted Rick. A small dark-haired man in his early fifties when I met him, Rick looked younger but for his eyes, which were filled with so much pain that it hurt to hold his gaze. He was just eight years old when his parents brought him to Mahone Bay in 1959 and so could claim literally to have grown up on the island. Almost forty years after leaving, he still knew nearly every inch of it. Not that this did him much good, because Rick hated the place. Rick paid his first visit to Oak Island since the 1960s the day before our interview and the experience had stirred up memories of what the island had taken from him all those years earlier. I’d like to think he was happier on other occasions.