The Curse of Oak Island

by Randall Sullivan

  When his workmen demanded a holiday over Christmas, Dunfield busied himself by making a complete examination of debris from the Money Pit, all of which had been run through an enormous sluice with a water-filtration system. The only things of note he found in the debris were shards of porcelain dishware and old drill casings that he assumed were from previous expeditions, Dunfield said. When he examined the pit his clam digger had created, though, he found exposed old timbers and hard clay walls with pick marks in them, the last remaining evidence of the original excavation and proof of where exactly the Money Pit was located.

  Persistent rain had begun to fall in early December and by the time his crews returned to Oak Island, Dunfield was faced with a pit where daily slides had filled it nearly to the top with sand and soil. He ordered a “reexcavation,” but the slides continued and progress was slow. He would deal with the weather by widening the diameter of the hole to 100 feet so that the sides would be gently sloped, then go down to a depth of 184 feet, Dunfield said. He was essentially proposing to turn the top of Oak Island’s east drumlin into an enormous crater. The rain continued, though, and so did the slides. The work was now costing Dunfield USD $2,000 a day and on January 2, 1966, he ordered his crew to halt the excavation, refill the pit with soft soil, and prepare to begin again the following summer.

  Dunfield wasn’t done, though. He had a huge oil-drilling rig hauled out to the island and used it to bore four 6-inch holes down to a depth of 140 feet. At 139 feet the drill dropped into a chamber with a 2-foot wooden roof that went all the way down to 184 feet.

  The half ton of material the drill brought up was sent to the University of Southern California for spectrographic analysis. Other than saying that the drill had struck cast iron on the floor of the “chamber,” Dunfield refused to reveal what the USC lab had found. But he did announce that he would proceed with his plan to dig out the Money Pit on a huge scale when the weather was drier.

  In an interview with local reporters, Dunfield said he was certain that “somewhere on the surface of the island there is an entrance to the treasure chamber.” It would be on higher ground, according to Dunfield, who said he had been convinced of this by the pockets of “dry, stale air” his drill had found. In the same interview, though, Dunfield revealed that he had already spent $120,000, nearly three times what he had estimated, and that if he did not recover the treasure by the end of the summer of 1966, he would go back to drilling oil wells until he made up his losses.

  Dunfield never really mounted a major operation in the summer of 1966, though. The problem, he said, was that his lease with Chappell was going to expire soon, and he had come to the conclusion that he needed to own the island to justify the level of commitment required. He issued a press release that “several friends in the oil business have stated that they were willing to buy the treasure island area and are interested in the negotiations.” The main effect of the press release was a loud howl of outrage from the Municipal Council of Chester, which was soon joined by a number of other Lunenburg County organizations in entreating the Nova Scotia provincial government to declare Oak Island a national historic park and keep it out of Dunfield’s hands.

  By then, word of the destruction Dunfield had wrought on Oak Island was spreading throughout Mahone Bay and beyond. The east end and south shore of the island were devastated, those who visited reported. The few days of excavating Dunfield had done at the Cave-in Pit had left it a shapeless hole filled with water. The finger drains at Smith’s Cove were broken apart and buried, and the drilled boulder nearest to the cove was gone, never to be recovered. Worse, Dunfield’s trench on the south shore had opened so wide during the rainy season that it swallowed the stone triangle whole, and a feature that many thought was key to solving the Oak Island mystery was lost forever.

  In the end the provincial government had elected to acquire Grave’s Island rather than Oak Island as its new historic park, but by then Robert Dunfield had fled Nova Scotia and would never return. “Nuking the island” was how Dunfield’s work was described by Nova Scotia surveyor and historian William Crooker, who claimed that because of the California man “a vast amount of ‘visual history’ was lost.”

  Not everyone agreed. Canadian journalist D’Arcy O’Connor wrote that Dunfield deserved credit for rediscovering the site of the original Money Pit and for helping stem the flow of water to the Pit from the south shore flood tunnel.” Reacting to my 2004 observation in Rolling Stone that Dunfield was “widely regarded as the greatest villain in the Oak Island story,” his son Robert Dunfield Jr. (a stakeholder in a subsequent search operation on the island) complained this was unfair. His father’s “approach may have been heavy-handed,” Dunfield Jr. conceded. “But very little credit is given to the positive aspects of his work” or to the toll that it took on the man. “My father aged ten years in only two years. He put his heart and soul into the effort.”

  One day in July 2016, as I stood with Rick and Marty Lagina on what was left of Oak Island’s east-end drumlin, I asked the brothers if they thought I had been in any way unfair to Dunfield. I told them I had been heavily influenced by what I had heard from Rick Restall in 2003 about his first return trip to Oak Island after he and his mother had moved to the mainland. “When I went back, I was shocked by how the island had changed,” Rick had said. “The hilltops had been hacked off, the Money Pit looked like a giant bomb crater, the beach at Smith’s Cove had been buried—even the shoreline had changed. I felt sick.”

  My description of Dunfield as a villain had been fair in his view, Marty Lagina said. Rick didn’t disagree, but the older brother, who I would come to know as a man who looked for the good in everyone, said this: “What people need to remember is that Dunfield truly believed he was going to find the treasure. And if he had, no one would have cared what he had done to the island.”

  “But he didn’t find the treasure,” Marty said.

  “That’s right. He didn’t,” Rick agreed. “So he’s paid the price of failure. Lots of people have done that on Oak Island.”

  FOR A FULL HALF CENTURY after Robert Dunfield quit the island, right up to the time that the Lagina brothers showed up in 2006, the treasure hunt was dominated by two men whose heroic efforts and remarkable discoveries were constantly overshadowed by the bitter rivalry between them. One was Dan Blankenship. The other was Fred Nolan.

  Blankenship was the one I met first when I came to Oak Island in 2003 and also the one who provided me with the greatest assistance in researching and writing the Rolling Stone article. That assistance, though, was not obtained easily. He’d “had it up to here” with reporters, Blankenship told me the first time I got him on the phone, and he hadn’t let one on the island in years. “You’re all looking to stir up trouble,” he said in a voice that made his words sound as if he were chewing them up before he spat them out. Not me, I replied with as much self-assurance as I could muster. All I wanted to do was bring the story of Oak Island up to date for readers who had mostly never heard of the place. I’d already learned that being a writer for the Rolling Stone was not the advantage in Mahone Bay that it was in most other places I’d visited in the twenty-plus years I’d been writing for the magazine, but Dan Blankenship drove the point home. “I guess I’ve heard of your publication,” he said. “But I’ve never looked at it. Was started by a bunch of hippies for kids who wanted to read about rock music, wasn’t it?” I told him it was just one hippie, who now wore an expensive haircut and $5,000 suits. “I just don’t see what good it would do me to talk to you,” Blankenship said. The best I could do was get him to agree to think it over, which gave me a reason to call back the next day and convince him to come over to the Oak Island Inn, where I was staying, to let me buy him a drink and see what he thought when he met me in person.

  He stalked into the hotel bar that evening like a man who didn’t want to be bothered by any damn tourists and made me start the conversation with the two of us standing pretty much toe-to-toe next to the table I had
been saving for our meeting. He was imperious and irascible and, to me, impressive. Just a few months shy of his eightieth birthday, Blankenship was still a lantern-jawed, big-shouldered bull of a man who had no trouble convincing me that he had cleared out more than a few bars with his fists when he was younger. Still, there was a twinkle in his eyes and a smile he barely suppressed when he tried to provoke me. As it happened, he was a lot like my father, and Blankenship started to soften up when I told him my dad had been a longshore foreman who more or less ran the docks in Portland, Oregon. He even seemed to start liking me a little about a half hour later, because I not only knew what a come-along was, but I had also used one to move some boulders on a piece of property in Woodstock, New York. By then we were sitting down over one apiece of Dan’s favorite beverage, a gin martini, dry with olives. When the old man finished his drink, he told me to meet him at the chained-off entrance to the causeway the next morning and he’d bring me up to his house to continue the conversation “and see how much of my time I think you’re worth.” Given that we spent most of the next forty-eight hours in each other’s company, I think it would be fair to say the meeting at the house went well.

  At least part of the reason we hit it off was that I didn’t hear braggadocio as much as a simple statement of fact when Dan told me, “I made the decision to come up here in the first place because I had never met an obstacle I couldn’t overcome.” Blankenship was a highly successful forty-two-year-old building contractor who had just finished the construction of a hospital in Palm Beach, Florida, in 1965, when he picked up a copy of Reader’s Digest that contained an article about Oak Island condensed and reprinted from the Rotarian magazine under the title “Oak Island’s Mysterious ‘Money Pit.’”

  “As soon as I learned about this place, I knew it was the greatest unsolved mystery in the world, and I believed I was the man to solve it.” A little later, when I met his wife, Jane, she told me wistfully how different her life might have been if she’d “never let Dan see that damn magazine.” Once Dan had seen that damn magazine, though, there was no stopping him from making a trip to Nova Scotia to take a look.

  Robert Restall was running the treasure hunt at that time, though, and Restall was wary of strangers who showed up there, especially if they were being shown around by Mel Chappell—M. R., as Blankenship was already calling him. Even among those potential interlopers, however, Blankenship was standing in line behind Robert Dunfield, who had taken over the treasure hunt within days of the Restall tragedy. So he invested $21,000 in Dunfield’s operation, Dan explained, becoming one of the California man’s several limited partners: “Dunfield was going at it the wrong way, but he was my only way in.”

  Dunfield was gone within a year and Blankenship needed no more than a day or two to persuade Chappell that he was every bit the man he thought he was. Becoming M. R.’s designated treasure hunter was no easy task, though, when Blankenship also had a construction business to run and three children to support back in Miami. For seven years or so he split his life in two, Dan told me, spending his winters in Florida with Jane and their three children, working long days on his company’s building projects and spending his summers in Nova Scotia, focused on solving the mystery of Oak Island. “That’s how committed I was to figuring this thing out,” he said. He stayed for weeks on end in Halifax, poring over the records in the Public Archives of Nova Scotia, the bulk of them collected by Frederick Blair and R. V. Harris. The rest of the time he lived and worked out of a motel in Western Shore, interviewing everyone he could find who had been part of previous expeditions, including not only Mel Chappell, but also Gilbert Hedden and Edwin Hamilton.

  One of the earliest conclusions he drew, Dan explained, was that the log platforms that had been found in the Money Pit by the Onslow Company were intended by the people who had done the original work to reduce the compaction of the soil over the years, so that it would subside into only a slight dent in the ground rather than a deep crater and help conceal the Pit. “Clearly they weren’t planning on tearing out those platforms to gain access to the treasure when they came back,” he told me. “That meant they must have another way to reach it.” The key to finding that other way in, Blankenship decided, was to do what so many before had tried and failed to do—stop the flow of water into the Money Pit area. “I thought I was just a little smarter than the other guys,” Dan admitted.

  He hired botanists and geologists to confirm the construction of the artificial beach at Smith’s Cove and to study whatever was left of the five-fingered drainage system there. After mapping out his rough diagram of the flood system, Blankenship laid out plans for an elaborate drilling program and for a series of excavations that would be based on what he found with the drill.

  The one thing he hadn’t really worked out, however, was how he was going to pay for his elaborate operations. “I was becoming so focused on Oak Island that my construction business was suffering, and so were my finances,” Dan told me, lowering his voice slightly, so that Jane, who was in the next room, wouldn’t hear him. The truth was that despite a business that was still netting six figures annually, by early 1967 he was “starting to feel the strain, financially.” It was at that moment that David Tobias entered his life.

  Tobias had first visited Oak Island in 1943, back when Edwin Hamilton was still running the treasure hunt. Tobias had been a young Royal Canadian Air Force officer training as a combat pilot at the Maitland, Nova Scotia, base when he heard about the island and its history. He made the long drive south on a free day to take a look and left unimpressed. Why they didn’t just dig up whatever was down there escaped him completely, he would admit with a laugh sixty years later. It was only in 1963, when he read a newspaper article about Robert Restall’s search operation, that he became fascinated enough to invest $20,000 in the project. Tobias had the money to spare; apart from a share of his family’s considerable investment portfolio, he was the owner of a very successful Montreal company called Jongerin Inc. that manufactured labels and packaging. Not only was that $20,000 gone after Restall’s death in 1965, but also Tobias found himself on the outside looking in as Robert Dunfield tore the island apart during the next year.

  In early 1967, though, after Dunfield headed back to California, Tobias approached Mel Chappell and told him about a Toronto company called Becker Drilling Ltd. that was working with a new type of drill, one that operated inside a pipe that was pounded into the ground with a pile-driving hammer. Once the drill bit was sent to the bottom of the pipe, a constant stream of high-velocity air pressure sent the cuttings back up through the pipe. It offered a tremendous advantage over any other piece of equipment so far invented for the recovery of artifacts from underground. A compact man with bright eyes who spoke with remarkable self-assurance, Tobias impressed Chappell enormously, especially when the Montreal man offered to pay for the Becker drilling program on Oak Island personally (at a cost of $130,000) in exchange for two-thirds of whatever treasure was recovered.

  Dan Blankenship was even more excited than Chappell about the Becker program Tobias had proposed, but he was not exactly thrilled that Tobias was going to claim two-thirds of the Oak Island treasure if it succeeded. During the previous year, working on a limited budget, Blankenship had made what followers of the Oak Island story considered to be a series of spectacular discoveries after deepening the Dunfield shaft on the island’s south shore. At a depth of 60 feet, Dan had uncovered a handwrought nail that was at least three hundred years old and another artifact that was described as either “a nut or washer” formed out of the same primitive low-carbon steel. At 90 feet down the shaft, Blankenship found a layer of round granite stones, each about the size of a man’s head, lying in a pool of stagnant black water. He was positive he’d discovered a branch of the south shore flood system, and Chappell was inclined to agree. Blankenship spent months trying to crib and deepen the Dunfield shaft, but he lacked the funds to do it properly and was forced to abandon the effort when earth began to collapse
the sides of the pit. Exhausted and tapped out, he was receptive when Tobias approached to explain that he was too busy running his company in Montreal to take charge of the Becker program on Oak Island and needed a “field operation director.” Blankenship agreed to take the job for a small salary and a cut of the treasure if the Becker drill located it.

  The Becker program began on Oak Island in January 1967 and continued for eight months. His preliminary goal, Tobias told Blankenship, was to prove beyond doubt that there were “man-made underground workings” on Oak Island. And these could only be identified as such at 150 feet or more underground, he said, because only when one went deeper than previous searchers could one be certain that what was found was connected to the original work. Only if he saw the evidence with his own eyes, Tobias said, would he keep the project going.

  As far as both Blankenship and Tobias were concerned, that evidence came quickly. The Becker drill would sink 49 six-inch diameter holes in and around the Money Pit area during the eight months it was operating on the island, and only about a dozen of those holes had been bored before Tobias was convinced that they had found the proof they were looking for. Exploration using the Becker drill had established that the bedrock in the Money Pit area began at a depth of about 160 feet, with variances of up to 10 feet in either direction. That was bearing in mind that Dunfield had scraped away enough of the “overburden soil” from the island’s east-end drumlin to lower the ground level by about 12 feet from where it had originally been. The bedrock was mostly anhydrite (crystallized calcium sulfate), with some seams of gypsum and limestone in the upper layers. The Becker drill found its first cavity at about 40 feet down in the bedrock, covered on top by two layers of wood that were each several inches thick and separated by a thin layer of blue clay. After passing through the wood, the drill had dropped through a void that was 6 to 8 feet deep before again striking bedrock.