The Curse of Oak Island

by Randall Sullivan

  The materials that came out of the drill’s tube were fragments of china, cement, wood, charcoal, and metal, including brass that was shown by spectrographic analysis to possess high levels of impurities, meaning the brass was “smelted early,” though putting a specific date on its age was not possible. Most exciting, though, were the oak buds found in the blue clay. Geologists said the seeds of oak trees could not possibly have been deposited by the glacial movements that had formed Oak Island, which could only mean they had been placed in the clay by human activity—170 feet belowground. Samples of a “bricklike” material had also been brought to the surface by the Becker drill. Testing by mineralogists confirmed that this material had been exposed to intense heat at some former time. The speculation was that a primitive kiln had operated far below the surface of the island to make and repair iron tools. The charcoal mostly had been used to fire the kiln. The cement was submitted for analysis by experts at Canada Cement LaFarge who identified it as a primitive type that had been common during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The Steel Company of Canada (Stelco) examined the metal pieces brought up from the bedrock and reported that they were at least several hundred years old. The wood that had come back from the deepest levels penetrated by the Becker drill was originally carbon-dated to 1585, but that estimate was plus or minus eighty-five years. A more thorough carbon-14 analysis was performed by Harold Krueger of Geochron Laboratories in Cambridge, Massachusetts. In his report, Krueger cautioned that since it was impossible to know how old the tree had been when it was cut, he could only say that he had found a 67 percent probability that the wood’s age fell between 1490 and 1660. To calculate the tree’s age with 95 percent accuracy, Krueger wrote, he would have to expand the possible date range to between 1405 and 1745.

  For Blankenship, the interesting moment during the Becker drilling had come when the drill was at a depth of 198 feet, only to be absolutely stopped by hitting hard metal. He and the drill operator agreed that it must be metal because of the high keening noise that came up through the tube. “It took us close to half an hour just to bore through a half inch of it,” he recalled. “I was tremendously excited to see what it was, but when we tried to bring up the core sample we lost it. I ask you, what would metal hard enough to stop a drill be doing almost two hundred feet belowground? People had to have put it there.”

  He had done a good deal of searching on his own away from the Money Pit during the months of the Becker drilling program, Dan told me, mostly at Smith’s Cove. Dunfield had destroyed most of the old five-fingered feeder drain system, but there were some sections left and he had spent weeks probing them with a shovel. One of the things he had turned up was a heart-shaped stone that had been chiseled. Another was an old set square that metallurgists dated to before 1780. His most amazing discovery had been a pair of handwrought iron scissors that he had pulled from beneath one of the drains. Mendel Peterson, the former curator of the Smithsonian Institution’s Historical Archeology division, examined the scissors and said they were of a type made and used by the Spaniards in Mexico during the mid- and late 1600s, though he had added that they might have been made more recently than that.

  “The stone and the set square might have been left by early searchers,” Blankenship told me. “Probably were. But those scissors, it’s almost certain that they were used by the people who did the original work on Oak Island to cut up the coconut fiber and the manila grass that was used as a screen under the artificial beach.” I remarked it was hard to know the difference between what was almost certain and what was a distinct possibility. This raised one of Dan’s shaggy eyebrows, but he let it pass.

  For David Tobias, the most compelling discovery during the Becker program was made when the drill entered a previously undiscovered chamber about 30 feet in diameter, extending from depths between 160 and 190 feet, almost directly beneath the Hedden shaft. It was riddled with holes that were filled with a heavy, puttylike blue clay in which layers of small stones were found at semiregular 18-inch intervals. Colin Campbell, a former army general and mining engineer who was considered Canada’s leading historian of underground workings, wrote a report in which he stated that the clay almost certainly had been puddled on the surface, then poured into the holes in layers. Small stones in the clay would sink to the bottom of each layer and produce the sort of stratification found in the drill cores. Before the development of cement, Campbell noted, clay had been commonly used as a water seal in underground workings.

  Tobias was heartened by Campbell’s conclusion that an enormous amount of human effort had gone into the creation of the Money Pit and the flood system, sometime before the middle of the eighteenth century. “A large number of men were engaged for a few years driving various shafts, inclined and lateral headings, some of which were apparently prepared for flooding in order to discourage any inquisitive searchers,” Campbell had written. A little later he added, “In my opinion the early operations by the ‘pirates’ or other parties were too elaborate and well planned to be for any minor venture and therefore it is reasonable to assume that the operations were for the purpose of hiding treasure which must be of great value to warrant the effort.”

  The Becker drillings, combined with the conclusions Campbell drew from them, were more than enough to convince both Tobias and Blankenship that they had proved the existence of man-made tunnels with ceilings of wooden planks shored with logs that had been dug at depths of up to 200 feet or more below the island’s surface. He was now all in with the treasure hunt, Tobias said, and ready to start reaching out to other people of means who could help him finance it on the scale it merited.

  This took a bit longer than expected, but by April 1969 Tobias had put together Triton Alliance, a limited partnership in which he and Blankenship were joined by “a largely unidentified group of some of Canada’s wealthiest and best known businessmen,” as Toronto’s Financial Post would put it. The investors did not remain unidentified for long. They included the past president of the Toronto Stock Exchange, the chairman of the board for one of Canada’s two largest supermarket chains, and a former Nova Scotia attorney general, along with a handful of Americans, among them the wealthy Boston land developer Charles Brown. Together, they were prepared to put $500,000 into the operation, according to Tobias, who told the Financial Post: “We are the first people to know what to expect and what we are after.”

  Dan Blankenship had been at it long enough to know that nobody ever knew what to expect on Oak Island. “Even I, though, didn’t imagine all the trouble Fred Nolan could make for us,” he admitted.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  When I thought about it later, I was fascinated by how determined the partners in Triton Alliance were to portray Fred Nolan as an interloper, given that Fred had been involved in the Oak Island treasure hunt longer than any of them had.

  Nolan was a surveyor living in Bedford, Nova Scotia, and working out of an office in Halifax in 1957 when he first visited Oak Island, just as George Greene’s operations were winding down. R. V. Harris’s The Oak Island Mystery was published one year later, and he had read it “forward and backward, at least a half dozen times,” Nolan told me when I spoke to him in 2003. He had been thrilled to discover that Harris’s office was just a few blocks from his own and began paying visits to the attorney, who seemed to welcome him, even when the surveyor peppered the lawyer with questions about the history of the treasure hunt. Harris would tell people later that he had been impressed with the originality of Nolan’s thinking process.

  Nolan said he went back to Oak Island to “poke around,” only to be informed by Mel Chappell that the Harman brothers were about to take over the treasure hunt and that Robert Restall was waiting in the wings behind them. Nolan, who had become fascinated by the survey Charles Roper conducted for Gilbert Hedden in 1937—in particular by the links Roper had found between the stone triangle, the Cave-in Pit, and the drilled boulders—asked if Chappell would mind if he conducted a survey of the complete i
sland, so long as he did it on his own time and paid for it with his own money. Reasoning that he was getting an expensive service for free, Chappell agreed.

  What Nolan didn’t tell Chappell was that he had been horrified by the damage to the surface of Oak Island the other man was doing by operating a drag line—essentially a tractor pulling a digging bucket behind it—that tore up everything in its path. Nolan feared that valuable landmarks were being obliterated, which was why he had pressed to conduct a survey immediately.

  During 1961 and 1962, Nolan spent thousands of dollars on labor and equipment (and devoted hundreds of hours that his family wished he were putting into his business) to lay out a grid that covered every inch of Oak Island and reference every object that might be considered a “marker.” It would have been much more expensive if not for the fact that he did most of the work himself, Nolan told me, crisscrossing the island with dozens of lines cut through the trees and brush. In total, these stretched for tens of thousands of yards, Nolan said, and laying them out had been “backbreaking work.”

  Fred was seventy-six years old in 2003, a short man with wispy white hair and a physique that might generously be described as spare. He was more sturdy-looking in photographs from the 1960s and 1970s. A flinty-featured fellow who squinted suspiciously beneath the brim of the tweedy porkpie hat he favored, he was never caught on camera smiling. In fact, he smiled exactly once during our conversation, when I told him that Dan Blankenship had, grudgingly it seemed, acknowledged the “significant discoveries” his island neighbor and mortal enemy had made. I was pretty sure Fred had only agreed to speak to me because he knew I had already interviewed Dan. He was curious to know what Blankenship had said about him and wanted the opportunity to defend himself against any accusations that might have been made.

  I can’t say I found him to be the least bit warm, unlike Dan, who had become almost avuncular after I had spent a couple of hours in his company. But one winning quality possessed by Fred Nolan that nobody—not even Blankenship—could deny was perseverance. The man was also meticulous, as he had demonstrated while conducting that free survey for Chappell back in the early sixties, installing twenty-three concrete survey markers, each crowned with a numbered bronze disk on which a transit or theodolite could be mounted. Nolan had also been the first person to photograph the stone triangle, which he surveyed as well, actions that would be much admired years later, when it began to dawn on people the havoc Dunfield had wreaked when he destroyed the triangle.

  Another idea that originated with Fred Nolan was that the flood tunnels on the island were not dug in straight paths. The clay down there was “unbelievably hard,” Nolan said, and he was convinced that the original diggers had followed the line of least resistance, which is to say the tunnels meandered. “If they came to a boulder, they dug around it,” he said in 2003.

  In late 1962, convinced that he had accomplished something important—and that Mel Chappell would surely recognize it—he arranged a meeting with the man who now owned all of Oak Island and proposed that he be allowed to lease the search rights. Chappell, though, already had Robert Restall and his family installed on the island and planned to keep them there until he found the individual or group that was willing to spend the serious money he believed was required to retrieve the treasure. Whether it was because Nolan was pushy or Chappell was testy, or both, the surveyor’s attempted negotiation blew up in his face, and the conversation ended with M. R. telling him to “get off my damn island and go to hell,” as Fred recalled it.

  Instead, Nolan went to the Registry of Deeds in Chester. “I was playing a hunch,” Fred told me. That hunch would pay big dividends. Nolan traced the Oak Island records back to 1935, when Gilbert Hedden bought lots 5 and 9–20 from Sophia Sellers’s heirs (three grown children and nine grandchildren). The deed office’s records, though, stated that Hedden had purchased only lots 15–20. The issue was muddled further by a survey plan dated September 9, 1935, stating that Hedden had purchased “52 acres” on Oak Island, which would have included lots 5 and 9–14. So Nolan jumped forward to 1950, when John Whitney Lewis had purchased the same property from Hedden. Again he found that the sale had not technically included seven of the lots: 5 and 9–14. Thus, neither had the sale made by Lewis to Chappell later that same year. What he suddenly realized was that because lots 5 and 9–14 had not been properly conveyed to Hedden by the Sellers heirs in 1935 or to Lewis by Hedden in 1950 or to Chappell by Lewis after that, that property still belonged legally to the last remaining Sellers heirs, two elderly ladies living on the mainland. Nolan immediately paid separate visits to the sisters and arranged to purchase the seven lots—one-quarter of Oak Island—for $2,500.

  In April 1963 Nolan went to Chappell without first making arrangements for a meeting, showed him the deeds to lots 5 and 9–14, then offered to trade the seven lots for a lease on the Money Pit. Chappell reacted with fury, calling Nolan a sneak and again ordering him the hell off his property. The man who had believed he owned Oak Island in its entirety hired R. V. Harris to investigate the matter and was outraged when Harris reported back that it appeared Nolan could indeed claim ownership of the seven lots in question.

  He was “set back and disappointed,” Nolan admitted to me in 2003, that Chappell had rejected his offer. He soon began to cheer up, though, when he realized that he now owned a swath of land that extended across most of the east end of Oak Island, permitting him to block anyone coming from the west if he chose to. He also had his survey notes and an immense collection of maps and documents. Rather than worry about Chappell and the operations at the Money Pit, he would hunker down and study all the materials in his possession to see if he could make connections.

  Nolan directed his attention first to the three piles of stones at the top of the hill just beyond the eastern boundary of his property, each rising from a 12-foot base to a point 5 feet aboveground. It had long been presumed these were the remnants of an observation point—a “sentry post,” as Robert Restall had called it. When he studied the survey grid he had laid out on that part of the island, though, Nolan recognized that the piles of stones formed a perfect isosceles triangle, with sides 150 feet long and a base about 100 feet wide. He looked at that triangle again and again, Nolan recalled, until he realized that it could be seen as an arrowhead pointed directly at the center of the swamp. He was already convinced, just as Robert Restall had been, that the swamp was a meaningful feature of Oak Island, probably man-made, possibly to conceal something buried beneath it.

  He filed that thought away and concentrated for a time on two granite boulders on which ringbolts had been fitted into drilled holes and fixed with a primitive cement. During 1963, he drew lines between the stone piles and the boulders with the ringbolts and decided to excavate where the lines intersected. Nolan demonstrated just how driven a man he was the following year in 1964, when he hired a six-man crew to dig two 30-foot-deep shafts at those locations. He was disappointed—but not at all discouraged—that the only object found was an old brass belt buckle buried more than 20 feet underground.

  Whether or not it was because he had no access to the Money Pit I was never sure, but during his time on Oak Island in the 1960s Nolan came to believe that the original shaft was not nearly as significant a feature of the island as people imagined. I never could get out of him exactly why, but Nolan was convinced that the treasure everyone sought was in a watertight vault at the end of a tunnel that ran off from the Money Pit. Or maybe, he seemed to be saying at one point, this tunnel was not even connected to the Money Pit. Fred’s reluctance to reveal anything more than he absolutely had to created a haze around his work that no one would ever entirely penetrate.

  He had spent hours, days, and weeks over a period of years searching for that tunnel and the vault at the end of it on his own property, Nolan said. Along the way he found more rocks with round holes bored or chiseled into them; some had pieces of metal inserted. He also excavated pieces of old hand-cut wood that he believed
were from an ancient treasure chest. One of the pieces had old iron hinges attached. He also discovered a number of rocks that he believed had been used as survey markers many years earlier. One in particular fascinated him. It was a piece of sandstone that had been cut to leave two smooth sides and the other two rough. How Nolan found it says a good deal about the man. He had been crawling along on the ground on his hands and knees, following a survey line with a hand compass that had bumped into the rock. Nolan said that when he saw that the sandstone was standing on end, he immediately recognized it as significant. He actually paid to have it examined by a geologist who wrote a report confirming that “this is not a natural stable resting position for a rock of this shape.” The geologist also agreed that the burn marks on the rock indicated that heat had been used to cut it. Nolan found any number of other sandstone rocks that he described as having “marks and figures” on them. All of the granite stones he had noted as potential markers were positioned naturally, but the sandstones had been placed by human hands. Eventually Nolan decided that the sandstones were not native to Oak Island, but instead had been brought there to use as survey markers.