The Curse of Oak Island

by Randall Sullivan

  Nothing Fred did during the 1960s, though, was as impressive as his decision at the end of the decade to drain the Oak Island swamp. He wouldn’t tell me what it had cost, other than “a lot,” but there had to be a considerable amount of labor and equipment involved. He did not find a tunnel entrance or a treasure chest under the swamp, Fred admitted, but he did discover numerous markers, most notably a number of spruce stakes driven into the ground that clearly were intended for some purpose of identification. He also found what he believed to be a gold-branding bar and part of a wooden ship’s gunwale. He was convinced that the swamp had once been low-lying ground, used possibly as either a docking or boat-repair yard.

  By 1969, the year he drained the swamp, though, the biggest news Fred Nolan was making involved his battles with Dan Blankenship and Triton Alliance. The conflict actually went all the way back to 1965, when Robert Dunfield—who had absorbed the animosity toward Nolan from his then-partner Mel Chappell—had built the causeway and posted an armed guard at the entrance to prevent Nolan from using it. Dunfield himself used to sit out there with a rifle, Fred said, “and threaten to shoot me if I tried to drive onto the island.” Dunfield and Chappell managed to force Nolan to use a boat to reach his land on the island and to barge out his equipment, but they also learned the hard way that Fred was not about to lay down for anyone. In 1966, he spent $3,000 to purchase the quarter acre of land on Crandall’s Point that butted up against the entrance to the causeway, then barricaded it, making it impossible to move any sort of oversized load between the mainland and the island. When Dunfield left Nova Scotia, Nolan negotiated a deal with Dan Blankenship, who paid him $1,000 to remove the barricade, at the same time giving Fred permission to use the causeway. Eventually that morphed into a deal that gave Nolan a small share of Triton’s Money Pit operation in exchange for doing some surveying work for Tobias and giving Blankenship a right of way through his property.

  The situation seems to have been reasonably amicable during 1967, Canada’s centennial year, when Fred built a museum at Crandall’s Point, where he exhibited the artifacts he had collected on Oak Island. He even managed to negotiate a deal with Canada’s Department of Tourism to collect a percentage of the revenue from public tours of Oak Island, in exchange for the right to cross his Crandall’s Point property.

  All of those agreements were annulled in 1969, though, when Triton Alliance was formed. After each side accused the other of breach of contract, Nolan again blocked off the entrance to the causeway, which forced Triton to build a bypass road. Triton retaliated by chaining off the causeway where it touched the island, on Chappell’s property, preventing Nolan from crossing and again forcing him to boat and barge out to his island property. Fred answered back by chaining off the trail to the eastern end of Oak Island that ran through his property, blocking Triton from road access to the Money Pit. To say that the conflict grew hot at this point would be an understatement. Nolan and Blankenship had a number of what were described as “nose-to-nose shouting matches,” although technically those would have been Fred’s nose to Dan’s chin. One afternoon in 1970 Blankenship became so incensed that he confronted Nolan at the chain armed with a hunting rifle. Fred called the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, who arrived in time to seem Dan still manning the chain with the rifle in his hands. He was protecting his property, Dan told the Mounties, who confiscated his rifle anyway.

  “OF ALL THE THINGS FRED HAS DONE, nothing has ever infuriated or outraged me as much as his systematic removal and destruction of the markers and artifacts he’s found—a lot of which weren’t even on his property,” Dan Blankenship told me back in 2003. Nolan admitted nothing when I asked him about this. “I have recorded the precise location of every single marker or other significant object I’ve found on Oak Island,” Fred told me. “If I choose not to share that information with Dan, well, that’s my right.”

  Nolan’s obstruction of the existing path to the Money Pit compelled Triton to build a new road around his property in 1970. Fred had also forced his adversaries to spend some serious money creating bypasses at the causeway entrance and to reach the east end of Oak Island from the west, but he lost nearly all of his leverage against Triton in the process. He had just two advantages left—the proximity of the southeastern border of his property to the Money Pit and, as of early 1971, his own treasure trove license from the province of Nova Scotia. When Nolan began a major excavation about 650 feet northwest of the Money Pit, Tobias and Blankenship realized how serious their island neighbor was about his search and about his theory that the treasure was in a tunnel that had been driven downhill from the Money Pit. The partners could not completely dismiss the possibility that what they were after might lie on Nolan’s property, not theirs. This was the basis for the negotiation of a new deal struck in late 1971. It guaranteed Triton at least 40 percent of any treasure found on Nolan’s land in exchange for giving Fred the right to drive to the island on the causeway, plus a promise that Triton would not challenge Nolan’s acquisition of his seven lots.

  Triton had convinced Nolan that its operation on Oak Island was a formidable one. In summer 1970 the Alliance had built a 400-foot-long cofferdam around the perimeter of Smith’s Cove, 50 yards farther out to sea than the previous dams built by searchers. Blankenship had done much of the work (mostly with bulldozers) and supervised all of it. Triton’s was an impressive structure, but like previous dams, it would ultimately be battered, beaten down and broken by the Atlantic Ocean’s winter storms.

  The construction of the cofferdam, though, had unearthed what might have been the most significant find of the twentieth century on Oak Island: a large U-shaped wooden structure buried beneath the sand and gravel just below the low tide line. It was made of logs 2 feet in diameter ranging in length from 30 to 65 feet, all of them notched at 4-foot intervals, each hand bored, and several still fitted with dowels that must have once secured cross pieces joining the logs. (Almost certainly this was the rest of what Gilbert Hedden had discovered when he spotted those two logs with hand-carved notches at Smith’s Cove back in 1938.) A different Roman numeral was carved into each log. Triton called in archeological consultants who concluded that the structure was the remains of an ancient wharf or slipway or of workings used in the construction of the original cofferdam that had held back the sea while the Money Pit was dug and the flood tunnel system constructed. Dan Blankenship maintained that the structure was a wharf, though he considered it possible that it had been both a wharf and a dam and was of the opinion that it had been destroyed purposely after the completion of the Money Pit and the flood system. Carbon dating at Ontario’s Brock University established only that the wood was at least 250 years old, which meant that the structure had been built sometime prior to 1720.

  Blankenship had also discovered two smaller and more crudely constructed wooden structures beneath the beach on Oak Island’s west end. He believed they were skidways that had been used to haul boats out of the water. A number of handwrought iron nails and metal strips were recovered in the vicinity of these two structures, and lab analysis found they had been forged prior to 1790. The Blankenship find that made the most news, though, was a large granite stone that had been uncovered by accident as bulldozers were backfilling the Cave-in Pit that summer. Dan had caught sight of some “cutting” on the stone as it was being pushed out of the ground toward the Pit and rushed in to retrieve it before it was buried. The cutting was a hand-carved G inside a rectangle. In Freemasonry, the letter G inside an “oblong square” denoted the “Grand Architect” of the universe—God, by another name. Formac Publishing author Mark Finnan had asserted that “the presence of this symbol on Oak Island and its location in the east, seen as the source of light in Masonic teachings, is further indication that individuals with a fundamental knowledge of Freemasonry were likely involved [in the original works on Oak Island].” That was certainly possible, though it was equally likely that the G had been carved by someone involved in a previous treasure-hunting ex
pedition.

  In his constant poking around the island, Blankenship had made a number of other notable discoveries in the late sixties and early seventies. One was a pair of old leather shoes buried 9 feet below the surface of the island’s western beach. Dan also found three more drilled boulders not far north of the Money Pit, similar to the two found in 1937 by Gilbert Hedden. Blankenship discovered several rock piles that he knew were man-made as well. When he dismantled them, he found mounds of ash beneath. Lab analysis later revealed this to be the remains of burned bones, though whether they were human or animal was not possible to say.

  Later in the summer of 1970, after the cofferdam’s construction, Triton had hired Golder Associates of Toronto, a geotechnical engineering firm, to conduct the most complete study ever performed of what lay beneath the surface of Oak Island. The company bored a series of deep holes across the island’s east end, removing core samples to be analyzed at their laboratories. Golder also ran seismic and other tests intended to determine the precise nature and porosity of the soil and the underlying bedrock of the east-end drumlin. Among other things, these tests determined that the seawater was pouring into the Money Pit and surrounding shafts at a constant rate of 600 to 650 gallons per minute, which laid Captain Henry Bowdoin’s “percolation” to rest.

  All told, the Golder project cost Triton more than $100,000, for which the Alliance received a trove of charts and cross-sectional drawings of the island’s underground, with both natural and man-made formations mapped out. Golder’s engineers also estimated that given the tools and technologies of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, it would have required approximately 100,000 man-hours to create the original works on Oak Island, meaning that forty men could have done it in one year.

  In terms of future events on the island, the most significant moment of the Golder project came when the company’s engineers were conducting a piezometer test (to determine the flow and pressure of the water beneath the surface) at what was designated as Borehole 10X. The borehole had been made in 1976 by a company called Bowmaster Drilling with a 6-inch rotary drill. At a depth of 140 feet in the hard-packed glacial till the drill had dropped into a 5-foot cavity. It hit a similar cavity 20 feet farther down, then reached the bedrock at a depth of 180 feet and continued boring deeper all the way to 230 feet, where it found yet another 5-foot cavity. At that point the drill was removed and a steel casing was inserted all the way to the bottom of the borehole. High-pressure air was injected to blow out loose material, and from a depth of 165 feet came enough “thin metal” to fill both of a man’s hands. The metal began oxidizing within minutes of exposure to the outside air and turned so brittle it would crumble if touched. What this meant, the geologists said, was that it had been starved of oxygen for a very, very long time. The metal was sent to Stelco, which reported back that it was a primitive form of smelted steel, extremely low carbon, possibly of Swedish origin that “in all probability was produced prior to 1750.”

  Dan Blankenship was at least as impressed when 10X filled with water that brought pieces of bird bones, seashells, and glass to the surface. To him, that meant 10X had found a connection to the flood system. Because of this, combined with the discovery of the cavities and the recovery of the old steel, it was decided to make 10X into an actual shaft, the twenty-ninth excavated on Oak Island, one large enough for divers to be lowered into it.

  One of Triton’s consultants suggested that an Aspen, Colorado, company named Statesman Mining owned a perfect piece of equipment for this job, a hybrid drill/clamshell digger capable of scooping out a 25-inch diameter hole to a considerable depth. Statesman Mining was best known for the fact that the movie star John Wayne was one its owners. During the negotiations for the lease of the company’s machine it was suggested that Wayne might narrate a documentary about Oak Island. The actor’s representatives eventually insisted his schedule wouldn’t permit this and that deal fell apart, though it did leave behind the legend of John Wayne’s “involvement” with Oak Island.

  Triton may not have gotten John Wayne, but it did obtain Statesman’s machine, which arrived on Oak Island in October 1970 and was immediately put to work reboring 10X. At first it looked to be the right piece of equipment, bringing up more of the thin metal from a depth of 45 feet. The Statesman machine couldn’t deal with the boulders that began to block its progress below that point, though, and by Christmas had reached a depth of only 85 feet. After Triton sent the Statesman rig back to Colorado, Dan Blankenship insisted on bringing Parker Kennedy of Halifax—”the best damn driller I’ve ever had on the island”—out to finish the job. Kennedy’s big churn drill opened a hole 27 inches wide in 10X right down through the bedrock to a depth of 235 feet. A quarter-inch-thick steel casing was driven down against the walls of the shaft to 180 feet, leaving the last 55 feet of the borehole with natural anhydrite walls.

  Kennedy’s drill had brought up more of the thin metal, along with several links of steel chain and a significant number of spruce borings. When the spruce was submitted for carbon-14 testing, the results were at first glance the most astonishing in the history of Oak Island. The wood was dated to the year 3005 AD—more than one thousand years in the future. It was eventually discovered that the reason for this bizarre result was that the wood was coated with pitchblende, a radioactive uranium ore that is today known as uraninite. Pitchblende, Triton was advised, had been used between the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries as a preserving agent on Britain’s wooden ships, and also on mineshaft supports.

  The churning action of Kennedy’s drill had also extracted chunks of cement from 10X at the 165-foot level. These were analyzed by W. S. Weaver of Canada Cement LaFarge, who reported: “It is likely that these materials reflect human activity involving crude lime…. Furthermore, the presence of rust [on some of the samples] indicates contact with man-made iron.”

  The nature of the debris recovered from 10X, along with the fact that it continued to fill to sea level with saltwater, convinced Triton that it would be worth the cost of sending a remote-controlled television camera into the shaft, all the way to the bottom. In August 1971, the camera was slowly lowered to the 235-foot level while Blankenship watched on a closed-circuit monitor that had been set up (with the assistance of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation station in Halifax) in a nearby shack. As Blankenship was describing the scene to me in his basement office in September 2003, he produced an envelope filled with still photographs that had been made from the videotape recorded that day. He pulled the photos out of the envelope and lay them facedown on the table between us, clearly relishing the suspense he was building.

  “For the longest time all I saw was the snow of static,” he recalled. “Then all of a sudden I saw these.” Dan turned one of the photos over and showed me what he said were the outlines of three chests. “See that right there,” he said, pointing at one of the supposed chests. “There’s the curved top, and there just below it is the handle.” Well, they could be chests, I thought. They seemed perfectly rectangular anyway, except on top. And that might have been a handle. Dan then turned over another photo and showed me what he said was a pickaxe that lay on the floor of the chamber at the bottom of 10X next to three logs. Again, the most I could concede was that it might have been a pickaxe. And I had to strain to imagine that the silt-covered bumps on the floor of the chamber could have been the body lying on its side that Dan traced with a fingertip.

  There were no photographs, only Blankenship’s memory, to verify what was perhaps the most compelling piece of apocrypha in the entire Oak Island story. “Out of nowhere, right in front of the camera, I saw a human hand floating past,” Dan said. The hand had been severed at the wrist and hung suspended, half clenched, in front of the camera for several seconds. He had called over Parker Kennedy, who was in the shack with him, and Parker had seen the hand, too. Unfortunately, Kennedy hadn’t known to advise Blankenship against trying to take a photograph of the floating hand with a camera that had a flash attachment
; the reflection of the flash off the glass of the monitor had resulted in what was nothing more than a picture of the glare.

  The emotion in Dan Blankenship’s voice in 2003 when he spoke of 10X was unfathomable to me at the time. Sitting with Dan in his basement office on that first sodden day I felt myself leaning toward him as I listened. It was almost as if he had placed me in a hypnotic trance and was willing me to be seduced by the mystery of that hole in the ground, one that had gone unsolved because of his partner’s lack of faith. “David just never believed in 10X,” he said. “He didn’t get it.”

  It seemed to me that Tobias had actually been pretty forbearing, especially considering the method by which Blankenship had selected the spot where 10X was dug in the first place. Dan had done it by dowsing, or water witching as it’s sometimes called. The forked witch hazel branch that the Romans Cicero and Tacitus suggested for dowsing had been replaced by two metal rods in Blankenship’s hands. More than forty years later he vividly conveyed the “force” with which those rods had pointed him to the spot where 10X had been dug and was not the least bit embarrassed to be telling me about it. Gilbert Hedden had located two tunnels between the Money Pit and Smith’s Cove with a twig from an apple tree, Dan pointed out. Back in 1897, Frederick Blair had been highly impressed by a Massachusetts man named Chapman who had used a divining rod to correctly trace the Halifax Company’s main tunnel, then staked off what he said was the pirate tunnel and predicted that its entrance into the Money Pit could be found at a depth of 110 feet.

  Science pretty much puts water witching in the same category as automatic writing, but that hasn’t prevented the mining and energy businesses from employing it with regularity over the years. Marty Lagina would tell me in the summer of 2016: “Dowsing is still used by a lot of people in the oil business. They say they don’t believe in it. I say I don’t believe in it. But I’ve seen it work and so have they. Which is why people keep resorting to it.”