The Curse of Oak Island

by Randall Sullivan

  Tobias only occasionally mocked the way Blankenship had “found” 10X, and while he was openly skeptical about what Dan had claimed to see when the camera was sent down 10X, David readily agreed to spend the money to expand the borehole to a diameter of 8 feet in order to search for a tunnel to the Money Pit. A team of divers led by Phil Irwin of Brooklyn, Nova Scotia, was to be sent down wearing helmets that fed air through a tube connected to a compressor on the surface. Irwin, who made the first dive alone, radioed up from a depth of 170 feet that the water was becoming murky. At 180 feet, where the metal casing ended, Irwin had reported a current of water so powerful it was about to tear the helmet off his head. Irwin descended farther anyway, but by then the turbidity of the water was so dense that he couldn’t see his hand in front of his face.

  After Irwin’s solo dive, Dan Blankenship led those aboveground to Smith’s Cove, where the water along the shore was muddied. They had done this with the pumps in 10X, he said, which proved that 10X was connected to the flood system. Triton paid to have a bulldozer hauled to the island in order to pile tons of clay on the spot at Smith’s Cove where Dan believed he had found a tunnel entrance, hoping that might block the flow of water into 10X. A week later Irwin made a second descent into 10X accompanied by two other divers. This time there was no rush of water at 180 feet, indicating that what Blankenship had done was succeeding. The divers went all the way to the bottom of the borehole, 235 feet, where they found themselves floating in a large cavity about 7 feet high. Even with the strongest underwater lights in Nova Scotia, though, the divers couldn’t see the width of the cavity. Their shoulders rubbing against the anhydrite walls of the shaft had clouded the water, they realized later; it was like swimming in a vast tub of skim milk. The divers groped around the bottom directly beneath the shaft, afraid to venture any distance away, and found only loose stones.

  Blankenship went down the hole in a wetsuit himself a few months later. Nothing the man had done impressed me more than that. Almost fifty years old at the time, Dan had squeezed through the 27-inch opening that extended for the last 55 feet below the metal casing and emerged into a chamber where he was “hanging from a cable like a pendulum in this big void,” as he put it. Because of the powerful pressure of the water flowing into 10X from the sea, the constant suck of the pumps on the surface, and the solubility of the anhydrite bedrock, he had been in considerable danger. Even though he was describing something he’d done more than thirty years earlier, I felt actual physical relief when Dan told me he not only realized it would be suicide to venture too far from the bottom of the shaft but also that the lack of visibility made exploration impossible. So he went back up. He went down 10X a second time in 1972, and on this occasion he found the bottom of the cavern covered with rubble. The pumps working around the clock above him were wearing away the bedrock walls of the bottom part of the shaft, Dan explained to me in 2003, and he knew it would be “ridiculously dangerous” to go back down a third time.

  “There was nothing to do but move away from 10X for a time,” Blankenship said. “And it was what David was pushing me to do, anyway.” During 1973, Blankenship, on behalf of Triton, sank three drill holes on the north side of the Money Pit. A borehole 660 feet away from the Pit was turned into a 12-by-6-foot shaft (no. 30) after a piece of wire and metal plate were found just below the 100-foot level. Stelco analyzed the wire as “a corroded low carbon material which has been drawn by cold workings, probably in the 1500s to 1800s.” No. 30, like so many shafts before, was abandoned when every effort to staunch the flow of water into it failed.

  It was not until August 1976, after the borings that Tobias wanted in the Money Pit area proved fruitless, that Blankenship was able to persuade the Triton partners to return to 10X. One of the things that persuaded Tobias to support this was Dan’s discovery that 10X was on the exact line between the two drilled rocks found by Gilbert Hedden in 1937, a fact that neither Blankenship nor any of the others had been aware of when the borehole was drilled.

  This time Dan went at 10X armed with a special piece of equipment that had been created by Triton partner Bill Parkin, a military weapons systems designer from Massachusetts. It was a highly sensitive ground-penetrating sonar sensor that detected a number of previously unknown cavities in the bedrock connected to or near 10X. Blankenship installed a pair of pumps capable of drawing up 2 million gallons of water a day and ran them continuously for a week to get the water level below 160 feet, until the drive on the larger of the two pumps snapped. Within two days the water level was back to nearly the surface.

  Not until September was Blankenship to get inside 10X and explore the cavities that had been detected with Parkin’s sonar device. All of them turned out to be shallow natural voids, probably created by the initial drilling of the borehole.

  BY THE TIME HE WAS EXPLORING 10X, Dan had persuaded Jane to leave Florida and live with him full time in Nova Scotia. The couple rented a house in Mahone Bay for two years, then in 1975 Dan acquired lot 23 on Oak Island’s west end, close to the spot where the causeway ended, and built the two-bedroom bungalow where he and his wife planned to spend the rest of their lives.

  Jane’s situation on the island was far more tolerable than Mildred Restall’s had been. She was living in a modern home with electricity and indoor plumbing; even the TV reception was pretty decent. It took the Blankenships less than five minutes to drive across the causeway to the mainland, where they could sit down for drinks or eat a restaurant meal. Dan was popular among the locals, especially by comparison to Robert Dunfield and George Greene, and the Blankenships made friends in the community. Still, it was lonely out on the island a lot of the time, especially in winter when visitors were infrequent. Less than a year after they’d moved into the house, though, Oak Island added one more full-time resident with the arrival of Dan and Jane’s son David, then in his midtwenties, who wanted to join his father’s treasure hunt. A few months later, Dan would be awfully glad that Dave had shown up.

  It was November 26, 1976. Dan was deep inside 10X, hanging by a cable at a depth of 145 feet, while Dave manned the winch on the surface. Father and son communicated by the headsets each wore. He heard “a bad sound,” Dan recalled, then chunks of clay began to rain down on his head. In a fraction of a second, he realized that the metal casing was giving way above him. “Bring me up! Bring me up! Out, out, out, out!” Dan had shouted into his microphone. We know his exact words because the conversation was recorded on a tape, which would be played to great effect on The Curse of Oak Island almost forty years later. Dave turned the winch up to full speed as he tried to lift his father out of the borehole. It felt like slow motion to him, Dan said; the sound of tearing metal and falling rocks scraping against the sides of the casing was deafening, and he knew that if the metal collapsed completely, 10X would become his tomb. “Keep bringing me up!” he shouted to David. “Don’t stop! Bring me up! It’s still over my head! Bring me up! Bring me up!”

  Dave had just raised Dan to above the 90-foot level, so that his father was looking down on the twisted metal and falling debris, when the casing crumpled completely and the rocks and clay poured into the shaft. “The sound was godawful,” Dan would tell me years later. “But it sounded a lot better when I was above it.”

  It had taken thirty-five seconds to raise Dan from 145 feet to 95 feet, where the casing was collapsing. Dave had handled the situation about as well as humanly possible that day, but even in that moment seemed overshadowed by his father’s big personality. When Dan got to the surface, he told his son: “For God’s sake, don’t tell your mother, David.”

  Dan, being Dan, went back into 10X the next day. Dave had lowered his father only 73 feet into the shaft before Dan found himself standing on solid ground; that much material had fallen into the borehole. Dan would drill 22 feet down through the rubble, until his bit caught on the twisted, shredded steel where the casing had collapsed. After studying the damage, Dan concluded that a man-made flood tunnel was passing very
close to 10X at a depth of about 90 feet and the continuous pumping had created a fault between the shaft and the tunnel that caused tons of soil and rock to push against the metal casing, gradually crushing it.

  Describing this in 2003, Dan admitted that he moved away from 10X for a couple of years after his near-death experience, but he said he was still determined to get back into the borehole. And by 1978 he was taking 10X on again. The plan this time was to create a much more solid casing by using railroad tank cars. After cutting off the ends of the cars with an acetylene torch, Dan was left with a collection of three solid steel cylinders, each 34 feet long and 8 feet in diameter, with half-inch walls twice the thickness of the original casing. Getting them into 10X was a monumental job. The interior of the borehole had to be broken up with a jackhammer. Men working with picks and shovels loaded the broken rocks and boulders to the bucket that brought the debris to the surface, where a dump truck removed it. The noise, the dust, and the darkness had to have made working in 10X absolutely hellish, and Dan Blankenship at that point was more than sixty years old. Dave Blankenship had left Oak Island by then, married, and gotten a job as a construction steelworker on the mainland. Dan did have help, though, in the person of his future minority partner: Dan Henskee.

  Henskee had grown up on a farm near the town of Alden in upstate New York. Like Blankenship, he had first learned of Oak Island from the 1965 article reprinted in Reader’s Digest. He was still a teenager at the time, and during college he spent his summers on Oak Island working with and for Blankenship. Even when he finished school, Henskee came back to the island, summer after summer. Despite his lanky frame and perpetually underfed appearance, “Dan was a hard worker,” Blankenship said, and a “real asset when it came to repairing equipment.” Henskee’s mechanical skills were so remarkable that he would modify some machines to the point that they could practically be called new inventions. It would not be until 1982, after Henskee’s mother died and the family farm was sold to pay the debts racked up during her illness, that he began to live in Nova Scotia year-round. Blankenship helped him negotiate a deal whereby he would get 4 percent of any treasure recovered, then installed Henskee in a shack that doubled as an equipment shed, where he lived with his cat, Hoser. He was by any standard a quirky character and a sometimes eccentric thinker, but his quiet intelligence combined with his considerable kindness and generosity won Henskee the appreciation of just about everyone who got to know him. As Rick Lagina would remark to me during the summer of 2016, “This world would be a better place if everyone was like Dan Henskee.”

  Henskee was still just a Triton employee in 1978 and worth a lot more than he was being paid. It was Henskee who did the majority of the work deep in 10X that summer, including most of the jackhammering. I remarked that the noise, the dust, and the darkness had to have been nightmarish. But Henskee’s reply made the experience sound almost cheerful. “I felt like I was part of really making something happen,” he would tell me in 2003. “And to be honest, I didn’t believe that I had anything better to do.” He had made numerous observations while underground that convinced him the legend of Oak Island was rooted in actual events, Henskee said. He was especially impressed by how hard the ground was down there; they had been forced to use a pneumatic pavement breaker to excavate, and the bedrock was so solid that it didn’t cave in even in places where no shoring was used. “There was no way a water channel would form down there naturally,” Henskee said. “It had to be man-made.”

  After 10X was cleared, the tank car cylinders were tipped into it, then driven one on top of the other until an impermeable 90-foot shaft had been created.

  It took two full summers (but only $35,000 in cash) to finish 10X to a depth of 126 feet, and he was convinced he could finish the job by the end of the summer of 1981, Blankenship said. “But then out of nowhere Triton pulled the plug on me.”

  It was Mel Chappell who had convinced Tobias they should return to the Money Pit. Chappell had sold all of his Oak Island property to Tobias in 1977 for $125,000 but remained a Triton director. And with 18 percent of the stock, Chappell was still the Alliance’s third-largest shareholder behind the Tobias family (31 percent) and Dan Blankenship (19 percent). M. R. was ninety years old by then but still sharp, everyone agreed, still able to recall the details of previous expeditions to Oak Island clearly and in detail. Dan had even less success convincing M. R. of the importance of 10X than he’d had with David Tobias. During his appearance in a 1978 documentary for Canadian television, Chappell had stood next to the Money Pit smacking the ground with his cane as he declared, “This is where father brought up the wood and parchment, and this is where the treasure is.” When David sided with Chappell against him and announced that Triton intended to focus its entire operation on the Money Pit, Dan said, “It was never the same between us.” Even after Mel Chappell died in December 1980 at age ninety-three, Tobias continued to insist that Triton’s main objective was to make the Money Pit into a much deeper and wider shaft. They would need $2 million to do that right, and Tobias was committed to raising the money, according to the newspapers in Nova Scotia.

  It was a bitter time for Dan Blankenship. During the previous several years he’d been making do with a Triton operation so scaled down it barely existed. Triton’s budget for Oak Island was just $30,000 per year at that point, which included Blankenship’s annual subsistence salary of $12,000. Even with such limited resources, Dan had continued to explore Oak Island. In early 1979, in fact, he had made one of the most significant discoveries in the history of the treasure hunt.

  That winter was severe, so cold in early February that the sheltered waters of Mahone Bay had frozen all the way from Chester to Lunenburg. “Using our derrick for an observation vantage point, it appeared that the ice extended all the way to [Big] Tancook Island,” Blankenship had written in the “activity report” in which he described his discovery. Even without Triton’s support, Dan continued to try to get deeper into 10X, which meant running the big pump there each day for about ten hours. He had been on the derrick when he “noticed an area to the south that wasn’t frozen,” Blankenship wrote; it was hard to really make out any distinct shape at first: “The colder it got, though,” Dan added, “the more the ice froze, the more distinct the shapes became.” The “shapes” were four large holes in the ice, about 200 feet from the shoreline, evenly spaced about 150 feet apart. The only conceivable explanation for the holes was that warmer water from underground was being pushed up from the seabed by the pump running in 10X.

  This was confirmed, Dan wrote in his activity report, when the pump broke down. From the derrick, “We noticed a thin film of ice forming after the second day we were shut down.” By the time the pump was repaired, four days after it had stopped running, “the ice covering those spots was about one to one-and-a-half inches thick.” From the derrick, sight lines to the four holes were spotted and steel pipes driven into the frozen ground so that he would be able to inspect those locations when the cold weather broke, Blankenship explained in his report to Triton. By the beginning of March, the ice had melted, and he rowed out to the four locations in a “view boat” he had made himself. Dan continued: “The whole area was riled up and you couldn’t see the bottom. However you could see air bubbles rising in the water on our sight lines.”

  He had interviewed several people from the Nova Scotia Department of Fisheries who “do a lot of flying and asked them if they have ever seen any holes like this in the bay, and they said ‘NO.’” He was therefore confident, Blankenship wrote, that these anomalies had been caused by the action of the pump in 10X, which meant he had discovered the locations of the starting points of the south shore flood system.

  In his report to Triton, Blankenship included a suggestion for how to stop the flow of water from the south shore to the Money Pit area. Since the four holes he had discovered were so deep underwater they couldn’t be plugged by simply dumping dirt on them as he had done at Smith’s Cove, he was proposing to bring
in “concrete pumpers” that would use a 3-inch hose to fill each of the holes “maybe to as much as twenty stories high.”

  David Tobias was willing to go as far as bringing in a team of geologists, who concluded there had to be a connection between the Money Pit and the ice holes and that this was almost certainly not a natural connection. But the cost of bringing in the concrete pumpers, as Dan suggested, would be prohibitive without a major financing plan in place. Tobias and Blankenship went back and forth about it. Dan was so dogged that David made plans for a summer dive in the areas where the ice holes had supposedly been spotted. In water that varied in depth from 14 to 22 feet, Tobias probed the bottom in each of the four locations, but reported seeing only kelp-covered rocks and the shapeshifting bottom of the seabed. Without stating it explicitly, Tobias seemed to be saying that he doubted Blankenship’s report about discovering the ice holes. He already said he’d doubted Dan’s claims about what he had seen when the camera was sent down 10X. The two old friends soon weren’t anymore. It was becoming the sort of situation in which the only sure way to prevent a complete fracturing of the relationship was to find a common enemy. And for that they had Fred Nolan.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  From Triton’s point of view, the problem posed by Fred Nolan had never gone away. Animosities were revived in 1974, when the province built a wider bypass road to the causeway at the request of the Department of Tourism, which had been operating tours on Oak Island for the past decade. Nolan insisted that part of the new road was on his property and responded by again lengthening his museum in order to block it. Rather than push back, the Department of Tourism chose to walk away, announcing that it was getting out of the Oak Island business. By 1976, Blankenship and Tobias had formed their own company, Oak Island Tours Inc., equally shared by each of them, to replace the government operation. For the next twenty years, tours of Oak Island would be run by this new private corporation. Most of the work, though, was done by Jane Blankenship, who managed the Oak Island Museum near the home she and Dan had built on the island’s west end and hired the locals who worked as guides when summer tourists began to arrive. It was fun for a while, Jane said. You never knew who might show up on Oak Island, a point that was driven home one summer afternoon in 1979 when the island’s tourists had included former Canadian prime minister Pierre Trudeau and his three sons (one of whom, Justin, would become Canada’s PM himself a little more than thirty-five years later). It became exhausting after a time, however, and there was never any really significant amount of money to be made from tourism. For Dan and Jane, and to a lesser degree David Tobias, this increasingly burdensome situation was one more that had been created by Fred Nolan’s obstinacy.