The Curse of Oak Island

by Randall Sullivan

  At the same time, Blankenship was becoming increasingly curious about what Nolan was up to. Fred was still conducting his never-ending survey of Oak Island, which produced an increasingly detailed and elaborate grid system, covered by the crisscrossing lines he had drawn between markers. What looked to others like an absurdly complex maze was filled with meaning, Nolan said—even if he himself still didn’t fully grasp what it was. He told a local reporter he was on to “something big” but refused to reveal what that might be. In 1982, Nolan confided to a handful of people that he had verified his great discovery, but he wasn’t yet ready to reveal it. He was still studying his grid, searching for new levels of meaning. That work was continuing in March 1983 when he had been “blindsided,” as Fred put it to me twenty years later, by the lawsuit filed against him on behalf of Triton Alliance.

  Tobias said he had no choice because Nova Scotia’s twenty-year statute of limitations on civil action was about to expire, meaning that any attempt to recover the seven lots on Oak Island that Nolan had acquired by “sneaky and surreptitious means” would have to be made now or never made at all. Also, Triton needed a resolution of the situation with Nolan if it was going to attract the financial backing required to mount a major operation in the Money Pit area, Tobias added.

  “David’s position was: ‘Let’s get this taken care of, once and for all,’” Dan would tell me in 2003.

  The resulting litigation would consume more than two years of their lives and tens of thousands of dollars. The court battle would prove nearly ruinous for Nolan, but Fred never retreated, not even in the face of upward of a thousand documents that Triton’s attorneys submitted to the court and the countless hours of discovery his own lawyers subsequently billed him for. By December 1985, when the case finally went to trial, Nolan estimated that the more than $50,000 he’d paid so far in legal costs was small potatoes compared to the couple of hundred thousand dollars in losses from his survey business. He was especially injured by how successfully Triton had portrayed him in the press as a kook. Fred confided that the companies that hired him to testify for them in court were leery of putting a man publicly identified as a “treasure hunter” on the witness stand and that part of his business had evaporated almost completely. He made up his mind that he was going to fight these guys to the bitter end.

  Dan Blankenship would later describe December 17, 1985, as “the worst day of my life,” because that was the day supreme court judge A. M. MacIntosh upheld Fred Nolan’s claims to the seven disputed lots and dismissed entirely the claim of damage to their property caused by Nolan’s “trespassing.” The judge did require Nolan to pay Triton $15,000 for interfering in its tourism business and ordered him to move his museum off the causeway path, but the court’s ruling was on the whole a big victory for the surveyor. However, it didn’t last long. Within weeks, Tobias instructed his lawyers to file an appeal, despite being warned by his son, Norman, a Toronto attorney, that Triton’s chances of victory were slim and that the additional legal fees would be at least $20,000.

  Part of what motivated Tobias to continue the fight was his wish to control every inch of Oak Island. In 1977, David had acquired all of Mel Chappell’s holdings on Oak Island for $125,000. Nearly all of that land—lots 1–4, 6–8, 15–22, 24, and 26–32, 78 percent of Oak Island—was assigned to Oak Island Tours Inc. Except for the lot where the Blankenships had built their house, all of the other land on the island that did not belong to Tobias was the property of Fred Nolan. Tobias hoped his appeal of Judge MacIntosh’s ruling would serve as leverage to persuade Nolan to sell his seven lots for $125,000, the same price David had paid to Mel Chappell just a few years earlier for nearly four times as much land. Nolan not only refused to sell—”for any price,” he said—but he also filed his own cross complaint against Triton with the appeals court and continued to pay the legal fees that were threatening to bankrupt him.

  The ruling on the Triton appeal and the Nolan cross complaint was issued on April 15, 1987. Fred had won again, and this time the $15,000 he had been ordered to pay Triton for interfering with tourism was reduced to $500. By then, he had spent $75,000 on lawyers and the loss from his survey business exceeded a quarter million dollars, Nolan said. I could still hear the bitterness in his voice in 2003: “I was forced to spend another eighty thousand dollars to construct a dock on my property because the only access I have to the island is by boat. On top of that, I have to barge all my equipment out to the island, which is very expensive.”

  It took me by surprise that Nolan’s rancor was much more intensely directed at Blankenship than at Tobias, given that David was the one who had launched and driven the legal action against him. In the end, Tobias had taken the position that it was just business, nothing personal, Nolan said, congratulating him on his victory after the appeals court ruling in 1987, even handing over one of his expensive Cuban cigars. “Dan, though, wanted to destroy me. And he was willing to do anything, no matter how dirty, to do it.”

  Blankenship said pretty much the same thing about Nolan, telling me: “Fred did some terrible things to win the court case.” Dan didn’t say what those terrible things were, and Fred wasn’t specific about Blankenship’s supposed dirty tricks, but the depth to which the two despised one another was striking. Other people told me that Dan’s grudge against Fred might have softened a bit over the years, perhaps because David Tobias had become a bigger enemy in his mind than Nolan was.

  Tobias had sold Jongerin Inc. in 1985, saying at the time that he intended to devote more time to managing his family’s investment company, Ilex Capital Corp., to piloting his Beechcraft airplane, and to the Oak Island project. Tobias was taken aback, however, by the results of a 1986 “feasibility study” of Triton’s plans for the Money Pit, which estimated that it would cost as much as $8 million to seal off the inflow of seawater to the Money Pit area and explore it below bedrock. By then Triton’s partners had poured $1.25 million into the Oak Island project and had made it clear they weren’t going any deeper into their own pockets without the level of fund-raising that could probably only be accomplished by a public stock offering. The Triton partners voted almost unanimously to put 10X aside and to offer shares in a plan to conquer the Money Pit once and for all.

  The one dissenting vote was Dan Blankenship’s. In March 1986, Dan sent a letter to all of Triton’s shareholders urging them to make “one final effort” to complete 10X, arguing that the borehole might be a “backdoor” to the treasure that would be far less expensive than the complete excavation of the Money Pit and avoid a stock offering in which “all of our shares will be greatly diluted proportionately.”

  In the short term, that letter paid off. Part of the reason was that January 1987 had brought another spell of bitterly cold weather to Nova Scotia’s south shore, and again Mahone Bay had frozen over. Blankenship decided to once more run the big pump in 10X for as long as twelve hours a day during this cold spell, and again the four holes appeared in the ice in exactly the same places as they did in 1979. This time Tobias conceded that the intake/outlet openings of the south shore flood system might be down there, hidden beneath the debris that covered the seabed. By the following spring, Triton had given Blankenship $70,000 (half of which was from Tobias personally) to continue with the completion of 10X, which had been left at a depth of 126 feet for the past six years.

  For the next eighteen months, the two Dans, Blankenship and Henskee (with only occasional help from laborers, brought to the island from the mainland) had replaced the tank cars in 10X with a ten-inch-thick casing of reinforced concrete. The work had been both difficult and dangerous. Several times Dan Blankenship had nearly suffocated at the bottom of the borehole when the compressor on the surface that supplied his fresh air cut out. Inside the shaft, the electrical generator, combined with the air compressor, the drum-winch hoist, and the turbine pump it powered, produced a sound that was deafening even to people who stood above looking down. It must have been positively bone rattling insid
e, where string bean Dan Henskee was using a jackhammer to break up the boulders that got in the way. After a pair of supposedly man-made cavities that had been detected at depths of 140 and 160 feet were revealed to be only pockets of loose sand blown away by the original churn drilling back in 1970, though, Tobias had had enough. No more “frigging around,” David told D’Arcy O’Connor. They were going back to the Money Pit.

  Triton’s “big dig” was being planned on a scale that overwhelmed all previous operations on Oak Island. The Ottawa engineer Triton had hired as its primary consultant on the project, Bill Cox, liked to tell people that in the previous two hundred years of treasure hunting on Oak Island, there had been a total removal of 300,000 cubic feet of earth; the big dig was going to take away nearly a million cubic feet in six months. Still, to anyone who knew the history of the search operations on the island, the big dig sounded like more of the same, only on a much larger scale. The plan was to excavate a shaft 80 feet in diameter to a depth of 215 feet, then seal its perimeter with interlocking steel plates reinforced by concrete. A $300,000 cofferdam would be built at Smith’s Cove, a $700,000 dam at the south shore. Any remaining flood tunnels or water fissures found would be sealed with cement grouting. And now Bill Cox, who wrote the phone book–size document titled “Engineering and Operational Plans Including Cost Estimates” that was to be the central piece in Triton’s stock offering, was pegging the cost at about $10 million.

  The Triton prospectus was sent to twenty separate Canadian and US underwriters in the winter of 1988, with the stated purpose of beginning the big dig the following June. The response from the investment community was underwhelming. Tobias hadn’t taken into account how traumatized many major investors had been by the Black Monday crash in October 1987. Triton waited until 1990 to make the actual public offering, putting 1 million shares of Oak Island Exploration Company Ltd. on the NASDAQ market. They couldn’t sell a tenth of them.

  Blankenship had objected to the stock offering just as vehemently in 1990 as when it was first proposed four years earlier. Dan was so incensed when Tobias pushed forward anyway that he resigned from the Triton board of directors. He was derisive when Tobias and Triton approached the Canadian government one year later, applying for a $12 million loan guarantee in exchange for the promise to create fifty jobs and the biggest tourist attraction in Nova Scotia. After the Atlantic Canada Opportunities Agency rejected the loan guarantee request because it “falls outside our guidelines,” Tobias turned to the Department of Tourism. But Minister Greg Kerr told reporters: “The Triton Alliance is a treasure hunt and the Department of Tourism and Culture does not fund that kind of thing.”

  Blankenship continued to push for a return to 10X, where completing his exploration would cost a tiny percentage of what Triton was proposing to spend on its big dig. Tobias, though, had only hardened his position. Speaking to reporters, David mocked Dan for having “wasted time, credibility, and hundreds of thousands of dollars on a worthless hole that he found by dowsing, for God’s sake.” Blankenship answered that “10X is the only place where any real evidence has come up. But David doesn’t want to hear about it, because he’s got his nose stuck in the Money Pit. And where’s that got him? Absolutely nowhere.”

  Perhaps the worst part for both Blankenship and Tobias was that their longtime archrival Fred Nolan was about to steal the spotlight with the announcement of a discovery that was the biggest on Oak Island in decades.

  IT STARTED WITH FIVE LARGE GRANITE STONES that were spread in different directions in the vicinity of the house Nolan had built on Joudrey’s Cove. The one right at the water’s edge had caught Fred’s eye first. It was about 8 feet wide and 6 feet high, set into the ground on a flat bottom. Nolan was pretty sure the top of the stone had been carved into its cone shape. Because it was so different from any other rock on the shoreline along Joudrey’s Cove, Fred also had a sense that it might have been moved to the spot where he found it. That would have been a considerable task, given that he estimated the weight of the stone to be about ten tons.

  Nolan found a second cone-shaped stone that was almost identical about 400 feet southeast of the first one, then the third conical rock, a near perfect match for the first two, another 400 feet or so southwest of the second. Eventually he found two more of these cone-shaped boulders on a line directly southwest of the second stone.

  As he always did, Nolan marked the exact locations of the stones and added them to his grid of the island. He was fairly certain that these five stones were the only ones of their kind on Oak Island, which suggested they might be significant. It was only in the course of the many hours that he spent studying his grid, however, looking for connections or meaning in the places where various lines intersected with the stones or with the lines between the stones, that it occurred to Nolan to try looking at the five “cone stones” independently, without reference to any other marker. When he did this, Fred told me, he was “literally stunned” by the realization that the cone stones formed a geometrical shape and that this shape was a Christian cross, one with two 360-foot arms and a center post that stretched 867 feet from tip to tip.

  Nolan did a second survey of the cone stones and their relationships to one another, then a third. The result was the same each time: the cross formed by the cone stones was almost perfectly symmetrical. Fred told me in 2003 that for years on Oak Island he had been exploring places where his survey lines crossed. And after discovering the cone stones and the cross they formed, he decided to see what he might find at the point where the line of the two arms and the line of the post intersected. He did find another rock but this one was a craggy piece of limestone, not granite, and had no discernible cone shape.

  Nolan told me he had discovered the cross and confirmed its dimensions by the end of 1982. So why had he waited until 1992 to reveal its existence, I asked. As I found Fred inclined to do, he avoided giving me a direct answer. I had only inferred that he enjoyed keeping the secret to himself and felt sharing it with other people might diminish his pleasure in some way. The next day I learned that it was not until 1991 that Nolan had finally decided to take a closer look at the limestone rock he found at the intersection of the two lines that formed the cross. He used his backhoe to tip the rock, Nolan told me, and immediately recognized that it had been hand carved to resemble a human head.

  I have to admit that when I first saw the famous “headstone” of what was by then known as Nolan’s Cross, I found it very difficult to make out any human features. Only when I stood at exactly the right spot could I see the outlines of the headstone’s eyes, nose, and chin.

  And had they really been carved, I wondered. It was possible, but it also looked to me as if the stone might have been shaped by natural forces. Joe Coleman, one of the executive producers of The Curse of Oak Island during the summer of 2016, told me a couple of geologists had been brought over from the mainland to examine the headstone. “What they told us, basically, was that it might have been carved, or it might not have been carved.”

  Whether it was carved or not, the headstone seemed certainly to have been placed in the spot where Fred Nolan found it. When the producers of The Curse of Oak Island brought a pair of stonemasons out to the island in the summer of 2016, they also had refused to say whether the headstone was carved, because it was so weatherworn. When they looked at the cone stones that formed the bottom of Nolan’s Cross, however, both the stonemasons agreed that the smoothness of the undersides was not natural, but rather it was evidence the boulders had been dragged a good distance.

  In 1991, Fred prevailed on his friend and fellow Nova Scotia surveyor William Crooker to verify his measurements of the cross. Crooker had done so. He had also, with Nolan’s permission as I understood it (though Fred himself wouldn’t confirm it), announced the discovery of the cross to the world in a 1992 book titled Oak Island Gold.

  Why reveal the cross then? I asked Nolan in 2003. In a tone that was surprisingly frank, Fred answered that he was motivated by w
orry that “if something happened to me” (the clear implication was that he feared Dan Blankenship might make it “happen”) what he had discovered might be lost forever.

  For those who followed the Oak Island story, Nolan’s Cross was the biggest news in decades. The dimensions and measurements were clearly laid out, checked, and rechecked. The symmetry and exactitude were simply too remarkable to explain the cross away as a coincidence of nature. And if the cross had been made by men, this meant that the stones that formed it not only had been carved with hammers and chisels, but they also had been moved into their current positions by people who had to rely on the machinery of the sixteenth, seventeenth, or early eighteenth centuries. The amount of labor and planning it would have required to move and align five ten-ton stones was comparable to what it must have taken to construct the artificial beach and drainage system at Smith’s Cove. Once more, the sheer enormity of what had happened on Oak Island, combined with the mystery of it, captivated public imagination.