The Curse of Oak Island

by Randall Sullivan

  Even Dan Blankenship, who initially scoffed at news of Nolan’s Cross, came around fairly quickly to accept that his mortal enemy had made a major discovery. By 2003, when I first interviewed him, Blankenship’s own elaborate survey grid of Oak Island featured the cross in red highlights. “My problems with Fred are well known,” Dan told me as he explained his grid that afternoon. “But I sincerely admire the excellent work, extraordinary work, he’s done.”

  Nolan chose the moment when the evidence of the cross was revealed in Crooker’s book to make a public display of some other items he had discovered during the past three decades of exploring Oak Island. Perhaps the most intriguing was a lock with a cross-shaped keyhole that, when turned, opened to reveal a second, smaller keyhole inside. Fred refused to say where on the island he had found it. When I asked him, he simply smiled with sealed lips and gave a slight shake of his head. Nolan had also produced a pair of hand-forged scissors similar to the ones Blankenship found at Smith’s Cove, though again he wouldn’t say where exactly they had come from. Fred was willing, though, to tell me and the world where he made what might have been his most remarkable find. This was an old railway trolley with wheels still attached that had run on a track. He had found it buried beneath the mud when he drained the swamp and hauled it out with a timberjack.

  All of a sudden Fred Nolan, the troublemaking outsider, seemed to have become the central figure in the Oak Island treasure hunt. That was acceptable to neither Blankenship nor Tobias, but by then the two partners were so estranged that they either would not or could not work together, even against their common enemy. In 1993 and 1994, what Blankenship described as a “pitifully underfunded” Triton program aimed at tracing the island’s underground tunnels through magnetometer detection had produced no useful results. In 1995, Tobias attempted to raise more money by bringing in two new partners, wealthy Bostonians David Mugar and Daniel Glazer, who proposed to spend at least $200,000 on an “aggressive exploration” of the Money Pit area. Blankenship, though, was incensed when he learned that what the Boston partners would be getting in return was “exclusive worldwide [media] rights to the entire Oak Island saga.” Dan accused David of plotting to “sell away our media rights, which are worth millions, and dilute our shareholdings as well.”

  Blankenship also refused to support Triton’s decision to spend $80,000 on a series of scientific tests to be conducted on Oak Island by a team of scientists from Massachusetts’s Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. In July 1995, twenty of the institution’s scientists were preparing to create complete tomography (X-ray and ultrasound exploration) and bathymetry (sea-depth measurement) maps of the island, along with a chart of the island’s groundwater. Woods Hole would also run seismic, side-scan sonar, and piezometer tests in 10X, at Smith’s Cove, and across the entire Money Pit area, and to perform new carbon-dating of the coconut fiber and wood fragment samples collected by Triton over the years. Tobias, thrilled by the prospect of what might be learned from an exploration of Oak Island conducted by what he considered to be the leading marine sciences organization on the planet, was startled by the fax he received from Blankenship just as the Woods Hole team was arriving in Nova Scotia: “I wish to inform you that I will not be participating in this venture nor cooperating with it.”

  Tobias and the rest of the Triton board chose to deal with Blankenship’s objections by ignoring them—and him. Dan couldn’t help gloating a little in 2003 when he showed me the 150-Page report Triton had gotten for its $80,000 investment in Woods Hole. What the report said, in a nutshell, was that the evidence that supported the existence of man-made tunnels and chambers on Oak Island was “inconclusive.” The report also stated that it still considered Oak Island to be a valid unsolved mystery, then proposed a “preliminary” two-year plan that would involve drilling and analyzing core samples from new test holes, performing camera and sonar investigations, combined with the reexcavation of Smith’s Cove, new dye and radiocarbon tests, plus morphological and geographical studies. A rough estimate of the anticipated cost was between $700,000 and $1 million. “So, in other words, what Woods Hole told us was, ‘Hey, give us another million bucks and we might be able to tell you something,’” Blankenship said.

  Tobias and Blankenship would briefly reconcile in early 1996. Again the catalyst was old friends rallying against a common foe. In this case the enemy was David Mugar, who had been trying, Tobias now agreed, to snag the Oak Island media rights for a song. By the spring of 1996, Triton and Mugar had ended their relationship. Perhaps this was why Dan had been amenable when David proposed bringing in Canada’s counterpart to Woods Hole, the Bedford Institute, based in Dartmouth, Nova Scotia, to conduct a “multibeam bathymetry study” of the waters surrounding Oak Island.

  During the summer of 1996, Bedford scientists aboard the research vessel Puffin circumnavigated the island while bouncing sonar signals off the bottom of Mahone Bay that produced color-coded images of the seabed, including any notable features. Bedford reported that while most of the features this study had found were of natural origin, a significant number were believed to be “anthropogenic,” as the report put it. In other words, they were man-made. The Bedford scientists had been particularly struck by what they described as “two parallel linear slight depressions” found off the island’s southeast shore, speculating that these might be “large linear scours in the mud attributed to unknown anthropogenic processes.”

  On the basis of that, the Bedford Institute was invited back to Oak Island in October 1997. Scientists Gordon Fader and Bob Courtney, now aboard the research vessel Plover, scanned the south shore in waters that were between 15 and 30 feet deep. A video of the complete mission was shot, but most of the attention would focus later on a single twenty-second snippet of conversation, when Fader and Courtney had relocated the “linear scours.”

  FADER: Gee, that feature sure is unusual…. Doesn’t look natural. Too linear … I’ve never seen anything quite like that.

  COURTNEY: Almost looks like it has been dredged.

  FADER: If I look at the image, there are some features on there that look unusual: the circular depression, the circular mounds, the long linear feature extending to the east off the island…. It looks like it may be man-made … as if maybe someone constructed a rock wall or dug an excavation of some sort.

  Blankenship was thrilled by Bedford’s conclusions, because they fitted nicely with what he had inferred from the appearance of the ice holes during the winters of 1979 and 1987. On November 3, 1997, Blankenship wrote to Tobias to remind David that for some time he had “strongly suspected” that the main flooding of the Money Pit was coming from the island’s south shore, adding that he was convinced the Bedford scientists had found clear evidence of this. Tobias was intrigued enough to approach the governments of both Canada and the province of Nova Scotia to fund a more elaborate search of the waters off Oak Island, using the best side-scan radar and seismic reflection instruments available. The cost would be $1,000 a day. Both the national and provincial governments said no, again because a treasure hunt was not a public project.

  So Triton would close the twentieth century on a sour note of continuing failure to secure the funding it had been after for most of the previous twenty years. Tobias, who had by this time sunk almost $750,000 of his own money into the Oak Island treasure hunt, decided to scale back. Triton’s corporate offices were relocated to a corner in the basement of David’s Montreal mansion. Yet Tobias, now in his late seventies, continued to insist he was an Oak Island believer. If they ever got to the bottom of the Money Pit and found nothing, Tobias told D’Arcy O’Connor, “it would mean that what I have seen or thought I saw with my own eyes doesn’t exist. I would be like something out of The Twilight Zone, and I would have wasted all of these years.” This he refused to accept. Tobias added: “We’ll find it.”

  But time was running out.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  During my interviews with Dan Blankenship and Fred Nolan in 20
03, I had to make an effort not to show my disappointment with their answers when I was able to steer either man toward the questions that arose from the Oak Island mystery. The revelation of Nolan’s Cross had only increased my inclination to believe that the original works on Oak Island weren’t created for the purpose of concealing a treasure of gold and silver. The scope of those works—from the excavation of the Money Pit, to the building and demolition of an enormous cofferdam and wharf, to the arduously, elaborately constructed artificial beach and the drainage system at Smith’s Cove, to the flood traps that poured water into the Money Pit from a source that was hundreds of feet away—was far beyond what anyone would have found necessary or been willing to do to hide a cache of monetary treasure, no matter how enormous, in my opinion.

  There had to be a greater reason than concealing wealth for what had been done on Oak Island, and the discovery of the cross strongly suggested what I already suspected, which was that the Money Pit and all the rest had been created by people whose motivations were spiritual or religious. Though neither Dan nor Fred said as much to me, I got the distinct feeling from each of them that they thought I believed what I did because it made the mystery of Oak Island deeper and richer; that it was, in short, a better story.

  Nolan said he believed the cross was “one aspect” of a geometric code constructed by military engineers to pinpoint the location of an enormous cache of gold and silver that had been created after the sacking of Havana, Cuba, by the British military in 1762. “Look at the evidence,” Fred advised me. “You’ll see that it adds up.” I did as he suggested, and was forced to admit that the evidence was indeed quite compelling.

  The expedition to capture Havana had launched from England in March 1762 under the command of Lieutenant-General George Keppel, 3rd Earl of Albemarle. Sir George Pocock commanded the British naval forces, with George Keppel’s brother Augustus serving as his second in command. The English fleet reached the Caribbean around April 22 and spent two weeks gathering six hundred black slaves from the islands of the Lesser Antilles, then arrived in Havana Harbor on June 6 with an enormous force of two hundred ships and more than eleven thousand troops. Among their many advantages was that the British had taken the Spanish by surprise. Havana’s fortifications, however, were so stout that the Spanish were able to keep the English outside the city’s walls until early August, when an additional three thousand British soldiers arrived from New York. Just days later, on August 12, 1762, the Spanish surrendered Havana. The amount of wealth the British plundered during the next six months can only be guessed at, but it was certainly enormous. In today’s value, tens of billions of dollars of gold and silver had been either mined by or seized from the native peoples of South and Central America during the previous 250 years of Spanish rule, and nearly all of it had passed through Havana. The Catholic Church’s share of the take was considerable and there is evidence that the church had chosen to keep most of that gold and silver in Havana rather than putting it at risk in sea voyages.

  The main evidence of how the Spanish treasure was divided among the British conquerors is contained in a letter sent by the Admiralty on behalf of King George III to Sir Pocock on February 18, 1762, about two weeks before the fleet set sail for Havana. The letter directed Lord Albemarle and Sir Pocock to distribute any booty recovered during their expedition among the land and sea forces under their command in such “manner and proportion” as they saw fit. Albemarle and Pocock, naturally, intended to take care of themselves first and foremost. Their agreement stipulated that a full one-third of whatever was seized from Cuba would be divided equally between the two of them. Then one-fifteenth of the total would be split between their two seconds in command, with the remainder to be divided among the officers and men in descending order of rank.

  Fred Nolan’s theory of what actually happened was laid out in his collaborator William Crooker’s Oak Island Gold. How much of this was Nolan and how much was Crooker I was never able to fully distinguish, but the essence of the theory is that Albemarle and Pocock decided to first conceal and then divert a shipload or two of the Havana treasure to a hiding place that became Oak Island. The primary evidence in support of such a theory is the apparent discrepancy between what the British seized in Havana and what was reported to the Crown. According to Albemarle and Pocock, the forces under their command had seized a total of 737,000 British pounds in treasure from the Spanish. Crooker (although Fred Nolan seemed to suggest it was really him speaking through Crooker) would point to a search of Spanish archives in 1977 that placed the value of the plunder seized in Havana at more than 10 million British pounds. Nolan and Crooker each pointed also to a biography of Augustus Keppel that placed the value of the treasure seized in Cuba at more than 3 million pounds. The two further noted records showing that after Havana fell, a number of Spanish galleons sailed unawares into the harbor and were taken by the British, who then seized large cargos of silver and gold that were never accounted for by Albemarle and Pocock.

  Albemarle was “accused of being a greedy man” by more than one of his fellow British officers, Crooker would note, but he and Nolan suggested the conspiracy might have gone all the way to the top—King George himself. The evidence they pointed to was the very fact that Albemarle had been put in charge of the Havana expedition. Albemarle “had never held an important command and his military career had been without distinction,” Crooker wrote. “Furthermore he was not imaginative or particularly quick-witted.” Albemarle’s main social and political advantage seems to have been the patronage of the Duke of Cumberland, King George’s uncle, who was implicated in the plot, according to Nolan and Crooker.

  The most solid piece of evidence for the theory as presented by Nolan and Crooker might be the letter written by Lord Pocock to John Cleveland, first secretary to the Board of Admiralty, on October 19, 1762, a little more than two months after Havana was surrendered by the Spanish. After describing how and to where he would dispatch the ships under his command by the first of November, Pocock threw in a mention of the fact that he had already sent three ships to Halifax, Nova Scotia, in response to the French invasion of Newfoundland. Nolan and Crooker would maintain that at least one of those three ships made its way to Mahone Bay, where a military engineer and his crew, along with a contingent of British soldiers, constructed a subterranean complex of chambers and vaults in which the largest part of the Havana treasure was concealed.

  Nolan and Crooker supported their theory with evidence that suggested the clearing where the Money Pit was found “would unlikely have been more than 50 years old and probably had been there in the vicinity of 30 years when it was discovered,” as Crooker put it. The main basis of this claim are the descriptions in the early accounts of younger oak trees growing among the stumps of larger trees that had been cut down. Crooker relied heavily on a senior forester for the Canadian government who said he had seen farm fields turn into forests within thirty years. He also cited an estimate from the Nova Scotia Department of Natural Resources that a Nova Scotia red oak with a diameter of between 6 and 8 inches (the description of the younger trees in the Money Pit clearing) would probably be between forty and fifty years old. I didn’t point out to Fred Nolan that a number of sources said those trees weren’t red oaks. I wasn’t sure it mattered, anyway.

  And I was impressed by what Crooker had found in a 1948 history of Nova Scotia’s capital city titled Halifax, Warden of the North, written by Thomas H. Raddall. In late 1762, Raddall had written, members of the British fleet and army that had captured Havana earlier that year arrived in Halifax with “enormous loot” and partied lavishly on the mainland while their ships were moored in the harbor for the winter. “There followed a saturnalia as this rabble of gaunt, sunburned adventurers … flung their pistareens, pieces of eight, and doubloons over the tavern bars and into the laps of prostitutes.” The level of dissipation “was something beyond belief,” according to Raddall. “The prize money they distributed among so many soldiers and sailors was w
orth 400,000 pounds sterling, which they almost threw away. The birds of prey drawn here from all quarters by the hope of plunder made Halifax more like a pirates’ rendezvous than a modest British settlement.”

  If the common soldiers and sailors had 400,000 pounds to spend in Halifax, Nolan and Crooker contended, how much more must Albemarle and Pocock have taken?

  They asked a good question and offered a substantial theory, except for one glaring problem. In 1762, the township that would become Chester (it was still called Shoreham then) had already existed for three years. While the population was small, there were enough people on the shore of Mahone Bay to make it highly unlikely that work on the scale of Oak Island’s could have been done without anyone noticing. Crooker (speaking for Nolan) acknowledged this more as a possibility than as a near certainty: “Although the subject island is hidden from Shoreham by other islands, someone might see the project from an elevated position and come to investigate or a fisherman might suddenly appear.” Absurdly understated, in my opinion: there were already dozens of people fishing in Mahone Bay by 1762 and there is no way they would not have noticed the work that, for example, created the drainage system at Smith’s Cove.

  Except this explained the early stories of “strange lights” out on Oak Island. So, once again, I found myself conceding a sliver of potential to a theory that I considered to be fundamentally flawed. I was coming to accept that the best I could ever do was arrange the various propositions in a descending order of plausibility. On that scale, I found Blankenship’s theory a bit more believable than Nolan’s.