The Curse of Oak Island

by Randall Sullivan

  WHILE FRED NOLAN WAS INSISTING that it was the British who had done the work on Oak Island, Dan Blankenship was growing increasingly adamant that it was the Spanish. When I first sat with him in the early autumn of 2003, Blankenship was obsessed with a book that was published in 1556, De Re Metallica by Georgius Agricola. “My bible,” Dan called the book the first time he showed me his copy. A standard text in mining engineering courses into the late twentieth century, De Re Metallica had actually been a lost work for several centuries. The medieval Latin text was “discovered” around 1910 by future US president Herbert Hoover, who was working at the time as a freelance mining engineer. Hoover and his wife, Lou, translated the work to English and published it in book form in 1913, creating a considerable stir in academia and in the engineering world. For many people, Hoover among them, the most remarkable thing about De Re Metallica was how convincingly it proved the sophistication of mining techniques that existed long before the machine age. “You read this book and you understand there’s no question that the technology existed, well before the sixteenth century, to have created the underground works on Oak Island,” Dan Blankenship told me as we flipped through the illustrated volume. “What Agricola describes and what we’ve seen belowground here match up perfectly.” Reading De Re Metallica had helped convince him of a theory he was already inclined to embrace, Dan said. Sometime between the late 1500s and 1700, Oak Island had become the repository of a huge cache of gold purloined by Spanish ship captains who used Incan slaves to excavate their hiding place, then slaughtered those who had done the work.

  There is certainly no question that enormous wealth was taken from South and Central America in the 200 years after Christopher Columbus made his first voyage to the New World. Until about the middle of the sixteenth century, this wealth had consisted mainly of booty seized from the native peoples: gold and silver artifacts, plus pearls and emeralds. The gold and silver pieces were melted down and re-formed into bullion for shipment back to Spain. By the time De Re Metallica was published, though, the Spanish had realized that they could recover far greater wealth by seizing the natives’ gold and silver mines, then using the enslaved men of those tribes (Incan mainly) to perform the labor. By this means, the conquistadors collected tens of billions of dollars of ore that was smelted into coins and ingots before being shipped back to Spain aboard galleons that sailed in convoys from the Caribbean ports of Colombia, Panama, and Mexico. The Gulf Stream route carried the Spanish ships much farther north than one might imagine, to within three hundred miles or so of Nova Scotia.

  The scale of the Spanish operations in the New World was made stunningly clear in 1985 when the sunken six-hundred-ton galleon Nuestra Señora de Atocha was discovered off the Florida Keys by the treasure hunter Mel Fisher and his team. Laden with gold, silver, emeralds, and other valuables collected from Cartagena, Colombia, and Porto Bello, Panama, the convoy to which the Atocha belonged had been struck by a powerful hurricane about thirty-five miles off the coast of what is today Key West on the morning of September 6, 1622. The Atocha was stripped of its masts by the fierce winds, then lifted by a huge wave and slammed against a reef that ripped open its hull. It sank within minutes along with a cargo that included forty tons of silver and gold and seventy pounds of emeralds. The gold and silver alone would be worth nearly $500 million today. Bearing in mind that the Atocha was just one of twenty-eight ships in the Spanish convoy and that this was just one of the many convoys launched from Latin America to Spain during the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the scale of the transfer of wealth that took place during those years is staggering.

  The Spanish convoys of that period were frequently hit by storms that scattered them, Blankenship would point out. Some ships straggled home days or weeks behind the others, while some were never seen again and presumed to have been sunk. But what if one or two or three of those stragglers had been captained and crewed by men who saw an opportunity in a near disaster? What if those captains had decided to steer their ships north in search of a spot so isolated that a treasure of hundreds of millions or even billions of dollars could be safely hidden until an opportunity to return and retrieve it became available? Wouldn’t that serve as an explanation for what had been done on Oak Island? Look at the carbon-dating results Triton had received over the years, Dan told me. They consistently occurred on or around the year 1575 and generally encompassed a range between 1525 and 1625, the pinnacle of the Spanish conquest of Latin America. “The Spanish theory makes sense on so many levels,” Dan said. “No other theory is as comprehensive.”

  People, of course, had been suggesting it was the Spanish who engineered the works on Oak Island long before Blankenship made that argument to me in 2003. A professor of economics at the University of Michigan named Ross Wilhelm had in 1970 presented the theory that Spain used Oak Island as a depot for repairing storm-damaged ships during the reign of King Philip II (who reigned from 1556 to 1598). The works on Oak Island had been created, Wilhelm argued, as a place to store the bullion from those ships so that they could sail back to Spain unencumbered. Other, undamaged ships would pick up the gold and silver and carry it across the Atlantic. The Spanish surely had devised a system that permitted them access to the treasure vault at the bottom of the Money Pit without springing the flood trap, contended Wilhelm, who pointed to the inscribed stone that was found 90 feet deep in the Pit by the Onslow Company in 1803. The symbols carved into that stone were nearly identical to the ones used by Giovanni Battista, a sixteenth-century Italian cryptologist whose cipher disks had been constructed of two metal rings, the one on the inside displaying various symbols and the one on the outside bearing letters of the alphabet.

  Wilhelm had used one of Battista’s disks to translate the symbols carved into the Money Pit’s inscribed stone, then translated them into English to reveal the following message: “At eighty guide maize or millet [into] estuary or drain. F.” What it meant, Wilhelm said, was that the Money Pit’s flood trap could be stopped up by pouring maize or millet into the drainage system, then waiting for it to expand and plug the flow of water. Once that was accomplished, the wooden platform on which the stone had been found—a cleverly designed air lock, Wilhelm said—could be removed, the shaft bailed out, and the treasure vault entered. The grain would gradually rot after the Pit was resealed, and the flood trap would once again be set. The “eighty” in the inscribed stone’s message, according to Wilhelm, was the depth at which the air lock had been built, and the F stood for Felipe, as Philip II would have been known to his own people.

  Wilhelm’s theory sounded quite compelling when I first heard about it in 2003. I quickly realized there was considerable reason to doubt it, though, because neither the professor nor anyone else could say with certainty what had been carved into the inscribed stone. No photograph or rubbing of the stone or its inscription existed, which seems astonishing in retrospect, though not nearly so surprising as how the stone was treated by those who possessed it in the last decades of the nineteenth century and the first decades of the twentieth.

  According to most accounts, the stone that had been lifted out of the Money Pit in 1803 remained in the fireplace jamb of John Smith’s house on Oak Island until 1863 or 1864, when it was removed to Jothan McCully’s home in Truro and displayed there to hundreds of curious visitors. In 1865, the stone was conveyed to Halifax by A. O. Creighton, treasurer of the Oak Island Association, to be displayed in the window of A. and H. Creighton, the bookbinding business on Upper Water Street that A. O. owned with his younger brother Herbert, for the purpose of attracting investors to the treasure hunt. When A. O. retired in 1879, Herbert formed a new bookbinding firm with Edward Marshall that was called Creighton and Marshall. One of the few who left any record of what happened to the stone was Edward Marshall’s son Harry, who went to work at the bookbinding company in 1890. In a sworn statement made in 1935 to Frederick Blair and R. V. Harris, Harry Marshall said:

  I well remember seeing [the stone] as
a boy and until the business was merged in 1919 with the present firm of Phillips and Marshall.

  The stone was about two feet long, fifteen inches wide and ten inches thick, and weighed about 175 pounds. It had two smooth surfaces [italics mine], with rough sides and traces of cement attached to them. Tradition said that it had been part of two fireplaces. The corners were not squared but somewhat rounded. The block resembled dark Swedish granite, or fine-grained porphyry, very hard, and with an olive tinge, and did not resemble any local Nova Scotia stone. While in Creighton’s possession, someone had cut his initials “J. M.” on one corner, but apart from this there was no evidence of any inscription either cut or painted on the stone. It had completely faded out. We used the stone for a beating stone and weight.

  When the business was closed in 1919, Thomas Forhan, since deceased, asked for the stone, the history of which seems to have been generally known. When we left the premises in 1919 the stone was left behind, but Forhan does not seem to have taken it. Search at Forhan’s business premises and residence two years ago (1933) disclosed no stone.

  Thorough searches of the old premises in 1935 and of the stone yards of Brookfield Construction Company on Smith and Mitchell Streets, Halifax, have failed to discover the stone.

  The most remarkable thing about Harry Marshall’s statement is that the stone had no inscription when he first saw it during the last years of the nineteenth century: “It had completely faded out.” Colonel Henry Bowdoin would write in his notorious Collier’s article that he had seen the stone in 1909 and that there was no inscription on it then. Bowdoin, who implied that there never was any inscription, can be substantially discounted as a source but not entirely dismissed. Others who worked at the bookbinding company would say that the inscription on the slab had been worn away over the decades it was used as a “beating stone” to prepare leather hides as book covers. If this is true, given how hard the stone was said to be, the inscription must have been more scratched than carved into it. None of that information, though, or anything else that’s known about the stone, explains how a supposed copy of what has been widely accepted as the original inscription on it surfaced in the middle of the twentieth century.

  That inscription might actually have surfaced in the early twentieth century, when James Liechti, a professor of languages at what was then Dalhousie College in Halifax wrote that he had seen the inscribed stone and decoded the message, which read, according to the professor, “Ten feet below two million pounds lie buried.” That Liechti was being employed by a prospective treasure-hunting company to help sell stock makes his claims suspect. But the “two million pounds lies buried” version of the stone’s inscription became more or less official in 1951, when Edward Rowe Snow’s book True Tales of Buried Treasure was first published and included not only a drawing of the inscription on the famous Money Pit stone but also a translation of that inscription by “an old Irish schoolmaster” that was identical to the one produced by Liechti, only with “ten feet below” replaced by “forty feet below.”

  Snow claimed he had obtained his copy of the inscription and the translation from Reverend A. T. Kempton of Cambridge, Massachusetts. Not a lot is known about Kempton, though the amateur local scholars at Blockhouse Investigations, a group who had been researching Oak Island for years, were able to trace him back to his 1891 birth and upbringing in Nova Scotia’s Annapolis Valley, then through his education at Arcadia University in Wolfville to his appointment as the minister at a Baptist church in Massachusetts. In New England, Kempton was an enthusiastic amateur historian who gave lectures throughout the region on his two favorite topics, the Acadians and the Mi’kmaq tribe.

  From the papers of R. V. Harris, we know that in 1909 Kempton asked a clergyman working in Nova Scotia to find someone to help him write an Oak Island book. This information comes from one of the several letters Kempton wrote to Frederick Blair, with whom the reverend began a correspondence in 1949, the same year that Rowe claimed to have received the inscription on the Money Pit stone from Kempton. What Harris kept of that correspondence mainly concerns Reverend Kempton’s theory that the works on Oak Island had been created by the Acadians. In one letter, though, Kempton tells the story of how in 1909 he contacted a fellow clergyman based in Mahone Bay to ask “if he knew of someone who would write me a good account of Oak Isl.” The minister had referred him to “a school teacher,” Kempton went on, who eventually sent him a manuscript. “I paid him for it,” Kempton wrote to Blair, but he never turned this manuscript into a published book. “The teacher who wrote my MSS. did not give me any proofs of his statements,” Kempton explained to Blair, but had maintained that “characters” were cut into the so-called inscribed stone and that “a very bright Irish Teacher had worked out this statement as printed in Snow’s book.” A number of years later, Kempton traveled to Mahone Bay to find the teacher, but the man had died. On that trip, “I learned that the stone was in the Historical Society in Halifax. I went there several times but never found anyone who could tell me about the stone. So I let the matter drop until I showed it to Ed. Snow and he set it in his book.”

  In other words, we have only the word of a long-dead and unnamed teacher on which to base the assumption that the cipher reprinted hundreds of times since it was published in Snow’s book is actually what had been carved into (or scratched onto) the inscribed stone. At least half a dozen authorities have agreed that this inscription can be decoded by a very simple cipher substitution code to read: “Forty feet down, two million pounds are buried.” But that doesn’t mean such an inscription ever actually existed.

  This leaves the question of why anyone would have felt it necessary to place a message 90 feet deep in the Money Pit stating that another 40 feet down there were 2 million pounds. To keep them digging? The only theory of Oak Island with which this comports is the claim that the entire thing was an elaborate ruse. And that theory is preposterous.

  Professor Wilhelm, of course, came up with a translation of the message on the inscribed stone that was quite different and considerably more interesting than the one originally printed in True Tales of Buried Treasure. Wilhelm was only able to do this, however, by making a number of changes in the supposed inscription to make it read as he claimed. And on what basis the professor made those changes, we have no idea.

  Still, the theory that the Spanish buried a purloined Incan treasure on Oak Island holds up to inspection better than any other theory involving a treasure of gold and silver. D’Arcy O’Connor refuted those who have claimed that the island’s original works couldn’t date back to the sixteenth century (because the large oak tree with the cut-off limb that grew over the Money Pit in 1795 wouldn’t have lived that long) by consulting with botanists at Harvard who “informed me that Nova Scotia red oaks commonly live for 300 years.” The coconut fiber, the traces of mercury, the parchment fragment, and the handwrought iron scissors that have been found at various locations on Oak Island also point to the Spanish, O’Connor maintained: coconut fiber was commonly used as packing material in the holds of Spanish ships; Spaniards used mercury to separate silver from its ore; their documents and charts were often written on sheepskin parchment, and the scissors found at Smith’s Cove were, according to an archeologist associated with the Smithsonian Institution, of a design that matches the scissors used by the Spanish conquistadors in Mexico.

  What O’Connor doesn’t say, though, is that nearly all of the same items could be linked to the ships of Elizabethan England. Nor does he address the claims in early accounts of the Money Pit’s 1795 discovery that it was the stumps of larger, older trees standing among younger trees that tipped off Daniel McGinnis and his friends that something had happened in this spot; such a contrast would almost certainly not have been visible if those trees were cut down in the 1500s, more than two hundred years earlier. Nevertheless, when I spoke to Dan Blankenship in 2003 he seemed quite taken with O’Connor’s proposed scenario, which was this:

  Sometime around 1600 a
convoy sails from Cuba to Spain on the Gulf Stream route but is hit by a storm that separates one treasure-laden galleon from the rest. The captain of the damaged ship looks for a sheltered spot to make repairs and finds his way to Mahone Bay, where the vessel is run aground off the east end of Oak Island. The decision to bury the ship’s valuable cargo on the island is motivated by the knowledge that the patched-up galleon stands a better chance of making it back to Spain if it isn’t loaded down with gold and silver. So the crew of the ship (and possibly the slaves aboard it) dig the Money Pit, build the cofferdams just above the low tide line at Smith’s Cove and on the South Shore, then construct the drain and flood trap system and bury their treasure, planning to return for it aboard a rebuilt ship. Riding a bit higher in the water, the galleon sets sail for Spain, but en route it is hit by a storm and the makeshift clay-and-fiber caulking with which the holes in the hull have been repaired begins to fall apart. The ship sinks with its captain and crew to the bottom of the North Atlantic and is assumed by the Spanish to have been lost at sea still carrying its cargo of gold and silver.

  “Not impossible,” I conceded to Dan Blankenship when he laid the theory out for me, and I was relieved that he accepted this without pushing me to be more enthusiastic.

  DAVID TOBIAS HAD FOR A NUMBER OF YEARS favored the Robert Restall theory that Oak Island had been a “communal bank” created by a number of pirate captains and their crews. This proposition was based on the idea that each set of buccaneers had dug a tunnel leading away from the Money Pit where they placed a watertight vault to hold their booty, each one protected by the same system of flood traps. The theory was that only the pirate group that had done the digging would know the precise location of its tunnel and the vault at the end of that tunnel, so only that group would be able to return to the island and retrieve its loot by shoveling straight down through virgin ground to the spot they had previously measured and recorded. Most people who heard this theory rejected it out of hand, believing that separate pirate groups would never have worked cooperatively in such a way. In the late 1960s, Tobias had been swayed to the theory by what he heard about Albert Lochard, the Haitian engineer who claimed to have discovered just such a communal bank at Kavanach Hill in southern Haiti. Tobias actually convinced Dan Blankenship to make a trip to Haiti in 1970 to look into Lochard’s story, but Dan had been unable either to locate Kavanach Hill or to find anyone who knew about the supposed discovery of a pirate bank there. Blankenship eventually tracked Lochard to New York City, where he was living under an assumed name as a political refugee. Dan had been at least a little impressed when Lochard told his story without asking anything for it. He had found the remains of the communal bank in 1947 and spent the next three years exploring them, collecting about $50,000 in eighteenth-century coins in the process. He was not nearly finished with his excavation of the site in 1951, when he was forced to flee Haiti under “government pressure,” Lochard told Blankenship. The engineer eventually gave Tobias a diagram of the Haitian site that described a 40-foot-tall, 35-foot-wide underground chamber with a domed roof that was connected to five large tunnels and a number of smaller tunnels that would channel water into the vault when the clay plugs inside were removed. Just like the treasure hunters on Oak Island, he had been forced to constantly fight an inflow of water to gain entrance to the chamber. The main problem with Lochard’s story was that he could offer no witnesses to verify it. He had found the Kavanach Hill site on his own, the Haitian said, and had told no one about it.