Tobias eventually came around to a new belief that involved both the English and the Spanish. Tobias had indicated the direction in which his thoughts were turning as early as 1987, when Triton Alliance had issued its prospectus for the big dig project. Within that document, Tobias had observed that the carbon-dating of artifacts recovered from underground on Oak Island indicated that the creation of the original works on the island had taken place during the period of the second or third voyage of Francis Drake.
Drake was not only the greatest explorer in British history, but he was also, and by far, England’s most successful privateer. Beginning in 1572, Drake captained vessels that made a series of attacks on Spanish ships and forts all along the Atlantic coast of the Americas, in the process introducing piracy to the Western Hemisphere. He took some enormous prizes during this period, the largest coming when he joined the French buccaneer Guillaume Le Testu in an attack on a Spanish mule train making a huge transport of silver and gold. Le Testu was wounded in the battle and captured by the Spanish, who eventually beheaded him. Drake and his men, however, escaped with more than twenty tons of silver and gold. It was more than they could carry, so the English buried much of it, then dragged the rest through eighteen miles of mountainous jungle to the cove where they had left their raiding boats. The boats were gone when Drake and his men reached the coast, with the Spanish on their heels. Drake ordered his men to bury the treasure on the beach, then built the raft on which he and two volunteers would sail ten miles south to the bay where the flagship was anchored. Drake eventually recovered both of the treasures he had buried (all subsequent stories of buried treasure arise from these events) and returned with them to England, now a wealthy man.
Drake’s greatest voyage, the one that made him the second man (after Magellan) to circumnavigate the Earth, took place between 1577 and 1580. Drake’s Golden Hind took any number of Spanish vessels along the way, the richest being the galleon loaded with twenty-six tons of silver and gold, plus chests stuffed with emeralds and pearls, which Drake and his men captured off the northwest coast of Ecuador.
Tobias’s theory was that during one of his earlier expeditions Drake had sent one or more of his ships north to Nova Scotia to establish a small secret colony on what would become Oak Island. There were two purposes, Tobias would explain: Drake’s early raids on the Spanish were not officially sanctioned by Queen Elizabeth I, because the British were bound by a peace treaty with Spain. Transporting the booty Drake and his men had taken back to England would have been politically risky during this period; a secret depository for this treasure in the New World would have been necessary for a period of years. The second purpose was to establish a safe base on the North American continent, Tobias added, one where Drake could repair, refurbish, and reprovision his ships. In the 1570s, the only claim to land in the Western Hemisphere the British could make was in Newfoundland and Nova Scotia, where John Cabot had planted the flag of England in 1490.
A great deal of what Tobias was saying made sense in the abstract. His was yet another of those theories to which one had to concede plausibility. What makes it difficult to believe is that not one of the thousands of historians who have pored over Francis Drake’s life and career during the past four-plus centuries has found even the slightest evidence to support it.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
By the first time I visited Oak Island in 2003, Tobias and Blankenship were diverging about a lot more than their theories of who had buried what. It was almost five years since Dan and David had first filed suits and countersuits against one another, and neither man showed the least sign of backing off. Tobias accused Blankenship of misappropriating operating funds from Oak Island Tours for his personal use and damaging the company’s reputation. Dan not only denied those allegations, but made a counterclaim stating that he had kept the company going with his own personal money and was owed $45,000 in back wages.
The dispute between the two men had been hot ever since April 1998, when Tobias, writing as president of Oak Island Tours, announced that “on behalf of Oak Island Tours Inc., the owner of all lots on Oak Island, exclusive of 23, 5 and 9 through 14, I hereby confirm that Oak Island Exploration Company is entitled to access to those lands for the purpose of exploration and exploitation of the Treasure on Oak Island.” Blankenship, who owned half of Oak Island Tours but had resigned his positions on the boards of Triton Alliance and Oak Island Exploration Company, found himself hemmed in. He had no power at all within the latter two companies and was subject to Tobias’s veto power over Oak Island Tours. To try to get around David, Dan had applied for a treasure trove license that allowed him to conduct his search not only on lot 23, the only one on the island he owned independently of Tobias, but also on lots 19 and 20 in the Money Pit area. Tobias responded by filing for his own license to search privately for treasure on lots 19 and 20. Both men’s personal applications were refused by the Canadian government, which meant that Triton’s license to explore the Money Pit area was the only one in effect. Because David maintained effective control of Triton, he could use the company to block Dan from searching anywhere on Oak Island beyond lot 23. And for the next five years, he did. Blankenship’s frustration and fury grew month by month.
In January 2003, the rumor that Oak Island Tours intended to sell its Oak Island property for $7 million was reported in the local press. Dan and David each accused the other of planting the story. I found Dan a bit more convincing when I asked about it nine months later, but I honestly didn’t know which of them to believe.
Meanwhile, Triton’s treasure trove license was set to expire in July 2003. The renewal application Tobias filed was swiftly followed by one from Blankenship, who again demanded the right to search for treasure on all lands owned by Oak Island Tours. David hadn’t “done shit” with Triton’s treasure trove license during the past five years, Dan said, and if he was allowed to proceed on his own he would demonstrate just how little Tobias had gotten done without him. David accused Dan of being delusional, devious, and determined to stop Triton at any cost. When I arrived in Mahone Bay in September 2003 to research the Rolling Stone article, the treasure trove applications of both Blankenship and Tobias were still “under consideration” by Nova Scotia’s Department of Natural Resources, which explained that “conflicting” claims had complicated the process. The province also had not yet ruled on the application of Fred Nolan, who complained publicly that the enmity between Blankenship and Tobias was stalling the renewal of his own treasure trove license. Not surprisingly, Nolan blamed Blankenship most, accusing Dan of “doing his best to scuttle the ship before he goes down.”
Fred had not produced another major revelation since the announcement of Nolan’s Cross in 1992. He had kept busy, though, moving his portable drilling rig to various places on his property where survey lines intersected. Fred’s most compelling discovery came when he began aligning various rock markers he discovered and using them to trace a survey line that he would probe at 2-inch intervals with a steel rod. Very quickly, he had discovered a spruce stake, driven so deep into the ground that only the round top showed. Following the same line, Nolan found fifty-eight more spruce stakes, all similarly concealed from view. Those stakes were carbon-dated to the 1600s, Fred said.
Fred seemed to take little satisfaction from the fact that Dan had gradually conceded not only the existence of Nolan’s Cross but also its importance to solving the mystery of Oak Island. For more than a decade, Fred had been publicly declaring that the Money Pit was a “decoy” and that the Oak Island treasure was in tunnels that ran off in different directions. Naturally he was startled to read in the Halifax Chronicle Herald that Dan Blankenship was now declaring the Money Pit to be an “elaborate decoy,” that the treasure was in tunnels running deep beneath the opposite end of the island, and that the cross was the key to finding those tunnels. “The man actually thinks my ideas are his ideas,” Fred told me in 2003.
There were other players in the game by then. One was R
obert Young, a wood-carver who in 1999 had purchased lot 5, on the northwest end of Oak Island, from Fred Nolan for $100,000. In the sales agreement, Fred had retained the right to search for treasure on lot 5, but now Young was applying for his own license. Also in the mix was the Oak Island Tourism Society, a nonprofit of Mahone Bay residents headed by a man named Danny Hennigar, who had worked as a tour guide on the island in the 1980s and whose grandfather had been part of Gilbert Hedden’s search crew in the 1930s. After the story about Oak Island being up for sale at a price of $7 million was published in January 2003, Hennigar had tried to prevent what he regarded as “an absolute disaster” by attempting to mediate the conflicts between Blankenship, Tobias, and Nolan and convince the three men they could work together. This had begun shortly before I arrived in Mahone Bay in 2003, but by the time I first set foot on Oak Island, paranoid accusations were already flying back and forth between the parties. Tobias was sending faxes and making phone calls to Nolan about how they might partner up, but at the same time Nolan was making identical overtures to Blankenship. In no time, each of the three men was accusing the other two of trying to stab him in the back.
On the last day of 2003 Blankenship startled everyone, including me, with an announcement in the Halifax Chronicle Herald that he had at last solved the mystery of Oak Island. In the past six weeks, “I’ve been able to confirm all my suspicions and I can say definitively who did it, how they did it, and where they did it. But until I get down there, I can’t say exactly what it is,” Dan told the Chronicle Herald. He found the evidence he had been looking for of tunnels on the west end of Oak Island, Blankenship said: ten-foot-wide holes that he was convinced had served as air shafts for the tunnels during their construction.
My Rolling Stone article was just hitting newsstands, and I was more than a little annoyed that Dan had never showed me these supposed air shafts, or advised me that he believed they marked the path of the tunnels that contained the Oak Island treasure. Fred Nolan must have been infuriated when he read Dan’s claim that he had located these air shafts by using measurements made from the coordinates of the cone stones of the cross. David Tobias could not have been very happy about the Herald article, either, especially after reading that Blankenship had just met with the minister of the Department of Natural Resources to “lay out his findings” and make the case that he, rather than Triton Alliance, was in the best position to recover the Oak Island treasure. If he received his treasure trove license, Dan declared, he could bring up the treasure in seven months. “I turned eighty in May and won’t get another chance,” he told the Herald. “If they give Tobias a license for property he’s never been interested in, it will be a very sad day.” David, who was just about to turn eighty himself, had to have fumed when he read that.
Part of what made the Herald article so discouraging to me was that I had half convinced myself that I’d orchestrated the rapprochement between Dan and David that so many others had tried and failed to achieve. This imagined accomplishment was admittedly inadvertent: As my Rolling Stone story was being prepared for publication, the magazine’s photo editor and I had convinced Blankenship and Tobias to pose together for a photograph that would accompany the article. The two old men were all smiles in the photo proofs I was shown and the photographer told me that Dan and David had seemed like dear friends the day he got them together, cracking jokes and sharing memories. That conviviality was short-lived. Hostilities between the two men were revived in 2004, when the treasure trove license applications of Triton Alliance and Fred Nolan were approved by the Department of Natural Resources and Dan Blankenship’s was again refused. Tobias pushed the blade a little deeper in Dan by announcing plans to raise $15 million for an excavation of the Money Pit.
Nothing came of either David’s plans for raising funds or for renewing Triton’s operations on Oak Island’s east end. A frosty stalemate had once again settled over the island and no one was doing much of anything. I was saddened but not really surprised in July 2005 when I read a Chronicle Herald article that ran under the headline: FOR SALE: ONE “MONEY PIT.” The subhead was: PARTNERS GIVE UP TREASURE HUNT, PUT OAK ISLAND TOURS ON MARKET.
Blankenship was the only one of the two partners quoted in the article. “I’ve been in litigation with my partner for quite some time and we’ve agreed to disagree on just about everything,” Dan had told the Herald. “We couldn’t work together. It’s been too long, the better part of fifteen years since we really worked as a team.” He and Tobias had agreed to abandon their court claims against one another, to liquidate Oak Island Tours, and to put their 78 percent of the island on the market for $7 million, Blankenship confirmed to the newspaper, but then he added that any sale “would depend on the buyer and their reasons.” I was a bit heartened, if not entirely convinced, when I read that Dan had said he would not agree to any transaction that involved a developer who planned to break the island up into lots and build condominiums on it: That “won’t happen in my lifetime,” Dan had declared. “Money’s not my god. It never has been, and it isn’t now.”
It was clear to me when I sat with Dan three years earlier that advancing age was wearing the old lion down, no matter how he tried to deny it. I heard the evidence, though, when Blankenship had contrasted himself with Fred Nolan. He told me that “the difference between us is that Fred thinks he’s going to live to be two hundred years old, and I realize I won’t.”
Afterward, I’d flown home from Nova Scotia convinced that the long story of Oak Island might be winding down toward bleak endings of these three elderly men who had dominated the treasure hunt for the last half century. I thought of my Rolling Stone article as an opportunity to prevent that from happening. Millions of people would read that article, I imagined, and perhaps at least one of them would have the combination of youthful enthusiasm and financial wherewithal to join the narrative and turn it in a new direction.
New blood, that was what Oak Island needed. Unbeknownst to me, a great infusion of just that stuff was on the way.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Rick and Marty Lagina each told pretty much the same story about how they’d gotten involved with the island. As viewers of The Curse of Oak Island know, it all began back in 1965, when Rick (who was thirteen at the time, not eleven, as Rick mistakenly once said during an interview) read that same Reader’s Digest article that had prompted Dan Blankenship’s first trip to Nova Scotia. Rick was so entranced that he insisted on reading the article to his ten-year-old brother, Marty, and “I just sort of absorbed his enthusiasm by osmosis,” as the younger Lagina put it to me.
The most remarkable thing about Rick’s “enthusiasm” was that it hadn’t waned at all during the succeeding decades. He’d read everything in print about Oak Island and in the early 1990s, not long after he turned forty, Rick, joined by brother Marty, had traveled to Nova Scotia to introduce himself to his hero Dan Blankenship.
The official account, which Rick and Marty each repeated to me in pretty much the same way, is that the two brothers got as far as the entrance to the causeway at Crandall’s Point and stopped, afraid to drive any farther. The only person living on the island to whom either brother had spoken was Jane Blankenship, who hadn’t extended an invitation, but rather told Rick over the phone that if he wanted to drive the nearly fourteen hundred miles from his home in Iron Mountain, Michigan, to Oak Island, she couldn’t stop him. As Rick would later describe it to Traverse magazine, they eventually worked up the nerve to drive across the causeway “and who’s there but Mr. Blankenship. This very imposing man that we’ve read about is actually standing there at the other end of the causeway clearing trees. And we got out of the car, and he looked up, and he didn’t say a word.” Rick’s story was that he broke the ice by silently going to work alongside Dan, pushing over the trees that the older man was whipping with a chainsaw. In Marty’s telling, it was the bottle of whiskey he had brought that got them invited back to the house. Both brothers agreed that they were barely past some opening
small talk and pouring three glasses of whiskey before Dan got a phone call and said he had to go. “We basically got the bum’s rush off the island,” as Rick recalled it, before even getting to the point of asking how they might join the treasure hunt.
The Curse of Oak Island Page 29