The Curse of Oak Island

by Randall Sullivan

  Looking back on what I wrote then, I’m glad I included the disavowals of Dan Blankenship and Fred Nolan. “I can’t entirely dismiss the Templar theory, but I don’t accept it,” Dan had told me. “The Templars were bankers, not miners. And there’s no record of them using slaves. The Spanish, though, were miners, and they had no compunction about using native peoples as slave labor.” I had been prompted to ask Nolan about the Templar theory after Robert Restall’s daughter, Lee Lamb, told me Fred had confided to her that he believed the knights had buried the Holy Grail, along with other treasures, on Oak Island. Nolan would only tell me that “there’s a lot of evidence to support that theory,” but like Dan he was more inclined to believe the Spanish were responsible for the original works on the island. “So many ideas have been put forward that have at least a little plausibility,” Fred had said. “But you have to go with what’s most likely.”

  The Templar theory had been introduced early in The Curse of Oak Island’s first season with a question about how the oak trees had gotten there. It had been “long speculated,” the narrator told the audience, that the fourteenth-century Scottish nobleman Henry Sinclair, “whose family took over the mantle of the Knights Templar,” had come to Oak Island in 1398 to hide the Templar treasure and planted the oak trees for the Templars who would come centuries later. Sparating what was true from what was possibly true, likely untrue and definitely false would be a thorny task, however. I started with what was actually known about the order of the Knights Templar.

  The knights had been a product of the First Crusade, launched by Pope Urban II in 1095 in Clermont, France. The Crusade had initially been directed at the Seljuk Turks, the ferocious horseback warriors whose attacks on Byzantine Christians were threatening Constantinople itself, but it quickly morphed into a mission to liberate Jerusalem from Muslim rule. Armies led by European nobles marched toward the Holy Land at the urging of a reformist pope who roused Christianity to make a valiant stand against the various Muslim kingdoms that had conquered Syria, Egypt, and most of North Africa, then taken southern Spain and Catalonia and were, the pope said, preparing to capture the entire Mediterranean Basin. While religious fervor was the primary driver of the Crusade, plundering, pillaging, and simple bloodlust played their parts as well. After laying siege to Nicaea and Antioch, the Crusaders marched on Jerusalem in June 1099 and by the middle of July had conquered the city. The scale of the massacre that followed has been debated among historians but it was certainly considerable. Even the Muslim soldiers who retreated to the Al-Aqsa Mosque were slaughtered, and most of the city’s Jews were killed when the Jerusalem synagogue was burned to the ground.

  The Christian Kingdom of Jerusalem was created by a council held in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, built on the spot where according to legend Jesus Christ had been crucified. During the next several decades, various orders of knights arose to lay claim to assorted powers and jurisdictions. The Knights Templar was one such order. They were the Poor Knights of Christ and the Temple of Solomon at their founding in 1118, a mystical order of warrior-monks who wore white capes decorated with red crosses and proclaimed their dedication to the protection of civilians traveling to the Holy Land. They were famously abstemious, unshaved celibates who were said to dine in silence while listening to prayers.

  The earliest legends that grew up around these knights derived from their base of operations in the Al-Aqsa Mosque, where, according to tradition, the Temple of Solomon had once stood. Rumors that there were secret chambers beneath the mosque where the greatest and holiest of treasures had been stored in the time of Solomon were the original basis of these legends, for which there is no solid historical evidence. It is a fact, though, that the Knights Templar grew not only wealthy but also powerful. Their power resulted from the admiration they commanded, which grew in part from Templars’ insistence that they were obedient only to the pope himself and would not serve any earthly king, prince, or prelate. Their most illustrious sponsor, the Catholic Saint Bernard of Clairvaux, said of them: “They are milder than lambs, and fiercer than lions. They combine the meekness of monks with the courage of knights so completely that I do not know whether to call them knights or contemplatives.” Paradoxically, the Templars’ wealth was initially produced by the vows of poverty the knights took. Their pledges to sign over all possessions upon entering the order began to swell Templar coffers as the sons of noble families joined them by the dozens.

  The Templars remained powerful even after they were forced out of Jerusalem in 1187 by Islamic reconquest of the city by the army of Saladin. The Christian retreat was gradual and the final defeat did not come until 1291, when the coastal stronghold of Acre fell amid a slaughter by the Muslims that was even more terrible than what had taken place in Jerusalem almost two hundred years earlier. The Templars then moved their headquarters to Cyprus, where they swiftly became the first international bank, financing, for a price to be paid in interest, the projects of kings, lords, and other nobles all over Europe. No one fell further in the order’s debt than the profligate King Philip IV of France. In the year 1307 Philip decided to cancel those debts in the most lethal way imaginable. Templar leader Jacques de Molay and about sixty of his knights were invited to Paris for a conclave with the king. But it was to be a capture, not a conclave. On the morning of Friday, October 13 (this may or may not be the beginning of Friday the thirteenth representing bad luck), de Molay and nearly every one of his knights were arrested and imprisoned by Philip’s soldiers. During the following months, they were subjected to gruesome tortures that extracted confessions that they had practiced such things as sodomy, idol worship, and spitting or urinating on crucifixes. Then, despite a commission dispatched to Paris by Pope Clement V that reported there was very little if any evidence to back up the accusations against the Templars, Philip ordered de Molay and fifty-four other knights burned at the stake as heretics. Witnesses later testified that de Molay had gone to his death most bravely, warning King Philip that he would one day pay to God for what he was doing. At least six and perhaps as many as twelve Templar knights had escaped France after the arrest of de Molay and the others. Where they went and what they did is not truly known, but claims about it are what have fueled the Templar legend for the seven centuries since.

  The first story to surface—when is difficult to say, since it did not appear in print until the nineteenth century—was that the surviving knights had loaded the “Templar treasure” on eighteen ships that sailed from the port of La Rochelle in northern France for parts unknown. The Templars certainly were wealthy, but whether they possessed any treasure is no more than speculation based on rumor. Claims have been made that while excavating beneath what was once the Temple of Solomon they had discovered a buried room where the Ark of the Covenant or the Menorah of Moses or the Holy Grail, or all three, were kept. There is, again, absolutely no historical record to support these claims, but they have not only endured but also expanded. What history does tell us is that the Templars kept copious records of their transactions and treaties, and that all of them disappeared in 1307 and have never been found.

  The story of the so-called Templar fleet carrying a treasure out of La Rochelle rests entirely on the protocol of the interrogation by Dominican inquisitors of one Jean Chalons, a French count who told it while under the threat of torture. There is no other source. Chalon’s claim was that he had heard (secondhand) that the preceptor of the French Templars, Gérard de Villiers, was warned in advance of his impending arrest and escaped France with fifty horses and eighteen galleys. That tale is undercut by what is actually known about the Templar fleet. The Templars did have ships, but the majority of these were lightweight craft suitable only for skirting the Mediterranean shoreline to carry pilgrims and supplies between Marseilles and Acre and could not have been used to make an ocean voyage. There are references to four larger “galleys” that could presumably have navigated the Atlantic, but the evidence of even that is sketchy. And none of the ships that ex
isted in the early fourteenth century could have crossed the English Channel in October.

  Nevertheless, from the tiny, fragile seed planted by Jean Chalon, an entire industry reaching into publishing, film, and television has arisen and from the late twentieth century to the present actually flourished.

  The story of how that happened turns on the addition of two additional written records that were first introduced into the narrative in the mid-sixteenth century by a Venetian nobleman named Nicolò Zeno. He was the descendant of a family that had helped build Venice in the eighth century and that in the centuries afterward had become the owners of one of the greatest fleets on the planet. The Zenos remained wealthy and powerful but by the 1500s were in decline.

  In 1558, Nicolò Zeno published a book he hoped might not only restore his family to its full status but also possibly support a claim that Venice had discovered the New World a hundred years before Christopher Columbus. Its primary contents were a map and a series of letters that Nicolò claimed to have discovered hidden away in the Zenos’ family home. These had been created, Nicolò wrote, sometime between 1390 and 1404, by two of his ancestors, a previous Nicolò Zeno and his brother, Antonio, and they described the fantastic voyages the two had made across the North Atlantic.

  The book produced by the Nicolò Zeno of 1558 employed an unusual style. It was a first-person narrative written by the author that was freely interspersed with quotations from the letters supposedly written by his relatives more than a century and a half earlier. The letters to his brother, Antonio, written by the previous Nicolò Zeno were the main source the author claimed to have relied on. Nicolò began his tale with a description of being shipwrecked on an island he called Frislandia, “much larger than Ireland,” as his letter described it. “By chance, a Prince with an armed following happened to be in the neighborhood,” he continued. The name of that prince was Zichmni, according to Nicolò’s letters. Zichmni was preparing to seize the island of Frislandia from the king of Norway, and he offered to employ Nicolò as a pilot, according to the Zeno narrative. When Nicolò served valiantly in the subsequent victory, Zichmni had made him a noble of the island nation he now ruled.

  As the story continued, the fourteenth century Nicolò had written to his brother, Antonio, inviting him to visit Frislandia. Antonio not only came, Nicolò recounted, but he also stayed for fourteen years, becoming Zichmni’s captain and leading his forces in an attack on Iceland. That great island nation was too well defended for his forces to so much as make landfall, let alone penetrate and conquer, so instead Zichmni turned his attention to seven small islands to the east, capturing them one after the other. On one of these islands, called Bres, Zichmni built a fort and placed Nicolò Zeno in charge of it. After Zichmni sailed off, however, the fourteenth-century Nicolò explained, he had set out on his own voyage of discovery, one that would last between four and five years. He returned to Frislandia seriously ill, with just time enough left before his death to send one last letter to Antonio.

  Antonio was the source of the narrative as it continued from there, with a story of Zichmni learning that a group of fishermen were telling a tale of having visited island countries called Estotilanda and Drogeo in the far west. In Estotilanda, they had encountered a tribe of cannibals that were persuaded not to eat them by being taught how to catch fish, the fishermen claimed.

  The final two sections of the Zeno narrative describe (through Antonio’s letters) Zichmni’s voyage west with Antonio to find Estotilanda and Drogeo, a voyage that would seem to have taken place in 1397 or 1398. Zichmni would never locate those two fabled island nations, according to Antonio’s letters. What he did instead was land on a previously undiscovered promontory of land that he called the Cape of Trin, later giving the name Trin also to the “excellent harbor” it enclosed. Spotting plumes of smoke rising from someplace in the interior of the great island beyond Trin, Zichmni dispatched a company of his men to seek the source. Eight days later they returned exhausted and reported that they had found the cause of the smoke, a great natural fire that burned at the bottom of a hill where there was a spring that flowed with a black, pitch-like substance. The stream coursed all the way to the sea the men said. They had also encountered a large group of natives, the men told Zichmni, according to the Antonio letters, who were small in stature and so timid they hid in caves upon seeing white men for the first time.

  Zichmni was delighted by the location, the climate, and the soil of Trin, the Antonio letters went on, and he announced that he would build a town there. Zichmni’s men were not so enamored, however, and their grumbling turned from insistent to threatening. Finally, Zichmni sent them off with Antonio to return home but chose to remain in Trin himself and said he would explore the entire coast on foot, alone. And there the Zeno narrative ends.

  The book produced by Nicolò Zeno in 1558 was an enormous sensation at the time of its publication, widely accepted as both historically and geographically accurate for the next three centuries. In the immediate aftermath of the book’s appearance, at least three explorers mounted Arctic expeditions. Gerardus Mercator, in creating his 1569 world map, which would endure as the primary chart for more than a century, had relied on the Zeno map to place Trin as an outcropping of land on the southernmost point of Greenland. But no one proposed to have any real idea who the great prince Zichmni had been. That would not change until the latter part of the eighteenth century, when the famous naturalist Johann Reinhold Forster began to study the Zeno narrative.

  Forster was best known as the naturalist who had accompanied Captain James Cook on his second Pacific voyage; his work in that capacity would become a significant basis of the development of anthropology and ethnology. So it is not surprising that Forster commanded attention and regard with his announcement that he had identified Prince Zichmni as one Henry Sinclair, a Scotsman who in the latter half of the fourteenth century had held the title of Earl of Orkney under the auspices of the Norwegian crown, which then held the island.

  It was an astonishing claim, given that up to this time Henry Sinclair was not known for having done much of anything beyond managing his domain and collecting its rents. Henry had been the son and heir of William Sinclair, Lord of Roslin, and in 1358 had succeeded his father to that title. Twenty-one years later, on August 2, 1379, Haakon VI, the king of Norway, had invested Henry as the Earl of Orkney in exchange for a pledge by Sinclair that he would pay a fee of one thousand nobles, and, when called upon, serve the king militarily with one hundred armed men for no less than three months. Henry Sinclair was again in Norway in 1389 to hail the new king, Eric, and to pledge an oath of fealty. That, essentially, is the historical record of Henry Sinclair.

  Johann Reinhold Forster’s reputation was such, however, that the claim that Henry Sinclair had been the famous Prince Zichmni from the Zeno narrative immediately caught hold. This belief really took off in 1873, when Richard Henry Major produced a translation of the Zeno narrative that included not only the claim that Henry Sinclair had been Prince Zichmni, but also that he had been the leader of the Knights Templar after the order reconstituted itself in Scotland following the horrific events in Paris under King Philip.

  Like Forster, Major was a man widely admired, an author and geographer who at the time was serving as curator of the British Museum’s map collection. So the claim that Henry Sinclair was Prince Zichmni seemed to have been confirmed when Major said so. His translation of the Zeno narrative inspired a member of one branch of the Sinclair family, Thomas Sinclair, to interrupt the 1893 Chicago celebration of the four hundredth anniversary of Christopher Columbus’s great voyage west to read aloud a paper in which he contended (and was apparently the first to do so) that the journey Zichmni/Henry Sinclair described in the Zeno narrative had not ended in Greenland as had been previously supposed but rather in North America. His illustrious ancestor, Thomas Sinclair proclaimed, was “the one and only discoverer of America.”

  IT WAS NOT UNTIL 1950 that all these threads were w
oven together by a college professor named Frederick J. Pohl, who that year began a life’s work dedicated to connecting the Zeno narrative not only to Henry Sinclair but also to North America—and to Nova Scotia in particular. Pohl’s starting point was the passage in the Zeno narrative about the discovery by Zichmni’s men of the fire that burned in a stream at the base of a hill where the water ran black, filled with some sort of pitch-like substance.

  Intrigued by the claim of an American geologist named William Hobbs that he had found such a natural feature in the mining region of Stellarton, just south of Pictou, Nova Scotia, where open seams of coal regularly caught fire and burned for days, Professor Pohl decided in the summer of 1950 to investigate for himself. The result was his 1959 booklet A Nova Scotia Project in which he placed the burning stream from the Zeno narrative at Stellarton. It would be the first of many future instances in which Pohl, over a twenty-year period, produced works where the omissions were more meaningful than the inclusions. In this case, what Pohl had failed to mention was that the “burning seam” was not a constant feature of the Stellarton landscape. More significantly, Pohl left out the fact that while it had caught fire on and off since 1830 when mining began in the Stellarton region, there was not a shred of evidence to suggest it had ever burned before or that even a single coal fire had been caused by anything other than mining activity.

  The main thrust of Pohl’s work was his effort to prove that linguistic differences between the language spoken and written by fourteenth-century Scots and fourteenth-century Italians had resulted in the mistranslation of “Orkney” into “Zichmni.” The Z in “Zichmni” could easily have resulted from a misreading of the d’O in “d’Orkney,” Pohl contended. Also, since Italian does not use the letters k or y, they needed to be represented by other letters; for instance ch is a hard k sound in Italian, Pohl pointed out.