The Curse of Oak Island

by Randall Sullivan

  By the time Pohl was ready to deliver what he regarded as the capstone of his work, the book Prince Henry Sinclair: His Expedition to the New World in 1398, he was arguing that Sinclair had been Glooskap, the mythical, magical being who had taught the native Mi’kmaq people of Nova Scotia how to hunt and fish with nets and how to gather plants and herbs for food and medicine. Pohl made much use of the work of Silas Tertius Rand, a nineteenth-century missionary and linguist who had lived among the Mi’kmaq and who had been first to put the legend of Glooskap in writing. Rand also made recordings of tribal songs. Those songs, Pohl wrote, sounded eerily similar to Scottish sea shanties.

  The most remarkable thing about Pohl’s claims is how widely they spread. In 1996, at Chebucto Bay, in Guysborough County, Nova Scotia, the Prince Henry Sinclair Society erected a fifteen-ton monument bearing a black granite narrative plaque that described the erstwhile Zichmni’s landing there in 1398 and his career as Glooskap. Twenty years after that, the Sinclair/Glooskap story had become a recurring meme on The Curse of Oak Island.

  What makes this so confounding is that by the time Pohl was writing his books and booklets, the Zeno narrative on which the entire project was based had been almost totally discredited. That process had begun as early as 1898, when a geographer named Fred W. Lucas produced a work that meticulously linked various passages in the Zeno narrative to literary works that had been created well before Nicolò Zeno’s book was published. In his deconstruction of the section in the narrative in which the Frislandia fishermen described their voyages to Estotilanda and Drogeo, Lucas was particularly devastating, showing how various passages corresponded closely to the letters of Columbus and Amerigo Vespucci, among various other works. Lucas was also able to show how the Zeno map had borrowed from various other maps created by sixteenth-century cartographers, the Carta marina map of the north by Olaus Magnus, the Caerte van oostland by Cornelis Anthonisz and the multiple maps of the north made by Claudius Clavus. He convincingly demonstrated as well how many of the islands on the Zeno map, including Frislandia, Estotilanda, and Drogeo, simply did not exist.

  Then in 1933, an Italian genealogist named Andrea Da Mosto authored an article titled “The Voyage of Nicolò and Antonio Zeno” that was based on hundreds of previously unpublished records from the Venetian archives. Da Mosto was able to demonstrate beyond any doubt that the Nicolò Zeno who had purportedly visited Frislandia in the 1380s and 1390s was a real person, a prominent navigator and public official in Venice in the period between 1360 and 1400 whose career was well documented. In May 1389, Nicolò had taken command of a squadron of naval galleys in the Gulf of Venice. The following year, he had been elected military governor of the cities of Corone and Modone in southern Greece. By the end of 1392 he had returned to Venice and in August of that year he had set sail for Corfu, where he served as bailiff and captain. These four years were, according to the Zeno narrative, the period when Nicolò Zeno had been fighting battles alongside Zichmni in the North Sea.

  It may have been fortunate for Frederick Pohl, and it certainly was for Richard Henry Major, that they were dead by the time Brian Smith put the nails in the coffin of the Zeno narrative. Smith, the archivist at the Shetland Museum and Archives, and a historian of Shetland and Orkney, began by declaring the once-admired Major as “the villain of this story,” then presented a painstaking description of the myriad ways in which Major had altered—actually rewritten in numerous instances—the Zeno narrative in his translation. Major began by changing the dates of not only the Zeno narrative but of the documents he would claim supported it, Smith demonstrated. Major then proceeded to change the locations of islands that appeared on the Zeno map and were described in the narrative, moving Grislanda, for instance, from the south coast of Iceland to the North Sea just above Scotland, in the vicinity of Orkney. “Major’s treatment of Shetland is even more outrageous,” Smith charged. In the original narrative, Zichmni makes a failed assault on Estlanda (assumed to be Shetland) before retreating north to the seven mythical islands on the east side of Iceland. Major, though, has Zichmni attack Shetland, then retreat to Orkney, then return to Shetland, where he places Zichmni’s fort at Bres, when the original Zeno narrative had placed Bres in Iceland. Major’s work was a “shocking piece of deception,” Smith wrote. “But it was very successful, because of the man’s scholarly reputation,” and “most readers swallowed his distortions whole.” Major’s falsified narrative was especially welcome among some members of the Sinclair family, one of whom would begin calling his largely undistinguished distant ancestor Henry the Holy.

  Smith did not spare Pohl, noting that the professor most certainly was aware of Da Mosto’s genealogical work, since he had listed it in his bibliography, but had omitted the overwhelming evidence it offered that the Zeno narrative was a fraud.

  EXCELLENT AND AUTHORITATIVE as Smith’s work was, it had been published in the rather obscure New Orkney Antiquarian Journal and made little impression on a public imagination that had been inflamed during the 1980s by a pair of works that became the pillars of an “alternative history” that reverberates through the culture to this day in manifestations that have ranged from Dan Brown’s novel The Da Vinci Code to The Curse of Oak Island. The first, published in 1982, was Holy Blood, Holy Grail, authored by Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh, and Henry Lincoln. The second, which appeared in print seven years later, was The Temple and the Lodge, authored by just Baigent and Leigh. The two books, the former in particular, conflated historical fragments, fraudulent documents, and “facts” drawn from poems and novels into a vitriolic condemnation of the Catholic Church, all of it imaginatively packaged into a thrilling narrative, but one that did not hold up to any scrutiny.

  Holy Blood, Holy Grail incorporated many of the Knights Templar myths and tales, including the “lost fleet” that sailed from La Rochelle to carry the Templar treasure “to the New World by following old Viking routes.” The Sinclair legend was introduced with the alleged transport of the Holy Grail to the family’s Scottish domain. Holy Blood, Holy Grail, however, began its story even before the Templar order was established early in the twelfth century, starting at the time of Christ. Both the daring and the transgression of the book were rooted in its claim of a deeper secret society, the so-called Priory of Sion, which, it was claimed, had created the Knights Templar as its military and financial operatives. This was one piece of a centuries-long plan to install the Merovingian dynasty (which did exist and had ruled the Franks from 457 to 751) on the throne of the entire European continent. It was further claimed that the Merovingians descended from Jesus of Nazareth and his bride, Mary Magdalene, and that the Catholic Church was dedicated to killing off the entire bloodline in order to preserve the claim of apostolic succession that had started with Peter.

  Holy Blood, Holy Grail had many antecedents beyond the ones I’ve described. The authors drew, for instance, on the 1835 claims of a French scientist named Claude Thory, who wrote that Robert the Bruce had created what he called the Order of St. Andrew in Scotland for Freemasons who had supported him at the Battle of Bannockburn; this had been taken up in 1837 by James Burnes, who asserted that it was the Templars themselves who had brought Freemasonry to Scotland. One of Burnes’s sources was the 1820 novel Ivanhoe by Sir Walter Scott, in which the villain was a Templar Knight. The authors of Holy Blood, Holy Grail also borrowed from an obscure 1773 book called The Jesus Scroll that was the first to claim that Mary Magdalene had given birth to the child of her husband, Jesus.

  Holy Blood, Holy Grail was a huge bestseller, in spite of its reliance on such spectacularly dubious sources as The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a foundational text of modern anti-Semitism that emerged from Russia in the early years of the twentieth century. Despite the fact that Protocols was exposed as a forgery as early as 1921 and after that was published only to aid assorted fascist movements, the authors of Holy Blood, Holy Grail made use of it, claiming that what the Protocols actually described were the master plan of the
Priory of Sion. The main source cited for the Priory of Sion story, though, was a work titled Dossiers Secrets that the authors of Holy Blood, Holy Grail had found at the National Library of France in Paris. Somehow it had escaped their attention that Dossiers Secrets was also a forgery, one created by the notorious con man/lunatic Pierre Plantard, who along with his partner had physically planted it in the National Library. Plantard was a former collaborator with the Vichy government of France in World War II, who following the war had recast himself and his group, the Alpha Galates, as a cell of the Resistance. After a series of bizarre scams and a career as a “clairvoyant” named Chyren, Plantard had in the 1960s become a public figure by teaming up with author Gérard de Sède to announce the existence of the Priory of Sion, its relationship to the Merovingians, and through them to the descendants of Jesus and Mary Magdalene. To this he added the claim that he himself was part of the bloodline, a direct descendant of the Merovingian king Dagobert II.

  Plantard actually outed himself in 1982, in an apparent fit of pique at how successfully the authors of Holy Blood, Holy Grail had incorporated his hoax into their work; he went on French radio to reveal that the Priory of Sion documents on which the authors had relied were fakes—his fakes. Yet it was not until 1996 that the fallacies that were the foundation of Holy Blood, Holy Grail were truly publicly exposed in a documentary that aired on the British Broadcasting Company (which was in a way responsible for the book ever coming into existence, having in the 1970s broadcast the series of documentaries produced by Henry Lincoln that were based on Plantard’s “work”).

  In spite of the fact that Holy Blood, Holy Grail was more fiction than fact, the book continued to sell and to spawn literally dozens of offshoots and spinoffs. Up until 2003, the most successful of all of these was Baigent and Leigh’s The Temple and the Lodge, which more deeply “explored” how the Templar order came to Scotland, survived though Jacobite Freemasonry, and made its way to America. The first and most successful attempt to connect all of this to Oak Island had come in 1988, when Michael Bradley’s Holy Grail across the Atlantic was published. Bradley’s breathless book had the Templars concealing the Holy Grail at the Cathar fortress of Montségur until the castle was sacked by the forces of the Inquisition in 1244. The Templars had protected the Grail, Bradley suggested, by transporting it to Scotland, where Henry Sinclair (of course) eventually took possession and transported it to Nova Scotia, where the Money Pit on Oak Island was dug as a hiding place, before the Grail was eventually hidden in Montreal by a mysterious secret society.

  The capstone of the whole Templar treasure/Henry Sinclair/Priory of Sion/Merovingian dynasty fantasy was, of course, The Da Vinci Code, which became an enormous international bestseller when it was published in 2003. In 2005, Baigent and Leigh sued author Dan Brown and his publisher for plagiarizing Holy Blood, Holy Grail. The result was a rare but delicious instance of true justice in which the High Court of Justice in London ruled that since Baigent and Leigh had attempted to pass off their fiction as history, they could not sue an author who had actually produced a work of fiction based on it. The court also noted that the success of The Da Vinci Code had only resulted in increased sales for Holy Blood, Holy Grail, which has continued to be a moneymaker for the authors and their publisher, despite the fact that imitators publish at least one new iteration of their false narrative every year.

  One of these derivative authors, Kathleen McGowan, presented the Sinclair/Priory of Sion/Merovingian theory in season two of The Curse of Oak Island. A former public-relations copywriter, McGowan initially self-published her 1989 novel The Expected One, which became a million-copy bestseller when it was republished by Simon and Schuster immediately after the release of the movie The Da Vinci Code. The reissue was a blatant piggyback on Dan Brown’s 2003 blockbuster, but McGowan offered a special wrinkle, declaring herself to be a direct descendant of Jesus Christ and Mary Magdalene. She had turned that success into a series of novels featuring her alter ego’s investigation of historical events that didn’t exist anywhere outside the pages of Holy Blood, Holy Grail or Holy Grail across the Atlantic, featuring, of course, a main character named Sinclair. She had also become the principal in a “Holy France” tour business that was itself quite successful.

  Marty Lagina and his twenty-nine-year-old son Alex (also an engineer) had made the first leg of The Curse of Oak Island’s European excursion to meet McGowan in the south of France. They rendezvoused at Montségur, the citadel castle where the author began the tour by presenting an ostensible history of the Cathar heresy’s rise and fall. “There is an idea that the Cathars had all the most sacred treasures in human history right here in this place,” McGowan told the Laginas. Those treasures of course included the Holy Grail and the Ark of the Covenant. It had been for the purpose of stealing these holy objects that Pope Innocent VIII (who is also regularly credited with initiating the Inquisition) had launched his crusade against the Cathars, McGowan explained, a campaign of slaughter that came to a climax right here at the mountain fortress of Montségur. Only by negotiating a two-week truce were the Cathars able to send four of their number out under cover of darkness to lower the Grail, the Ark, and the rest of their treasure down the side of the mountain by a system of pulleys that delivered it to the waiting Knights Templar, who would carry it out of France to Scotland, and then, of course, to Oak Island.

  As it happened, I knew a good deal about the Cathari (as they’re properly called), because I had researched them for two prior books. They were a final flowering of what had been since the first century the primary heresy of Judeo-Christian faith, gnosticism. The Persian sages Zoroaster and Mani were the early drivers of gnosticism, which made its way to Europe during the tenth century with the Bogomil movement in the Balkans. The great heresy of the Bogomils, as with the gnostic movements that preceded them, was a dualism that essentially elevated the Devil to the same stature as God, envisioning the world as a struggle between darkness and light that had been ongoing since men were created. The Council of Constantinople suppressed the Bogomils by sentencing all the heretics to be burned alive. Rome, on the other hand, insisted on an attempt to “reconvert” the Bogomils, killing only those who refused salvation. The urgency of the church’s mission increased dramatically when the gnostic revival spread from the Balkans into Italy, then into the Swiss Alps, and finally into the Languedoc region of southern France, where the Cathari arose. The Cathari, disgusted with the corruption and indulgence of the Catholic clergy (more than three centuries before Martin Luther), recognized no priests, instead dividing themselves into two categories, the Believers and the Perfects. The Perfects were required to surrender all worldly goods to the larger community, to vest themselves in simple corded black or blue robes, and to serve as mendicant monks who devoted their lives to prayer, preaching, and charitable work. Even the Believers were expected to eat a vegetarian diet and refrain from procreation, which would only serve to increase the power of Rex Mundi, the name they had given to the devil. Escape from a realm of materiality where Rex Mundi ruled into a realm of pure spirit where the God of Light dwelled was the ultimate goal of all Cathari. The church, naturally, had a problem with the fact that the Cathari’s dismissal of the visible world required them to spurn the symbol of the cross. The Cathari likewise rejected the concepts of salvation and damnation, embracing instead a belief in reincarnation that had been imported from the East.

  Innocent VIII found this no less abhorrent than had his predecessors and after a failed attempt to corral Count Raymond VI (ruler of the Languedoc) in January 1208, immediately called for a Crusade against them, strengthening the incentive by decreeing that all lands owned by the Cathari and their supporters were to be confiscated. Charged with devil worship, human sacrifice, cannibalism, and incest, among other iniquities, the Cathari were slaughtered by the thousands. During an early battle, Arnaud, the abbot-knight leading the Crusade, was asked by his men who among the heretics should be put to the sword. He answered with a l
ine that is refrained among military men to this day: “Kill them all. God will know His own.”

  The Cathari movement suffered its final defeat in March 1244, at Montségur, in the foothills of the Pyrenees, where more than two hundred heretic priests were massacred. Based on my research, the suggestion that the Cathars had been an extension of the Merovingian dynasty, dedicated to protecting the Jesus Christ–Mary Magdalene bloodline, however, was likely false. What had most offended Innocent VIII was that the Cathari, like the Docetists ten centuries earlier, insisted that Jesus’s body had been an illusion and that therefore His crucifixion and resurrection were illusions also. Obviously, an illusion could never have fathered a child with Mary Magdalene. Equally impossible was the story of the Cathari passing their holy treasure to the Knights Templar. First, there is no evidence the Cathari possessed any such treasure; the idea did not even exist until Holy Blood, Holy Grail. McGowan’s story conflated the persecution of the Templars by King Philip with Innocent VIII’s campaign against the Cathari. But Philip’s roundup of the Templars in Paris took place in 1309, sixty-five years after the Cathar surrender at Montségur. In 1244 the Templars were still headquartered at Acre. There were a few Templars in France during the campaign against the Cathari, but every one of them had fought with the Catholic army against the heretics. The Templars were devout Catholics loyal to the pope.

  FROM MONTSÉGUR, McGowan led Marty and his son Alex to Rennes-le-Château. Rennes-le-Château was where the story that Jesus had not died on the cross but instead fathered the child who founded the Merovingian dynasty had actually begun. It all started with a priest who had presided over the village church dedicated to Saint Mary Magdalene during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Father Berenger Saunière had supervised a remarkable degree of construction in the poor parish, not only achieving the restoration of the church (including the presbytery and cemetery) but also building a spectacular personal library called the Tour Magdala on the edge of the village, featuring a circular turret connected to a tower with a promenade that led to his villa, perhaps the loveliest home in Rennes-le-Château. Questions about how all of this work had been financed eventually led to Saunière being convicted of trafficking in masses at an ecclesiastical trial and suspended from the priesthood.