The Curse of Oak Island

by Randall Sullivan

  The scandal came to the attention of a Belgian journalist who visited Rennes in 1948. He reported the sordid story of Saunière but also declared the church he had built was an architectural masterpiece, admiring even its most unusual feature, the stoup (basin for holy water) at the entrance to the chapel that was held by a horned devil with cloven hooves. A local named Corbu, who had opened a restaurant in Sauniere’s former villa, read the article and began promoting Rennes as a place of mystery and enchantment. It was Corbu who first produced the story that Father Saunière had discovered “parchments” during the renovation of the church that led him to the treasure of Blanche of Castile, what remained of 28,500,500 gold pieces that the French crown had assembled to ransom Saint Louis from the infidels. Corbu’s tale got picked up by an author named Charroux who wrote a book that captured the imagination of Pierre Plantard, who adapted it to the mythological story of the Priory of Sion, then collaborated with Gérard de Sède on the book L’Or de Rennes, the precursor to Dossiers Secrets. Henry Lincoln read L’Or de Rennes, which inspired him to produce the BBC documentaries that led to Holy Blood, Holy Grail and the presumed descent of the Merovingian fantasy to Kathleen McGowan.

  What McGowan told Marty and Alex Lagina was that Rennes was where the Cathari-affiliated Templars had first taken the Grail and the Ark and the rest of the holy treasures. For proof she led father and son to a cottage with an iron Templar cross hanging over the front door. It was the home of McGowan’s Holy Tour associate Tobi Dobler, who now identified himself as a member of the Knights Templar of the New Order, whose members claimed to be descended from the original Templars.

  The group soon headed off to Scotland, there to meet up with Rick Lagina, Charles Barkhouse, Dave Blankenship, and the rest of the team to hear the story of the Templars’ eighteen-ship fleet that had escaped from La Rochelle to the protection of Robert the Bruce and the Sinclair family. In claiming the Templars were connected to the British Isles via an actual historical person, the English Lord Ralph de Sudeley, McGowan was most likely drawing on the work of Graham Phillips, an author whose histories verged even further into invention than Holy Blood, Holy Grail. In one of his works, Phillips described how de Sudeley, as a Crusader, found the Ark of the Covenant with the Maccabean treasure at Jebel al-Madhbah, then carried it back to Britain for safekeeping.

  Various elisions helped McGowan connect the Knights Templar, the Cathari, and Henry Sinclair to the team’s ultimate destination, Rosslyn Chapel, where the climactic scenes of The Da Vinci Code film had been shot. The chapel had been built and commissioned by William Sinclair more than half a century after Henry the Holy’s death. Rosslyn is a small chapel that was never completed, but its interior is rich with stone carvings. Eight Nordic dragons ring the base of one particularly ornate pillar, while 110 carvings of the pagan sylvan deity known as the Green Man peer through the carved foliage that grows all around them, as well as through their ears, mouths, and noses. One arch is covered with a fantastically detailed danse macabre in which men and women dance with their future skeletons.

  Queen Victoria had visited Rosslyn in 1862, more than four hundred years after its construction, to find it abandoned and in disrepair, yet she was so impressed by what she saw through the weeds and vines covering the building that she urged it be restored. It was, and it was rededicated in 1862. The strangeness of Rosslyn had sprouted legends even before the advent of Holy Blood, Holy Grail and The Da Vinci Code, especially about what was inside the stone crypt that had been sealed shut for centuries. Stories that the Holy Grail, sacred scrolls from the time of Christ, a large fragment of the cross, or even the actual mummified head of Jesus were entombed in the crypt had gained currency over the years, especially after The Da Vinci Code.

  Because they encouraged such stories despite knowing how false they were, the Sinclair family had been accused by the historian Louise Yeoman, curator of manuscripts at the Museum of Scotland, among others in the country, of “cashing in” on the chapel’s appearance in The Da Vinci Code. More than a hundred thousand tourists were showing up every year at the chapel, paying customers all, and the Sinclairs benefited while doing nothing to discourage belief in the legend of Henry the Holy, which at least a couple of Sinclairs (Andrew Sinclair, most notably) had promoted in books and articles.

  “Christian, Jewish, Egyptian, Masonic, Pagan,” the character played by Tom Hanks had ticked off the influences he saw in the carvings inside Rosslyn Chapel in the film version of The Da Vinci Code. The idea that the Sinclairs were the founders of Freemasonry (intent on creating a disguise for the Templar order after it was dissolved by the pope in 1312) had become part of what, in the popular imagination, was encoded in the chapel’s carvings. This despite the fact that the Masons had not come into existence until more than a century after Rosslyn Chapel was built. The blending of history and myth so annoyed the curator of Scotland’s Grand Lodge, Robert L. D. Cooper, that he had written a book called Rosslyn Hoax? to attack at length and in detail the claims that The Da Vinci Code drew on.

  At Rosslyn, the chapel’s “keeper” regaled the Laginas and company with the legend that Scottish knights went to the Americas long before Columbus and that their leader could have been Henry Sinclair. Nova Scotia was Latin for “New Scotland,” the keeper noted, then pointed out carvings of plants that were “said to be” shucked corn and trillium blossoms and aloe cactus, all species native to North America, and recounted the legend that these had been drawn by Henry Sinclair in North America and brought back to Scotland. At least a few botanists, however, had argued that the carvings at Rosslyn were of plants native to the country. The “corn,” for instance, was actually bundled wheat, they said.

  Alan Butler also made his first appearance on the show in connection to the team’s visit to Rosslyn Chapel. Butler and his podcast partner Janet Wolter based their work on goddess worship and gnosticism, especially the book of Enoch, an allegedly suppressed book of the Bible that told the story of the “Watcher” angels referenced briefly in the book of Daniel and, perhaps, in Genesis 6:2: “The sons of God saw how beautiful the daughters of man were, and so they took for their wives as many of them as they chose.” In the book of Enoch version the Watchers, sent to Earth by God to watch over mankind, instead procreated among them, illicitly instructing humans in making weapons, cosmetics, and mirrors and practicing sorcery; the Great Flood had happened in order to cleanse the Earth of the Watchers’ offspring, the Nephilim. Butler and Wolter transformed the Watchers and their offspring from the villains of the story to its protagonists and incorporated the Roman cult of Venus, the symbolism of Freemasonry, and of course the entire Merovingian meme in which the Jesus Christ–Mary Magdalene bloodline was destined to rise again to power in the Kingdom of God on Earth forecast by the book of Revelations. The two had also made much of what they called the Tariot Tomb Conspiracy that claimed the bones of Jesus had been hidden by the early Christians in Jerusalem, that the Templars had discovered this tomb, and that the skull and crossbones flag that most people associated with pirates was really a reference to Christ’s rotting corpse.

  Butler did not mention most of this, but he did explain on camera that the flagstones found in the mouth of the Money Pit were actually a “threshing floor” like the one the Templars and their gnostic compatriots (again, the Templars were not gnostic) had used to mark spiritually significant sites. From this Butler had transitioned to the book of Enoch, the Masonic Royal Arch of Enoch, and a calculation based on various obscure texts that there was a second treasure vault on Oak Island, 996 feet due west of the Money Pit. Some broad humor erupted when Marty Lagina discovered that this would put them right in the middle of the “stinky swamp” he so despised.

  In the same Newsweek article from the Rosslyn Chapel visit, Rick Lagina asked, “Has there been a find on Oak Island that we can say is a definitive tie-in to the Templars? No, but are there curious facts and bits of discovery that indicate the possibility? Yes.”

  The main exampl
e Rick cited was the similarity between the flag of the Mi’kmaq and the Templar battle flag that supposedly had been flown from the ship Henry Sinclair steered to North America in 1397 or 1398. This claim had been presented in an earlier episode of the show, when viewers were shown the two flags, one atop the other, in order to see that they were virtually identical, both white with red markings, a horizontal cross with two symbols on opposite sides of the vertical post, one a star and one a crescent. The only difference was that the crescent was on the top of the Templar flag while it was on the bottom on the Mi’kmaq flag.

  This discovery had been presented on The Curse of Oak Island through one J. Hutton Pulitzer—he preferred to be called Treasure Force Commander J. Hutton Pulitzer—a theorist who had appeared in a few episodes of the show during season two. Pulitzer (born Jovan Philyaw) was outfitted in a getup of khaki pants tucked into knee-high boots and a safari shirt worn with a shoulder holster like a villain in a campy remake of King Solomon’s Mines. Pulitzer’s earliest appearances had centered on some petroglyphs that were found on an outcropping of rock at Bedford Barrens, Nova Scotia, about fifty miles northeast of Oak Island. The eight-pointed star inside a circle was a link to the ancient Middle East and, ultimately, to the sacking of Solomon’s Temple in Jerusalem by Nebuchadnezzar around 597 BC, as Pulitzer had it. From this, the show had pivoted to the similarities between the Templar/Sinclair and Mi’kmaq flags.

  Historians who made the counter argument relied on a 1610 book by Marc Lescarbot titled The Conversion of the Savages, which described how the tribe was introduced to the symbol of the cross by a Catholic missionary named Jesse Fleche (more than two hundred years after the supposed voyage of Henry Sinclair) and had begun to use it to decorate various cloths and ornaments, resulting ultimately in the creation of the flag.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  After the contribution of Kathleen McGowan, The Curse of Oak Island featured another theorist named Robert Markus, who would argue that the lost treasures of King Solomon’s Temple had been buried on Oak Island, but not in the Money Pit. He was basing this claim on the Zeno map. Well, actually it was based on the map Harold Wilkins had drawn for Captain Kidd and His Skeleton Island, which was itself based on the Zeno map, as Markus had it. The Zeno map, Markus explained, had been created not just by the Venetian brothers, but also by Henry Sinclair, who had encoded a message on it with the numbers written in the margins. Wilkins unfortunately had misread one of those numbers. By correcting that mistake and applying the resulting code to a GPS triangulation of the Westford Stone, another stone in Overton, Nova Scotia, on which what was described as a Templar Cross had been carved and the Money Pit on Oak Island, Markus had helped the Laginas arrive at the spot where they would dig—and find nothing.

  Yet another Oak Island theorist, Jeff Irving, had showed up at the end of season three of the show to declaim the proposition that while Henry Sinclair had come to the island in 1398, he was only working as an advance scout for Christopher Columbus, who had actually installed the Ark of the Covenant in the Money Pit vault. Henry the Navigator got worked into Irving’s narrative, as did the Zeno brothers, who, as part of a secret Templar plan to bury the treasures of Solomon’s Temple on Oak Island had come to Nova Scotia, married aboriginals, and disappeared into their tribe.

  BY THE TIME I ARRIVED in Nova Scotia, I had become determined to find some middle ground. After all, these people were not only paying me for coming here, but they were also covering all of the costs of my research and personal expenses. They’d given me a decent room in a resort right on Mahone Bay and a brand-new Jeep to drive. In return, I owed them at least a good faith effort to serve the show.

  That quite possibly had more than a little to do, I realize now, with my growing interest in the subject that had received the third-most screen time during The Curse of Oak Island’s first three seasons: the theory that Francis Bacon and his followers were behind the works on Oak Island.

  This was a theory tethered—at some points, at least—to historical evidence. The people who had promulgated it may have veered off into esoteric, eccentric, or maybe even simply crazy tangents, but even those were connecting dots that actually existed. As with the Knights Templar, I began with what could be most reliably known about Bacon: the official history, so to speak. I was quite fascinated by how much struggle, suffering, intrigue, treachery, and pathos even this version of Bacon contained.

  He was born in 1561, the son of Sir Nicholas Bacon, who would serve as Lord Keeper of the Great Seal under Queen Elizabeth. Bacon was twelve when he entered Trinity College at Cambridge, where he developed the convictions that formed the basis of what is most widely considered his greatest legacy, the modern scientific method. While he was a student in Cambridge he rejected the strictures imposed on scientific inquiry by preconceived notions; in particular he objected to any compulsion to fit one’s observations into the limits of religious dogma.

  At nineteen, Bacon declared that his goals were three: to uncover truth, to serve his country, and to serve his church. A year later he won election to Parliament and at twenty-five was made clerk of the Star Chamber, the collection of privy councilors that effectively operated as the supreme court of sixteenth-century England. By the time he turned thirty, Bacon was widely known for his opposition to feudal privileges and religious persecution and had acquired the reputation of a liberal reformer. He fell in and out of favor with Elizabeth, who denied him the positions of attorney general and master of the rolls, but was much favored by her successor James I, who made Bacon his solicitor general in 1607, his regent in 1617, and his lord chancellor in 1618.

  From this great height, Bacon would fall hard and fast in a scandal orchestrated by his longtime archnemesis Sir Edward Coke, the leader of the opposition party in Parliament, who accused Sir Francis of twenty-three counts of corruption based on his negligent management of debt and his practice of accepting gifts from the litigants who came before him. Bacon was fined 40,000 pounds and committed to the Tower of London, but James let him remain in the tower only a few days and remitted the fine. Nevertheless Parliament declared Bacon ineligible to hold future office or to sit in their company. He narrowly avoided degradation, which would have stripped him of his titles of nobility. At the age of sixty, he withdrew from public life to devote himself to study and writing. Five years later, on April 9, 1626, Bacon died of pneumonia contracted while studying the effects of freezing on the preservation of meat.

  THE OUTLINES OF BACON’S LIFE, of course, do not account for the enormous expansion of his posthumous reputation and the cult of devotion that would form and spread about his name and accomplishments. The process by which that happened seems all the more remarkable when one considers that in the early aftermath of his death, most of the historical revision was anything but flattering to Bacon’s memory.

  Much of this early writing focused on the question of Bacon’s sexuality. One of the earliest and for many years the most influential portrait of Bacon to appear between hard covers was in John Aubrey’s Brief Lives, written in the last decades of the seventeenth century. On the one hand, Aubrey portrayed Bacon as a martyr to science who had been journeying to Highgate with the King’s physician in April 1626 when he was struck by the idea that snow might serve as a meat preservative. Bacon and the doctor “alighted out of the coach and went into a poor woman’s house at the bottom of Highgate hill, and bought a fowl, and made the woman [disembowel] it,” Aubrey wrote. It was immediately after stuffing the fowl with snow that Bacon had contracted his fatal case of pneumonia by Aubrey’s account: “I remember Mr. Hobbes told me, he died of Suffocation.” This was the great philosopher Thomas Hobbes, a close Bacon friend.

  The restoration of Bacon’s reputation began with his literary executor, William Rawley, who declared Bacon’s genius by editing and publishing his many works. Of these, Novum Organum was especially influential in the years after Bacon’s death. Bacon’s insistence on empirical evidence and the search for the essence of
a thing by a process of reduction made him a hero of the Restoration. In 1733 Voltaire would introduce Bacon in France as the “father” of the modern scientific method, and during the French Enlightenment the Englishman Bacon became more influential than the former icon of French science René Descartes. By the early nineteenth century Bacon was being hailed not only as the founder of the scientific method, but as the “Father of Experimental Philosophy” for his advocacy of inductive reasoning.

  Bacon was also becoming immensely admired for his writings on legal reform. As early as the seventeenth century Sir Matthew Hale had acknowledged Bacon as the inventor of the process of modern common law adjudication. By the nineteenth century, Bacon’s Verulamium was being described as the basis of France’s Napoleonic Code, while in England there were many who were saluting Bacon as the founder of modern jurisprudence. Thomas Jefferson declared that Bacon was one of “the three greatest men that have ever lived,” along with John Locke and Isaac Newton. By 1861 historian and biographer William Hepworth Dixon was writing: “Bacon’s influence in the modern world is so great that every man who rides a train, sends a telegram, follows a steam plough, sits in an easy chair, crosses the channel or the Atlantic, eats a good dinner, enjoys a beautiful garden, or undergoes a painless surgical operation, owes him something.”