The Curse of Oak Island

by Randall Sullivan

  Bacon’s greatness was by then a given among the educated, but among some admirers his legend was taking on dimensions that exceeded human scale. There was near-unanimous agreement that Bacon had been one of the authors of the King James Bible—some said the main author—but many of those who had studied him most closely contended that Bacon had also been, among many other things, the founder of the British Royal Society. That was a remarkable claim, given that the Royal Society had not been formally founded until 1660, thirty-four years after Bacon’s death, but the claim that the Society had actually originated in the circle that gathered around Bacon at Gray’s Inn was not without merit. Many extraordinary men had been part of that circle, including not only Ben Jonson and Thomas Hobbes, but the greatest physician of the period, Robert Fludd, and the greatest architect, Inigo Jones. It was among them and around Bacon that the idea of a group—the Invisible College—dedicated to “improving natural knowledge” had first arisen. The Elizabethan era was a time when men were contemplating the perfectibility of the human condition, to be brought about by full development of human faculties and a deeper understanding of the laws of nature. Bacon and his circle—among whom he does seem to have taken his seat as first among equals—were the planetary locus of these ideas more than a century and a half before they spread across the Atlantic Ocean and inspired the men who invented the United States of America.

  Some of Bacon’s nineteenth- and twentieth-century admirers, though, were beginning to describe him as more than a genius. For them, he was taking on the aspect of a religious teacher and spiritual master. Some called him the founder of the Rosicrucian order, although he almost certainly was not. The author of the two manifestos that first appeared in Germany during the early seventeenth century and declared the Order of the Rosy Cross is widely agreed to have been Johann Valenin Andreae. A case can be made, however, and has been by any number of historians and biographers, including the estimable Frances Yates, that Bacon was the leader of an English movement closely associated with the Rosicrucians of the European continent. The modern Rosicrucian order based in the United States, the Ancient Mystical Order Rosae Crucis, claims Bacon as the “imperator” (master) of the order in both England and on the European continent during his lifetime. Other evidence connects Bacon to the founding of Freemasonry.

  There was no real dispute of Bacon’s greatness during the first 250-plus years after his death, only about what the degree of that greatness might have been. It was not until people began to claim that he had written the plays of William Shakespeare that the real controversy took hold.

  The contest over the authorship of the greatest body of literature in the history of the English language also did not exist during most of those first two and a half centuries. It may or may not have begun in 1785. Letters dated that year, supposedly written by the Reverend James Wilmot, described how in the course of researching a Shakespeare biography he had discovered that the bard had little if any education, owned no books, and did not mention the disposition of any literary works in his will. There was no convincing evidence that the actor from Stratford had ever written a word, the Wilmot letters asserted, not even a letter to the wife from whom he was apart much of the time. And he had not been eulogized as a playwright in Stratford at the time of his death. Francis Bacon had to have been the author of the Shakespeare plays, the Wilmot letters declared. It’s entirely possible those letters were a fraud perpetrated by the reverend’s sister, a notorious prevaricator. Anyway, they did not surface until the early twentieth century.

  The claim that Bacon had authored the works attributed to Shakespeare only certainly arose in 1856, when American playwright and scholar Delia Bacon (no relation to Sir Francis) produced an article for Putnam’s Monthly titled “William Shakespeare and His Plays: An Inquiry Concerning Them.” Delia Bacon, who had performed ten years of research under the sponsorship of Ralph Waldo Emerson, delivered the first public announcement of the claim that Shakespeare’s plays had been written by a “little clique of disappointed and defeated politicians who undertook to organize popular opposition against the government” through these works of imagination. This committee of writers had included Sir Walter Raleigh and Edmund Spenser, Ms. Bacon wrote, and was headed by Francis Bacon. One year later, Delia Bacon’s book The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakespeare Unfolded was published and stunned the English-speaking world.

  The author’s credibility was enhanced by the fact that she had been assisted by the inventor of the telegraph himself, Samuel Morse, who had advised her about Francis Bacon’s fascination with ciphers and the nature of encryption. Though there was a storm of criticism, the author received support from influential admirers, among them Harriet Beecher Stowe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Walt Whitman, along with Emerson, who would praise Ms. Bacon as “America’s greatest literary producer of the last ten years” upon her death in 1859, two years after the Shakespeare book was published.

  The Bacon-wrote-Shakespeare controversy was revived and expanded in 1888, when Minnesota congressman Ignatius Donnelly authored The Great Cryptogram, a book that generated an enormous cultural uproar with the claim that Francis Bacon alone had actually written Shakespeare’s plays and had filled them with secret codes (that Donnelly never fully deciphered). Donnelly was already famous for his book about the lost continent of Atlantis, which had been destroyed, he claimed, by a comet that scorched the Earth in prehistoric times, and an 1891 novel Doctor Huguet, about a liberal white intellectual who wakes up one morning to discover he has become a Negro and gets to experience racism firsthand, a book that was more than a half-century ahead of its time.

  During the decades that followed, the ranks of those who expressed public disbelief that Shakespeare had written Shakespeare’s plays grew to include Sigmund Freud, Mark Twain, Benjamin Disraeli, Henry and William James, Charlie Chaplin, and Orson Welles. So it was hardly a void into which Orville Ward Owen had entered in 1909 when he embarked on his quest to find the vault where Francis Bacon had hidden the original Shakespeare manuscripts. And there was certainly a foundation for Professor Burrell Ruth to stand on in the 1940s when he became the first to connect the never-found original Shakespeare manuscripts to Oak Island, where he’d come to believe that Francis Bacon’s followers had hidden them.

  It seems clear from their correspondence that over time Ruth convinced Gilbert Hedden that the Baconian theory was the most likely explanation of the works on Oak Island. In a letter written in 1967, Hedden advised a fellow treasure hunter that “I date the original work [on Oak Island] as about 1630 and I am convinced that the engineer who made the original layout had no intention of making a recovery in his lifetime, but intended to leave it for future generations.” Ten years later, after her husband’s 1974 death, Hedden’s widow, Marguerite, told an interviewer: “Gilbert was willing to believe the Bacon manuscripts might well have been in the Pit; he knew it had to be something precious because of the engineering job that was done there.”

  In the summer of 1952, when attorney Thomas Penn Leary from Omaha, Nebraska, visited Oak Island, Hedden briefly described the Bacon theory after the lawyer asked him what his favorite ideas were about the original works on the island. This was enough to inspire Leary to dedicate the next year to researching Bacon’s life. During that time he corresponded regularly with Burrell Ruth and absorbed many of the professor’s ideas. Leary seems to have been taken with Ruth’s interpretations of various markers, the stone triangle in particular, which both men would agree was intended to point toward the “truth” or “knowledge” that lay within the Money Pit. It was Ruth who directed Leary toward the record R. V. Harris had made of a workman named Baker who in 1937 had reported bringing up specks of mercury on a drill at the Money Pit. Leary put it all together in a thirty-six-Page booklet titled The Oak Island Enigma: A History and Inquiry into the Origin of the Money Pit that he paid to have published in 1953. Though it’s become an especially obscure part of Oak Island’s written record, it was the most detai
led and compelling exposition up to that point of the theory that Francis Bacon was the man behind it all.

  Reading Leary’s booklet led to the first time I saw any basis for taking the whole thing seriously. The Omaha lawyer had drawn heavily on one of Bacon’s lesser-known works, Sylva Sylvarum: Or, a Natural History in Ten Centuries. The detailed description of Bacon’s ideas about preserving manuscripts in mercury did seem curious, especially since Bacon didn’t really explain why one would want to preserve manuscripts in some underground vault for centuries. The directions in Sylva Sylvarum of how to create “an Artificiall Spring,” though, gave me pause. Leary made a compelling case that what Bacon had described was a very close match to the actual construction of the flood system that flowed to the Money Pit from Smith’s Cove: it should be made of a “Trough of Stone” with one end upon high ground and the other on low, that was covered with “Brakes” (which in Bacon’s day would have meant thickets of fern) over which was laid sand. All that was missing was the coconut fiber.

  It was enough to send me to Sylva Sylvarum to read this section of Bacon’s work, and when I did I was stunned to find that the first line in the instruction for the creation of a perpetual spring read: “Dig a pit up on the seashore.”

  I STARTED TO BACK AWAY from Leary’s argument because he had built the entire thing around his assertion that “the cumulative weight of the documentary verification that Shakespeare did not, and Bacon did, write the plays is … enormous.” I doubted that, but decided to at least take a look at the “documentary verification.”

  I first became aware that there was a purported Bacon/Shakespeare connection to Oak Island back in 2003, when Dan Blankenship told me about a fellow from Norway who was going to be arriving just a week or two after my departure to try to find evidence of his belief that the original Shakespeare manuscripts—written in Bacon’s hand, of course—were buried on Oak Island. In a later phone conversation I learned that the Norwegian—Petter Amundsen—had dug some holes on the island in locations that were connected to Nolan’s Cross. Dan sounded pretty impressed Amundsen had found a rock buried in the exact spot where he had said it would be. I didn’t have a lot of space for any of this in my Rolling Stone article, but what I heard from Dan was enough to persuade me to give some brief consideration to the Bacon-wrote-Shakespeare theory. I became quickly annoyed, however, by what I read. As near as I could tell, the main reason for saying that the William Shakespeare from Stratford-upon-Avon couldn’t have written the plays bearing the Shakespeare name was that he didn’t come from the right class background: this village bumpkin son of an illiterate glove maker was far too untutored and unrefined to have possibly produced such timeless works of literary art, various authorities had submitted. To me that sounded a lot like saying Bob Dylan couldn’t have grown up in northern Minnesota as the son of an appliance dealer named Zimmerman. Genius, as I understood it, wasn’t impressed by social barriers. So I cast the whole subject aside, gave Amundsen a brief mention in the article and forgot about the entire subject.

  After reading Leary’s booklet, though, I thought I should examine the “anti-Stratfordian” case, as it had become known, a bit more thoroughly. When I did, I had to admit these people made some compelling arguments; I could see why the likes of Twain and Whitman were impressed by them.

  There was no evidence that Shakespeare had ever attended school. Neither his parents nor his two daughters were literate; not one of them could so much as write their own names. No letters or signed manuscripts written by Shakespeare have ever been found. There are six “authenticated” Shakespeare signatures, which the doubters describe as having been written in “an illiterate scrawl,” and none of these signatures match the spelling of his name as it appears on most Shakespeare title pages, where his name was often hyphenated as “Shake-speare” or “Shak-spear,” pseudonyms, the doubters say, for the true author. The surviving documents that bear his signature establish him as a businessman and real estate investor but not as a writer. The will Shakespeare left after his death on April 23, 1616, was utterly mundane, and it makes no mention at all of his plays, poems, or papers. The only slight reference to a theatrical career was in connection to the money he left to some fellow actors for the purchase of mourning rings, and it was a clause inserted into the will after it had been written. There is no record of public mourning at the time of Shakespeare’s death, and no eulogies or poems memorializing him were published until seven years after his death, with the First Folio of his plays.

  To these hard facts the anti-Stratfordians had added that the absence of biographical information about Shakespeare was suspicious on its face; some went as far as to suggest that it indicates an organized attempt to expunge all traces of his life from the historical record, so as to conceal the true author’s identity. They contrast Shakespeare’s background to the familiarity in his plays with court politics, high culture, and sports that were only played by aristocrats: falconry, tennis, and lawn bowling. The Shakespeare plays mock the sort of social-climbing commoners that Shakespeare himself grew up among, say the doubters, who see upper-class snobbery in how often the common folk assembled into groups in those plays turn into mobs. There is more, but it grows increasingly tenuous. Still, there can be little doubt that those who say Shakespeare was not Shakespeare have made some telling points.

  The Stratfordian side, though, has an even stronger case. They say he was largely self-educated but most likely did attend the free Kings New School of Stratford that was only a half mile from his home, where instructors who were all Oxford graduates would have taught him Latin, the classics, and rhetoric free of charge. Contemporaries Ben Jonson and Christopher Marlowe came from backgrounds every bit as humble as Shakespeare’s, and no one doubts that they wrote the works that bear their names. And of course there is the funerary monument to Shakespeare in Stratford that depicts him with pen in hand, with an attached plaque saluting his talents as a writer. The anti-Stratfordians have claimed the original monument was a different image. But a painting made in 1748, before the monument’s first restoration, shows that it looks pretty much the same as it looks today. And the monument was specifically referred to in the First Folio on its publication in 1623.

  If there was some sort of conspiracy to turn a hapless actor into the front man for a committee of geniuses who actually wrote the Shakespeare plays, the Stratfordians have pointed out, it had to have been quite enormous. Ben Jonson, who published the First Folio, obviously would have had to be in on it; how else to explain his eulogy “to the memory of my beloved, the Author William Shakespeare” in which Jonson hails Shakespeare as a playwright, a poet, and an actor. William Camden, the foremost antiquary of the time, would also have had to be among the conspirators, because in 1605 he hailed Shakespeare as among the “most pregnant witts of these ages our times, whom succeeding ages may justly admire.” There are any number of others who would have had to be directly involved in the plot and countless others who would have been required to turn a blind eye to it. The more names accumulate, the more the whole thing strains credulity.

  For me, the most convincing evidence is the plays themselves. There is consistency to both thought and expression that make it obvious the plays are not the work of a committee, but of a single transcendent genius. That genius could have been Francis Bacon, or any one of the dozen or so other candidates who had been proposed over the years, but I saw no compelling reason to believe so.

  Neither do the overwhelming majority of American college professors who teach Shakespeare classes. In 2007, the New York Times published a survey of 265 of them who were asked if there was good reason to question Shakespeare’s authorship. Just 6 percent answered yes, though an additional 11 percent answered possibly. The other 83 percent said there was no basis for doubt.

  When I spoke to the people who have been most prominent among those who believe that the Shakespeare manuscripts are buried on Oak Island I heard repeatedly that academics have a vested interest in “the Shak
espeare industry,” and so by shielding the bard’s reputation were protecting their own livelihoods. This line of thought was a staple of Oak Island theorists, and I was as sympathetic to it as anyone with an Ivy League diploma could be. Still, when the pinheaded professors had facts and logic on their side, I had to give them credit for being scholars who might very well know more about the subject they had been studying for decades than I did after a few weeks of feverish research. I had found that that line of thinking was scorned as a sort of intellectual cowardice among all too many of the self-discovered authorities on Oak Island. Take J. Hutton Pulitzer, for example, who had rebranded himself as the “History Heretic” and expressed disdain for academic rivals who had spent $300,000 or $400,000 on their advanced degrees and “were still paying off student loans in their forties.”

  Anyway, I had come to the conclusion that I wasn’t going to be able to fully embrace a theory that required me to believe that Francis Bacon or anyone else had written Shakespeare’s plays. The best I could do was concede a remote possibility. But doubting Sir Francis had written the greatest theatrical works in the history of the English language didn’t necessarily preclude consideration of a Baconian connection to Oak Island.

  There was a line that Leary had pulled from Bacon’s will that kept coming back to me, the one in which Sir Francis had declared, “For my name and memory, I leave it to men’s charitable speeches, and to foreign lands, and the next ages.” It certainly sounded as if Bacon had imagined he would be rediscovered by people from faraway places in future times. It was enough of a tease to prompt a series of contacts with the people who, nearly four hundred years after his death, were the dedicated members of the Francis Bacon Society. To a person, they insisted that I had to make contact with Peter Dawkins, who for more than forty years had been the director of the Francis Bacon Research Trust. That was not an especially easy thing to do, but eventually I was able to reach Dawkins by phone at his home in England. It was only during the series of conversations that resulted that I began to understand that the Baconians were members of a religious sect.