The Curse of Oak Island

by Randall Sullivan

  The works authored by the pseudonymous Philalethes (Greek for “lover of truth”) would provide the most enduring descriptions of alchemical processes, and it was the Philalethes books that had most captivated Betty McKaig, Dawkins told me. There were actually two Philalethes who had authored published books on alchemy in the seventeenth century I would learn in between conversations with Dawkins, and neither of them was ever identified as Francis Bacon. The one with the more interesting story was Eirenaeus Philalethes (“peaceful lover of truth”), who historians almost universally believe was George Starkey, born in 1628 two years after Bacon’s death. Starkey, who had been born George Stirk, was a colonial American physician who for reasons not entirely clear had immigrated to London at twenty-two. Most believe the motive for the move was his wish to have greater access to materials and equipment and, especially, teachings that would further his alchemical experiments. In London, he changed his name and continued his medical practice while at the same time working tirelessly to develop what he called sophic mercury, the amalgam of antimony, silver, and mercury that he believed would dissolve gold into a mixture that when heated would produce the philosopher’s stone. He was enormously respected in his day for both his laboratory expertise and the formal scientific methodology he developed. Many credit him as the forerunner to and teacher of Robert Boyle, who is today regarded as the first modern chemist. Starkey was plagued throughout his life by the debts he accumulated in pursuit of his alchemical research, actually went to debtor’s prison twice, and died in the Great Plague of London in 1655, at just thirty-seven. The works he left behind, though, especially Introitus Apertus Ad Occlusum Regis Palatium, were enormously influential with readers who included not only Boyle, but also John Locke, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, and Isaac Newton. Newton was so taken with the Philalethes texts that he devoted much of the rest of his life to the study of alchemy and in fact produced many more pages on that subject than he did on his study of physics.

  The other Philalethes was Thomas Vaughan, a Welshman who made his living as a royalist clergyman and wrote under the name Eugenius Philalethes. He was a near contemporary of Starkey’s, born in 1621, seven years before the American, while Francis Bacon was still alive. Vaughan’s alchemy was more along the lines laid out by Paracelsus and he applied his skills mainly to the preparation of medicines, though he, too, was ultimately dedicated to producing the philosopher’s stone. While Vaughan’s personal story is less cinematic than Starkey’s, the Welshman was much more open about the sources of inspiration and knowledge, which was what, Peter Dawkins told me, had helped him and Betty McKaig to connect both of the Philalethes authors to Francis Bacon. Their mutual association with Samuel Hartlib was the key, Dawkins explained, because Hartlib was a devotee of Bacon’s who had joined the Invisible College created by Sir Francis as a young man and been instructed by him personally. That Starkey was also a member of what became known around the middle of the seventeenth century as the Hartlib Circle is one of the few things known about the man. Vaughan, though, was much more public about his association with Hartlib and also with the Rosicrucian order. The Welshman, who publicly proclaimed himself to be a member of what he called the Society of Unknown Philosophers, was the person who had produced the first English translation (in 1652) of the Fama Fraternitatis Rosae Crucis, the seminal Rosicrucian manifesto that was first published in Kassel, Germany, in 1614.

  Through the research she was conducting with the resources acquired from her physician patron’s library, Dawkins told me, McKaig had determined that both the seventeenth-century authors who had produced the Philalethes texts were disciples of Bacon who in large part had reproduced his unpublished alchemical formulas and writings. Out in California, putting all these pieces together, McKaig began to conduct her own alchemical experiments, following what she understood to be instructions that came directly from Francis Bacon. Dawkins, who first visited her in California in the mid-1970s, sounded truly moved as he described his experiences in McKaig’s laboratory. “The experiments were all being done in these flasks,” he recalled. “And I watched as she performed them. At one point she told me to watch this particular flask and out of nowhere, it seemed, there appeared a salamander.”

  Alchemical literature for centuries has used the salamander to symbolize the soul, and the production of them “in the shapes of fiery balls, or tongues of fire,” as Paracelsus put it, has been an essential aspect of the search for the philosopher’s stone. That they were magical creatures born of fire was a common belief for centuries. “The real truth is that the Salamander is no beast, as they allege in our part of the world,” Marco Polo wrote after his visit to the Orient, “but is a substance found in the earth.”

  The skeptics of our materialist age would point out that salamanders are associated with fire because they tend to dwell in rotting logs from which they emerge when the logs are thrown onto fires. “I am telling you that what I saw was a creature that was—well, I’ll just say what happened: Betty told me, ‘Wait, in five minutes it’s going to change into the Beating Heart of Jesus,’” Peter Dawkins recalled. “So I waited, and suddenly the salamander disappeared and in the center appeared a shape that didn’t make a sound, but beat just like a heart. She said, ‘That’s gonna go on for a couple of hours or so, and then we’ll go on to the next stage’ … Betty firmly believed she was on her way to the production of the philosopher’s stone. And so did I.”

  McKaig’s alchemical experiments were not being conducted only in the laboratory, Dawkins said. The work she was doing that may have been just as important, and that led her to Oak Island, was born out of the astronomical alchemy—”as above, so below”—first advocated by John Dee and perfected, according to Dawkins, by Francis Bacon. In one of the Philalethes texts that had been created by Bacon, McKaig said, she had discovered “a star map with instructions to project it onto the world globe,” as Dawkins recalled it. She was able to determine that the key marker was the star Deneb in Cygnus, which stood at the apex of a triangle—known as “God’s hand,” according to Dawkins—that pointed to a specific location on the face of the Earth, but the instructions about how to find the bearing that would determine this location were enciphered, McKaig explained. She spent weeks decoding that cipher, McKaig told Dawkins, and then performed the process of projection, which pointed to a spot in Nova Scotia. “But it wasn’t Oak Island,” Dawkins told me. He asked McKaig which star map—”star catalogues,” they were actually known as in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries—she had used as the basis of her projection. The Tycho Brahe star map published in 1602, of course, McKaig replied; it was by far the most accurate and respected of its time. No, no, Dawkins told her, he was fairly certain that Bacon had used an earlier star map, one created decades before Brahe’s. So McKaig performed a second projection, this time using the older star map, and this time God’s hand pointed to a tiny spot of land off the mainland of Nova Scotia in Mahone Bay—Oak Island. “Which Betty had never even heard of,” Dawkins told me.

  After reading everything she could find on the subject of Oak Island—and being especially impressed by Leary’s slim volume, The Oak Island Enigma—McKaig became convinced that she had found the exact location of the spot where Bacon’s followers had secreted his teachings for the benefit of those who would be living on Earth at the end of the present Great Age (there’s considerable debate among astrologers about when that will be).

  McKaig booked a flight to Montreal to meet with David Tobias, the man who seemed to control what happened on Oak Island. Her timing was not good. Tobias was invested in other ideas and associated the Bacon theory with Gilbert Hedden. Tobias and the Triton partners “either were not interested or did not believe her sufficiently,” Dawkins wrote to me in one email; he honestly wasn’t sure which.

  Discouraged, McKaig returned to California to press forward with her quest for the philosopher’s stone. “This was, like, the late 1980s,” Dawkins said. By then, people affiliated with the Francis Bacon
Foundation in Claremont, California, had become interested in McKaig’s work and someone affiliated with that group—Peter told me he didn’t know who—had arranged for her to receive a monthly stipend from what Dawkins knew only as “a company.” He believed it might have been a pharmaceutical company, but Betty was secretive about her financial dealings.

  “Betty really believed she was getting close” to the alchemical breakthrough she sought, Dawkins told me, “but then her house burned down, which destroyed not only her laboratory, but nearly all of her papers and records as well.” I asked him how the fire started. “Someone set it intentionally,” he answered. When asked who might have done it, he said, “Betty believed, and so do I, that it was a rival company that was concerned about how close she might be to success.” This sounded a lot like a conspiracy theory, I thought, but did not interrupt.

  After a brief period of reeling, McKaig had attempted to restart her work, Dawkins told me, but was feeling pressure from her benefactors to produce something useful. The reason he believed it was a pharmaceutical company is that her focus seemed to be on producing medicines. “Unfortunately, she began to use herself as a guinea pig, and I knew that was dangerous. I was concerned about her.” In 1990 or perhaps early 1991, McKaig had called him, sounding frightened, Dawkins remembered. “She told me, ‘Peter, I think I may have overdosed on mercury.’ She died just a few weeks later.”

  At almost that exact time, David Tobias began an extensive correspondence with the Francis Bacon Foundation in Claremont and the Francis Bacon Society in Surrey, England. Word of McKaig’s death and of her commitment to her work seem to have been the trigger. It was actually this correspondence that had gotten Tobias onto the idea that Francis Drake was the one who had supervised, on Francis Bacon’s behalf, the original works on Oak Island. How that would have worked, I’m not certain; Drake died thirty years before Bacon did. And I couldn’t ask David, because he had died in 2012.

  Still, through his contacts with the Bacon groups, Tobias did make connections to a pair of mining engineers who have become tied up in various Oak Island theories. One was Joachim Gans, a Bohemian engineer who Tobias said had been shipped across the Atlantic by Drake in the late sixteenth century, making him the first Jew to touch North American soil. That last part was true, but according to the histories I consulted Gans had actually been brought to Virginia in 1584 by Sir Walter Raleigh, as part of the group that founded the first English settlement in colonial America, on Roanoke Island off the coast of North Carolina. That settlement only lasted two years, however, before Gans and the other settlers, increasingly fearful of the native tribes, accepted an invitation from Drake to sail them back to England. So there was a Drake connection, but no record that I could find of the great seaman taking Gans to some other part of North America. Somehow, though, a story had grown up that Gans had been sent by Drake (or someone) with a company of Cornish miners that landed on the Bay of Fundy and made its way to Nova Scotia. The miners had not been heard from for two years, according to this story, and were supposedly on Oak Island during that period. Tobias clearly had been fascinated with the tale and so was I when Tony Sampson, the diver associated with The Curse of Oak Island with whom I enjoyed a couple of meals, first told me about it. Tony said he had read about it at the O’Dell House Museum in Annapolis Royal, Nova Scotia. When I phoned the museum, though, I was told by the public information officer that she had never heard the story before. She put me in touch with a woman she described as the foremost historian in the entire Bay of Fundy, who said that this story only existed, insofar as she knew, in some “fanciful histories” written about Oak Island.

  What’s known of Joachim Gans is that he joined the Royal Mining Company and moved to Bristol, England, where he gave Hebrew lessons to local gentlemen who wanted to read the Bible in its original tongue. Then the bishop of Chichester paid a visit to Gans, and on learning he was a Jew, demanded, “Do you deny Jesus Christ to be the Son of God?”

  “What needeth the almighty God to have a son?” Gans replied. “Is he not almighty?”

  His resulting trial for blasphemy made him famous—or infamous—and inspired Francis Bacon to use him as the model for the heroic Jewish scientist Joabin in New Atlantis. So there were connections of a sort between the men, but David Tobias was probably following a more promising path when he became interested in the engineer most often cited in Oak Island theories, Thomas Bushell.

  Bushell, who served as Britain’s chief mining engineer during the reign of Charles I, was famed for his expertise in the construction of underground water channels used in the flooding and pumping out of mine shafts. He was also a protégé of Francis Bacon’s. There is ample record of Bacon cultivating the mystic in Bushell, encouraging him to various esoteric pursuits that probably included alchemy, and sharing both his scientific knowledge and his experimental research with the young engineer. According to Bushell’s diaries, Bacon also ultimately entrusted him with his “dearest secret.” What that secret may have been is not certain, but it seems likely that it involved Bacon’s plan for the creation of a research institute modeled on Salomon’s House in New Atlantis. There are also references to “treasures” being entrusted to Bushell in the diaries.

  What’s known for certain is that shortly after Bacon’s death in 1626, Bushell was said to have spent three years as a religious hermit on a remote island off the west coast of England. According to certain Baconians, Peter Dawkins among them, what Bushell was actually doing during much of that time was supervising the construction of the works on Oak Island, in service to the memory of Francis Bacon. This seemed vanishingly unlikely, but again I didn’t interrupt Peter.

  It was unfortunate that Tobias had missed his chance with Betty McKaig, Dawkins told me, and more unfortunate still that he had lost interest in the Bacon theory in favor of one that involved Spanish gold. The loss he mourned most, though, was of Betty McKaig’s research and experimental notes. Those that hadn’t been lost in the fire, along with the new ones Betty had generated, Peter told me, disappeared after her death. He had never been able to learn what happened to these materials.

  All that McKaig had left behind was a single article written in 1985 for Baconia, a publication of the Francis Bacon Society. It was about Oak Island.

  I found McKaig to be an intelligent writer, but the subject matter was so arcane it was a struggle to stay with her. Part of this may have been that she was summarizing what had been an exorbitantly complex process of deciphering “Bacon’s subtle plan for marking out the boundaries of his New Atlantis,” as she described it. She had relied mostly on what were described in the article as “a number of discontinuous sequences couched in a mythological matrix featuring the classical deities so dear to Bacon’s heart” that she had found in the great man’s “masque works,” McKaig wrote, in particular the Philalethes texts. Many of these had correlated to various heavenly bodies, at least in McKaig’s reading. For instance, a line about how “the Red man and the White woman must be wed in the West” was interpreted as referring to the planets Mars and Venus “in a conjunction [a marriage] of Spica in Virgo” in the western sky.

  Eventually, using the star map Dawkins had suggested, she followed the other lines referenced in Bacon’s works to their connecting points and found she was looking at “three overlapping triangles resembling the sails of a ship, with the original hermaphrodite line serving as mast, and the curved line of the elliptic resembling the sails of a ship.”

  Once she had the various points that provided a bearing for the pointer of Deneb, it was a “simple mathematical formula” that had led her to the precise latitude and longitude of the “target,” as she called it, “a minuscule speck of land on the south coast of Nova Scotia called Oak Island.”

  To me, the most interesting part of the article had come near the end, when McKaig made reference to the stone triangle, which she described as “a great stone arrow, laid out in ancient beach boulders” that duplicated Bacon’s “celesti
al arrow” precisely, “including a 7-degree westward slant in the vertical ‘hermaphrodite’ line!” McKaig promised in her “next article” to explain what she had discovered about the stone triangle, but to my knowledge no such article had ever been written; it certainly had not been published.

  While it was difficult for me to fathom a mind that could have designed such a fantastically intricate scheme as the one McKaig described, I found it even more difficult to imagine the thinking of a person who believed she had unraveled it all. Still, it somehow had led Betty McKaig to Oak Island, a place Peter Dawkins said she had only discovered existed when she found that Deneb was pointing to it. If true, that was pretty astounding. I wondered if Peter, by suggesting a particular star map, had helped guide her to Oak Island, perhaps even without being aware of it, but he insisted that wasn’t so.

  When I had finished my Baconian research I felt certain that if nothing else I had fresh material for The Curse of Oak Island’s cast and producers. I would lay it all out for them in my War Room scene, which was to be the summation of my appearance on the show. To register the magnitude of Francis Bacon, I quoted the famous historian Will Durant, who had written: “The whole tenor and career of British thought have followed the philosophy of Bacon.”

  I used the star map Peter Dawkins had created for me as my main illustration and went through the story of Betty McKaig in considerable detail, explaining how widespread encryption and secret societies were in Elizabethan England, a time when the power of the Crown and the church were absolute and a man could easily lose his head for saying or thinking the wrong thing. As historian Michael Taylor had written, “Bacon resurrected the Rosicrucian Mystery School and the Freemasons, and injected new life into these secret fraternity societies so they became vehicles for the new Baconian philosophy of reason and scientific enquiry.” Peter Dawkins had pointed me to something Bacon had written under one of the “masque names” identified by Betty McKaig that involved using a treasure hunt as a form of spiritual instruction, turning the search for material wealth into the discovery of inner riches.