The Curse of Oak Island

by Randall Sullivan

  Extraordinary, outlandish even, as the Bacon theory of Oak Island might seem, he was one of the few men in the history of the human race who might have been capable of imagining and accomplishing what had been done on the island, and in fact some of his published work came close. We had to at least consider it.

  I described the ways in which Bacon had been connected to the New World and to the Atlantic coast of Canada in particular. Sir Francis had been a partner in private enterprises that had established early North American colonies in Newfoundland and Virginia. Newfoundland, in fact, had in 1910 issued a stamp that commemorated the three hundredth anniversary of Bacon’s role in the founding of the province’s first colony, printed with a salute to Sir Francis as “the guiding spirit in the Colonization Schemes in 1610.” One of Bacon’s closest associates had been Sir William Alexander, the Scottish poet and philosopher who had given Nova Scotia its name.

  Then I finished by explaining that I had first started thinking seriously about the Bacon theory when I considered something Dan Blankenship had said to me back in 2003, and that I had used in the Rolling Stone article: “The people who did the original work on this island were the most brilliant sons of bitches in the history of the world.” Francis Bacon may very well have been the most brilliant, I said.

  I felt afterward it had gone well. At the least, I’d brought hard evidence and solid research into the more esoteric elements of the second most popular theory about the mystery of Oak Island.

  Several cast members approached me to say they thought they knew pretty much all there was to know about Oak Island and were amazed by how much I’d told them that they didn’t know. They found the Betty McKaig story especially powerful.

  So naturally it came as a surprise to me when the show used absolutely none of it.

  Weeks would pass before I learned that this hadn’t been because of me or even because of the fairly arcane details of the Bacon theory. It had all been about the Norwegian Shakespeare researcher who’d first visited the island back in 2003, Petter Amundsen.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  Petter Amundsen had come back to Oak Island in 2014, during season one of The Curse of Oak Island, to follow up on excavations he had done with Fred Nolan’s permission eleven years earlier. While on the island, he had helped the producers build the platform that launched what was arguably the most dramatic moment of the show’s first three seasons.

  In 2003, Amundsen would explain to me, his entire focus was on the Cabalistic Tree of Life that he believed extended from Nolan’s Cross. The Tree of Life was an intrinsic aspect of the kabbalah, the ancient Jewish mystical tradition of Bible interpretation. The cabala was a Christian reconfiguration of the kabbalah that linked Jesus to the ten Sephirot (divine emanations) that formed the branches of the Tree of Life. The Rosicrucians had adopted it, according to Amundsen, and of course the leader of the Rosicrucian movement had been Francis Bacon.

  When Amundsen, who made his living as the organist at the Evangelical Lutheran chapel in the Holmenkollen section of Oslo, Norway, tried to explain how he had arrived at his Tree of Life theory, his process sounded so abstruse that it made Betty McKaig’s seem succinct by comparison. It was rooted in the same basic Baconian theory, though, and included the belief that Sir Francis had been the actual author of the Shakespeare plays. Amundsen also had used a sky-to-land projection that involved the Northern Cross in the Cygnus constellation.

  When I asked if he felt he owed a debt to McKaig, however, Amundsen’s denial was suspiciously circuitous. While he would concede that McKaig had “introduced me to the possibility that the stone triangle could have an astronomical significance” and that a projection from the sky to the earth might be the key to solving the Oak Island mystery, and he had included McKaig’s work in a pamphlet he provided to Triton Alliance in 2003, he had “since come to disregard her input,” Amundsen told me. He had not had his own star map interpreted until 2005, Amundsen noted.

  So Amundsen was contending he had no star map in 2003? “When I was at Oak Island in 2003 I only had the Tree of Life element in my pocket,” he replied, “and the observation that the Northern Cross part of Cygnus resembles Nolan’s Cross, which I linked to the Sweet Swan of Avon [Shakespeare], not knowing that this is ‘New Temple of God’ read backwards with the Greek-Latin cipher.”

  When I heard this I shook my head and smiled, imagining how Fred Nolan—and Dan Blankenship especially—must have reacted to Amundsen’s theory. It was clear, however, that Dan at least had been mightily impressed by the way the Norwegian had gone about confirming his ideas.

  After Amundsen conducted a survey that overlapped the one by which Nolan had found his cross, he announced that they should dig at the exact spot on Oak Island where he believed the Kingdom Sephirot of the Tree of Life lay. They needed to scrape away only about five centimeters of soil, Dan Blankenship had told me, before discovering a “very unusual red granite rock.” That rock was curved like a seashell on one side, with a nearly perfect flat edge that was ideal for placing it in an upright position. Amundsen had pointed out three dots on the rock that may or may not have been man-made, Blankenship said, that did seem to form an almost perfect isosceles triangle.

  This had been enough to win Amundsen the continuing cooperation of both Dan and Fred Nolan (and getting Fred to cooperate, as everyone who had dealt with the man knew, was never an easy task), who would allow Amundsen to film on his Oak Island property during the production of a documentary that in 2009 would run in four episodes on Norway’s main national television channel, NRK. “Shakespeare’s Sweet Swan of Avon,” was the title’s English translation. I thought Shakespeare was the Sweet Swan of Avon, I told Amundsen. “Yes and no,” he told me, declining to elaborate.

  By the time Amundsen returned to Nova Scotia to appear on The Curse of Oak Island in 2014, his theory had grown even larger and more complex. It still centered on Francis Bacon, but now it included the “coded map” he had created from the ciphers found in the Shakespeare plays. He had relied on the First Folio, in which the misspellings and the misordered pages were the key to unraveling the code, Amundsen explained, and revealing the map that “takes you up in the sky and brings you down on Oak Island.” After describing the Tree of Life and the ten Sephirot (Crown, Wisdom, Intelligence, Mercy, Justice, Beauty, Victory, Glory, Foundation, Kingdom), Amundsen explained to the Laginas that his calculations had convinced him that the Mercy Point was the key location where access to the Oak Island treasure might be found. The Mercy Point turned out to be in the island’s swamp, which was the beginning of the continuing comic relief on the show provided by Marty’s abhorrence of the foul-smelling marsh.

  First Amundsen had the Laginas dig for the Kingdom Stone he had found in 2003. The first rock the brothers dug up was not right—”too small,” Amundsen said—but then Marty had spotted a larger stone, flat on one side. That was it, Amundsen declared, pointing out the three “slightly carved” triangle-point indentations. The brothers then rented an airplane for a flyover of Oak Island where they saw that if the “Kingdom” stone was added to the other stones that comprised Nolan’s Cross, a diamond shape was formed that aligned perfectly with the place where Amundsen said the Mercy Point would be found.

  Back on the ground, as the Laginas said goodbye to Amundsen, the brothers promised him they were committed to searching the Mercy Point and seeing what might be found there. This had led to the climactic scene of The Curse of Oak Island’s first-season finale. The drama was all built on whether they would continue the Oak Island treasure hunt (and of course the show). Rick was inclined to keep going, but Marty was beginning to wonder what the point of it all might be. They needed to find something to keep him with them, Marty told the rest of the cast.

  An expert named Steve Zazulyk was brought in to operate his Lorenz Deepmax X6, an advanced piece of high-tech metal detection equipment that would probe the area where Petter Amundsen had said the Mercy Point would be found. Zazulyk’s machine found
nothing at first; the display screen on which the presence of nonferrous metals would register in orange or red was blank. Then suddenly the screen filled with what Craig Tester’s stepson, Jack Begley, called “mountains of red.”

  Minutes later, as Zazulyk and Marty Lagina were probing the bottom of the swamp with their hands, up to their necks in the mucky water, they had simultaneously felt the object that Marty lifted out into the open air. It was a copper coin with an 8 inscribed on it, a Spanish maravedi (“piece of 8”) from the 1600s. On camera, Marty would call it “probably the most valuable thing ever found on Oak Island.”

  This was not true. Back in the mid-1960s, Peter Beamish, the teacher who’d revived Andy DeMont and Edward White after they were pulled from the shaft where the Restalls had died, had led a party of nineteen students from Phillips Academy through an electromagnetic survey of Oak Island that had produced, among more than three hundred other metal objects, a maravedi coin dated 1598. Any number of other old coins also had been found on the island over the years.

  Still, it was an affecting moment when Marty presented the coin from the swamp to Dan Blankenship, who had choked up on camera as he turned the maravedi in his gnarled fingers. “That’s the first thing I’ve held in my hands,” in forty-eight years. “The real evidence,” he declared.

  That final episode of season one, titled “The Find,” had been the determining factor in the decision to film a second season of The Curse of Oak Island. The last scene was shot in the War Room, where the implications of the coin’s discovery were discussed. Dan, of course, felt it confirmed his suspicion that the Spanish had done the original work on the island. But there were other possibilities. In the seventeenth century, coins crossed borders far more easily than today. The English used Spanish coins, and the Spanish used French coins. Pirates had called the maravedi “the treasure coin.” Wasn’t it even possible that a Spaniard could have dropped the coin while digging in the Money Pit to find the Templar treasure long before the Pit’s 1795 “discovery?” the show’s narrator asked.

  While almost everyone agreed they wanted to keep the treasure hunt going, it came down to Marty, who as the man with the money would have the final say. “Well, I was sort of playing this in my mind,” he said on camera. “There’s a bunch of these guys, they go out, they spend a bunch of money, they bust their asses, they’re up to their necks in the swamp, then at the end of their summer quest, they find a pirate coin. And then they quit.” As the others laughed with relief, Rick raised Marty’s hand, making the vote to continue unanimous.

  It had been a rousing conclusion to the first season of the show, made better by the History Channel’s decision to order a second series of episodes. Only when I arrived on Oak Island during the shooting of season four did I learn that both of the Lagina brothers were nagged by the suspicion that the maravedi had been planted at the Mercy Point by the producers of The Curse of Oak Island.

  It was the only subject on which I heard both the brothers speak with one voice. Without me bringing it up, Rick and Marty had each, in separate conversations, told me that they’d intensely questioned Kevin Burns and the other producers about their suspicions. “It just seemed a little too convenient,” Marty said. The producers had adamantly denied it and the Laginas had accepted those denials, but they had also told Burns that if they ever found out the coin had been planted, the show would end immediately. I told them that what I knew of the producers had convinced me they would never go along with such a deception, and both brothers appeared happy to hear it.

  A second Baconian theorist arrived from Scandinavia during the show’s second season. He was a Swede named Daniel Ronnstam who asserted that the message carved onto the inscribed stone actually bore two messages: “a double cipher.” After explaining how his cipher disk worked, Ronnstam had undertaken a revisionist critique of the dubious translation performed by Dr. Ross Wilhelm in 1971; the main mistake Wilhelm had made, according to Ronnstam, was failing to use the Spanish alphabet rather than the English. Then Ronnstam revealed his own translation of the more deeply encrypted message on the inscribed stone: “At 80FT Guide Corn, Long Narrow Sea Inlet Drain: F.” It was very nearly identical to the message Wilhelm had found, the only real difference being that Wilhelm had said the F stood for Felipe, king of Spain, while Ronnstam said it stood for Francis Bacon. The similarities between Wilhelm’s decryption and Ronnstam’s went unmentioned on the show but it did add to the sense that the production was committed to running the Bacon theory alongside the Templar one.

  What I didn’t know when I was watching the Ronnstam scenes was that he had been invited at the last minute to replace Petter Amundsen, who had become persona non grata across the entire production. Amundsen’s “betrayal” (as one producer called it) had arisen out of his relationship with a politically connected Nova Scotia marine biologist named Wynand Baerken. Very early in the production of the first season of The Curse of Oak Island, Baerken had become concerned about the cultural and environmental impact on the island and had taken that concern to the Member of Parliament who represented the Chester–St. Margaret’s District, Denise Peterson-Rafuse. She responded by writing a bill that called for placing Oak Island under the same “heritage protection” statutes that prevailed in the rest of Nova Scotia. “Then she and Wynand contacted me, hoping to seek my support,” Amundsen would explain to me more than two years later. “Which I gladly provided.”

  Amundsen told me he hadn’t offered to assist the passage of the legislation because he distrusted the Laginas and couldn’t have cared less about anything the brothers chose to do in the Money Pit area, “which is totally ruined anyway from earlier explorers.” His concern was for the mideastern part of the swamp, “because I believe in my rather fantastic theory,” he explained. “If they should accidently ruin such artifacts as I describe, then the consequences would be dramatic to say the least.” All Amundsen was hoping for was that an archeologist be consulted each time new operations were begun on the island. “In Europe, this is totally normal.” It certainly seemed reasonable to me.

  The Laginas, however, saw Amundsen’s cooperation with Canadian activists as an impediment to the progress of their work on Oak Island. Amundsen had stepped way over the line in their view when he obliged Baerken by encouraging a letter-writing campaign to Minister of Culture Tony Inces, who was blocking the Peterson-Rafuse bill. Amundsen contacted some “Norwegian Oak Island enthusiasts who supported the legislation,” he said, and “Rick was very unhappy when he found out about that.” Amundsen sent an email to Kevin Burns and Joe Lessard acknowledging that he had been lobbying for the bill. “I also expressed my understanding, should they need to prevent me from appearing in season two, to which I had been invited.”

  The dispute became moot when the Peterson-Rafuse bill was defeated in Parliament, and the special permission to dig on Oak Island remained intact.

  THERE WAS SOME IRONY at least in the fact that all of the most notable finds the Laginas had made during those earlier seasons had come from the swamp. Early in season one Dan Blankenship had explained to Rick and Marty that while there’d been a lot said about the metal stakes and wooden posts that he and Fred Nolan discovered in the swamp, the most significant thing they’d found were the stumps of old oak trees. What this suggested was that the swamp had at one point been dry land and was man-made, most likely by holding back the water with a cofferdam, digging out the triangle shape, then letting it fill with freshwater. It had always been an intriguing notion. Fred Nolan had been advancing a related theory in these past years: He believed that Oak Island probably had been two close but separate islands in the past and that at some point someone had sailed a ship between the two islands, then allowed it to founder and sink, before joining the two landmasses with what became the swamp. It tied in to Fred’s other theory that the Money Pit was a deliberate distraction and that the treasure was buried closer to the surface someplace else on the island. An arborist was brought in to examine one such stump tha
t the Laginas and their team managed to pull from the swamp. He could only say that it was hardwood and that he found it highly unlikely that it could have grown in water. Eventually the stump would be dated to between 1450 and 1640 by another expert who was absolutely convinced that the swamp was man-made.

  All of that had given the others enough leverage to overcome Marty’s objections and arrange for the swamp to be pumped out—or rather down. Pumping in the swamp truly was dangerous work; the pockets of hydrogen sulfide that produced the swamp’s rotten egg stench were highly flammable and running motors near them could have caused an explosion. Luckily, it didn’t, but unluckily the search for something of value in the swamp yielded no results—until the maravedi was discovered in the final episode of season one.

  Season two had begun with a trip to Global Marine Exploration in Tampa, Florida, a company that salvages coins from shipwrecks. The coin they’d found was no treasure—closer in value to a copper penny than a silver dollar, in point of fact, Global’s experts said—but after cleaning it they had been able to find a date on the maravedi: 1652.

  This information led to the only winter scenes of the show ever shot, with Rick and Marty dragging a sled loaded with the Deepmax X6 across the ice and snow to the swamp, accompanied by the machine’s operator, Dave Spencer. When Spencer began to get hits, they were of nonferrous metals, which meant possibly gold and silver but also copper. His graph was showing him a chamber or container of some sort about the size of the War Room tabletop, about 15 to 20 feet below the surface, Spencer said. It was either right at or very near the spot Petter Amundsen had selected as the Mercy Point.