The Curse of Oak Island

by Randall Sullivan

  Steele also tended to cherry-pick the written record—often including highly dubious sources to buttress her claim. She cited what Edward Rowe Snow had written in True Tales of Buried Treasure about “tales” of men silhouetted against fires on the island that had been seen in the early eighteenth century, whom she asserted were the operators of the “ground kiln.” Any reasonable person would have read Snow’s account as apocryphal. He cited not a single source, other than “tales” he claimed to have heard from people he didn’t identify. Worse was the enormous fuss Steele made over the fact that one of the pieces of wood that Robert Dunfield had pulled out of the Money Pit had been white pine. She seemed completely oblivious to the fact that nearly every treasure-hunting team attempting to get to the bottom of the Pit had built or rebuilt the cribbing reinforcing it. Almost certainly, the piece of pine was a fragment of that cribbing. Steele used the inconclusive Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution dye test as evidence that there was no flood system on the east-end drumlin, and echoed Captain Henry Bowdoin’s claim that the water was simply “percolating” not pouring into the Money Pit. I was certain there was no way she wouldn’t have known about the Money Pit dye tests conducted by Frederick Blair and Edwin Hamilton. It was possible that Steele didn’t know about the ice holes Dan Blankenship had spotted in 1979 and 1987, but it was impossible that she could be unaware of the various tests that had established water poured into the Money Pit at a rate of between four hundred and eight hundred gallons a minute. And Captain Henry Bowdoin’s false claims had clearly been a form of extortion or vengeance.

  It took me longer than it should have to realize that what Steele had offered as the strongest pieces of evidence for her theory actually disproved it. It was a line at the end of her naval stores narrative that did it. The South Sea Company “bubble burst” in 1720, she had written, and “Oak Island and the naval stores produced there was but one casualty among many ruined and abandoned enterprises.” The one piece of evidence on which Steele’s thesis rested was that letter from Thomas Harley about “some pretty island” in Nova Scotia (which has literally thousands of pretty islands). The Harley letter, though, had been written in December 1720, just as the bubble, as Steele described it, was bursting. No more such facilities were set up in Nova Scotia after that date, at least not by the South Sea Company or its partners in the British navy.

  The other “aha!” piece of evidence Steele had offered was a set of instructions for constructing a tar kiln used by Jonathan Bridger, surveyor general of His Majesty’s Woods in America, dated 1706. Those instructions stated that one should begin by digging a pit “eight feet deep, twenty foot wide at top, sloping towards bottom.” The Money Pit was more than 100 feet deep, which is to say at least twelve times as deep as Bridger’s instructions called for, and more deep than wide, which would have severely limited the supply of oxygen to feed the fire at the bottom.

  Steele had, however, done considerable research, making a good case to defeat the claim that the Money Pit was a natural sinkhole, the favorite theory of the most determined Oak Island skeptics. And Steele had discovered some interesting documents related to the South Sea Company’s involvement in the slave trade, which included human trafficking in Nova Scotia. In Lunenburg, during the years when it was becoming a major shipbuilding center, most of the well-to-do in town had owned slaves, Steele found. While there was no actual evidence to support her claim that those slaves had been manufacturing naval stores on Oak Island, her research did support the possibility that slaves might have been involved in the excavation of the Money Pit and the construction of the artificial beach on Smith’s Cove. Steele had devoted a good deal of research to the inscribed stone. Like me, she had concluded after looking at all the evidence that the stone must have existed. But she had accepted without reservation that the inscription on the stone was the rows of symbols that had been translated to read: “Forty feet below, two million pounds lies buried.” Those 2 million pounds, Steele asserted, were the capital allotted to the naval stores operation on Oak Island, and the inscription was a sardonic epitaph on that operation, written for some reason in code.

  Steele did help me find new information about the inscribed stone, however, in her mention of the long-out-of-print 1929 article “The Oak Island Treasure” by Charles Driscoll. Trying to find the Driscoll piece had led me to a research group headed by the Swedish Baconian Daniel Ronnstam that was attempting to locate the inscribed stone.

  The Ronnstam group had obtained a bit more information about Jothan McCully, finding records of his birth on January 19, 1819, in Truro and his death on September 9, 1899, also in Truro, where he had fathered ten children and worked at a train station when he was not employed on Oak Island. Ronnstam was convinced by the story (told by Charles Driscoll and subsequently repeated by others) that McCully in the early 1860s had taken the inscribed stone to his own home after the Smith family sold the house where it had been part of the fireplace, and that it was from there that the stone had been moved to Creighton and Marshall in Halifax. Ronnstam also had accepted the description of the rock as 1 foot thick, roughly cut into a 2-foot square. He and his team were pursuing the theory that the stone was today part of the foundation of a home on the south shore. They’d had no luck in locating it.

  During season two the production had undertaken a brief but quickly abandoned inquiry into the whereabouts of the stone that largely involved using Charles Barkhouse’s connections to Nova Scotia’s Masonic Grand Lodge, where the librarian agreed to scour the archives looking for information on Jothan McCully. The librarian reported back that there was no mention of the man, but he had found that a James Pitblado, whose profession had been listed as “drilling engineer,” had been a lodge officer at one point. But there was nothing further and no record of where the mysterious Pitblado and whatever he had plucked from that drill bit back in 1849 had gone. I suggested to the producers of The Curse of Oak Island that I could hook up with this group and join their search.

  The producers told me they already had their own team searching for the inscribed stone and I was told they had produced the first real leads to what had happened to the stone after the closing of Creighton and Marshall in the 1930s. That wasn’t a complete exaggeration, although most would date the last recorded sighting of the stone to 1909, when Henry Bowdoin had seen it. The two principals of Blockhouse Investigations, Doug Crowell and Kel Hancock, had obtained permission to explore the building on Upper Water Street that had once housed the bookbindery. With Charles Barkhouse and Marty Lagina’s son Alex in tow, they had joined up with Dr. Allan Marble, the former president of the Royal Nova Scotia Historical Society. After a search of the building’s basement, where the only really interesting thing they found was a boarded-up military tunnel, Dr. Marble revealed a recent conversation with the son of a former member of the nearby Halifax Club, who said his father had told him he believed a stone set into the floor of the club’s headquarters was the “90-foot stone” from Oak Island. The Halifax Club had been formed in 1862 and continued to operate as a hub of social activity among Halifax’s most prominent businessmen and women. It certainly seemed possible that some lore connected to the Oak Island stone might have been passed down through the decades. The group’s visit to the Halifax Club building, though, produced absolutely nothing. They not only found no one familiar with the story of the stone being built into the club’s floor, but they also discovered that the building was in the midst of a remodeling project. The construction supervisors had suggested looking in the basement, where a good many items had been removed for storage, but there was no sign of the stone.

  What we all were certain of was that the stone still existed; crushing it would have been pointless and because it was so dense that job would have been a difficult one, anyway. Even if it was found, though, I doubted the stone would reveal much; Harry Marshall’s 1935 description of the inscription as worn away by the bookbindery’s leather workers rang true. The chances were infinitesimal that we w
ere ever going to know for certain what the inscription on the stone had been. It was one more mystery of Oak Island that no one was likely to solve.

  Accepting the fact that after more than two centuries of search and exploration there was still more about Oak Island we didn’t know than we did made it difficult to issue definitive statements about anything connected to the island. I was prepared to say, for instance, that I thought Joy Steele’s theory was extremely unlikely, but I wasn’t prepared to say that it absolutely was not true, and likewise with the inscription on the stone. In one of our conversations, Rick Lagina had characterized Steele as “one of those people who really need to believe they’re right, and can’t consider any other possibilities. For people like you and me, though, it’s impossible to rule anything out, until we know we have the answer. And the only way to get that is to bring up whatever’s down there.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  The first time I ever spoke at any length with Rick, he told me that the only way he would continue with the show for another season “is if we find something significant this summer.” Only a day later, Marty ended a conversation with me about the endless stream of theories about Oak Island by saying: “The only thing that really matters is what we can find, see with our own eyes, and hold in our own hands.”

  I wondered if Rick would feel they had hit the mark of “something significant” with the maravedi and the coin and button found by Gary Drayton. I doubted it. And I knew Marty would say that all they had actually seen or held that summer were more clues that pointed in multiple directions. The younger brother in particular seemed to need verification of claims from the past, a sense that the stories they had been told could be trusted. Marty even refused to accept without reservation what had been written for more than a century and a half about the drainage system connected to Smith’s Cove. He and Rick and the others had all agreed that a search for some remaining evidence of that system, something that hadn’t been torn apart by Dunfield and those who preceded him, should be one of the summer’s major projects.

  They had begun with the same first step as so many others before them, the installation of a cofferdam that would block the tide from entering the cove and permit it to be drained. The Laginas and their partners, though, had access to equipment and technology that the members of the Onslow and Truro companies couldn’t have begun to imagine. In this case, that was an enormous system of inflatable rubber bladders that completely enclosed Smith’s Cove and gave the brothers 9,000 square feet below the high tide line that could be excavated and searched.

  A good deal of the digging was by hand and Jack Begley did a lot of it, not only without complaint, but with genuine enthusiasm. Jack was dealing with a medical condition that had forced him to drop out of college and spend the entire winter and spring recuperating, so I was pleased that he was the one to find the first coconut fibers beneath the sand and clay on Smith’s Cove, and it was gratifying as well when Dan Henskee looked at the fibers and announced this was the place to dig deeper. Henskee was supervising the excavation at the cove, owing to his memory of the undisturbed drainage system from thirty years earlier. Henskee’s elevated role was also due to Rick Lagina’s faith in him, one more thing I liked about the older Lagina brother. During one of our conversations, Rick and I each described cringing at the way Dan Blankenship sometimes spoke to “the other Dan” as if he were a simpleminded servant. Henskee sometimes struggled to express himself, but Rick and I agreed that he knew Oak Island as well as anyone alive and maybe better.

  The digging in the spot Henskee had selected gradually revealed stratified layers of soil that according to the consulting archeologist, Laird Niven, could only have been created by human beings. Niven also agreed with Henskee that the clay they were digging in was not native to the cove. When the shovels hit blackened wood, it was obvious the excavation had reached the remains of a wooden structure of some sort, most likely the one that Robert Restall had reported finding in his notes from 1964.

  Eventually, at a depth of about 5 or 6 feet below the surface, the digging had begun to expose what looked like a rock wall. When he saw that the stones were also in layers, stones of one size above and of another size below, Rick, who had constructed a number of rock walls back in Michigan, said the rocks looked fitted to him. Laird Niven was brought in to take a look and agreed that the wall was man-made. Eventually it became clear that the stones were the sides and the bottom of a long trench. Dan Blankenship came to take a look and declared that it was a French drain. The atmosphere was jubilant. Finding “original work” was the aim of every search effort made on The Curse of Oak Island, and Rick announced that he was certain that this was original work. No one, including me, was going to argue with him.

  During the work at Smith’s Cove, Robert Restall’s daughter Lee Lamb had made a return trip to Oak Island, presenting the “1704 stone” for inspection. “This is the Oak Island treasure,” Rick told her as he took the stone into his hands.

  Rick’s sentimentality had proven to be a key ingredient of The Curse of Oak Island’s winning formula, in large part because he wasn’t faking his feelings. References to “Rick’s big heart” were a refrain among the members of the show’s crew, who all respected him immensely. Rick had told me himself that he believed the emotional connections being made among the people involved in the production and in the treasure hunt itself “might be the real purpose of all this.” Rick also treated every person who approached him with a theory of Oak Island, even the most agitated crackpots, with unfailing courtesy. He said that since no one really knew what Oak Island was about he felt an obligation to listen with an open mind to whatever ideas people brought him.

  This was also, however, how Rick explained being open to what some would regard as fringe histories often featured on The Curse of Oak Island. There, he and I parted ways. I could see that Rick was a bit hurt and slightly offended by my rejection of the Templar theory. Within a couple of weeks of arriving in Nova Scotia I had given up arguing the case, but I truly had to bite my tongue when the La Formule cipher showed up.

  THE SHEAF OF DOCUMENTS and the map of Nova Scotia and Oak Island that included the La Formule cipher had been presented to the Laginas by Doug Crowell of Blockhouse Investigations. Crowell and his partner, Kel Hancock, were amateur historians who had spent twenty years investigating the various loose ends associated with the Oak Island treasure hunt. Though often the object of their investigations was obscure stuff that ultimately went nowhere, some of it, especially what had been culled from long-dead Nova Scotia newspapers more than a century old and public records from remote municipalities, provided rich texture to what had been bare-bones tales and legends. But when Crowell presented the Laginas with the story of a lady in New York whose investigation had followed the Templars from Jerusalem to France to Scotland to the New World, I reacted with a skepticism that bordered on suspicion. The woman, Zena Halpern, described the papers in her possession, claiming an associate of hers had discovered them tucked into the back pocket of a book she had been given several years earlier.

  These documents, Halpern said, were dated from 1178 to 1180 and described a Templar voyage to the northeast part of the North American continent, where their ship made landfall on “an island of oaks.” Then, “when I found the map, which is dated 1347, I began to put the pieces together,” Halpern explained to the Laginas. The mystery of the island, she revealed, was connected to African gold that had been under the protection of King David’s army commander Joab. How exactly the Templars had gotten hold of it, Halpern didn’t say.

  Halpern was best known up to that point for her association with the Burrows Cave, a purported hole in the ground that a man named Russell Burrows claimed to have stumbled upon—or into—while taking a walk through the Illinois countryside one April day in 1982. I say “purported” because in the thirty-five years since Burrows’s alleged discovery, he hasn’t allowed other people to take a look at his cave, out of fear, he has insisted, that it
would be ruined by looters if its exact location were ever known. What Burrows has done is present hundreds of the thousands of carved stones that he professed to have found in the cave to various archeologists and epigraphers (inscription scholars) including former Harvard zoology professor Barry Fell, whose studies of other stone artifacts have made him perhaps the most famous diffusionist in the United States, if often considered an outlier by his colleagues. Zena Halpern had herself become one of those who traffic in theories about the ways in which cultures all over the planet have been communicating and sharing since much further back in time than mainstream historians believe. Halpern was also among those who have embraced the claim that the Burrows Cave was filled with inscriptions written in Egyptian, Sumerian, Greek, Etruscan, and other ancient languages that were never spoken in North America. University-affiliated historians, on the other hand, including Barry Fell, have not only rejected but also openly derided Burrows’s claims. Fell publicly denounced the carved stones Burrows had given him as fakes and observed that one of them, the so-called elephant stele, had obviously been copied from his own book, America B.C. Halpern, though, had written extensively in defense of the Burrows Cave artifacts, publishing alleged translations of what some peer-reviewed scholars dismissed as gibberish.

  What most excited the Laginas when they took a look at Halpern’s “1347 map” were the various notations written in French on it. The body of land depicted was, as Marty correctly stated, “clearly Oak Island.” Written alongside various markings on the map were identifiers that included: “The Basin,” “The Marsh,” “The Dam,” “The Anchor,” “The Valve,” and, most intriguing, “The Hatch.”