Also by Randall Sullivan

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Copyright © 2018 by Randall Sullivan

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To Gabriel and Grace, whose searches, I hope, will all lead to discoveries.

Introduction

Thirteen years ago, I began an article for Rolling Stone magazine with these lines:

Can what’s buried beneath the ground on Oak Island possibly be worth what the search for it has already cost? Six lives, scores of personal fortunes, piles of wrecked equipment, and tens of thousands of man-hours have been spent so far, and that’s not to mention the blown minds and broken spirits that lie in the wake of what is at once the world’s most famous and frustrating treasure hunt.

Still a pretty strong opening, I’d say, and the question remains a valid one. The article was published in the magazine’s January 22, 2004, edition, and every comment I heard about it was positive. I was not entirely satisfied with the piece, however, especially as time passed. I knew I’d left things out; magazine deadlines force one to work fast and the limited space in the pages of any periodical compels writers to make tough choices and sharp cuts—or to let editors make those choices and those cuts for them. It was the nagging thought that I’d accepted the semiofficial legend of Oak Island without sufficient examination, though, that truly bothered me.

In the summer of 2010, I was working as the host of a show being produced for the Oprah Winfrey Network. Early on, Joe Nickell of the Skeptical Inquirer, perhaps the best known naysayer in the country, was brought in to be my on-camera adversary. Nickell had written an article that attempted to debunk certain “myths” surrounding Oak Island, and when we spoke briefly about this off camera, I was acutely aware that I wasn’t confident enough in what I knew about the historical record to refute some of what he was saying. That troubled me.

It also troubled me that I might have given some preposterous theories about what had taken place on Oak Island more than their fair due, while dismissing as outlandish at least one hypothesis that I had come to believe deserved serious consideration.

Oak Island had long been a Rorschach test for dozens of historical loose ends and broken threads, most of the major conspiracy theories and a good many of the minor ones, and just about every tale of lost treasure out there. The island drew obsessive-compulsives, crackpots, and the sincerely curious to it like no place on Earth. None of this changed the fact, though, that Oak Island was a genuine enigma and quite arguably the most mysterious spot on the planet. I wanted another shot at the place.

I got one in the late spring of 2016 when I received a telephone call from the producers of the astonishingly successful cable television series The Curse of Oak Island, inviting me to spend a month or so on the island while the show was shooting its fourth season in Nova Scotia that summer.

It wasn’t getting back on television that I looked forward to as much as getting back on Oak Island. That tiny dot of land off the coast of Nova Scotia haunted my imagination like no other place I’ve been. That July I headed back there for the first time since the autumn of 2003. I didn’t delude myself into believing I was about to solve the mystery. All I aimed for was to tell the island’s story in a more comprehensive and entertaining way than any who had gone before me. But of course, I told myself, one never knew what one might find when one started looking.

CHAPTER ONE

Oak Island sits off the coast of Nova Scotia just north of the 45th parallel, the halfway point between the equator and the North Pole, about forty-five miles southwest of Halifax. It’s almost a mile long and not quite a half mile wide at its broadest point, narrowing to only a little more than a thousand feet at its sunken center, which is filled mostly with swamp and marsh. The island is commonly described as peanut shaped, but when I’ve looked at it from above I’ve always seen a baby elephant, mainly because of the curve of an incipient trunk that protrudes from its east end, wrapping around the southern shore of a compact, crescent-shaped bay that was once known as Smuggler’s Cove. Small hills of glacial drift, known geologically as drumlins, rise to about 35 feet above sea level on both ends of the island. The composition of the island’s two sides is very different: on the east layered with limestone, gypsum, and sandstone, on the west mainly quartzite and slate. Because the geologic structures of the island’s east and west ends are so dissimilar, and because the swamp divides them, some theorists think Oak Island was once two islands, very close together, that may or may not have been joined by the work of men.

While there are more than 350 other islands in the churning silver-gray waters of Mahone Bay, it’s not difficult to imagine why this one would have stood out to the mariners of the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries. It is larger than most of the other dots of land in those waters and very close to shore, barely two hundred yards from a protrusion of the mainland that’s been known for the past two and a half centuries as Crandall’s Point. What most impressed the first Europeans to live in the Mahone Bay area, though, was that the island was covered with a magnificent forest of mature oak trees, with deep roots and stout trunks that supported massive, spreading limbs, leaving most of the ground in the shadow of their canopy. It may have been the only island in Mahone Bay where oak trees grew, and certainly it was the only island covered with them. Those trees were what gave the island its eventual name, though it was designated simply as Island No. 28 by Charles Morris, the surveyor general of the province, who between 1762 and 1765 conducted the first survey of the island and divided it into thirty-two four-acre lots. In 1776, a British cartographer named Des Barres attempted to name it Glouster Isle, but he was overruled by the locals’ insistence on calling it Oak Island.

The island’s oaks, growing so close to the mainland, were an especially attractive feature to the settlers who in 1759 accepted pieces of the hundred-thousand-acre Shoreham Grant that brought hundreds of men and dozens of families to the south shore of Nova Scotia from New England. They were mostly English and Welsh, with names like Monro, Lynch, and Seacombe, and populated a village they called Chester Township. On the south end of the bay, a mostly German and Swiss population was in the process of creating the great seagoing and shipbuilding town of Lunenburg, famous for the Georgian mansions topped with five-sided dormers that were the homes of sea captains in that epoch of tall ships. The settlers in the Chester area, though, were mostly farmers, plus a few ambitious souls who prospered by building and operating lumber mills. Most of the trees on the other islands of Mahone Bay and on the mainland as well were evergreen softwoods—spruce and pine predominated—making the island a primary source of hardwood timber. That a single island among the dozens in Mahone Bay should be covered with oak trees was for a period of sixty years or so the principal mystery of the place. The first to describe the island in print and to remark on its impressive forest of oak trees was a French nobleman named Nicolas Denys, who had helped establish LaHave, the settlement at the entrance to Mahone Bay, in 1632. Denys could conceive of no explanation for how the oaks had gotten there.

AMONG THE POINTS DRIVEN HOME by a study of Oak Island is how much of what we call history is hearsay and supposition, conflation and apocrypha. Even revisionists go back to the earliest written sources, created by men who were putting to paper what they’d heard from people who were themselves often repeating stories they’d been told by someone else. Historians since the time of Herodotus and Thucydides have been deciding what version of events to include and what version to leave out; readers can only hope they’ve chosen wisely.

If one person is identified as the first to discover the works on the island, the name Daniel McGinnis is almost unanimously put forward. As the story is told, McGinnis was sixteen years old in the late spring of 1795 when he rowed to Oak Island one fine morning to explore it, all alone. It was still early in the day, the story goes, when the teenager stumbled upon an unusual saucer-shaped depression in the earth, about 13 feet in diameter, on the elevated ground of the island’s east drumlin. The forked limb of a giant oak extended over the clearing, cut off at a point where its two branches were still almost as thick as a man’s thigh. Attached to the limb, about 15 feet above the ground, was a weatherworn wooden tackle block that was held in place with a wooden peg or “treenail” of the type used in the construction of wooden ships. Taking all this in, young Mr. McGinnis surmised that he had happened upon the hiding place of a pirate treasure.

During the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, when buccaneers terrorized shipping lanes across the globe, Mahone Bay had been one of the world’s great pirate havens. Tales of buried treasure were endemic to the region, but the legends that surrounded Oak Island were particularly ominous. According to several of Nova Scotia’s numerous amateur historians, the citizens of nearby Chester Township had for years shared stories of “strange lights” that glowed on the island after dark. Author Edward Rowe Snow, who embraced this bit of apocrypha as historical fact, wrote that a number of fishermen claimed to have seen on the island human figures “silhouetted against bonfires,” as one local chronicler put it. Eventually, Snow had written, two men overcome with curiosity had ventured out to Oak Island to investigate. They never returned.

Daniel McGinnis did make it back to Chester, according to the story, where he recruited two young friends, also teenagers—John Smith and Anthony Vaughan—to help him dig for the treasure he was certain must have been buried at this mysterious spot on Oak Island. The first thing the three did was attempt to remove the tackle block hanging from the forked limb of the oak tree. But it slipped off the treenail and fell to the ground, where it shattered into powdery fragments, suggesting to the boys that it must be very old. They went to work on the ground then, armed with pickaxes and shovels. They had reached a depth of only 2 feet, though, when they hit a tier of carefully laid flagstones. (They would later decide after some investigation that the rocks were not from Oak Island but instead had been moved there from Gold River, about two miles north on the mainland.) Eagerly tossing the stones aside, McGinnis and his friends found themselves at the entrance to a large shaft. The sides were made of hard, packed clay, but the earth inside was loose and easy to shovel. Driven by the excitement of discovery, the three dug within a few days to a depth of 10 feet, where they struck solid wood. Assuming they had hit the top of a treasure chest, the teenagers shoveled feverishly, only to discover that what they had found was a level platform of oak logs, all about 6 to 8 inches in diameter, the ends of which had been embedded in the walls of the shaft. Removing these, the boys kept digging over the next few days, clearing out the loose soil with a pickaxe, two shovels, a rope, and a bucket. When they hit solid wood for a second time at 20 feet, the three again dug feverishly, convinced that his time they really had found the top of the treasure chest. What they had struck with their shovels, though, was another tier of oak logs, with their rotting ends embedded in the sides of the shaft exactly as the logs at 10 feet had been. At that point, the three looked up at the walls of clay towering above them and realized that even a partial collapse would bury them alive. It was agreed that they needed to mount a much more substantial operation, involving both a far larger workforce and more expensive materials and equipment if they were to go deeper into the shaft.

The three youngsters bought land on Oak Island, as the story goes, where they supported themselves as farmers while making regular trips to nearby towns, seeking out men of means who might help them recover what they were calling Captain Kidd’s treasure.

I HAD RETURNED TO NOVA SCOTIA determined to test every major theory and to question all received wisdom about Oak Island. After four weeks of research, assisted by, among others, the Nova Scotia Archives, the South Shore Genealogical Society, and local historian Charles Barkhouse, I was convinced that the tale was mostly true. This is not to say entirely true. There were a number of details in the narrative that I either doubted or was convinced couldn’t be right, and several others that I believed might be embellishments added as the story was told and retold.

For the moment, I was leaving aside the deeper mystery of who was behind the works on Oak Island and concentrating instead on the story of how those works had been discovered. Even then, the best answers I could find to my questions about who, what, and when were so unclear that nebulousness may have been their most defining feature. At least I didn’t have much doubt that the first to find the massive hole in the ground, now world-famous as the Money Pit, had been the young man Daniel McGinnis. While McGinnis himself was dead by the time the treasure hunt on Oak Island hit high gear in the mid-nineteenth century, his former partners, Vaughan and Smith, had been alive to describe what took place on the island in the early days—dating back to the discovery of the Money Pit—to those who produced the earliest written accounts. Both said there was no question Daniel was the first to spot the features that had inspired the three of them to start digging. Who Daniel McGinnis had been, though, was still a puzzle with a lot of missing pieces to me.

McGinnis was described as “an enigma” by R. V. Harris, the lawyer whose 1958 book The Oak Island Mystery had made the Money Pit story known outside Nova Scotia: “His age in 1795 is unknown. His origin and parentage is unknown.” So where had the story of the sixteen-year-old boy who discovered the Money Pit come from? From Anthony Vaughan, mostly, it seemed. Vaughan, an old man by the time his memories were recorded for posterity, had been a main source for the first published account of what had taken place on Oak Island, which appeared in the October 16, 1862, edition of the Liverpool Transcript, a now-defunct weekly newspaper that was distributed throughout southwestern Nova Scotia during the mid- and late nineteenth century. Vaughan had actually told his story at length more than twelve years earlier, in an 1849 interview with a devout Presbyterian named Robert Creelman, who was a member of a treasure-hunting group known as the Truro Company. The author who made use of the Creelman interview for the Transcript article was Jothan (sometimes called Jotham) B. McCully, who had been part of both the Truro Company and the Oak Island Association, separate treasure-hunting groups that had worked on Oak Island between 1849 and 1865. McCully may also have written the second and far more detailed published account of the discovery of the Money Pit, which appeared in three consecutive editions of a Halifax triweekly called the Colonist in January 1864, although the author was identified only as a “member” of a team that had searched for treasure on Oak Island in 1861. The Transcript and Colonist articles each had relied on interviews with John Smith (who died in 1857) as well as those Creelman had conducted with Anthony Vaughan, but Smith apparently had been more taciturn than his old friend. Not so Smith’s daughter, Mary, who worked as the housekeeper for Judge Mather Byles DesBrisay, the county magistrate and local eminence who authored History of the County of Lunenburg (originally published in 1870), which included a two-page account of the discovery of the Money Pit that was the first to appear between hard covers. Mary Smith, apparently quite voluble, had told Judge DesBrisay the story from her family’s perspective on multiple occasions.

Those three accounts, published sixty-seven, sixty-nine, and ­seventy-five years after the putative date of the Money Pit’s discovery, were the core versions of the Oak Island story before Harris’s book was published. There were of course various documents and records dating back to the early nineteenth century that related to the assorted treasure-hunting companies that had formed to attempt the recovery of whatever might be buried on Oak Island. And the scene at the Money Pit had been briefly described in an 1863 volume titled Rambles among the Blue-Noses, written by British author Andrew Learmont Spedon, whose aim was to amuse the people back home with tales from the provincial wilds of eastern Canada. There was also an account of the discovery of the Money Pit written in 1866 by one Israel Longworth, but his work, “History of the County of Colchester,” had never been published. And only a fragment remained of a manuscript written in 1863 by another early treasure hunter, James McNutt, that described the early search for treasure on Oak Island.

So the early story of the treasure hunt on the island was based largely on the recollections of Anthony Vaughan and Mary Smith, along with various others who claimed to have heard it from Daniel McGinnis and John Smith. This paucity of sources and questions about their reliability have fueled rampant speculation about what really happened on Oak Island in those early days, everything from the allegation that the three young men cooked up a story to cover their tracks after finding a huge treasure trove on Oak Island to the claim that McGinnis, Smith, and Vaughan were the front men for a conspiracy of Yankee loyalists operating a smuggling operation out of Oak Island during the Revolutionary War. The evidence offered to back up these and the dozens of other alternative theories of what took place on Oak Island in the last years of the eighteenth century is of course even more meager than the evidence that supports what has become the more or less official version.

R. V. Harris wrote in The Oak Island Mystery that most of what could be actually known about Daniel McGinnis’s background had to be derived from “the origins and lineages” of Vaughan and Smith, whose family histories were much easier to find in Nova Scotia’s early public records. In my opinion, no one was in a better position to make such an assertion than Harris, who had served as the attorney to the two men who drove the treasure hunt on Oak Island for seventy years between 1895 and 1965 and who had inherited and relied on the vast collection of records and documents that now made up the bulk of the huge Oak Island file at the Nova Scotia Archives in Halifax. So I took his advice.

I began with Vaughan. Government and church records established that he was the son of an Anthony Vaughan Sr., who had come to Nova Scotia from Massachusetts in 1768 to claim his piece of the British Crown’s Shoreham Grant: two hundred acres on the mainland almost directly across from Oak Island. Anthony Vaughan Jr. was thirteen years old in 1795, which offered at least some tangential confirmation that his friend Daniel McGinnis probably had been a teenager also. Judge DesBrisay, in his book, described Vaughan and his family as living on the mainland in 1795 and that jibes with what other early writers up to and including R. V. Harris have maintained. But there was little question in my mind that the boy’s family owned land on Oak Island well before the discovery of the Money Pit. There are deeds that show Anthony Vaughan Sr. acquired lots 15 and 17 on Oak Island in 1765 (which wouldn’t seem possible if he had emigrated to Canada in 1768) and lot 14 in 1781. One of Vaughan Sr.’s brothers bought lot 13 in 1781. It is also clear that the Vaughans were operating a lumber mill on the mainland directly across from Oak Island. In 1788 they petitioned the Surveyor General of Woods in the province of Nova Scotia for permission to cut down “Sundry Pine Trees” on nine hundred acres of land for the purpose of farming the land and milling the trees. So there seems little doubt that by 1795 the Vaughan brothers were using or intended to use the trees on their Oak Island properties as timber for their mill and that Anthony Vaughan Jr. must have had some familiarity with the island.

John Smith was almost certainly living on Oak Island in 1795. In fact, he may have been born there, but it appears more likely that he moved to the island in 1786 at the age of eleven. Born on August 20, 1775, he would have been nineteen years old in the spring of 1795 (more support, in my mind, that Daniel McGinnis really was sixteen years old or so at that time). Smith’s family, like Vaughan’s, had come to Mahone Bay as part of the Shoreham Grant immigration. An Edward Smith, who was most likely (though not certainly) an uncle of John Smith’s father, had acquired the title to Oak Island’s lot 19 on March 8, 1768. John Smith himself made a first appearance in the public record on September 28, 1790, when he married (at age fifteen!) one Sarah Floyd. He next publicly registered his existence on June 26, 1795, when he purchased lot 18 on Oak Island from a Chester merchant named Casper Wollenhaupt for £5. It was the plot of land where the Money Pit was located. That purchase seems to have been the main basis for the claim that the Money Pit had been discovered in the late spring of 1795, the assumption being that Smith had bought the property to secure access to the presumed treasure. Not unreasonable, but far from conclusive.

But back to Daniel McGinnis. I was distracted briefly by the claims of a handful of amateur historians (and the subject of Oak Island is beset by literally thousands of amateur historians) who doubted that such a person as Daniel McGinnis had actually ever existed, their claim being that the Smith and Vaughan families had used this fictional character as a front to cover their own secretive activities on the island. Judge DesBrisay had described Daniel McGinnis as one of the earliest settlers on Oak Island, but there is no record of anyone named McGinnis owning property on the island prior to 1795. Some of the doubters pointed out that there was no Daniel McGinnis listed in the records of the poll tax imposed on Nova Scotians by the British Crown in 1791, but that merely suggested to me again that McGinnis probably had been a teenager, because only those over the age of twenty-one were required to pay the poll tax and therefore would be listed in the Crown records. Others who questioned whether McGinnis was a real person also pointed out that no grave marker with his name had ever been found in Lunenburg County. The early newspaper accounts, though, had described McGinnis as having been buried on Oak Island, and there is to this day a collection of rocks on the drumlin where the Money Pit is located that could very well mark his final resting place. A shard of broken stone from that pile was found to have letters and numbers that could have been consistent with the name, the date of birth, and the date of death of a Daniel McGinnis. On top of that, records existed of various McGinnises living on Oak Island throughout the 1800s. And on the southwest end of the island were the remains of the foundation for a home that had been described since the beginning of the twentieth century as the “McGinnis place.”

Finally, I consulted a volume titled Families of Western Shore, recommended to me by the South Shore Genealogical Society as the most accurate source available. There was a lengthy section in the most recent edition of the book on the “McInnis-McGinnis” clan that began in the late eighteenth century and ended in the late twentieth, when the book was published. The first entry described the arrival in Nova Scotia of a Donald Daniel McInnes, a “Planter” of Welsh descent, who came to Chester from New England with, among others, “the Vaughan Brothers” in or around the year 1772. McInnes (whose family name became McGinnis at some point before the end of the eighteenth century) was described as having “settled on Oak Island.” The only confusing entry was one showing that McInnes had been awarded a Crown grant of one hundred acres near Chester in 1784, which suggested that was when he came to Nova Scotia, rather than with the Shoreham Grant immigrants who had arrived in 1772.

My bearings were further shaken when Karlie Morash, who runs the museum on Oak Island, gave me a copy of a document that had been prepared by “the McGinnis family” that she said showed Daniel McGinnis had been thirty-six years old at the time of the Money Pit’s discovery. These family members had relied mainly on three documents: an “Application for Compensation for losses” suffered during the American Revolutionary War that was dated April 7, 1785; a related submission “To the Honourable Lord Commissioner of his Majesty’s Treasury” dated February 17, 1785; and the application for a memorial to Donald McInnes, “Captain of the North Carolina Militia.” On the basis of those, the family had created a time line for Donald Daniel MacInnes (yes, yet another spelling) that followed him from his birth in Scotland in 1759 through his immigration to America in 1770, his residence with his parents in North Carolina, his enlistment in the ranks of the loyalists in 1776 when the revolution broke out, his service under General Angus McDonald and then with Lord Charles Cornwallis, his command of a gunboat in Charleston, South Carolina, and his eventual relocation to Nova Scotia (in or around the year 1785). The final event listed on the time line was the man’s attendance of the baptism for his grandson Johan James MacInnes in Chester in 1795.

I was flummoxed. When I went back to Families of the Western Shore, however, I found that the genealogy in that volume passed from Donald Daniel McInnes, to a “Daniel Jr.” who had “found ‘The Money Pit Site’ in 1795.” The only explanation I could come up with was that either Karlie or the McGinnis descendants had confused Daniel McGinnis, discoverer of the Money Pit, with his father. But what about the claim that family records showed “Donald MacInnes” attending the baptism of his grandchild in Chester in 1795? That might be accounted for by the other available eighteenth-century document relating to either Donald or Daniel McInnes in Nova Scotia (found in the archives of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints), a copy of the record of the marriage of Donald Daniel McGinnis to Maria Barbara Saller at St. James’ Anglican Church in Lunenburg on September 8, 1795. Daniel Jr. was supposed to have been sixteen when he found the Money Pit a few months before that date, but a marriage later that year hardly seemed out of the question, given that his friend John Smith had been only fifteen when he married. But what about the alleged baptism of the grandson of Donald MacInnes? I went back to Families of the Western Shore, where, with both a sense of relief and a conviction that I could be done chasing the ghost of Daniel McGinnis, I discovered a reference to a document recording the baptism of one James Johan McGinnis, son of Daniel and Maria Barbara, in Chester on July 26, 1797.

I was satisfied that I had a working model of who Daniel McGinnis had been and where he had come from: the son of a Scottish or Welsh father who came to America as a boy, lived with his family in North Carolina, joined the loyalist side in the Revolutionary War and emigrated to Canada after the British surrender, accepting the grant of one hundred acres near Chester that he worked as a farmer. If Donald Daniel Sr. had been born in 1759, then it made sense that Donald Daniel Jr. might have been born twenty years later in 1779, which would have made him sixteen years old in 1795. The story held up, but only to a point.

It seemed clear that the tale of young Daniel McGinnis rowing out to a mysterious uninhabited island where he was startled by the discovery of a weird depression in the ground was not exactly how things had really happened. In 1951, the Nova Scotia Bureau of Information (a government agency that no longer exists) published the first official account of the Oak Island story. The document’s concise summary of the Money Pit’s discovery reads as follows: “Anthony Vaughan, Jack Smith and Dan McInnes, on a shooting trip to Oak Island from the neighboring mainland, found an aged oak with a sawed short limb from which dangled a stout line and pulley. Under the tree was a depression in the ground, apparently man made.”

Among the many problems with that account is that Oak Island was inhabited in 1795 by John Smith and his family among others. It was possible Smith already owned lot 18 on Oak Island when the Money Pit was discovered at some date after June 26, 1795. (One account of the Pit’s discovery placed the year as 1799.) Daniel McGinnis might have rowed out to the island—almost certainly had rowed out to the island, if he wasn’t already living there—but it could have been for the purpose of visiting his friend John or doing some work for John’s family. Or maybe he was tracking game; Frederick Blair, the dominant figure in the Oak Island treasure hunt from the late nineteenth century through the middle of the twentieth and the greatest researcher of the Oak Island story, wrote that McInnes had been “partridge hunting” when he found the Money Pit. Other accounts say that he was cutting trees for either Smith or Vaughan when he stumbled on the anomaly that would launch what has become the longest treasure hunt in human history.

What exactly that anomaly had been was yet another question for which a variety of answers had been offered.

The account of the discovery in Judge DesBrisay’s book read:

McInnes one day discovered a spot that gave evidence of having been visited a good many years earlier. There had been cuttings away of the forest, and oak stumps were visible. One of the original oaks was standing, with a large forked branch extending over the old clearing. To the forked part of this branch, by means of a treenail connecting the fork in a small triangle, was attached an old tackle block. McInnes made known his find to his neighbors.

No mention of a large circular depression. Also, DesBrisay’s account made it sound as if McGinnis was living on the island at the time, as were “his neighbors” Smith and Vaughan. Only when all three went back to the spot the next day did they notice that the ground beneath the tackle block had “settled and formed a hollow,” according to DesBrisay, who wrote that the three “cleared away the young trees, and removed the surface soil for about two feet” before finding the tier of flagstones and the entrance to a shaft.

The first newspaper account written by McCully for the Liverpool Transcript also described McGinnis as initially being curious about the stumps of old oak trees crowned with thick mats of moss and then noticing that the trees growing among the stumps were younger than the other oaks in the forest. The descriptions of “oak stumps” and “young trees” seemed especially significant to me, because, if true, they almost certainly ruled out a number of the theories of Oak Island that had been offered over the years, some of them dating back a thousand years or more. There was no way (and arborists hired by The Curse of Oak Island have confirmed this) that McGinnis would have noticed either the oak stumps or the young trees if the “cutting away of the forest” had occurred centuries earlier. To me, that almost certainly meant that whoever was responsible for the original excavation in that spot had done the work no earlier than the seventeenth century. This considerably shortened the long list of candidates who had been proposed by literally dozens of theorists.

The Colonist articles of 1864, also possibly written by McCully, made less of the oak stumps than of three remaining oak trees that grew in an equilateral triangle around the Money Pit. The articles make it clear that those three trees were what marked the ground between them. The Colonist articles also state that after observing the triangle of trees, McGinnis noticed that the bark of each trunk had letters and symbols carved into it. This description appears in no other early account of the Money Pit’s discovery.

Among the many questions raised by these early accounts is this: just what kinds of oak trees were growing on Oak Island back in 1795? The original trees are long gone, mostly killed off by an infestation of black ants during the nineteenth century. R. V. Harris had noted that a number of his sources “apparently with a view to adding more mystery to their stories, have stated that this species of oak does not grow elsewhere in Nova Scotia, that they are southern trees found no farther north than Louisiana.” Also, at least two historians who authored books on the subject of piracy and mentioned Oak Island in their works (one being Charles B. Driscoll, whose Doubloons is regarded in Canada as a classic work) had written that the trees on the island were the species known as live oak (Quercus virginiana), an evergreen oak found only in the southern United States. Harris, though, asserted that the trees on the island were “undoubtedly” red oaks, which do grow on the Nova Scotia mainland. He cited the autopsy of one of the last surviving old oaks on the island, a wounded tree that had been cut down in 1931 “and examined critically with a view to determining its age and the cause of the injury.” Embedded deep in the tree’s trunk, those who cut it open found the tip of a thick knife blade that had broken off inside it. When the rings of the tree were counted outward from the blade, it was determined that at least 183 years had passed since the wound was inflicted, which Harris claimed as support for his theory that “the ‘Pit’ was constructed between 1650 and 1750.” Some later investigators would point out that those who had identified the trees on the island not as red oaks but as live oaks “had the benefit of seeing them in person,” as one put it. The last account concerning the oaks written while some of them were still standing on the island was in the pamphlet published by the Nova Scotia Bureau of Information, whose anonymous author had visited the island by motorboat during the summer of 1951. “The bare branches of three large, dead oaks tower above the evergreens east of Pirate Cove, and there are a few standing large dead oaks around the corner on the southern side [of the island]. There are a few other oaks in leaf, but all much smaller.”

Those who insist the trees on Oak Island were brought north in wooden ships and planted there make much of the fact that the recovered fragment of the McNutt manuscript asserted that the first thing Daniel McGinnis had noticed that caused him to stop and consider the Money Pit location was a circle of red clover growing in the spot, a variety of clover that was not native to Nova Scotia. This claim about the red clover and other nonnative plants growing around the Money Pit was repeated in T. M. Longstreth’s To Nova Scotia, published in 1935.

What most confused me about the nineteenth-century descriptions of the Money Pit’s discovery was the part about the tackle block. When I’d first heard the story of the old wooden pulley fixed to the oak tree branch that hung over the Money Pit, I’d reflexively dismissed it as apocrypha. If some group of people had gone to the massive effort of performing the extraordinary work on Oak Island for the purpose of concealing a treasure (for which, obviously, they planned to return at some later date), it did not make sense that they would have been so careless as to leave an obvious tell. And yet the story of the tackle block attached to the forked branch of the oak by a treenail had been repeated in every early account of the discovery of the Money Pit. I had a sense it must be true. But if it was true, this meant that whoever had dug the Money Pit in the first place had wanted it to be found. That seemed even more certain if one accepted as accurate an early account attributed to Anthony Vaughan that there were carved “marks and figures” on the trunk of the oak near its base.

WHAT MCGINNIS, SMITH, AND VAUGHAN DID after they gave up digging in the Money Pit by themselves is easier to know than what happened earlier, because the three young men were by then intent on involving others in their treasure hunt. First, though, they took precautions to protect their find. Before they went in search of a partner or partners who would help them mount a more extensive excavation, the three teenagers marked the depth their dig had reached, loosely refilled the bottom of the pit with dirt, surrounded it with oak sticks driven into the mud, then covered those over with branches from young trees they had felled.

They also searched the island. Their most significant find was what was left of an “old road” (which is Judge DesBrisay’s description; another writer called it a “rough path”) that led to the Money Pit site. In DesBrisay’s account, the three actually found the road before they started digging and that discovery seems to have been what convinced Smith and Vaughan that their friend McGinnis really had found something. Besides the road or path, the discovery that seems to have most excited the three was a large iron ringbolt they found at low tide on an eastern cove of the island, embedded in a rock. The three assumed it was where the ship had tied up while the pirates had buried their treasure. Though there is no clear record of when McGinnis purchased his property on Oak Island, it seems clear from the recollections of others that McGinnis, after marrying, built himself a house on the southwestern part of the island and farmed the land. Smith, already married and the owner of lot 18, built himself a house near the Money Pit and proceeded to acquire lots 16, 17, 19, and 20, giving him ownership of the entire twenty-four-acre eastern end of the island. Vaughan, by every account, lived on the mainland even after marrying. This is perhaps why, after an intervening period of seven or eight years, it was Vaughan who found the partner who would organize the first well-financed assault on the Money Pit.

The early accounts offer multiple explanations of why it took so long. Only those willing to work twelve-hour days could make a life on Mahone Bay during that time, and neither the young men nor their neighbors had the time, the energy, or the money to reopen the Money Pit and try digging deeper into it. Others have argued that people were afraid of Oak Island. Word that McGinnis, Smith, and Vaughan claimed to have found a spot where pirate treasure was buried had produced an oft-repeated local legend that the buccaneers killed a black slave and left his ghost to guard their treasure. There were also stories that a witches’ coven met on the island and cast curses on anyone who dared to visit. But the simplest (and therefore most likely) explanation was that the three young friends kept their mouths closed about what they had found and waited for an encounter with a person of means they believed could help them find the treasure.

In retrospect, what seems most remarkable is that McGinnis, Smith, and Vaughan never seem to have wavered in their belief about who had buried that treasure.

CHAPTER TWO

From the perspective of what we know about the world today, it might seem absurd that the belief it was Captain Kidd’s treasure buried on Oak Island should persist for more than a hundred years. Even when the second edition of his History of the County of Lunenburg was published in 1896, Judge DesBrisay referred to the Money Pit as the burial place of “the Kidd Treasure.” From the point of view of the people living in Mahone Bay in the late eighteenth century, however, this notion was perfectly reasonable.

The coastlines of Nova Scotia and Newfoundland had been pirate havens all during the seventeenth century and well into the eighteenth. In Nova Scotia, there was hardly a bay, cove, or inlet that did not have some legend of pirate treasure associated with it. And no part of Nova Scotia was more steeped in such lore than Mahone Bay. According to R. V. Harris, “the name ‘Mahone’ itself is derived from the French word mahonne which in turn is derived from the Turkish word mahone, which means a low-lying craft, propelled by long oars, called sweeps, and much used by pirates in the earlier days of the Mediterranean.” There’s some question about whether the bay’s name actually is an allusion to pirate boats, though most believe so. “Mahone Bay” first appeared on a chart of the Nova Scotia seacoast drawn by a Captain Thomas Durell in 1736, but Durell left no indication of where he got the name. It is clear, though, that pirates had been making use of the bay for more than a hundred years by then, and the reasons why it was so attractive to them are obvious. Twenty miles long by twelve miles wide, surrounded by thickly forested hills and protected from view by the Tancook Islands, Mahone Bay provides an ideal location to scan what are today the main shipping lanes running along the southern coast of Nova Scotia. And Oak Island might be the most protected body of land in the entire bay, with outer islands blocking sight of it until one sails very close to the mainland. A ship anchored on the south shore of Oak Island is about as well hidden from the open sea as it is possible to be and remain afloat, in a spot where it would take five minutes to row a boat to a mainland, which back in the seventeenth century was heavily populated with white-tailed deer, black bear, and moose, along with plenty of pheasant and grouse. The bay was then and remains today the summer home of hundreds of thousands of ducks and geese, not to mention the haddock, mackerel, and scallops that also fill its waters. During the warm season, it’s difficult to imagine a better place for a ship’s crew to fatten up, lay in provisions, and make repairs.

Henry Howard Brownell, in his 1861 work The English in America, observed not only that pirates had been “quite numerous all along the Atlantic coast of America” during the previous two centuries, but also that the freebooters made LaHave, at the entrance to Mahone Bay, “their depot.” In 1700, the French governor of Arcadia actually invited the pirates of Nova Scotia to make LaHave their base of operations, in order to keep the fort there out of British hands. The buccaneers happily obliged, mainly because the fort “was favorably situated for committing depredations on the trade with Massachusetts,” as Thomas Chandler Haliburton put it in volume 1 of his An Historical and Statistical Account of Nova Scotia, published in 1829.

This sort of cozy relationship between pirates, government officials, and financial interests was common in the years between 1600 and 1750. Those who worked under the sponsorship of the British Crown were called privateers, and there were any number who alternated between collecting bounties for the ships they captured and simply seizing the loot and sailing off on the high seas. I found it remarkable that the greatest of all the privateers who turned pirate—the most successful and powerful buccaneer in history, in my estimation—is so little known. Perhaps this is because the career of Peter Easton (1570–1620) came so early in the history of English piracy. He was the scion of a family that was admired and respected for its service to the Crown, not only for having fought in the Crusades under Richard the Lionheart, but also for having distinguished themselves in the defeat of the Spanish Armada. Peter Easton himself was still a loyal servant of Queen Elizabeth in 1602, when she commissioned him as a privateer and gave him command of a convoy that was to protect the British fishing fleet in Newfoundland. His commission from the Queen gave Easton the legal right to press local fishermen into his service and to attack enemy ships and wharves with impunity; he was actually encouraged to capture any Spanish ship that he could. Aboard his flagship Happy Adventure, with what had once been the Crusader flag, the St. George’s Cross, at its masthead, Easton enjoyed immediate success. His career as a privateer was short-lived, however, because when Elizabeth died in March 1603 her successor, James I, promptly sued for peace with Spain. Easton’s continued attacks on Spanish ships turned him into the first notorious British pirate, a role he played with remarkable dash and vigor. For the next decade, he and his fleet captured Spanish ships from the West Indies to the Mediterranean, taking enormous wealth in gold, while at the same time extorting protection money from English ships throughout the Atlantic Ocean. In 1610, his convoy successfully blockaded Bristol Channel, which gave Easton control of all shipping that came and went from British ports in the west of England. Throughout this time, Easton maintained his headquarters in Newfoundland, where his home base was an island in Placentia Bay called Oderin. Horseshoe-shaped and composed mainly of high hills, Oderin’s sheltered harbor not only had room for all of Easton’s ships, but it also concealed them from virtually every approach. (Placentia Bay was also the protected body of water where Franklin D. Roosevelt and Winston Churchill met aboard a ship to draft the Atlantic Charter as they prepared to join forces in World War II.) In Newfoundland, Easton continued to fill his ranks with men from English fishing vessels. Many were pressed into service, but it was widely reported that most of the fifteen hundred fishermen who joined Easton’s crews did so voluntarily.

The British captain Sir Richard Whitbourne, in his work Discourse and Discovery of Newfoundland, recalled that in late 1611 he had met “the famous pirate, Peter Easton, who then commanded ten stout ships.” Whitbourne’s encounter with Easton was more than a meeting. In fact, the pirate captured and plundered all of the thirty ships under Whitbourne’s command at St. John’s (today the largest city in Newfoundland) and took Whitbourne himself prisoner. The captain was not released until he pledged to obtain a pardon for Easton upon his return to England.

Even after turning Whitbourne loose, though, Easton remained unrelenting. In June 1612, by Whitbourne’s account, Easton sailed into Harbour Grace, where he stole five ships, a hundred cannons, and “goods to the value of £10,400”—millions of dollars in today’s money. The pirate also “induced” an additional five hundred English fishermen to join his crews and robbed assorted French, Flemish, and Portuguese ships of their cargos and provisions. On the mainland, his crews robbed settlers, burned their forests, and murdered those who resisted.

Easton’s behavior was not entirely malign, Whitbourne would point out when he submitted his request that the pirate be pardoned. Easton, then in near-total control of Canada’s Atlantic coast, had permitted the first man appointed by the Crown as proprietary governor of Newfoundland, John Guy, to form the island’s founding British colony at Cuper’s Cove. He would not allow Guy to form a second colony, however.

By the time Easton’s pardon was granted by King James I, he was working the Barbary Coast, where he took a number of Spanish ships. From there he sailed to the Caribbean, where it was reported he had breached the purportedly unassailable fort at San Felipe del Morrow in Puerto Rico (which had previously withstood a siege by Sir Francis Drake). Whether that is true or not, Easton certainly captured the treasure-laden Spanish ship San Sebastian, which he hauled back to Newfoundland. On discovering that his pardon had been granted, Easton retired to Villefranche on the French Riviera with two million pounds of gold, wealth that permitted him to acquire the title marquis of Savoy and live out the remainder of his days in splendor.

It’s difficult to think of another outlaw in history who made crime pay better than Peter Easton. Among his admirers is Marty Lagina, one of the two brothers who have driven the treasure hunt on Oak Island since 2007. It was Marty who first suggested to me that Easton might be the man behind the works on Oak Island: “This was a very smart guy, and he wouldn’t have just sailed off with all his wealth and risked losing it on the sea or on land. He would have kept something in reserve, hidden. Why not on Oak Island?”

While Easton may have had motive and opportunity, there’s absolutely no evidence that connects him with Oak Island. Placentia Bay is more than a thousand miles from Mahone Bay. The idea that Easton was responsible for what took place on the island certainly can’t be dismissed, but that’s about the extent of the theory’s viability.

Of course, the evidence is even thinner for the numerous other famous pirates who have been linked to Oak Island. Those who propose Edward “Blackbeard” Teach (1680–1718) as the man behind the Money Pit like to cite his famous boast that “I’ve buried my money where none but Satan and myself can find it, and the one that lives longest takes all,” but that’s about all they have. There’s nothing to indicate that Teach was ever anywhere near Nova Scotia. Henry Morgan (1635–1688) is another candidate who has been suggested. Those who back Morgan note that after sacking the city of Panama in August 1670, the famous pirate captain and his crew sailed away with spoils of gold, silver, and gemstones worth well over $100 million in today’s values. Just six months later, Morgan, suspecting a mutiny among his men, slipped away during the night. Aside from the fact that the treasure of Panama has never been found or accounted for, however, there’s nothing that connects Morgan to Nova Scotia, let alone to Oak Island.

A slightly more plausible case might be made for Sir William Phipps (1650–1694). Phipps was a privateer who managed to remain in the good graces of the Crown, in large part because of a spectacular early success. In 1687 and 1688 Phipps led a pair of expeditions that recovered the Concepcion, an almiranta or “flagship galleon,” of the Spanish fleet that had foundered on a reef along Hispaniola’s Ambrosia Bank more than forty years earlier and was still loaded with a fantastic thirty-four-ton treasure of silver coins, silver bullion, gold doubloons, gemstones, and Chinese porcelain that was worth well over a $1 billion in today’s money. When Phipps hauled his prize back to London, he became a wealthy man and a national hero. He was knighted and made a Sheriff of New England, where he eventually rose to the position of Massachusetts governor. While most of the other famous pirates and privateers of his time sailed the waters of the Caribbean, Phipps was quite familiar with the North Atlantic, and in fact he was almost as celebrated for his sacking of the Acadian city of Port Royal on Nova Scotia’s Bay of Fundy as he was for the capture of the Concepcion. Phipps was proposed as the originator of the Money Pit in a book titled Oak Island and Its Lost Treasure, put out by Formac, a Halifax house that has created a significant-sized cottage industry devoted to publishing works that champion doggedly researched but often weakly supported theories of Oak Island. The suggestion that Phipps kept a huge part of the treasure recovered from the Concepcion and buried it on Oak Island is something that can’t be simply shrugged off, but that’s about as much as can be said for it.

THE PEOPLE LIVING IN THE MAHONE BAY of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries had just one pirate in mind when they spoke of the Oak Island treasure, however, and that was William Kidd (1645–1701). This singular focus on Captain Kidd was, I believe, largely a function of time and place. His rise to prominence came three-quarters of a century later than Peter Easton’s and took place only after he had settled in New York City. The unquestionably political circumstances of Kidd’s trial and execution by the British Crown, though, were what made him a pirate legend.

Kidd was “of obscure origin” according to the Encyclopedia Britannica, though the man himself testified before the High Court of Admiralty in London that he had been born in Greenock, Scotland, in 1645. His father may have been a ship’s captain who was lost at sea, but some historians have made the case that the famous pirate was sired by a Church of Scotland minister. Historians also have made claims that in his youth Kidd served as an apprentice on a pirate ship, that he commanded a privateer in the wars of William III and fought the French, and that he performed “brave service” for the Crown in the American colonies. It can be stated with a bit more confidence (but no real certainty) that by 1680 Kidd, then thirty-five, had prospered well enough from his life at sea that he was able to resign from the British navy and purchase his own ship. What we can be sure about is that in 1689, Kidd attempted to settle in New York and to establish himself there as a person of means. This early effort at making a life on land was cut short the same year, though, when Kidd was dispatched by British authorities to the Caribbean. There is yet more disagreement about whether he went there as the captain of a privateer or as a member of the French and English crew of a pirate ship that mutinied, renamed the ship Blessed William, and made Kidd their new captain. Either way, the Blessed William became part of the small British fleet that defended the island of Nevis from the French; Kidd and his crew were instructed that they could collect their pay from any French ships or towns they captured and looted.

By 1691, Kidd had made it back to New York, where he married a wealthy young widow named Sarah Oort and began to join society, becoming acquainted with at least three governors and contributing to the construction of Trinity Church in Manhattan. At the behest of the British Crown, he was still employed off and on as a privateer, serving during the Nine Years’ War (1688–1697) off the coasts of Massachusetts and New York and in the Caribbean. In December 1695, New York’s new governor, Richard Coote, the 1st Earl of Bellomont, tasked the “trusty and well-beloved Captain Kidd” with taking command of a British privateer that was to attack both pirates and ships of the enemy French. Kidd could not refuse without destroying his reputation and so sailed to London to prepare for the voyage that would cost him his life and make him a legend. In England, he was given a new ship named the Adventure Galley, along with command of thirty-four cannons and a handpicked crew of 150. He carried a letter of marque signed by William III that licensed him as a privateer obliged to surrender 10 percent of his booty to the Crown. The Adventure Galley’s voyage got off to a bad start, though, when Kidd and his crew failed to salute a British navy yacht as they sailed down the Thames. When the yacht fired a shot across the bow to demand what was considered a proper show of respect, the Adventure Galley’s crew replied by presenting to the navy their backsides. Such unprecedented impudence resulted in the navy pressing virtually the entire crew of Kidd’s ship into its service. The Adventure Galley made it shorthanded back to New York, where Kidd was compelled to pick up a new crew, this one made up mostly of former pirates and hardened criminals.

By the autumn of 1696, the Adventure Galley was sailing off the coast of Madagascar, where a third of the crew died of cholera. The new ship began to spring leaks and Kidd failed to find any of the pirate ships he had told both his backers and his men would be there. With an increasingly discontented crew aboard the Adventure Galley, Kidd sailed to the entrance to the Red Sea, another popular pirate refuge, but again found no prizes to capture. Under pressure to deliver rewards to his backers (among them Governor Bellomont) and increasingly menaced by an unruly crew that regularly threatened mutiny, Kidd still refused to cross the line into piracy. That refusal would lead to a confrontation with a ship’s gunner named William Moore, who on October 30, 1697, was sharpening a chisel on the deck of the Adventure Galley when a Dutch ship appeared on the horizon. Moore demanded that they attack the Dutchman, but Kidd said he would not do it, knowing that to do so would infuriate Dutch-born King William. Kidd called Moore a lousy dog. Moore replied, “If I am a lousy dog, you have made me so,” and he accused the captain of bringing him and the rest of the crew “to ruin.” An enraged Kidd picked up an ironbound bucket and threw it at Moore, fracturing the skull of the gunner, who died the next day.

At his eventual trial, two members of Kidd’s crew would accuse him of savage abuses that included hoisting rebellious men and drubbing them with the dull edge of a cutlass. Others, not called to testify, said later that Kidd had punished his men only after they ransacked the trading ship Mary while he and the Mary’s captain were speaking in his quarters, and that this punishment consisted mainly of forcing the crew to return what they had taken. Only those who refused were beaten.

It was not until January 1698 that the Adventure Galley finally took a great prize. This was the four-hundred-ton Quedagh Merchant, an Indian ship under hire to Armenian merchants, loaded with gold, silver, and a rich assortment of East Indian merchandise that included silks, satins, and muslins. The captain of the captured ship was an Englishman carrying passes from the French East India Company promising him the protection of the French crown. When Kidd learned that the captain was English, he attempted to persuade his men to return the ship and its cargo, but the crew refused and Kidd, who at that point maintained only tenuous control over his men, backed down and agreed to keep the prize. That decision made him a criminal in the eyes of the British navy, which ordered its commanders to “pursue and seize the said Kidd and his accomplices” for having committed “notorious piracies.” Kidd kept the Quedagh Merchant, as well as the captain’s French passes, hoping the latter would justify his capture of the ship. It was a calculated risk, as Kidd knew that British admiralty courts in North America frequently turned a blind eye to the trespasses of English-licensed privateers, especially if those trespasses were committed against the French.

Renaming the seized ship Adventure Prize, Kidd set sail again for Madagascar, where he encountered an old nemesis, the pirate Robert Culliford, who years before had stolen a ship and crew from Kidd. This time, Culliford stole only the crew—or most of it, anyway. With just thirteen men remaining, Kidd ordered the worm-eaten Adventure Galley to be burned at sea, then sailed the Adventure Prize across the Atlantic. Upon arrival in the Caribbean, Kidd discovered he was a wanted man and that at least four English men-of-war were hunting him. He abandoned the Adventure Prize in a concealed location and sailed a sloop toward New York. Avoiding apprehension by a series of clever maneuvers, Kidd came to his downfall by trusting Governor Bellomont, who lured him to capture in Boston. Kidd seems to have convinced himself that Bellomont and the various other Whig politicians (advocates of constitutional monarchy) who had backed him would come to his defense in the end, but the governor and the others were far more concerned about protecting themselves from the accusations of their rivals. Bellomont kept Kidd confined in Boston’s Stone Prison (often having him held in solitary confinement in the prison’s dungeon) and also ordered that Kidd’s wife, Sarah, be imprisoned in New York. After more than a year of that misery, Kidd was returned to England to be questioned before Parliament. The accused pirate quickly discovered that the newly elected Tory ministry was determined to use the now-infamous Captain Kidd as a tool to discredit his Whig sponsors. Kidd, though, was apparently still convinced that Bellomont and his other backers would come to his aid and refused to name names. Realizing Kidd was of no use to them, the Tories sent him to stand trial at the High Court of Admiralty in London on charges that included the murder of William Moore. While awaiting his trial, Kidd was lodged in the hellhole of Newgate Prison, where he busied himself by writing letters to King William pledging loyalty to the Crown and pleading for clemency.

The accused still imagined that his backers would help him at trial, but in fact Bellomont and the others withheld both the money and the evidence (including the French passes taken from the Quedagh Merchant) that might have helped him avoid being condemned to death. On the testimony of two former crewmen who had been granted pardons if they helped the prosecution, Kidd was convicted of murder and five counts of piracy. While awaiting execution, he wrote a letter to the speaker of the House of Commons in which he claimed that on the way back to New York from the Caribbean he had “lodged goods and Treasure to the value of one hundred thousand pounds.” This sum (equivalent to approximately $20 million in today’s money) he would happily surrender to the Crown if he were permitted to lead a ship to the spot where it had been buried, Kidd added. The request was refused and on May 23, 1701, he was hanged at Execution Dock in Wapping. Afterward, Kidd’s body was displayed over the River Thames at Tilbury Point inside a gibbet (a metal cage affixed to a gallows) where it was left to rot for three full years as a warning to those who might contemplate following the dead man into piracy.

A broadside song about Captain Kidd called “Farewell to the Sea, or, the Famous Pirate’s Lament” became enormously popular in the weeks and months after his execution and spread the false notion that he had confessed to his crimes. The broadside also popularized the story that Kidd had buried treasure on his way back to New York from the Caribbean. “Two hundred bars of gold, and rixdollars [silver coins] manifold, we seized uncontrolled,” was the song’s most oft-repeated line. The legend of Captain Kidd’s buried treasure would make its way into the works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Washington Irving, and Edgar Allan Poe, among others. It would also lead to treasure hunts that stretched from Grand Manan Island on the Bay of Fundy (between Nova Scotia and Newfoundland) to the Vietnamese island of Phú Quốc.

What cemented the idea that Captain Kidd’s treasure was on Oak Island, however, was the story of a confession made by an old sailor with his dying breaths. By the nineteenth century, the tale had become apocryphal to the point of cliché, but it seems to have originated in the story of Captain Kidd’s treasure that spread up the Atlantic coast of North America around the middle of the eighteenth century. On his deathbed, the story went, this sailor confessed to having been a member of Captain Kidd’s crew and claimed that he and the others had buried a treasure worth two million pounds on “an island.” In fact, a treasure buried by William Kidd on his return from the Caribbean already had been found on an island.

Gardiners Island (which still belongs to the Gardiner family and is today the only US real estate still intact as an original royal grant from the British Crown) is a six-by-three-mile piece of land standing just offshore from the town of East Hampton on New York’s Long Island. In 1701, shortly after learning that William Kidd had been arrested for piracy and was to face trial in England, John Gardiner contacted Governor Bellomont to tell him that Captain Kidd had anchored off his island in June 1699, when he had come ashore to say he wished to bury a chest filled with treasure and two boxes, one filled with gold and the other filled with silver. In the treasure chest were diamonds, rubies, Spanish coins, and candlesticks. The treasure was intended for Lord Bellomont, Kidd told the Gardiners, who agreed that the privateer might cache the two boxes and the chest on their property. In thanks, Kidd gave Mrs. Gardiner a length of gold cloth and a bag of sugar.

It was more than a year later when John Gardiner read that Captain Kidd was on trial for piracy in England. Gardiner contacted Bellomont and told him of the buried treasure. British soldiers were immediately dispatched to retrieve it. Once it was delivered to him, Bellomont shipped the loot to England to be used against Kidd at trial. During the proceedings at the Old Bailey, the value of what Kidd had cached on Gardiners Island was placed at around $1 million in today’s money—far less than the value of the booty Kidd was believed to have accumulated during his three years as a rover on the high seas. (The coins and effects Kidd had with him when he was captured were sold for £6,471—nearly $15 million in current value—in 1701, and used by the Order of St. Anne to establish Greenwich Hospital in London.)

So there was a not entirely unreasonable basis in the minds of eighteenth-century North Americans for the widespread belief that there remained a hidden Captain Kidd treasure on an island somewhere off the Atlantic coast. And that lent enough credence to the tale of the old sailor’s deathbed confession to let it take hold in the popular imagination. Jothan McCully in his 1862 article for the Liverpool Transcript observed that the early settlers of Mahone Bay had brought this story with them from New England and that Daniel McGinnis, John Smith, and Anthony Vaughan were all quite familiar with it. So it was no wonder that the three young men told prospective partners that they believed they had found the spot where Captain Kidd’s treasure was buried.

There is one other outstanding description of the connection between Captain Kidd, Oak Island, and the discovery of the Money Pit. In 1939, a ship’s captain named Anthony Vaughan, the grandson of the Anthony Vaughan who had been the friend of Daniel McGinnis and John Smith, gave an interview in which he added elements to the story that were previously unknown. Captain Vaughan, who was ninety-nine years old at the time of this interview—meaning his memories went back before the middle of the nineteenth century—said that the story of the Money Pit’s discovery he had heard started with a trip to England around 1790 made by a sailor who was a member of either the Smith or McGinnis family. While in England, this sailor had befriended an old fellow who claimed he had been a member of Captain Kidd’s crew and, out of gratitude for help he had been given, confirmed the story that Kidd had buried a huge trove of booty on an island in “New Anglia” that was “covered with oaks.” Months later, the younger sailor stopped over in Nova Scotia and related this story to family members there, whose excitement had led to a search of Oak Island and the discovery of the Money Pit.

The story may not be true, but it certainly doesn’t lack appeal. And that alone has been enough to keep it in circulation.

CHAPTER THREE

It was the spring of 1804 when a distant relative of Anthony Vaughan’s named Simeon Lynds became the first of many who have financed the search for treasure on Oak Island. Two versions of how this happened were published in the nineteenth century. According to the more colorful of the two accounts, John Smith’s wife, Sarah, was pregnant and refused to give birth to her child on Oak Island because of superstitions associated with the place. Instead she traveled to Truro, the largest nearby town, about seventy miles distant, to have the child delivered by a “Dr. Lynds.” Her husband, John, came along, of course, and immediately sized up the physician as the partner he had been hoping to find. After hearing Smith’s story, this version goes, Lynds visited Oak Island and was so excited by what he saw that he returned immediately to Truro and formed a company to finish the job that Smith and his two young friends had started. Among the problems with this account is that it seems in places to imply that the child delivered by “Dr. Lynds” was the Smiths’ first. Church records in Chester, though, show that the couple’s first child was christened on April 15, 1798, years before Lynd joined the probe of the Money Pit.

What R. V. Harris called the “more plausible version” of the story was that Simeon Lynds was a merchant, not a doctor, and he was in Chester to do business in early 1804 when he spent an evening with Anthony Vaughan’s father and heard the story of what Vaughan’s son and two other young men had found on Oak Island. The next day, Lynds went with the younger Vaughan to take a look at the Money Pit and was so impressed by what he saw that he hurried home to Truro to find other investors.

Whichever version is accurate (and almost certainly it’s the second), what can be known for sure is that Simeon Lynds quickly assembled an impressive collection of partners in this enterprise. Lynds’s first and more important get was Colonel Robert Archibald, the government surveyor who had first laid out the township of Onslow in 1780 and now served as the justice of the peace and town clerk there. Once Archibald had agreed to accept a position as director of operations for what was now being called the Onslow Company, he recruited his nephew Captain David Archibald, whose brother was about to become the speaker of the assembly in Nova Scotia and later would serve as attorney general of the province. Also added to the roster of investors was Thomas Harris, the sheriff of Pictou County. That men of such standing in their communities were willing to invest their time, their money, and their reputations in the Onslow Company says something about how convinced they were that a treasure of enormous value had been buried on Oak Island. And what had convinced them, clearly, was what they saw when the Money Pit was reopened. What they found when they dug deeper, though, is truly extraordinary, so extraordinary that it has driven men to follow after them for more than two centuries so far.

IN JUNE 1804, the company’s investors set sail from Onslow aboard a sloop loaded with tools and provisions, following a southwesterly course along the twisting shoreline that took them past the mouth of the Bay of Fundy. A passage of some 350 miles ended when the sloop anchored off Oak Island in what was then known as Smuggler’s Cove (today it is called Smith’s Cove). They were met onshore by McGinnis, Smith, and Vaughan, along with a crew of local workmen who were mostly farmers looking to earn wages and hoping for a small piece of the Oak Island treasure, if there was one. After unloading their cargo and setting up a camp, the entire group went to inspect the Money Pit. They found that the Pit had caved in on top and formed “the shape of a sugar loaf resting on its apex,” as R. V. Harris paraphrased one early account, and that an enormous pile of mud had settled to the level of the log platform 20 feet deep. After their crew had cleared away the debris and mud, Lynds and his partners were delighted, according to the early accounts based on interviews with the members of the Onslow Company, to find that the sticks McGinnis, Smith, and Vaughan had driven into the ground around the Money Pit back in 1795 (if that was the actual year) were still in place, meaning that no one had disturbed the spot. Thus encouraged, the men began to work the ground with picks, shovels, and crowbars, building a wooden box cribbing that protected them from a collapse by reinforcing the surrounding walls as they descended, employing the same rope-and-bucket method McGinnis, Smith, and Vaughan had used years before to empty the pit, only with more rope, several buckets, and the best block-and-tackle system money could buy.

After removing the log platform that had stopped McGinnis and his two friends at 20 feet, the Onslow Company crew continued digging. At 30 feet, their shovels clanged against wood. Just like the three young men who had struck the tier of oak logs at 20 feet years before them, the workmen were certain that they had hit the top of a treasure chest. But it was another platform of oak logs, their rotting ends embedded in the sides of the shaft just as the tiers of logs at 10 feet and 20 feet had been. The Onslow Company crew members showed one another the pick marks in the hard clay walls of the surrounding shaft and were certain these had been made by the men who first dug it out. The workmen and their employers asked one another what could compel men to dig deeper than 30 feet to bury a treasure. Only a cache of incredible riches could possibly explain it.

They were asking the same question after they struck another log platform at 40 feet, this one covered with a thick layer of charcoal. The Onslow Company’s investors agreed that the only reasonable explanation for the charcoal was that there had been a smithy set up on this platform to sharpen the tools of the men who had opened the Pit originally.

There was another platform at 50 feet. According to the McNutt manuscript, this tier of logs was covered with a layer of smooth beach stones with “figures and letters” cut into them. At 60 feet, according to McNutt, the platform of logs was spread with a mat of manila grass and “the rind of coconut.” Well aware that coconut fiber had been commonly used as dunnage to protect cargo that had originated in the Caribbean, this find fed the idea that what had been hidden so deep underground must be a fantastic treasure of Spanish gold captured by pirates in the seventeenth century. There was yet another platform of logs at 70 feet, this one covered with a blue-tinted clay “putty” (later used to seal the windows of twenty buildings on the mainland).

According to the McNutt manuscript, what became known as the “inscribed stone” was found at 80 feet. Adams A. Tupper, a mining engineer who had joined the treasure hunt more than a decade before McNutt did, said that the stone had been found at 90 feet. (It should be mentioned that there are also accounts that suggest the log platforms were not so exactly spaced, which is to say they were only more or less, not exactly, 10 feet apart.)

What McNutt and Tupper agreed on was that the slab was unmarked on its upper side when the Onslow crew first uncovered it. Only when they flipped the stone over did the workers discover that some sort of message had been etched into it.

Descriptions of those carvings (which may have been more like scratchings) and of the stone itself have varied in a number of respects. “Three feet long and one-foot square, with figures and letters cut into it,” was how McNutt described the slab, “and being freestone, being different than any on that coast.” However, in his Transcript article (reprinted in the Halifax Sun and Advisor), McCully had described “a stone cut square, two feet long and about a foot thick, with several characters cut on it.”

Judge DesBrisay’s account has to be given weight because it was based mainly on what he was told by the daughter of the man who took possession of the stone and kept it on display in his home for more than forty years. What the Onslow crew had found (“farther down” than the charcoal and putty, in DesBrisay’s telling) was “a flagstone about two feet long and one wide, with a number of rudely cut letters and figures upon it,” according to the judge’s History of the County of Lunenburg. “They were in hope that this inscription would throw some valuable light on their search, but unfortunately they could not decipher it, as it was too badly cut, or did not appear in their own vernacular.”

Anthony Vaughan, who told Creelman the stone was found at 90 feet, said it was 3 feet long and 16 inches wide. There were no letters carved into the stone, the way Vaughan told it, just strange “figures.”

One eyewitness described the stone as yellow-tinged Swedish granite. Another thought it was porphyry and said it was olive colored.

What all accounts agree on is that after the stone was lifted from its place and removed from the Pit, a slow seep of water began to soften the dirt beneath the workmen’s feet. This quickly became a problem. According to the Colonist article: “At 93 feet [the water seepage] increased and they had to take out one tub of water for two of earth. Still they had no idea that anything was wrong.” It was dusk by then and, as they did each evening, the men finished their workday by probing the bottom of the Pit with a long crowbar. This time, according to the Colonist account, “they struck a hard impenetrable substance bound by the sides of the pit. Some supposed it was wood, and others called it a chest. They left for the night to resume operations in the morning, when they fully expected to solve the mystery.”

What the men found when they reported for work the next day was that the Pit had filled with water to the 65-foot level. According to all of the early accounts, the Onslow crew bailed that entire day and into the night, but could not lower the water level by more than a few inches. Frustrated and baffled, they sat among the heaps of dirt and debris that surrounded the rim of the shaft, wondering what to do next. The farmers among the workmen told Colonel Archibald that haying season was upon them and that they would have to leave the island to return home in time to cut, dry, and store their grass. Archibald ordered a temporary suspension of work while he and the other investors came up with a new plan of attack.

In October, the Onslow Company sent “a committee” to Hants County to meet with a “Mr. Mosher” who was reputed to be the best authority in the entire province on how to remove water from a shaft. Mosher was paid the princely sum of £80 to rig a special pump that was transported to Oak Island and lowered into the Money Pit. There, in a preview of things to come, the pump promptly burst. By then, the weather was growing wet and cold with the approach of winter. Colonel Archibald decreed that they should adjourn the expedition until the following spring, in hope that a better plan might be arrived at before then.

The Onslow Company did return to Oak Island in the spring of 1805 with a new strategy, developed by Colonel Archibald, for emptying the water from the Money Pit. Fourteen feet southeast of the Pit, they sank a shaft to a depth of 110 feet, planning to tunnel under the bottom of the original shaft and approach the treasure from below. When the diggers got within 2 feet of the original Pit, though, water began to ooze through the end of the tunnel. The bank of clay suddenly collapsed in front of them and water surged through. The men in the tunnel barely made it out alive, and within two hours the new shaft was also filled with water to the 65-foot level.

One more attempt was made at bailing, but the crew could not lower the water in the new shaft either. By then, the Onslow Company’s investors had spent themselves nearly into bankruptcy and surrendered their effort on Oak Island.

NEARLY HALF A CENTURY WOULD PASS before another serious effort was made to bring up whatever was at the bottom of the Money Pit. By then, the Onslow Company’s two most significant members were dead: Colonel Robert Archibald died in 1812 and Captain David Archibald went two years after that. McGinnis, Smith, and Vaughan lived on for some time after.

McGinnis built his family home on the opposite end of the island from the Money Pit, where generations of his descendants lived. Daniel’s grandson John McGinnis, for instance, was born on Oak Island in 1865 and remained there all his life. Smith, who took possession of the mysterious stone that the Onslow Company crew had pulled from deep in the Money Pit, built it into the backing of his fireplace, “strange characters outermost, so that visitors might see and admire it,” as Charles Driscoll wrote. Hundreds of people trooped through the modest Smith home to examine the curiosity over the next few decades. Vaughan returned to the mainland to work with his increasingly prosperous family.

The first of the three to die was the Money Pit’s original discoverer, who passed sometime in early 1827. The only exact dates known are the ones on which Daniel McGinnis’s will was dated, January 4, 1827, and the date it was probated, February 27, 1827. Anthony Vaughan was one of two executors and John Smith was a witness. So was a man whose role in the early discoveries made on Oak Island remains a mystery, one Samuel Ball.

I was startled to learn during my return visit to Oak Island, thirteen years after going there to research the Rolling Stone article, that in the first edition of History of the County of Lunenburg, the one published in 1870, Judge DesBrisay had identified the three who discovered the Money Pit as Daniel McGinnis, John Smith, and Samuel Ball. Ball was not replaced by Vaughan until the second edition of DesBrisay’s book was published in 1896. There was no explanation for the change offered. Ball was still in the book, described as one of the “early residents” on Oak Island, “a coloured man, who came from South Carolina where he had been a slave to a master whose name he adopted.” DesBrisay added only that Ball was remembered as “a good man.”

A bit more information than that was available. Samuel was born (probably in 1764) and grew up on a plantation in South Carolina. On November 14, 1775, fearing the revolutionary fever that was sweeping through the colonies, John Murray, 4th Earl of Dunmore and governor of Virginia, issued the Proclamation of Kemps Landing, in which he declared free men any black males who would join His Majesty’s forces in the battle against rebel forces. Based on this promise, Ball escaped the plantation shortly after the Revolutionary War broke out and joined the troops commanded by Lord Charles Cornwallis, but he was quickly transferred to the army marching on New York under the command of General Henry Clinton, then assigned to the command of a Major Ward and stationed at Bergen Point, New Jersey. At Bergen Point, Ball worked for the British army as “a woodcutter” until Cornwallis surrendered at Yorktown, then fled along with many of the other loyalist freemen to Canada.

Records show that Ball arrived in Shelburne in 1783 and remained there three years before moving to Chester. Based on an 1809 petition (called a memorial in those times) that Ball submitted to a justice of the peace named Thomas Thompson in Chester, we know that Ball had by then been living on Oak Island for twenty-three years. In his petition, Ball requested the allotment of land promised to black slaves who had joined the loyalist cause. Thomas stated Ball’s case in writing:

Your Memorialist Ball has no lands but, what he has purchased, never having got any from government, and there is a four-acre lott vacant, No. 32, on Oak Island, joining a lott purchased by your Memorialist. Your Memorialist therefore prays, Your Excellency well be pleased to grant, or otherwise order to have said Lott. Your Memorialist has but one son living. Chester, 9th September 1809.

This day the above named Samuel Ball came before me and made oath on the Holy Evangelist, that what is stated in the above memorial is strictly true, which I verily believe to be so.

I do hereby further certify that I have known said Samuel Ball, above twenty years, and I believe he is an honest, sober and industrious settler, worthy of encouragement.

Thos. Thompson, Jus’Peace.

The lot Ball requested was granted, and eventually he acquired others, gradually becoming the owner of nine four-acre lots on Oak Island, which made him for a time the landowner with the most real estate on the island. Ball had paid £8 for the first lot he purchased on Oak Island according to the deed dated September 22, 1787. This was a considerable sum at the time and evidence, as shown by the records in the Lunenburg County Book of Deeds, that acre for acre Oak Island was the most expensive land in Mahone Bay. How Ball was able to afford to purchase another seven lots in addition to the one he was awarded by the British Crown and also to acquire an additional hundred acres on the mainland and on Hook Island is something of a mystery. In various poll tax registries, Ball was listed as a farmer who raised cattle and sheep, also working as a logger and fisherman. Somehow, though, Ball and his wife, Catherine, were able to afford a servant named Isaac Butler who remained with them until Ball’s death on December 14, 1845, at the age of eighty-one. Ball’s will, probated on January 5, 1846, shows that his hundred acres on the mainland adjoined “lands owned by Daniel McGinnis.”

For more than a century and a half, there have been accusations that the young men who discovered the Money Pit (along with Samuel Ball, who was not so young but may have been part of that original discovery) did in fact find a treasure there, which explained their apparently “sudden prosperity” in the early nineteenth century. The story that the young men found three chests of treasure about 20 feet deep in the Money Pit and took one each surfaced in 2007. That year, a local historian named Danny Hennigar spoke to a woman descended from McGinnis who showed him a heavy cross of braided gold that was clearly hammered and hand formed, claiming she had inherited it as part of the treasure passed down through the generations from Daniel McGinnis. The cross, the woman said, had been examined by experts who said it was six hundred years old. That same woman, Joyce McGinnis, also showed up on the island in 2015 with her two sisters and repeated the tale of the three chests—which made for a dramatic story for the season three finale of The Curse of Oak Island. According to her, this cross was the one part of his treasure that Daniel McGinnis had held on to, insisting that it be handed down through the generations from oldest son to oldest son. Her brother had received it from her father, Joyce McGinnis said, but when he was about to die without a male heir, he had given it to her, making her promise to “never let this out of your sight.” Joyce McGinnis said she’d taken it to several jewelers who had told her “it could be as old as five hundred years.” In the summer of 2016, the producers of The Curse of Oak Island arranged for the cross to be examined by Dr. Lori Verderame, a former professor of art history at Penn State who had built a business identifying ancient artifacts. She reported that the cross was rose gold, between twenty-two and twenty-four carats in weight, and was of Spanish colonial design and manufacture, probably cast in a mold in either Mexico or Peru sometime between 1550 and 1700. The tiny holes in the cross had originally held emeralds, she said.

Others have focused their suspicion on John Smith, who not only fathered fourteen children and supported his brood comfortably, but also came to own 19 percent of Oak Island, all of nearby Frog Island, and pieces of several other islands. How had that been possible, this faction of amateur investigators has demanded. They point to John Smith’s grandson Murdock Smith, who in the late nineteenth century donated the funds for the construction of the library at Port Williams, Nova Scotia, suggesting that he was using a portion of the “treasure” he had inherited to relieve his familial guilt. In fact, Murdock Smith was a successful dentist in Massachusetts and might very well have been able to pay for the library out of his own savings. As for the real estate holdings of John Smith, those could have been amassed by a combination of hard work, thrift, and shrewd investment.

The stories of the Vaughan family coming into “sudden wealth” around the end of the eighteenth century are both the most numerous and the most compelling. These stories seem to go back to two of Anthony Vaughan’s brothers, John and Daniel, who in the early 1800s became wealthy shipyard and mill owners in New Brunswick. The story that they got their start with a pile of gold coins received from their nephew Anthony Jr. might have something to do with the fact that, according to Families of the Western Shore, the Vaughans established their business in New Brunswick in 1796, within a year of the Money Pit’s putative discovery. Those tales of the Vaughans and the mysterious source of the family’s wealth have stayed alive for more than two centuries. In 1991, an eighty-one-year-old man named Carl Mosher who was living in the veterans’ unit of the Fishermen’s Memorial Hospital in Lunenburg, told one of those stories to a local reporter. Back in 1925, Mosher said, his grandmother Lucy Vaughan, a descendant of Anthony Vaughan, showed him “a wooden trunk containing about twenty-five white canvas bags of gold.” Not long after this, according to Mosher, Lucy’s brother Edward Vaughan “took the trunk and disappeared, leaving his property, business, wife and family.”

In August 2016, I spoke to a woman named Anna Frittenburg, the great-great-granddaughter of Ennis Joudrey, for whom one of the two major inlets on Oak Island, Joudrey’s Cove, was named. Her grandfather (Ennis Joudrey’s grandson) Harris Joudrey, who was born on Oak Island in 1889, had spoken often of the Vaughans and his suspicions about their wealth, Frittenburg told me.

He said there were four Vaughan brothers living in the area when he was growing up, and that they lived very well, even though they never seemed to work. They had this little schooner that they sailed to the States two or three times a year. My grandfather had been friends with one of the brothers when they were young. He said one time this boy got ill and my grandfather went to visit him. He said the boy was so happy to have a visitor that he sent him to a closet in his room and said, “Move that board.” When my grandfather did, behind the board, in between the wall studs, was a bag filled with gold coins. And the Vaughan boy told him, “You could take some.” My grandfather said he put the board back without taking any of the coins, but that he never forgot that day. He said that later when the Vaughan boy who had been his friend was grown up and was sailing off to Massachusetts or Rhode Island with his brother on their schooner, he became convinced they were making these trips in order to sell some of their gold.

I rejected (although, I must admit, not categorically) the idea that McGinnis, Smith, and Vaughan had found the treasure back in 1795, for pretty much the same reasons I scorned the theory that the story the three had told of the Money Pit had been a clever fraud. The fraud hypothesis was mainly the product of one Richard Joltes, a colleague of Joe Nickell’s at the Skeptical Inquirer. Joltes’s assertion is that Smith and Vaughan and, possibly, McGinnis (if he actually existed) had cooked the whole thing up as a for-profit scam. The main thing wrong with this argument is fairly obvious, though Joltes seems not to have noticed it. There were only two ways that McGinnis, Smith, and Vaughan could have made money from a manufactured story about treasure buried on Oak Island. One would have been to sell the property on which the Money Pit was located, and Smith—the actual owner of lot 18—not only made no effort to do this, but also refused all offers that came his way and held on to all of his Oak Island property until the end of his life. The other way in which Smith and his two friends could have profited from a fraud would have been to demand payment from those who wanted to search for treasure on Oak Island. It’s clear, though, that the deal the three made with the Onslow Company was to permit the excavation of the Money Pit in exchange for a percentage of whatever treasure was found. There’s not even a slight basis for doubt that all three of the Money Pit’s discoverers believed there was a treasure buried on Oak Island. McGinnis was so convinced—and so convincing about it—that he inspired the succeeding generations of his family not only to hold on to their Oak Island properties, but also to continue the treasure hunt, as both Daniel’s son and grandson did after he was gone.

That McGinnis, Smith, and Vaughan believed there was a treasure buried in the Money Pit also mitigates strongly against the story that the three found the treasure back in the beginning. Why, if they had, would they have continued searching for the treasure years afterward? Joyce McGinnis would explain more than two hundred years later that her ancestor and his two friends had found only “a small treasure” and believed the greater treasure was deeper down in the Money Pit. This story had been told by others in previous decades, the claim being that those who originally dug the Money Pit used the three small chests of gold and silver found by McGinnis, Smith, and Vaughan as a distraction to prevent searchers from probing deeper into the Pit and finding the “real treasure.” Some added that the three chests were only there to stop the wrong searchers from going deeper, so that only those worthy of a treasure much greater than gold and silver would eventually find it.

Curious notions both, I didn’t believe either. But I also wasn’t willing to completely dismiss them, because once I had confirmed to my satisfaction that the early descriptions of the Money Pit’s original discovery and of the Onslow Company’s search of the Pit were fundamentally accurate, I found myself convinced that the only explanation for such fantastic underground works on Oak Island was that something equally fantastic must have been buried down there.

That was the essential mystery of the place. But there were other smaller mysteries that seemed to demand attempted solutions, and Samuel Ball’s role was one of them. The only way I could conceive of approaching that particular problem was to try locating Ball’s descendants to see if perhaps they, like the descendants of Daniel McGinnis, had passed down a story through the generations. It turned out there had been a descendant of Samuel Ball (eight generations removed) named Frank Stanley Boyd who had posted some biographical notes and commentaries on the blog of an organization called We Stand on Guard, which had dedicated itself to “the elimination of Racism in Canada.” Boyd had died in Halifax in October 2010, however. I found his obituary, which led me eventually to his son, John-David Boyd, a plumbing contractor in Quispamsis, New Brunswick.

My first contact with John-David was promising. Two or three days after I left a message on the voice mail at his business, Boyd called me back and seemed intent on impressing me. He repeated at least twice that he was “the head of the family” and the only one in a position to speak for the descendants of Samuel Ball. John-David also told me that when his father was near death, Frank Stanley Boyd had summoned him to his bedside to tell “the rest of the story,” then had said, “don’t give it away.” I took this to mean John-David Boyd was looking to get paid for what he knew, if he knew anything. I could have been wrong about that, and I wasn’t going to pay a source anyway, so I asked Boyd for his email address, which he gave me. The next day I sent a description of my background and intentions, then received a brief but cordial reply from Boyd that he would look it over and get back to me. Days passed, so I sent a second email letting Boyd know that my time in Nova Scotia was growing short. He answered two days later that he was busy with “a project” and that my request was “not a priority” for him. When he did not reply to the email I sent a couple of weeks after returning home, I passed his contact information along to the producers at The Curse of Oak Island, who, unlike me, were prepared to pay Boyd for his time. They told me a month later that he had not replied to any of their emails or phone calls. I sent one more email myself and got no answer.

If there was any light to be shed on Samuel Ball’s role in the discovery of the Money Pit and the early days of the treasure hunt on Oak Island, it wasn’t going to be shined by me. My frustration was one more reminder, as if I needed any at this point, that Oak Island has long produced more questions than answers.

CHAPTER FOUR

What the Onslow Company’s investors had told family and friends about their experiences on Oak Island mostly has to be inferred from who joined the next excavation of the Money Pit. The Truro Company was formed in 1845, although it would not begin operations on Oak Island until four years later. This time there really was a “Dr. Lynds” among the investors (most likely Dr. David Barns Lynds, who lived and worked on Queen Street in Truro). Sheriff Thomas Harris was the only holdover from the Onslow Company’s investors to acquire stock in the new venture, but Anthony Vaughan, now sixty-seven, joined the Truro Company also. The most significant contributions to the Oak Island legend, though, may have been made by four other men: Jothan McCully, who was appointed director of operations and wrote the first newspaper articles about the events on Oak Island; Robert Creelman, who interviewed Vaughan and John Smith and passed their recollections on for posterity; Adams A. Tupper, who would leave the most detailed account of the Truro Company’s operations; and James Pitblado, another mining engineer who was appointed foreman of the crew that reopened the Money Pit in the summer of 1849 and would become one of the most mysterious figures in the annals of Oak Island.

John Smith had filled in both the Money Pit and the second hole dug 14 feet away by the Onslow Company, which has become known over the years as shaft no. 2. It was Anthony Vaughan, though, who helped the Truro team locate both shafts and then identified which was the Money Pit. The Truro crew had dug to a depth of only 6 feet in the Pit when they hit the top of the Mosher pump that had been abandoned by the Onslow Company back in 1804. Twelve days later, they had reached a depth of 86 feet, where some of the Onslow Company’s cribbing was intact.

The Colonist article (probably McCully’s) described what happened next:

When Saturday night arrived . . . all further work was postponed until Monday morning. Sabbath morning came and no sight of water, more than usual, appearing in the Pit, the men left for church at Chester village with lighter hearts. . . . At two o’clock they returned from church, and to their great surprise found water standing in the Pit to the depth of sixty feet. . . .

The next morning they set vigorously to work bailing, and had not been long engaged until the result appeared as unsatisfactory as taking soup with a fork.

For reasons that were not explained in either the Colonist or Transcript articles, McCully and Pitblado decided that they should proceed by probing the pit with a primitive drill called a pot auger, commonly used to prospect for coal. Curiosity with a whiff of desperation, along with a vague hope that they might bring up clues from below on the drill’s tip seems to have motivated the decision, though that is inference and no more. Under the direction of McCully and Pitblado, five holes were bored to the maximum depth the pot auger could reach, 106 feet, on both the west and the east of the Money Pit’s center. Mud and stone was all the pot auger brought up from the first two holes.

McCully’s account in the Transcript described what happened when the drill was sent down a third time:

The platform was struck at 98 feet, just as the old diggers [of the Onslow Company] had found it, when sounding with the iron bar. After going through the platform, which was five inches thick, and proved to be spruce, the auger dropped 12 inches, and then went through four inches of oak; then it went through 22 inches of metal in pieces; but the auger failed to bring up anything in the nature of treasure, except three links resembling the links of an ancient watch chain. It then went through eight inches of oak, which was thought to be the bottom of the first box and the top of the next; then 22 inches of metal, the same as before; then four inches of oak and six inches of spruce, then into clay seven feet without striking anything.

Those “links” have become gold in subsequent tellings, and they may have been, but McCully did not describe them so in his 1862 article. It was “the metal in pieces” that interested the Truro Company’s investors, several of whom were present, including Dr. Lynds and the company’s largest shareholder, John Gammel.

McCully and Pitblado moved the auger a few feet away to bore a fourth hole. The drill again struck the spruce platform at 98 feet, and as McCully told it:

Passing through this, the auger fell about 18 inches and came in contact with (as supposed) the side of a cask. The flat chisel revolving close to the side of the cask gave it a jerky and irregular motion. On withdrawing the auger, several splinters of oak (believed to be from the bilge of a cask) such as might come from the side of an oak stave, a piece of a hoop made of birch and a small quantity of a brown fibrous substance, closely resembling the husk of a coconut, were brought up.

Pitblado had instructed the men operating the pot auger to remove whatever was brought up on the chisel as carefully as possible, so that it might be examined under a microscope. Pitblado and McCully then directed the men to drill a fifth and final hole a few feet from the fourth. When the auger was brought up that last time, according to Gammel, he saw Pitblado wait until he thought no one was watching him to quickly pinch something from the chisel, wash it clean, then examine it closely before putting it into his pants pocket. He asked Pitblado to show him what he had removed from the auger, but the man refused, Gammel said, insisting that he would show it to all of the investors at the next meeting of the company’s directors.

The only person Pitblado is known to have showed what he pulled from the auger that day, though, is one Charles Dickson Archibald, who was the manager of the Arcadian Iron Works in Londonderry, Nova Scotia. And all we really know is that Archibald then made a determined effort to purchase the eastern part of Oak Island from John Smith, offering considerably more than the property was worth and raising the offer when Smith refused. Smith would not sell, though. Archibald never made any known statement about what he had seen that had made him want so desperately to purchase the Smith properties on Oak Island, and he would be recalled by his company to England by the time McCully thought to seek him out and ask. Pitblado disappeared from the Mahone Bay area the same night he had pocketed whatever it was from the pot auger. According to that 1951 Nova Scotia Bureau of Information report, the “local legend” was that Pitblado had removed “a jewel” from the auger’s blade. All that can be said for certain is that Pitblado never returned to Oak Island after that day and that the speculation about what he took with him has been endless. But my reading of the record is that it has never been more than that, speculation.

THOUGH THEY COULDN’T HAVE KNOWN IT at the time, in the spring of 1850 the Truro Company established a pattern of failure that was to be repeated by one group after another over the next century and a half. Each new search team would prepare for success in the belief that a new strategy combined with more advanced machinery would solve the puzzle of Oak Island. And each time they were defeated, the mess they left behind complicated the problem for the next group of treasure hunters.

The equipment the Truro Company barged out to Oak Island in 1850 included a pair of “two-horse gins,” cast-iron engines powered by workhorses, which could be used for everything from milling grain to pumping water. It was the latter capacity that the treasure hunters of 1850 intended to employ. First, though, they sank a new shaft, the third on the drumlin where the Money Pit was located, digging through red clay so unyielding that at times it seemed they were trying to shovel through bricks. The density of that ground was in and of itself convincing evidence to the Truro Company that whatever channel was delivering water to the Money Pit had to be man-made; water was not going to find a natural course through clay that impenetrable.

The intent of this exhausting excavation was to create a new shaft (no. 3) they would fill with the water diverted from the Money Pit. They thought they could drain the Pit. Shaft no. 3 stayed dry down to a depth of 109 feet, at which point the Truro Company crew drove a tunnel toward the Money Pit. The result was the same as that achieved by the Onslow Company forty-six years earlier: as the diggers neared the Pit, the end of the tunnel collapsed under a surge of water that nearly drowned the men inside. The two-horse gins were put to work in both the new shaft and in the Money Pit, and the crew worked in bailing teams that kept at it twenty-fours a day for a solid week. The lowest water level they ever managed to attain in the Money Pit was 80 feet.

The Truro Company’s defeat, though, led them to discoveries that have become a significant part of the Oak Island story. The first of these came when the crew realized that both the Money Pit and the new shaft had filled with saltwater, indicating that it had come from the bay. This meant that the best hope for success was to interrupt the flow of water at its source—or at least somewhere between its source and its point of entry into the Pit. Another reason it couldn’t be a natural watercourse, the Truro Company’s principals reasoned, was that if the water were already flowing underground where the Money Pit had been dug, it would have been impossible to excavate the Pit in the first place. So they had to be dealing with an artificial channel created by drawing from an inlet on the shoreline of the island. And there had to be gates somewhere along its path to permit the original depositors to stop the water and retrieve their treasure.

For the Truro Company, this was a staggering realization. It meant that the works on Oak Island were not only more sophisticated than anything they had ever seen, but also more than anything they had ever heard about. Exploring what had been done on the island and then figuring out a way to solve the problems this work had created would be a fantastically complex engineering problem, and McCully was only one of a number who were excited about taking it on. The company began what it knew would be a mammoth project by leaving the Money Pit to investigate the south shore of the island, focusing first on Smith’s Cove, which seemed by its proximity the most likely place for an artificial channel of seawater to have been started.

They began with an examination of the Smith Cove’s beach, situated about 520 feet from the Money Pit, with obvious advantages for channeling water with a tunnel. The company noticed almost immediately that all of the large stones had been removed from a considerable expanse of the beach. Then, when high tide began to ebb, the men observed that this section of the beach “gulched forth water like a sponge being squeezed,” as McCully described it. The men stared at the water bubbling up through the surface and realized this couldn’t be happening naturally. They began to shovel away the sand and stones. At a depth of 3 feet the Truro crew found a 2-inch-thick layer of a brown stringy material they believed (correctly) to be coconut fiber. Below that was a thicker layer of decayed eelgrass or kelp (there was and still is some debate which). Tons of coconut fiber and (most likely) eelgrass were pulled away and piled in heaps all along the shoreline until the workers revealed a compact and remarkably clean mass of beach rocks, protected from the sand and gravel on the surface of the beach by the 6-inch-thick mat of coconut fiber and eelgrass. The men of the Truro Company could only guess how many tons of sand and clay had been removed from the surface of the beach to make room for both the filter and the rocks beneath, but it had to be a hundred thousand pounds at least. The work that had gone into this was stupefying to contemplate, because what had been created was a giant insulating sponge spread out for a length of 145 feet along the shoreline between the high and low tide marks.

When they recovered from their astonishment, the Truro men agreed that this must be connected somehow to the tunnel that was flooding the Money Pit. To investigate more thoroughly, they decided to build a cofferdam to hold back the tide and enclose this portion of Smith’s Cove while they excavated further. When that had been done and the men removed the layer of beach rocks, they were more astounded still, because what lay beneath were five remarkably well-made box drains constructed from flat stones, each about 8 inches wide, that fanned out from the edge of the high-water mark like the fingers of an open hand.

As the Colonist article described it:

In investigating the drains, they found that they connected with one of larger dimensions, the stones forming which had been prepared with a hammer, and were mechanically laid in such a way that the drain could not collapse. There were a number of tiers of stones strengthening the higher part of the drain, on the top of which was also found a coating of the same sort of grass as that already noticed. Over it came a layer of blue sand, such as before had not been seen on the Island, and over the sand was spread the gravel indigenous to the coast.

Having laid bare the large drain for a short distance into the bank, they found it had been so well made and protected that no earth had sifted through the arch to obstruct water passing through it.

The Truro men attempted to follow the drain into the island, but the surrounding soil became so soft and saturated with water that continuing was “impracticable,” as the Colonist article put it. In the alternative, the men excavated half of the shoreline where the sponge of coconut fiber and eelgrass had been torn away, then calculated that whoever had done this work had removed the original beach to a depth of 5 feet. According to Robert Creelman, who was there with the Truro men, the only significant discovery made during this dig was “a partially burned piece of oak wood,” the purpose of which no one could imagine.

At that point, the labors of the Truro men were interrupted by a fierce storm that rose up on Mahone Bay, creating an unusually high tide that poured over the top of the cofferdam and gradually washed it away, leaving the exposed box drains covered with sand. The company retreated to high ground, where it was agreed the fan of box drains must be the starting point of the tunnel that was flooding the Money Pit, which meant the only possible way forward was to find a way to block the tunnel or locate and close the gate that had to be somewhere within it. A plan was formed to sink a new shaft between the shore and the Money Pit, on the line between the box drains and the Pit. A spot 140 feet from the Pit was selected.

The Truro men had estimated that the flood tunnel would be about 25 feet deep, but they dug to a depth of 75 feet without locating either a tunnel or a flow of water. They moved 12 feet south and dug to a depth of 35 feet before encountering a large boulder. As they worked to pry the boulder loose, a rush of water poured into their shaft, within minutes filling it to the tide level with saltwater. They labored for days driving heavy timbers, called spiles, into the shaft, but this failed to stop the flow of water.

CONFLICTING ACCOUNTS of what took place after the Truro Company’s failure to block the flood system have created some confusion about who and what was responsible for the most cataclysmic event in the history of the Oak Island treasure hunt up to that point: the collapse of the Money Pit. R. V. Harris, long considered the most authoritative chronicler of the early work on the island, attributed this disaster to the Truro Company and placed its occurrence in 1850. A majority of subsequent investigators—and I stand rather tentatively among them—believe it took place eleven years later in 1861, under the auspices of the newly formed Oak Island Association. I should caution the reader that this conclusion is based almost entirely on an article published in the September 30, 1861, edition of the Novascotian newspaper that relied on the eyewitness account of a man identified only as “the digger Patrick.”

What we know with relative certainty is that the Truro Company dug one more shaft close to the Money Pit, down to a depth of 112 feet before the workmen drove a tunnel east toward the Pit and, one more time, had to flee for their lives when water and debris burst through the area where they were digging. At this point, funds exhausted and spirits broken, the men of the Truro Company packed up their gear and went home.

CHAPTER FIVE

In the years between 1850 and 1865, probably the most interesting development in the chronicle of Oak Island was the way word began to spread after the discovery of the artificial beach and the drain system. The story reached first across Nova Scotia, of course, then throughout the rest of Eastern Canada, and eventually across the national border into New England and New York.

The first mention of the treasure hunt on the island to appear in print was not actually in any of the newspaper articles or books mentioned earlier but in an 1857 report to the provincial government of Nova Scotia written by one of its geologists, Henry S. Poole, who was principally interested in the structural formation of Oak Island:

I crossed to Oak Island and observed shale all the way along the main shore, but I could not see any rock in situ on the Island. I went to the spot where people had been engaged for so many years searching for the supposed hidden treasure of Captain Kidd. I found that the original shaft had caved in, and two others had been sunk alongside. One was open and said to be 120 feet deep, and in all that depth no rock had been struck. The excavated matter alongside was composed of sand and boulder rocks and though the pit was some two hundred yards from the shore, the water in the shaft (which I measured to be within thirty-eight feet of the top) rose and fell with the tide, showing a free communication between the sea and the shaft.

We know from Anthony Spedon, whose Rambles among the Blue-Noses was published in 1863, that there was another attempt at excavating the Money Pit about a year after Poole’s visit. “Up to the present moment,” Spedon wrote, “the work [on Oak Island] has been resumed and relinquished a dozen times. Companies have been formed again and again, numerous experiments tried, and no less than fifteen different pits have been dug, at a cost of many thousands of dollars; and yet the mysterious box appears not to have been found.” Given that there were nowhere near fifteen shafts on Oak Island at the time, Spedon’s account has to be considered with some suspicion. He had at first regarded the story of the treasure hunt on Oak Island as “only a fictitious tale, or a chimerical infatuation,” Spedon informed his readers, but then he met with Jothan McCully, who persuaded him to visit the island in the summer of 1862. During that visit, he had confirmed that “the operations [on the island] have been immense,” Spedon reported. “The great obstruction and difficulty has been the inexhaustible quantity of water in the Pit. It appears to come from the sea, but no experiment as yet has been enabled to remove it, or stem the current.” During the summer of 1859, Spedon wrote, a new iteration of the Truro Company “had no less than thirty horses employed at the pumps, but all efforts have proved abortive. . . . In the fall of 1861, at great expense, pumps were erected to be driven by steam power, but scarcely had the works been commenced when the boiler burst, causing operations to be suspended until another season.”

Spedon’s is the only description extant of the 1859 operations on the island and his description of the burst boiler in 1861 was also the first. Strangely, though, Spedon did not mention the most significant thing about that particular catastrophe, which was that it cost the life of the first man to die during the Oak Island treasure hunt. On the Oak Island Memorial that has greeted visitors to the island since 1995, he is listed simply as “Unknown.” The first mention of his death did not come until seven years after it happened, in an account written by E. H. Owen of Lunenburg:

The boiler of one company burst, whereby one man was scalded to death and others injured. The water was pumped out by a large barrel-shaped tube made of thin materials, and reaching to some distance into the Pit. The stream of water was conducted from this into the sea by means of a long wooden trough, which extended down to the shore.

Owen also was the first to suggest an idea that I would find persuasive during my return visit to Oak Island in 2016, almost a century and a half after his account was written: “It appears that in digging the Pit in which [Captain Kidd] deposited his gold, he connected with it a subterraneous passage, leading towards the shore, by which means he might be enabled to recover his gold, without having to excavate the Pit, which he had filled up with such substance as would render it almost impenetrable to the enemy, if discovered.” That there must be what R. V. Harris called a walk-in tunnel somewhere on the island seems certain to me, but as Marty Lagina’s brother, Rick, pointed out to me during one of our conversations, “People have been looking for that tunnel a long time, and no one’s ever found it.” I still think it’s there.

A handful of Oak Island investigators have speculated that the walk-in tunnel was found long ago by someone who took full advantage of this hidden entrance to the treasure chamber, then eradicated all trace of it. The name mentioned most often in this regard is Anthony Graves, who assumed ownership of most of Oak Island in 1857. In 1853, John Smith, in the name of what he called “natural love and affection,” had conveyed all the property he owned to his two sons, Thomas E. and Joseph Smith. Shortly after their father’s death four years later, the Smith brothers sold the property to one Henry Stevens, who promptly sold it to Graves. The new owner appeared to have little interest in the treasure hunt. He built his home and barns on the north side of Oak Island, above the shoreline along Joudrey’s Cove (where pieces of the house’s foundation can still be seen) more than 1,500 feet from the Money Pit and lived there until his death in 1887.

Stories that Graves regularly paid for his supplies in Mahone Bay with old Spanish coins are the basis of the claim that he found at least part of the Oak Island treasure, and these have been buttressed by the discoveries of such coins near the spot where Graves’s house once stood, including one coin dated 1598. What undercuts the claims about Graves is that his two daughters clearly did not inherit any significant wealth from their father beyond his land. One of them, whose married name was Sophia Sellers, worked the ground on Oak Island with her husband as farmers who struggled to support their family.

The only involvement Anthony Graves seems to have had with the treasure hunt on the island was the deal he made with a new group from Truro that called itself the Oak Island Association. Graves was to receive one-third of any treasure recovered in exchange for permitting the new company to make yet another attempt to get to the bottom of the Money Pit, but he was due no cash payment.

A number of those who had been part of the Truro Company were members of the Oak Island Association, most notably Jothan McCully and James McNutt. McNutt kept a diary of the Association’s efforts. The new company’s proposal to investors was that with the right equipment and a sufficient workforce it would be able to drain the Money Pit and bring up the treasure. That this was essentially the same claim that had been made by the Truro Company did not dissuade the one hundred people who purchased the first $20 shares of the Oak Island Association that were offered to the public.

Money in hand, the Association in the spring of 1861 barged sixty-three workmen (being paid the then-considerable wage of $18 per month), thirty-three horses, four 70-gallon bailing casks and the most powerful pump to be found in all of Nova Scotia onto Oak Island. The workmen first cleared out the Money Pit and recribbed it to a depth of 88 feet before going to work on a new shaft about 25 feet to the east of the Pit. This shaft (now known as no. 6) was excavated to a depth of 118 feet, before yet another tunnel was driven toward the bottom of the Money Pit, the plan being pretty much the same as the one that had failed for the Truro Company back in 1850: divert the water in the original Pit into a new shaft.

According to a letter written by McCully one year later, the new tunnel “entered the old Money Pit a little below the lower platform, where [we] found the soft clay spoken of in the [1849] boring. The tunnel was unwisely driven through the old pit until it nearly reached the east pipe, when the water started, apparently coming from above the east side.”

The man whom McCully was implicitly accusing of this unwise decision was the Oak Island Association’s superintendent of works, George Mitchell. And while Mitchell’s story does seem to be one of escalating desperation combined with increasingly poor decisions, the man has to be given credit for his relentless effort. What Mitchell ordered his men to do after the 118-foot shaft flooded was set up the big pump next to it while the men and the horses went to work around the clock with the bailing casks, not only attempting to lower the water level in no. 6 but also in the shaft on the west side of the Money Pit (no. 3) and in the original Pit itself. By McCully’s account, the crew and the horses worked nonstop from two o’clock in the morning on Tuesday until late in the afternoon on Thursday and were able to lower the water level to a depth of 82 feet. At that point, the tunnel between shaft no. 3 and the Money Pit became clogged with soft clay that caused the water to begin rising. According to the accounts of McCully and McNutt, the Association crew worked to clear the tunnel until seven o’clock Friday morning, when another massive flow of soft clay out of the Money Pit replaced what they had just spent more than twelve hours hauling to the surface. As they worked to remove this new mudflow, the men recovered a number of curious items. In the Novascotian article, “digger Patrick” reported that these included pieces of wood, blackened with age, that had been “cut, hewn, chamfered, sawn and bored, according to the purpose for which it was needed.” He and the others also pulled out “part of the bottom of a keg,” Patrick recounted. McNutt, writing in 1867, described a “piece of juniper with bark on, cut at each end with an edge tool” and “a spruce slab with a mining auger hole in it” that were removed from the mudflow out of the Money Pit. McCully wrote that there were also oak chips, manila grass, and coconut fiber found in the mud, along with two large stones that he believed had been brought down from the surface of the island.

The Oak Island Association’s work in the tunnel between shaft no. 6 and the Money Pit continued until five o’clock Saturday afternoon, when yet another rush of clay surged into the tunnel. The men working nearest to the Pit (among them Adams A. Tupper) reported that the bottom of the shaft had sunk by several feet and that the cribbing inside had shifted. Tupper can’t have been the only one who recognized that sinking yet another shaft in the vicinity of the Money Pit—which made a total of six deep, broad holes and at least as many tunnels within a circle 50 feet wide—might have destabilized the Pit to a point of collapse. Perhaps there was some discussion about it when the men took a break for supper that Saturday evening. All we know for certain is that the men had just begun to eat when they heard a “tremendous crash” as McCully described it and hurried back to the Money Pit only to discover that water in it was “boiling like a volcano.” The bottom had literally fallen out of the Pit, pulling down with it all of the cribbing and tools in the original shaft, along with tons of mud that flowed into the new tunnel.

In a letter written June 15, 1895, Samuel C. Fraser, who had worked as the foreman of operations for the Truro Company and had returned to the island as part of the Association, laid the blame on Mitchell:

He finished the sinking of the 118 foot shaft through which the water was [to be] taken away, while the Money Pit was to be cleared out to the treasure. . . . I was sent down to clean out the Money Pit, but before going into it I examined the 118 foot pit and tunnel, which was then nearly finished. At the end of the tunnel I saw every sign of the cataclysm that was about to take place and I refused to go down [again] into the Money Pit . . . When the pit fell down I was there, and I, with George Mitchell, threw a line down as far as it was open from the top when the subsidence ended: it was open 113 feet from the top. . . . There went down 10,000 feet of lumber, board measure, the cribbing of the old Money Pit.

This would prove to be the greatest disaster in the history of Oak Island not involving the loss of life, leaving the Money Pit an all but impenetrable jumble of mud, lumber, and equipment. The treasure, if there was one, was believed to have fallen either into a tunnel or deeper into the Pit.

The former Truro Company foreman Samuel Fraser believed the latter:

The pirates sank the shaft at first 155 feet deep, put part of the treasure there with a branch drain into it. Then working upon the older superstition that “treasure runs away from the seekers” . . . put another portion at 100 feet, with a drain into it.

This meant, Fraser wrote to his friend in 1895, that whatever was buried in the Money Pit had dropped into an open space that was, he estimated, 155 feet deep. On what basis Fraser supposed this he never stated in the letter.

Those who believed the treasure had slid into the tunnel seemed to have based much of this opinion on the fact that J. W. Publicover, the last man out of the 188-foot shaft no. 6 and its adjoining tunnel, had come to the surface with a yellow-painted wooden disk about the size of a barrelhead that had landed at his feet in the tunnel when the Money Pit collapsed. The men who examined it agreed that it must be part of an old keg or cask that had dropped out of the Money Pit’s treasure chamber as the bottom fell out.

Whatever was true about that, the collapse of the Money Pit ended the efforts of the Oak Island Association in the summer of 1861. Yet, remarkably, most of the same men were back on the island in the spring of 1862. George Mitchell had been replaced by one J. B. Leedham as director of operations, but what Leedham did was little more than a duplication of all that had failed during the previous sixty years. He began by ordering the men to sink yet another shaft (no. 7) just west of the Money Pit. At 90 feet, the workmen found tools left behind by the Truro Company and at 100 feet tools that had been abandoned by the Onslow Company, evidence that they were digging through sections of the collapsed Money Pit.

When the new shaft reached a depth of 107 feet and no sign of the flood tunnel had been found, Mitchell ordered his men to dig a new shaft (no. 8) right next to the no. 6 shaft, then dig laterally until they struck the flood tunnel. When this effort, too, failed, Leedham sent his crew to Smith’s Cove, ordering them to seal the “filter bed” beneath the man-made beach with packed clay. That didn’t succeed either, of course. Leedham, whose frantic determination seems to have been a match for Mitchell’s, then ordered the men to dig yet another shaft (no. 9) about 100 feet east of the Money Pit and 20 feet south of where the flood tunnel would be if it was dug on a straight line. When shaft no. 9 had been excavated to a depth of 120 feet, Leedham instructed his men to dig a series of exploratory tunnels to try to locate the flood channel. Given how unstable the ground around the Money Pit must have been by that point, it’s a wonder Leedham found men willing to do such work, but apparently he did.

One of the exploratory tunnels was driven all the way to the Money Pit, which it entered at a depth of 108 feet. According to the Oak Island Association’s records, the workmen were successful in draining the Money Pit to the level of the tunnel. Leedham descended to make an inspection, and in his notes he reported that while the walls on one side of the Pit were rock hard, they were so soft in other places that he could plunge a crowbar into them with relatively little effort.

The Association’s records show that yet another tunnel was dug between the Money Pit and shaft no. 2, the one dug by the Onslow Company in 1805, but that the men found no sign of either the flood tunnel or the treasure chests they were looking for. At that point, operations were suspended while the Association’s members returned to Truro to raise more money. They apparently succeeded, because on August 24, 1863, the Novascotian published a report that the Oak Island Association had resumed operations on the island and that “men and machines are now at work pumping the water from the pits previously sunk, and it is said that they are sanguine that before the lapse of the month they will strike the treasure.”

Sanguinity aside, the Association did perform an astounding series of digs that summer, the most remarkable being a circular tunnel at a depth of 95 feet that went around the entire circumference of the Money Pit. They encountered two of the previous shafts that had been sunk in the vicinity but no sign of the flood system, and yet each time they dug down to a depth below 110 feet, their tunnels filled with seawater.

IN THE SUMMER OF 1864, at a depth of 110 feet, the Oak Island Association finally did find the flood tunnel, according to Samuel ­Fraser, who described this event in his 1895 letter to friend A. S. Lowden: “As we entered the old place of the treasure we cut off the mouth of the tunnel. As we opened it, water hurled around rocks about twice the size of a man’s head with many smaller, and drove the men back for protection. . . . The [flood] tunnel was found near the top of our tunnel.”

The Association’s crew confirmed that they had in fact found the fabled flood tunnel by dumping cartloads of clay on the man-made beach in and around the box drains; when the water in the Money Pit was muddied just a short time later, the Association’s investors were certain that they had indeed located the tunnel that men had been searching for since the early nineteenth century. Their sense of accomplishment was short-lived, however; every attempt they made at shutting off the flow of water failed, and they could not find the gate that they were certain must be somewhere inside the tunnel.

By the late summer of 1864, its funds exhausted and its investors discouraged, the Oak Island Association was winding down. The constant churn of seawater in the Money Pit was softening the walls of the shaft to the point that more and more of the workmen were refusing to enter it. To reassure their crew, the Association’s members voted to hire a mining engineer to inspect the Pit. When the engineer declared the original shaft “unsafe” and advised that it be condemned, however, the Association accepted defeat and withdrew from the treasure hunt.

At least a couple of the Association’s members insisted that the discovery of the flood tunnel was a victory they could build on, and they refused to give up. The evidence that men had gone to extraordinary—even incredible—lengths to bury something on Oak Island was now simply too overwhelming to doubt. A new treasure-hunting company would be formed, these diehards declared, and this one would find its way to the treasure.

THE DISASTERS WROUGHT by the Oak Island Association ensured that any future treasure hunters would be working on two fronts, not only wrestling with the puzzle of the original engineering project on the island, but also working through the jumble of failed efforts left behind by the searchers who had gone before them. The existence of nine or ten shafts and several dozen tunnels dug all around the Money Pit, combined with the collapse of the Pit in 1861, made further work in that location not only dangerous but also probably futile. In terms of the larger investigation of what had taken place on Oak Island, though, there was at least one positive result: prospective treasure hunters were forced to back up and look at the big picture beyond the drumlin on the east end of the island where the original Pit had been dug.

In March 1866, with the consent of Anthony Graves, the directors of the Oak Island Association assigned their rights on the island to a new company that was being formed in Halifax. It initially called itself the Oak Island Eldorado Company, but eventually became better known as the Halifax Company. Proposing to raise $4,000 in capital to begin operations, the Halifax Company incorporated in May 1866 by offering two hundred shares at $20 apiece. By June, these had been sold on the basis of a “Plan of Operations” that would begin in Smith Cove with the construction of “a substantial wood and clay dam seaward to extend out and beyond the rock work, so as to encompass the whole [cove] within the dam [and] pump out all the water within the area, and so block up the inlet from the sea.” The cost of this work would be no more than £400 (about $2,000 in US currency at the time), promised the new company’s directors, who added that “there cannot be any doubt but this mode of operation must succeed and will lead to the development of the hidden treasure, so long sought for.”

Nearly all of what we know about the operations of the Halifax Company comes from James McNutt, who continued the search with the third enterprise that had employed him on Oak Island during the past sixteen years, and Samuel Fraser, who worked as a foreman for the Halifax consortium. It is from Fraser that we have a description of the cofferdam the company constructed, 12 feet high by 375 feet long off the shoreline of Smith’s Cove, 110 feet below the high-water mark. Fraser does not describe the labor that went into this project, but it had to have been tremendous; nor does he remark on what must have been the company’s devastation when the dam not only failed to stop the flow of water into the Money Pit, but also was fairly rapidly broken apart by tidal surges.

What the Halifax Company did next was both sad and predictable: they returned to the Money Pit. One more time, the Pit was cleared out, this time to a depth of 108 feet, 10 feet below the oak platform that had been struck by the Onslow Company in 1805. That platform, though, was gone, having fallen in the 1861 collapse. There were various speculations about where the platform—and the supposed treasure that had rested on it—were now. It was generally agreed that the Money Pit contained a cavity that went to a depth of perhaps 155 feet (Fraser insisted that this was how deep the original excavation had gone) and that the treasure could have dropped all the way to the bottom or into one of the tunnels to the Pit dug by various search groups. Believing that the treasure would have fallen in the direction of the tunnel that caused the Pit’s collapse, the Halifax group dug into the south side of the Money Pit. Once again, though, the water in the Pit stopped their progress. In a letter written in 1898 by a man from Pictou, Nova Scotia, there is a description from the worker (“Mr. Robinson”) who was at the front of the tunnel:

After going a few feet he felt the earth give under his feet a little; he told the men to give him a pick and he drove it down and through and the water came up. He took a crowbar and put it down and his arm to the shoulder with it and says that he could swing the bar around in the Pit [below him] but the water was coming so fast he had to give it up.

The Halifax Company’s crew then built a platform at the 90-foot level in the Pit, from which they would carry on what they called “boring operations.” The day-to-day journal of the work kept by McNutt tells us that a drill inside a pipe was sent in various directions between November 26, 1866, and January 7, 1867. At a depth of 110 feet the drill went through spruce wood, then coarse gravel, then soft clay and blue mud to an additional depth of 20 feet, when water began to flow up through the tube, carrying with it wood chips, coconut fiber, and charcoal. At a depth of 134 feet from the surface the drill brought up oak borings, then some chips of either spruce or poplar from a plank it seemed to be running alongside of. Between 155 feet and 158 feet, the drill brought up a material that was dry and reddish brown. In other words, they found nothing new.

The company at that point decided on a radical departure, this being a move to solid ground 175 feet south of the original works to sink a new shaft (now no. 10) on a line between Smith’s Cove and the Money Pit. They went down 175 feet, the deepest penetration of the island since the treasure hunt had begun, then used the shaft to drive tunnels laterally at depths of between 95 and 110 feet, the hope being that they would find the flood tunnel and divert it into the new shaft. The utter failure of this effort not only bankrupted the Halifax Company, but it also stopped the treasure hunt on Oak Island for more than a quarter century.

Still, stories of what had been discovered continued to spread, told and retold by men who had been part of the Truro Company, the Oak Island Association, and the Halifax Company. Among those who heard these stories, none seem to have been so thrilled by them as a boy named Frederick Leander Blair, born a year after the Halifax Company abandoned its efforts. Blair would not only revive the treasure hunt on Oak Island and sustain it for more than fifty years, but he would also become the best student of the island’s history there has ever been.

CHAPTER SIX

That the story of “pirate treasure” buried on Oak Island could endure so long—well into the late nineteenth century—was much easier for me to understand when I learned that buried caches of gold coins were regularly being discovered in Nova Scotia during those years. People all across the province were thrilled by tales of treasure finds being made in nearby towns and villages. In Pictou County, the largest public gathering of 1876 had been generated by a story that swept through the town of New Glasgow, where, as the Eastern Chronicle reported it, “throngs of people, not less than a thousand” had rushed to the southwest corner of the Riverside Cemetery after hearing that a “group of individuals” had been seen “lurking about during the night.” There, they discovered that “a spruce tree upwards of 40 feet had been uprooted, and a hole of considerable size dug,” the newspaper reported. “When first seen after the digging, the place alleged to have all the appearance of a box of some size, having been exhumed, hauled across the tracks with sleepers and planks and dragged down the steep bank to the East River, where it was supposed the box of treasure was placed in a boat and carried away.” Only a little more than a year later, the December 15, 1877, edition of the St. John Daily News splashed the discovery of more than sixty thousand “three spade guineas” that had washed out of a muddy bank at St. Martins on the Bay of Fundy. The estimated value at the time was more than $300,000, about $36 million in today’s U.S. dollars.

It was not until the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that some in Nova Scotia began to suggest that what was buried on Oak Island might not be pirate booty after all. The alternative theories these people offered arose from the century-and-a-half-long conflict between the French and the British for control of Canada’s Atlantic coast.

The English had first claimed the northern reaches of the New World in 1497, when John Cabot landed on Cape Breton Island, now part of Nova Scotia. The French soon followed, though, with an eye to the establishment of settlements that defied British rule. The fort and town that Samuel de Champlain constructed at Port Royal on the Bay of Fundy was the first solid foothold the French made in what would become Nova Scotia. The British answered with a warning that they owned the entire province, as well as Newfoundland and New Brunswick, from the moment that Cabot planted the English flag at Cape Breton. Resulting wars large and small for control of the disputed territories were waged between the French and the British until deep into the eighteenth century.

The French, after losing what would be known as the War of the Spanish Succession and signing the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713, surrendered all of their holdings on the Canadian mainland, retaining just four islands along the Atlantic coast: Prince Edward, Cape Breton, St. Pierre, and Miquelon. King Louis XIV and the great-grandson who in 1715 succeeded him, Louis XV, moved vigorously to protect what France had been left with. On Cape Breton, government engineers, private contractors, craftsmen, and French soldiers would labor for more than a quarter century to construct the immense fortifications that enclosed the fifty-acre settlement at Louisbourg. The costs were enormous and what were known as “Louisbourg pay ships” regularly delivered a fortune in gold and silver coins from the French treasury to pay for men and materials. Two of those pay ships disappeared en route to Cape Breton. No survivors ever surfaced to explain what had happened and the ships themselves have never been found. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, it would begin to be whispered that to protect their wealth from an eventual British attack on Louisbourg, the French had hidden the gold and silver from those missing pay ships in an underground vault they had created in some remote part of Nova Scotia. Oak Island gradually became the favored location of those who spread this story.

A rival but related theory involving Louisbourg also emerged during this period, the story in this case being that a high-ranking French official had colluded with a corrupt contractor to funnel much of the gold and silver bound for Louisbourg into a secret hiding place, which again became Oak Island.

Neither theory was entirely implausible, but as I would find was the case with most of the possible answers to who was behind the works on Oak Island, the fact that they might possibly be true was the principal evidence that supported them. The same could be said of the third popular theory of who was responsible for works on Oak Island that began to spread in the late nineteenth century, this one involving the famous fleet of the Duc d’Anville. In 1746, a year after losing the fortress at Louisbourg to the British, France had assembled an armada of sixty-five ships carrying more than three thousand troops that set sail across the Atlantic to take back Louisbourg. The ocean crossing seemed damned from the beginning as storm after storm struck the fleet until the final and by far the most powerful tempest struck as the ships sailed past the “graveyard of the Atlantic,” Sable Island, about ten miles off the southern tip of the Nova Scotia mainland.

Just twenty miles long, one mile wide, and made mostly of sand, Sable Island has been described as “the fastest moving island in the world” because of the shifting plates beneath it. Combined with the rough waters and thick fogs that surround it, this has created treacherous conditions for passing ships and also for planes that fly too close to the island. Four hundred seventy-five shipwrecks have been recorded around Sable Island since the seventeenth century, and it is believed the true number might be at least twice that. How many of these were from the d’Anville fleet is not possible to know precisely, but certainly more than half of the French armada at least was lost in the Sable Island storm, while the rest of the ships were scattered and separated. Most of the fleet that remained made it eventually to what would become Halifax Harbour (it was called Chebucto Harbour at that time), where d’Anville himself and many of his men died of the diseases that had broken out on their ships during the ocean crossing.

The story that connected this doomed expedition to Oak Island was that one of the ships separated from the fleet off Sable Island was a pay ship that found its way into Mahone Bay, where the captain decided to create an underground vault to store his cargo of gold and silver until he was certain it could be transported safely. The pay ship then sailed off toward Chebucto Harbour, the story continued, but was wrecked by yet another storm along the way, and the treasure the crew had buried on Oak Island remained there. Again, the theory could not be entirely dismissed, but there was nothing truly evidentiary to support it. And when the records of the d’Anville fleet were reviewed, historians noted that there was no mention of any of the ships carrying a cargo of “specie or bullion.”

In retrospect, it seems rather remarkable that there was little mention, even in the early twentieth century, of an explanation for Oak Island rooted in the history of Nova Scotia that was far more credible. This theory involves the removal of the Acadians.

The Acadians had been French originally, back in 1605 when their first sixty families were settled by Champlain at Port Royal. Even as their numbers grew into the thousands, most of the Acadians remained on the Bay of Fundy, though a good number made their way to Mahone Bay, where they established small communities at LaHave and at what is today Lunenburg (called Merligueche back then). The Acadians gradually began separating from their French roots in an attempt to establish themselves as a unique population. This was a matter of sheer pragmatism, as it became increasingly clear that the Acadians’ best hope for survival lay in refusing to take sides in the long struggle between France and England for control of the land they called home. Theirs was an ethos of labor and thrift. The Acadians worked as farmers, tradesmen, artisans, and small business owners and thrived in Nova Scotia. They also controlled much of the smuggling trade in the province and were reputed to be the main suppliers of provisions to pirate ships.

After the Treaty of Utrecht was signed, the English demanded that the Acadians swear an oath of loyalty to the British Crown that included a promise to bear arms against the French if called upon to do so. The Acadians resisted so successfully that the British eventually inserted a clause in the oath that permitted them to remain neutral during military conflicts. The Acadians’ independent stance became impossible, however, after Edward Cornwallis was appointed the first governor of Nova Scotia in 1749 and created the city of Halifax to serve as his provincial capital. Governor Cornwallis (the uncle of Charles Cornwallis, who led the British armies against the Americans in the Revolutionary War) insisted that the Acadians’ oath of loyalty be reconsidered in light of changing circumstances. The French had retaken Louisbourg and the rest of Cape Breton, and Cornwallis saw the ten thousand Acadians living in Nova Scotia as a potential threat to British control of the mainland. If he evicted them from the province, Cornwallis reasoned, the Acadians would almost certainly resettle on Cape Breton, substantially increasing the French presence on Canada’s Atlantic coast. First the governor insisted that the Acadians retake the loyalty oath, this time without the clause that permitted them to remain militarily neutral. When the Acadians again refused to sign the oath, tensions with the British rapidly escalated beyond their ability to manage them. Still, most of them were caught off guard when, in 1856, Cornwallis ordered that the Acadians be rounded up at gunpoint, stripped of their land and possessions, then loaded aboard ships that would drop them off at ports spread along the American coast between Maine and Georgia. There was a rush among the Acadians to conceal their assets; they liquidated as much of their property as possible, then buried the coins in safe places.

When the Treaty of Paris was signed in 1763, the edict expelling the Acadians from Nova Scotia was revoked and a good many of them returned to the province. (Most of those who did not made their way to the bayous of Louisiana, where they became the Cajuns.) Few of the Acadians were permitted to reclaim their former homes in Nova Scotia, however, which made it difficult if not impossible to gain access to the places where they had cached their fortunes before the expulsion of 1756. What resulted during the nineteenth century was story after story of some lucky plowman or merchant of British or German or Swiss origin discovering a stash of Acadian coins in a cellar, a well, or a farm field. In 1879, for example, just ten miles south of Oak Island, the discovery by a farmer named William Moser of more than two hundred French écus and Spanish escudos while digging up the floor of his barn had been front-page news in the local newspaper.

It was inevitable that someone would suggest, eventually, the underground vault on Oak Island was a kind of bank where the most prosperous of the Acadians had deposited their wealth before being rounded up by the British in 1756. It made a good deal of sense, except that there were very few if any truly wealthy Acadians.

On the other hand, Nova Scotia had been home to many rich Huguenots in the eighteenth century. Most of the Huguenots (Protestants, as opposed to the mostly Catholic Acadians) who left France for the New World because of religious persecution in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries were upper class. Many were members of the French nobility and nearly all of the others were part of what historians have called an affluent artisan class.

In 1685, when the Edict of Nantes (which since 1598 had protected French Protestants from persecution by the Catholics) was revoked by Louis XIV, fifty thousand Huguenot families fled the country. Nova Scotia was among their primary destinations.

The theory that linked the Huguenots to Oak Island, though, seems to be most solidly founded in an early twentieth century report by the historian (and William Kidd biographer) Dunbar Henrichs. In 1928, Henrichs was living on Mahone Bay in the town of Chester. It was there that Henrichs was visited by a Frenchman who had come to Nova Scotia to investigate a family legend involving a group of wealthy Huguenots (including one of his ancestors) who had escaped from France aboard two ships immediately after the Edict of Nantes was revoked. The family story was that the ships had sailed together from La Rochelle across the Atlantic to the island of Saint-Domingue (in what is now Haiti), where the engineer accompanying them had supervised the construction of a complex of underground vaults protected by flood tunnels. Some but not all of the families had deposited their wealth in these vaults, then boarded one of the ships, which sailed off to New York. The second ship, carrying passengers who still held their wealth onboard, had sailed farther north to Nova Scotia, making its way eventually to Mahone Bay, where the leaders of this group selected an uninhabited island on which the same engineer supervised construction of a second system of vaults, also protected by flood tunnels. These vaults could be accessed either by a secret tunnel from the surface of the island or by closing a gate that had been installed in the flood tunnel system, as the Frenchman told the story, Henrich said.

Henrich admitted he hadn’t taken the tale seriously until he heard that in 1947, nineteen years after his conversation with the mysterious Frenchman, a system of tunnels and vaults very similar to what had been described were found by an engineer named Albert Lochard in Haiti.

The Huguenot theory became quite a compelling one in his mind after that, Henrich said. There was one major problem with it, however. The Huguenots had not arrived in Nova Scotia in any numbers until after the Acadians were expelled in 1756, by which time the Mahone Bay area was populated by a good many New Englanders and Germans who had moved there on the promise of free land from the British government. It is doubtful that the Huguenots or anyone else could have created the works on Oak Island at that late date without people noticing.

The main objection to both the Acadian and the Huguenot theories of Oak Island, though, was the same one made in answer to those who suggested that whatever treasure had been buried in the Money Pit had long since been removed by the original depositors. If the people who placed the treasure there had returned for it, the reasoning went, they certainly wouldn’t have bothered to close the Money Pit up so neatly as it was found to be by McGinnis and the others back in 1795. “They would have just left the dirt piled up and hole open—why not?” as Marty Lagina put it to me in a conversation over our breakfasts one morning in August 2016. That the platforms inside the Pit were still intact and the massive hole in the ground still filled in with soil all the way to the surface, along with the fact that there was no obvious sign of any point of entry anywhere else on the island, proved in the minds of Oak Island’s treasure hunters that whatever had been buried down there remained. A young man who believed as much would incorporate the next company that conducted operations on Oak Island.

Frederick Leander Blair was a twenty-six-year-old insurance salesman working out of an office in Boston, Massachusetts, when he formed the Oak Island Treasure Company in 1893. Over the next fifty-eight years, as his interest grew into an obsession, Blair would not only become the driving force in the search for the treasure on the island, but he would also become the most relentless seeker in the search for answers as to how it got there and why. It is largely because of him that we know as much as we do about what happened during the first century after the discovery of the Money Pit, as the fascination with Oak Island crossed out of Canada to spread worldwide.

CHAPTER SEVEN

Frederick Blair was living and working in Massachusetts, but he had grown up in Nova Scotia: born in Thomson Station and reared in Amherst. He was a young child when he first heard stories of Oak Island, told by his uncle Isaac Blair, who had been part of the Oak Island Association and Halifax Company crews that had worked on the island during the 1860s. As Isaac Blair summed up his position in a letter to his nephew written in 1896: “I saw enough to convince me that there was treasure buried there and enough to convince me that they will never get it.” Frederick Blair agreed with his uncle that the treasure was there, but for more than a half century refused to accept that it could not be gotten.

What distinguished Blair right from the beginning was his commitment to research. He began by interviewing his uncle Isaac and Isaac’s friend Jefferson McDonald, from whom he had also heard tales of the treasure hunt on Oak Island as a boy. From those two, Blair moved on to the other men who had worked on Oak Island with the Truro Company and the Oak Island Association, focusing on those he considered most authoritative, among them James McNutt, Jothan McCully, Samuel Fraser, and Robert Creelman. Still working out of his office on Boston’s Liberty Square, Blair collected every available document, including the journals and letters that chronicled the labor, the discoveries, and the failures of those who had gone before him. Many if not most of those documents would have been lost if not for the fact that Blair maintained them in his personal archives. He sought out everyone still living who had heard firsthand the stories of the three discoverers, McGinnis, Smith, Vaughan, and of the Onslow Company’s leader, Dr. Lynds, and he made extensive notes of those interviews. Blair not only interviewed Adams A. Tupper, the former mining engineer for the Truro Company, but he also recruited him as a partner in his new Oak Island Treasure Company. Tupper, drawing extensively on his conversations with Anthony Vaughan during the middle of the nineteenth century, assisted Blair in writing the prospectus of the Oak Island Treasure Company, which began with a detailed account of the discovery and the attempted excavations of the Money Pit. Tupper also attached an affidavit in which he declared that he was “familiar with the various reports and traditions concerning the work done there before my own personal knowledge” and that his account of what he had been told was “to the best of my knowledge and belief, absolutely true.”

Blair also spoke to Anthony Graves’s daughter, Sophia Sellers, whose accidental discovery of what became known as the Cave-in Pit had been the biggest event on Oak Island in the years since the collapse of the Halifax Company. In the spring of 1878 she had been plowing with oxen about 350 feet from the Money Pit, Sellers told Blair, near what she knew was the supposed line of the famous flood tunnel. Suddenly one of the oxen disappeared into a “well-like” hole about 6 to 8 feet in diameter that had caved in under the animal’s weight. She and her husband, Henry, had needed help to pull the animal out of the hole, and after that they had simply filled it in with boulders and worked around the area. Blair, though, decided that investigating this new discovery should be among his new company’s first tasks.

“It is perfectly evident,” he explained in his prospectus, “that the great mistake thus far has been in attempting to ‘bail out’ the ocean through the various pits. The present company intends to use the best modern appliances for cutting off the flow of water through the tunnel at some point near the shore, before attempting to pump out the water.” This had been tried before, by both the Oak Island Association and the Halifax Company, as Blair certainly knew, but he apparently believed his “modern appliances” would make the difference. With them, he wrote, “there can be no trouble in pumping out the Money Pit as dry as when the treasure was first placed there.”

In late 1893, one thousand shares in the Oak Island Treasure Company were offered at $5 apiece to undertake the work. Blair indirectly but skillfully exploited the widespread publicity that had attended the reported treasure finds at New Glasgow and St. Martins and the even greater sensation that had been created when a boatswain’s whistle made of ivory or bone and said to be of “an ancient and peculiar design” was found on Oak Island at Smith’s Cove. In a second edition of the Oak Island Treasure Company prospectus he published in early 1894, Blair proclaimed, “We are happy to state that the stock is selling quite rapidly and only a few hundred shares remain to be sold, of the one thousand shares sufficient to complete the work.” It was “worthy of note,” Blair added in this edition of the prospectus, “that with very few exceptions every man whom we have met that has ever worked on Oak Island has expressed his intention of taking stock in this Company.”

It was true that Robert Creelman, Samuel Fraser, and Jefferson McDonald had already joined the company. What Blair didn’t mention in the new prospectus was that a majority of the Nova Scotia shareholders were demanding that the planned work on Oak Island be overseen by a local committee, not by directors sitting in Boston offices. They organized a meeting in Truro on April 4, 1894, at which Creelman, McDonald, and Jothan McCully were among those who spoke. McDonald was unanimously elected to represent the Nova Scotia shareholders, and five other men were named to the committee that would be in charge of the operations on Oak Island. One of them, a lumberman from Amherst named William Chappell, would become almost as important in the story of the island as Blair himself. Adams A. Tupper was appointed by the committee to perform the hands-on supervision of the work, beginning in June 1894.

We know virtually every move the Oak Island Treasure Company made because Frederick Blair was just as scrupulous about recording the new company’s activities as he had been about researching the past work on the island. The Treasure Company crew began with an exploration of the Cave-in Pit. When the boulders were removed to a depth of 18 feet, the new company’s workmen found themselves standing in a shaft almost 8 feet in diameter that was nearly perfectly circular, with well-defined walls that convinced them they were looking at a piece of the original work on Oak Island. The miners among them agreed that the Cave-in Pit was an air shaft, essential for ventilation in a tunnel more than 500 feet long. They did not even need to use picks to clear the shaft, it was reported back to Boston, because while the earth inside was soft, the walls containing it were smooth and solid, made of clay so hard it was nearly impossible to sink a spike into them anyway; the labor of the men who had dug this shaft was unimaginable.

Blair would declare that he believed the Cave-in Pit might be the key to solving the entire problem of Oak Island. Eventually the stones and the loose soil inside the shaft were removed to a depth of 52 feet, and box cribbing was built that stretched from the bottom to several feet above the surface. An auger bored another 16 feet deeper into the Cave-in Pit without encountering any resistance. The next morning, though, water broke into the Cave-in Pit from shaft no. 4, dug by the Truro Company more than forty years earlier. When the cribbing grew unstable, it was agreed that working in the Cave-in Pit had become unsafe for the men.

Blair, Tupper, McDonald, and the committee overseeing the work agreed they would sink yet another shaft (no. 12), this one right next to the “pirate tunnel” (as the members of the company referred to the original tunnel that flooded the Money Pit), going deep enough to undermine the old tunnel from below, then destroy it with dynamite, thereby, they hoped, cutting off the flow of water to the Money Pit. The excavation of shaft no. 12 reached a depth of only 43 feet, though, before water from shaft no. 4 burst into it. They bailed this out, but then a seep of stagnant water, almost black, began to fill the new shaft. This was from the Money Pit, the men agreed, and they bailed that out also. Eventually they were able to dig to a depth of 55 feet, then strike a tunnel from the bottom of no. 12 toward the surface, in hopes of finding the flood tunnel. When they were just 25 feet from the surface, though, the tunnel had not been found.

James McGinnis, the grandson of Daniel McGinnis, claimed that one of the last things the Halifax Company had done was to build a stout platform in the Money Pit, just above the high-water mark, then fill the Pit in with loose soil from the platform to the surface. Henry Sellers also insisted there was such a platform. When the Treasure Company excavated what they believed to be the Money Pit to look for this platform, however, it could not be found. James McGinnis insisted they had looked in the wrong place. Winter was coming on, though, so the Treasure Company adjourned until the following spring.

As I studied the notes of the Treasure Company’s attempt to re-form itself in 1895, the familiar vows of previous searchers recurred yet again in a way that was both poignant and absurd. One A. S. Lowden had been named by the directors in Boston to serve as the new general manager of the company, and after a meeting of the stockholders on April 2, 1895, Lowden laid out a two-part plan that was long on effusion but short on originality in every respect:

ONE: “To make another effort to cut the tunnel off at or near the scene of last year’s operations.” There had to be a gate in the flood tunnel, Lowden wrote, repeating the conclusions of men who had preceded him by almost half a century. He proposed to locate it by tunneling from shaft no. 12 at the 49-foot level toward shaft no. 5.

TWO: “To attack the Money Pit direct, nothing having been done there last year, the exact conditions are not known.”

Not surprisingly, Lowden’s efforts to raise the money to purchase a larger and more expensive pump through a new stock issue failed utterly. The Nova Scotia stockholders met again in Truro on November 26, 1895, and appointed a new board of management that included William Chappell, with Frederick Blair to serve as treasurer. Blair, who had moved his insurance office from Boston to Amherst, Nova Scotia, to be closer to Oak Island, helped prepare a new version of the Treasure Company’s prospectus that helped raise the $2,000 needed to purchase a top-of-the-line steam pump and boiler. This took almost a year, but in the late autumn of 1896 Blair’s Amherst friend Captain John Welling was chosen to mount yet another new effort to get to the bottom of the Money Pit.

Blair received daily reports that tracked the work on Oak Island during the winter of 1896 to 1897. Shaft no. 2 had been doubled in width, while shaft no. 12, now 123 feet deep, was used to collect the water pumped out of no. 2. The failure of this effort is implied in reports to Blair during the spring of 1897 that the work had moved to the excavation of a new shaft (no. 13) 25 feet north of the Cave-in Pit. At a depth of 82 feet, the workmen began to tunnel toward the Cave-in Pit. They got within 4 feet before being driven out by water pouring through the tunnel’s leading wall. Within a couple of weeks, the diggers struck what they at first believed was the Pirate Tunnel. It was 4 feet wide by 6 feet tall, well timbered, and connected to the Cave-in Pit. What they had found, however, turned out to be a tunnel dug by the Halifax Company crew in 1866. After considerable discussion, it was agreed that the Pirate Tunnel was likely not more than 5 feet below and they began to search for it.

This effort ended on March 26, 1897, when a workman named Maynard Kaiser was sent into one of the shafts (probably no. 13) to retrieve a cask that had fallen in. Rather than bring up the empty barrel, Kaiser for some reason chose to fill it with water, then ride atop the bucket as it was raised to the surface. The weight of the water and the man was more than the hoist could bear, and when the rope slipped off the gear both the cask and Kaiser plunged to the bottom of the shaft. He was dead by the time a crew of rescuers found him. Immediately, nearly the entire Treasure Company crew refused to continue working underground. As the April 13, 1897, edition of a Halifax newspaper reported it: “Captain Welling who is in charge of the work of excavating for the Oak Island treasure reports that all his men have quit the job. They became suspicious after the death of poor Kaiser last week and will not continue to dig. One of the men had a dream in which the spirit of Captain Kidd appeared and warned him they would all be dead if they continued the search.”

Welling must have had some force of personality, because within a week he had assembled a new crew that on April 22 discovered yet another tunnel leading into the Money Pit. It was 9 feet square and solidly cribbed, with saltwater percolating into it from beneath. They excavated upward into the Money Pit from there, and at the 30-foot level found the platform built by the Halifax Company, exactly as James McGinnis had described it. After correcting the misalignment of the cribbing (with planks they attached as a skid), the crew began to once again probe deeper into the Pit. At 111 feet they found what they thought must be the flood tunnel. It was a sharply cut rectangular channel 2.5 feet wide that was floored with a layer of beach stones, gravel, and sand, in that order from the bottom up. Saltwater was flowing with great force through the tunnel. The horizontal ceiling was clear evidence this tunnel was man-made.

Yet another celebration was cut short, though, when the valve stem of the Treasure Company’s prized steam pump broke. Within an hour the Money Pit was filled with seawater to tide level, leaving the flood tunnel under almost 50 feet of water.

After calculating the expense of repairing the pump and the cost of keeping it going, the Treasure Company’s directors determined that yet another effort must be made to intercept the Pirate Tunnel near the shore of Smith’s Cove and cut it off. To locate the flood channel, the crew began a series of boreholes about 50 feet from the high tide mark at the cove, following a perpendicular line across the approximate path the Pirate Tunnel must follow. They drilled five such holes, each 5 inches in diameter at varying depths between 80 and 95 feet. Sticks of dynamite were lowered into each of these holes, then ignited. The only apparent results of the subsequent explosions were the spumes of seawater that rose 100 feet and more into the air. An enormous charge of dynamite—more than 160 pounds—was then placed into the center borehole and detonated. There was no gush of water from the hole this time, but the water in both the Money Pit and in the Cave-in Pit boiled and foamed for almost a minute. The men agreed that they were in or next to a tunnel carrying water from the shore to the Money Pit.

There was contention among the crew, though, about what it meant that no saltwater had been found in this middle hole before a depth of 80 feet. Those who insisted the flood channel must now be blocked won the day and they agreed to return to the Money Pit and continue the boring operations there. The results of this decision would include what is arguably the most remarkable discovery in the history of the treasure hunt on Oak Island.

EARLY INTO MY WORK on The Curse of Oak Island I began to be convinced by what I knew about human nature that it was not a treasure of gold and silver that had been buried on the island. What had been done on Oak Island could only have been done by a large workforce, and there was no way I believed a group of even half a dozen people could or would have kept it a secret that a fortune in precious metals was concealed on an island off the coast of Nova Scotia.

There were answers to that, of course. One, obviously, was that whoever had buried the treasure on the island had already returned to retrieve it. That wasn’t a possibility anyone who had hunted for treasure on Oak Island wanted to embrace and, as mentioned earlier, there was a standard response to this suggestion. The fact that we still don’t know who hid whatever is hidden there, more than 250 years (at least) after it was likely buried, might also be explained in other ways. If the people who had done the actual labor were slaves, as many supposed, they might have been silenced by a mass execution immediately after their work was done. Or, if the work was done by soldiers or a ship’s crew, they might have all gone down on the return voyage to wherever they were from, taking their secret with them to the bottom of the ocean.

I conceded these points, then said that what I really believed was that it would be impossible to motivate men to do what had been done on Oak Island simply to hide a treasure of gold, no matter how great it might be. More than that would be required in my opinion. What had been concealed on the island had to be something of incalculable value, something that meant more than money ever could. I think Marty Lagina thought that was more than a little naïve. His brother, Rick, though, was inclined to agree with me.

Only a single piece of tangible evidence has ever been brought up from belowground to support my side of this argument, however, and it is not only of unknown origin, but preposterously tiny to boot. Infinitesimal some might say. It was found right around the first of September in 1897 during the boring operations of the Oak Island Treasure Company in the Money Pit.

A sketch drawn by Frederick Blair in February 1898 shows where the boreholes were drilled in a circular pattern around the rim of the Pit. The water had been pumped out to the 100-foot level, where a new platform was built and the drill mounted. William Chappell was one of those who operated the drill; he would describe in a sworn statement what the bit and the pipe that surrounded it brought back up to the platform. The first hole was bored to a depth of 122 feet before a piece of oak wood was penetrated. At 126 feet, the drill was stopped when it struck iron. A second hole was bored a foot away, and again the drill struck iron and was stopped. Chappell and the others decided to try a smaller drill, just 1.5 inches in diameter. This drill deflected off the iron and went around it, passing first through “puddled clay” then striking “soft stone or cement” at a depth of 153 feet, 8 inches. The drill worked its way through the “soft stone” and then went through 5 inches of solid oak, which proved to the men on the platform that they had not yet reached bedrock.

The drill was raised slowly and carefully. T. Perley Putnam, who was on the platform with Chappell and Captain Welling, had been placed in charge of removing, collecting, cataloguing, and preserving the borings from the drill’s auger bit. He panned out the dirt from the auger in direct sunlight, then meticulously gathered everything that floated in the water. There were oak chips and coconut husks, Putnam reported, plus a small piece of—well, he was not sure what it was, he admitted. On instructions from Welling, Putnam several days later carried the borings he had collected in envelopes to the offices of Dr. A. E. Porter, a physician who was then practicing in Amherst. They had chosen Porter as a consultant, Frederick Blair would explain later, because the doctor owned the most powerful microscope to be found in Nova Scotia at that time.

On September 6, 1897, Porter examined the borings from the Money Pit in the presence of between thirty-five and forty men, including Putnam and Blair. Almost immediately his attention was attracted to the ball of “strange fiber” that Putnam had not been able to identify. It was only about the size of a grain of rice, as Porter would describe it, with some sort of fuzz or short hair on its surface. Using his medical instruments under the magnifier, Porter worked at this ball of fiber for several minutes, until it slowly began to unfold. After another few minutes, the doctor had it flattened out, whereupon he described it as being, to all appearances, a tiny piece of parchment paper with a fragment of writing in black ink that appeared to be parts of either the letters ui or vi or wi.

Blair insisted on an examination by experts in Boston associated with Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. They reported back that the item most certainly was a piece of parchment that had been written on with a quill pen and India ink.

THE DISCOVERY OF THE PARCHMENT FRAGMENT was the real beginning of consideration of the possibility that what was buried on Oak Island might not be chests of gold buried by pirates but rather something of real—perhaps even profound—historical value. In a 1930 interview with the Toronto Telegram, Blair declared that the day the Oak Island Treasure Company found the piece of parchment had provided “more convincing evidence of buried treasure than a few doubloons would be. I am satisfied that either a treasure of immense value or priceless historical documents are in a chest at the bottom of the Pit.”

The 1897 borings in the Money Pit produced a great deal of evidence beyond the parchment. At 171 feet into one borehole, the chisel point that had replaced the auger bit struck solidly against iron. The drillers said they knew it from the sound. They continued to push the drill against this barrier for more than forty minutes and could make no deeper penetration than a quarter-inch. Chappell, Putnam, and Welling then withdrew the drill, pumped the loose material from the hole, and ran a magnet through it, collecting about a thimbleful of fine iron cuttings. What was regarded as an even more exciting discovery was made in a borehole where a tremendous spout of water rose out of the pipe when the drill was at 126 feet. They measured the flow with their pumps and determined it to be 400 gallons a minute. This had to mean there was a second flood tunnel, also coming from the south shore of the island, most likely from a location closer to the Money Pit than Smith’s Cove.

The oak splinters, charcoal, and coconut fiber that came out of the boreholes were also saved for examination, but the greatest interest was in the soft stone struck by the drill at 153 feet, eight inches. The drillers believed this might be a kind of early cement and sent it for analysis to A. Boake, Roberts and Company in London. The report back from the London chemists was that this material did indeed seem to be a primitive sort of cement, composed of lime, carbonate, silica, iron, alumina, and magnesium. “From the analysis it is impossible to state definitively, but from the appearance and nature of the samples, we are of the opinion that it is a cement which has been worked by man.”

The jubilation of the Treasure Company’s principals soon gave way to a debate about whether they should issue new stock for sale in order to expand the operations on Oak Island. In the end, the stockholders voted unanimously that there would be no “outside” sale of shares in the company and that the current shareholders should finance any future work and split the proceeds only among themselves when the treasure was finally retrieved.

A new round of work began in October 1897. The plan this time was to sink one more shaft (no. 14) to a depth of between 175 and 200 feet, then drive a tunnel to the Money Pit, in hopes of draining it into the new shaft, which would be octagonal in shape, 13 feet across and 40 feet from the original Pit. Why the Treasure Company imagined they would produce a different result than had been found in previous attempts to do pretty much the same thing is not clear, but what happened was quite predictable: at 112 feet into the new shaft it began to fill with seawater at a rate that made continuing impossible. The company’s response was to attempt yet another shaft (no. 15) about 35 feet southwest of no. 14. The diggers were encouraged when at 105 feet they came to an abandoned tunnel that had been dug by the Halifax Company and found it dry. At 160 feet, though, water began to pour into no. 15 from the Money Pit, where the water level briefly dropped by 14 feet, then rose again, until both it and the new pit were filled to sea level. Pumping was attempted until the plunger rod broke. Water quickly poured into the new shaft from the Money Pit and within a few hours both the tunnel and no. 15 were destroyed.

“Nothing daunted,” as Frederick Blair’s man R. W. Harris would put it, the Treasure Company sank four more shafts (nos. 16, 17, 18, and 19) to depths of between 95 and 144 feet. Each was abandoned when the diggers encountered quicksand, impenetrable boulders, or an overwhelming surge of water.

In the spring of 1898, however, the Treasure Company did perform a series of tests that gave them new and deeply unsettling news about what they were up against. First, they pumped shaft no. 18 full of water to well above tide level in the hope that they would force the muddy water in the new shaft out onto the beach at Smith’s Cove. The muddy water did soon appear on the south shore of the island but not at Smith’s Cove. Three different sections of the shore of the south beach showed evidence of the muddy water escaping from no. 18. To make certain of what this suggested, Welling and Chappell agreed that they should pump the Money Pit full of water above sea level, then drop red dye into it, hoping the dye would drain through the flood tunnel as it receded. As they hoped, the dye began to seep into the bay a short time later; again this was not at Smith’s Cove but rather on the south end of the island in the same places where the muddy water had been seen earlier.

What it meant, almost certainly, was that there was at least one flood tunnel that ran toward the Money Pit from the south shore but not from Smith’s Cove and that there could be as many as three such tunnels. Finding a way to drain the Money Pit had become an exponentially more complex problem. Yet what the Treasure Company chose to do next was return to the Pit itself.

For reasons that were not explained in the journal kept by Blair, the company’s crew spent months on work that essentially doubled the size of the Money Pit. This was done by sinking a new shaft (no. 20) right next to the original Pit. A double wall of cribbing was constructed to divide the two halves of what was otherwise now a shaft measuring 10 feet by 8 feet. The excavation of the new shaft became increasingly difficult as the crew descended into rock-hard clay and was stopped at 113 feet by a surge of seawater that poured in with more force than the pumps could handle. The work continued, though. On April 2 the crew’s foreman, a man named Burrows, told Blair that his men were 3 feet below the flood tunnel from Smith’s Cove and that they were confident they could reach a depth of 126 feet within a couple of weeks and would there locate the tunnel from the south shore. Only a few days later, though, Burrows reported that most of his men had left the island to join fishing crews and that they were running out of coal to run the pumps and the boiler.

Creditors were literally standing at the Treasure Company’s door. The county sheriff showed up on the island in May 1898 with a court order obtained by a Halifax machinery firm that forced the sale of every bit of equipment that could be carried off. Captain Welling had invested $4,000 of his own money and was at risk of losing his home. Putnam was in far worse shape, having put in $20,000; within a few months he had no choice but to declare a bankruptcy from which he never recovered. Blair proposed a new stock issue, based on the discoveries of the Treasure Company, but the other directors and shareholders, many of whom had already borrowed money to make their investments, turned him down. In December 1900, Blair used his own money to buy out all of the other shareholders and took complete control of the Treasure Company, vowing to continue the work on his own.

Blair summarized his position in a draft prospectus:

When we went to work at the Island two years ago, we knew comparatively nothing about the conditions as they existed. We supposed at that time that the Money Pit was not over 120 feet deep and that the treasure was not over 110 feet down. Our work has since proved that the Pit is not less than 180 feet deep, that there are two tunnels instead of one, and that one of them is not less than 160 feet down, and that there is treasure at different points in the Pit, from 126 feet down to 170 feet, without a doubt. We have also found out that the work done by the Halifax Company is a greater hindrance to the procuring of the treasure than is the original work.

We now claim that there is nothing that can prevent us getting the treasure.

All that was really certain was that the treasure hunt on Oak Island that had begun in the eighteenth century would continue into the twentieth.

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