The Curse of Oak Island

by Randall Sullivan

  The Laginas were back in the spring, this time to use caissons to isolate and drain the Mercy Point. It was fairly compelling drama up to the point they found absolutely nothing. At that point, it seemed like the right decision to abandon the swamp for the time being.

  I wanted the show to stay in the water, though. To me, the most promising line of inquiry The Curse of Oak Island had pursued was in its offshore explorations. These had been limited, however, and the lack of follow-up was terribly disappointing. Diving about 300 feet off the south shore, Tony Sampson had found two triangular rocks pointing in a line straight at the Money Pit. I had the feeling there would be others, but I also knew, having paddled through the thick beds of kelp just offshore, that it would become increasingly difficult to find them. Still, I thought they should have tried. The show had acknowledged that Blair’s 1898 dye test proved that the flood system that had been for two-hundred-plus years the main obstacle to exploring the Money Pit was connected to the south shore. There’d been an attempted replication of that test, but the dye being used in 2015 instead of red was a very difficult-to-see green that was dropped down 10X rather than into the Money Pit. That effort fizzled, but I began pushing for another try within a couple of days of arriving in Nova Scotia. Almost certainly, it seemed to me, the south shore was the main source of the water that now saturated the east-end drumlin. Blair’s results, after all, had been confirmed by the second dye test conducted by Hamilton in 1938. And a connection between 10X and the ice holes Dan Blankenship had spotted off the south shore in the harsh winters of 1979 and 1987 left little doubt that openings in the seabed off the south shore were sending most of the water into the flood system. Those openings likely hadn’t been in the seabed but rather on the beach, probably near the high tide line, at the time the Money Pit had been dug.

  Back in 2003, Fred Nolan told me about an offshore survey of Oak Island that had been conducted in the early 1960s by a group of Nova Scotia divers. David Tobias later confirmed that Fred was right about this. I’d lost interest when Fred told me the diver leading the survey, Eric Hamblin, had believed Oak Island was where the treasure of Tumbes had been buried. I was pretty sure even back then that was about as unlikely a theory of Oak Island as had ever been put forward. But now, in 2017, it occurred to me that Fred had also told me that the most interesting thing those divers had found all those years earlier was a hole in the seafloor off the south shore that they were convinced was man-made. The first chance I had to talk to Dan Blankenship, I mentioned this to him and he stared at me for a moment, his eyes wide in surprise. “I think I know what you’re talking about,” he said. He had found just such an opening off the south shore himself back in the late sixties, Dan said. He’d actually used an air hose to blow away the debris around the opening, and had showed it to his son, David, but he had become distracted by other things and forgotten all about it. “Today’s the first time I’ve thought of it in almost fifty years,” he told me. Dan was ninety-three now and hard of hearing, but his mind was still remarkably acute; I was pretty sure his recollection could be trusted. Armed with his story, I made the case to the producers for more exploration off the south shore; maybe Dan and David together could remember approximately where the hole in the seafloor could be found. But neither the production team nor I could locate any documentation of the early sixties survey or any divers who’d participated in it, Eric Hamblin included. I asked my diver friend Tony Sampson to make some inquiries and he did, but he came up with nothing. Not surprising, considering it had taken place more than a half century earlier. I suggested consulting Fred Nolan, and it was then that I learned that Fred was no longer with us.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  One of my favorite parts of the show had been the relationship that developed between Fred Nolan and Rick Lagina. I was quite familiar with how difficult Fred could be and how hard he made people work to get any kind of information about Oak Island out of him. Rick, though, had won him over as thoroughly as anyone ever had. Part of this transformation was that Fred had finally begun to face his mortality. He was eighty-seven when Rick met him, and far more gaunt and frail looking than he’d been even back in 2003. I came to realize that it was Rick’s enthusiasm for the treasure hunt combined with his respect for those who had conducted it that largely made the relationship with Fred work. Rick’s demeanor was entirely genuine and a big part of what contributed to his winning personality, onscreen and off. Honoring those who’d come before him was to Rick an important reason for the show’s existence and his participation in it. Fred had come to acknowledge that, and some of the frost on the old fellow had melted. “I don’t want to be an obstacle anymore,” he had told Rick at one point. “I’m too old for that now.”

  This didn’t mean, of course, that Fred was prepared to share everything he knew. I was amazed that Rick had been able to get Fred to confess during one of their off-camera conversations that just as Dan Blankenship suspected, he had moved many of the objects and markers he’d found on Oak Island over the years. Their original locations, though, were all recorded on his map of the island, Fred said. That map was Nolan’s life’s work, a chart on which he’d recorded more than fifty years of discovery on Oak Island. After weeks of back and forth, he had finally agreed to share it with Rick, on camera, and that was no small thing. To my knowledge, Fred had never let another living soul see his map. The scene in which this was supposed to happen, though, was a complete fiasco. First, Fred had presented Rick with what he said was his map but turned out to be something else. Rick told me it was the only time he’d ever lost his temper with Fred. After Fred more or less confessed to what he’d done, he agreed to let Rick, and Rick alone, see his map at his house on Joudrey’s Cove. When Rick arrived at the appointed time, however, there was no answer to his knock. He didn’t know if Fred was inside pretending not to be home or had actually left, but he’d never gotten to see the map.

  Now Rick was concerned that he never would. Fred had died at age eighty-nine on June 6, 2016, about six weeks before my arrival in Nova Scotia. It wasn’t until the show aired the following November that I saw the scene where Rick went to Dan Blankenship’s house to tell him Fred had passed. Recalling how Dan had cursed Nolan for the things he’d done to conceal or disguise his discoveries over the years, it was strangely moving to hear him observe that while Fred was “a little bit on the secretive side,” so were most treasure hunters, himself included.

  Rick was struggling now with his concern that all of Nolan’s research might never be seen, at least by him. Fred’s son, who felt he had already lost his father to Oak Island many years earlier, was said to be despondent about facing that this loss was now permanent, and he was nowhere near ready to make decisions about how to dispose of the enormous collection of objects and documents Fred had accumulated in more than fifty years on Oak Island. Promises that had been made to Rick but never put in writing were just whispers in the wind now and it seemed inevitable that the son would soon realize his father’s research was worth money—perhaps a lot of money—to someone somewhere.

  The older Lagina brother sounded sincere, though, when he observed that what pained him most was that Fred had not lived until the end of this year. Because in the summer of 2016 he and Marty and the rest of them were poised to make a search of the island that would be more comprehensive than all they’d done in the previous three seasons of The Curse of Oak Island. That sounded a trifle grandiose to me, until I paid my first visit to the Money Pit since 2003. It was a different place.

  The production had kept me away from the Money Pit for my first week on Oak Island, preferring to shoot scenes of me doing research at the Genealogical Society, among other locations. I knew something major was happening at the east-end drumlin, though, because of the steady stream of big trucks that were carrying loads of gravel in that direction. Rick—and Marty especially—seemed very excited about what was going on, but all the details were withheld from me so my initial reaction to the changes taking plac
e could be caught on camera. Both my astonishment and mixed emotions were genuine when Rick and Marty walked me to the high spot that provided an overview of what had once been the crown of the east-end drumlin but was now an acre-sized, three-foot-thick platform of gravel. It was utterly unrecognizable as the place I had first seen thirteen years earlier. In 2003, in spite of all that had been visited on the east-end drumlin in the previous two centuries, the Money Pit area still had the quality of a living history. This was mainly due to all the wrecked, broken or abandoned machinery and other equipment that had been pushed to the side each time a new expedition arrived on Oak Island, offering mute testimony of what had taken place. The ghosts of Frederick Nolan, Gilbert Hedden, Melbourne Chappell, Robert Restall and, yes, even Robert Dunfield had haunted the place. They were gone now.

  The enormous pad of gravel, which was still being built up with dump truck load after dump truck load, then spread by bulldozers, would be necessary to support the three-hundred-ton crane that would hoist the caissons (steel chambers, air locked at the top, whose air pressure would repel the water below the work area) that were then to be driven into the ground by an oscillator that itself weighed five tons. One location where the first 40-inch-wide metal cylinder would be put down was called C1 because it had been chosen by Charles Barkhouse as his best guess as to the location of the original Money Pit. That seemed appropriate; Charles knew as much or more than anyone about the history of Oak Island and his guess was likely to be an informed one.

  The prep work had been going on for weeks already, beginning with the construction of a new road that had been built to accommodate the enormous rigs required to carry the two cranes (the second was a mere hundred-ton model) that would be used to lift, lower, and place the caissons. While the pad was being created, the Laginas and the rest of the cast had been spending a good deal of their time in one of the two other locations that had been selected as the focus of this season’s efforts on Oak Island. That, of course, was the swamp, which the Laginas had obtained permission from Fred Nolan, before his death, to drain as much water from as possible.

  The stated goal of that summer’s work in the swamp was to determine whether it had formed naturally centuries earlier or was man-made, and whether Nolan’s theory that a ship had been deliberately sunk there to conceal the treasure it carried held any water. “Why are there stumps in the swamp?” Marty asked. “Because trees grew there once, obviously.”

  They had already spent $2 million in the Money Pit area that summer, but what they were doing in the swamp was costing even more, Marty told me. The first find they had been rewarded with was the 18-foot-long wooden plank Tony Sampson brought up from just below the surface of the water. It had to be either deck or side planking from a masted ship all agreed. Considering how thin the plank was, it seemed almost certain it was from the ship’s deck. A company called Beta Analytic ran carbon-dating tests and came back with a report that the ship had been built sometime between 1680 and 1735, with 90 percent likelihood. As this was being explained to me, I had the feeling for the first time that the search was actually getting somewhere.

  Once 90 percent of the water in the swamp had been pumped out (and, for environmental reasons, into the Cave-in Pit), the backhoe was brought in to lift out bucket upon bucket of foul-smelling muck that would be dumped into an enclosure made of hay bales and sandbags that the crew called the cattle pen. Jack Begley, my favorite by far among the younger people on the show, in part because he was always willing to take on a dirty job, was literally covered with the filth of the cattle pen as he swept it with a metal detector. Then the man who had been chosen as the best at locating metal objects in this kind of slimy mess, Gary Drayton, arrived to take over, scanning the cattle pen with his own, more high-powered detector. Drayton was a sturdy Brit with a piping voice and a charming sense of humor who wore a billed cap to cover his bald dome. He had made his bones as a “mud larker” (a scavenger in river mud) back in Lincolnshire, England, but was better known these days for searching shipwrecks out of his home base in Florida. Drayton had not taken long to locate a heavy lead spike—he called it a nail—in the spoils from the swamp. He recognized it immediately as the type of nail that was used to hold down the deck planks of old ships; he said he had found a number of identical nails on Spanish galleons from the 1600s.

  A decision was made to seek confirmation from an antiques appraiser. Dr. Lori Verderame, better known as Dr. Lori, was a familiar face on television from her appearances on the Discovery Channel’s Auction Kings and the Fox Business Network’s Strange Inheritance. After examining the spike-size nail, Verderame identified it as a wrought iron deck nail called a barrote, which in Spanish meant simply “iron bar.” She dated it to earlier than 1652, meaning it was made before the coin that had been found in the swamp at the end of the show’s first season. The barrote, the length of planking, along with the scuppers Fred Nolan had earlier pulled out of the swamp, all added support to Nolan’s theory that a Spanish galleon had been sunk where the swamp now lay.

  Gary Drayton, though, was making finds on another part of the island that seemed to point away from Spain and toward the British. With Charles Barkhouse in tow, Drayton was using his metal detector to scan much of Oak Island’s lot 24, owned during the early 1800s by Samuel Ball. I noticed that when these scenes aired later in the year, there was no mention of the fact that there had been many metal detector searches of the island in previous years, most notably the exhaustive one conducted by Peter Beamish and his students from Phillips Academy. Knowing how picked over the island already was, I found it fairly impressive that Drayton was able to come up with what he at first thought was a coin, then decided must be a “dandy button” of the sort used on the cuffs of British military officers during the eighteenth century. Drayton also found a British coin on lot 24, one engraved with the name and likeness of King George II, which would have placed it in the mid-1700s, and a lead ingot like the one British soldiers had used for making musket balls in the same time frame. All of this suggested to Drayton that there had been a British military encampment on Oak Island at some point prior to 1795. Or, I thought to myself, all of it could have belonged to Samuel Ball himself, who after all had served with the British army during the Revolutionary War.

  Still, there was something exhilarating about this accumulation of small discoveries and the giddy speculation that they could add up to more confirmation of Fred Nolan’s theory that the treasure of Havana had been secreted on Oak Island. I realized that beneath a veneer of detachment I was as susceptible to the wish to believe as any of the others involved with The Curse of Oak Island. Unlike them, though, I had to consider the possibility that the finds made by Drayton might support what everyone associated with the island regarded as their least favorite theory, the one that had been proposed by a woman from Sydney, Nova Scotia, named Joy Steele.

  IT SOUNDED PLAUSIBLE when I first heard it described, and even in the brief introduction of it that I read in Joy Steele’s book, The Oak Island Mystery Solved. Steele described herself as a longtime member of various Oak Island forums who had been more or less obsessed with various theories associated with the place, until she got seriously ill and while convalescing realized that “Oak Island was the site of naval stores installation, part of a mercantilist scheme engineered between the British government and a company of English merchants in the early part of the 18th century.” By “stores,” Steele meant tar, raw turpentine, pitch, and rosin, all made by cooking down the crude gum oleoresin that comes out of pine trees. The Money Pit, Steele contended, “was none other than a ground kiln constructed to produce naval stores for use of either the British Admiralty and/or use by the South Sea Company in its triangular slave trade.”

  Steele had done an extraordinary amount of research into the British naval stores industry in the Americas that thrived between 1713 and 1720, as a result of the Act for the Encouraging of the Importation of Naval Stores of 1705. Most of her book in fact was derived from
various records and documents associated with the production and transport of naval stores by the South Sea Company at the behest of the Crown. There were detailed accounts of businesses created for the production of tar among Virginia’s Jamestown colonists and the Palatine Germans of New York. It made for tedious reading, but the curious thing was that absolutely none of it made any direct connection to Oak Island. That alone spoke a good deal about the weakness of Steele’s theory: the fact that both the British government and the South Sea Company kept such detailed records of their naval stores, and yet there was not a single mention of any such operation on Oak Island was a strong indication that there had been none.

  What Steele had done, I realized, was to take a slender implied connection to the island and built her entire case on it. This was a letter written by a member of the British Parliament named Thomas Harley in 1720 in which, speaking of Nova Scotia as a possible source of naval stores, he stated, “They are likewise to have some pretty island in those parts, which is not yet peopled, and therefore more valuable.” Really, that was all she had, aside from the fact that also in 1720 Colonel Richard Phillips had sailed into Annapolis Royal with orders that vast tracts of forest in Nova Scotia should be set aside as Crown reserves. That order specifically cited that the white pine trees in those forests should be used for “masts and timber.” It probably wasn’t unreasonable to assume that some of those trees, or their stumps at least, might have been used to cook tar and turpentine, but Steele had no evidence of it. She did think it was quite important, though, that one of those tracts—one among dozens—was set along the LaHave River, which emptied into Mahone Bay. It might have been enough to establish a thesis, but it was far from the proof Steele implied when she wrote, “All evidence weighted, Oak Island strongly appears to be the island Thomas Harley talked about in his letter.”