The Curse of Oak Island

by Randall Sullivan

  There would be a further exploration of the C1 shaft as well, said the show’s creator, who admitted being continually surprised by viewers’ obsessive fascination with Oak Island. It had even infected the show’s crew, Burns said: “I have to actually admonish them not to get involved in trying to solve the mystery. That’s how invested they get just by being on the island.”

  Through season four, The Curse of Oak Island had continued to be the most popular reality show on cable television, and often the most popular cable show of any kind on the Tuesday nights when its episodes aired. “The possibility of an extraordinary find” was what kept viewers coming back, Burns said.

  When the Laginas asked me about the theories I “embraced” or had ruled out, I admitted that the most perplexing thing about Oak Island was how difficult it was to either hold close or outright dismiss any one of the dozens of propositions I had heard or read about. I recalled the old television show Columbo, in which the detective played by Peter Falk, in episode after episode, would conclude his questioning of a suspect, begin to step away, then turn back to say, “One more thing.” On Oak Island there was always one more thing.

  “It’s maddening,” Marty agreed. “Like the story of the five men and the elephant. You only get bits and pieces.”

  Rick’s view was predictably more romantic: “An Island of what if’s and possibilities,” he called Oak Island, and sounded as if that was what he most loved about the place.

  Kevin Burns compared Oak Island to a slot machine in Las Vegas. “You get just enough to keep you coming back. You want to walk away, but you’re afraid the next person’s going to pull the lever and hit the jackpot.”

  Certainly, the Laginas said, they had collected enough in the summer of 2017 to support an enthusiastic search in 2018. After that, well, he wasn’t sure, Marty said. His brother Rick, though, was never going to let the treasure hunt go, and Marty knew it. So did Burns: “For Rick, it’s a quest, a mission, a tribute to the dreams of those who came before.” And in spite of the demurrals he offered, Marty had been ineluctably drawn into that quest. “He’s hooked,” Burns said, “even if he doesn’t want to admit it.”

  Afterword

  I anticipate that there will be complaints that I have failed to mention some of the many theories of Oak Island that have been put forth over the years. I’d like to consider a few briefly.

  There are those who have suggested the native people of Nova Scotia, the Mi’kmaq, were responsible for the works on Oak Island. The idea is dubious. There is absolutely nothing that connects the tribe to Oak Island other than that they were living in what would become Nova Scotia long before even the earliest Europeans arrived. The Mi’kmaq themselves have no stories or legends associated with Oak Island, which one would expect if this had occurred.

  Some theories sound plausible at first, but they fall apart upon even a cursory examination. A number of investigators, for instance, have energetically promoted the idea that the works on Oak Island were done by the British army during the Revolutionary War in the years between 1776 and 1783. After the British evacuated Boston in March 1776, they had good reason to fear that their New York command post was next, these theorists point out. The New York garrison contained several million pounds for the payment of troops and the purchase of supplies. Also, there were rumors that George Washington intended to attack Halifax (something Washington is known to have considered). The theory goes that to protect its assets, the British sent engineers to Oak Island to supervise the construction of a repository for its colonial treasure that would not be threatened with seizure by the upstart Americans.

  There is also a sort of opposite theory that it was the American revolutionaries who created the works on Oak Island as a weapons cache to be used when the War of Independence spread north into Canada’s Atlantic coast. Some other theorists have suggested that the pits on Oak Island were used as a part of a smuggling operation run by those who supported the American cause. The problem with both of these—as with the theory that the French army buried a Louisbourg treasure on the island—is obvious. By the middle of the eighteenth century, Mahone Bay was increasingly populated with Europeans who would have been well aware of any major operation on Oak Island. Along with the fact that the carbon-dating points strongly to the late seventeenth or early eighteenth century, this makes these scenarios extremely unlikely.

  Even when one has to be impressed by the time and energy an investigator has devoted to the problem of Oak Island, one does not have to treat it with great regard. George Young of Queensland, Nova Scotia, was the project manager for an engineering firm that in 1975 installed a sewage disposal system for the community of Western Shore on behalf of the city of Chester. Part of this work involved constructing a pumping station for the Oak Island Inn, on the mainland about three thousand feet across the bay from Oak Island. During that work, an excavator bucket broke through the earth into a 10-foot wide cavern that was 52 feet deep. From this discovery, Young developed an elaborate theory that hundreds of years before the birth of Christ, Mediterranean peoples were operating a number of trading settlements on the Atlantic coast of North America and that one group of them—people from the coast of Libya who were of mixed Phoenician and Greek blood—were using the cave he had found along with others, including some on Oak Island, as living quarters. This arrangement was ended by the Punic Wars, circa 260 BC, and at that point, Young would assert, those who had been living in the caves were integrated into the Mi’kmaq tribe. Later a group of Copts from Egypt inhabited the abandoned caves, Young’s theory went on, then around 1384 AD a large party of Copts arrived on Oak Island with something of extraordinary value that they wished to conceal (Young doesn’t claim to know what) and converted the old living quarters on Oak Island into what would become the Money Pit. He doubted they ever intended to reopen the vault they created. Young speculated that they may have been “interring one of exalted rank,” which for him was an explanation of the flood tunnel system. It’s every bit as outlandish as the theory that Oak Island holds the lost secrets of Atlantis—and one hell of a lot more complicated.

  A couple of former miners have proposed theories of Oak Island that probably don’t deserve to be dismissed out of hand. The first was John Steadman, a New Brunswick man who had worked at Oak Island with the Truro Company. His claim was that the Money Pit was an old mine that had been dug by the earliest French inhabitants of Nova Scotia. The major problem with that claim is that there is no evidence that valuable minerals were ever on Oak Island to be mined. A former miner named John O’Brien did an extraordinary amount of research in support of a book he titled Oak Island Unearthed! A Miner’s Investigation into the Enigma of Oak Island, the Mesoamericans, and the Treasure Buried Within. O’Brien at least claimed that the Money Pit was dug to mine something that actually exists on Oak Island, the strata of blue clay found deep underground. It was the ancient Mayans who first dug the mine, O’Brien claimed, and the Aztecs who came later, after the Spanish conquest in the fifteenth century. There is evidence that the Maya were maritime traders whose reach extended as far north as the coastal lagoons of Mexico, Belize, and Guatemala. Their only watercraft, though, is believed to have been the dugout canoe. No intact Mayan canoes have ever been discovered, but there are depictions in Mayan art of royal figures being ferried about by canoe. Also, Christopher Columbus’s son Ferdinand wrote a fairly detailed description of seeing the Mayans paddling offshore in their canoes. There is absolutely no evidence, however, that the Maya ever got as far north as even Florida, and the notion that they paddled all the way to Nova Scotia to mine blue clay strains credulity to the breaking point.

  A fringe theorist who got to make an on-camera presentation to the Laginas for The Curse of Oak Island is Gary Clayton, a former Baptist minister from Arizona, who had acquired Little Mash Island, a tiny blot of sand very near Oak Island. He had found evidence of tunnels and chambers connecting Oak Island to Little Mash, claimed Clayton, who asserted that a treasure that i
ncluded several hundred tons of gold bullion had been deposited in those chambers following a 1740 voyage from England by a group with “ties” to the Freemasons and Templars. He was there to offer a consulting contract, Clayton told the Laginas, for which he would receive 15 percent of any treasure found.

  What was not mentioned but I knew was that Clayton had been claiming to know exactly what was buried on Oak Island and where since the 1970s, when he and two partners put together a theory that involved the Aztecs and Mayans. As late as 2004, Clayton was boasting that he had invested “forty-five thousand hours’ research” to the problem of Oak Island and had figured it out completely by breaking the various clues and codes that had been left on the island by the original depositors and was ready to prove beyond all doubt that the Aztecs or Maya had had engineered the Oak Island works. He had “mathematical proof,” asserted Clayton, who was equipped with elaborately drafted engineering blueprints of the various vaults, passageways, flood tunnels, and underground living quarters he claimed were on Oak Island. Now, forty-four years after he started, Clayton had left the Aztecs and Maya behind and was claiming he had absolute proof instead of a Freemason/Templar treasure.

  I WAS FAIRLY CERTAIN when I left Nova Scotia at the end of August 2016 that the Laginas would continue their treasure hunt and their television show for at least another year. In the months that followed, though, a disturbing thought struck me: Now that the treasure hunt and the television show had become not just intertwined, or even symbiotic, but had merged to the point of being completely indistinguishable, what would happen when the show ended? When the show was cancelled, might the treasure hunt be as well?

  That the show would go on wasn’t completely confirmed in my mind until November, when the fourth season began to run on the History Channel. Shortly after the season debut, Kevin Burns called me to talk about my work on the show. Early in the conversation he told me that this first episode of the new season had been the highest rated program on cable that week. At some point we got on the subject of another season. I mentioned Rick Lagina’s remark about not continuing unless they made a breakthrough discovery that summer. Was he sure there would be a fifth season of The Curse of Oak Island? I asked Burns. Of course there would be a fifth season, I thought, answering my own question. I just wouldn’t be part of it.

  Even as I was putting myself at the distance from the show that would be required to write a book about Oak Island, I knew I would be rooting for the Laginas and their cohort to find the “game changer” Dan Henskee had written to me about. I told those who inquired that I was content to watch from the sidelines with the rest of the audience. What I didn’t say was that while I was certain the mystery of Oak Island would be solved someday, I doubted it would be any day soon. I would be long gone by then. The most I could hope for, probably, was that someone who read what I wrote about Oak Island would carry the search forward and allow me some small contribution to the end of the story.

  Oak Island Time Line

  1497 John Cabot becomes first European known to have set foot on Nova Scotia; claims territory for England

  1602–1614 Career of pirate Peter Easton, based on island of Oderin off coast of Newfoundland

  1604 Samuel de Champlain establishes Port Royal on Bay of Fundy, laying the first French claim to Nova Scotia

  1605 Acadians begin settling in Nova Scotia

  1632 French establish LaHave settlement at entrance to Mahone Bay

  1670 Henry Morgan sacks city of Panama; treasure haul is never accounted for

  1680–1699 Career of privateer and pirate William Kidd; Kidd buries part of treasure seized from Quedagh Merchant on Gardiners Island in 1699

  1687–1694 Career of privateer William Phipps; Phipps sacks Acadian city of Port Royal in Bay of Fundy in 1690

  1685 Huguenots persecution begins in France; many sail to and settle in Nova Scotia

  1700 French governor invites Atlantic Coast pirates to make LaHave their “depot”

  1713 French found fortress of Louisbourg on Cape Breton; Louisbourg pay ships begin sailing Atlantic

  1745 Louisbourg falls to British

  1746 D’Anville fleet sails from France to take back Louisbourg; many ships lost at sea

  1756 Governor Cornwallis expels Acadians from Nova Scotia

  1759 Shoreham Grant brings influx of settlers to Mahone Bay from New England; Chester Township established

  1763 Treaty of Paris permits Acadian return to Nova Scotia

  1765 What will become Oak Island designated as Island No. 28 by Charles Morris, surveyor general of the Nova Scotia province; Morris divides island into thirty-two four-acre lots

  1768 Anthony Vaughan Sr. immigrates to Mahone Bay area of Nova Scotia

  1781 Two Vaughan brothers purchase lots 13 and 14 on Oak Island

  1783 Freed slave Samuel Ball arrives in Canada and settles in Mahone Bay

  1784 Donald Daniel McGinnis, father of Money Pit discoverer, awarded a Crown grant of one hundred acres near Chester Township

  1786 Eleven-year-old John Smith moves onto Oak Island with family

  1787 Samuel Ball purchases first of nine lots he will own on Oak Island

  1788 Vaughans petition province of Nova Scotia for permission to cut and mill pine trees on the mainland

  1795 Putative year of discovery of Money Pit by Daniel McGinnis, John Smith, and Anthony Vaughan; initial excavation of the Pit

  1795 John Smith purchases lot 18 on Oak Island; whether this was before or after the discovery of the Money Pit is not known

  1795 Daniel McGinnis marries Maria Barbara Saller in Lunenburg

  1797 Daniel McGinnis’s son Johan baptized in Chester

  1804 Onslow Company sails to Oak Island, begins second and more extended excavation of Money Pit; discovery of lot platforms, charcoal, coconut fiber, blue clay, and inscribed stone follow, as does flooding of Money Pit

  1805 Onslow Company returns to Oak Island; unable to solve flood system problem

  1827 Daniel McGinnis dies on Oak Island

  1845 Truro Company formed

  1849 Truro Company begins operations on Oak Island; discoveries include the chain “links” brought up by a pot auger from the Money Pit; also claim to have passed through “metal in pieces” while drilling at a depth of more than 100 feet in Money Pit; dig shaft no. 2 on the island’s east-end drumlin

  1849 Anthony Vaughan gives his account of Money Pit’s discovery to Robert Creelman

  1849 Truro Company drill operator James Pitblado disappears from Oak Island and Mahone Bay area, supposedly after having removed some unknown object from drill tip

  1850 Truro Company returns to Oak Island, barging out a “two-horse gin”; digs shaft no. 3; after failing to solve flood system, company explores Smith’s Cove, where they discover man-made beach and five-fingered drain system

  1857 John Smith dies

  1857 Geologist Henry Poole observes and describes the Money Pit area

  1861 Oak Island Association begins operations on Oak Island with sixty-three workmen; by the time they finish there are six shafts in Money Pit area; digging and tunneling results in collapse of Money Pit; burst boiler results in first death of Oak Island treasure hunt, name of victim not known

  1862 Jothan McCully writes first article about discovery of Money Pit for Liverpool Transcript

  1863 Andrew Learmont Spedon’s Rambles among the Blue-Noses published, the first mention of Oak Island to appear between hard covers

  1863 Inscribed stone is removed from Smith home to home of Jothan McCully

  1863 Treasure hunter James McNutt writes a description of the early search for treasure on Oak Island; it is never published and only fragments of the manuscript are recovered

  1864 Oak Island Association locates what they believe is the “flood tunnel” but operations on the island soon abandoned; by this point there are nine shafts in Money Pit area

  1864 Jothan McCully (most likely) writes first published full account of Money Pit’s
discovery for the Colonist

  1865 Inscribed stone is removed from McCully home to be displayed in window of A. and H. Creighton in Halifax

  1866 Oak Island Eldorado Company (soon to be the Halifax Company) formed; begins operations on Oak Island

  1867 Halifax Company gives up treasure hunt on Oak Island

  1870 Judge Mather Byles DesBrisay’s History of the County of Lunenburg originally published, the first description of the Money Pit’s discovery to appear between hard covers

  1878 Sophia Sellers’s team of oxen falls into what will become known as the Cave-in Pit

  1885 Ivory or bone boatswain’s whistle found at Smith’s Cove

  1893 Frederick Blair establishes Oak Island Treasure Company in Boston

  1894 Treasure Company begins operations on Oak Island; excavates the Cave-in Pit; digs shaft no. 12

  1896 Second edition of History of the County of Lunenburg published; in it DesBrisay replaces Samuel Ball with Anthony Vaughan as one of the Money Pit’s original discoverers

  1897 Blair and Treasure Company dig shaft no. 13; Maynard Kaiser becomes second to die during treasure hunt on Oak Island; Captain John Welling and Treasure Company crew find man-made tunnel flowing with saltwater to Money Pit; scrap of parchment with writing in India ink pulled from bit of drill bit probing Money Pit; Treasure Company sinks six more shafts on east-end drumlin, bringing the total to nineteen; A. Boake, Roberts and Company of London identify substance removed from drill bit as primitive man-made cement