It was the year 1933 that the erstwhile treasure hunter Franklin Delano Roosevelt became the thirty-second president of the United States, and also about when Oak Island historians began to turn decisively away from the Captain Kidd theory.
Thomas Nixon of Victoria, British Columbia, was the man running the operations on Oak Island during the early part of Roosevelt’s first term in office. Nixon’s place in the chronicle of the island would be just one more chapter consisting of grand announcements, elaborate plans, and less elaborate implementation, ending in an abysmal but familiar failure, except for the theory he brought to the treasure hunt and the method by which he had arrived at it. If Nixon proved anything, it was that the Oak Island story could and would get stranger.
Like Captain Bowdoin, Nixon would use the New York newspapers to announce his bold and thrilling claim about what it was that had been buried on Oak Island. His Canadian Oak Island Treasure Company was “equipped with the latest engineering apparatus,” according to the story Nixon planted in the October 15, 1933, edition of the New York Herald Tribune. This redundant boast would likely have attracted little attention if not for the claim that the works on Oak Island had been completed by “a tribe of Incas” who had fled their homes hundreds of years earlier “carrying jewels and precious metals,” as the Herald Tribune article put it. “The legend says the Indians landed on Oak Island and buried their riches in a deep tunnel running from the Atlantic Ocean to the centre of the island, and then vanished.”
What the article didn’t say was that this “legend” was the product of what at the time was known as “spirit rapping.” This was a method of alleged communication with the souls of the dead that involved messages tapped out, most commonly on a tabletop. It had become a kind of craze in the United States during the years immediately before and after the Civil War, owing in large part to the public fascination with a pair of young teen sisters from New York State named Maggie and Kate Fox, whose supporters included Horace Greeley and Arthur Conan Doyle.
In the context of the era, it was perhaps understandable that Frederick Blair might form a partnership with a man who claimed to have learned during a séance that it was Inca treasure buried on Oak Island. And it couldn’t have hurt that Nixon’s psychic was referencing perhaps the richest lost treasure ever known to have existed.
Certain elements of the story of the so-called treasure of Tumbes are foggy conflations, but many others are as solid and certain as anything we call history can be. This story begins in the early sixteenth century, when an aspiring conquistador named Francisco Pizarro joined a colonization expedition to the New World. Pizarro, seeking to become as wealthy and famous as his distant cousin Hernán Cortés, the conqueror of the Aztec empire, distinguished himself in several battles with native tribes and by the year 1526 had risen to the position of second in command of the Spanish army in the region of Darien, in what we now know as Peru and Ecuador. In 1527 and 1528, Pizarro and his troops twice visited the city of Tumbes, where the people we today call the Incas lived (actually “Inca” was a term that could only be used by their king), and each time were stunned by the wealth and splendor of a place where even weapons and tools were made of silver and gold, and heaps of enormous emeralds filled vases and jars surrounding statues made entirely of precious metals.
Lacking the force to challenge the natives, Pizarro retreated all the way back to Spain, where he entreated King Charles to finance a military expedition that would claim the fabulous treasures of Tumbes. Charles agreed and even stipulated that Pizarro would be governor of any lands he conquered.
Pizarro and his troops marched back into Tumbes in the autumn of 1532, but found the city in ruins and its treasures gone. There is a claim based on some historical evidence that the two priests Pizarro had left behind to minister to the natives instead warned the Incas of Pizarro’s intentions and helped them move and conceal the treasure of Tumbes. Whether that is so, it is a certifiable fact that from Tumbes, Pizarro marched his men to the Inca city of Cajamarca, home of the newly crowned Inca king Atahualpa. With a force of just 160 men (but also several cannons that they used to devastating effect), the Spaniards routed an Inca honor guard of some six thousand and captured Atahualpa. The king quickly promised Pizarro that he would fill a room 24 feet long by 18 feet wide by 8 feet tall with gold and give him twice that amount of silver if his life was spared. Pizarro agreed and during the next two months the Inca began to deliver the promised precious metals. The gold and silver came slowly, though, and Pizarro and his men began to believe that the natives were using the time to assemble their eighty thousand men into an enormous army to rescue Atahualpa and destroy the Spanish. Pizarro’s response was to announce in August 1533 that Atahualpa would be burned at the stake for his supposed crimes against humanity. The Inca king converted to Christianity to spare himself such a fate, but Pizarro then ordered that Atahualpa be garroted, and he was. The general of the Inca army responded by ordering that the 750 tons of gold he was bringing to secure his king’s release now be hidden from the Spanish. The hiding place is most often said to be a cave in the Llanganates, a remote and misty mountain range between the Andes and the Amazon, in what is now central Ecuador.
Other stories and legends about what happened to the fabulous Inca treasure began to emerge even before the beginning of the seventeenth century. One often-repeated story was that the priests Pizarro left behind had aided the Incas in moving the treasure to the Isthmus of Darien (today the Isthmus of Panama), where the priests helped the Inca either obtain or build the ships they would use to transport the treasure to one of the Windward Islands (stretching from Dominica to Trinidad and Tobago). Eventually, the story became that the boats carrying the Inca treasure had been swept up and away by a series of enormous tropical storms and hurricanes that struck the Caribbean (the historical record suggests that the tempests that struck the region in the year 1530 were of astounding and terrifying force) and were swept north to some distant location, where the treasure of Tumbes was cached. Not until the advent of Thomas Nixon, though, was that location identified as Oak Island.
It was perhaps because he had no other offers at the moment that Blair reached an agreement with Nixon that would allow the British Columbia man to work on Oak Island between April and November 1934 on the condition that half of any treasure he found would go to Blair. His plan, Nixon had told both Blair and his backers, was to drive interlocking pilings around the Money Pit until he created a steel circle with a diameter of between 50 and 75 feet. He would then excavate the entire contents of this enormous enclosure as deep as he needed to go to recover the treasure. Instead, Nixon and his crew arrived on Oak Island in June 1934 and did no digging at all. What Nixon did do was bore fourteen holes that went as deep as 170 feet in the vicinity of the Money Pit. The most interesting things he brought up were bits of old oak timbers and fragments of gold-and-blue china. On November 1, 1934, Blair refused Nixon’s request for an extension and terminated their relationship. Nixon threatened legal action, but in the end simply withdrew and disappeared from the Oak Island story.
The theory that it was Inca treasure buried on Oak Island, though, did not vanish with him. It would be revived by at least one self-appointed investigator in every decade that followed. So in his fleeting way, Thomas Nixon might be said to have pioneered the proliferation of theories about who or what was responsible for the work on Oak Island. Thus it might also be fitting that Nixon was about to be succeeded by the man who was the first to recognize that the answers to his questions might be written in the very topography of the island.