By the time Gilbert Hedden joined the Oak Island treasure hunt in 1935, he was as apparently well set financially as anyone who had preceded him. After graduating from the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in 1919, Hedden had become, at age twenty-two, the vice president and general manager of his family’s business, Hedden Iron Construction Company of Hillside, New Jersey, fabricators and erectors of structural steel. He pocketed a tidy sum as his share of the company’s sale to Bethlehem Steel in 1931 and earned a significant annual salary as plant manager of what Bethlehem was now calling its Hedden Works division. There was an independent spirit in the young man that chafed against corporate constraints, though, so in 1932 he walked away from Hedden Works to try the auto industry. By 1934, he was the owner of a thriving dealership in Morristown, New Jersey. In nearby Chatham, where he lived, Hedden was elected mayor that same year.
The dreamer in Hedden was not satisfied with this sort of conventional prosperity, however. That part of him had responded powerfully to an article about Oak Island that was published in the May 28, 1928, edition of the New York Times Magazine, an article that he carried with him and read repeatedly. The engineering challenge was what fascinated him, Hedden would say initially. In early 1934 he made a trip to Nova Scotia to take a look at the Money Pit area of Oak Island and make a close inspection of the problem it posed. Like Frederick Blair, Hedden was methodical, collecting all the available data that went back to 1795, studying every expedition to the island in the years since. He was all about separating fact from fiction, Hedden told Blair and his lawyer, R. V. Harris. He interviewed William Chappell and at least a dozen other men who had been part of previous treasure-hunting companies and began to assemble his own journal, one that rivaled Blair’s in length and detail. “Investigation of the Legend of Buried Treasure at Oak Island, Nova Scotia,” Hedden titled his thirty-one-Page monograph, to which he attached an assortment of old surveys, charts, and aerial photographs of the island. Blair, effectively Hedden’s partner by virtue of his continued hold on the treasure trove license, shared all of his records, letters, and plans. Only after completing a thorough study of those as well was Hedden prepared to state with conviction that he believed something extraordinary had taken place on Oak Island, something singular in the history of the world. He might not have known it yet, but Hedden was hooked for life.
Blair was pleased to hear Hedden’s opinion, but he wanted to know what the man proposed to do about it. Blair might have lost his lease on the Money Pit area after failing to reach a deal with Sophia Sellers’s heirs, who were demanding far too “fancy” a price for their property as he wrote Harris, but he still held the treasure trove license, which made him indispensable to any further Oak Island operations. On March 1, 1935, Blair and Hedden signed a deal that guaranteed each of them a share of any treasure recovered on the island, with Blair to lend his experience and expertise and Hedden to finance the work.
There was an immediate threat of complication when the province political leadership proposed that the Nova Scotia Mines Act should be amended to give the Minister of Mines the same authority over treasure troves that the office had over ores and minerals. The bill was explicitly targeted at Oak Island, and this stirred much controversy. The Mines Act amendment was ultimately killed in committee, but the heirs of Sophia Sellers had had their inflated sense of the value of the land affirmed and refused to sell for even two or three times what it was worth. Hedden was so determined to acquire the Sellers’s Oak Island lots that he eventually agreed to pay the heirs $5,000, close to ten times the land’s appraised value. He and the Sellers heirs signed their deed of sale in July 1935.
Hedden immediately impressed Blair with his seriousness by bringing electricity to the island by an underwater cable, building a wharf at Smith’s Cove, having the island surveyed, and building himself a cabin not far north of the Money Pit. Blair was not happy, though, when Hedden announced that he had hired Sprague and Henwood, the Scranton, Pennsylvania, company that had previously worked on Oak Island for the Rochester Group in 1916, to “de-water” and excavate the Money Pit and most of the other shafts surrounding it, then to drill laterally at depths between 125 and 160 feet. “There does not appear to be anything very decisive about the work outlined,” Blair groused in a letter to Harris, “it being more along the lines of previous operations and open to failure without definite results.”
Hedden had money to spend, however. The man he selected to lead his operation was Frederick Krupp, an engineer who had headed major drilling operations on Africa’s Gold Coast and in Persia. Blair had to admit some satisfaction in seeing men who knew what they were doing, equipped with the finest machinery that had ever been brought to Oak Island, including turbine pumps fed by a 7,500-watt hydroelectric power line that would empty the Money Pit and the other shafts at a rate of 1,000 gallons per minute.
Based on what he had learned from William Chappell, Hedden instructed his crew to open and drain the Chappell shaft (no. 21), strengthen the cribbing on its walls, then send drills in all directions. The work began in June 1936 and before the end of the month the men were working on a platform 90 feet deep in the shaft. When their drills brought up oak splinters from a depth of 150 feet, both Blair and Hedden agreed the wood must have come from either a box of some kind or the platform that had fallen during the 1861 collapse. Below 165 feet, the drills struck granite boulders that had to be dragged to the surface one at a time. The shaft was then retimbered to a depth of 170 feet, the deepest the cribbing had ever gone on Oak Island. At the bottom, they found the earth “much disturbed,” as Blair put it, but no sign of treasure chests.
After adjourning for the winter, the Hedden crew was back on Oak Island in May 1937, when the men began work on the shaft that would become no. 22, determined to make it twice the size of the Money Pit, 12 feet by 24 feet. They dug into an old shaft cribbed with double pieces of 3-inch planking that was in fair shape and believed they had encompassed the Money Pit. By the end of June, the workmen were at a depth of 50 feet, where they found nearly a dozen 2-inch drill casings and several 6-inch casings. At 65 feet they found an old tin miner’s lamp partially filled with whale oil and a piece of unexploded dynamite that Hedden decided had been left behind by the Oak Island Association in 1867. At 93 feet, they found what they were certain must be one of the original flood tunnels, mostly collapsed. Close by, the men discovered what appeared to be primitive putty. Hedden matched this against the putty that had been used to seal the windows of an old shack left by the Onslow Company and decided it was the same stuff.
At 106 feet, the Hedden crew found a tunnel 3 feet, 10 inches wide by 6 feet, 4 inches high, lined with 5- and 6-inch planks of hemlock timber. Following the timbering of the tunnel, the men reported that it passed through the Money Pit in an arc, as if part of a circle. They had found part of the Fraser tunnel from the 1860s, Hedden decided, which meant they were very close to the original shaft. At 124 feet, the crew stopped digging down and began to bore lateral 42-foot-long holes from the floor of the shaft. When oak fragments were brought up from five of the holes, Hedden and his men were jubilant, believing they must have hit the treasure. Winter was coming on hard by then, however, so Hedden ordered his men to seal things up tight so they could resume work in the spring of 1938.
This decision was “a grievous disappointment” to Frederick Blair, as his attorney, Harris, put it. The discoveries made by Hedden’s people convinced Blair that they had confirmed the location of the Money Pit and he was tremendously excited. The drill casings, the unexploded dynamite and, especially, the old lamp filled with whale oil were all solid evidence they were in the original shaft, but what he found most convincing, Blair said, were the oak borings brought up from below 125 feet, just as they had been by the pot auger back in 1866 and again in 1897.
Hedden concurred, writing to Blair’s lawyer, Harris, that he was convinced an unknown number of treasure chests were buried on Oak Island at a depth of between 160 and 175 feet and that they were encrusted with hardened blue clay. He believed the original chests had rotted and the treasure itself was embedded in that belt of blue clay. It must be a fantastic treasure, Hedden added, given the precautions that had been taken to protect it.
What neither Blair nor Hedden knew at that moment, however, was that Hedden was done digging on Oak Island. By November 1937, the New Jersey man had sunk more than $51,000 into the Oak Island search and from a financial standpoint his timing couldn’t have been worse. The US Internal Revenue Service had filed a civil lawsuit against him that month, claiming back taxes related to the sale of his father’s steel business in 1931. Years of litigation and attachments would follow. Suddenly desperate for cash, Hedden decided on a rapid expansion of his auto dealership back in New Jersey.
In March 1938, Hedden wrote to Blair’s attorney, Harris, that because of the demands of his business, “I shall have to postpone my activities on the Oak Island adventure rather indefinitely.” He asked the lawyer “to correspond with Blair and inform him of the present condition and of the fact that I will be unable to proceed any further this summer and possibly next.”
Blair, unaware of Hedden’s financial circumstances, was crestfallen and bitter. He was seventy-one years old, convinced that his last best chance to bring the Oak Island treasure up from below was evaporating before his eyes. Hedden’s withdrawal was “nothing more or less than a downright betrayal,” Blair wrote to Harris.
Those who followed after him, though, would eventually credit Gilbert Hedden as perhaps the most visionary treasure hunter ever to set foot on Oak Island, and as a man who made some of the most significant findings in the entire history of the endeavor. During the summer of 1936, while Frederick Krupp directed the work in the Money Pit area, Hedden had spent most of his time exploring the rest of Oak Island. In July 1936, he had been combing the beach at Joudrey’s Cove when a granite rock about the size of two fists caught his attention. He dug it out and discovered the Roman numeral II carved into one of the rock’s flat surfaces and below that the letters GIN, which looked to be a fragment of a word. The name McGinnis came to mind immediately. Locals who had worked on the island in previous decades told Hedden that the rock was part of a much larger boulder that had been blasted apart with dynamite back in the 1920s so that the crew could dig beneath it. Nothing was found, and afterward a number of men had carried away pieces of the boulder as souvenirs. That particular boulder had been of some interest, the former workmen told Hedden, because of the inscriptions etched into it. Some appeared to have been made during the nineteenth century, but there were other “strange symbols” that seemed much older.
To the exasperation of Blair and the amusement of the men on his crew, Hedden pulled them out of the Money Pit to spend two days searching the shoreline at Joudrey’s Cove. Two more large inscribed rocks were discovered by the men, one etched with the letter W and another reading “S.S. Ross 1864,” marks made, Hedden assumed, by a man who had worked with the Oak Island Association. But then a fourth and much larger inscribed rock was found, and the symbols carved into this one appeared to be much more weathered—and therefore much older than those on the other rocks—and were utterly indecipherable to Hedden and his crewmen. Hedden had the four slabs of rock rafted around the island to his dock at Smith’s Cove, then hauled by a team of horses to his cabin near the Money Pit. When he attempted to fit the pieces together, though, nothing matched, which to Hedden meant he was missing many pieces of the original boulder that must indeed have been taken by the men who had blasted it apart back in the 1920s. Convinced that at least the most weathered of the inscriptions on the largest rock predated the discovery of the Money Pit, Hedden began to consider the possibility that the solution to the mystery of the island might have been left behind on the ground by the men who first dug the Pit and did the rest of the original work on Oak Island.
Hedden also studied the south shore during the summer of 1936, and in the process became convinced (as would later be proven accurate) that the shoreline there was eroding at the rate of 2 feet every forty years, which meant that much of the land trod upon by those who did the original work on Oak Island was now underwater. This made him curious about what might be found at low tide on Smith’s Cove, and Hedden was soon rewarded with the discovery of two large timbers protruding from the rocks well inside the cofferdam that had been constructed by the Oak Island Association back in 1863. Hedden at first believed he was looking at a skidway built during the construction of the cofferdam, but he realized this was not so when he studied the two timbers more closely. They were each about 15 inches in diameter at the base and notched for a quarter of their circumference every 4 feet, where they had been fitted with cross members that had been attached with wooden pins. Suddenly Hedden realized that he was looking at the remnants of a much older structure, something that had been built back in a time when wooden pins were easier to make than iron bolts or champs, something, that is, that predated the early eighteenth century.
It would be almost forty years before anyone realized the full significance of what Hedden had discovered at Smith’s Cove, but there is no question that the man himself understood the importance of the features he found during the following summer in 1937. Foremost among these was what has become known as the stone triangle. The process by which Hedden rediscovered the triangle (first spotted by Captain Welling in 1897), though, may have been as significant as the discovery itself, and it is certainly more captivating.
In June 1937, shortly after Hedden returned to Nova Scotia to spend his second summer on Oak Island, R. V. Harris, who had become Hedden’s attorney as well as Blair’s, showed him a recently published book titled Captain Kidd and His Skeleton Island, written by the English author Harold T. Wilkins. There was a map of an island used as an illustration in the book that bore remarkable similarities to Oak Island. Hedden was immediately fascinated, noting that the configurations of the shoreline of the mapped island in Wilkins’s book, along with its offshore water depths and shoals were indeed similar to those of Oak Island. Even more striking, though, was that the island depicted on the map featured two mountains on its east and west ends, along with a sunken lagoon between them, correlating closely to the two drumlins and the swamp on Oak Island. On the Wilkins’s map, there was also an X to mark the spot that was situated almost exactly where the Money Pit stood on Oak Island.
The Wilkins map bore a legend that read “W.K. 1669” and below that a handwritten list of distances and bearings:
The island in the Wilkins book was not named and there was no latitude or longitude marked. The water surrounding the island was identified only by the words “Mar Del.”
Wilkins claimed that the map and three similar to it had been in the secret compartments of a desk that had belonged to William Kidd. Such maps, Hedden would learn, really did exist, and the story of how they had come to the attention of Harold Wilkins enchanted him.
The principal players in this drama were a pair of “bachelor brothers” (as they were described in the British newspapers at the time) named Guy and Hubert Palmer. The Palmers were the curators of a well-regarded private museum of pirate and nautical history. Hubert Palmer was considered to be perhaps the planet’s leading authority on the epoch of high seas piracy, and he maintained a particular interest in anything associated with the life and times of Captain William Kidd. In the better publications of his period, Hubert Palmer was regularly described as remarkably discerning, known to subject any items offered to him to the best available experts for authentication.
In the early 1930s, Hubert had acquired a desk he believed had been used by Captain Kidd aboard the Adventure Galley. During his inspection of the desk, Hubert found four hidden compartments, two made by false bottoms in drawers, one behind a mirror and the other—and presumably most significant—in a small hole that had been drilled in a side runner of the desk and fitted with a small brass cylinder. Each of the compartments contained a hand-drawn map.
These maps would become known as Captain Kidd’s treasure charts after Hubert Palmer submitted them to the British Museum for authentication. The work was performed by a team under the supervision of R. A. Skelton, the superintendent of the museum’s Map Room. In his report, Skelton wrote that the maps were so old and fragile they might be destroyed by “direct photographic reproduction,” so he made hand-drawn copies of the originals with notes of what he could make out of the writing and markings on the maps.
Harold Wilkins had seen the treasure charts during a visit to the British Museum, where R. A. Skelton had permitted the author to examine but not to touch them. Apparently, Wilkins had used what he had seen as the basis for the maps that illustrated his book. Wilkins was an odd fellow to say the least, Hedden had been told. Once a Cambridge-educated journalist, he had become perhaps the most infamous “pseudohistorian” of his time, one who had first attracted attention with his claims about the Mary Celeste, an American merchant brigantine that on December 5, 1872, had been discovered deserted and adrift in the Atlantic Ocean near the Azores Islands. The mystery of what had happened to the captain and his crew was one that would fascinate the public for decades afterward, and Wilkins had fed that appetite with a largely unsupported claim that the men of the Mary Celeste had been lured aboard another ship and slaughtered. He also produced works that claimed a vanished white race had once populated South America, that the survivors of Atlantis were living deep underground in immense caverns, and that planet Earth was being watched by hostile aliens. In spite of all that, Hedden was riveted by what he found to be undeniable similarities between Wilkins’s Mar Del map and Oak Island.
When Hedden wrote to Wilkins in the summer of 1937, however, pointing out those similarities and requesting additional information about how he had obtained his map, the author wrote back that there could be no connection to Oak Island because he knew the latitude and longitude of the island on the Mar Del map and it was in the Eastern Hemisphere. Furthermore, Wilkins added that William Kidd had never been anywhere near Nova Scotia, and he urged Hedden not to waste his time pursuing such a notion.
In spite of that, Hedden persisted. He was so convinced that there was a connection between Wilkins’s map and Oak Island that in August 1937 he ordered his men to discontinue their excavation work in the Money Pit area and join him in a search of the island based on the distances and bearings from the Mar Del map.
Blair was not pleased, but he consulted with Hedden anyway, and for the first time informed his partner of some features that had been discovered by Captain John Welling back in 1897. One of these, Blair said, was a white granite boulder about 50 feet north of the Money Pit with a 1.25-inch hole through its center that had clearly been drilled by human hands. The other feature Blair described was the stone triangle, lost during the forty years since Welling first observed it.
On August 15, the curious Hedden ordered his crew to search for the triangle of stones Blair had described. A workman named Amos Nauss was “clawing around” with a hoe in the underbrush above Smith’s Cove when, as he described it years later to the Canadian journalist D’Arcy O’Connor, “Suddenly I hit one rock, then another and another, all in line with each other.”
When the rest of the crew helped Nauss clear away the underbrush, they found an equilateral triangle made out of round beach stones set in the grass just above the high-water mark on the south shore. Each side of the triangle was 10 feet in length. After further examination, Hedden noticed that from a point on the baseline 4 feet from the west corner of the triangle and 6 feet from the east corner, there was a medial line, also composed of round beach stones, which connected the base of the triangle with its apex. The triangle also featured a curved line of beach stones 3 feet below the base that connected both corners of the base, giving the entire design the outline of an enormous sextant.
What truly excited Hedden, though, was that when he followed the sight line from the stone triangle to the white granite boulder and then beyond, he discovered—just a bit more than 400 feet away—a second granite boulder that had also been drilled through and in exactly the same way as the other: with its hole in alignment with the hole in the first boulder. Hedden was at this point so convinced of the significance of his discoveries that he engaged the services of a land surveyor from Halifax named Charles Roper, who was boated to the island the next day, August 16, 1937, and immediately began making measurements between the drilled boulders and the stone triangle.
The distance between the drilled boulders was almost exactly 25 rods (about 415 feet) Roper reported to Hedden. Using the top numbers from the list of distances and bearings on the Mar Del map, Hedden instructed Roper to establish a point on the line between the drill holes that was 18 rods east of the drilled boulder near Smith’s Cove and 7 rods west of the boulder nearer to the Money Pit. Roper did as instructed and found himself standing right next to the Cave-in Pit. Hedden was impressed enough to tell Roper he should lay in a course directly from this point toward the south shore. At a distance of 30 rods from the point next to the Cave-in Pit, Roper struck the medial line of the stone triangle just below the triangle’s east-west base. It was then that Roper realized—stumbled on the realization, really—that the medial line of the stone triangle was pointing perfectly due north, directly at the polestar. He and Hedden then followed that line toward the drumlin on the east end of the island and found that it led directly to the center of the Money Pit.
Hedden was flabbergasted and ecstatic. What convinced him he had made a monumental discovery, though, was when Roper determined that the sight lines of the drilled boulders not only ran through the medial line of the stone triangle, but also into the center of the Money Pit. There could be no doubt, Hedden told Blair, that the designer or designers of the original works on Oak Island had placed the drilled stones and created the stone triangle so the location of the Pit would never be lost to them.
Hedden was so excited that he dashed off a letter to President Roosevelt on September 1, 1937, detailing the discoveries he had made that summer. Hedden wrote that he had reached several solid conclusions:
First, that a large amount of complicated and difficult engineering was done on the site for some purpose a long time ago, probably as early as 1640.
Second, that Kidd [based on the Mar Del map, Hedden was at that point sticking with the story of the famous pirate’s involvement] knew of the site and of the work and probably who did it, but was not aware of its exact location.
Third, that the early legends of the discovery of the shaft, the tunnels, the peculiar fiber, the mysterious stone with the inscription … are to a large part true and can be, in large part, substantiated today.
FDR replied with a letter in which he thanked Hedden for the news, then added: “It vividly recalls to my mind our semi-serious, semi-pleasure efforts at Oak Island nearly thirty years ago. I can visualize the theories on which you are working. As I remember it, we also talked of sinking a new shaft on our main run out.”
That autumn, Hedden decided he had to speak in person to Harold Wilkins. On November 10, 1937, not yet aware that the IRS was about to initiate the actions that would ruin him, Hedden boarded the Cunard ocean liner Aquitania, bound for London. Upon arrival, he found Wilkins, but the meeting was not nearly so fulfilling as he had hoped. All we know of what transpired between the two men is in the letter Hedden wrote the next day to R. V. Harris: “Wilkins is a very peculiar character,” Hedden told the attorney. “And it is difficult to describe him adequately. I would say that in appearance and manner of speech he is every bit as crazy as his book would seem to make him.”
Wilkins had almost immediately admitted that the Mar Del map in his book was “a figment of his imagination,” Hedden went on, “and apologized sincerely for not being able to tell me before that it was.” To his astonishment, Wilkins had found himself under siege after the publication of Captain Kidd and His Skeleton Island and on the receiving end of letters from all over the world written by men who believed they knew exactly where the island on the Mar Del map was. And yet, Hedden wrote, “He admitted my claims to identify far surpass any others he had received and agreed that his drawing was according to the evidence undoubtedly of Oak Island.” He had concocted the map for no other reason than that his publisher had demanded one for the frontispiece of the book, and “therefore drew the chart as shown, using symbols and marks shown on contemporary charts on file in the British Museum. Somehow, he had “unconsciously” drawn what he had seen when he looked at Hubert Palmer’s Captain Kidd treasure charts.
Hedden was baffled. There was no satisfying or even entirely rational way to explain the similarities between Wilkins’s Mar Del map and Oak Island, and the fact that Hedden’s attempt to follow the measurements and bearings on the Mar Del map had led him to connections between the stone triangle, the drilled stones, and the Money Pit was perplexing to say the least.
Hedden returned home to New Jersey just in time to learn that the IRS was suing him. The court battles that ensued would bankrupt him, yet Hedden refused for another dozen years to surrender his ownership of the lots in Nova Scotia that included the Money Pit to pay off his debts. When the IRS attempted to put his Oak Island property up for sale, Hedden fought them off fiercely. And while he may not have done further exploration on the island, his search for answers about what had happened there continued to be a driving force in an unfolding narrative.
THE FIRST TIME I WAS ASKED publicly what I thought of the pirate treasure theory of Oak Island, I scoffed. It was difficult to imagine a band of pirates burying treasure in a hole more than 10 feet deep and the idea that buccaneers would create a complexly engineered shaft that went down more than 100 feet into the earth was ridiculous. Oak Island historian Charles Barkhouse readily agreed with me, which was something of a balm to my embarrassment when I learned months later about what pirates had done on the islands of Tortuga and Jamaica.
The labyrinths of tunnels and underground chambers on both Caribbean islands, created both to store booty and as avenues of escape, rivaled in complexity what had been done on Oak Island and surpassed it in scope. And it was pirates who had designed and dug the underground works on Tortuga and at Jamaica’s famous pirate haven Port Royal. So there had been pirate engineers after all, and there were pirates either willing to do the hard labor of excavation on a tremendous scale or to make slaves do it. And they had done it mainly for the purpose of protecting their booty, I realized, a fact that disagreed with my belief that Oak Island must be about something more than gold or silver.
I learned of what had been done on the two Caribbean islands while preparing (I imagined) to skewer yet another of the alternative theories of Oak Island that had proliferated in recent years. This one involved the idea that what had been created on Oak Island was a sort of “pirate bank” where buccaneers from different bands could keep their loot in a secure repository. I found the idea absurd. Not only was the notion that pirates would have joined together in such an organized and trusting fashion far-fetched, but it was also incomprehensible to me that they would have left their booty untouched. And if they had come back for their gold and silver, they would certainly not have sealed things up so neatly before departing. After learning about the works that had been created on Tortuga and at Port Royal, however, I wasn’t prepared to be quite so absolute in my opinion. This was what Oak Island did to people: gradually, it became impossible to completely dismiss any theory of what the works on the island were about.
I had been talking this over with the Lagina brothers and the producers of The Curse of Oak Island when one of them (I honestly don’t remember who) brought up Harold Wilkins’s Mar Del map, which had been featured on an earlier episode of the show. This led me to the discovery of the story of Hubert Palmer’s Captain Kidd treasure charts, a subject with which the producers and the Laginas weren’t familiar. The producers became interested, urging me to see if I could locate Palmer’s original charts. Kevin Burns, who had created the show, seemed particularly excited. I learned that Hubert Palmer had held on to the charts up to the time of his death in 1949 at the age of eighty-five. Palmer had never suggested any connection between the charts and Oak Island, and in fact before taking ill had devoted more than a decade to attempts to organize an expedition to the South China Sea, where he believed Captain Kidd had buried his treasure on a deserted island. In his will, Palmer had specified that the charts and all of his other pirate artifacts should go Mrs. Elizabeth Dick, the “nurse-companion” who had cared for him during the last eleven years of his life and who had shared his belief that the Captain Kidd treasure charts were the genuine article. Mrs. Dick had lived on until 1965, when she died at the age of seventy-seven, but by then the woman had sold the treasure charts for what at the time was the considerable sum of $50,000. The auction house that brokered the sale in 1957 had identified the purchaser only as the agent of “a North American/Canadian syndicate.” The charts were never seen again and I could obtain no more information about who had purchased them, I told the producers, unless I was sent to Eastbourne, England, where Hubert Palmer had maintained his home and where the maps had been sold.
Excited as they were about the maps, the producers weren’t willing to spend what it would cost to send me (with a camera crew, of course) to England, especially after Rick and Marty Lagina insisted they would be coming along if the trip happened. “Find out what you can about the copies of the maps that were made,” one of the producers suggested. “Maybe we can get a look at those.”
I assumed the copies of the charts that R. A. Skelton had made back in the 1930s were still somewhere in the archives of the British Museum, but I got absolutely no help at all from the museum in locating them. Eventually, I was able to obtain copies of the copies that Skelton had made. When they arrived in Nova Scotia, I was terribly disappointed.
The famous treasure charts were four crudely hand-drawn maps of what appeared to be the same vaguely boomerang-shaped island. The island wrapped around what was marked as “Lagoon” on three of the four maps, with a simple directional chart that was identical on all four of them. There were some variations; an area on the opposite side of the island from the lagoon was marked “Sand and Coral” on two of the maps, but it had a notation that read “Wood—20 Turtles” above markings for twin “Reefs” on another. One map did note two hills on the island, but they were right next to one another rather than at opposite ends of the island. The most detailed map identified the body of water beyond the lagoon as “China Sea.” There were a list of directions and bearings on two of the treasure charts, but they were quite different from those on Harold Wilkins’s Mar Del map.
Chagrined, I took some comfort from the discovery that many before me had been led into some fruitless pursuit by stories of an Oak Island map. Back in 1894, Frederick Blair had been excited by a story that was published the day after Christmas in the Boston Traveller about some unnamed individual who nearly fifty years earlier had found a “plan” of an island on Nova Scotia’s southeast coast that had once been a pirate rendezvous. A large ship’s block hung from a branch of a large oak tree on the island where the block and its tackle had been used in the sinking of a deep shaft, the story went on, a shaft that was filled with seawater by a tunnel deep underground. For reasons unknown to the writer and his anonymous source, however, the pirate treasure had never been placed in the shaft, but instead it was buried only 20 feet belowground at a certain distance from the oak tree. The shaft was merely a “blind” intended to distract those who might stumble on the spot. Blair spent months trying to obtain a copy of the “plan” mentioned in the Traveller article, but was unsuccessful and eventually decided that the story had been invented by some joker who had read the prospectus of the Oak Island Treasure Company.
Blair was also captivated for a time by another story of an Oak Island map that had originated in Boston. This one repeated the story of pirates who had spent months excavating a deep pit and digging tunnels that would fill the shaft with seawater. In this iteration, the pirates and their ship were captured by two British frigates whose officers hanged the pirate leaders and sent most of the rest of the crew to an English prison. One slow-witted fellow, though, was spared punishment and made his way to Bristol, England, where he sketched a chart of the spot where the treasure pit had been dug and gave it to a young sailor who was about to set sail on his first voyage. When his ship docked in Nova Scotia, the sailor gave the chart to a Halifax harbor pilot who held on to it until he was an elderly retiree and showed it to his grandson. It was the grandson who realized that the chart was of Oak Island. He made his way from his home in Roxbury, Massachusetts, to Nova Scotia, only to learn that an insurance man living back in Boston by the name of Frederick Blair held the legal rights to search for treasure on Oak Island. When Blair heard this story, he assigned R. V. Harris to interview the grandson and his father and to obtain signed affidavits from each man. The affidavit of the younger man, one James H. Smith, read:
When I was a boy living at home in Greenfield, Colchester County, Nova Scotia, I frequently heard my father, John J. Smith, speak of a chart, then in possession of his father, Amos Smith, who lived in Shaw’s Cove, County of Halifax, Nova Scotia.
According to my father, John J. Smith, the chart had reference to the burial of a quantity of gold on an island in Chester Basin, Nova Scotia, and that my grandfather, Amos Smith, who had been a pilot working in and out of Halifax Harbour, claimed that the longitude and latitude given him of the said chart was in the vicinity to the entrance to Chester Bay and that this island was Oak Island.
His grandfather had described an island “about one mile in length and about one-half mile in width, shaped like a bottle, two coves at the northeast end forming the bottleneck; and the island was wooded with oak trees.” According to Amos Smith, pirates had dug a pit “to a depth of 165 feet, near a large oak tree, from a limb of which they hung a block and tackle, and that a vault was constructed at the bottom of the pit, and the vault was lined with granite stone, eighteen inches thick and that the inside was lined with gold bars, each four feet long and four inches square, and it was then covered with granite slabs. Two tunnels were dug forty-five feet below sea-level, at low tide, leading from the pit to the shore, in opposite directions, and there was placed in each tunnel an iron gate arranged so as to stop the flow of water, but these gates were left open to permit the water to flow through.”
Blair was tremendously excited until he discovered that Amos Smith had never been a pilot for Halifax Harbour, but rather for St. Margaret’s Bay, the next major inlet to the west. Blair and Harris eventually concluded that Amos Smith had made up the entire story based on things he had heard about the searches conducted on Oak Island between 1804 and 1864.
A character known as Captain Allen actually did have an old chart with him when he showed up in Chester during the summer of 1885. The man had been careful about the questions he asked, the local people told Harris, but suspicions arose anyway, because Captain Allen was not the usual sort of fellow one met in these parts. He was a handsome man with an accent suggestive of the American South who dressed in expensive clothes and wore the same white broad-brimmed hat day after day. The man also had a reputation for spending his money rather freely, especially after paying the exorbitant price of US $1,200 for the little sloop he bought from a fisherman named Ganter at Shad Bay. Captain Allen then hired a pair of brothers named Zinck to work as his crew, paying them well to mind their business and do what they were told. The Zincks talked anyway, when they had a few drinks in them, and claimed that Captain Allen had no interest in fishing and instead spent all of his time aboard studying an old chart with writing on it in a foreign language that one brother said was Swedish and the other said was Spanish. Early every morning, according to the brothers, Captain Allen would have them sail out of Mahone Bay to a position thirty miles offshore where he took the altitude of the sun, then began to consult his chart, directing them back toward shore on a northwest compass bearing that would have taken him to Oak Island if he had continued on the same course, but for some reason he never did. Two full summers Captain Allen did this, then disappeared from Mahone Bay and was never seen again. The fellow who bought his sloop, though, a man from Halifax named Pickels, began doing pretty much the same thing Captain Allen had with the boat, the locals said. Pickels was less careful about what he said than Allen, and he confided to several local people that the captain had provided him with the latitude and longitude of his starting point and the compass directions he should follow. The captain said he had been searching for an island where there was “a huge cache of treasure, so huge that it was beyond imagination.” Allen had said he was a wealthy man and didn’t need the money, Pickels claimed, but he wanted to recover the treasure for the benefit of mankind. Pickels lasted three summers aboard the sloop, then gave up the search and went back to Halifax, leaving the mystery of Captain Allen’s chart behind him.
In his 1899 book A Search for Pirate Gold, James Clarence Hyde claimed that Daniel McGinnis had been in possession of a “treasure map” at some point either immediately before or after the discovery of the Money Pit. Strangely, it seemed to me, there was no further published mention of this map until the early twenty-first century, when a descendant named George McInnes told a local investigator that his grandfather, who was born in 1886, had been in possession of this fabled map as a young man, but that it had been lost in a house fire in the 1920s or 1930s. What lent the claims of George McInnes some credibility, at least in my mind, was that he made no attempt to profit from any knowledge of the map that might have been handed down by his family, explaining that because “everything changed” on the island over the years and most of the landmarks on the map had disappeared, it would likely be useless even if it still existed.
Perhaps the most famous story of an Oak Island map appeared in a booklet titled The Lure of Pirate Gold written in 1917 by author Josephine Freda for the Chester Board of Trade. A dozen years earlier, in 1905, Freda had written an article for Collier’s that was considerably more enthusiastic than the piece by Colonel Bowdoin the same magazine would publish in 1912. During the intervening years, she wrote, she had learned of at least one compelling new development in the Oak Island story that suggested the fabled pirate treasure really had been deposited by some among that “horde of lawless and adventurous spirits … sailing under the black flag”:
The last will and testament of one of these men has recently been discovered by a gentleman prominent in English literary circles. This gentleman, whose name I am not at liberty to disclose, recently purchased an old manor-house located near a certain seaport in England. Rambling over his new property he one day visited a long-unused room, where the dust lay thick on floor and furniture. His attention was attracted to an old oaken chest covered with quaint carvings. This he opened and discovered within clothing, nautical instruments and a casket containing a considerable sum of money, several old maps or charts and other documents, as well as the last will and testament of their owner.
The will left all the testator’s possessions to his only son, but the young man had been killed in action aboard a British naval ship in 1780, the first year of the Fourth Anglo-Dutch War, Freda went on. After “careful and exhaustive inquiry,” she wrote, “the present owner came to the conclusion that the information [contained in the maps, charts, and documents] was of great value and was about to embark on a search for the hidden property when he chanced to read the story of Oak Island [written by Freda] in Collier’s magazine. He was immediately struck by its remarkable similarity to a certain island indicated on the chart in his possession.”
The documents found with the chart “showed that a removal and subsequent deposit of seven separate packages took place on certain dates” after the treasure vault was first created on this “certain island,” Freda explained further, “each package bearing separate symbols and initials.”
The gentleman currently in possession of both the chart and the documents had been forced to suspend his planned search because of the outbreak of World War I, Freda explained, and she had sworn to protect his identity. But she could reveal that in the casket within the chest in the unused room in his seacoast manor house in England, he had found “a diagram of the Cove on Oak Island … which has not been easy to decipher”:
Members of different companies engaged in excavation work on Oak Island always believed that documents were in existence which would make plain the mystery of the Island, and the discovery of the old sea-chest shows that their opinion was correct.
I am not at liberty to go more fully into a description of these documents, for reasons which must be at once apparent to you, but when peace has at last been concluded and men once more take up the prosaic routine of daily life, some adventurous spirit will no doubt resume the search on Oak Island and finally solve for us its fascinating mystery.
Frederick Blair was among those who beseeched Freda to reveal more about the “gentleman” who had found the Oak Island chart, but she adamantly refused, and Blair would admit he could never be sure whether Freda had made the story up or actually interviewed this individual. In any event, the chart itself never surfaced, nor did the man who claimed to possess it.
In 1934, Blair had been offered what became known as the Doyle map. A Saskatchewan man named W. J. Doyle had written to Blair that December after reading an article about Oak Island in Canada’s most widely circulated magazine, MacLean’s, that purported to be a full account of the findings of the Oak Island Treasure Company’s Captain John Welling. He had immediately recognized a map that was included in the article as an illustration, Doyle wrote:
It was about fifty years ago, I was a small boy just starting to school. My father was a teamster and he hired a very old man by the name of Jim Thompson. He worked for my father for a long time and he took a great liking to me, and when he got sick I used to do all his little errands and before he died he gave my father a map of a buried treasure and told him it was for me.
He was in his midtwenties before he came into possession of the map and received the description of the treasure on Oak Island and how to recover it that had been given to his father by Jim Thompson, Doyle wrote: “I used to often take it out and study it, but I knew it would take more money than I had to recover it … then, about twenty-nine years ago, I had my place of business burned and I lost the map.”
Only when he read the MacLean’s article did he realize that the “Oak Island” that loomed so large in his imagination was real. Doyle went on:
Just as soon as I saw the map [in the magazine] I recognized it, but the map I had was drawn with pen and ink; it was very clear; it showed how the water got in, how to shut it off and a few more details which I can still remember.
With the knowledge I have, and if it can be applied, the water can be shut off inside of two or three days and maybe not that length of time. If it cannot be used, I know of another way that might take two or three weeks, or maybe a little longer.
Despite having been burned before by claims of a lost and/or recovered Oak Island treasure map, Blair corresponded at length with Doyle and in 1935 invited him to Amherst for a visit. He naturally grew suspicious when Doyle, in his retelling of his story, now described Jim Thompson as “an old sailor” who had given his father the map sometime between 1884 and 1888. Nevertheless, Blair wrote a voluminous memorandum on his interview with Doyle for his attorney, Harris, and was particularly descriptive of the diagram the man had prepared for him: “The plan was marked ‘Oak Island’ and showed three pits, one at the shore about 80 or 90 feet deep, one on the hill about 470 or 480 feet distant and 176 feet deep, the third between the first two mentioned and about 270 to 280 feet from the shore and 125 feet deep.”
Blair went on to describe just as meticulously the various tunnels and the other works that Doyle described. He seemed particularly captivated by the description of the “clapper” gate in the main flood tunnel that Doyle had offered: “It was arranged with two hooks, an iron bar, links of chain and a ball, or weight, so that when dropped by the pull of the chain, the hooks would catch under the bar of iron and keep the gate closed.”
Only at the end of a memo that went on for pages did Blair write: “I put little credence in the story. Note how well the known facts compare with his map, and then consider his details after a space of thirty years, without seeing the map. It is simply too much for me to believe without better evidence.”
Harris had no doubt Doyle was a fraud after interviewing the man himself and hearing that the map was “dated 1821,” that it had “just come into his possession,” and that it “had belonged to his grandfather, who received it from his brother, a sailor.”
“Those who have pirate maps to sell should be careful to tell the same story on all occasions!” Harris observed, advising Blair to have nothing more to do with this W. J. Doyle.
At least Gilbert Hedden was not taken in for long by the man named Doyle who wrote to him in 1945. This Doyle (who may or may not have been the same one who wrote to Blair in 1934) had enclosed what he described as “a tracing or copy from an old pirate map that is the same as Oak Island, only a little larger.” The difference in size, this Doyle explained, was due to the fact that the island had lost more than 20 feet of coastline in the past two centuries. The letter told an elaborate story of Kidd’s visits to Nova Scotia—”I have proof of this,” he declared—then suggested that the pirate had buried not one but two treasures on Oak Island, only one of which would be found in the Money Pit. The map he enclosed had been sent to him by “a highly educated gentleman,” wrote Doyle, who requested that “when you are done studying it, please return it to me by registered mail.”
Hedden did study the map—long enough to recognize that it was almost an exact copy of the Mar Del map in Harold Wilkins’s Captain Kidd and His Skeleton Island, with a few slight alterations. While he did not respond to Doyle, Hedden once again puzzled over the map Wilkins had drawn, which showed no less than “fourteen resemblances” to Oak Island. Most perplexing to Hedden, though, was that the compass directions on the Mar Del map were an exact reversal of the compass directions to Oak Island. How could this possibly be a coincidence?
Perhaps this conundrum was why Hedden continued to correspond with Wilkins long after visiting the man in England in the autumn of 1937. Even after Wilkins began to claim that he was “channeling the ghost of Captain Kidd,” Hedden kept in contact with him. And while there’s no evidence that Hedden ever subscribed to such a claim, it’s not clear either that he rejected it. The mystery of Oak Island had both baffled and consumed him so completely that he was afraid to rule out any possibility. Blair had long since become the same way, and by the time I’d spent a month on Oak Island in the summer of 2016 I felt I understood not only Blair and Hedden but also those who had decided that it couldn’t hurt to listen to any idea, no matter how ridiculous it might seem.