In the last years before World War II, and in the early stages of the global conflict, operations on Oak Island were directed by Edwin H. Hamilton, a professor of engineering at New York University. Hamilton had approached Gilbert Hedden in the spring of 1938 with an offer to take over the treasure hunt on Oak Island and to bear all the costs of the expedition. Frederick Blair had been glad to hear it at first, but he began to back off when Hedden suggested an even three-way split of any recovery. Every previous deal Blair made had guaranteed him half of whatever valuables were brought up from belowground, and he expected the same again. The subsequent negotiation consumed more than two months, but by the end of June the three men had agreed that Hedden and Hamilton would each receive 30 percent of the take, with the remaining 40 percent going to Blair.
Hamilton moved forward immediately, beginning in mid-July 1938, when he arrived on the island with a drilling crew from the same company Hedden had used, Sprague and Henwood. For the professor, step one was to locate the original shaft and to define it as precisely as possible. He and his crew began in the Chappell shaft (no. 21), where two sections of the cribbing were beginning to buckle. The crew spent five weeks working downward to reinforce the timbers between depths of 145 feet and 170 feet, then upward between 90 feet and 62 feet. Once that was done, they used a diamond bit to bore fifty-eight holes in the Pit down to the bedrock, which they struck at depths of between 168 and 171 feet. The lateral drilling began in August, and within a day or two the drill bit brought back splinters of what was described as “very old oak.” Hedden believed they were from the remains of the timbers installed in 1850 that had sunk toward the bottom of the Money Pit during the 1861 collapse. Blair concurred, and both men felt certain that they were either in or right next to the original Pit.
In late August, Hamilton moved his crew to the northeast corner of the Hedden shaft (no. 22), where the drill went down to 117 feet but struck nothing of real interest. So the professor moved the crew to the shaft nearest to the shore of Smith’s Cove, where their excavation unearthed a horizontal tunnel at a depth of 35 feet that was filled with broken timbers, running straight for a distance of about 15 feet toward the Cave-in Pit, then gradually curving around and coming to an end just below it. Deeper, at 45 feet, Hamilton’s crew found another tunnel running south from the shaft for about 25 feet. It was filled with beach gravel and cribbing made of hemlock timbers that had been cut with an up-and-down handsaw and were badly deteriorated. This tunnel led to a sand streak (a bleed of fine aggregate) about 3.5 feet wide. Two posts were still in place in this part of the tunnel, just a few feet from where it extended for about 5 feet into hard blue clay. Hamilton made careful measurements in both of these tunnels showing that the sand streaks in them were in a perfect line between the Money Pit, the Cave-in Pit, and the stakes at the south shore marking what was believed to be the beginning of the water course.
Convinced he had found connections to the flood tunnel system, Hamilton ordered a new shaft sunk from the floor of the lowest tunnel to a farther depth of 11 feet, where the men were met with sand, beach gravel, small stones, and blue clay but no evidence of water. About 6 feet down in this shaft, they recovered a large flat stone that was “not native to this level,” as R. V. Harris described it, lying next to several pieces of “chewing tobacco of the old fashioned type, in good condition.” The tobacco—and the stone, too, most likely—had been left by earlier searchers, Hamilton decided, rather than by those who did the original work on the island.
The crew returned to the Hedden shaft, where at the 82-foot level they discovered a trench that had been dug downward to flood the Money Pit and made Hamilton even more certain of where the original shaft was located.
Amos Nauss, who was working for Hamilton now, recalled that “when we were down there [in the Hedden shaft], there was always saltwater coming in. But we couldn’t find where it was coming from. We never saw the flood tunnels.”
Hamilton decided to conduct his own dye test, similar to the one Blair had done in 1898, to try to trace the source of the flooding. As Nauss recalled it, the dye was dropped into both the Hedden and Chappell shafts “and it came out on the southeast side of the island, about one hundred yards out from the high tide. We took my boat out to it, and we could see the dye coming up from the bottom of the sea. So we knew there was a connection there with a waterway going through the Money Pit area.” They also knew that the starting point of that connection was now completely underwater, even at low tide, due to the rising ocean and the eroding shore.
On November 4, 1938, Hamilton sent a summary of the work his crews had done that summer and what they had found to President Roosevelt. FDR seemed especially interested in Hamilton’s report that he had measured water pouring into the Hedden shaft at the rate of “approximately 800 gallons per minute,” indicating that it could not possibly be from the sort of “percolation” that Roosevelt’s old boss Captain Bowdoin had described. The president, now in the middle of his second term, made plans to visit Oak Island the summer of 1939 during the Halifax stopover of his US Navy cruiser. Hamilton was so excited that he ordered the construction of a custom sedan chair to carry the polio-disabled president from the dock at Smith’s Cove directly to the Money Pit area. The professor was crushed when at the last minute Roosevelt sent word through a friend that the imminent war in Europe “made it impossible.”
The outbreak of World War II—which Canada entered alongside England when Germany invaded Poland in September 1939—made it difficult for Professor Hamilton to find workers in Nova Scotia. Eventually, by offering the exorbitant pay of forty cents per hour, Hamilton assembled a crew of eleven in the summer of 1940. During this same period, Hamilton also had to fend off a move on his flank by the film star Errol Flynn, who was attempting to assemble his own team of treasure hunters.
Flynn was considerably more than some celluloid swashbuckler. He was in fact an adventurer of remarkable nerve and determination, which he exhibited in spectacular fashion back in the autumn of 1927, when he sailed into Salamaua, a village on the northeast coast of New Guinea, then hiked the Black Cat Track to the fabled gold-mining village of Wau. This was one of the most treacherous treks on the planet, through a tropical forest infested with typhoid and blackwater fever, leeches and killer snakes, razorback boars and cassowaries—not to mention native tribes who were headhunters and cannibals. Most of the white men who attempted it never came back. Eleven years later, in 1938, Flynn sailed to Jamaica, where he attempted to recover the treasures lost when Port Royal fell into the sea, using deep-sea diving equipment that was absurdly primitive by today’s standards. The movie star could never get deep enough to reach the pirate booty at the bottom of the ocean, but he did bring back various museum-quality architectural items. He seems to have been quite serious about his wish two years later to take over the Oak Island treasure hunt but found himself stymied by an inability to break through the agreement Hamilton had made with Hedden and Blair, and he eventually withdrew.
So in June 1940 it was Hamilton who directed the crew that tunneled from the Hedden shaft around the Chappell shaft in a search for the Halifax Company tunnel, which the men found just to the southeast of the Hedden shaft. The crew followed it to the top of the east-end drumlin, found a tunnel running toward the Cave-in Pit that divided just before it reached the (presumed) air shaft, then traveled around it on both sides. Original wooden tracks for the carts that had been used in its excavation were found on the bottom of this tunnel and convinced Hamilton absolutely that this was part of the Halifax tunnel, which he knew had terminated in the center of the Money Pit.
The net takeaway of this extended search, for Hamilton, was to confirm that the Money Pit and the Chappell shaft were close enough to be connected, but that the center of the Money Pit was at least a few feet—perhaps as many as five—to the south, in the direction of the Hedden shaft. In other words, the professor was fairly certain he had recovered the location of the original shaft. Buoyed, Hamilton returned to Oak Island in the summer of 1941 determined to explore the bottom of the Money Pit itself, but labor was now even scarcer. Once he finally had a few men, Hamilton was stopped by the failure of electricity on the island. His pump stopped, and so did his effort to drain the Hedden shaft. Despite this, Hamilton was back on Oak Island in the summer of 1942 and managed to sink a shaft 8 feet square between the Hedden and Chappell shafts, using the remains of two earlier tunnels to connect the two shafts at a depth of 155 feet. His crew’s lateral drilling, though, produced no results.
During this work, the crew did intercept a watercourse 8 inches high by 10 inches wide that was cut through limestone. Hamilton sent a sample of the water running through this apparently man-made tunnel for analysis and was puzzled by a report that it had a slightly higher specific gravity than the water drawn from Smith’s Cove, suggesting that it might contain minerals that gave it greater density.
Hamilton separated from his two partners when he asserted that the so-called coconut fiber that had been found both in the Money Pit and along the shore of Smith’s Cove was really hemlock bark. Blair and Hedden found that ridiculous. The two pointed out that hemlock bark deteriorates far more rapidly than coconut fiber and would have been nothing more than goo had it been buried for years beneath the artificial beach at the cove. They noted the interview just five years earlier in which Captain Anthony Vaughan II (who was almost ninety-nine at the time) recalled being present as a boy of ten on the beach at Smith’s Cove when the five finger drains were discovered after an enormous amount of what was clearly coconut fiber was removed from on top of them. A sample of this fiber had been submitted in 1916 to the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC, whose scientists reported: “The specimen of fibre submitted is undoubtedly from the fibrous husks surrounding a coconut. This fibre is especially resistant to the effects of seawater and under the conditions in which it was found may have been there for several hundred years.”
A 1937 analysis by the Bureau of Plant Industry in Washington, DC, had confirmed the Smithsonian Institution report, but that same year a scientist at the Botanical Museum of Harvard University had reported that the fiber submitted to him was “readily distinguishable as manilla hemp.” But while some small measure of uncertainty about the fiber existed, no scientist had ever said it was hemlock bark.
Whether the dispute among the partners about the composition of the fiber was a cause of Hamilton’s decision to discontinue his operations on Oak Island is not clear from the record, but the timing certainly suggests this. At the same time, it’s clear that the ongoing war was making it more and more difficult to continue. Furthermore, by the summer of 1943 Hamilton had sunk USD $60,000 (equivalent to slightly more than $1 million in 2018 value) into the Oak Island treasure hunt; he was quite possibly tapped out. Whatever the case, he concluded his work on the island in admirable fashion, constructing two stout platforms just above the waterline in both the Chappell and Hedden shafts, decked with heavy timbers that sealed them more effectively than had ever been done before on Oak Island. Another year passed before Hamilton admitted he had given up the search, but by then Mahone Bay had captured him for good. The professor retired from NYU to settle in Chester, where he and Amos Nauss became partners and founded a boatbuilding business—keeping front-row seats from which to observe the continuing drama on Oak Island.
In the mind of Frederick Blair, and therefore in the annals of the island, Edwin Hamilton’s principal accomplishment had been to prove that neither the Hedden nor the Chappell shafts were directly over the Money Pit, but rather that the Pit was somewhere between them. The professor had come very close to pinpointing the exact location of the original shaft.
The other main thing Hamilton had proved was what a mess a century and a half of treasure hunting had made of Oak Island. Reading through the records of the professor’s operations between 1938 and 1943, I could visualize more clearly than ever before the underground chaos created by the dozens of shafts and tunnels that had been driven into and under the ground on the east end of Oak Island. Each effort to reach the Money Pit—or to drain or divert or block the water flowing into it—had resulted in some form of contact with a flood system that still wasn’t well understood, and as a result nearly all of the shafts and most of the tunnels were now filled with seawater that was endlessly replenished by the Atlantic Ocean. There was now enough water down there to fill a hundred Olympic-size swimming pools, I estimated. Its constant churning was steadily eroding the walls of the shafts and the floors and ceilings of the tunnels. The entire subterranean structure of the island was in danger of slowly collapsing into a kind of underground sea filled with detritus of human folly. The original engineering problem had been perplexing enough, but what existed now was a quandary of staggering proportions. Even if there was a treasure down there, the likelihood of getting to it had diminished year by year. Yet no matter how many tried and failed, there always seemed to be someone who believed that a bolder plan or some new and improved technology would deliver the success that had eluded all those who came before.
So the Oak Island treasure hunt would go on.
IN THE SPRING OF 1944, Frederick Blair renewed his treasure trove license with the Nova Scotia provincial government. At almost the same time, Gilbert Hedden moved to protect his property on the island from IRS seizure by transferring it to a trust managed by his attorney. Together, the two men began searching for someone to replace Edwin Hamilton. They swiftly entered into negotiations with a Toronto engineer named Anthony Belfiglio, who claimed to have backers willing to put up $50,000 to continue the treasure hunt. Offers and counteroffers went back and forth all through 1945 and into 1946; at one point Belfiglio offered to buy Hedden’s Oak Island properties for $15,000, but no deal was ever consummated.
In late 1946, the Broadway stage singer Edward Reichert approached Hedden with an offer to lease the east end of Oak Island. Reichert claimed to have more than $150,000 from unnamed “backers” to finance his search. Hedden made a tentative agreement with the singer, and Reichert came to Nova Scotia in May 1947 to meet with Blair. In a foreshadowing of what was to come during later decades, Reichert explained that his plan was to use steam shovels to dig a hole 80 feet in diameter and more than 200 feet deep in the Money Pit area. He had made arrangements in Halifax to lease the necessary equipment for $4,500 a month and had budgeted the work to last ten months. During the next few weeks the singer gave numerous newspaper interviews that stirred public interest, then simply disappeared. Hedden spent several months searching for the man, before writing him off as “just another crackpot.”
In spite of this exasperation, Hedden listened attentively when he was approached by Colonel H. A. Gardener, a retired US Army officer from Arlington, Virginia. Colonel Gardener had made a survey of Oak Island on his own during the summer of 1947, Hedden explained later, before bringing him a proposal unlike any he had heard before. He believed he could locate the treasure, Gardener said, with a portable radar scanner that had been developed by the army during WWII. He would place the device in various shafts that had been dug by searchers on the island and use it to locate the original tunnels and chambers on the island’s east end. Hedden was so impressed by Gardener’s description of the process that he agreed to lease the land and to take only 10 percent of whatever Gardener found. The colonel’s enthusiasm began to wane, however, when he learned that he’d also have to make a deal with Blair, who could be a much tougher customer and was almost certain to demand half of whatever was recovered on Oak Island.
In late 1947 Hedden wrote to a friend: “The present status seems to be a stalemate situation. I own property rights and Blair owns the treasure trove rights. Neither can proceed without the other, and Blair sticks to his 50 percent [demand], thereby scaring away all ventures of any kind.”
Blair, though, continued to maintain at age seventy-nine that the Oak Island puzzle could and would be solved within his lifetime, if the effort to do so were properly funded. “Scientific engineering and modern equipment will do the work if properly financed,” he wrote. “Previous failures, and there have been many, were due to lack of knowledge of conditions. In other words they knew nothing of the original work and in addition they lacked engineering skill and were short on the financial end. Today, it is the financial backing we need, not a method of recovery. The latter will come with the former.”
Blair seemed not to recognize that the financial backing Hedden needed at this point was for his survival. In early 1948, Hedden agreed to sell his Oak Island property to Gardener for a small down payment, with the balance to be paid over ten years. The colonel arrived on the island in July of that year with the radar scanner he had obtained from the army, but after several weeks of belowground tests decided his equipment wasn’t working as it should. He returned to Virginia to adjust it, promising to come back the next summer. Blair was furious when he discovered that Hedden had allowed someone to conduct a search in the Money Pit area without his permission. He contacted Gardener directly and became even angrier when the colonel told him that he had a deal to purchase Hedden’s Oak Island lots. Blair threatened litigation, but what appeared to be an explosive situation fizzled into nothing when Gardener died suddenly in January 1949 and his widow canceled the agreement to purchase Hedden’s land.
In late 1949, Hedden was approached by yet another potential buyer, a New York mining and petroleum engineer named John Whitney Lewis. Hedden, increasingly desperate for cash, agreed to sell all of his Oak Island lots to Lewis for just $6,000, plus a small percentage of any treasure recovered. The deal was concluded on May 12, 1950, and Lewis immediately flew to Nova Scotia to prepare for a summer of operations in the Money Pit area. Only upon arrival did Lewis learn that Blair intended to block him. Lewis accused Hedden of deceiving him with the claim that Blair’s treasure trove license had expired on June 30, 1949, but Hedden had told the truth. What Hedden didn’t know was that Blair, with the assistance of R. V. Harris, had surreptitiously renewed the license for another five years.
Harris, acting as Blair’s attorney, delivered the bad news to Lewis on May 27, 1950, exactly two weeks after the New York man had completed his purchase of Hedden’s Oak Island lots. Mr. Blair, Harris explained, had made a deal with William Chappell’s now sixty-three-year-old son, Melbourne, to resume the treasure hunt in the Money Pit area. It appeared there was a new stalemate, one in which Lewis was blocked by Blair’s deal with Chappell and Chappell was blocked by Hedden’s sale to Lewis. What Lewis didn’t know, however, was that Blair and R. V. Harris had been lobbying the Nova Scotia legislature for months to rewrite the Treasure Trove Act so that treasure hunters had the same rights that mineral prospectors had under the Mines Act.
Lewis appealed to the provincial secretary, claiming “misrepresentations” by Blair and Harris. What really infuriated the New York man, though, was his dawning realization that he was being stymied by an old boys’ network, all of them Freemasons and most of whom belonged to the Grand Lodge of Nova Scotia. Blair was a high-ranking Mason and his attorney, Harris, had actually risen to the top Masonic position in Nova Scotia, provincial grand master, a position that was later held by Melbourne Chappell. Gilbert Hedden was among the most prominent Freemasons in New Jersey, and Edwin Hamilton had served as grand master of the Grand Lodge of Massachusetts. Many—some said most—of high office holders in Nova Scotia’s provincial government were also Masons.
THE MASONIC CONNECTIONS to Oak Island had always struck me as curious but not really an interesting avenue of investigation. At least a dozen Canadian writers, bloggers, and amateur historians had explored and tortured the subject, and more than a few of those had both explored and tortured it. Sure, there’d been a lot of Freemasons involved in the treasure hunt over the years (along with a lot of treasure hunters who weren’t Masons), but that seemed to have to do with the fact that Masonic membership was so widespread, especially in Nova Scotia. Though it has antecedents that some claim predate the time of Christ, Freemasonry formally came into existence in 1717 with the establishment of the Grand Lodge of London and began to establish itself in North America around 1730. The Grand Lodge of Nova Scotia was established in Halifax in 1766, less than twenty years after the city’s founding, and put down deep roots in the province. While Freemasonry appeared to be dwindling in the United States, it continued to thrive internationally, with as many as 6 million members worldwide, and it was particularly strong on the south shore of Nova Scotia. Within a week of arriving in Canada to work on The Curse of Oak Island I’d been told by two of the regular cast members, historian Charles Barkhouse and Tony Sampson, a diver whose company I had enjoyed over breakfast, that they were Masons and that membership was widespread among the men of the local community.
Charles and Tony both readily agreed that what could be regarded as Masonic symbols had cropped up again and again as the Oak Island story unfolded, and that this was probably significant. “The triangles, obviously,” Charles said. The triangle was not just the Masonic symbol for the sacred number three but was also understood as a geometric representation of God.
“The stone triangle, the triangle of oak trees outlining the Money Pit that were described in McCully’s Colonist article,” I prompted.
“The triangular swamp,” Charles added. I wasn’t entirely comfortable with the inclusion of the swamp in the list of Oak Island triangles. Admittedly, one could see the outline of an equilateral triangle if one looked at the swamp from the air, but that involved filling in sections of the three sides with the mind’s eye. I had been told that there were triangular swamps along the shorelines of other islands in Mahone Bay, and my impression was that these had been created gradually by the combination of erosion and rising water that surged forward to a point. Maybe the Oak Island Swamp was man-made, as many believed, but I needed more evidence. I filed the subject away as something to consider in the future.
Still, there was a case to be made for Masonic fingerprints being all over Oak Island. Interestingly, the most exhaustive claims of Masonic involvement were made by those skeptical of the treasure story. Joe Nickell had observed that “secret vault symbolism” was central in a number of Masonic rituals, and he described certain inscribed stones on the island as “explicitly Masonic.” Nickell pointed in particular to a stone discovered by Gilbert Hedden at Joudrey’s Cove in 1936 that featured a cross next to the letter H, which he described as “a modification of the Hebraic letter for Jehovah,” and another carving of the Masonic symbol known as the point within a circle that represented mankind within the compass of God’s creation. It was an intriguing possibility, though this carving hadn’t been dated, and it could have been made by people involved in the treasure hunt rather than by those who had dug the Money Pit and made the flood tunnels.
Nickell had stretched his argument further than that, however. His list of Masons “associated” with the treasure hunt on Oak Island included not only Franklin Roosevelt but also the polar explorer Richard Byrd and the actor John Wayne. Wayne’s closest connection to the treasure had been some correspondence between a mining company in which he was an investor and an Oak Island search company about renting a piece of equipment. Admiral Byrd was a passive investor in a company that proposed an expedition to Oak Island and had some conversations with FDR about what might be buried there, but he was never directly involved in any of the operations on the island. Nickell went further out on a limb when he attempted to make something of an “old metal set-square” that had been found at Smith’s Cove. “Indeed, the square is one of the major symbols of Freemasonry,” Nickell had observed. It’s also a common tool that’s used by virtually everyone involved in mechanical engineering and technical drawing and was almost certainly left on Oak Island by a member of one of the early search companies.
At the end of his Skeptical Inquirer article, Nickell had equivocated, conceding that he couldn’t be sure “whether the Masonic elements were opportunistically added to an existing treasure quest or whether the entire affair was a Masonic creation from the outset.” Still, he insisted the mystery of Oak Island had been “solved.”
A far more thorough and compelling exploration of the Masonic symbolism on Oak Island—along with a more definitive conclusion—was provided by another skeptic, Dennis King, who had authored an Internet article entitled “The Oak Island Legend: The Masonic Angle.” Though I found the arguments King made to be even weaker than Nickell’s, the research on which he based those claims was admirably detailed and quite fascinating. I was especially impressed by the connections King (a Freemason himself) had made between the works on Oak Island and a pair of Masonic rituals practiced in the eighteenth century by those who attained the Thirteenth Degree in Freemasonry’s so-called Scottish Rite:
Prior to the flood, the biblical patriarch Enoch constructed an underground temple consisting of nine chambers descending vertically into the earth, and in the ninth or lowest chamber he deposited a treasure which included the secret name of God engraved on a triangular plate of gold. The temple was inundated by Noah’s flood and was lost, until it was accidentally rediscovered by three searchers (“Grand Master Architects” in the Masonic description) during the building of King Solomon’s Temple, with the three searchers recovering the treasure and the secret name of God from the lowest or ninth chamber.
The parallels to the Money Pit, with its nine tiers of log platforms and the flood system that had rendered it impenetrable for the past 220 years, were obvious.
King had taken his material mainly from an exposé of Masonry published in the 1850s by William Morgan under the title “The Mysteries of Freemasonry,” but focused his attention mainly on the 1864 Colonist articles (which he definitely attributed to Jothan McCully, a Mason, according to King), noting a number of claims made in it about the discovery and exploration of the Money Pit that corresponded to elements of Masonic rituals. In addition to the nine levels in the Pit and the flood system, the triangle of oak trees that surrounded the Money Pit in McCully’s telling could conceivably be linked to the triangular plate of gold on which the secret name of God was engraved according to the Masonic rituals described in Morgan’s book. It was possible also, I conceded, that the inscribed stone found at either 80 or 90 feet in the Money Pit was analogous to the “cubic stone” with an iron ring handle that covered the entrance to Enoch’s temple, according to Morgan’s description of the ritual of the Knights of the Ninth Arch, even though the cubic stone was on the surface in the Masonic ritual and the inscribed stone was buried deep belowground in the Money Pit. King contended that the letters and symbols McCully had said were carved into the trunks of the three oak trees could be compared to the inscription on the cubic stone, according to Morgan’s account of the Masonic rituals. He began to lose me, though, when he suggested that the story of how McGinnis, Smith, and Vaughan had discovered the Money Pit was an invention meant to echo the legend of the three grand master architects in the Enochean ritual. McGinnis, Smith, and Vaughan were real people and the story of the Money Pit’s discovery had come from them and those close to them, not from McCully.
I had to be impressed by how thoroughly King had researched the early accounts of the three small chain links that had been brought to the surface by the auger boring of 1849. In the three Colonist articles published in January 1864, there was no mention at all of any chain links or gold links being brought to the surface by the auger. They had been mentioned, though, in an article published eleven months earlier, in the Yarmouth Herald’s February 19, 1863, edition, which described “three links of a chain, of a copper colour, which, however, upon being tested proved to be gold.” Yet the same newspaper on March 12 of that year had referred to “gold wire” rather than chain links as being what the auger brought to the surface. But in his 1867 diary, King noted, James McNutt had referred not to chain links brought up by the auger, but to three pieces of copper wire. And two articles published in September 1866 in the New York Herald and the Scotsman that were otherwise fairly complete accounts of the Oak Island treasure hunt so far made no mention of either chain links or wire being brought to the surface by the pot auger borings of 1849. That was all pretty interesting, though I found it difficult to draw any conclusions. For King, though, these variances were evidence of an attempt to introduce another Masonic element into the Oak Island story. “The aprons and other regalia worn by Freemasons are often adorned with metal epaulettes,” he noted, “comprising chains of small links, and which were and still are frequently of gold or a metal resembling gold.”
Again, King brought this back to McCully, drawing this time on a biographical sketch of the man that had been produced by Oak Island researcher Paul Wroclawski. McCully had lived most of his life in Truro, Nova Scotia, and had fathered ten children who were raised there. He had worked as an engineer, which was why he had been appointed manager of operations for the Truro Company in 1845. I wasn’t sure about that; there were records that said he’d worked in a train station. Whatever his regular job, McCully had remained active in the treasure hunt on Oak Island for more than twenty years, working, among other things, as the secretary of the Oak Island Association and as a director of the Halifax Company.
“What Were McCully’s Motives?” read the concluding section of King’s article.
There were two possibilities, he wrote. First, “the more speculative and sinister possibility,” was that “the Oak Island Treasure Hunt in the 19th century was a deliberate fraud, and McCully inserted the Masonic elements as a coded warning to his fellow Scottish Rite Masons that Oak Island was fraudulent and they shouldn’t waste their money by investigating it.” King did not explain why McCully would choose not to simply announce that the treasure hunt was a fraud or why he would invest the next several years of his life and a considerable portion of his fortune in that treasure hunt. At least King had been judicious enough to describe it as “speculative.”
The second, and “more likely” motive for McCully’s account of the treasure hunt, King went on, was that he had been “perpetrating a Masonic prank, or a kind of in-joke with his fellow Masons.” At a cost of tens of thousands of hours and a commensurate amount of dollars over a period of almost a century, McCully and his mates must have been dedicated comedians.
I was beginning to think that the problem with the Oak Island skeptics—apart from the highly selective manner in which they sorted the evidence—was that they inevitably proposed explanations for the treasure hunt that were far more fantastic than what they called the Oak Island legend.
Still, there was something to this whole claim of a Masonic connection to Oak Island. I didn’t think it had to do with who the treasure hunters had been, though I didn’t rule that out completely. What interested me was the possibility of a Masonic connection to the original work on Oak Island. That didn’t mean that Freemasons, per se, had done that work, but their precursors went back deep into history. It has been often claimed that the traditions underlying the creation of Freemasonry go back at least as far as the ancient Greek mathematician and philosopher Pythagoras (570–495 BC), who learned geometry from the Egyptians, arithmetic from the Phoenicians, astronomy from the Chaldeans, and philosophy and theology in Babylon. He’s best remembered today for the theorem that bears his name, stating that the square of the hypotenuse of a right triangle is equal to the sum of the squares of the other two sides. What’s not as well-known is the cult of devotion that grew up around Pythagoras after he moved to the Italian city of Crotone and began preaching his religious and ascetic doctrines, urging his followers to abandon materialism to pursue spiritual development. This movement came to a climax when its adherents were attacked by a mob that set their meeting place on fire. The organized brotherhood of Pythagoreans disappeared from the face of the Earth, but a remnant carried on as a sect and it is claimed that they formed the earliest European mystery school.
Many of the mystery schools—associations that offered esoteric instruction—that arose on the Continent, though, declared as their founder not Pythagoras, but a master who had preceded him, known as Hermes Trismegistus. Hermes “Thrice-Great” was said to have manifested at three different times in three different places, first in Egypt where he was equated with the god Thoth, who had introduced civilizing knowledge to men by carving the first teaching of sacred science in hieroglyphs (the American mystic Edgar Cayce claimed in his “trance readings” that Hermes/Thoth was an engineer from the sunken city of Atlantis who had designed and directed the construction of the Pyramids). Hermes’s second incarnation was as the teacher of Pythagoras in Babylon, according to this tradition, and his third was as the first teacher of alchemy on the European continent, the one who introduced the rituals that eventually became Freemasonry.
There is another claim, either competing or complementary, depending on who is making it, that Freemasonry arose from the surviving traditions of the Knights Templar, the order of monk-warriors that arose during the Crusades and grew to become perhaps the wealthiest and most powerful organization on Earth before it was destroyed by a jealous French king in the early fourteenth century. According to this version of Masonry’s origins, the knights who survived went underground in Europe until the eighteenth century, when they reemerged as the modern Freemasons.
It was true, Charles Barkhouse told me, that there was a Masonic order known as the Knights Templar, but that group didn’t claim any direct descent from the original knights. That said, there were many Freemasons who believed that the origins of the group went back to the time of the Crusades. That claim had been extant since 1737, when Chevalier Ramsay, the famous Scottish Jacobite, declared that European Freemasonry had been born of a marriage between the Templars and another order of crusader knights, the Order of St. John, also known as the Knights Hospitaller.
There was also, of course, a claim that invoked Francis Bacon as the interface between the ancient mystery schools out of Egypt and Asia and European-based alchemy, and as the foundational figure in the rise of Freemasonry. What’s certain is that Bacon did regularly assemble the leading men of Elizabethan England at Gray’s Inn to discuss politics, science, philosophy, literature, and religion. Whatever the truth is about Bacon’s centrality in the founding of Freemasonry, it is known that Bacon’s sixtieth birthday was celebrated in the year 1622 with what was called a Masonic banquet at which the poet Ben Jonson read a “Masonic ode.”
What all that meant, I had no idea, but I was resigned to the fact that I would be required to investigate further. There was some kind of connection between Oak Island and what became Freemasonry, I tentatively believed. It was tempting to try to weave the loose threads into a whole cloth.
I wasn’t buying the idea that Oak Island was an inside joke—or even an inside job—among the Freemasons of Nova Scotia, however. The leaders of the various expeditions to Oak Island who had been identified as Masonic bigwigs—Blair, Hedden, Hamilton, among others—all had dedicated a huge portion of their lives and fortunes to the treasure hunt on the island. They had been believers in a big way, every one of them. And the mystery of the place had been a large part of what captivated them.
Blair alone offered an overwhelming refutation of the “Masonic prank” theory. The man had invested more than half a century—nearly three-quarters of his life—along with the bulk of his fortune and a huge part of his energies in the Oak Island treasure hunt. His commitment had been as close to absolute as seemed humanly possible, and in early 1951, as the twentieth century rolled into its second half, he was approaching the end of his life still holding on tightly to the treasure trove license to the Money Pit. He might have grown cantankerous in the eyes of some, and he was certainly stubborn, but it was impossible not to admire the man for his perseverance in the face of failure after failure.
Blair’s death in March 1951 at the age of eighty-three marked the end of an epoch and the breaking of the last living link between the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries on Oak Island. The legacy he left behind included not only the vast collection of documents, letters, and records that still serve as the foundation of any attempt to tell the Oak Island story, but also any number of enduring quotes from various newspaper interviews he gave, including the one that among archeological accomplishments, arriving at the solution to Oak Island would be “equaled only by the discovery of King Tutankhamun’s tomb.”
R. V. Harris, who had been Blair’s attorney, friend, and colleague for almost a quarter century, offered this posthumous tribute to the man:
Mr. Blair was a good community man and actively interested in the First Baptist Church, Alexandra Masonic Lodge No. 87 and other organizations, and his excellent memory made him an interesting conversationalist. His tall spare figure was very familiar to many citizens of Amherst…. Mr. Blair had, in the course of sixty-five years, gathered a vast amount of information respecting the efforts to find the Oak Island Treasure; he believed implicitly in its existence and in its ultimate recovery…. Mr. Blair received thousands of letters from eccentric as well as sane people who had suggestions to make for the sure and certain recovery of the treasure. In answering them, he was invariably courteous as well as lucid.
Though he died before I was born, researching this book made me feel compelled to pay my own respects to Frederick Blair, and that included a consideration of the theory of Oak Island on which he had become fixated in his last years. As did a number of others, this theory originated in seventeenth-century England. The execution of King Charles I had been the climax of a nearly a decade of upheaval, a good deal of it owing to the monarch’s refusal to submit to the British Parliament’s demands for a constitutional monarchy. Under a claim of divine right, Charles levied enormous taxes and spent as he saw fit. This included amassing what was arguably the finest personal collection of art that has ever existed, an estimated 1,760 paintings by, among many others, Rembrandt, Raphael, Rubens, Titian, Correggio, Brueghel, Velázquez, Caravaggio, and Da Vinci. Charles’s gold and silver alone, most of it in the form of royal and church plate, was worth what would be billions in today’s dollars. And that’s what disappeared, along with a trove of historical artifacts, after the king was beheaded in 1649 under the protectorate of Oliver Cromwell. Although he was never very specific—at least in his journals and letters—about who precisely was responsible, Blair became convinced that the missing treasure of Charles I had been transported around 1650 to Nova Scotia, where “very probably it now lies buried on Oak Island.”
I could find no particular reason to believe this was so, but as was the case with several dozen other Oak Island theories, it hadn’t been disproved. If nothing else, there was a thrill in learning that yet another great treasure had gone missing and remained unaccounted for. Among the most seductive aspects of Oak Island was the way the place nourished one’s sense of possibility.
Frederick Blair had never achieved what he set out to do, but what he had gotten done was enough to inspire new generations to follow in his footsteps. The difference between those who thought he should be praised for that and those who believed he ought to be blamed was for me as close to the crux of the Oak Island mystery as any test that could be devised.