When I thought about it later, I was fascinated by how determined the partners in Triton Alliance were to portray Fred Nolan as an interloper, given that Fred had been involved in the Oak Island treasure hunt longer than any of them had.
Nolan was a surveyor living in Bedford, Nova Scotia, and working out of an office in Halifax in 1957 when he first visited Oak Island, just as George Greene’s operations were winding down. R. V. Harris’s The Oak Island Mystery was published one year later, and he had read it “forward and backward, at least a half dozen times,” Nolan told me when I spoke to him in 2003. He had been thrilled to discover that Harris’s office was just a few blocks from his own and began paying visits to the attorney, who seemed to welcome him, even when the surveyor peppered the lawyer with questions about the history of the treasure hunt. Harris would tell people later that he had been impressed with the originality of Nolan’s thinking process.
Nolan said he went back to Oak Island to “poke around,” only to be informed by Mel Chappell that the Harman brothers were about to take over the treasure hunt and that Robert Restall was waiting in the wings behind them. Nolan, who had become fascinated by the survey Charles Roper conducted for Gilbert Hedden in 1937—in particular by the links Roper had found between the stone triangle, the Cave-in Pit, and the drilled boulders—asked if Chappell would mind if he conducted a survey of the complete island, so long as he did it on his own time and paid for it with his own money. Reasoning that he was getting an expensive service for free, Chappell agreed.
What Nolan didn’t tell Chappell was that he had been horrified by the damage to the surface of Oak Island the other man was doing by operating a drag line—essentially a tractor pulling a digging bucket behind it—that tore up everything in its path. Nolan feared that valuable landmarks were being obliterated, which was why he had pressed to conduct a survey immediately.
During 1961 and 1962, Nolan spent thousands of dollars on labor and equipment (and devoted hundreds of hours that his family wished he were putting into his business) to lay out a grid that covered every inch of Oak Island and reference every object that might be considered a “marker.” It would have been much more expensive if not for the fact that he did most of the work himself, Nolan told me, crisscrossing the island with dozens of lines cut through the trees and brush. In total, these stretched for tens of thousands of yards, Nolan said, and laying them out had been “backbreaking work.”
Fred was seventy-six years old in 2003, a short man with wispy white hair and a physique that might generously be described as spare. He was more sturdy-looking in photographs from the 1960s and 1970s. A flinty-featured fellow who squinted suspiciously beneath the brim of the tweedy porkpie hat he favored, he was never caught on camera smiling. In fact, he smiled exactly once during our conversation, when I told him that Dan Blankenship had, grudgingly it seemed, acknowledged the “significant discoveries” his island neighbor and mortal enemy had made. I was pretty sure Fred had only agreed to speak to me because he knew I had already interviewed Dan. He was curious to know what Blankenship had said about him and wanted the opportunity to defend himself against any accusations that might have been made.
I can’t say I found him to be the least bit warm, unlike Dan, who had become almost avuncular after I had spent a couple of hours in his company. But one winning quality possessed by Fred Nolan that nobody—not even Blankenship—could deny was perseverance. The man was also meticulous, as he had demonstrated while conducting that free survey for Chappell back in the early sixties, installing twenty-three concrete survey markers, each crowned with a numbered bronze disk on which a transit or theodolite could be mounted. Nolan had also been the first person to photograph the stone triangle, which he surveyed as well, actions that would be much admired years later, when it began to dawn on people the havoc Dunfield had wreaked when he destroyed the triangle.
Another idea that originated with Fred Nolan was that the flood tunnels on the island were not dug in straight paths. The clay down there was “unbelievably hard,” Nolan said, and he was convinced that the original diggers had followed the line of least resistance, which is to say the tunnels meandered. “If they came to a boulder, they dug around it,” he said in 2003.
In late 1962, convinced that he had accomplished something important—and that Mel Chappell would surely recognize it—he arranged a meeting with the man who now owned all of Oak Island and proposed that he be allowed to lease the search rights. Chappell, though, already had Robert Restall and his family installed on the island and planned to keep them there until he found the individual or group that was willing to spend the serious money he believed was required to retrieve the treasure. Whether it was because Nolan was pushy or Chappell was testy, or both, the surveyor’s attempted negotiation blew up in his face, and the conversation ended with M. R. telling him to “get off my damn island and go to hell,” as Fred recalled it.
Instead, Nolan went to the Registry of Deeds in Chester. “I was playing a hunch,” Fred told me. That hunch would pay big dividends. Nolan traced the Oak Island records back to 1935, when Gilbert Hedden bought lots 5 and 9–20 from Sophia Sellers’s heirs (three grown children and nine grandchildren). The deed office’s records, though, stated that Hedden had purchased only lots 15–20. The issue was muddled further by a survey plan dated September 9, 1935, stating that Hedden had purchased “52 acres” on Oak Island, which would have included lots 5 and 9–14. So Nolan jumped forward to 1950, when John Whitney Lewis had purchased the same property from Hedden. Again he found that the sale had not technically included seven of the lots: 5 and 9–14. Thus, neither had the sale made by Lewis to Chappell later that same year. What he suddenly realized was that because lots 5 and 9–14 had not been properly conveyed to Hedden by the Sellers heirs in 1935 or to Lewis by Hedden in 1950 or to Chappell by Lewis after that, that property still belonged legally to the last remaining Sellers heirs, two elderly ladies living on the mainland. Nolan immediately paid separate visits to the sisters and arranged to purchase the seven lots—one-quarter of Oak Island—for $2,500.
In April 1963 Nolan went to Chappell without first making arrangements for a meeting, showed him the deeds to lots 5 and 9–14, then offered to trade the seven lots for a lease on the Money Pit. Chappell reacted with fury, calling Nolan a sneak and again ordering him the hell off his property. The man who had believed he owned Oak Island in its entirety hired R. V. Harris to investigate the matter and was outraged when Harris reported back that it appeared Nolan could indeed claim ownership of the seven lots in question.
He was “set back and disappointed,” Nolan admitted to me in 2003, that Chappell had rejected his offer. He soon began to cheer up, though, when he realized that he now owned a swath of land that extended across most of the east end of Oak Island, permitting him to block anyone coming from the west if he chose to. He also had his survey notes and an immense collection of maps and documents. Rather than worry about Chappell and the operations at the Money Pit, he would hunker down and study all the materials in his possession to see if he could make connections.
Nolan directed his attention first to the three piles of stones at the top of the hill just beyond the eastern boundary of his property, each rising from a 12-foot base to a point 5 feet aboveground. It had long been presumed these were the remnants of an observation point—a “sentry post,” as Robert Restall had called it. When he studied the survey grid he had laid out on that part of the island, though, Nolan recognized that the piles of stones formed a perfect isosceles triangle, with sides 150 feet long and a base about 100 feet wide. He looked at that triangle again and again, Nolan recalled, until he realized that it could be seen as an arrowhead pointed directly at the center of the swamp. He was already convinced, just as Robert Restall had been, that the swamp was a meaningful feature of Oak Island, probably man-made, possibly to conceal something buried beneath it.
He filed that thought away and concentrated for a time on two granite boulders on which ringbolts had been fitted into drilled holes and fixed with a primitive cement. During 1963, he drew lines between the stone piles and the boulders with the ringbolts and decided to excavate where the lines intersected. Nolan demonstrated just how driven a man he was the following year in 1964, when he hired a six-man crew to dig two 30-foot-deep shafts at those locations. He was disappointed—but not at all discouraged—that the only object found was an old brass belt buckle buried more than 20 feet underground.
Whether or not it was because he had no access to the Money Pit I was never sure, but during his time on Oak Island in the 1960s Nolan came to believe that the original shaft was not nearly as significant a feature of the island as people imagined. I never could get out of him exactly why, but Nolan was convinced that the treasure everyone sought was in a watertight vault at the end of a tunnel that ran off from the Money Pit. Or maybe, he seemed to be saying at one point, this tunnel was not even connected to the Money Pit. Fred’s reluctance to reveal anything more than he absolutely had to created a haze around his work that no one would ever entirely penetrate.
He had spent hours, days, and weeks over a period of years searching for that tunnel and the vault at the end of it on his own property, Nolan said. Along the way he found more rocks with round holes bored or chiseled into them; some had pieces of metal inserted. He also excavated pieces of old hand-cut wood that he believed were from an ancient treasure chest. One of the pieces had old iron hinges attached. He also discovered a number of rocks that he believed had been used as survey markers many years earlier. One in particular fascinated him. It was a piece of sandstone that had been cut to leave two smooth sides and the other two rough. How Nolan found it says a good deal about the man. He had been crawling along on the ground on his hands and knees, following a survey line with a hand compass that had bumped into the rock. Nolan said that when he saw that the sandstone was standing on end, he immediately recognized it as significant. He actually paid to have it examined by a geologist who wrote a report confirming that “this is not a natural stable resting position for a rock of this shape.” The geologist also agreed that the burn marks on the rock indicated that heat had been used to cut it. Nolan found any number of other sandstone rocks that he described as having “marks and figures” on them. All of the granite stones he had noted as potential markers were positioned naturally, but the sandstones had been placed by human hands. Eventually Nolan decided that the sandstones were not native to Oak Island, but instead had been brought there to use as survey markers.
Nothing Fred did during the 1960s, though, was as impressive as his decision at the end of the decade to drain the Oak Island swamp. He wouldn’t tell me what it had cost, other than “a lot,” but there had to be a considerable amount of labor and equipment involved. He did not find a tunnel entrance or a treasure chest under the swamp, Fred admitted, but he did discover numerous markers, most notably a number of spruce stakes driven into the ground that clearly were intended for some purpose of identification. He also found what he believed to be a gold-branding bar and part of a wooden ship’s gunwale. He was convinced that the swamp had once been low-lying ground, used possibly as either a docking or boat-repair yard.
By 1969, the year he drained the swamp, though, the biggest news Fred Nolan was making involved his battles with Dan Blankenship and Triton Alliance. The conflict actually went all the way back to 1965, when Robert Dunfield—who had absorbed the animosity toward Nolan from his then-partner Mel Chappell—had built the causeway and posted an armed guard at the entrance to prevent Nolan from using it. Dunfield himself used to sit out there with a rifle, Fred said, “and threaten to shoot me if I tried to drive onto the island.” Dunfield and Chappell managed to force Nolan to use a boat to reach his land on the island and to barge out his equipment, but they also learned the hard way that Fred was not about to lay down for anyone. In 1966, he spent $3,000 to purchase the quarter acre of land on Crandall’s Point that butted up against the entrance to the causeway, then barricaded it, making it impossible to move any sort of oversized load between the mainland and the island. When Dunfield left Nova Scotia, Nolan negotiated a deal with Dan Blankenship, who paid him $1,000 to remove the barricade, at the same time giving Fred permission to use the causeway. Eventually that morphed into a deal that gave Nolan a small share of Triton’s Money Pit operation in exchange for doing some surveying work for Tobias and giving Blankenship a right of way through his property.
The situation seems to have been reasonably amicable during 1967, Canada’s centennial year, when Fred built a museum at Crandall’s Point, where he exhibited the artifacts he had collected on Oak Island. He even managed to negotiate a deal with Canada’s Department of Tourism to collect a percentage of the revenue from public tours of Oak Island, in exchange for the right to cross his Crandall’s Point property.
All of those agreements were annulled in 1969, though, when Triton Alliance was formed. After each side accused the other of breach of contract, Nolan again blocked off the entrance to the causeway, which forced Triton to build a bypass road. Triton retaliated by chaining off the causeway where it touched the island, on Chappell’s property, preventing Nolan from crossing and again forcing him to boat and barge out to his island property. Fred answered back by chaining off the trail to the eastern end of Oak Island that ran through his property, blocking Triton from road access to the Money Pit. To say that the conflict grew hot at this point would be an understatement. Nolan and Blankenship had a number of what were described as “nose-to-nose shouting matches,” although technically those would have been Fred’s nose to Dan’s chin. One afternoon in 1970 Blankenship became so incensed that he confronted Nolan at the chain armed with a hunting rifle. Fred called the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, who arrived in time to seem Dan still manning the chain with the rifle in his hands. He was protecting his property, Dan told the Mounties, who confiscated his rifle anyway.
“OF ALL THE THINGS FRED HAS DONE, nothing has ever infuriated or outraged me as much as his systematic removal and destruction of the markers and artifacts he’s found—a lot of which weren’t even on his property,” Dan Blankenship told me back in 2003. Nolan admitted nothing when I asked him about this. “I have recorded the precise location of every single marker or other significant object I’ve found on Oak Island,” Fred told me. “If I choose not to share that information with Dan, well, that’s my right.”
Nolan’s obstruction of the existing path to the Money Pit compelled Triton to build a new road around his property in 1970. Fred had also forced his adversaries to spend some serious money creating bypasses at the causeway entrance and to reach the east end of Oak Island from the west, but he lost nearly all of his leverage against Triton in the process. He had just two advantages left—the proximity of the southeastern border of his property to the Money Pit and, as of early 1971, his own treasure trove license from the province of Nova Scotia. When Nolan began a major excavation about 650 feet northwest of the Money Pit, Tobias and Blankenship realized how serious their island neighbor was about his search and about his theory that the treasure was in a tunnel that had been driven downhill from the Money Pit. The partners could not completely dismiss the possibility that what they were after might lie on Nolan’s property, not theirs. This was the basis for the negotiation of a new deal struck in late 1971. It guaranteed Triton at least 40 percent of any treasure found on Nolan’s land in exchange for giving Fred the right to drive to the island on the causeway, plus a promise that Triton would not challenge Nolan’s acquisition of his seven lots.
Triton had convinced Nolan that its operation on Oak Island was a formidable one. In summer 1970 the Alliance had built a 400-foot-long cofferdam around the perimeter of Smith’s Cove, 50 yards farther out to sea than the previous dams built by searchers. Blankenship had done much of the work (mostly with bulldozers) and supervised all of it. Triton’s was an impressive structure, but like previous dams, it would ultimately be battered, beaten down and broken by the Atlantic Ocean’s winter storms.
The construction of the cofferdam, though, had unearthed what might have been the most significant find of the twentieth century on Oak Island: a large U-shaped wooden structure buried beneath the sand and gravel just below the low tide line. It was made of logs 2 feet in diameter ranging in length from 30 to 65 feet, all of them notched at 4-foot intervals, each hand bored, and several still fitted with dowels that must have once secured cross pieces joining the logs. (Almost certainly this was the rest of what Gilbert Hedden had discovered when he spotted those two logs with hand-carved notches at Smith’s Cove back in 1938.) A different Roman numeral was carved into each log. Triton called in archeological consultants who concluded that the structure was the remains of an ancient wharf or slipway or of workings used in the construction of the original cofferdam that had held back the sea while the Money Pit was dug and the flood tunnel system constructed. Dan Blankenship maintained that the structure was a wharf, though he considered it possible that it had been both a wharf and a dam and was of the opinion that it had been destroyed purposely after the completion of the Money Pit and the flood system. Carbon dating at Ontario’s Brock University established only that the wood was at least 250 years old, which meant that the structure had been built sometime prior to 1720.
Blankenship had also discovered two smaller and more crudely constructed wooden structures beneath the beach on Oak Island’s west end. He believed they were skidways that had been used to haul boats out of the water. A number of handwrought iron nails and metal strips were recovered in the vicinity of these two structures, and lab analysis found they had been forged prior to 1790. The Blankenship find that made the most news, though, was a large granite stone that had been uncovered by accident as bulldozers were backfilling the Cave-in Pit that summer. Dan had caught sight of some “cutting” on the stone as it was being pushed out of the ground toward the Pit and rushed in to retrieve it before it was buried. The cutting was a hand-carved G inside a rectangle. In Freemasonry, the letter G inside an “oblong square” denoted the “Grand Architect” of the universe—God, by another name. Formac Publishing author Mark Finnan had asserted that “the presence of this symbol on Oak Island and its location in the east, seen as the source of light in Masonic teachings, is further indication that individuals with a fundamental knowledge of Freemasonry were likely involved [in the original works on Oak Island].” That was certainly possible, though it was equally likely that the G had been carved by someone involved in a previous treasure-hunting expedition.
In his constant poking around the island, Blankenship had made a number of other notable discoveries in the late sixties and early seventies. One was a pair of old leather shoes buried 9 feet below the surface of the island’s western beach. Dan also found three more drilled boulders not far north of the Money Pit, similar to the two found in 1937 by Gilbert Hedden. Blankenship discovered several rock piles that he knew were man-made as well. When he dismantled them, he found mounds of ash beneath. Lab analysis later revealed this to be the remains of burned bones, though whether they were human or animal was not possible to say.
Later in the summer of 1970, after the cofferdam’s construction, Triton had hired Golder Associates of Toronto, a geotechnical engineering firm, to conduct the most complete study ever performed of what lay beneath the surface of Oak Island. The company bored a series of deep holes across the island’s east end, removing core samples to be analyzed at their laboratories. Golder also ran seismic and other tests intended to determine the precise nature and porosity of the soil and the underlying bedrock of the east-end drumlin. Among other things, these tests determined that the seawater was pouring into the Money Pit and surrounding shafts at a constant rate of 600 to 650 gallons per minute, which laid Captain Henry Bowdoin’s “percolation” to rest.
All told, the Golder project cost Triton more than $100,000, for which the Alliance received a trove of charts and cross-sectional drawings of the island’s underground, with both natural and man-made formations mapped out. Golder’s engineers also estimated that given the tools and technologies of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, it would have required approximately 100,000 man-hours to create the original works on Oak Island, meaning that forty men could have done it in one year.
In terms of future events on the island, the most significant moment of the Golder project came when the company’s engineers were conducting a piezometer test (to determine the flow and pressure of the water beneath the surface) at what was designated as Borehole 10X. The borehole had been made in 1976 by a company called Bowmaster Drilling with a 6-inch rotary drill. At a depth of 140 feet in the hard-packed glacial till the drill had dropped into a 5-foot cavity. It hit a similar cavity 20 feet farther down, then reached the bedrock at a depth of 180 feet and continued boring deeper all the way to 230 feet, where it found yet another 5-foot cavity. At that point the drill was removed and a steel casing was inserted all the way to the bottom of the borehole. High-pressure air was injected to blow out loose material, and from a depth of 165 feet came enough “thin metal” to fill both of a man’s hands. The metal began oxidizing within minutes of exposure to the outside air and turned so brittle it would crumble if touched. What this meant, the geologists said, was that it had been starved of oxygen for a very, very long time. The metal was sent to Stelco, which reported back that it was a primitive form of smelted steel, extremely low carbon, possibly of Swedish origin that “in all probability was produced prior to 1750.”
Dan Blankenship was at least as impressed when 10X filled with water that brought pieces of bird bones, seashells, and glass to the surface. To him, that meant 10X had found a connection to the flood system. Because of this, combined with the discovery of the cavities and the recovery of the old steel, it was decided to make 10X into an actual shaft, the twenty-ninth excavated on Oak Island, one large enough for divers to be lowered into it.
One of Triton’s consultants suggested that an Aspen, Colorado, company named Statesman Mining owned a perfect piece of equipment for this job, a hybrid drill/clamshell digger capable of scooping out a 25-inch diameter hole to a considerable depth. Statesman Mining was best known for the fact that the movie star John Wayne was one its owners. During the negotiations for the lease of the company’s machine it was suggested that Wayne might narrate a documentary about Oak Island. The actor’s representatives eventually insisted his schedule wouldn’t permit this and that deal fell apart, though it did leave behind the legend of John Wayne’s “involvement” with Oak Island.
Triton may not have gotten John Wayne, but it did obtain Statesman’s machine, which arrived on Oak Island in October 1970 and was immediately put to work reboring 10X. At first it looked to be the right piece of equipment, bringing up more of the thin metal from a depth of 45 feet. The Statesman machine couldn’t deal with the boulders that began to block its progress below that point, though, and by Christmas had reached a depth of only 85 feet. After Triton sent the Statesman rig back to Colorado, Dan Blankenship insisted on bringing Parker Kennedy of Halifax—”the best damn driller I’ve ever had on the island”—out to finish the job. Kennedy’s big churn drill opened a hole 27 inches wide in 10X right down through the bedrock to a depth of 235 feet. A quarter-inch-thick steel casing was driven down against the walls of the shaft to 180 feet, leaving the last 55 feet of the borehole with natural anhydrite walls.
Kennedy’s drill had brought up more of the thin metal, along with several links of steel chain and a significant number of spruce borings. When the spruce was submitted for carbon-14 testing, the results were at first glance the most astonishing in the history of Oak Island. The wood was dated to the year 3005 AD—more than one thousand years in the future. It was eventually discovered that the reason for this bizarre result was that the wood was coated with pitchblende, a radioactive uranium ore that is today known as uraninite. Pitchblende, Triton was advised, had been used between the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries as a preserving agent on Britain’s wooden ships, and also on mineshaft supports.
The churning action of Kennedy’s drill had also extracted chunks of cement from 10X at the 165-foot level. These were analyzed by W. S. Weaver of Canada Cement LaFarge, who reported: “It is likely that these materials reflect human activity involving crude lime…. Furthermore, the presence of rust [on some of the samples] indicates contact with man-made iron.”
The nature of the debris recovered from 10X, along with the fact that it continued to fill to sea level with saltwater, convinced Triton that it would be worth the cost of sending a remote-controlled television camera into the shaft, all the way to the bottom. In August 1971, the camera was slowly lowered to the 235-foot level while Blankenship watched on a closed-circuit monitor that had been set up (with the assistance of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation station in Halifax) in a nearby shack. As Blankenship was describing the scene to me in his basement office in September 2003, he produced an envelope filled with still photographs that had been made from the videotape recorded that day. He pulled the photos out of the envelope and lay them facedown on the table between us, clearly relishing the suspense he was building.
“For the longest time all I saw was the snow of static,” he recalled. “Then all of a sudden I saw these.” Dan turned one of the photos over and showed me what he said were the outlines of three chests. “See that right there,” he said, pointing at one of the supposed chests. “There’s the curved top, and there just below it is the handle.” Well, they could be chests, I thought. They seemed perfectly rectangular anyway, except on top. And that might have been a handle. Dan then turned over another photo and showed me what he said was a pickaxe that lay on the floor of the chamber at the bottom of 10X next to three logs. Again, the most I could concede was that it might have been a pickaxe. And I had to strain to imagine that the silt-covered bumps on the floor of the chamber could have been the body lying on its side that Dan traced with a fingertip.
There were no photographs, only Blankenship’s memory, to verify what was perhaps the most compelling piece of apocrypha in the entire Oak Island story. “Out of nowhere, right in front of the camera, I saw a human hand floating past,” Dan said. The hand had been severed at the wrist and hung suspended, half clenched, in front of the camera for several seconds. He had called over Parker Kennedy, who was in the shack with him, and Parker had seen the hand, too. Unfortunately, Kennedy hadn’t known to advise Blankenship against trying to take a photograph of the floating hand with a camera that had a flash attachment; the reflection of the flash off the glass of the monitor had resulted in what was nothing more than a picture of the glare.
The emotion in Dan Blankenship’s voice in 2003 when he spoke of 10X was unfathomable to me at the time. Sitting with Dan in his basement office on that first sodden day I felt myself leaning toward him as I listened. It was almost as if he had placed me in a hypnotic trance and was willing me to be seduced by the mystery of that hole in the ground, one that had gone unsolved because of his partner’s lack of faith. “David just never believed in 10X,” he said. “He didn’t get it.”
It seemed to me that Tobias had actually been pretty forbearing, especially considering the method by which Blankenship had selected the spot where 10X was dug in the first place. Dan had done it by dowsing, or water witching as it’s sometimes called. The forked witch hazel branch that the Romans Cicero and Tacitus suggested for dowsing had been replaced by two metal rods in Blankenship’s hands. More than forty years later he vividly conveyed the “force” with which those rods had pointed him to the spot where 10X had been dug and was not the least bit embarrassed to be telling me about it. Gilbert Hedden had located two tunnels between the Money Pit and Smith’s Cove with a twig from an apple tree, Dan pointed out. Back in 1897, Frederick Blair had been highly impressed by a Massachusetts man named Chapman who had used a divining rod to correctly trace the Halifax Company’s main tunnel, then staked off what he said was the pirate tunnel and predicted that its entrance into the Money Pit could be found at a depth of 110 feet.
Science pretty much puts water witching in the same category as automatic writing, but that hasn’t prevented the mining and energy businesses from employing it with regularity over the years. Marty Lagina would tell me in the summer of 2016: “Dowsing is still used by a lot of people in the oil business. They say they don’t believe in it. I say I don’t believe in it. But I’ve seen it work and so have they. Which is why people keep resorting to it.”
Tobias only occasionally mocked the way Blankenship had “found” 10X, and while he was openly skeptical about what Dan had claimed to see when the camera was sent down 10X, David readily agreed to spend the money to expand the borehole to a diameter of 8 feet in order to search for a tunnel to the Money Pit. A team of divers led by Phil Irwin of Brooklyn, Nova Scotia, was to be sent down wearing helmets that fed air through a tube connected to a compressor on the surface. Irwin, who made the first dive alone, radioed up from a depth of 170 feet that the water was becoming murky. At 180 feet, where the metal casing ended, Irwin had reported a current of water so powerful it was about to tear the helmet off his head. Irwin descended farther anyway, but by then the turbidity of the water was so dense that he couldn’t see his hand in front of his face.
After Irwin’s solo dive, Dan Blankenship led those aboveground to Smith’s Cove, where the water along the shore was muddied. They had done this with the pumps in 10X, he said, which proved that 10X was connected to the flood system. Triton paid to have a bulldozer hauled to the island in order to pile tons of clay on the spot at Smith’s Cove where Dan believed he had found a tunnel entrance, hoping that might block the flow of water into 10X. A week later Irwin made a second descent into 10X accompanied by two other divers. This time there was no rush of water at 180 feet, indicating that what Blankenship had done was succeeding. The divers went all the way to the bottom of the borehole, 235 feet, where they found themselves floating in a large cavity about 7 feet high. Even with the strongest underwater lights in Nova Scotia, though, the divers couldn’t see the width of the cavity. Their shoulders rubbing against the anhydrite walls of the shaft had clouded the water, they realized later; it was like swimming in a vast tub of skim milk. The divers groped around the bottom directly beneath the shaft, afraid to venture any distance away, and found only loose stones.
Blankenship went down the hole in a wetsuit himself a few months later. Nothing the man had done impressed me more than that. Almost fifty years old at the time, Dan had squeezed through the 27-inch opening that extended for the last 55 feet below the metal casing and emerged into a chamber where he was “hanging from a cable like a pendulum in this big void,” as he put it. Because of the powerful pressure of the water flowing into 10X from the sea, the constant suck of the pumps on the surface, and the solubility of the anhydrite bedrock, he had been in considerable danger. Even though he was describing something he’d done more than thirty years earlier, I felt actual physical relief when Dan told me he not only realized it would be suicide to venture too far from the bottom of the shaft but also that the lack of visibility made exploration impossible. So he went back up. He went down 10X a second time in 1972, and on this occasion he found the bottom of the cavern covered with rubble. The pumps working around the clock above him were wearing away the bedrock walls of the bottom part of the shaft, Dan explained to me in 2003, and he knew it would be “ridiculously dangerous” to go back down a third time.
“There was nothing to do but move away from 10X for a time,” Blankenship said. “And it was what David was pushing me to do, anyway.” During 1973, Blankenship, on behalf of Triton, sank three drill holes on the north side of the Money Pit. A borehole 660 feet away from the Pit was turned into a 12-by-6-foot shaft (no. 30) after a piece of wire and metal plate were found just below the 100-foot level. Stelco analyzed the wire as “a corroded low carbon material which has been drawn by cold workings, probably in the 1500s to 1800s.” No. 30, like so many shafts before, was abandoned when every effort to staunch the flow of water into it failed.
It was not until August 1976, after the borings that Tobias wanted in the Money Pit area proved fruitless, that Blankenship was able to persuade the Triton partners to return to 10X. One of the things that persuaded Tobias to support this was Dan’s discovery that 10X was on the exact line between the two drilled rocks found by Gilbert Hedden in 1937, a fact that neither Blankenship nor any of the others had been aware of when the borehole was drilled.
This time Dan went at 10X armed with a special piece of equipment that had been created by Triton partner Bill Parkin, a military weapons systems designer from Massachusetts. It was a highly sensitive ground-penetrating sonar sensor that detected a number of previously unknown cavities in the bedrock connected to or near 10X. Blankenship installed a pair of pumps capable of drawing up 2 million gallons of water a day and ran them continuously for a week to get the water level below 160 feet, until the drive on the larger of the two pumps snapped. Within two days the water level was back to nearly the surface.
Not until September was Blankenship to get inside 10X and explore the cavities that had been detected with Parkin’s sonar device. All of them turned out to be shallow natural voids, probably created by the initial drilling of the borehole.
BY THE TIME HE WAS EXPLORING 10X, Dan had persuaded Jane to leave Florida and live with him full time in Nova Scotia. The couple rented a house in Mahone Bay for two years, then in 1975 Dan acquired lot 23 on Oak Island’s west end, close to the spot where the causeway ended, and built the two-bedroom bungalow where he and his wife planned to spend the rest of their lives.
Jane’s situation on the island was far more tolerable than Mildred Restall’s had been. She was living in a modern home with electricity and indoor plumbing; even the TV reception was pretty decent. It took the Blankenships less than five minutes to drive across the causeway to the mainland, where they could sit down for drinks or eat a restaurant meal. Dan was popular among the locals, especially by comparison to Robert Dunfield and George Greene, and the Blankenships made friends in the community. Still, it was lonely out on the island a lot of the time, especially in winter when visitors were infrequent. Less than a year after they’d moved into the house, though, Oak Island added one more full-time resident with the arrival of Dan and Jane’s son David, then in his midtwenties, who wanted to join his father’s treasure hunt. A few months later, Dan would be awfully glad that Dave had shown up.
It was November 26, 1976. Dan was deep inside 10X, hanging by a cable at a depth of 145 feet, while Dave manned the winch on the surface. Father and son communicated by the headsets each wore. He heard “a bad sound,” Dan recalled, then chunks of clay began to rain down on his head. In a fraction of a second, he realized that the metal casing was giving way above him. “Bring me up! Bring me up! Out, out, out, out!” Dan had shouted into his microphone. We know his exact words because the conversation was recorded on a tape, which would be played to great effect on The Curse of Oak Island almost forty years later. Dave turned the winch up to full speed as he tried to lift his father out of the borehole. It felt like slow motion to him, Dan said; the sound of tearing metal and falling rocks scraping against the sides of the casing was deafening, and he knew that if the metal collapsed completely, 10X would become his tomb. “Keep bringing me up!” he shouted to David. “Don’t stop! Bring me up! It’s still over my head! Bring me up! Bring me up!”
Dave had just raised Dan to above the 90-foot level, so that his father was looking down on the twisted metal and falling debris, when the casing crumpled completely and the rocks and clay poured into the shaft. “The sound was godawful,” Dan would tell me years later. “But it sounded a lot better when I was above it.”
It had taken thirty-five seconds to raise Dan from 145 feet to 95 feet, where the casing was collapsing. Dave had handled the situation about as well as humanly possible that day, but even in that moment seemed overshadowed by his father’s big personality. When Dan got to the surface, he told his son: “For God’s sake, don’t tell your mother, David.”
Dan, being Dan, went back into 10X the next day. Dave had lowered his father only 73 feet into the shaft before Dan found himself standing on solid ground; that much material had fallen into the borehole. Dan would drill 22 feet down through the rubble, until his bit caught on the twisted, shredded steel where the casing had collapsed. After studying the damage, Dan concluded that a man-made flood tunnel was passing very close to 10X at a depth of about 90 feet and the continuous pumping had created a fault between the shaft and the tunnel that caused tons of soil and rock to push against the metal casing, gradually crushing it.
Describing this in 2003, Dan admitted that he moved away from 10X for a couple of years after his near-death experience, but he said he was still determined to get back into the borehole. And by 1978 he was taking 10X on again. The plan this time was to create a much more solid casing by using railroad tank cars. After cutting off the ends of the cars with an acetylene torch, Dan was left with a collection of three solid steel cylinders, each 34 feet long and 8 feet in diameter, with half-inch walls twice the thickness of the original casing. Getting them into 10X was a monumental job. The interior of the borehole had to be broken up with a jackhammer. Men working with picks and shovels loaded the broken rocks and boulders to the bucket that brought the debris to the surface, where a dump truck removed it. The noise, the dust, and the darkness had to have made working in 10X absolutely hellish, and Dan Blankenship at that point was more than sixty years old. Dave Blankenship had left Oak Island by then, married, and gotten a job as a construction steelworker on the mainland. Dan did have help, though, in the person of his future minority partner: Dan Henskee.
Henskee had grown up on a farm near the town of Alden in upstate New York. Like Blankenship, he had first learned of Oak Island from the 1965 article reprinted in Reader’s Digest. He was still a teenager at the time, and during college he spent his summers on Oak Island working with and for Blankenship. Even when he finished school, Henskee came back to the island, summer after summer. Despite his lanky frame and perpetually underfed appearance, “Dan was a hard worker,” Blankenship said, and a “real asset when it came to repairing equipment.” Henskee’s mechanical skills were so remarkable that he would modify some machines to the point that they could practically be called new inventions. It would not be until 1982, after Henskee’s mother died and the family farm was sold to pay the debts racked up during her illness, that he began to live in Nova Scotia year-round. Blankenship helped him negotiate a deal whereby he would get 4 percent of any treasure recovered, then installed Henskee in a shack that doubled as an equipment shed, where he lived with his cat, Hoser. He was by any standard a quirky character and a sometimes eccentric thinker, but his quiet intelligence combined with his considerable kindness and generosity won Henskee the appreciation of just about everyone who got to know him. As Rick Lagina would remark to me during the summer of 2016, “This world would be a better place if everyone was like Dan Henskee.”
Henskee was still just a Triton employee in 1978 and worth a lot more than he was being paid. It was Henskee who did the majority of the work deep in 10X that summer, including most of the jackhammering. I remarked that the noise, the dust, and the darkness had to have been nightmarish. But Henskee’s reply made the experience sound almost cheerful. “I felt like I was part of really making something happen,” he would tell me in 2003. “And to be honest, I didn’t believe that I had anything better to do.” He had made numerous observations while underground that convinced him the legend of Oak Island was rooted in actual events, Henskee said. He was especially impressed by how hard the ground was down there; they had been forced to use a pneumatic pavement breaker to excavate, and the bedrock was so solid that it didn’t cave in even in places where no shoring was used. “There was no way a water channel would form down there naturally,” Henskee said. “It had to be man-made.”
After 10X was cleared, the tank car cylinders were tipped into it, then driven one on top of the other until an impermeable 90-foot shaft had been created.
It took two full summers (but only $35,000 in cash) to finish 10X to a depth of 126 feet, and he was convinced he could finish the job by the end of the summer of 1981, Blankenship said. “But then out of nowhere Triton pulled the plug on me.”
It was Mel Chappell who had convinced Tobias they should return to the Money Pit. Chappell had sold all of his Oak Island property to Tobias in 1977 for $125,000 but remained a Triton director. And with 18 percent of the stock, Chappell was still the Alliance’s third-largest shareholder behind the Tobias family (31 percent) and Dan Blankenship (19 percent). M. R. was ninety years old by then but still sharp, everyone agreed, still able to recall the details of previous expeditions to Oak Island clearly and in detail. Dan had even less success convincing M. R. of the importance of 10X than he’d had with David Tobias. During his appearance in a 1978 documentary for Canadian television, Chappell had stood next to the Money Pit smacking the ground with his cane as he declared, “This is where father brought up the wood and parchment, and this is where the treasure is.” When David sided with Chappell against him and announced that Triton intended to focus its entire operation on the Money Pit, Dan said, “It was never the same between us.” Even after Mel Chappell died in December 1980 at age ninety-three, Tobias continued to insist that Triton’s main objective was to make the Money Pit into a much deeper and wider shaft. They would need $2 million to do that right, and Tobias was committed to raising the money, according to the newspapers in Nova Scotia.
It was a bitter time for Dan Blankenship. During the previous several years he’d been making do with a Triton operation so scaled down it barely existed. Triton’s budget for Oak Island was just $30,000 per year at that point, which included Blankenship’s annual subsistence salary of $12,000. Even with such limited resources, Dan had continued to explore Oak Island. In early 1979, in fact, he had made one of the most significant discoveries in the history of the treasure hunt.
That winter was severe, so cold in early February that the sheltered waters of Mahone Bay had frozen all the way from Chester to Lunenburg. “Using our derrick for an observation vantage point, it appeared that the ice extended all the way to [Big] Tancook Island,” Blankenship had written in the “activity report” in which he described his discovery. Even without Triton’s support, Dan continued to try to get deeper into 10X, which meant running the big pump there each day for about ten hours. He had been on the derrick when he “noticed an area to the south that wasn’t frozen,” Blankenship wrote; it was hard to really make out any distinct shape at first: “The colder it got, though,” Dan added, “the more the ice froze, the more distinct the shapes became.” The “shapes” were four large holes in the ice, about 200 feet from the shoreline, evenly spaced about 150 feet apart. The only conceivable explanation for the holes was that warmer water from underground was being pushed up from the seabed by the pump running in 10X.
This was confirmed, Dan wrote in his activity report, when the pump broke down. From the derrick, “We noticed a thin film of ice forming after the second day we were shut down.” By the time the pump was repaired, four days after it had stopped running, “the ice covering those spots was about one to one-and-a-half inches thick.” From the derrick, sight lines to the four holes were spotted and steel pipes driven into the frozen ground so that he would be able to inspect those locations when the cold weather broke, Blankenship explained in his report to Triton. By the beginning of March, the ice had melted, and he rowed out to the four locations in a “view boat” he had made himself. Dan continued: “The whole area was riled up and you couldn’t see the bottom. However you could see air bubbles rising in the water on our sight lines.”
He had interviewed several people from the Nova Scotia Department of Fisheries who “do a lot of flying and asked them if they have ever seen any holes like this in the bay, and they said ‘NO.’” He was therefore confident, Blankenship wrote, that these anomalies had been caused by the action of the pump in 10X, which meant he had discovered the locations of the starting points of the south shore flood system.
In his report to Triton, Blankenship included a suggestion for how to stop the flow of water from the south shore to the Money Pit area. Since the four holes he had discovered were so deep underwater they couldn’t be plugged by simply dumping dirt on them as he had done at Smith’s Cove, he was proposing to bring in “concrete pumpers” that would use a 3-inch hose to fill each of the holes “maybe to as much as twenty stories high.”
David Tobias was willing to go as far as bringing in a team of geologists, who concluded there had to be a connection between the Money Pit and the ice holes and that this was almost certainly not a natural connection. But the cost of bringing in the concrete pumpers, as Dan suggested, would be prohibitive without a major financing plan in place. Tobias and Blankenship went back and forth about it. Dan was so dogged that David made plans for a summer dive in the areas where the ice holes had supposedly been spotted. In water that varied in depth from 14 to 22 feet, Tobias probed the bottom in each of the four locations, but reported seeing only kelp-covered rocks and the shapeshifting bottom of the seabed. Without stating it explicitly, Tobias seemed to be saying that he doubted Blankenship’s report about discovering the ice holes. He already said he’d doubted Dan’s claims about what he had seen when the camera was sent down 10X. The two old friends soon weren’t anymore. It was becoming the sort of situation in which the only sure way to prevent a complete fracturing of the relationship was to find a common enemy. And for that they had Fred Nolan.