Weeks later, after returning home, I hired my college student daughter to transcribe my interviews with Peter Dawkins. When my proposed due date came and went, I called to check on her progress. “This is really hard,” she told me. I was preparing to remind Grace that I’d paid her in advance and really needed this done when she added, “He sounds so cultured and intelligent, like a perfect English gentleman inviting you to tea. I’ll be enjoying just listening to the sound of his voice when I realize that he is saying some really crazy stuff.”
I was nowhere near calling Dawkins crazy, but I did know what she meant. Over the course of a couple of phone conversations and the on-camera Skype interview with the man that the producers of The Curse of Oak Island arranged, I found that he sounded exactly as I would have imagined a Cambridge-educated architect—which is what he had been as a young man. Things had begun to change, Dawkins told me, in 1973, shortly after he took a job in Edinburgh and married his wife, Sarah, when he met a woman associated with the Francis Bacon Society. It was about three weeks later that he had “an extraordinary dream” in which he encountered “the soul who is Francis Bacon, you might call him the master soul, and he literally told me, ‘Right, so now we begin our work together.’”
There almost certainly were academics who would claim to know as much about the historical Francis Bacon as Dawkins did, but none who even approached the level of research he’d done into the esoteric Bacon. An astonishing amount of it was rooted in written records that had sat on dusty shelves for centuries, some of them Bacon’s own unpublished writings, Dawkins told me. The story they told was of an Englishman who had been selected at a young age as the leader of a group that was known by many names, the best known being the Knights of the Golden Helmet. “It was only later on that they called themselves Rosicrucians, the fraternity of the golden rosy cross,” Dawkins said.
They were men dedicated to the construction of a golden age, Dawkins went on, and their project had been ongoing since long before Bacon was born. “It was a whole line of wisdom traditions that had been carried by secret societies across Europe from the East for many years. They had kept it fairly quiet, something held among themselves, until the supernova of 1604, which they took to be a sign they should announce their existence publicly.”
That 1604 event is better known today as Kepler’s supernova, for the great astronomer who tracked it. This explosion of a giant star only twenty thousand light-years away from Earth was visible even in daylight for three weeks. At night it was far brighter than any other star in the sky, nearly as bright as the moon. There has not been a supernova in our galaxy since, so one can imagine the impact on the people of Earth as they observed it more than four hundred years ago.
It certainly had a great effect on the Invisibles, as the group called themselves, who began preparing to make themselves known with a series of letters that were posted and published under the authorship of one who was first known as Frater C. R. C. and later as Christian Rosenkreuz or Christian of the Rosy Cross. The letters first appeared in Germany but the real center of the group was in England, the home of the man who had been chosen years earlier to lead the Order of the Rosy Cross, Sir Francis Bacon. “They had selected him—found him, is more like it—around 1570,” Dawkins said, which would have made Bacon nine years old at the time.
The men who would follow him at first mentored and instructed him, Dawkins said. Probably the most influential of these had been John Dee. Several of the Baconians I had spoken to or corresponded with previously had mentioned Dee, and I noticed that he was the subject of more articles published by the Francis Bacon Society than anyone other than Bacon himself. All I really knew about Dee was that he had been a famous mathematician of the Elizabethan era, but I was about to find out he was far more than that. Studying Dee’s life, even more than Bacon’s, drove home what a different place the world was in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and how differently people thought of knowledge.
Dee certainly had been a mathematician. At twenty he was lecturing on Euclid in Paris. He studied with and befriended the two greatest cartographers of his time, Mercator and Ortelius, and turned down a position as Reader at Oxford in his middle twenties to devote himself to his writing, which included the “Mathematical Preface” to the English translation of Euclid’s Elements that would itself become an enduring work.
While Dee believed that numbers were the basis of all things, he placed that belief squarely within the nexus of religion, philosophy, and esoteric science known as the hermetic tradition and viewed math as a means of accessing divine power and ancient wisdom. While he served for years as Queen Elizabeth’s main scientific adviser, the Queen seems to have valued him more as her astrologer; Elizabeth actually allowed Dee to select an auspicious date for her coronation. Astronomy and astrology were essentially one science in the post-Renaissance world Dee inhabited, and in fact he made no real distinction between his studies of mathematics, cartography, navigation, and philosophy on the one hand, and his deep interest in hermetic magic, divination, and spirit summoning on the other. All were the processes by which one arrived at the “pure verities” that underlay all of creation.
Even as Dee became Elizabeth’s main adviser on England’s voyages of discovery, personally trained and prepared navigation charts for many of England’s greatest explorers, including Raleigh and Drake, designed the British navy, coined the phrase the “British Empire,” and invented the term “Britannica” to describe it, he was at least as deeply invested in his practices of conjuring and alchemy. The latter he considered the supreme science, aiming as it did for the creation of the so-called philosopher’s stone that would heal mankind physically and spiritually and, Dee hoped, bring forth the unified world religion that would recombine not only the Protestant and Catholic churches, but the great wisdom of the ancients.
This was a point of view that made sense to the people of the era, among whom Dee’s reputation as a magician rivaled his status as a scholar. It was widely believed among the British populace that the English defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588 had been aided if not accomplished by the hex Dee put on the enemy fleet. In the Baconian version of Dee, much of which Peter Dawkins repeated to me, he was eventually persecuted for his hermetic practices to the point of being driven out of England. Dee was in fact brought before the Star Chamber in 1555 on a charge of “calculating” the horoscopes of both Queen Mary and Queen Elizabeth, and this charge eventually expanded into one of treason. He was acquitted, however.
It was his yearning for a deeper and more unified knowledge that seems to have compelled Dee’s departure from England and Elizabeth’s court. Discouraged by the Queen’s refusal to adopt his heliocentric calendar and the blame she seemed to cast his way for the failure of North American explorations, he plunged ever more deeply into the metaphysical and supernatural, attempting to communicate with angels through a crystal ball he called a scryer. It was during this period that Dee met a young man called Edward Talbot, whose real surname, Kelley, had been abandoned in order to distance himself from a conviction for “coinage,” the production of false coins, equivalent at the time to forgery. Kelley was, to Dee’s mind (and in the Baconian tradition), the greatest alchemist of his age. The two men, almost thirty years apart in age, together with their wives began a tour of the Continent that lasted six years, along the way staging “spiritual conferences” for royal families in much of eastern and central Europe.
I noticed that the Baconian articles about Dee always left out the fact that Kelley had convinced him, on the instructions of the angel Uriel, that the two of them should share all of their possessions, including their wives. The stress this produced eventually sent Dee back to England, where he discovered that his personal library, the largest in the entire country, had been ransacked, and that many books were stolen, along with his most prized instruments. The country he came back to was now looking askance at occult practices, which forced Dee to become more covert. Queen Elizabeth did make him warden of Christ’s College in Manchester. It was a position he held to the end of his life in either 1608 or 1609, but in all historical records he is described as impoverished and miserable during these last years.
Peter Dawkins told me this was not entirely accurate; Dee had taken on the role of instructing those who were about to take the Rosicrucian movement public, including and especially the chosen leader: Francis Bacon. The goal was to “raise the consciousness of people by using the arts and sciences,” Dawkins said, “so as to bring them to an understanding of what Bacon called ‘the summary law,’ which is the law of love, how to practice love in every single situation.” But this had to be done under a veil of secrecy and with the aim of speaking ultimately to people of a more enlightened age. Bacon’s junior associate Robert Fludd, for instance, was relatively forthright about his interest in the occult, publicly exchanging arguments with Johannes Kepler on the merits of the hermetic versus the strictly scientific approach to knowledge. Fludd even wrote a defense of the Rosicrucian movement, but he never admitted to being part of it for fear of the consequences, as Dawkins had it.
I admit I became a bit restive as Dawkins went on to describe how Bacon and “his good pens” (among them Ben Jonson) had created the Shakespeare plays as part of the great Rosicrucian project, but I was so fascinated by the overarching story that I simply kept silent until Dawkins had moved on to the subject of the sky and land zodiacs that Bacon and his circle had created in order to bring about the marriage of the heavens and the Earth they envisioned. This was what ultimately linked Bacon to Oak Island, as Dawkins had it.
The sky and land zodiacs had all been calculated in connection to the constellation that was most commonly known as the Northern Cross, which was itself only a part of the larger constellation known as Cygnus (the swan), Dawkins explained. The triangle formed by the bright star Deneb and two others was the key to this calculation and was referred to repeatedly in the alchemical texts of the Elizabethan era, as they were in the works from Egypt, India, and Sufi Islam from which those had emerged. Much of what he had learned about all of this came from a woman named Betty McKaig, Dawkins said. I was impressed immediately by the admiring, almost reverent, way Peter spoke of her.
“I’ve never heard of Betty McKaig,” I admitted.
“You should have,” Dawkins told me. “She’s an important part of the Oak Island story.”
McKaig was working as a freelance journalist in California in the early 1970s, when she was hired by a famous surgeon to ghostwrite his autobiography. She went to live in the physician’s home while working on the book, and while there she became fascinated by the two enormous collections that filled much of his library. One was made up of works—many rare—by and about Francis Bacon. The other consisted of texts that chronicled the history and practice of alchemy and other hermetic arts. “When she started to look at what he knew, in order to write his biography, she got enthralled herself,” Dawkins explained. “She became so absorbed that this was the total focus of her research, and then the doctor died.” Before his death, however, the physician had bequeathed his Bacon and alchemy collections to McKaig, “who carried on [with] all the research and became convinced that many of the alchemical texts that were written under the name ‘Philalethes’ had actually been authored or inspired by Francis Bacon.”
The history of alchemy, McKaig found, was far richer and stranger than she had imagined. The roots of the tree that had produced Philalethes stretched in three directions, into Taoist China, dharmic India, and a more complex network that was threaded over time from hermetic Egypt to Platonic Greece to Sufi Islam and ultimately into medieval Europe. The sciences of medicine, chemistry, and metallurgy all had emerged either from or alongside alchemy. The first alchemist in recorded history, McKaig was pleased to discover, had been a woman, one known only as Mary the Jewess, who had lived in the great melting pot of the age, Alexandria, Egypt, during the late second and early third centuries. Modern science credits Mary with nearly all of the early advancements in the processes of heating and distillation. The Jewess’s most remarkable and enduring achievement, though, was her discovery of hydrochloric acid. She had emerged from a hermetic tradition whose origins were largely lost in the mists of time, mostly due to the order that the Roman dictator Emperor Diocletian had given right around the end of the third century that all alchemy texts should be burned.
What is still known is that while alchemy in China was focused on healing and the creation of medicines (both acupuncture and moxibustion have their roots in Chinese alchemy), the alchemy of India had been closely associated with the development of metallurgy. The use of mercury in alchemical processes, for example, first appeared in the Arthashastra in the late third century and in various Buddhist texts that were written between the second and fifth centuries. The conquests of Alexander the Great were likely what made the connection between the Eastern and Western traditions of alchemy.
However it happened, the Western tradition’s incorporation of the Eastern tradition had produced the next major figure in its development, the Sufi Jabir ibn Hayyan (better known in Europe by his Latinized name Geberus) who had set up a laboratory where he introduced scientific methodology and controlled experimentation into alchemy and in the process earned a reputation as the father of modern chemistry. He was also, at least in part, responsible for the reputation alchemy acquired as a dark art: Jabir’s stated goal was what he called takwin, the artificial creation of life, up to and including human life.
Jabir’s work was introduced to Europe in 1144 when Robert of Chester translated the Arabic work Book of the Composition of Alchemy. As it began to be practiced in Europe, what in Chinese alchemy had been a search for the so-called grand elixir of immortality and in India was the aim of producing a gold so pure that touching it would perfect a man’s soul, the West made into a quest for the philosopher’s stone.
The alchemy of Europe was at once material and spiritual, McKaig discovered in her reading. Given the reputation alchemy had acquired as something either fraudulent or satanic, it was fascinating to discover that in thirteenth-century Europe the three most notable students of alchemy had been the Franciscan Roger Bacon, the Dominican Albertus Magnus, and the latter’s student, Thomas Aquinas. It was not until the fourteenth century that the practice of alchemy began to leak outside the confines of the church, and that process sped up in the fifteenth century, when the Italian Marsilio Ficino translated the Corpus Hermeticum (along with the works of Plato) into Latin. This set the stage for the first two major European alchemists, born just seven years apart, the German Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa (1486–1535) and the Swiss Philippus Aureolus Paracelsus (1493–1541).
Agrippa was the mystic, whose opus De Occulta Philosophia attempted the fusion of kabbalah, hermeticism, and alchemy into something very like a religion. Paracelsus was less interested in the occult and in the manufacture of precious metals, focusing instead on the creation of medicines.
John Dee followed Agrippa’s tradition. For all his accomplishments in mathematics, cartography, astronomy, cryptography, and navigation, by far the best known and most widely read of Dee’s works during his own lifetime was his 1564 work on alchemy, Monas Hieroglyphica. In it, Dee had been the first to describe alchemy as a kind of terrestrial astronomy, coining the axiom: “As above, so below.”
“And of course Betty McKaig discovered that it was John Dee who had been Francis Bacon’s instructor in the art and science of alchemy,” Dawkins told me.
Historians have had little to say about Bacon’s involvement with and practice of alchemy. As Dawkins had it, this was because Sir Francis had kept it well hidden during his lifetime. “But through this doctor’s collection, Betty had access to materials that aren’t commonly known,” he explained. “She found that his practice of alchemy, in the manner described by John Dee, was at the center of Francis Bacon’s work.”
Bacon’s connection to the flowering of English alchemy in the seventeenth century has not gone entirely unrecognized. Lauren Kassell, a professor of history and philosophy of science at Cambridge, named Bacon as one of the three principals responsible for that occurrence. Though started by John Dee, English alchemy was “codified by Francis Bacon in the early decades of the seventeenth century, and implemented by Samuel Hartlib in the 1650s.”
In the histories I read, Hartlib was regarded as the most significant figure in English alchemy after John Dee and the one who did the most to take it mainstream. The “Hartlibean improvers,” as Kassell called them, had made alchemy the basis of a grand scheme for the combined investigation of nature’s secrets and the reform of society. Hartlib’s circle was a precursor to the formation of the Royal Society, and the man himself openly and repeatedly acknowledged Bacon as his inspiration. In fact, he had modeled his vision of the Royal Society on the research institute Bacon had called Salomon’s House in his great work New Atlantis. Two of the Royal Society’s earliest fellows, Robert Boyle and Elias Ashmole—”both Baconians,” as Dawkins, through McKaig, had it—were proponents of alchemy who openly stated their belief that the philosopher’s stone might be used for, among other things, communicating with angels.
Alchemy’s ascendance in Britain, however, was also its downfall. More and more alleged practitioners of the recondite science were selling their services to kings and queens, lords and ladies. Many of them were con men or stage magicians, like Betruger, whose combination of sleight of hand and swindling had resulted in a public trial by the Holy Roman Empire. Those who preferred to be called scientists began to distance themselves from the practice, and the pressure to do so only increased as science and materialism began to merge. As early as 1720 chemists began to insist on a firm distinction between themselves and alchemists, and by the 1740s alchemy was almost totally associated with gold making and the various flimflammers that claimed they could accomplish it.
The works authored by the pseudonymous Philalethes (Greek for “lover of truth”) would provide the most enduring descriptions of alchemical processes, and it was the Philalethes books that had most captivated Betty McKaig, Dawkins told me. There were actually two Philalethes who had authored published books on alchemy in the seventeenth century I would learn in between conversations with Dawkins, and neither of them was ever identified as Francis Bacon. The one with the more interesting story was Eirenaeus Philalethes (“peaceful lover of truth”), who historians almost universally believe was George Starkey, born in 1628 two years after Bacon’s death. Starkey, who had been born George Stirk, was a colonial American physician who for reasons not entirely clear had immigrated to London at twenty-two. Most believe the motive for the move was his wish to have greater access to materials and equipment and, especially, teachings that would further his alchemical experiments. In London, he changed his name and continued his medical practice while at the same time working tirelessly to develop what he called sophic mercury, the amalgam of antimony, silver, and mercury that he believed would dissolve gold into a mixture that when heated would produce the philosopher’s stone. He was enormously respected in his day for both his laboratory expertise and the formal scientific methodology he developed. Many credit him as the forerunner to and teacher of Robert Boyle, who is today regarded as the first modern chemist. Starkey was plagued throughout his life by the debts he accumulated in pursuit of his alchemical research, actually went to debtor’s prison twice, and died in the Great Plague of London in 1655, at just thirty-seven. The works he left behind, though, especially Introitus Apertus Ad Occlusum Regis Palatium, were enormously influential with readers who included not only Boyle, but also John Locke, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, and Isaac Newton. Newton was so taken with the Philalethes texts that he devoted much of the rest of his life to the study of alchemy and in fact produced many more pages on that subject than he did on his study of physics.
The other Philalethes was Thomas Vaughan, a Welshman who made his living as a royalist clergyman and wrote under the name Eugenius Philalethes. He was a near contemporary of Starkey’s, born in 1621, seven years before the American, while Francis Bacon was still alive. Vaughan’s alchemy was more along the lines laid out by Paracelsus and he applied his skills mainly to the preparation of medicines, though he, too, was ultimately dedicated to producing the philosopher’s stone. While Vaughan’s personal story is less cinematic than Starkey’s, the Welshman was much more open about the sources of inspiration and knowledge, which was what, Peter Dawkins told me, had helped him and Betty McKaig to connect both of the Philalethes authors to Francis Bacon. Their mutual association with Samuel Hartlib was the key, Dawkins explained, because Hartlib was a devotee of Bacon’s who had joined the Invisible College created by Sir Francis as a young man and been instructed by him personally. That Starkey was also a member of what became known around the middle of the seventeenth century as the Hartlib Circle is one of the few things known about the man. Vaughan, though, was much more public about his association with Hartlib and also with the Rosicrucian order. The Welshman, who publicly proclaimed himself to be a member of what he called the Society of Unknown Philosophers, was the person who had produced the first English translation (in 1652) of the Fama Fraternitatis Rosae Crucis, the seminal Rosicrucian manifesto that was first published in Kassel, Germany, in 1614.
Through the research she was conducting with the resources acquired from her physician patron’s library, Dawkins told me, McKaig had determined that both the seventeenth-century authors who had produced the Philalethes texts were disciples of Bacon who in large part had reproduced his unpublished alchemical formulas and writings. Out in California, putting all these pieces together, McKaig began to conduct her own alchemical experiments, following what she understood to be instructions that came directly from Francis Bacon. Dawkins, who first visited her in California in the mid-1970s, sounded truly moved as he described his experiences in McKaig’s laboratory. “The experiments were all being done in these flasks,” he recalled. “And I watched as she performed them. At one point she told me to watch this particular flask and out of nowhere, it seemed, there appeared a salamander.”
Alchemical literature for centuries has used the salamander to symbolize the soul, and the production of them “in the shapes of fiery balls, or tongues of fire,” as Paracelsus put it, has been an essential aspect of the search for the philosopher’s stone. That they were magical creatures born of fire was a common belief for centuries. “The real truth is that the Salamander is no beast, as they allege in our part of the world,” Marco Polo wrote after his visit to the Orient, “but is a substance found in the earth.”
The skeptics of our materialist age would point out that salamanders are associated with fire because they tend to dwell in rotting logs from which they emerge when the logs are thrown onto fires. “I am telling you that what I saw was a creature that was—well, I’ll just say what happened: Betty told me, ‘Wait, in five minutes it’s going to change into the Beating Heart of Jesus,’” Peter Dawkins recalled. “So I waited, and suddenly the salamander disappeared and in the center appeared a shape that didn’t make a sound, but beat just like a heart. She said, ‘That’s gonna go on for a couple of hours or so, and then we’ll go on to the next stage’ … Betty firmly believed she was on her way to the production of the philosopher’s stone. And so did I.”
McKaig’s alchemical experiments were not being conducted only in the laboratory, Dawkins said. The work she was doing that may have been just as important, and that led her to Oak Island, was born out of the astronomical alchemy—”as above, so below”—first advocated by John Dee and perfected, according to Dawkins, by Francis Bacon. In one of the Philalethes texts that had been created by Bacon, McKaig said, she had discovered “a star map with instructions to project it onto the world globe,” as Dawkins recalled it. She was able to determine that the key marker was the star Deneb in Cygnus, which stood at the apex of a triangle—known as “God’s hand,” according to Dawkins—that pointed to a specific location on the face of the Earth, but the instructions about how to find the bearing that would determine this location were enciphered, McKaig explained. She spent weeks decoding that cipher, McKaig told Dawkins, and then performed the process of projection, which pointed to a spot in Nova Scotia. “But it wasn’t Oak Island,” Dawkins told me. He asked McKaig which star map—”star catalogues,” they were actually known as in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries—she had used as the basis of her projection. The Tycho Brahe star map published in 1602, of course, McKaig replied; it was by far the most accurate and respected of its time. No, no, Dawkins told her, he was fairly certain that Bacon had used an earlier star map, one created decades before Brahe’s. So McKaig performed a second projection, this time using the older star map, and this time God’s hand pointed to a tiny spot of land off the mainland of Nova Scotia in Mahone Bay—Oak Island. “Which Betty had never even heard of,” Dawkins told me.
After reading everything she could find on the subject of Oak Island—and being especially impressed by Leary’s slim volume, The Oak Island Enigma—McKaig became convinced that she had found the exact location of the spot where Bacon’s followers had secreted his teachings for the benefit of those who would be living on Earth at the end of the present Great Age (there’s considerable debate among astrologers about when that will be).
McKaig booked a flight to Montreal to meet with David Tobias, the man who seemed to control what happened on Oak Island. Her timing was not good. Tobias was invested in other ideas and associated the Bacon theory with Gilbert Hedden. Tobias and the Triton partners “either were not interested or did not believe her sufficiently,” Dawkins wrote to me in one email; he honestly wasn’t sure which.
Discouraged, McKaig returned to California to press forward with her quest for the philosopher’s stone. “This was, like, the late 1980s,” Dawkins said. By then, people affiliated with the Francis Bacon Foundation in Claremont, California, had become interested in McKaig’s work and someone affiliated with that group—Peter told me he didn’t know who—had arranged for her to receive a monthly stipend from what Dawkins knew only as “a company.” He believed it might have been a pharmaceutical company, but Betty was secretive about her financial dealings.
“Betty really believed she was getting close” to the alchemical breakthrough she sought, Dawkins told me, “but then her house burned down, which destroyed not only her laboratory, but nearly all of her papers and records as well.” I asked him how the fire started. “Someone set it intentionally,” he answered. When asked who might have done it, he said, “Betty believed, and so do I, that it was a rival company that was concerned about how close she might be to success.” This sounded a lot like a conspiracy theory, I thought, but did not interrupt.
After a brief period of reeling, McKaig had attempted to restart her work, Dawkins told me, but was feeling pressure from her benefactors to produce something useful. The reason he believed it was a pharmaceutical company is that her focus seemed to be on producing medicines. “Unfortunately, she began to use herself as a guinea pig, and I knew that was dangerous. I was concerned about her.” In 1990 or perhaps early 1991, McKaig had called him, sounding frightened, Dawkins remembered. “She told me, ‘Peter, I think I may have overdosed on mercury.’ She died just a few weeks later.”
At almost that exact time, David Tobias began an extensive correspondence with the Francis Bacon Foundation in Claremont and the Francis Bacon Society in Surrey, England. Word of McKaig’s death and of her commitment to her work seem to have been the trigger. It was actually this correspondence that had gotten Tobias onto the idea that Francis Drake was the one who had supervised, on Francis Bacon’s behalf, the original works on Oak Island. How that would have worked, I’m not certain; Drake died thirty years before Bacon did. And I couldn’t ask David, because he had died in 2012.
Still, through his contacts with the Bacon groups, Tobias did make connections to a pair of mining engineers who have become tied up in various Oak Island theories. One was Joachim Gans, a Bohemian engineer who Tobias said had been shipped across the Atlantic by Drake in the late sixteenth century, making him the first Jew to touch North American soil. That last part was true, but according to the histories I consulted Gans had actually been brought to Virginia in 1584 by Sir Walter Raleigh, as part of the group that founded the first English settlement in colonial America, on Roanoke Island off the coast of North Carolina. That settlement only lasted two years, however, before Gans and the other settlers, increasingly fearful of the native tribes, accepted an invitation from Drake to sail them back to England. So there was a Drake connection, but no record that I could find of the great seaman taking Gans to some other part of North America. Somehow, though, a story had grown up that Gans had been sent by Drake (or someone) with a company of Cornish miners that landed on the Bay of Fundy and made its way to Nova Scotia. The miners had not been heard from for two years, according to this story, and were supposedly on Oak Island during that period. Tobias clearly had been fascinated with the tale and so was I when Tony Sampson, the diver associated with The Curse of Oak Island with whom I enjoyed a couple of meals, first told me about it. Tony said he had read about it at the O’Dell House Museum in Annapolis Royal, Nova Scotia. When I phoned the museum, though, I was told by the public information officer that she had never heard the story before. She put me in touch with a woman she described as the foremost historian in the entire Bay of Fundy, who said that this story only existed, insofar as she knew, in some “fanciful histories” written about Oak Island.
What’s known of Joachim Gans is that he joined the Royal Mining Company and moved to Bristol, England, where he gave Hebrew lessons to local gentlemen who wanted to read the Bible in its original tongue. Then the bishop of Chichester paid a visit to Gans, and on learning he was a Jew, demanded, “Do you deny Jesus Christ to be the Son of God?”
“What needeth the almighty God to have a son?” Gans replied. “Is he not almighty?”
His resulting trial for blasphemy made him famous—or infamous—and inspired Francis Bacon to use him as the model for the heroic Jewish scientist Joabin in New Atlantis. So there were connections of a sort between the men, but David Tobias was probably following a more promising path when he became interested in the engineer most often cited in Oak Island theories, Thomas Bushell.
Bushell, who served as Britain’s chief mining engineer during the reign of Charles I, was famed for his expertise in the construction of underground water channels used in the flooding and pumping out of mine shafts. He was also a protégé of Francis Bacon’s. There is ample record of Bacon cultivating the mystic in Bushell, encouraging him to various esoteric pursuits that probably included alchemy, and sharing both his scientific knowledge and his experimental research with the young engineer. According to Bushell’s diaries, Bacon also ultimately entrusted him with his “dearest secret.” What that secret may have been is not certain, but it seems likely that it involved Bacon’s plan for the creation of a research institute modeled on Salomon’s House in New Atlantis. There are also references to “treasures” being entrusted to Bushell in the diaries.
What’s known for certain is that shortly after Bacon’s death in 1626, Bushell was said to have spent three years as a religious hermit on a remote island off the west coast of England. According to certain Baconians, Peter Dawkins among them, what Bushell was actually doing during much of that time was supervising the construction of the works on Oak Island, in service to the memory of Francis Bacon. This seemed vanishingly unlikely, but again I didn’t interrupt Peter.
It was unfortunate that Tobias had missed his chance with Betty McKaig, Dawkins told me, and more unfortunate still that he had lost interest in the Bacon theory in favor of one that involved Spanish gold. The loss he mourned most, though, was of Betty McKaig’s research and experimental notes. Those that hadn’t been lost in the fire, along with the new ones Betty had generated, Peter told me, disappeared after her death. He had never been able to learn what happened to these materials.
All that McKaig had left behind was a single article written in 1985 for Baconia, a publication of the Francis Bacon Society. It was about Oak Island.
I found McKaig to be an intelligent writer, but the subject matter was so arcane it was a struggle to stay with her. Part of this may have been that she was summarizing what had been an exorbitantly complex process of deciphering “Bacon’s subtle plan for marking out the boundaries of his New Atlantis,” as she described it. She had relied mostly on what were described in the article as “a number of discontinuous sequences couched in a mythological matrix featuring the classical deities so dear to Bacon’s heart” that she had found in the great man’s “masque works,” McKaig wrote, in particular the Philalethes texts. Many of these had correlated to various heavenly bodies, at least in McKaig’s reading. For instance, a line about how “the Red man and the White woman must be wed in the West” was interpreted as referring to the planets Mars and Venus “in a conjunction [a marriage] of Spica in Virgo” in the western sky.
Eventually, using the star map Dawkins had suggested, she followed the other lines referenced in Bacon’s works to their connecting points and found she was looking at “three overlapping triangles resembling the sails of a ship, with the original hermaphrodite line serving as mast, and the curved line of the elliptic resembling the sails of a ship.”
Once she had the various points that provided a bearing for the pointer of Deneb, it was a “simple mathematical formula” that had led her to the precise latitude and longitude of the “target,” as she called it, “a minuscule speck of land on the south coast of Nova Scotia called Oak Island.”
To me, the most interesting part of the article had come near the end, when McKaig made reference to the stone triangle, which she described as “a great stone arrow, laid out in ancient beach boulders” that duplicated Bacon’s “celestial arrow” precisely, “including a 7-degree westward slant in the vertical ‘hermaphrodite’ line!” McKaig promised in her “next article” to explain what she had discovered about the stone triangle, but to my knowledge no such article had ever been written; it certainly had not been published.
While it was difficult for me to fathom a mind that could have designed such a fantastically intricate scheme as the one McKaig described, I found it even more difficult to imagine the thinking of a person who believed she had unraveled it all. Still, it somehow had led Betty McKaig to Oak Island, a place Peter Dawkins said she had only discovered existed when she found that Deneb was pointing to it. If true, that was pretty astounding. I wondered if Peter, by suggesting a particular star map, had helped guide her to Oak Island, perhaps even without being aware of it, but he insisted that wasn’t so.
When I had finished my Baconian research I felt certain that if nothing else I had fresh material for The Curse of Oak Island’s cast and producers. I would lay it all out for them in my War Room scene, which was to be the summation of my appearance on the show. To register the magnitude of Francis Bacon, I quoted the famous historian Will Durant, who had written: “The whole tenor and career of British thought have followed the philosophy of Bacon.”
I used the star map Peter Dawkins had created for me as my main illustration and went through the story of Betty McKaig in considerable detail, explaining how widespread encryption and secret societies were in Elizabethan England, a time when the power of the Crown and the church were absolute and a man could easily lose his head for saying or thinking the wrong thing. As historian Michael Taylor had written, “Bacon resurrected the Rosicrucian Mystery School and the Freemasons, and injected new life into these secret fraternity societies so they became vehicles for the new Baconian philosophy of reason and scientific enquiry.” Peter Dawkins had pointed me to something Bacon had written under one of the “masque names” identified by Betty McKaig that involved using a treasure hunt as a form of spiritual instruction, turning the search for material wealth into the discovery of inner riches.
Extraordinary, outlandish even, as the Bacon theory of Oak Island might seem, he was one of the few men in the history of the human race who might have been capable of imagining and accomplishing what had been done on the island, and in fact some of his published work came close. We had to at least consider it.
I described the ways in which Bacon had been connected to the New World and to the Atlantic coast of Canada in particular. Sir Francis had been a partner in private enterprises that had established early North American colonies in Newfoundland and Virginia. Newfoundland, in fact, had in 1910 issued a stamp that commemorated the three hundredth anniversary of Bacon’s role in the founding of the province’s first colony, printed with a salute to Sir Francis as “the guiding spirit in the Colonization Schemes in 1610.” One of Bacon’s closest associates had been Sir William Alexander, the Scottish poet and philosopher who had given Nova Scotia its name.
Then I finished by explaining that I had first started thinking seriously about the Bacon theory when I considered something Dan Blankenship had said to me back in 2003, and that I had used in the Rolling Stone article: “The people who did the original work on this island were the most brilliant sons of bitches in the history of the world.” Francis Bacon may very well have been the most brilliant, I said.
I felt afterward it had gone well. At the least, I’d brought hard evidence and solid research into the more esoteric elements of the second most popular theory about the mystery of Oak Island.
Several cast members approached me to say they thought they knew pretty much all there was to know about Oak Island and were amazed by how much I’d told them that they didn’t know. They found the Betty McKaig story especially powerful.
So naturally it came as a surprise to me when the show used absolutely none of it.
Weeks would pass before I learned that this hadn’t been because of me or even because of the fairly arcane details of the Bacon theory. It had all been about the Norwegian Shakespeare researcher who’d first visited the island back in 2003, Petter Amundsen.