Eighteen

Nuking the Island

The opinion has been occasionally expressed by investigators of the Oak Island enigma that with enough money and today’s equipment, it is possible to quite literally take the island apart. One enthusiast recently said, “After the expertise we exhibited in the Gulf War, there isn’t any question about not being able to get whatever’s down there. Why...we could build a water-tight wall around the Island and simply lift it out. It would be like cutting the core out of an apple.” Unfortunately, from an archaeological point of view, one man took a stride in that direction.

Immediately following the Restall tragedy, Robert R. Dunfield, an experienced petroleum geologist of Canoga Park, California, and a graduate of the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA), took over the operation.

Dunfield, who first heard about Oak Island as a young boy in Denver, Colorado, harboured the opinion that the mystery could be solved with the application of heavy excavation equipment. He noticed Restall and his son digging with a pick and shovel, and was undoubtedly moved to the opposite extreme.

So, in the fall of 1965, at the age of thirty-nine, Dunfield made the necessary arrangements with Mel Chappell and put his concept into action. To make the project financially viable, he enlisted several wealthy California backers, who included John Nethercutt of Beverley Hills and G. R. LePerle of Bakersfield. The expedition also included Daniel Blankenship of Miami, Florida, later to become one of the island’s current treasure hunters.

Dunfield described the project as “a problem in open-pit mining but with the added difficulty of seeping water. We can complete the excavation successfully, if we can dig it dry.” He also stated his belief that treasure caches were buried at various elevations.

Dunfield gave considerable thought as to what might be required in heavy equipment, and he decided on a seventy-ton digging crane with a ninety-foot boom from which hung a large excavating bucket. The machine was capable of digging a hole two hundred feet deep and one hundred feet in diameter. To keep the hole dry, he proposed a 110,000-gallon-per-hour pump.

The plan was to situate the digging crane on stable soil about forty feet from the edge of the hole to be excavated, and to have a man held by a safety harness on a nylon rope stand on the opposite edge of the pit and direct the crane operator. All excavated soil was to be deposited in a sluice, and screened by a water filtering system to separate out all rocks and any other objects such as artifacts and precious metals. The plan was to go to a depth of 180 feet, and deeper if anything of importance was recovered.

But before applying the big machine, Dunfield first barged two bulldozers out to the island and proceeded to rip off a twelve-foot-deep layer of the surface soil over the entire Money Pit area. This exposed the cribwork of several old shafts and what appeared to be the Money Pit itself, judging from its position in relation to the Hedden and Chappell shafts. He then attempted to block off the flood tunnel from Smith’s Cove by pushing hundreds of tons of clay over the beach with his bulldozers. He may have succeeded, for although the water in the cove was muddied, the water pumped from the Hedden shaft remained clean.

Having apparently blocked the flood system connected with Smith’s Cove, Dunfield turned to the south shore flood tunnel problem. But first he had to bring over the big digging crane. To accomplish that, he built a one-lane causeway across the straight, separating the west end of the island from the mainland. The causeway—about six hundred feet in length—took only ten days to construct. Approximately fifteen thousand cubic yards of fill (common soil and rock) were trucked and dozed to build the fixed link. The causeway project was completed on October 17, 1965.

Treasure hunters Robert Dunfield (right) and Mel Chappell meet at the Money Pit.

Dunfield moved the big crane down to the south shore and dug a trench about twenty feet deep and about two hundred feet long, parallel to the shoreline. While excavating this huge trench, he struck a refilled, eight-foot-diameter shaft. Since this shaft was not cribbed and there is no record of it having been dug by an earlier search group, Dunfield concluded that it was part of the original project prior to 1795. He then removed the infill, which extended forty-five feet down, but found no trace of a flood tunnel.

Robert Dunfield’s excavator, used in the ’60s in the search for the second flood channel discovered in 1898 by the Oak Island Treasure Company.

It is significant to mention that the mysterious triangle of stones that had so intrigued Hedden in 1937 may have had some unknown relationship to the infilled shaft Dunfield discovered. Covered with moss and embedded in mud, the almost-hidden triangle lay just twenty-five feet to the north of the shaft.

Having exhausted a lot of energy and money on the search for the south shore flood tunnel, Dunfield turned to the Money Pit itself in November. With the huge equipment, he dug a hole nearly 140 feet deep by 100 feet in diameter and ripped out most of the old cribbing from earlier shafts and tunnels, leaving only the Hedden shaft basically undisturbed. Throughout the dig, the project was besieged by mechanical breakdowns and heavy rains. The sides of the big pit kept caving in during the storms, and one day’s work was cancelled out by another day or two of rain. Dunfield estimated that the project was costing two thousand dollars per day. At one point, he said he would have to “call it quits” if they didn’t find anything at the maximum obtainable depth of 198 feet.

After more than two months of sluggish digging, Dunfield refilled the huge hole to provide a solid soil platform from which a drilling operation could be conducted. He planned to re-excavate the big pit the following spring, when the weather would hopefully be better and the ground drier. But the dig wasn’t entirely fruitless. The sifted and screened soil from the hole yielded pieces of porcelain dishware thought to have been made sometime in the 1700s.

Working from the soil platform, Dunfield drilled a series of six-inch holes to almost 190 feet. In several of the holes, he encountered the cavity or cavern that Greene had discovered in 1955. The drill struck a twenty-four-inch layer of limestone at depths between 140 and 142 feet before dropping through a forty-foot void to bedrock.

The Cave-in-Pit, ten years after it was excavated by Robert Dunfield. All that remains is a water-filled hole about one hundred feet wide. It was originally a circular shaft six to eight feet in diameter.

Having accomplished everything he could at the Money Pit, Dunfield turned to the Cave-in-Pit. It is not known what he intended to accomplish here. Perhaps he was simply searching in desperation, grabbing at straws like a general fighting a losing battle. With the big machinery at his disposal, he may have gone on a wild goose chase in the hope of finding anything, however small, that might have helped to solve the puzzle. He excavated the pit to a depth of 108 feet, scooping out old timbers at sixty-eight feet and again at one hundred feet that were probably part of the Oak Island Eldorado Company (also known as the Halifax Company) tunnels. Again, mechanical problems and heavy rains ended the work, and the sides of the pit rapidly caved in. The Cave-in-Pit had become a gaping, volcanic-shaped crater one hundred feet wide and as many feet deep.

Bad luck and Mother Nature had conspired to keep the secret of the original Money Pit engineer. His subterranean puzzle remained unsolved after a savage assault by modern machinery. Dunfield had been badly beaten. He had entered the project with all the confidence in the world. He had been sure that he would win. But he had lost, and in more ways than one. The project had cost him an estimated $131,000.

Drenched to the bone, Dunfield returned to California in April 1966, after calling a halt to the project. His lease with Chappell terminated in August of the same year.

Dunfield’s heavy equipment approach to solving the mystery stirred up a hornet’s nest of criticism in the Mahone Bay area, and many island observers were horrified by the devastation. Although the criticism of the local people and tourists may have been based on aesthetics, it has been said that the damage was archaeological. Certainly, a vast amount of visual history was lost.

It is not known if any damage was done to the original works prior to 1795, but one significant piece of the Oak Island puzzle was lost forever—the mysterious stone triangle. It slid into the south shore trench through rainstorm erosion after Dunfield’s departure.